In Search of the Lost Testament of Alexander the Great
Page 12
So what had now become of the Isocrates’ grand ideal, which latterly implored Philip to lead a Panhellenic army against Persia?311 Well, on one hand, Isocrates, then in his late nineties, took it with him when he starved himself to death shortly after defeat at Chaeronea while reportedly reciting lines from a Euripides play.312 And there is an added irony here too, for it was that battle in Boeotia that finally enabled Philip to take the leadership of the League at Corinth and so advance his invasion plans. Isocrates, it seems, didn’t foresee the true price of conquest or the cost of a unified Greece, for he had not lived to see the total destruction of Thebes.313 The Sicilian historian Timaeus, who ‘turned his back’ on Alexander and his Diadokhoi when ‘steeping himself in a past age of civil liberties’, gave a usual scathing summation: he quipped that Alexander needed fewer years to conquer Persia than Isocrates had taken to write his Panegyric.314
We may speculate whether Alexander, at that point, saw his own personal Bodyguards, traditionally seven in number, as the Epigonoi in the Thebaid, the ‘seven against Thebes’ who were sons of Argive heroes, when he oversaw the city’s destruction in 335 BCE; its Hieros lochos, the Theban Sacred Band, had been annihilated by him and his Companion Cavalry in the charge at Chaeronea three years before. But following the landscape-changing battle at Gaugamela, Alexander’s Somatophylakes would now be better considered as ‘seven against the False Smerdis’, for a final hurdle separated him from his own Great Kingship: the still-at-large pretender Bessus, the satrap of Bactria.315 It took a further year to track down the renegade who proclaimed himself a new Great King, Artaxerxes V;316 yet the eventual capture and execution of Bessus heralded in Alexander’s own troubled reign. He was twenty-seven when he effectively became the first European ‘Great King’ of the Persian Empire.
The Vulgate genre presented Alexander as a king ‘storm-tossed by changing fortune’ and the transformation is nowhere better exhibited than in Curtius’ polemical artistry.317 Initially, ‘fortune was with him at every turn and so even his rashness had produced glorious results’; it was a rhetorical high point from which Alexander was to slide.318 Even before victory at Issus Alexander reportedly ‘feared Fortuna’.319 He murdered the innocent Sisines due to misguided suspicions, and he left infantry stragglers for the approaching enemy to mutilate; when the Persians found them they ‘succumbed to a frenzy of barbarian ruthlessness’.320
From the alleged crucifixions following the siege of Tyre, to a ‘foreign mode of behaviour’ that saw him drag the still-breathing Baetis, the phrourarchos (here, a garrison commander) of Gaza, behind his chariot in the fashion of Achilles, whilst putting all men to the sword, dark clouds had been gathering.321 Gaza, the spice capital of Syria, fell, and 500-talents’ weight of frankincense and a hundred of myrrh headed back to Alexander’s austere tutor, Leonidas, so that he could stop ‘dealing parsimoniously with the gods’. Somewhat paradoxically, the incident involving the cruel treatment afforded to Baetis (possibly traceable back to Hegesias) is regularly challenged, whereas the crucifixions at Tyre are not.322
A ‘recklessness that could have spelled defeat’ preceded Curtius’ statement that: ‘The blood of thousands was paying for the grandiose plans of one man who despised his country, and who had deluded ideas about aspiring to heaven.’ Curtius’ fifth chapter highlighted Alexander’s liaisons with courtesans and an inexcusable fondness for drink, though, in his defence, Heracles had himself been a notoriously heavy imbiber and Dionysus was the god of wine (Liber or Bacchus to the Romans). These degenerative themes, repeated by Curtius throughout the next five books, are a far cry from the sexual abstinence and organisational brilliance that Plutarch and Arrian extended further into their coverage.323 Alexander had, as Timaeus would have phrased it, run aground into luxury.324
Callisthenes, who may have concluded the same, might have reported on one final post-Gaugamela episode before he was executed, and it occurred in Sogdia sometime in 329 BCE. Ptolemy and Aristobulus bypassed it, saving Arrian the trouble of justifying what was possibly the most troubling crime Alexander would commit: the massacre of the Branchidae. Eulogistic scholars such as Tarn have tried to dismiss the historicity of the event, though Callisthenes’ deliberately inaccurate rendering of its background argues that it actually took place.
