In Search of the Lost Testament of Alexander the Great

by David Grant

  Precariously based in Athens as a philomakedon (or rather an employee of its king), Aristotle had to condone the presence of Macedonian-installed oligarchs in Greece while managing a philosophical school founded under a demokratia in which, according to Aristotle’s Athenian Constitution, ‘the poor, with their wives and children, were “enslaved” to the rich’. The limits of Aristotle’s own creativity must have been tested when he attempted to pair the conqueror of Asia with the pepaideumenos (learned) prince he had taught in the Temple of Nymphs at Mieza. The recurring dichotomies in his writings, and what Diogenes Laertius described as a ‘double criterion of truth’, along with the ‘dual structure of politics, morality and ethics’, were probably a result of his uncomfortable position.464 In his Politics Aristotle appreciated that some monarchies can neither be described as absolute nor constitutional, and this is no doubt how he avoided passing judgment on Makedonon Politeia.465 If genuinely attributable to him, his disquisition on monarchy hinted that he and Alexander may have philosophically shadow-boxed on which of his five subcategories of kingship Alexander had actually established, encroaching as it did on ‘absolute rule’ as far as it fitted into the ‘heroic’.466

  If these complexities defied easy explanation, the Platonist and Peripatetic classifications did not advance the case. Plato determined there are four species of justice, two divisions of law, four of nobility and four of perfect virtue.467 They seek absolute definitions for Alexander’s mercurial character when there was clearly an evolution. The abstemious prince who fought at Chaeronea could hardly be the king who enjoyed nightly komoi (Macedonian-styled court banquets which often descended into drinking binges) at Babylon dressing variously as Ammon, Artemis and Hermes, a point even the admiring Tarn reluctantly conceded.468 Nietzsche apparently took delight in discovering that at his death the solemn Plato was found to be reading the light-hearted Aristophanes. He concluded the philosopher has a sphinx-like nature; isn’t it just possible Alexander did too?469

  But just as ‘great natures exhibit great vices also, as well as great virtues’, mythology provided us with both a Theban winged Sphinx with malevolent riddles, and an Egyptian Sphinx endowed with benevolent strength.470 Opinion on which inhabited the conqueror depends entirely on the position of the onlooker.

  While guessing like Oedipus on the changing nature of man, we recall that the corpus of fragments collected by Jacoby and Müller is exclusively of Graeco-Roman descent and opinion.471 What of the opposing view expounded by the Persian, Phoenician, Egyptian and Babylonian accounts? We have no idea what Berossus, the Chaldean priest of Bel-Marduk, actually wrote about Alexander in Babylon; writing just a generation later, the twenty-two quotations or paraphrases of his work and the eleven statements about him in classical sources suggest he was prolific in astronomical and philosophical references to Chaldeans, though to what extent is represented a history of events remains unknown.472 The ‘barbarian’ accounts that are extant remember history quite distinctly. Controversial Zoroastrian claims in the Book of Arda Viraf, the religious texts written in ‘Middle Persian’ or Pahlavi, paint Alexander as that thoroughly evil spirit:

  But afterward, the accursed evil spirit, the wicked one, in order to make men doubtful of this religion, instigated the accursed Alexander, the Roman, who was dwelling in Egypt, so that he came to the country of Iran with severe cruelty and war and devastation; he also slew the ruler of Iran, and destroyed the metropolis and empire, and made them desolate.473

  This may be later Sassanid-era spin (with specious ethnic attachments) but it surely captures the ancient tones of the regions Alexander had once devastated, and were they not just as entitled to their reflections in order to balance the total tradition?

  Surely Porus, the 7-foot tall ruler of Paurava, had scribes in India recording the Macedonian onslaught. What did Alexander’s ‘most loyal vassal’, as Arrian termed him, really think of the short godless invader who killed two of his sons at the Hydaspes River?474 What did Manetho’s Aegyptiaca (ca. 285 BCE) make of the Macedonian rule of the Ptolemies written from the perspective of a subjugated priest of Ra based at Heliopolis?475 Manetho’s Criticism of Herodotus gives us a hint of his views on Greeks coveting the oriental past for themselves. Nevertheless it was Herodotus’ account, and not Manetho’s pages and neither those of Berossus, that remained ‘the standard authority’ on the prehistory of Egypt and Babylonia, from a Western perspective at least.476

