In Search of the Lost Testament of Alexander the Great
Page 38
Furthermore, as a writer living in the political and military sphere of influence of either these dynasts, Aristobulus would have been extremely sensitive when making references to Roxane and her son, Alexander IV, or to Alexander’s older son, Heracles, each of whom had been executed on Cassander’s direct orders or through his political reach. But no matter how well disguised a suppression is, clues always remain and ‘whilst silence is not necessarily an admission, it is not a denial either’.113 As it has been pointed out, Aristobulus certainly ‘was not encumbered by the truth’.114
Chares of Mytilene on Lesbos has to be considered a primary or ‘court’ source, penning his Historiai peri Alexandron in ten or more books. As eisaggeleos, the royal usher or chamberlain to the king, he could not resist capturing court gossip he was uniquely well placed to hear. Some nineteen fragments remain, principally in Athenaeus’ Deipnosophistai and Plutarch’s Lives, and they range from lucid eyewitness memoirs of court ceremony to what are clearly tinsel-covered anecdotes.115 The vivid descriptions of regal excesses suggest he published under a later patronage that must have been tolerant of its content; a location on Lesbos under Antigonus’ sphere of influence might support that supposition.116 There is no guarantee, however, that the fragments are fully representative of Chares’ work as a whole, and unlike the unrestrained accusations of alcoholism credited to Ephippus of Olynthus, he was careful not to directly slander Alexander or his Companions.117
Medius the son of Oxythemis from Larissa, host of the fatal party at which Alexander was reportedly poisoned, was possibly a member of the Thessalian Aleuadae royal house, and Anaximenes of Lampsacus, a Hellespontine city notable for its philosophers and historians, resided within Alexander’s inner circle; both dipped their reeds into self-serving ink.118 Anaximenes, possibly a pupil of Diogenes of Cynic, supposedly composed an epic poem and histories of Greece and Philip II, as well as a Rhetoric to Alexander; these disappeared without a trace despite his notoriety.119 Fragments strewn through the Roman-era texts of Pliny, Strabo, Plutarch, Aelian and Athenaeus suggest Polycleitus of Larissa may have been a contemporary author, and although he did not accompany the Macedonians, we already know Theopompus had much to say (some of it negative) about Macedonian court life.120
Aristoxenus of Tarentum (a pupil of Aristotle) gave Plutarch a physical description of Alexander, and Marsyas from Pella, the half-brother to Antigonus and a naval commander at the battle at Salamis in 307/6 BCE, authored another now lost The Education of Alexander and a Makedonika in ten books that captured detail of the early campaign;121 his was, almost uniquely, a Macedonian history written by a Macedonian, whereas the thirteen other authors we know of who chronicled the rise of the nation were conspicuously not.122 Eugene Borza, the ‘Macedonian specialist’, concluded that, ‘like the Carthaginians and the Spartans, the Macedonians are among the silent people of the ancient Mediterranean basin’, referring to the lack of literary output from these once dominant powers. This might be a little over-generalised, for we know that either Alexander’s regent, Antipater, or perhaps an Antipater of Magnesia, wrote a historical work titled On the Deeds of King Perdiccas in Illyria (a former Macedonian king), and we know there once existed a Ta peri Alexandron by a Philip of Pella. We also have fifteen fragments of a Makedonika by the native Theagenes (possibly written in the Hellenistic era) whose works may have perished when Rome and her broadsword waded into the marshes bordering Pella.123
References to Idomeneus of Lampsacus, a friend of Epicurus, suggest an anecdotal work in the style of Duris (whom he likely knew) had once existed, and the Suda suggested another contemporary, Menaechmus of Sicyon, wrote a history of the campaign. Strabo captured an additional snippet of the sea voyage back from India by Androsthenes of Thasos who was a prominent crewmember under Nearchus’ command.124 A few of the titles attached to these lost works are tantalising: Ephippus’ On the Death (or Funeral) of Alexander and Hephaestion, and Strattis of Olynthus’ Five Books on the Royal Diary are mouth-watering names for our enquiry but so far they remain no more than that.125
These writers no doubt constituted the corpus that Arrian, Diodorus and Curtius later referred to under the frustrating collectives of ‘some historians’, ‘other writers’, or even, ‘so they say’; the indeterminate in-betweens that still elude identification and dating, leaving us wondering if the snippets that feature in Plutarch’s multi-sourced biographies, or in the still-anonymous Oxyrhynchus Papyri XV 1798 found in Egypt and which looks to have been copied from a detailed archetypal history, reincarnates any of them accurately or substantially.126
