In Search of the Lost Testament of Alexander the Great

by David Grant

  Young Persian nobles had also augmented the Royal Guard, the agema, which was now, tellingly, under Alexander’s personal command; the king was, it must have appeared, handing back the empire to the Persians.410 As Briant notes: ‘Of the twelve satrapies conquered and reorganised between 331 and 327 BCE, only one, Arachosia was given to a Macedonian (Menon); all others, at least initially, had been bestowed on Iranians’; even former Persian plotters (Nabarzanes) were pardoned, though they relinquished their military power and then saw their sons enrolled in Macedonian ranks as hostages for good behaviour.411 In Alexander’s wedding of Roxane he effectively gained a ‘detainee’, for this helped ensure the troubled regions of Bactria and, or, Sogdia, remained ‘loyal’.

  The face of the original expeditionary force had changed beyond recognition; the core of the royal army ‘became increasingly less Macedonian – perhaps only a sixth of the entire force – and behaved more mercenary itself.’412 When Alexander announced his intention to demobilise up to 10,000 veteran soldiers and return them to Macedonia, including those unfit for future campaigning, the assembled men (probably those due to leave and those scheduled to remain) expressed their discord, shouting back something along the lines of ‘go to war yourself then, together with your father Zeus-Ammon’; Alexander’s public rejection of his ‘terrestrial father’, Philip II, had clearly offended those who had once fought under him. The disquiet was suppressed by the drowning of thirteen ringleaders, by Persians no less, a traditional Babylonian retribution though also a Macedonian punishment for those committing sacrilege.413

  The mutiny at Opis (or Susa), when veterans were discharged, was the second, or arguably the third, revolt in three years.414 So where did the loyalty, the esprit de corps and eunoia (goodwill) to the king now come from except within Alexander’s own personal guard? Where was the implicit pistis, trust, in their commander-in-chief? The answer looks increasingly pecuniary; the new homonoia came in the form of a talent of silver per discharged man; this equated to approximately 57 lb (26 kg) of silver, the equivalent of 6,000 drachmas which would have amounted to something like sixteen years of an infantryman’s generous pay.415

  On top of that, Alexander pledged the repayment of years of accumulated debt, a settlement that ‘… was received not more thankfully by the debtors than by the creditors.’ Rather than be burdened with hauling waggons of silver into India, Alexander had kept the captured wealth in the Persian treasuries at Susa and Ecbatana; unable to pay his men in coin, a huge backlog of payments must have accumulated, and that in turn would have filtered down to camp provisioners and service providers.416 But what was once monetary munificence was now little short of a bribe; according to Cicero, this was not the first time Alexander had imprudently used wealth to garner support:

  Philip takes his son Alexander sharply to task for trying by gifts of money to secure the goodwill of the Macedonians: ‘What in the mischief induced you to entertain such a hope,’ he says, ‘as that those men would be loyal subjects to you whom you had corrupted with money?’417

  There followed the announcement that Alexander would fix the royal seat in Asia, and dissent once more filled the air.418 But by now the greater part of Alexander’s adult life had been spent east of the Hellespont. Chaldeans from Babylonia, Indian gymnosophists, Phoenician shipwrights and traders, and embalmers from Egypt complemented the Macedonian entourage.419 The inner circle at the court symposia included Thessalians, Cretans, Cypriots and royal Asiatics. His first wife, Roxane, was Bactrian, or perhaps Sogdian (‘another Briseis for a new Achilles’ suggested Curtius), and he had attachments to Carian and Persian ‘mothers’, adopted by one, and adopting the other.420 Alexander was not a man longing to return to the provincial pastures of Pella, whose harbour and natural port was in any case (evidence suggests) beginning to silt up.421

  The arrival of the Macedonian army at Susa in early 324 BCE saw the en masse marriages of Macedonian soldiers to Asian brides in a great celebratory pavilion, a venue that itself paralleled the apadana, the marquee-style audience hall of Achaemenid tradition.422 Arrian summed up Alexander’s intentions: he was offering his megistoi to ‘the noblest of Persian and Median blood’.423 Performing at the weddings, and possibly capturing the truer sentiment of the betrothed Macedonians officers, were the tragic actors Aristocritus, Athenodorus and Thessalus, though none of the neogamoi, the newlyweds, dared voice their dissent.424 The event evidenced a practical reality rather than the more fanciful stoic notions that were later attached to it: Alexander was initiating plans for a hybrid aristocracy. His Somatophylakes and other distinguished officers, some ninety-two in total, were to produce a future generation of half-Asiatic governors that would maintain his legacy across the vast empire.425 And it is here that we may insert Badian’s final assessment: Alexander was ‘essentially not interested in a future without himself’, a presence that was to be extended through his own half-caste sons who would be accepted as overlords of this new environment.426

