In Search of the Lost Testament of Alexander the Great
Page 7
The graves unearthed at Vergina dating back to the 5th century BCE indicate inhabitants had certainly adopted Hellenic names by then; of the 6,300 inscriptions found in the former state borders, ninety-nine per cent were written in Greek. In contrast, Hatzopoulos notes that ‘a relatively high percentage of the names attested in the neighbouring lands conquered after 479 BCE are of pre-Greek origin’; this suggests the vanquished were not immediately displaced and for a time retained their ethnicity.62 But there can be no doubt that Macedonia, though regionally discrete and perhaps tribally distinct, was by the 5th century BCE certainly a part of the Greek cultural milieu,63 by which point it is likely that foreign policy and out-of-state business was conducted in Attic Greek, though Attic Greek, in turn, would be infiltrated by elements of Macedonian in time.64
If we need any proof that the reform-minded Macedonian monarchs like Alexander I, Perdiccas II (reigned ca. 448-413 BCE) and Archelaus I were modelling their cultural sophistication on Greece, we only have to recall that the great tragedian Euripides, Hippocrates of Kos (ca. 460-370 BCE) the ‘father of western medicine’, the revered Pindar of Thebes (ca. 518-433 BCE), the dithyrambic poet Melanippides and Bacchylides the lyric poet, Choerilus the epic poet and Agathon the tragic poet along with his lover Pausanias, were all invited to stay at the royal court at Aegae or at the new capital at Pella. So was the musician Timotheus, alongside Zeuxis who captured life on canvas like none before him, and the historian Hellanicus of Mytilene who as colourfully captured lives on parchment.65
Foreign hetairoi (high-ranking court friends) were given substantial tracts of land in Macedonia and many ended up drinking at symposia, the banquets (komoi or deipnoi) typical of the Macedonian court.66 Guests typically relaxed on the Greek-styled couch, the kline, and famously downed their wine neat, akratos, and judging from the outcomes they consumed more than the Spartans’ daily ration of two kontylae per soldier which had helped to wash down their notorious melas zoomos, Sparta’s black bean soup (with boiled pork, blood and vinegar) that Leonidas, Alexander’s stricter teacher, might well have introduced him to as a youth.67
Herodotus is thought to have ‘stayed with the king of the Macedonians in the time of Euripides and Sophocles’ (ca. 480 and 497-406 BCE respectively), whilst Aristotle’s own father, Nicomachus, had been a state doctor to Amyntas III (reigned 393/392-370 BCE), the father of Philip II.68 Although Socrates (ca. 470-399 BCE) is said to have declined an invitation to the state, Euphraus, the philosophising student of Plato, visited and taught at the court of Perdiccas III, Philip’s older brother; it was, in fact, Euphraus who advised Perdiccas to give the teenage Philip II a district to cut his teeth in governance.
The Greek comedy playwrights of the period made references to the lavish Macedonian court banquets and weddings that were the envy of the Athenians. Actors, such as the celebrated Neoptolemus and Philocrates were even sent as diplomats to Philip, so aware were they of his philanthropia to performers; in this particular case, as a precursor to what is now termed the ‘Peace of Philocrates’ of 346 BCE, the anti-Macedonian Athenian orator Demosthenes accused the hypocrites (actor) Neoptolemus of ‘acting’ in the best interest of Philip rather than Athens. Opposing Demosthenes to the end of his career, the Macedonia-friendly orator Aeschines, also present as part of the embassy, was a former actor himself.69
The emerging power of Macedonia had hardly gone unnoticed; Plato certainly took an interest and Thucydides appears to have been an admirer of the growing state (he owned property in the Strymon basin); the historians Theopompus and Anaximenes of Lampsacus (ca. 380-320 BCE), possibly encouraged by Isocrates, spent time at the Pellan court of Philip II, as, of course, did Aristotle who would uniquely influence his son; Aristotle’s student Theophrastus (who became an expert on plants) was to later advise on land reclamation nearby.70 The Argead kings, if not quite ready to adopt the ‘people power’ of demokratia, had ambitions on becoming civilised in all other ways, especially now that the ‘Aegean façade’ of Lower Macedonia had integrated itself into the ‘international, economic, diplomatic and cultural world of its times’.71
This newly ‘united’ and monarchic Macedonia was a ‘sub-Homeric enclave’ in which citizens started adding Makedon to their names as a sign of a national identity, suggesting there existed an extraordinary legal homogeneity under the late Argead kings. This was something of a paradox to a still-fragmented Greek mainland, a state of affairs epitomised by the almost simultaneous call from Isocrates for Philip II to lead a ‘Panhellenic’ expedition against ‘barbarian’ Persia, and a reply from Demosthenes which rallied Athens to oppose the ‘barbarian’ Macedonian king.72