Callisthenes claimed that the clan of the Branchidae, who were the keepers of the ancient shrine of Apollo at Didyma near Miletus, ‘gave over the treasuries of the gods to the Persians’ when Xerxes was planning his advance upon Greece (483 BCE onwards) some 150 years before.325 Herodotus, however, had made it clear that the Persian plundering of the temple was punishment for the earlier Ionian revolt against Darius I, which ended in 494 BCE; moreover, the oracle had not been rebuilt by Xerxes’ day.326 But following Callisthenes, Strabo claimed the Branchidae themselves sacked the temple before being granted a safe haven in Bactria beyond the Oxus River by Darius I to protect them from Greek retributions.
Alexander had symbolically reconsecrated the temple at Didyma in 334 BCE, and some five years later he located, by chance, the new settlement of the Branchidae (a site possibly rediscovered in 2014) when campaigning in the upper satrapies. The population, still Greek-speaking and retaining Hellenic customs, came out to greet him. Alexander had their city surrounded and reportedly massacred them to the last man to punish them for their ancestral betrayal, reportedly urged on by the Milesians in his entourage. As Curtius described it: ‘Everywhere there was butchery; neither their common language, nor prayers, nor olive branches held out to the attackers were able to prevent the cruelty.’
The city and its groves were razed to the ground. Yet by suggesting the Branchidae had treacherously sided with Xerxes, Callisthenes was, it appears, trying to justify (perhaps deliberately poorly) the crime that made its way into the pages of Diodorus, Strabo, Curtius and into Plutarch’s Moralia; the polemic in the latter two suggests that Cleitarchus characteristically saw the darker consequences of the episode as well.327 Despite his thinly veiled spin on the morality of retribution in the name of Greece, it may have been the point at which Callisthenes rebelled. He died soon after, and here, in Bactria, what the Macedonians saw were the descendants of Greeks being massacred when an Asiatic (Roxane) was being wed by their king.
The campaign magic and its love of honour, philotimia, died in what have been termed Alexander’s ‘three catastrophes’: the trial and execution of Philotas in Drangiana (autumn 330 BCE); the murder of his general, Cleitus, at Maracanda in Bactria (Samarcand, winter 328/7 BCE); and the proskynesis debacle that preceded the arrest of the official campaign historian (possibly as late as 327 BCE). Callisthenes may have been required to write in eulogistic tones but he is also credited with: ‘For my part, I hold Alexander for any mark of honour that a man may earn; but do not forget that there is a difference between honouring a man and worshipping a god.’328
This was a distinction, a limitation, and an apotheosic rejection that Alexander could not tolerate, just as he could not accept a Cleitus who revered him and yet who maintained that Philip, his mortal father, was responsible for the foundation of his success – a father whose life Alexander was claiming he had once saved.329 The sword arm of ‘Black’ Cleitus, whose sister had been Alexander’s wet-nurse, saved Alexander’s life at the battle at the Granicus River, but it was now the unwelcome arm of his father’s old guard generals sabotaging his metamorphosis from a carousing Macedonian warlord to demigod.330
‘Alas what evil customs reign in Hellas’ was Black Cleitus’ accusation on the back of Alexander’s boasting; it was a line taken from Euripides’ Andromache, supposedly quoting Peleus the father of Achilles.331 It was fatal; Alexander ran Cleitus through with a spear, though he blamed his murderous frenzy on the vengeful wrath of Dionysus that was brought to bear for his sacking of Thebes.332 But Cleitus had been right; the ‘rudder’s guidance and the curb’s restraint’ that Sophocles propounded and Plutarch once saw in Alexander’s early education under Aristotle, were by now lon
g abandoned in the dust of Asia.333 As Justin phrased it: ‘The father had laid the foundations of the empire of the world, the son consummated the glory of conquering the whole world’, and yet the son exceeding father ‘in both his virtues and his vices’.334 At Cleitus’ death in the upper satrapies, Alexander was probably aged twenty-eight, but the tragedy of the episode may have been instructive; after the customary withdrawal, fasting and weeping to the gods at Opis several years later, Alexander did place his father first when summing up royal achievements to appease his mutinous men, so the sources inferred.335
After the controversial execution of the popular veteran general, Parmenio, who, until he fell under the shadow of suspicion at Philotas’ trial, had been a demonstrably loyal strategos, Alexander censored letters home; when the couriers were a sufficient distance from the camp, he ordered them opened and read to fathom the army’s opinion of his actions and continued eastward campaigning. Damning reports were destroyed, the malcontents identified and then brigaded into the ataktoi, the ‘disciplinary unit’; his plan was, allegedly, to destroy them or settle them in distant colonies at the empire’s edge.336 This was not the first censorship; we are told Alexander had previously demanded that Antigone spy on Philotas, her lover already under suspicion.337 Although Curtius permitted the reader a vote on the outcome of Philotas’ trial, he condemned Alexander’s execution of Callisthenes as nothing short of ‘barbarous’.338
‘Alexander fixed his gaze on him [Philotas]. The Macedones are going to judge your case,’ he said. ‘Please state whether you will use your native language before them.’339 The unfortunate Philotas, now the most prominent commander of the Companion Cavalry, was being tried for treason. Alexander mocked Philotas for rejecting their native tongue, a harsh repost in the circumstances. In Curtius’ rendering of the trial, Bolon, a common soldier, also reprimanded Philotas for needing an interpreter to listen to men speaking his own language; this was perhaps a rhetorical device to highlight Philotas’ aloofness from the common infantryman and their rustic virtue, for he had grown, according to Curtius, vulgar in extravagant living.340 The treatment of Alexander in the extant Roman-era accounts is peppered with rhetorical devices.
