In Search of the Lost Testament of Alexander the Great
Page 16
The Persian Great Kings buried clay cylinders inscribed with a record of their deeds in the corners of significant city buildings. Where were Alexander’s, and where was his golden commemorative statue on the Babylonian plain?514 If he had truly inherited the pharaonic titles ‘Horus the Strong’, ‘the beloved of Ammon’, and ‘Son of Ra’, as a Luxor inscription suggests, he would have also been introduced to the Egyptian Book of the Dead.515 Alexander would have known that he would fail many of the thirty-six denials and that would have hindered his journey to the Egyptian gods, demigods and spirits of the dead.516 In which case, he might have simply considered little more than the words of Themistocles, ‘the subtle serpent of Hellas’, after the Persian defeat: ‘… the gods and heroes begrudge that a single man in his godless pride should be king of Hellas and Asia, too.’517
Perhaps Alexander was contemplating Themistocles’ own fate: a hero at Marathon and the real (if not official) commander of the Greek forces at the naval battles at Artemisium and Salamis, and in Plutarch’s opinion ‘the man most instrumental in achieving the salvation of Hellas’, his arrogance saw him ostracised to Argos (as the 190 inscriptions on excavated ostraka testify). Themistocles then ventured to the sanctuary of Alexander I of Macedonia, before, ironically, gaining Persian employ, for Athens had a habit of exiling and poisoning her best.518
The eyewitness authors would have us believe that none of these introspections, regrets, the blood guilt (alastoria) and the pleas to the gods of Olympus, Egypt and Esagila, made their way to Alexander’s fever-cracked lips as his men gathered around him. Was the king who had been quoting ‘the most tragic of the poets’ about to acquiesce to another silent tragedy, leaving the last lines of his own play unwritten, or to be penned by those about him?519 We propose not, for Alexander was a manipulator of men, Pythia, diviners and their gods; he exploited imagery of the past and he attempted to change the present; he was more likely to have been disdainfully churning over Themistocles’ challenge on impiety the moment he left Pella. And whether truly verschmelzungspolitik or a purely practical initiative, the mass weddings at Susa made it clear that Alexander was setting out to manipulate the future as well.
As it has been pointed out, the very existence of Alexander’s lavish funeral hearse and its unchallenged construction at Babylon over two full years is evidence enough that he requested burial somewhere else.520 The 12 by 15-foot bier that departed Babylon, vividly described by Diodorus, was so heavy that special shock-absorbing axles had to be designed and a team of road menders and mechanics employed to accompany its slow but loud advance.521 Mysteriously, a spectacular sarcophagus was found in Sidon in 1887 and now has pride of place in the Istanbul Archaeology Museum. One scholar commented: ‘It is tempting to see its scaled roof, running vine garlands, guardian lions, and long narrative friezes, as an homage to Alexander’s hearse, which must have passed close by the city in 321 BCE but nothing can be proved’,522 though the frieze clearly depicts the Macedonian king and Hephaestion.