Something of that paradox resurfaced in Alexander who was mentally fused to the past through syngeneia (kinship) and lineage to the heroes of Hellas and the venerated kings of antiquity: ‘For what is the worth of human life, unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history?’73 He was acutely aware of being porphyrogennetos with an illustrious crossbreeding, and just as mindful of how that imagery could be exploited. ‘Alexander’ broadly translates as ‘repeller’ or ‘defender’ of men, and it was a name fit for cause.74 He appears to have genuinely believed in his alleged descent from heroes, and his training had been far more illustrious than the encyclios paideia, the general classical Greek education. The poems of the Trojan Epic Cycle became his Omphalos, or as Alexander liked to term them, his ‘campaign equipment’ or viaticum.75 But surely the keenest blade in his Homeric arsenal was Odysseus’ declaration: ‘Let there be one ruler and one king!’76
Alexander’s birth was heralded as divine. Hegesias the Magnesian (fl. ca. 300 BCE), founder of the ‘Asiatic style’ of composition, proposed that the great fire at Ephesus in 356 BCE could be explained on the basis that the goddess was absent from her temple attending his delivery, for the events had apparently coincided; Plutarch wasn’t impressed with the connection, terming it ‘a joke flat enough to have put out the fire’.77 Yet Parmenio’s defeat of the Illyrians and Philip’s recent capture of Potidaea, along with the victory of his racehorse at the Olympic Games, made the day Philip heard that a son had been born to him, indeed seem rather auspicious.
Alexander’s mother, Olympias, initiated into the Dionysiac mysteries of the Clodones and Mimallones (the Maenads, ‘raving ones’, of Greece linked to Orpheus whose grave was located in Macedonia), was from the Molossian tribe of Epirus.78 Through her, Alexander managed to claim Aeacid descent from Achilles, whose son, Neoptolemus (also known as Pyrrhus of the Pyrrhidae), according to legend, had once ruled the region.79 Through him, and as popularised in the Andromache of Euripides who spent his final years in Macedonia, Alexander was also a descendant of Hector’s widow, the Trojan princess Andromache, who became Neoptolemus’ concubine and gave birth to Molossus, the founder of the eponymous Epirote tribe; the ancestry linked Alexander to both the attackers and defenders of Troy.80 As a result, as Bosworth points out, he did not view Trojans as barbarians but as ‘Hellenes on Asian soil’, which rather underpins Homer’s own linguistic treatment of Priam’s men and Dardanus’ mythological roots. In Alexander’s invasion of Asia, the united blood of Achilles and Priam would finally campaign together.81
Arrian associated Alexander with the hero Perseus, the son of Zeus, and the father of both the Persian race and the Greek Dorians through Heracles; this helps explain the similarities between the Greek Succession Myth and the Babylonian equivalent, the Enûma Elis.82 From his reading of Herodotus, Alexander would have been aware that King Midas, adopted by the childless Gordias, and the founder of the Phrygian dynasty, was said to have emerged from a region of Macedonia though the Roman geographer, Strabo (literally, ‘squint-eyed’, 64/63 BCE-24 CE), thought the Phrygians, originally Bryges or Brigians, were a Thracian tribe. Midas’ wealth came from mining iron ore until he was expelled by the semi-mythical Caranus (‘Billy-goat’), ‘the founding father of Macedonia’ who in legend reigned ca. 808-778 BCE. The Gardens of Midas at the fo
ot of Mount Bermion still carried his name in Alexander’s day.83 This dominant Phrygian tribe, which migrated across to Asia Minor (ca. 800 BCE, though claims dating to as early as 1200 BCE suggest they broke Hittite power), inhabited the early tombs at Aegae found under some 300 of the tumuli, and it is worth noting that in Euripides’ Helen the Trojans are referred to as ‘Phrygians’.84
The opening lines of Plutarch’s biography additionally managed to trace Alexander’s descent (through the Heraclid line of his father) back to the ‘founding father’, Caranus, who originally hailed from Argos and invaded Macedonia ‘with a great multitude of Greeks’.85 This enabled Alexander to trace his lineage to the Argive Heracleidae and back to Danaus and the Danaans who shipped to Troy, the heritage Isocrates had assigned to Philip.86 Other Heraclids included the kings of Sparta and the Aleuadae dynasty of Larissa in Thessaly (Heracles’ supposed birthplace), and so by definition their relatives, care of their common forefather, Heracles Patroos.87