The decapitation of Parmenio at Ecbatana in late 330 BCE, and Alexander’s use of Darius’ own signet ring and his harem, symbolised a metamorphosis complete, as Hermolaus’ defence speech at the trial of the ‘conspiring’ pages had neatly articulated.341 Parmenio may have never been forgiven for his ‘sluggish’ performance at Gaugamela which ultimately led to Darius’ escape, depriving Alexander of the long-dreamt of opportunity of seeing the Great King prostrated before him, unless this was once again Callisthenes’ handiwork at the general’s expense.342
The trial of Parmenio’s son, Philotas, nevertheless acts as a litmus test for the political pH of each narrator and their underlying sources, in this case through the reporting of a plot on Alexander’s life led by a court hetairos, Dymnus.343 As far as Curtius was concerned, Philotas’ torture after a sham trial in front of a hastily convened Common Assembly of Macedones, and his subsequent sentencing and execution, formed an integral part of Alexander’s moral decline that was painted in tragic biographical tones that typified the Vulgate genre.344 Although Plutarch also saw a conspiracy against an innocent Philotas too, at this point the dispassionate Diodorus still saw Alexander ‘stumbling into a base action quite foreign to his goodness of nature’; Arrian almost bypassed the affair altogether, as no doubt had his principal source, Ptolemy. After all, the removal of the prominent Bodyguard, Demetrius, on the suspicion of collusion with the plotters, provided the opportunity for Ptolemy to occupy the resulting vacant post of Somatophylax.345 Indeed, at Alexander’s death, the Somatophylakes were transformed from Bodyguards to successors, the Diadokhoi, who governed regions of the newly expanded empire; by then they would include Perdiccas, Leonnatus, Ptolemy, Aristonus, Lysimachus, Seleucus, Peucestas, and possibly Eumenes.
Cleitarchus, writing later in Ptolemaic Alexandria, sensibly appears to have kept Ptolemy off the list of commanders summoned to coordinate a covert action against the accused.346 And soon after the trial, the acquitted Amyntas, a prominent (though arrogant) son of Andromenes, a syntrophos of the Pellan court and one of the king’s hetairoi, died conveniently (some might say ‘mysteriously’, for he had too much support for an open conviction).347 Yet both trials – that of Callisthenes with the pages, and Dymnus with Philotas – along with the death of Alexander Lyncestis (Antipater’s son-in-law) who had been held in captivity for years after falling under suspicion of offering his services to Darius, would have caused widespread panic in the ranks, for Macedonian law seems to have demanded the death of all who were related to those deemed guilty of treason.348
This series of episodes represented a dark period for Alexander, though blacker was still to come. Holt calculates that the Macedonian campaigns in Bactria and Sogdia through 328/9 BCE (much of it absent from Arrian’s account and dealt with more fully by Curtius) had already left 100,000 dead, including women and children, whilst 7,000 Macedonians are estimated to have perished there. Deaths from wounds, illnesses and disease had surely taken more allied troops than any eyewitness source would have been prepared to admit. When Alexander departed the region he had to leave behind a defence force with garrisons that might have totalled 20,000 ‘peacekeepers’.349 Curtius claimed he actually tried to conceal the disastrous outcome, ‘… threatening with death those who came back from the battle, if they revealed what had happened.’350
The ‘Vulgate Alexander’ was now more Ahriman than Ahura Mazda, and more the stuff of the Spartan Crypteia than king portrayed in Xenophon’s Cyropaedia.351 The wolf that the priestess Pythia predicted would guide the Macedonian conqueror to the Persians (Apollo-Lyceus that appeared on Macedonian coinage?), had finally crept out of Alexander himself;352 as far as Demosthenes was concerned, this was the monolykos, the rapacious ‘arch wolf of Macedonia’, he had warned of years before.353
