In Search of the Lost Testament of Alexander the Great

by David Grant

  Justin painted a more hostile picture of court affairs: after the initial rift with Philip, Olympias urged her brother, Alexander Molossus, now the Epirote king, to declare war; it would have been an opportune moment with Philip’s most effective generals, Parmenio and Attalus (Cleopatra’s uncle), absent in Asia with a significant part of the royal army which was establishing a bridgehead for the invasion. At this point Alexander’s envoy, Thessalus, was to be found in Corinth potentially seeking military Greek support for the prince. Philip’s oikos (household) was clearly in trouble, and only the diplomacy of Demaratus of Corinth managed to reconcile father and a son who then became Master of the Royal Seal.106

  Astute as ever in a political crisis, Philip paired Alexander’s sister, Cleopatra, to Molossus to stave off any Epirote threat; he ‘disarmed him as a son-in-law’, as Justin put it.107 Nevertheless, he sent Alexander’s philoi (closest court friends) including Ptolemy (the future Egyptian dynast), Nearchus, Laomedon and Harpalus (with his older brother Erygius) into exile. Those broadly coeval with Alexander were syntropoi (literally ‘those eating together’) who would later become the megistoi, the ‘great men’, who frequented his court. Staging the wedding would be the last performance of Philip’s twenty-three-year reign, for he was stabbed by Pausanias of Orestis upon entering the amphitheatre at Aegae.108 The day signified Alexander’s arrival; it was perhaps even a day he orchestrated himself. Alexander took up the reins of power as keenly as he is said to have mounted his Thessalian warhorse, Bucephalus, and he and Olympias didn’t hesitate in executing the rivals for the throne, most likely along with their families and their political backers as well.109

  Pausanias was pursued by Alexander’s close court friends, Perdiccas and Leonnatus, and by the royal page Attalus, and was conveniently murdered before he could be questioned; the murderer and his pursuers were all from the canton of Orestis and both Perdiccas and Leonnatus became Alexander’s personal Bodyguards, Somatophylakes, on campaign.110 Pausanias had allegedly confronted Alexander with the same grievance he had previously taken to Philip – sexual assault – and he received, as Alexander’s reported reply, the line from Euripides’ Medea: ‘the giver of the bride, the bridegroom, and the bride’; it hinted of a triple murder in the making, and one that did come to pass (at Philip’s death, Alexander executed the ‘giver’, Attalus, and Olympias murdered the bride, Cleopatra). Justin claimed Olympias had arranged the getaway horses for the assassins.111

  Possibly to distance himself from any further implication of guilt, Alexander ‘took every possible care over the burial of his parent’ at a time when he needed all the support he could muster.112 Within two years, and having ‘re-subdued’ Greece, Thrace and the Balkans, Alexander crossed the Hellespont (Hellespontos, ‘Sea of Helle’), today’s Dardanelles (named after Dardanus), in his father’s place, and he bolstered support for the invasion by claiming Philip’s assassins were backed by Persian gold. We will never know if Alexander fully dismantled the stigma of parricide, but an alleged oracular reply at Siwa some three years on, confirming all Philip’s killers had been punished, sounds suspiciously like a contrived vote on his own innocence, though it was peculiarly exonerating to the still-at-large Persian Great King as well.113

  The two previous invasions of Greece by Persia under Darius I (ended 490 BCE) and his son Xerxes I (ended 480 BCE) had not been sudden appearances of Persian power and influence in Europe. Macedonia of the 6th century BCE was, as Borza termed it, a ‘dependency of the Persian Empire’, after which the autonomous vassal kingdom was formally occupied as Darius’ forces under Mardonius spread west across the Hellespont in 492 BCE. The occupation and the tribute lasted until 479 BCE when Xerxes was forced to withdraw after three decades of Persian control which had nevertheless helped their client kings, Amyntas I, and then his son Alexander I, subjugate a hinterland that would become ‘Upper Macedonia’; also absorbed were lands to the west into an expanded Lower Macedonia.

