In Search of the Lost Testament of Alexander the Great

by David Grant

  Besides, it was Pindar who introduced Zeus-Ammon, the hybrid god who became attached to Alexander’s own divinity, to Greece in his Pythian Ode 4; Pindar dedicated a cult statue in 462 BCE to the sanctuary on the Cadmea, having seen the god being worshipped on his visit to Cyrene in Libya.255 A ‘mean spirited’ Thebes had fined her homebred celebrity 1,000 drachmas for his Pythian Ode 1 in which the enemy, Athens, was praised for her defence against Xerxes’ naval assault.256 The costly lines read:

  I will earn

  the praise of Athens by singing of Salamis

  and of Sparta by making my theme

  the battles beneath Cithaeron

  where the curved-bow Medes strive and were crushed…257

  Furthering any nostalgic attachment, Pindar had also written an encomium of the campaigner’s predecessor, the flamboyant Alexander I who was termed a traitor by Demosthenes for his part in assisting the Persian advance at a time when Themistocles was insightfully persuading Athens to spend its rich silver finds of 483 BCE (from the mines of Maronia in Laurium) on a new Athenian fleet of 200 triremes – the fleet that helped smash Persian naval power at Salamis in 480 BCE. Athens theatrically recompensed Pindar ten-fold for the Theban fine.258

  With these past incursions in his mind, Alexander minted coins depicting the Persian defeat at Salamis before himself confronting the might of her empire; it was a message to the Great King and an announcement of intention. Spoils from the battle at Gaugamela, the ‘camel’s house’ (otherwise named Arbela),259 that saw Darius III finally toppled from power in 331 BCE, were even sent to Croton in Sicily as compensation for her naval expense in that earlier epic defence of Greece.260 Alexander’s declaration of war on Carthage at the siege of Tyre in 332 BCE, if indeed it ever took place, was possibly motivated by its part in Xerxes’ pincer movement generations before than its blood ties with the Phoenician mother-city then under siege.261

  If Athens was unlikely to have granted him an early apotheosis for facing the Achaemenid threat, Alexander received the divine response he surely sought at the Ammonium at the Libyan Desert oracle of Siwa after being welcomed into Egypt by the native population that had been under the Persian yoke. The very public divine ‘private reply’, which suggested he was the son of Zeus-Ammon, was most likely crafted with Callisthenes’ help, though if the priests of the sanctuary expected that Alexander would next proclaim himself pharaoh, then his immortality could hardly be denied.262 The outcome was an avowed confirmation of his immortal blood and it readied him for the march ahead into the Asian interior.263 The divinity was later ridiculed by Marcus Terentius Varro (ca. 116-27 BCE) in a work titled Orestis or A Treatise on Insanity264 and satirised by Lucian (ca. 125-180 CE) who captured something of the dilemma and the real political agenda in his Dialogues of the Dead:

  Philip: ‘You cannot deny that you are my son this time, Alexander; you would not have died if you had been Ammon’s.’

  Alexander: ‘I knew all the time that you, Philip, son of Amyntas, were my father. I only accepted the statement of the oracle because I thought it was good policy.’

  Philip: ‘What, to suffer yourself to be fooled by lying priests?’

  Alexander: ‘No, but it had an awe-inspiring effect upon the barbarians.

  When they thought they had a God to deal with, they gave up the struggle; which made their conquest a simple matter.’265

  Alexander’s pothos (desire or yearning) to journey through the desert and consult the deity, a god now with ties with both the East and West, was less unique than Callisthenes’ account might have suggested.266 The oracle was well known to the Greeks through their intermediaries in Cyrene, the lush ‘spring’ city consecrated to Apollo in Libya that had left its mark on Pindar.267 Founded by famine-threatened settlers from Thera (Santorini) in 631 BCE and the birthplace of Eratosthenes (ca. 276-194 BCE) and Callimachus (ca. 310/305-240 BCE), Cyrene, along with its port, Apollonia, became a major centre of maritime trade and was minting its own coinage since the last quarter of the 6th century BCE on the Athenian standard. It was also the home to Aristippus’ (ca. 435-356 BCE) hedonistic brand of philosophy, which produced a treatise titled On Ancient Luxury, which provided Diogenes Laertius with much doxographic scandaleuse.268

  Plutarch explained that Cimon, who waged incessant war on Persia a century before, had also sent messengers to the Siwan oracle to obtain answers from Zeus-Ammon, and the Spartan commander Lysander, too, at the end of the 5th century BCE. Each was following in the windblown footsteps of Cambyses II (ruled 529-522 BCE) who reportedly lost a 50,000-strong army in a sandstorm (their remains were possibly discovered in 2012), and those of Heracles and Perseus before him.269 Alas, Cimon did not live to receive his reply, but the emotional footprints were certainly there for Alexander to step into.