The sarcophagus is now popularly accredited to Abdalonymus, the ‘rags to riches’ King of Sidon, but that has been recently challenged; Laomedon, the displaced satrap of Coele-Syria, has been proposed as its alternative inhabitant.523 Forensics now reveal that the Pentelic Marble sarcophagus was brightly painted in polychromatic style with evidence of gold plating; this is not inconsistent with the ‘hammered gold’ in Diodorus’ description of Alexander’s hearse.524 And so we might be forgiven for wondering whether Ptolemy left the ponderously heavy cask in Syria in his hurried flight back to Egypt after kidnapping Alexander’s body, if it weren’t for a panel which appears to depict the murder of Perdiccas which took place a year or so later.525
If Alexander had genuinely envied Achilles in having Homer to preserve him, he might have equally taken solace in the speech Thucydides provided to Pericles:
Rather, the admiration of the present and the succeeding ages will be ours, since we have not left our power without witness, but have shown it by mighty proofs; and far from needing a Homer for our panegyrist, or other of his craft whose verses might charm, for the moment, only for the impression, which they gave to melt at the touch of fact we have forced every sea and land to be the highway of our daring, and everywhere, whether for evil or for good, have left imperishable monuments behind us.526
But in Alexander’s case the monuments had not been built; no new Acropolis with a Propylaia or Erektheion adorned Asia’s rocky outcrops. The new eponymous cities listed in the epitome of Stephanus of Byzantium’s Ethnica (6th century) and in the Romance, were, more often than not, simply Asiatic settlements refounded.527 They appear little more than mud brick forts (‘and a market’), or a forced synoecism of smaller settlements into a larger hastily walled town, and, moreover, through the campaign decade much had been destroyed. One of the many new Alexandrias (of perhaps fourteen, and with the exception of the new city in Egypt, all of them east of the Tigris) had been founded on the River Jaxartes (today’s Syr Darya flowing through Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan); the population of three existing ‘cities’ was resettled here at Alexandria Eschate (the ‘Furthest’) and yet a wall 6 miles in circuit was completed in just seventeen days.528
This does not represent a true attempt at architectural permanency, despite Arrian’s statement about its intended greatness and the ‘splendour of its name’. Neither did the settlements (rather, fortresses) of Boucephala and Nicaea on the banks of the Hydaspes, for these were significantly damaged by heavy monsoon rain soon after being established. As Tarn put it, ‘he left his arrangements in India an unfinished sketch, to be sponged off the canvas the moment he died.’529 None were monuments to an empire any more than Hadrian’s ditch and palisade limites at Rome’s furthest borders were; Alexander’s infrastructure is simply redolent of military occupation rather than empire building. The speech Xenophon crafted for Cyrus in the Cyropaedia had called for just that, fortresses along the way, or his men risked becoming sailors on a sea that left open and hostile water behind them.530
Twelve altars to the Olympian gods at Alexander’s ‘world’s end’ now existed, sculptures by Lysippus of the twenty-five Companions who fell at the Granicus River had been erected at Dion, and ‘Alexander’s Steps’ had been cut into Mount Ossa in Thessaly (they are still visible); we must include the mole at Tyre and the causeway at Clazomenae as ‘construction projects’, though both were simply necessities of aggressive siege warfare. But there was little else to show; no lofty gardens or new palaces with stone carvings that graced Assyrian reliefs.531 Even his treasurer, Harpalus, seems to have outdone him in Babylon for an ‘expensive’ monument (perhaps a temple) to Pythionice had already been erected for his dead courtesan.532
There were no new aqueducts, permanent bridges or a new road network that we know of, just the flotsam and jetsam of campaign necessity and a mercurial nostalgia for a Great King’s tomb; even the harbour construction at Babylon and removal of weirs on the Tigris and Euphrates appear more motivated by military requirements (for the fleet heading to Arabia) than for agricultural purposes.533 Although Alexander retained Achaemenid administration structures, whether they could be maintained under garrison conditions and thinly spread Macedonian authority is questionable. So was this the skilled and pragmatic adaptation to circumstances that Briant, for one, credits to him, or the tired and insufficiently imaginative solution from a warrior who simply coveted the Persian throne? Perhaps Alexander realised, like Hannibal would later do in Italy, that you cannot truly ‘own’ or keep a whole begrudging country or empire suppressed – when it had been gained by military conquest – when you are ethnically foreign.
‘Positive Hellenism’, which was to see safe trading routes, real cities constructed and Greek amphitheatres nestling in the foothills of the upper and eastern Persian provinces, came later with the Successor kingdoms, when Greeks settled by choice and not coercion in the newly opened up Asiatic world. Aramaic would then give way to koine, the patois of the Western conqueror
s, and even the Babylonian calendar was synchronised to that of Macedonia.534 But with the exception of Silk Road commodities and dwindling Persian gold, and camels exported to Macedonia and Egypt with hydraulics and irrigation expertise – as well as the appearance of leprosy that was probably imported from India with Alexander’s returning veterans – this was predominantly one-way traffic and not a permanent cultural exchange. It was something of a reversal of the old world order in which the Persian Empire saw little need of Greek goods in the interior. Yet even in this more stable environment, the Greeks themselves continued to show a great apathy for learning foreign tongues or homogenising their existence. The one significant exception, however, was in the growing entrepôt of Alexandria in Egypt.