It was at this point that Alexander lost control of his passions that his self-restraint and continence, supreme virtues at the height of good fortune, degenerated into arrogance and wantonness… he began to rival the loftiness of the Persian court, equal to the power of the gods.354
Alexander was criticised for slapping Asiatics on the back and marrying into the Persian royal line the Macedonians had fought to topple in battle, and he slept with the ‘prostitute’ eunuch, Bagoas, who had convinced him to execute Orsines, ‘the noblest of Persians’.355 Even the apologist Arrian, in an unconscious attempt at physiognomy, commented in his so-called ‘great digression’ on moral turpitude that it was ‘regrettable that a descendent of Heracles’ traded Macedonian garb for ‘the median dress and the Persian mitre… when he was victor and they the vanquished.’356
But objection on campaign had become dangerous, and the relationship between the Macedonian commander-in-chief and his men-at-arms, which traditionally permitted isegoria – freedom of speech – was dissolving. Alexander began to see his kingship as a personal sovereignty more than an organ of state and any word against it was deemed mutinous. Finally, Curtius claimed his ‘friends regarded him as the enemy’.357 Alexander’s own brand of court politics had been a one-way diplomacy: unstoppable, inflexible, unflankable and unforgiving as his phalanx; there was no neutral and Alexander recognised no reverse gear at all.
If Alexander had ‘systematically exploited the tensions of his court’, he had finally become part of them himself;358 the passage in Aelian’s Varia Historia is likely apocryphal but may, nonetheless, preserve a core of truth:
Alexander son of Philip is said to have been very jealous of his friends and suspicious of them all, though not for the same reasons. He disliked Perdiccas for being a natural solder, Lysimachus because he was renowned as a general and Seleucus for his bravery. Antigonus’ ambition troubled him, and he disliked Antipater’s ability in leadership, and he was suspicious of Ptolemy’s cleverness and feared Atarrhias’ insubo
rdination, not to mention Peithon’s revolutionary character.359
Of course, this type of epitomised scandeleuse, and the Vulgate character portrayal along with its sibling offshoots, was a literary and rhetorical package deal: the philosophical and moral viatica were all thrown in so that they are now impossible to separate from the core of unimpeachable detail. But somewhere buried beneath Arrian’s steadfast apologia, Plutarch’s moralising ‘pottages’ (as Macaulay termed them), Trogus’ troubled king which gave us Justin’s jaundiced précis overlaid on Cleitarchus’ kingly model of reverse transfiguration artfully re-rendered by Curtius in moralistic Rome, lies the real Alexander, who pushed himself, his men, and tyche to the limits of the imagination and on towards the great encircling ocean.
THE ILLUSIVE OIKOUMENE: A RIVER TOO FAR
We can only try to approximate the psychological processes at work on Alexander through the latter part of the campaign, fettered as we are today by the concept of infinity. To the learned community of his day the world must have seemed intellectually tameable and truly all knowable, despite the apeiron (the ‘indefinite’ or ‘boundless’) of Anaximander (ca. 610-525 BCE) and the paradoxes of Zeno of Elea (ca. 490-430 BCE) who first pondered them. Plutarch claimed Alexander had wept when the campaign philosopher, Anaxarchus, proposed innumerable worlds existed: ‘Is it not worthy of tears,’ he said, ‘that, when the number of worlds is infinite, we have not yet become lords of a single one?’360
But would Ephorus, Herodotus or Diodorus have embarked on ‘universal’ history unless they believed its boundaries could be encompassed in their pages? One cannot help but imagine that Aristotle felt, given a long life, he could wrap his arms around the sum total of the physical and metaphysical world and house it in a treatise. Indeed he tried; Cicero reported Aristotle ‘… could see that, since great advances had been made in so few years, philosophy would be completely finished in a short time.’361 If ever completed, it would have anticipated the so-called speculum literature of the Middle Ages, the single compendia encompassing the supposed sum of all knowledge.