  THE ARTISTIC ANACYCLOSIS

  Even in Western eyes Alexander metamorphosed, through the Hellenistic Age and the rise and fall of Rome, then through the so-called European Dark Ages and then the Renaissance that rediscovered the Hellenistic philosophies once more. As Polybius, Tacitus and the Annales school of historians proposed, the canvas of history is cyclical. Renaissance France of the 16th and 17th centuries reviled Alexander and much of the polemical tone was surely inspired by Curtius’ account, for the National Library of France had printed ten editions of his texts before 1550.477 Nicolas de Soulfour’s 1629 L’Alexandre françois proposed: ‘Alexander, in order to acquire the title ‘Great’, ceased to be just and did not hesitate to appropriate the empires of the others or lay unjust hands on the treasures of all the world, to increase his own glory.’478 And though King Karl XII of Sweden (ruled 1697-1718) thought he was Alexander reborn when campaigning brilliantly in his Great Northern War in the Baltic, Nicolas Beauzée, in 1781, suggested Alexander ‘… had no other motive than his own vanity, no right on his side other than that he could seize with his sword, no rule other than that dictated by his passions.’479 Durante degli Alighieri (ca. 1265-1321), whom we refer to mononymously as simply ‘Dante’, ultimately consigned Alexander to the inferno.480

  But the popes, Alexander VI in particular and the Borgia line especially, had inclined to the opposite view, decorating the Vatican with his likeness and charging their contemporaries to ‘behave like Alexander, in dealing with the kings of the East’.481 Louis XIV, the ‘Sun King’ (1683-1715), fashioned himself on the conqueror, commissioning paintings and a set of prints from Charles Le Brun named Battles of Alexander; even Mehmet II, who ended the Byzantine Empire when conquering Constantinople, adopted the iconography of the Macedonian.482 The political philosopher Montesquieu in his 1748 De l’Esprit de Lois (On the Spirit of the Laws) saw an enlightened policy of infrastructure improvement and racial integration in Alexander’s maritime plans and his Graeco-Persian intermarriages.

  It has been proposed that ‘murderers are allowed to kill if to the sound of a trumpet’, and so Machiavelli’s Why the Kingdom of Darius, conquered by Alexander, did not rebel against his successors after his death was tolerant of Macedonian brute force too.483 He also forgave and even lauded the Borgias’ cruel reign when discussing ‘whether it is better to be loved or feared’, and he found Hannibal’s ‘inhuman cruelty wholly responsible’.484 Machiavelli (1469-1527) had in fact borrowed much from Polybius’ anacyclosis and theories of mixed constitutions along with stoic credits to Fortuna, when outlining his own city state models.485 The Florentine is remembered as ‘Machiavellian’ when he was in many ways a model Renaissance man: a humanist trained in grammar, Latin and rhetoric, a musician, playwright, diplomat and a political scientist who published an Art of War.

  A reading of Machiavelli’s Discorsi (on the first ten books of Livy) reveals a true republican, and his statement that ‘no prince is ever benefited by making himself hated’ should be juxtaposed beside the cruelty he advocates, perhaps satirically, in The Prince – a ‘cynical, amoral’ work that once again ended up on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, the papal list of banned works first issued in 1559 under the directorship of Pope Paul IV.486 We should not forget that Machiavelli had been tortured ‘with the rope’ before retiring in exile and each evening ‘entering the courts of the ancients’, as he himself described his fascination with, and immersion into, the classical world.487 The cruelty must have left its mark and tarnished his sense of ‘civil virtue’. He died at age fi
fty-eight, though not before the Church of Santa Croce in Florence afforded him the epitaph tanto nomini nullum par elogium, ‘no eulogy would be adequate to praise so great a name’.

  Where Gustav Droysen saw a ‘Bismarck’ in Alexander in the 1870s,488 Tarn, born into privelege in 1869 and writing on the subject through to 1948 in the heyday of the League of Nations, represented Alexander’s campaign somewhat differently: he saw in him that ‘utopian’ mission to bring unity or ‘brotherhood to mankind’.489 Schachermeyr published in 1949 and as a result saw the ‘mixing of cultures’ as a dangerous ‘chaos of blood’, rejecting Tarn’s ideals completely.490 Ernst Badian, writing in 1958 in the aftermath of Jewish persecution, considered Alexander a ruthless totalitarian tyrant where Peter Green, who published his brilliant but cynical account in the liberal 1970s, was simply disillusioned and failed to see any higher ideals at all. He nevertheless conceded that Alexander was, ‘… perhaps, taken all in all, the most incomparable general the world has ever seen.’491