A five-column fragment of the Oxyrhynchus Papyri XV 1798, probably dating to the late 2nd century CE preserving otherwise unknown details relating to Alexander’s campaign from the death of Philip II to the prelude to the battle at Gaugamela. Now housed at the Papyrology Rooms, Sackler Library, Oxford, it was first published by Grenfell and Hunt in 1922. There are similarities to both Curtius’ book and the Romance with evidence of epitomising.127
We should not forget the verbal material that birthed rumour, hearsay and anecdote that crept into Alexander’s tale. Tarn identified what he termed a ‘mercenary source’ which we postulate was not an individual but a recycling factory of information from soldiers of fortune and campaigners settling in the provinces in the Successor War years, some seeking sanctuary and others seeking silver. According to Tarn, this incendiary bundle included the reminiscences of a soldier who fought for the Persian king. Political discharge was just as surely emanating from Cape Taenarum to the south of Athens, the gathering ground for returning Greek mercenaries who were employed to good, or arguably poor, military use, in the Lamian War of 323-322 BCE, when Greece attempted to shake off its Macedonian shackles immediately after Alexander’s death.128 Both locations were magnets for campaign veterans on either side of the Persian-Macedonian divide; they had stories to tell and grudges to settle in the choppy wake of Macedonia’s continued domination of Greece.
THE FUNERAL GAMES HISTORIAN AND THE SAMIAN TYRANT
When Alexander died, his remarkable group of generals assumed control of the Macedonian-governed empire, and it was at this point Hieronymus of Cardia129 commenced his account of the years that saw them rise and fall. Professedly living to a remarkable age of 104, Hieronymus first supported Eumenes, and then served three successive generations of the Antigonid dynasty; Antigonus Monophthalmos and his son Demetrius Poliorketes, and finally his grandson, Antigonus II Gonatas, Hieronymus’ lengthy career saw him operating in Asia Minor, the eastern provinces, Greece, and finally in Macedonia, and alliances were fluid within those years. We do not know the title of his work with any certainty, though the Romanised Josephus and Dionysius of Halicarnassus (published from 7 BCE onwards) who described it as ‘long winded and boring’, suggested it was called A History of the Diadokhoi (successors), or Epigonoi (broadly meaning ‘offspring’ or ‘sons of’).130
Hieronymus’ ‘post-Argeadia’, which, in its scope, most obviously followed on from the Philippika of Theopompus but which was also neatly sequelled the monographs on Alexander, was a unique work that unified Greek, Macedonian and Asian contemporary history through his unique eyewitness testimony. Hieronymus’ ‘elitist’ approach once again focused on the deeds (praxeis) of kings, generals and their statesman alone, with little space on the pages for the plight of the common man,131 an ‘aristocratic bias’ in historical writing that goes back to the Iliad and the Odyssey. But the narrative, ending sometime after the death of Pyrrhus of Epirus in 272 BCE, captured at least fifty-two years of war reporting through one of history’s most dramatic and metamorphic eras.132
Like Ptolemy, Hieronymus’ affiliations and the vicissitudes of his career are central to our debate on the fate of the Will and to the portrayals of the characters that both buried and exhumed it. Yet ‘strictly speaking, we do not possess a word’ of his original material.133 The eighteen or nineteen fragments we have (one is dubious), less than five pages of text in all, make an
y evaluation of Hieronymus’ work rather speculative, that is unless we are prepared to accept that his account is preserved reasonably intact in the more expansive sections of books eighteen to twenty-two of Diodorus’ Bibliotheke (Library of History, known in Latin as the Bibliotheca historica) of the Roman era and which deal with the same years; a reasonable conclusion considering Diodorus’ utilitarian method.134
Though it was criticised by Dionysius, Hieronymus’ work was a unique and invaluable account of the decades that may have been less thoroughly chronicled otherwise because of the instability. A number of Hellenistic and Roman-era historians extracted detail for their biographies of his contemporary generals and statesmen and Hieronymus’ books was précised to various degrees in ‘universal’ histories of the period.135 Hieronymus himself is said to have criticised the writing of his broad contemporary, Duris of Samos, for its hostility towards Macedonian affairs, which in turn appears to betray Hieronymus’ own political partiality;136 it has even been suggested that he published, once again in old age, in response to Duris’ critical books, though he must have diarised events and sketched out his narrative years before.137 Hieronymus would have had an intimate knowledge of the nature of the death of Alexander (through the testimony of Eumenes, amongst others) and we believe he had a hand in the provenance and the birth of the Pamphlet; so, like Ptolemy and the royal secretary Eumenes, Hieronymus reappears in later chapters in a significant way.138