  Cementing the foundations of Alexander’s own apotheosic myth, and one appropriately born in Egypt, was the priest’s allegorical slip of the tongue from ‘O, Paidion’ (‘O, my son’) to ‘O, pai Dios’ (‘O, son of God’, thus Zeus). We should recall that Alexander’s forefather, Danaus, who settled in Argos, was in myth the son of Belus, the legendary king of Egypt; Alexander was stepping into yet another ancestral homeland.270 We have no evidence of formalities to proclaim him pharaoh at this time except claims in the Romance, and, in any case, the more enduring epitaph was to be the founding of the city of Alexandria.271 But to quote de Polignac’s study of the Macedonian ‘myth’: ‘Alexander stands at the crossroads of a Greek legend born out of the Libyan pilgrimage and the ancient Egyptian tradition of the pharaoh’s divine conception…’272

  As the Macedonian war machine advanced from Egypt into the heart of the Persian Empire, Alexander cited revenge as his mantra: it was unifying, uncomplicated, profitable and legitimate. Being semeiotikos when it suited him – observant of portentous signs – and having sacrificed to Phobos to bring terror to the enemy, he finally slept deeply late in the night before the battle at Gaugamela dated to 1st October 331 BCE. This may have been propaganda to counter the effect on morale of an ominous lunar eclipse,273 for Curtius gave the impression that the phenomenon occurred ‘right on the brink’ of the final confrontation with Darius III, whereas Arrian, Plutarch, and tableted Babylonian observations, placed the eclipse some eleven days earlier; modern astronomical calculations point to the night of 20th September.274 A source (the most obvious being Cleitarchus following Callisthenes’ original propaganda) was obviously attempting to coincide the phenomenon that swallowed the ‘far shining Goddess Selene’ with the final toppling of the Achaemenid Empire.275 Alexander’s Egyptian diviners managed to spin the eclipse as portentously positive, and his seer, Aristander, who rode out in front of the ranks ‘wearing a white mantle and crown of gold’, pointed to a propitious eagle soaring overhead to motivate the Macedonian-led army.276

  The Persians interpreted the eclipse differently: Herodotus claimed the Magi regarded the moon as the symbol of Persia; the Great King’s soldiers knew it and fear permeated their ranks. Babylonian astronomical diaries additionally recorded ‘deaths and plague occurred’; two days later a meteorite was seen ‘flashing to earth’ with two consecutive nights of ‘falls of fire’ along with an ominous reference to a dog being burned. Finally, there was ‘panic in the camp’; by the time the armies faced off, there was apparently little confidence left on the Persian side of the plain.277

  The morning of the battle, Alexander rode at the head of his royal cavalry agema (the king’s own brigade) wearing a gleaming helmet fashioned by Theophilus, a sword of ‘astonishing temper’ from the king of the Citeans, an ornate Rhodian belt crafted by Helicon ‘the ancient’, and a thick linen thorax belonging to Darius himself, captured with booty at Issus two years before; the cuirass must have been far too large for Alexander (as was Darius’ throne) though the effrontery of its bearing must have humiliated the Persian king.278 Plutarch’s rundown of the panoply is once again steeped in the Iliad; Alexander was now adorned with not just an ancestry that combined the
gods of friend and foes, but with their panoply and weapons too.279

  Alexander’s return of the statues of the two tyrant slayers, Harmodius and Aristogeiton, from Susa to Athens soon after (where tyrannicides could find refuge, according to Callisthenes), and his burning of Persepolis, the Persian ceremonial capital modelled on Nineveh, echoed his continued retributions for those earlier Persian invasions of Greece.280 As a ‘political act’ the destruction of the palace, the ceremonial home of Persian power, was defensible and it signified a regime change from the Achaemenids to the Argeads.281 But Alexander had other reasons to be angry; mutilated Greeks had been encountered nearby (if reports are genuine and not designed to justify what came next) and despite his defeat at Gaugamela, Darius III was still on the loose.