  In contrast, Lane Fox’s charismatic 1973 biography has been labelled a ‘last great gasp’ of the Alexander ‘romance’. But a historiophotic romantic genre does still persist when summing up his military achievements;492 even Polybius allowed Alexander some divinity when recognising his soul had, ‘as all admit, something of the superhuman in it’.493 Hammond’s influential source studies have been branded as: ‘A misguided attempt to turn back the clock of Alexander studies to the time when WW Tarn dismissively rejected the fruitful work of German Quellenforschung, in an attempt to lay the foundations for his Alexander, the Nice.’494 As one commentator proposed, Tarn’s thematic approach ‘… has tended to cow originality into silence, because of the mass of erudition underlying that study.’ And it has been said that the studies of ‘Droysen, Berve, Tarn, Schachermeyr and Badian have both added to our understanding and multiplied uncertainties’ attached to the Macedonian king.495

  But to attempt to attach to Alexander the simplistic and polarised behavioural notions of ‘good’ or ‘bad’, or to label him ‘benevolent’ or ‘evil’, would be as anachronistic as concluding that Demosthenes, or any one of the Ten Attic Orators, was (in our sense of the word) a democrat or a republican, monarchist or anarchist, on the basis of the few speeches ascribed to them. Neverthless, few men from our classical past, perhaps with the exception of the equally mercurial Alcibiades, termed ‘in spirit brilliant’ by Diodorus and ‘the least scrupulous’ of human beings by Plutarch, have been so variously summed-up and decanted.496 Alexander remains, as Heuss aptly put it, ‘a bottle which could be filled with any wine’.497

  These many ‘vintages’ have been readily captured in oils and tapestries – enduring propaganda that pitted the brush and weave against the pen. An ekphrasis in late-medieval art was reasserted throughout the Renaissance merging contemporary and classical themes as effectively as an auctor supplementorum filled manuscript gaps.498 Paying due attention to the intolerances of the Holy Roman Empire, the tale of Alexander was already something of an iconograph that was sufficiently alluring to divert the attention of great painters from the safe career of biblical depictions. The result was colourful tapestries depicting the Tales of Alexander and canvasses named Les Reines de Perse aux pieds d’Alexandre (1660-61, better known as The Tent of Darius), Alexander at the Tomb of Cyrus, Alexander and Porus (1673) and Alexander the Great and the Fates (ca. 1667), whilst the 17th and 18th centuries saw a still wider artistic proliferation of the theme.499

  Albrecht Altdorfer’s The Battle of Alexander at Issus painted in 1529 and commissioned by Duke Wilhelm of Bavaria, was influenced by both the recently published World Chronicle of Hartmann Schedel (1440-1514) and Curtius’ account of the engagement.500 A civic officer of some repute with connections at the imperial court, Altdorfer had announced the expulsion of Jews from the city and sketched the synagogue before its destruction. He interrogated Anabaptists, appointed Protestant ministers and he shunned ‘spiritual accessories’. The fermenting Turkish push towards Vienna threatened apocalyptic events, and it is against this background that Altdorfer’s canvas depicted a dark turning point in history, thus his rendering of Issus has been described as a ‘cosmic Armageddon’.

  A tablet within the picture emphasised the Persian death toll while soldiers wear turbans in Turkish style and women wear feathered toques in the fashion of the German court. Their presence is a likely allusion to Curtius’ description of the capture of Darius III’s royal family, a scene depicted in Paolo Veronese’s equally anachronistic The Family of Darius before Alexander (1565-70). What Duke Wilhelm IV finally received from Altdorfer was a depiction of a world ‘dominated in equal parts by new ideas and medieval tradition’. The conquering Napoleon, a clear admirer of Alexander’s military genius, had the painting relocated to Paris and hung in his bathroom.

  Alexander was not alone in artful transformations; Hannibal, Mark Antony and Cleopatra were all synthesised and resyncronised to the artists’ own era. Lorenzo Castro’s The Battle of Actium painted in 1672,501 probably inspired by a new English translation of Virgil’s Aeneid, revealed a thoroughly Baroque interpretation. The triremes and quinqeremes of Antony and Octavian resemble squat Dutch fluyts; soldiers wear plumed galea which look more Pickelhaube than Roman, and Cleopatra is garbed in a 17th century gown. Hannibal Crossing the Alps, a fresco by Jacobo Ripanda from ca. 1510 at the Palazzo del Campidoglio (Capitoline Museum) in Rome, is similarly structured with little regard to historical accuracy; the Carthaginian general is astride an elephant in what appears an Ottoman turban.