The anti-Macedonian Duris was termed ‘tyrant’ of the island of Samos, but we should beware of the despotic label; in the pre-Hellenistic era a turannos had carried no ethical censorship or connotation of ‘tyranny’, but rather it meant the sole ruler (at the head of a plutocracy, for example) who used unconventional means, and, moreover, it was a position that could be inherited.139 Duris had been watching events from close by after the family’s return from exile (the Samians were exiled from their island by Athens from ca. 366/365 BCE to 322/321 BCE) and he wrote at the time when Samos was ‘gradually swallowed up by Macedonian warlords.’ Duris apparently modelled his Makedonika in twenty-three or more books on the style of Herodotus and Hellanicus (ca. 480-395 BCE) the logographer and historian from Mytilene on Lesbos. The son of Kaios (possibly the tyrant of Samos before him), Duris was a self-proclaimed descendant of the Athenian Alcibiades, famous for his unconventional military tactics in the latter Peloponnesian War and his close relationship with Socrates.
Duris’ history covered the period from the Battle of Leuctra in 371 BCE to the battle of Curopedion in 281 BCE, at least, and he too had to carefully navigate through the political reefs and shoals of the Diadokhoi shores. His work appears to have been a highly anecdotal scandaleuse that targeted luxury and extravagance, if the thirty-six fragments are indicative, though we cannot say with any certainty (Hieronymus’ alleged criticism aside) how slanted his account was to any one regime. He certainly had cause to hate Athens as much as the continued Macedonian upheaval, and though he was perhaps younger than the first generation of Diadokhoi, he would have met certain of them (Antigonus, Demetrius and Lysimachus, for example) as part of his family’s governance of an island that came under their respective (or attempted) control.140
Here the ‘contentious spirit’ of Greek historians raises its head once more. Plutarch implied Duris was untrustworthy and yet we know he frequently borrowed his detail for his own biographical works.141 Dionysius of Halicarnassus viewed his arrangement as completely faulty, where Duris himself criticised both Theopompus and Ephorus, who was himself accused at a banquet (according to Porphyry) of stealing 3,000 of his lines from the works of Daimachus, Callisthenes and Anaximenes. Ephorus, whose thirty-book history dealt with events from ca. 1069 BCE to 341 BCE, could, in fact, have had an inside track and featured most prominently in the story of Alexander had he wanted, for Plutarch claimed it was he who was initially invited to join the Macedonians as the official historian, possibly for the compliments he had already afforded Philip II.142 Ephorus wisely declined and saved himself much trouble, for he liked to draw a sharp line between the mythical and the historical, and that was a methodology unlikely to have pleased Alexander.143
But to Duris, these historians were concerned with merely ‘writing’ and not with mimesis or hedone, imitation or pleasure. This, too, rather reveals his own literary agenda, and it suggests he believed ‘tragic’ history (typified by Alexander’s Vulgate genre) was an imitative art, thus not distinct from poetry, as Aristotle proposed it should be.144
THE QUELLENFORSCHER’S PHANTOM
No one can glance through the thirty-six fragments of Cleitarchus without being struck by one thing, how little we really know about the writer who in modern times has been magnified into such an influential and far-reaching source in the Alexander story, and has attracted to himself most of the flotsam brought down by that somewhat muddy stream or streams, the so-called Vulgate.145
Tarn’s opening commentary from his study of Cleitarchus captures an unfortunate dilemma: though his influence on the Vulgate tradition has now been established, the extent of that sway, and the original shape of Cleitarchus’ book, remains nothing short of a mystery; he is as Badian mused, ‘the Quellenforscher’s phantom.’146
Based in Alexandria (according to Philodemus) in the final years of older campaign veterans or in the early years of their offspring, Cleitarchus composed the first syncretic biography of Alexander by fusing primary material in circulation with the gossip, rhetoric and those negative philosophical tones emanating from Greece.147 The fermentation vat of Alexandria did the rest in that tumultuous, creative, and yet dangerous period for historians and dynasts alike.