  Alexander I had prudently and ingeniously managed to play a ‘double game with great skill’; chosen by Mardonius to offer seductive terms to Athens to fracture Greek resistance, he provided the Persians with support at Plataea, yet timber for the Greek fleet, and he covertly spied for the allied forces to warn them of imminent Persian attack, eventually falling on a large body of the retreating Asiatic army.114 Macedonia’s hinterland and the Athos peninsula provided much-needed wood (pine, silver fir and four types of oak) to the Athenian shipbuilding trade and alliances (often short) with Athens were driven by this dependence.115 To counter any suggestion of exploitation in the war, Alexander I next dedicated a golden statue of himself at Delphi and Olympia, with the result that Pindar termed him ‘the bold scheming son of Amyntas’. His son, Perdiccas II, was to change sides even more frequently in the Peloponnesian War (431-404 BCE); a century and a half later a no less scheming Philip II played a similar diplomatic game and was once aligned with Artaxerxes III, sending expediently supportive messages to the Persian court.116

  Persian occupation left its mark on Macedonia and perhaps on Alexander III as well; the term ‘satrap’ we see in the campaign histories relating to Alexander’s regional governors, stemmed from the Achaemenid rule of an empire managed through client kings and officials who maintained the pax Persika. It has been proposed that the late Argead tradition of enrolling royal pages (paides basilikos, ‘informal hostage sons’ of the Upper Macedonian nobles), as well as the formal polygamy of the Argead (and Molossian) kings, who had their own military units of ‘friends’ (hetairoi), were also of Persian origin, and some commentators argue that the melophoroi, the golden apple-bearing Persian Immortals, were the inspiration behind the Macedonian agema of the hypaspists, the royal guard.117 Somatophylakes, the king’s personal Bodyguards, as well as chiliarchos, likened to post of the Achaemenid hazarapti (a second-in-command who also had administrative and diplomatic responsibilities like chief usher and the king’s intermediary with messengers) and reintroduced by Alexander (and occupied by his closest companion Hephaestion, and assumed by Perdiccas after him), were titles or roles adopted (or adapted) from the Persian courts, it is believed. Even the position of the king’s cupbearer had its origins with the Achaemenid kings.118

  Compared to the ‘old guard’ command – the seasoned campaigners and infantry generals Alexander inherited from his father – the Bodyguards represented a class of relatively young equestrian aristocrats expected to adhere to the kalos kagathos of classical Greece, the Homeric-rooted code of virtue and honour.119 In fact the Homeric poems have been termed nothing less than the Bible of the Greeks containing ‘the germs of all Greek philosophy’.120 Alexander’s Bodyguard corps emerged from the syntrophoi raised at the king’s court in Pella, the ‘city of stone’.121 If broadly coeval, they too would have been familiar with, or even educated with Alexander under the tutelage of Aristotle. Along with other trusted generals and leading landowners, they formed the noble ‘cavalry’ class of Macedonia, which attended the synedria, the gatherings of the king’s Privy Council and advisers. In the absence of what we might today term a ‘middle class’, Macedonian nobles commanded both the cavalry and the infantry battalions that were formed from tenant farmers and herders who responded to the king’s call, and who made up a professional standing army that first appeared under Philipp II.122

  Hellas, and especially Macedonia, had been fascinated with tales of the Persian dynasty with its fabled court wealth which still pulled influential strings across the Aegean; at one time over 300 Greeks frequented the Achaemenid court and some even attended the Great Kings as physicians. Inscriptions dating to the reign of Darius I confirm the presence of Ionian and Carian stonecutters working on the new palace constructions, and the Greek cities of the Asia Minor seaboard acted as information conduits and contact points with the Persian administration.123

  It is no wonder, then, that the Greeks had tried to link the ancient East with their own mythology once they appreciated its greater antiquity; they accepted
African and Asian origins for the ancestries established by Medea, Perseus and the Achaeans, which appears a paradoxical sociality considering their proud autochthonism.124 Cadmus, Pelops, Danaos and Aegyptus all arrived in Greece from Asia and Egypt in the founding myths.125 As Nietzsche put it, ‘… Their culture was for a long time a chaos of foreign forms and ideas – Semitic, Babylonian, Lydian and Egyptian – and their religion a battle of all the gods of the East…’ Xerxes had exploited just that when he too reminded Greece of the Persian-Perseus link when garnering Argive support for his pending invasion.126

  In Greek literature the term ‘Persian’ was employed loosely, as was its geographic and dynastic association. In the Alexander histories we see the Great King’s vassals referred to as Iranian, Asiatic and Oriental, as well as Median, beside Persian. Cyrus and Darius I were additionally termed kings of Assyria (often shortened to ‘Syria’ by Diodorus), the breadth of which might unite Assyrian Nineveh, Mesopotamia (Greek in origin, from mesos ‘middle’ and potamos ‘river’) and Babylonia. The ambiguity has caused much confusion for historians;127 Herodotus and Xenophon used ‘Assyria’ when referring to regions as diverse as Anatolia to the Black Sea and the Aramaic Mesopotamian lands, where Curtius at times referred to the region of ‘Lydia’ in a manner that recalled the old kingdom of the expanded state, thus Asia Minor west of the Halys river.128 Unable to untwine these knotted threads, we will defer to simply using ‘Persian’ when regional appellations and ethnographies remain less than well defined, and refer to their inhabitants as ‘Asiatic’ where their origins are mixed or contested.