  Babylonian cuneiform tablet BM 36761 which formed part of the astronomical diaries recording the defeat of Darius at Gaugamela and Alexander’s entrance into Babylon. With permission and © of The Trustees of the British Museum.

  Alexander would have additionally been aware of the rising tension within the Hellenic League in Greece which had recently resulted in a coalition led by Agis III of Sparta and an eventual battle with the Macedonian home army at Megalopolis in which the Greeks were funded by Persian gold. Alexander had himself sent funds to his regent, Antipater, to counter the accumulating threat (though probably too late to have had an effect). The message being sent from Persepolis was clear: if Alexander could now torch the Persian heartlands he could certainly burn Athens and the Peloponnese. On the other hand, Hellas was still supposed to rejoice in seeing the hegemon of the League of Corinth executing ‘Greek’ revenge. The result was, nevertheless, lamentable and Alexander is said to have regretted destroying the royal precinct, which was now, as Parmenio pointed out, his own property.282

  The new conqueror of Asia was still pandering to the image Greece demanded, or rather the image he desired Greece demand of him: her long-awaited avenging hero with due cause and grievance. To cap it off he had Apelles paint him as Zeus wielding a thunderbolt to open a path to the gods.283

  ‘OF WILD SYCOPHANTS AND TAME FLATTERERS’284

  With the defeat of Darius, Alexander was effectively on the path to becoming the Great King of Persia, Shahansha, a title that came with connotations of divine approbation, even if it did not suggest the ruler was a god himself.285 Heracles achieved his divinity through nobility of soul alone, though it arrived posthumously and thanks to the oracle at Delphi.286 Being far less patient than his ancestral hero, Alexander knew true immortality lay in the lifetime recording of his deeds, ‘monuments more durable than bronze’, to quote Horace’s Odes.287 And so his campaign retinue included writers, philosophers, poets and classical antiquarians, and an unparalleled retinue of intellectuals: scientists, surveyors (bematistes), engineers and Aristotle-educated hetairoi recording the developing detail. And we should not forget the exiles that attached themselves to the mobile court. This was a proto ‘Scipionic Circle’, a group reminiscent of the scholars and philosophers Scipio Aemilianus (185-129 BCE) famously gathered about him two centuries later in Rome. Pondering the entourage in Asia, Cicero once questioned: ‘How many historians of his achievements are said to have been with Alexander?’288

  Inevitably, the group housed the fawning camp followers whose traits Diogenes likened to the ‘worst biters’ in nature: ‘of wild beasts, the sycophant, and of tame animals, the flatterer’.289 ‘So great is the power of flattery, and nowhere greater, it seems, than among the greatest people.’290 The court poetasters, including Agis of Argos, Choerilus of Iasus and Cleon of Sicily, were noteworthy amongst the kolakeutikoi (sycophants) who proffered Homeric comparisons to Alexander and encouraged Achaemenid-style proskynesis, full body prostration in front of the king.291 And there were more besides, those Curtius referred to as ‘the other dregs of their various cities’, for the mobile Macedonian court and its symposia, which followed the Homeric tradition of strengthening bonds through the ritualistic feasting of the commander with his men, were the perfect venues to practise he rhetorike techne.292 And no doubt some of the noise was menoeikes to Alexander, soothing words for a searching soul.293 His early tutor, Lysimachus, had understood the prince in this respect; he took to referring to himself as ‘Phoenix’, to Alexander as ‘Achilles’ his pupil, and to Philip as ‘Peleus’ his father who had, in fact, befriended the hero Heracles.294

  Alexander’s relationship with these writers reflected the paradox in him, and to quote a further fable attributed to Aesop: ‘We often despise what is most useful to us.’295 He recognised the utility of their artful prose for his pro-Greek press corps, and yet despised his own reliance upon them to produce a truly timeless history – ‘Some men are better served by their bitter-tongued enemies than by their sweet-smiling friends; because the former often tell the truth, the latter, never.’296

  If there is any truth behind the late-sourced anecdotes preserving the king’s scorn of Choerilus, who was apparently paid a gold coin for each quality verse he wrote, Alexander held a dim view of their efforts. Choerilus’ epic ‘excremental poetry’ had inevitably likened Achilles to Alexander, whose reported response to the poet was less than enthusiastic: ‘By the gods, I would rather be Homer’s Thersites, than your Achilles.’ Thersites was the dull-witted, bow-legged fool whose ‘unbridled tongue’ had branded the hero a coward in the Iliad; he was eventually slain by Achilles for mocking his grief over Penthesilea, the dead Amazon queen.297 The Romance developed a variant in which Agamemnon took the place of the warrior.298 But in Alexander’s case, what none of the king’s entourage trailing around the Persian Empire fully appreciated was that he did see himself as both Agamemnon and Achilles, the king that led a flotilla to war and its most eminent warrior who fought dia promakhōn, in the foremost of the ranks.