The statement that ‘Alexander was essentially a destroyer, not a creator’ epitomises the view of many historians, old and new; even Tarn thought he was ‘fortunate in his death’ as ‘the real task was yet before him.’535 The conclusion that he ‘… was better able to cope with war than with peace’, repeated in many guises, was a weakness Alexander might have even recognised himself. ‘Augustus heard Alexander at the age of thirty-two years had subdued the greatest part of the world and was at a loss what he should do with the rest of his time. But he wondered why Alexander should not think it a lesser labour to gain a great empire than to set in order what he had got.’536
In the opinion of the Roman emperor Augustus (ruled 27 BCE-14 CE), ‘for Alexander conquest and arete were all, the dull but essential business of administration held no charms for him.’537 Is the appraisal unfair? We could argue that had he lived a decade longer we might have evidence of a grand infrastructure emerging across Asia, and yet his desire to head west from Babylon when the East was still so fragile and recently won, clearly suggests otherwise. It is perhaps understandable then that Alexander’s original Will might have sought to address this: demanding construction of grand mausoleums, temples and chryselephantine statues in his name, a dying man’s compensation for the lack of stone mortared during his life. The Wills detailed in the Romance and at the end of the Metz Epitome (Epitoma Metensis, possibly 4th or 5th century CE), a later Latin précis which recounted campaign events through 330 to 325 BCE, request just that (T1, T2).
We opened the chapter with an extract from the words carved into the Cyrus Cylinder, but this timeless and benevolent imagery has its flip side too. It was the Shah of Iran in 1971 who referred to its declaration as ‘the first bill of human rights’ when dedicating a copy to the United Nations; the Pahlavi regime was exploiting the relic as a symbol of 2,500 years of continued Persian monarchy. But Cyrus’ true mindset must be considered in a more sober context, for he had just defeated the much-hated Babylonian king, Nabonidus, at Opis, slaughtering the retreating army and capturing a great haul of loot; Babylon was his for the taking.
The inscription on the cylinder, hardly original in Mesopotamia, was standard conqueror’s rhetoric. Along with the Nabonidus Chronicle, it positioned Cyrus’ capture of the city as an invitation from the local god, Marduk, in the same way that Nabopolassar (Nebû-apal-usur, ca. 658-605 BCE) had recorded and justified his actions at Nineveh seventy years before.538 Cyrus’ ‘restraint’ was a political necessity if he was to unify his new empire, and there is no archaeological evidence suggesting the reconstruction of any building, or the repairing of Mesopotamian temples during his reign.539 Even Xenophon’s encomiastic Cyropaedia contradicted the claims on the cylinder, providing an altogether darker version of events:
Cyrus sent squadrons of cavalry down the different roads with orders to kill all they found in the street, while those who knew Assyrian were to warn the inhabitants to stay indoors under pain of death…When all was done he summoned the Persian priests and told them the city was the captive of his spear and bade them set aside the first fruits of the booty as an offering to the gods and mark out land for sacred demesnes…540
The legends that Alexander fed off were clearly open to question. Arrian doubted that either Heracles or the ivy-wreathed Dionysus, the ‘Lord of the Triumph’, had really visited India; he was after all in Hades bringing Euripides back to life.541 And according to the Cypria, a book of the early Homeric Cycle, the invading Greek fleet heading for Troy made a navigational error and landed at Theuthrania some miles south, fighting an inconclusive battle before noting their mistake.542 After nine years besieging the city, a disheartened Agamemnon proposed sailing home with: ‘Cut and run! Sail home to the fatherland we love! We’ll never take the broad street of Troy.’ Helen was, in any case, not in the city; she was stranded for a decade in Egypt while the Greeks battered the Ilion walls.543 Herodotus’ verdict on it all:
It seems to me that Homer was acquainted with this story, and while discarding it, because he thought it less adapted for epic poetry than the version which he followed… If Helen had been at Troy, the inhabitants would, I think, have given her up to the Greeks, whether Alexander [Paris] consented to it or not.544