  Herodotus, faced with the task of combining ‘oriental dynasties with Greek genealogies in the first attempt at international chronology’,129 and Ctesias, himself a physician to Great King Artaxerxes II (Artaxšaçā in Old Persian), argued over the conflicting traditions behind the Achaemenid dynasty founded by Cyrus I and which endured from 539 to 330 BCE, ending with Alexander’s defeat of Darius III. Originally named ‘Artashata’ in Persia and Kodommanos (Latinised, Codommanus) to the Greeks, ‘Darius’ originated as something approximating ‘Darayavaus of the haxamanisiya’ in Old Iranian. Yet the founder of the line, Achaemenes, was as mythical as Romulus, the legendary founder of Rome. Cyrus the Great was an Elamite described as half-Median – Xenophon confirmed his Median roots through Astyages and his Perseidae origins from Cambyses130 – though ‘Cyrus’ is a Latinised-Greek derivative descended from Old Persian (Kūruš) with Elamite and Assyrian overtones, the meaning of which is still debated, though Plutarch claimed it was the Persian word for ‘sun’.131

  The tombs at Naqsh-e Rustam (close to Persepolis), and that identified as Darius I’s, in particular, among other less-legible inscriptions at the necropolis, along with the relief at Behistun (Bastagana in Persian, ‘place of god’), are rich in multi-lingual engravings referring to the conquests of the Great Kings. Cuneiform syllabary often placed Elamite beside Akkadian as well as Old Persian – the languages that later transmuted into the more broadly used Parsi and written in Aramaic script.132 Like the bilingual and trilingual stone inscriptions of the Ptolemies, these provide us with ‘rosetta stones’ of rare linguistic clarity.133

  To the Persians the Hellenes were Yauna, Ionians, though it seems Yauna takabara specifically referred to Macedonians and possibly because of their distinctive felt hats, the traditional flat kausiai, that would now be seen across the empire as Alexander’s army marched east.134

  The 50 x 82 feet Behistun Inscription of Darius I carved sometime in his reign ca. 522-486 BCE. The multi-lingual texts in Old Persian, Elamite and Babylonian recorded Darius’ lineage and battles through the upheaval caused by the deaths of his predecessors, Cyrus the Great and his son, Cambyses.

  ATHLIOS PAR’ ATHLIOU DI’ ATHLIOU PROS ATHLION: THE GRUDGING FACE OF FEALTY

  Scholars have noted that from the beginning of the Asian campaign Alexander ‘acted not merely as a conqueror, but as the rightful heir’ to the Persian royal line.135 Quite possibly he saw the Asian hinterland as a ‘Pantheon’ for installing the legend that would underpin the new anabasis, his journey into the Asian interior. In Tarn’s opinion ‘the primary reason that Alexander invaded Persia was, no doubt, that he never thought of not doing it; it was his inheritance’, as were the vast lands that lay across the Hellespont.136

  ‘Persuasion through words is not a characteristic of kings but of orators’,137 and as early as 330 BCE, as Alexander ventured into the heart of the Persian Empire, Demosthenes’ On the Crown made a scathing declaration to Aeschines, the philomakedon, on the extent of Macedonian continued domination in Greece.138 Having subdued Greece in the wake of his father’s death, Alexander was confirmed as hegemon (literally the ‘dominant one’), or in the military context, strategos autokrator, of the League of Corinth,139 a federation which represented to koinon ton Hellenon, the community of Greeks and their Defenders of the Peace. He inherited two seats on the Amphictionic Council and life archonship of the Thessalian League, as Philip had before him, deftly holding measuring scales in one hand and a dagger in the other, like Themis and her divine justice.140 For the Macedonian court at Pella was ‘freeing’ Greece from the Persian yoke and yet holding the sword of Damocles over the kyria ekklesia, the treasured assembly meeting that kept Athenian demokratia (literally ‘people power’) alive and vocal from the Pnyx.141

  He left behind him a smouldering resentment despite the oath sworn by its members under the Treaty of the Common Peace, the Koine Eirene:

  I swear by Zeus, Gaia, Helios, Poseidon and all the gods and goddesses. I will abide by the common peace, and I will neither break the agreement with Philip, nor take up arms on land or sea, harming any of those abiding by the oaths. Nor shall I take any city, or fortress, nor harbour by craft or contrivance, with intent of war against the participants of the war. Nor shall I depose the kingship of Philip or his descendants…142

  The oath went on to list all the member states and the ‘peace’ was watched over by a Macedonian garrison positioned on the heights of the Acrocorinth and Chalcis which were described by Polybius as two of the ‘Three Fetters of Greece’ (Demetrias in Thessaly became the third), as well as at the Cadmea, the citadel of Thebes.143 More garrisons would soon appear under Alexander’s regent, Antipater. The real meaning of Greek loyalty, however, was epitomised by Athens’ contribution to the Macedonian-led war effort: the city-state supplied no more than 600 cavalrymen and twenty triremes from a fleet of over 300 in commission.144 So it is no surprise to read that of the fifty-two attested satraps Alexander appointed to govern the newly acquired Persian satrapies, only three were Greek and none of them came from the mainland, a clear sign of continued distrust. Of Alexander’s eighty-four identified hetairoi just nine were Greek, which illustrates the reality of the ‘Panhellenic’ crusade.145 And only thirty-three Greeks were associated with any military command from a list of 834 officers (principally Macedonians) identified in the accounts of Alexander’s decade-long campaign.146

  The natural auditorium of the hill of the Pnyx in the foreground and the view across to the Acropolis.

  In the first major pitched battle in Asia at the Granicus River in the summer of 334 BCE, the Macedonians slaughtered some 18,000 of perhaps 20,000 ‘warlike and desperate’ Greek mercenaries at the conclusion of the engagement, or so we are led to believe from cross-referencing Arrian’s claims with Plutarch’s. Four Persian satraps and three of Darius’ family also fell. Any Greeks rounded up (Athenians, Thessalians and Thebans) were sent back to hard labour camps in Macedonia. But we should once again be cautious with the numbers, for this has the distant feel of the propaganda of the on-campaign historian Callisthenes, in the form of a lesson to Hellas and the Corinthian League; modern interpretations suggest 5,000 mercenaries might have been killed.147 But Alexander was to have a more effective stranglehold on Greek dissent: he soon controlled the corn supply routes from Egypt and trade through the Hellespont to the Kingdom of Bosphorus and its commercially favourable grai
n contracts. The Black Sea ports remained the largest grain producer and Greece required ‘more imported corn than any other nation’, a vulnerable state of affairs, as Demosthenes voiced.148

  Nevertheless, obtaining the approbation of Athens, Plato’s ‘Hellas of Hellas’, seems to have weighed heavy on Alexander’s mind, or in the mind of those who crafted his public relations machine, for the ethnic divide that separated Macedonians and Greeks persisted through the campaigns.149 When the Great King’s palace at Persepolis burned and ‘prosperity turned to misery’, it was for Athens that revenge was reportedly being extracted.150 In Bactria, Callisthenes had apparently needed to remind his king that it was to the dominion of ‘Hellas’ that Asia was being added (though this may be posthumous Greek spin for it was woven into Callisthenes’ rejection of proskynesis, the prostration before the king that emulated Persian court protocol).151 And in India (‘lands east of the Persian Empire’, much took place in modern Pakistan), Onesicritus claimed Alexander commenced battle with King Porus (a derivative of his Hellenised name) of the Paurava region, broadly the Punjab, with the cry: ‘O Athenians can ye possibly believe what perils I am undergoing to win glory in your eyes.’152

  We do sense that Alexander, an honorary Athenian citizen (as Philip had become following the victory at Chaeronea in 338 BCE which brought Greece to its knees), wished to be acknowledged for allowing the city its democratic heart, but he knew in order to do so Athens would need to be hemmed in by pro-Macedonian oligarchs, a situation that left the Pella-salaried Aristotle in a precarious position. It is difficult to say whether Alexander genuinely admired Athens’ constitutional ideals, or whether he shared the jaundiced view of Xenophon and, in particular, the exiled Alcibiades (ca. 450-404 BCE), on its unique governmental system once they became exiles of the state: ‘As for democracy, the men of sense among us knew what it was, and I perhaps as well as any, as I have more cause to complain of it: but there is nothing new to be said of a patent absurdity.’153 Thucydides credited Alcibiades with a speech that extolled the virtues of conquest, and that would have been easier for Alexander to comprehend: ‘We cannot fix the exact point at which our empire shall stop… and we must scheme to extend it’, for ‘if we cease to rule others, we are in danger of being ruled ourselves.’154