In Search of the Lost Testament of Alexander the Great

by David Grant

  225.Hieronymus’ portrayal of Pyrrhus necessarily brought Pyrrhus’ clashes with Rome into his narrative and thus he was one of the earliest Hellenistic authors to bring Rome into mainstream Hellenic history. See discussion in Hornblower (1981) pp 71-72. Dionysius of Halicarnassus Roman Antiquities 1.5.8 claimed Hieronymus was the first historian to give an account of Rome and Timaeus the second. Yet an ‘account’ might suggest the definition of something fuller than the mention of an embassy; perhaps something of a background history to their origins, which fits Hieronymus’ style. Discussion in Tarn (1948) pp 22-23.

  226.See chapter entitled The Tragic Triumvirate of Treachery and Oaths for Antigonus’ career.

  227.Euripides Ino fragment 413.2 quoted by Plutarch On Exile 16 and Moralia 506c.

  228.Ovid Tristia 1.1.39.

  229.Quoting Voltaire Treatise on Toleration, 1763 and Letter to François-Joachim de Pierre, Cardinal de Bernis, 1761.

  230.Diodorus 19.95.3, translation from the Loeb Classical Library edition, 1963.

  231.Quoting Bosworth From A to A (1988) p 266 and for full discussion pp 260-270.

  232.According to Pseudo-Lucian Makrobioi 10-13, Lysimachus was over eighty when he died, Ptolemy eighty-four and Seleucus eighty.

  233.For the opening of hostility between Ptolemy and Seleucus post-Ipsus see Diodorus 21.5-6.

  234.See discussion in Green (2007) p 46.

  235.Discussed in Errington (1969) p 233.

  236.Memnon’s work is preserved in an epitome by Photius FGrH no. 434 F 7.3 and detailed the city’s history and the influences upon it, dating from the tyranny of Clearchus (ruled 364-353 BCE) to the city’s capture by Rome in 70 BCE.

  237.Discussed in Bosworth-Baynham (2000) p 287. See Billows (1990) p 339 for sources.

  238.See chapter titles Sarissa Diplomacy: Macedonian Statecraft for more on the fate of the children.

  239.Discussed in Boardman-Griffin-Murray (1986) p 234.

  240.Polybius 8.8.8-9, translation from the Loeb Classical Library edition, vol. III, 1922-1927. See discussion in Walbank (1962) p 4.

  241.Aristotle Politics 1.1253a2-3 proposed that men are by nature political animals.

  242.Aristotle Historia Animalium, 2.7. Aristotle actually wrote: ‘On the whole, the wild animals of Asia are the fiercest, those of Europe the boldest, and those of Libya the most varied in form.’ Later authors turned this into a well-used adage.

  243.Lucian How to Write History 38.

  4

  MYTHOI, MUTHODES AND THE BIRTH OF ROMANCE

  What are the origins of the Greek Alexander Romance and does the book contain any historical truths relevant to our investigation?

  The Greek Alexander Romance is, in one form or another, one of the most influential and widely read books of all time; it has birthed a whole literary genre on the Macedonian king.

  Where and when did it first appear and what did it originally look like? Which earlier accounts did it absorb and what is its relationship to the mainstream Alexander histories? Most importantly, does it contain unique factual detail?

  We take a closer look at the best-selling book of fables in which Alexander’s testament sits most conspicuously. We review the perennial propensity for writers to ‘romance’ and highlight some of the iconic episodes in history that have been misinterpreted as a result.

  ‘In their narratives they have shown a contempt for the truth and a preoccupation with vocabulary and style, because they were confidant that, even if they romanced a bit, they would reap the advantages of pleasure they gave to their public, without the accuracy of their research being investigated.’1

  Herodian History of the Empire from the Death of Marcus Aurelius

  ‘… the uncomfortable fact remains that the Alexander Romance provides us, on occasion, with apparently genuine materials found nowhere else, while our better-authenticated sources, per contra, are all too often riddled with bias, propaganda, rhetorical special pleading or patent falsification and suppression of evidence.’2

  Peter Green Alexander of Macedon

  ‘Historical, or natural, truth has been perverted into fable by ignorance, imagination, flattery or stupidity.’3

  Sir William Jones On the Gods of Hellas, Italy and India

  In 1896 the historian and orientalist, Sir Ernest Alfred Thompson Wallis Budge, proposed only one country could be the birthplace of Alexander’s story, and that country was Egypt.4 Its new city, ‘Alexandria-by-Egypt’, as the Greeks came to differentiate it from the conqueror’s many eponymous settlements, was to become a centre for syncretistic literature and the likely birthplace of the Corpus Hermeticum, the Sibylline Oracles, The Wisdom of Solomon, the Septuagint with its reputed seventy-plus translators, and its Alexandrian Canon too. Much of the detail that eventually filled the Suda most likely had its origins in the vibrant metropolis whose creative environment recycled apocrypha onto papyrus in the Hellenistic Age. And we have grounds to believe one of its earliest and most successful productions was to metamorphosise into the Greek Alexander Romance.5