  Had Darius been captured alive, we might even conjecture that Alexander would have followed the example he later set with Porus in India: reinstating him as a ‘client king’ to manage an eastern Argead realm, and in the process reuniting him with a family Alexander had all but adopted himself; he did bring Darius’ brother, Oxyathres, into the fold of court hetairoi and even into his Bodyguard corps.427 And we sense that Alexander would have relished the moment of this grand and poignant gesture, which may explain why he levied such a cruel sentence on Darius’ murderer, Bessus, who was delivered to him naked in a collar, with nose and ears then cut off, and summarily crucified.428 Pure altruism would not have been behind his partial reinstatement, for practically speaking it would have saved him a huge administrative burden, and where possible and when suitably compliant, we know Asian satraps were reconfirmed. Moreover, Alexander ‘will certainly have understood that his work could not last unless he made use of the Achaemenid model’.429 Alexander had made sure that Darius was buried in the royal sepulchre of the Achaemenids close to Persepolis.430

  The Macedonian rank and file was bewildered by Alexander’s adoption, admiration, and preservation of so much he had conquered, just as the Spartan hoplites under Lysander had questioned why Pausanias voted against destroying Athens at the end of the Peloponnesian War (which nevertheless marked the end of the creativity of the Greek city-state). Pausanias was tried and finally exiled for his pacifist policy, though Plutarch credited the lines of Euripides’ Electra with saving the day, for upon hearing them, ‘… all were moved to compassion, and felt it to be a cruel deed to abolish and destroy a city which was so famous, and produced such poets.’ But Athens’ Long Walls were pulled down and its fleet was burned to the melancholy sound of the flute.431 But in Alexander’s case, the simple truth is that he did not so much defeat the Persian Empire as become subsumed by it.

  The army finally returned to Babylon in late 324 BCE, by which time troops were cynical, friends had been executed and close Companions were dead. How did this affect the ever-campaigning king? Lane Fox insightfully stated ‘nothing is harder, than to appreciate Alexander after Hephaestion’s death’, for the former chiliarchos – Alexander’s alter ego – had died in Ecbatana earlier in the year.432 A decade before, and in more hopeful times, Darius’ mother, Sisygambis, had unwittingly mistaken Hephaestion for the king due to his height.433 The king’s immortalised reply – ‘he too is Alexander’– implied a true homoousios in which they shared the same essence. If Aristotle’s definition of ‘a single soul dwelling in two bodies’ held true here, Alexander had lost his more temperate half, and any remaining sophrosyne, moderation, was lost along with him.434

  ‘To lighten his sorrow’, after reportedly destroying the temple to Asclepius at Ecbatana and shearing the manes of his horses and mules in a Homeric mourning, Alexander embarked on a ‘blood-soaked hunt’ of the Cossean tribes from the youths upwards; Plutarch termed it a ‘sacrifice to the shades of his dead friend.’435

  In contrast
to the earlier Asiatic appointments, by the time Alexander returned to Babylon, tellingly, only three Persians still held office.436 The new administration was never the Graeco-Oriental homonoia many believe he attempted to bring about. Within this new administrative model Alexander relied on resettled mercenaries, principally Greeks, to keep peace across the empire. Curtius proposed that: ‘Alexander… was thinking that Asia could be held by an army of modest size because he had distributed garrisons in many places and filled his new cities with settlers eager to preserve the status quo.’437 But Isocrates had long before alerted Philip to the prospect of these wandering and destitute fighters searching for new employment, advising him to plant them in colonies on the empire borders to thwart any dangerous build-up.438 Even Calanus, the resident Indian gymnosophist, had demonstrated to Alexander, with a stiffened hide laid on the floor, that unless you controlled the centre, the edges of the empire would always rise up in opposition.439