Euripides, once described as ‘the first psychologist’, had a different idea altogether: to please his reform-minded host, he proposed it had been an earlier Archelaus, a son of Temenus, who anticipated the Temenids, encapsulating the new proposition in a play aptly named Archelaus.88 Adding to the thickening founding fog was a parallel belief that the etymological roots of the Argeads lay in ‘Argives’ who were Dorians in Greek tradition, as this challenged the claims that the stemma actually derived from ‘Argaeus’ the son of King Perdiccas I, or, according to later writers, a son of Macedon.89 Appian (ca. 95-165 CE), writing later from the safe distance of Roman Alexandria, more controversially claimed that the true origins of the name of the Macedonian royal clan might have stemmed from a far more rural Argos in the Macedonian canton of Orestis; if so, it had been expediently hidden beneath layers of court-sponsored propaganda.90
Hellanicus of Mytilene, who also spent time at the Macedonian court (probably in the reign of Archelaus), positioned a Macednus (not Macedon) as the son of Aeolus, so from the direct line of Hellen with ancestry to the Aeolians and Dorians, thus firmly ‘Hellenic’; Herodotus, who treated geography and ethnology as one, supported the Dorian links and claimed that Alexander I, the first Argead to mint coins, had convinced the adjudicating hellanodikai, the official judges from Elis, of his Peloponnesian Argive roots so that he might compete in the Olympic Games; his entry resulted in victory in the furlong foot race ca. 495 BCE. It has been more recently suggested that the increasingly pro-Hellenic stance of the Macedonian court resulted in the kings adopting the Greek names conspicuously found on the Vergina graves.91
To anchor down these polymorphic lineages, Philip and Alexander minted a new bimetallic currency system, stamping images of Zeus crowned with laurel and Apollo on gold Philippeioi, while Heracles appeared on silver tetradrachms; and here, anew, was allos houtos Heracles, the hero ‘reborn’, as the Greek proverb suggested.92 Philip’s ‘sacred wars’ in Greece in Apollo’s name had already forged the attachment and the imagery of success was stamped on his coinage in both the Attic and Thraco-Macedonian standards for circulatory effect: it included Philip’s three chariot victories at the Olympic Games showing a youth on horseback and, suitably, a chariot.93
The first of Alexander’s own silver coins; a tetradrachm struck sometime between ca. 335-29 BCE. Minted in Pella, it still displays the laureate head of his father, Philip II. On the obverse is a nude youth holding a palm frond and reins on horseback with a kantharos (a deep double-handed drinking vessel) below. Images provided with the kind permission of the Classical Numismatic Group. Inc. www.cngcoins.com.
A late Alexander tetradrachm minted at Sardis, the well-guarded treasury, under its governor Menander ca. 324 BCE. It bears a head of Heracles wearing a lion skin, and Zeus Aetophoros (‘Eagle-bearer’) with a club is seated on the obverse.
Philip and Alexander had commissioned portraits and bronzes by Lysippus and Euphranor before the planned Persian campaign. The family statues Philip commissioned from Leochares and erected in chryselephantine (or possibly marble) in the circular Philippeion in the precinct of Zeus at Olympia suggest the early birth of the Argead public relations machine, as well as an attempt of reconciliation with a then alienated son and wife.94 Epic lineages were ever sought after by kings and their court poets, but here the Argeads were creating a new Succession Myth, and as history was to show, they became every bit as brutal as the Titans from whom they professedly descended.95
Backed by this useful polytheism, these heritages implied a telegony in which their combined traits and bloodlines would converge and meet in a new demigod: Alexander himself. They gave him his entelekheia, the vital force that completed him and then compelled him to Persia in his father’s stead. Although heritages were clearly often fused, confused and conveniently manipulated, the one ancestor that Alexander was never able to comfortably integrate into his developing persona was his own father, Philip, murdered at Aegae when Alexander was aged twenty, for he had provided the legitimacy that Alexander needed, but not the identity he ultimately sought. And as a recent study concluded, once the memory of Philip began to develop into nostalgic myth, Alexander lost control over its subordination to him.96
A reconstruction of ancient Olympia from Pierers Universal-Lexicon, 1891. The circular building in the left corner is the Philippeion housing the statues of Philip’s family.