Many veterans found their way to new employment in Egypt, for the Ptolemies knew, as did all of the Diadokhoi, that you needed a hard core of Macedonian soldiers to face Macedonian-led satrapal armies, and no standing Asiatic contingent of the time had proved able to withstand an assault by its unique phalanx. So the klerouchoi (cleruch) system of incentive and remuneration became all-important in attracting new ‘settlers’ who formed a ‘state within a state’ in Egypt, Greek mercenaries and Macedonian former campaigners alike. Under this arrangement land was allotted on condition of continued military call-up and no doubt the enrolment of their sons into the state army.148 This may explain why Cleitarchus was able to garner more eyewitness detail (as Thucydides had for the Peloponnesian War) than Arrian could obtain from his revered but long-dead and ‘sanitising’ court sources.149
The result was the most influential Greek biography of Alexander that would circulate in the Roman Republic some two centuries on. Cleitarchus became the template, if not the whole pattern, for the Latin Vulgate, even if he was at times, as Cicero thought, entertaining with ‘pretty fictions’ and a ‘better orator than historian’, a claim that somewhat undermined Cicero’s own canon on the subject. Although the Roman rhetorician Quintilian (ca. 35-post 96 CE) considered him ‘brilliantly ingenious but notoriously untrustworthy’,150 Cleitarchus, nonetheless, appears to have been a talent that eclipsed the eyewitness histories written without his flair, for neither Ptolemy and Aristobulus, nor Nearchus and Onesicritus, had benefited from any formal literary training or previous journalistic experience that we know of.
Cleitarchus’ father, Deinon, came from Colophon in Lydia, one of the cities claiming to be the birthplace of Homer and one later destroyed by Alexander’s former Bodyguard, Lysimachus. Deinon had been a colourful historian who based himself in Egypt and produced a non-extant history of Persia (a Persika) that was praised by Cornelius Nepos (ca. 110-24 BCE) and much referenced in Athenaeus’ Deipnosophistae and Plutarch’s biography of Artaxerxes II.151 The Persika, however, frequently contradicted Ctesias who was resident at the Persian court from ca. 415-387 BCE, though, according to Plutarch, he too ‘… put into his work a perfect farrago of extravagant and incredible tales… often his story turns aside from the truth into fable and romance.’152 Deinon’s son, it seems, was born in the same mould, setting out to ‘improve o
n the facts’.153 Alexandria was to become a centre of creative reporting and elements of Deinon’s work might well have found their way into his son’s book, especially detail concerning Babylon and a Persia Cleitarchus may never have visited himself.
The acquaintance of Ptolemy I Soter with the philosopher Stilpo of Megara, whom he (unsuccessfully) invited to Egypt around 307 BCE, suggests Cleitarchus, who is attested to have studied under Stilpo, would himself have been personally acquainted with Ptolemy or his son, Ptolemy II Philadelphos, in the years that followed.154 Ptolemaic authority, whilst progressive in terms of architecture, the arts and trade, was also ruthless, and the new Macedonian dynasts proved to be manipulative politicians.155 So it would have been impossible for Cleitarchus to publish a work under Alexander’s former Somatophylax or his son unless it was politically benign and did not undermine Ptolemy’s claims on the nature of Alexander’s death, as portrayed in the Journal with which Ptolemy closed his book. And like Aristobulus, Cleitarchus would have been unable to recount any lingering rumours or suspicions concerning Alexander leaving a Will with succession instructions.
If the Ptolemaic regime could not control or regulate the inbound flow of information available to Cleitarchus in Alexandria, the repeated flattering of Ptolemy we see in the Vulgate texts (especially the closing chapters) indicates the historian was prudently sensitive with the outbound production and its references to the dynast.156 The burgeoning city would have been full of scurrilous propaganda and allegations emanating from a patchwork of personal campaign memories, and if this and the accusations which originating in the Pamphlet could not be rebroadcast in the original form, it could be cloned, cropped and grafted by Cleitarchus onto a suitable root. If he published sufficiently late for the alleged participants in the plot to poison Alexander to have died, he would have been able to incorporate the lingering rumours and colourful story of regicide, for the allegations exonerated Ptolemy from guilt. Moreover, by then the earlier Ptolemaic alliances with those damned in the Pamphlet were over. So where the books of Ptolemy and Aristobulus had ended as wholly quarantined affairs, the swelling of Cleitarchus’ final chapter still posed no threat to the Egyptian dynasts.