  Curiously, when considering the possible origins of this episode, the Athenian demagogue, Demades, captured after the Athenian defeat at Chaeronea, had apparently accused the drunken Philip II of playing the ‘Thersites’ role when fate had, in fact, cast him as the Mycenaean King.299 Once described as ‘the wreckage of a shipwrecked state’, it was Demades who finally obliged Alexander with a proposal of divine honours, though his On the Twelve Years (ca. 326 BCE, and if truly attributable to him) had laid the groundwork for his later apologia to a hostile Athens for his proposing the same status for Philip II in 338 BCE.300

  Alexander may even have been guilty of meddling in the affairs of his literary entourage; Anaximenes, the historian on campaign with the Macedonians and the likely author of the Rhetoric to Alexander, circulated a work in the literary style of Theopompus, the accomplished Chian chronicler who may have recently returned from exile. Copies of Anaximenes’ Trikaranus, a work deliberately hostile to Athens, Thebes and Sparta, were dispatched to each city with the result that Theopompus was unwelcome in much of Greece.301 The mischief-making was obvious to those in the know yet the Trikaranus misled notable later historians; Josephus (Yosef Ben Matityahu 37-ca. 100 CE), Lucian and Aristides all referred to it as a genuine Theopompian work.302

  Theopompus’ authentic history of Greece had undermined the tradition of Athens’ glorious past, and it justified the new Macedonian supremacy that the historian had himself benefited from. Yet his Philippika, a history spanning the years 359-336 BCE and completed (we believe) shortly before Alexander’s death, included foul-language derogatory remarks about Philip II. It also painted a picture of degenerate behaviour at the Macedonian court (and even Alexander’s court, if a letter concerning his friend, Harpalus, is genuine).303 This explains why Theopompus was termed a ‘prosecutor’ rather than a historian, despite the attempts he had made to widen the telling of history with ethnology, geography, mythography and digressions that ventured away from the habitual focus on war and politics.304

  Theopompus’ hostility, which suggests that he too, amongst many others, did not believe Alexander would return from his Eastern campaigns alive, was captured by a disapproving Polybius who was: �
�… indeed astonished at this writer’s extravagance.’305 He painted Philip’s hetairoi as a ‘band of debauchees assembled from across Hellas’; his Companions were ‘whores’, soldiers were ‘harlots’ and Philip’s men-slayers were ‘men-sodomisers by habit’. This reads as something of a paradox, for Theopompus simultaneously portrayed Philip as nothing less than the second founder of the Macedonian nation after Caranus. Theopompus is further alleged to have published a sophistical treatise on Alexander that balanced an encomium with polemic, so we may even posture that Alexander endorsed Anaximenes’ literary subterfuge.306

  STORM-TOSSED BY CHANGING FORTUNE: THE EMERGING RAPACIOUS MONOLYKOS

  Alexander dismissed his Greek allies at Ecbatana in Media, the summer residence of the Archaemenid kings, soon after Darius’ defeat at Gaugamela, and this suggested that the League of Corinth was being excluded from his future campaigning; quite possibly the recent news of Peloponnesian support for the Spartan revolt of King Agis had a part to play. Alexander was sufficiently practical, however, to offer the units he discharged employment as mercenaries, but as they no longer represented a city-state in that capacity, formal Greek participation in the subjugation of Asia was over.307

  The rhetorical war of revenge against the Achaemenid kings was over too and a personal crusade began; even Isocrates had only envisaged the conquest of Asia Minor. If Alexander no longer needed Greek political support, neither did he need a historian obsequious to her demands; raw conquest was something the sophist Callisthenes would have found difficult to tame on his pages and his arrest came soon after.308 ‘The cloven hoof’ had shown itself, but for a time Alexander’s troops were carried along on the adrenaline of battle and loot, and by the knowledge that their tight and disciplined formations resulted in comfortingly few casualties, if numbers are to be believed.309 But the ‘old guard’ generals who headed what was substantially his father’s army, still influentially commanded by Parmenio and his sons, would soon be supplanted by Alexander’s own generation of ‘friends’.310