  Polybius ominously concluded that tyrant-employed mercenaries are superior to those recruited by democracies.440 But Iphicrates’ advice to hire a ‘mercenary soldier fond of money and of pleasures, for thus he will fight the more boldly to procure the means to gratify his desires’, did not contemplate a life on the far banks of the Indus, or the wolf-packed forests of Hyrcania (‘wolf-land’), despite the raising of the mysterious so-called Wall of Alexander erected in the region.441 These garrisoneers were supposed to become what the Romans broadly termed limitanei, frontier soldiers. They were farmers of kleroi, land grants in the Athenian-style kleroukhia that established a new colony with political dependence on the mother city.

  Those in settlements furthest from home inevitably degenerated into local militia when regular ‘state’ contact became infrequent. The policy was a huge overestimate of their enthusiasm and stability; some 3,000 of these settlers in katoikiai, military settlements or colonies, had already revolted upon rumour of Alexander’s death in Mallia. Others murdered Philip, the satrap of the expanded Indian provinces east of the Indus.442 Demaratus of Corinth had been wasting his tears on the fallen Hellenes who, he lamented, had been deprived of the ‘great pleasure’ of seeing Alexander finally sit on Darius’ throne; he, like Isocrates, appears to have held a far too utopian view of the ‘Panhellenic’ invasion of Persia.443

  Alexander had issued an edict to his Asian satraps in 326 BCE ordering them to disband their own hired armies in anticipation of trouble, just as the Persian King Artaxerxes III Ochus had soon after his accession in 358 BCE, for by now over 100,000 mercenaries (if cited numbers can be believed) had seen service with the Macedonians and were stationed across the empire; many of them had once been in the pay of Darius III.444 ‘Partly for the sake of gaining fame, and partly wishing to secure many devoted personal followers in each city to counter the revolutionary movements and seditions of the Greeks’, Alexander followed up with the Exiles Decree that was read aloud at the 324 BCE Olympic Games (July 31st-August 4th), and which must have broadly coincided with the trouble at Opis or Susa.445

  The edict, unconstitutional as it turned out, was partly motivated by the need to repatriate these itinerant soldiers and to gain a core of support in the Greek cities. The decree was particularly onerous for Athens which had turfed out the native residents of Samos and made the island a cleruchy in 366/365 BCE, following which the Samian exiles may have journeyed to Sicily (amongst other locations, Iasus, for example) where the historian Duris may have been born.446 We even have the lengthy diagramma (legislation) drafted by the city of Tegea in Arcadia to deal with the complicated property and civil laws surrounding the returnees.447 The re-emergence of up to 20,000 political outcasts in Greece was to cause huge property conflict, though Antipater was instructed to act against any city resisting. In this Antipater was precariously placed, for the decree undermined his own political architecture and perhaps Alexander was aiming to achieve just that, for Craterus was already journeying home through Asia with orders to take over the regency.448

  The Athenian commander Leosthenes, ironically the son of an exile once given sanctuary by Philip II, and singled out for the sacred duty of leading the Greek forces by a newly vocal and ever-hostile Hyperides, another of the so-called ‘Ten Attic Orators’, was offering wandering mercenaries an alternative: a home at Taenarum in southern Laconia. Here the seeds of the Lamian (originally ‘Hellenic’) War against Macedonia were being irrigated by covert Athenian sponsorship, along with an alliance with Locris, Phocis and Aetolia using 50 of the talents from the Athenian treasury that now housed, thanks to the earlier arrival of Alexander’s defecting treasurer, Harpalus, a further 700 talents guarded on the Acropolis.449 The 22,000 or so gathering soldiers of fortune (some 8,000 of them formerly employed in Asia by Alexander) should, however, have thought twice about the chthonic implication, for it was here at Taenarum that Heracles discovered the entrance to Hades; a nekyomanteion, a ‘drawing place of ghosts’, was located nearby as well as the Death Oracle of Poseidon and its temple of sanctuary.450

  Hyperides, who was quite accustomed to representing for a fee, argued to keep the balance of Harpalus’ stolen gold to fund ‘his’ war, fermenting an already explosive brew. Demosthenes, who had been positively mute for the previous six years, and who had been appointed Athens’ representative, archetheoros, for the 324 BCE Olympic Games, was now planning to meet, or had just returned from meeting, Alexander’s general, Nicanor of Stagira (possibly Aristotle’s nephew and soon-to-be son-in-law) at Olympia. Demosthenes now voted against the move. We can only speculate on the repercussions Nicanor threatened both him and Athens with if Harpalus and his funds were not handed over.