‘THE GIVER OF THE BRIDE, THE BRIDEGROOM, AND THE BRIDE’97
There were both immediate and lingering rumours that Alexander had played a part in his father’s death, and they, in turn, were fuelled by Philip’s accusations of Olympias’ infidelity (so claimed Justin, who also stated that Philip divorced her – Arrian claimed he ‘rejected’ her), and that would have been tantamount to Philip disowning his son.98 Badian went as far as suggesting the previous rift between the prince and king had resulted in Philip favouring Amyntas Perdicca, the son of his older brother, Perdiccas III, in the line of succession; Philip had ostensibly ‘managed’ Amyntas’ kingship due to his nephew’s youth and more recently he had married him to his daughter, Cynnane, Alexander’s half-sister.
Plutarch believed the Macedonians themselves were inclining to Amyntas and to the sons of Aeropus of Lyncestis (who had a claim to the throne through an older branch of the royal house) at Philip’s death. Alexander had two of the latter (Heromenes and Arrhabaeus) immediately executed, and soon after, Amyntas as well, to secure his position. The exception was the superficially compliant third son of Aeropus, Alexander Lyncestis, married to a daughter of the now all-important Antipater, previously Philip’s foremost general and the regent in his absences.99 Plutarch summarised the court position at the time:
All Macedonia was festering with revolt and looking toward Amyntas and the children of Aeropus; the Illyrians were again rebelling, and trouble with the Scythians was impending for their Macedonian neighbours, who were in the throes of political change; Persian gold flowed freely through the hands of the popular leaders everywhere, and helped to rouse the Peloponnese; Philip’s treasuries were bare of money, and in addition there was owing a loan of two hundred talents…100
Along with ‘the accomplices in the murder’ who were summarily executed on Alexander’s orders ‘at the tumulus of Philip’, those upon whom regicidal suspicion fell (genuine or contrived) would have suffered a similar fate, either publicly, or behind the scenes.
Several events which took place in close succession contributed to the patricidal finger pointing: Philip had recently married Cleopatra, the young niece (Diodorus and Justin said ‘sister’) of the influential Macedonian baron, Attalus, who had prayed for a ‘legitimate heir’ from the union; that was a barbed reminder to Alexander, who apparently threw his goblet at him during the court banquet where the toast was made, that he was half Epirote, or indeed a product of Olympias’ infidelity.101 Philip had his sword drawn as he lurched drunkenly towards his unapologetic son who then called into question his father’s ability to lead the invasion of Asia. The incident precip
itated the flight of Olympias to her home in Epirus, while Alexander journeyed to Illyria, probably to his friend and ally, the Agrianian king, Langarus. That is exactly where you would go to raise a hostile force to oust a Pellan king, for the Illyrians had managed exactly that before.102
The teenage Cleopatra was now pregnant with Philip’s heir; she gave birth to a daughter, Europa, just days before Philip’s death and there was possibly an earlier son named Caranus; they were murdered by Olympias, probably with the blessing of Alexander (despite claims otherwise), within the year.103 Moreover, at the time of the wedding of Philip and Cleopatra, Alexander had reached throne age, eighteen.
The rift between Alexander and his father appears to have run deeper still. In preparation for his invasion of Asia, Philip had (earlier) reached out to Hermias of Atarneus (with whom Aristotle had resided), and to Pixodarus of the Carian Hecatomnid dynasty – the ‘grandest’ in the Eastern Mediterranean and influential in Lycia – to arrange a royal marriage for an alliance on the coast of Asia Minor. Perhaps when still in his self-imposed exile in Illyria, Alexander had undermined the proposed pairing of his half-witted half-brother, Arrhidaeus, to Pixodarus’ daughter, by offering himself instead; it was Parmenio’s son Philotas who possibly revealed the plot to Philip, and he was apparently a marked man thereafter.104 Some have interpreted from the episode that Alexander already had plans to lead the invasion of Asia in his father’s stead. His recent impetuous founding of Alexandropolis in 340 BCE (when Philip was busy besieging Byzantium) after campaigning in Thrace at the age of just sixteen, was a testament to the prince’s own ambition, and it may have left his father wary despite Plutarch’s claim that he ‘was excessively fond of his son, so that he even rejoiced to hear the Macedonians call Alexander their king, but Philip their general.’105