We may be equally dubious about the much-debated concept of verschmelzungspolitik that was so fulsomely anticipated in Plutarch’s Moralia with its ‘philosophic commonwealth’ and ‘one great loving cup’.545 Arrian’s account of ‘the international love-feast’ at Susa, which espoused a ‘union of purpose between Macedonians and Persians and partnership in empire’, along with Curtius’ rendering of Alexander’s indignant harangue to his troops that preceded it with further calls for homonoia and koinonia (‘harmony’ and ‘fellowship’) – must have played their part in the notion. The phraseology Curtius used implied the Macedonian king sought to erase the national distinctions of his soldiers: ‘It is neither unbecoming for the Persians to copy Macedonian customs nor for the Macedonians to imitate the Persians’; this was an equalising sentiment that was perhaps perpetuated by the frequent references in Roman rhetoric to Alexander’s breaking the bolts of the doors of the earth. Yet this admirable notion has been described as nothing more than a ‘… romantic comfort blanket thrown by later Hellenistic writers over a by now wobbling Isocratic crusade.’546
Curtius did, however, have his reasons for rebroadcasting such a theme: he was espousing the benefits of a Roman imperialism (we suggest in Nero’s rule, 54-68 CE) which was by then rapidly swallowing up a good portion of the known world.547 Some historians such as Droysen argued that a breakdown of cultural barriers was part of Alexander’s grand design, and it is hard to refute the man who first coined the term ‘Hellenistic’, though, ironically, he saw the outcome of the cultural movement as positive to the spread of Christianity but to little else.548 Tarn more cautiously stated: ‘The germs of certain phenomena of Hellenism begin to appear before Alexander.’549 Mausolus and his Hecatomnid predecessors had, for example, already established a Greek-orientated cultural foothold at Halicarnassus in Caria in the previous century, and Hermias’ philosophical experiment in government at Assus (in the Troad) ought to be mentioned too, though perhaps it was too perfect a concept to escape Persian curiosity;550 he was tortured to death in Susa giving his son-in-law, Aristotle, something to ponder on after his prudent return to Macedonia from a too-close-by Lesbos.551
But it remains highly unlikely that Alexander had such elevated pretensions, and the speech re-rendered by Curtius surely attempted nothing more than to deliver something of a morale-boosting epipolesis (akin to a pre-battle speech) in the face of a military mutiny.552 The Greek allusion to a common purpose, homonoia, is, as one scholar put it, a phantom that should be laid to rest.553
As even the harshest critics have, we must acknowledge Alexander’s military prowess and credit him with a coercive campaign genius, for with the exception of Procles of Carthage who rated Pyrrhus of Epirus (died 272 BCE) the better tactician, Alexander is hailed as history’s most successful general. According to Appian, even Hannibal agreed and Scipio too, reluctantly; Livy, Appian and Plutarch repeated the story of Scipio and Hannibal meeting at Ephesus some years after the formative battle at Zama in 202 BCE, and it was here that they questio
ned each other on their respective military rankings. Polybius rated leaders by the plots and mutinies they attracted or steered clear of, but where Hannibal had remained conspiracy-free, Scipio, whose deeds were later immortalised by Petrarch (who took a dim view of Alexander) in his poem Africa, had not been free from controversy himself. Scipio’s near death illness led to a mutiny of his troops at Sucro in Spain, though the grievances were familiar: soldiers demanding back pay and a larger share of the plunder.554
Less fortunate than Pompey the ‘Great’ (106-48 BCE), and though perhaps megalopsychos (‘great souled’) in spirit, Alexander had no spontaneous elevation by his men to Megas and had to wait centuries for Rome to propose the epithet Magnus.555 But Pompey had Cicero arguing for him, where Demosthenes, to whom Cicero was often compared, was on the opposing team in Alexander’s day. Aeschines, the ‘old sprain’ who might have proposed the honorific, had been shamed to retirement on Rhodes despite his ‘Three Graces’ (eloquent speeches), and was no doubt attacking his nemesis in absentia from his new school of rhetoric, for Demosthenes clearly had the upper hand in Athens.556
The close temporal proximity of the deaths of Alexander and Demosthenes, with the equally influential Aristotle, each within the successive years 323-322 BCE, has been termed ‘one of the most marvellously significant synchronisms in the history of civilisation’, for it emphatically marked the end of a productive period of Greek genius. It is indeed a wonder that three of history’s most brilliant individuals breathed the same air and with fates that were intertwined. The list becomes even more remarkable if we include Diogenes the Cynic who was said to have died on the same day as the Macedonian king.557