  Demosthenes was nonetheless accused (by Hyperides, Stratocles and Deinarchus) of taking a commission; 350 talents went missing and so did Harpalus himself to a death in Crete at the hand of one of his Spartan associates, Thibron, while being chased across the Aegean by Alexander’s agent, Philoxenus. After the Areopagus concluded its investigation and made its accusations (the result possibly guided by accusations from Harpalus’ captured steward), Demosthenes, the recipient of a gold crown in 340 BCE and again in 338 BCE at the Great Dionysia for his services to the state, was eventually forced to seek sanctuary on the island of Calauria.451

  Alexander’s well-documented requests for divinity had accompanied the Exiles Decree. Demosthenes, surely heeding those warnings from Nicanor, declared: ‘Alexander can claim to be the son of Zeus and Poseidon as well for all we care;’452 certainly by 370/371 BCE Athens had a cult of Zeus-Ammon, Alexander’s alleged father, and that would have been an obvious target as a place to leave votives for the new Pella-born deity.453 The pro-Macedonian Demades warned the arguing Athenians that they were so concerned with the gods above that they would lose the earth below.454 And they almost did, immediately following the arrival of reports of Alexander’s death in Babylon; the city fined Demades 10 talents and deprived him of his citizenship, and Leosthenes was killed enforcing the blockade at Lamia; his ‘towering cypress tree’ bore no fruit except a poignant funeral oration by Hyperides.455

  THE ETERNAL QUEST FOR THE SPHINX

  With the backdrop of turmoil in both Greece and the Asian empire, the final months of Alexander’s life are difficult to decipher, as we are left with the image of a man painted in sfumato, and the court sources appear to have been remarkably light on coherent detail through this period, when the rapidly concluding biographies degenerated into local reports of portents, prophecies and funeral pyres. So it is difficult to establish who or what Alexander had become. Eugene Borza proposed that every historian needs to deal with three incarnations of the Macedonian king: the ‘mythological-romanticised’, Alexander the ‘historical’, and ‘Alexander the man’.456 They are of course inseparable despite Quellenforschung’s best efforts. Besides, ‘the original author of the myth was often Alexander himself’.457

  There can be no doubt that he was, on the whole, incomprehensible to the average man of his age; simply put, Alexander was a maverick. C
an we reconcile the king who paired eighty officers with Asiatic brides at the Susa mass weddings with the campaigner who forbade them and soldiers to take their half-caste offspring back to Macedonia?458 Can we explain why Persepolis was burned when Cyrus’ tomb and the Esagila Temple were repaired? And can the Alexander who ran Cleitus through be the same tyrant who let the ever-hostile Demosthenes outlive him? The latter may have been down to the influence of his agent, Aristion, who had enjoyed a friendship with Hephaestion,459 and yet the long arm of Antipater and his oligarchs could have easily silenced the anti-Macedonian logographos years before.460

  If Alexander was misunderstood, he himself may have failed to grasp the subtleties of those around him when journeying off the road Aristotle would have bade him follow. The elite education Philip had arranged for his son was not void of controversy itself; Alexander allegedly took Aristotle to task for disseminating his ‘exclusive’ knowledge and learning to anyone but him: ‘Thou hast not done well to publish thy acroamatic doctrines; for in what shall I surpass other men if those doctrines wherein I have been trained are to be all men’s common property?’461

  Plutarch claimed that in a letter sent to his regent, Antipater, Alexander threatened to bring Aristotle to account for his role in Callisthenes’ treason, but how far their relationship had truly deteriorated remains conjecture.462 Nevertheless, we doubt Aristotle would have performed proskynesis at the campaign court despite knowing what had befallen his relative. Alas, he left us no opinion of the great Macedonian conquest; Aristotle’s essay titled Alexander, or On the Colonists, which was associated with his On Kinship and similarly dedicated to Alexander, is lost, and here he might have critiqued what he heard of the new overseas poleis.463