  In all these ideological hybrids, however, one episode has remained literarily and artistically stable: the rendering of Alexander’s death. In no portrayal of his passing, from the illuminated manuscripts of the 1330s to the unfinished The Death of Alexander the Great by Karl Theodor von Piloty (he died in 1886), do we see sight of a testament or the reading of a Will, not even in those depictions taken straight from the Romance.

  THE POISONED TRAGEDIAN AND THE CONSCIENCE OF ACHILLES

  If Athenaeus’ testimony is accurate, Alexander was launching himself into an animated recital from Euripides’ Andromeda at Medius’ komos in Babylon just days before he died, as Perseus the saviour we would imagine. Medius of Larissa, whose close relationship with Alexander might stem from the assistance the Thessalian royal Aleuadae line had provided to his grandfather, Amyntas III, allegedly called the impromptu party with the specific intent of facilitating the poisoning of the king. Alexander was toasting his guests in unmixed wine; Ephippus claimed his usual cup held 2 choes (12 pints which verged on a krater, so mixing-bowl-sized) and so it was redolent of the cup of Nestor, so large it was a challenge to lift. We do not know how much Alexander had imbibed that night but the tenth krater signified madness and unconsciousness, according to a fragment of a play from Eubolus (floruit 370/60s BCE).502 Euripides seems to have been the choice verse for fevered men; Lucian claimed that when an epidemic hit the population of Abdera, the pale ghost-like citizens recited Perseus’ lines over, mimicking Archelaus’ performance seen earlier that summer. Apparently it was only stopped by the onset of frost.503

  How symbolic was the Andromeda for Alexander, and how symbolic is this recital for our argument? We might wonder who played opposite him at Medius’ banquet, for an extant line from the now lost tragedy proposed: ‘I forbid the getting of bastard children. Though, not at all inferior to legitimate ones, they are disadvantaged by law. You must guard against this.’504 We may hope for his counterpart’s sake that Alexander avoided the subject of offspring, for within two weeks of his final gulp, the argument over succession, and which child, or children, would inherit the Macedonian kingdom, almost resulted in civil war.505

  Aside from his professed silence in the Journal and his succession failure in the Vulgate accounts, what did Alexander truly contemplate in the fevered days before he died? He must have recalled the Chaldean warning not to enter the city, the advice that diverted him past the now barely inhabited Bors
ippa, if this is historical and not part of later thauma that attached itself to his death (T21, T22, T23, T24). Or, perhaps he regretted heeding Anaxarchus who advised him to ignore it, though the philosopher’s belief in innumerable worlds might at last have seemed appealing.506 Reflecting that most of the Aeacid line had died before the age of thirty, did the first Macedonian ‘Great King’, now with one young son (two, if Justin’s unlikely episode with Cleophis is true), a pregnant wife, an illustrious family and the wealth of Croesus, complain that Tyche and Asclepius had treated him unkindly?507 Asclepius had no explaining to do for he was termed ‘the blameless physician’, but surely the Homeric and Iliadic comparisons finally came back to haunt Alexander.508 The Iliad, which (it has been proposed), like Statius’ epic poem, was perhaps once named the Achilleid due to its focus on the hero,509 opened with:

  Sing Goddess, the wrath of Peleus’ son, Achilles and its devastation, that caused the Achaeans loss on bitter loss and hurled many warrior souls down into the house of Hades.510

  Through Alexander’s final hours, as he ‘exchanged life for an eternal battle line’ (as Hyperides phrased it), and when fever-wracked and sweat-soaked in Nebuchadnezzar’s bedchamber, did he think of the warriors he, like Achilles (whose name stems from ‘grief’) had cast into the underworld, or had he conveniently become a believer in the Pythagorean immortal soul?511 Did Alexander expect to meet Cronus breathing the upper air of Aether in the Elysian Fields, or on Hesiod’s Makaron Nesoi, the Isles of the Blessed?512 And we wonder whether he requested Zeus to consider himself and Hephaestion as new Dioscouri and immortalise them both.513