  As antiquities adviser to the British Museum, Budge was exploring the origins of the various Ethiopic Romance recensions, and he stumbled on something of a basic truth: the nations humbled by Alexander, he reasoned, would not so quickly record their own downfall.6 Only one place immediately prospered in the aftermath of the Macedonian campaigns, and that was Egypt. The propitious interpretation of Alexander’s seer, Aristander, which deflected embarrassment at Alexandria’s mapping-out when birds flocked to eat the barley-meal being used as the boundary marker, had provided a founding prophecy: the new city, which bears the inscription ktistes, founder, against Alexander’s name in the Romance, would feed the world.7

  Cleomenes’ posthumous bank balance of some 8,000 talents, a legacy of over-zealous and quasi-autonomous tax collection, probably had the greater part to play, though its fate was now underpinned by the talisman that was Alexander’s body.8 Egypt’s new heart, Alexandria, established by the harbour settlement of Rhacotis, originally established to fend off Greek pirate attacks on the Nile Delta, was becoming something of a ‘new Heraclion’; it was fostered into maturity by the Bodyguard, Ptolemy I Soter, who, within two decades of taking up his post, would proclaim himself a king.9

  ALEXANDER THE TWO-HORNED BEAST

  Macaulay proposed history ‘is under the jurisdiction of two hostile powers: the Reason and the Imagination’, and, he added, never equally shared between them.10 This was particularly the case in ancient Attic Greek where the stories of the past were literally mythoi, and the segregation between myth, legend, and the factual past was a soft border blurred by Homeric epics and Hesiod’s Theogonia, which permitted a coeval interaction between men, heroes, and gods. Scholars have even pondered that ‘the absence of a clear distinction between factual and fictional discourse’ in the influential dialogues of Plato, ‘far from being idiosyncratic, may reflect a larger feature of Greek (or ancient) thinking’.11 Even Thucydides, who claimed to have sacrificed ‘entertainment value’ (hedone) in order to dispense with to muthodes, the mythical elements in his work, nonetheless interlaced his texts with self-constructed speeches which reintroduced just that.12 But the results were ‘immortal’ and the legends live on; as the habitually terse Sallust (ca. 86-35 BCE) reasoned, ‘these things never were, but are always’.13

  We will illustrate how fraud entwined itself around the most momentous of historical episodes, but once a deliberate deceit is discovered, the truth is more often than not revealed. When an episode is adorned in the colourful robes of romance, however, we are on less firm ground, for truth and fiction may have been wedded in a ceremony that rendered them lifelong partners: ‘There are many occasions in the story of Alexander when it is hard to be sure just where history ends and romance begins.’14 To quote Michael Wood on the problem: ‘We are accustomed to believing that fiction can tell both truths and untruths… poets have a (highly visible) stake in the notion, but so do historians and philosophers and scienti
sts.’ In which case it is ‘… misleading to contrast the so-called “historical biographies” with the legendary lives.’15 And this better equips us to appreciate how the Pamphlet and Alexander’s Will, along with many other genuine campaign episodes, came to be bedfellows with the Greek Alexander Romance.

  Separating the historical from the fabulae has indeed proved no easy task, for material was added through a gradual process of accretion. Analysis of the Romance manuscripts was made easier once the composite 1846 editio princeps of Müller had been printed in Paris, for it provided a continuous non-lacunose text.16 Adolf Ausfeld’s 1894 Zur Kritik des Griechischen Alexanderromans and his treatise of 1901, with that of Kroll in 1907, attempted to reconstruct the lost Romance archetype and started probing into the mysteries behind ‘peculiarities’ within the main narrative and the testament of Alexander sitting in its last chapter. Merkelbach’s 1954 study, Die Quellen des Griechischen Alexanderromans, articulated the challenge of detecting the underlying sources, and alongside them developed an influential corpus of German studies that set the forensic standard for a modern reassessment of what we might term the ‘quasi-historical’ Macedonian king.17

  Attributing the Romance in its earliest form to a single author or date remains impossible, but evidence suggests that both the unhistorical and the quasi-historical elements were in circulation in the century following Alexander’s death. The oldest text we know of today, recension ‘A’, is preserved in the 11th century Greek manuscript known as Parisinus 1711; the text is titled The Life of Alexander of Macedon and ‘this most closely resembles a conventional historical work’, though any factual narrative is only a ‘flimsy continuum’ to which other elements were attached. Recension A, whilst ‘ill-written, lacunose, and interpolated’, is nevertheless the best staging point scholars have when attempting to recreate an original (usually referred to as ‘α’ – alpha) dating back some 700 or 800 years (or more) before the extant recension A.18 We cannot discount an archetype that may have been written even earlier still, in the Ptolemaic era; if Callisthenes was once credited with its authorship (thus ‘Pseudo-Callisthenes’), the prevailing belief must have been that it emerged in, or soon after, the campaigns. Through the centuries that followed, the Romance evolved and diversified into a mythopoeic family tree whose branches foliaged with the leaves of many languages, faiths and cultures; more than eighty versions appeared in twenty-four languages.19

  The Alexander Romance stemma from recension ‘α’, which may itself be an embellished descendent of an earlier archetype. Provided with the kind permission of Oxford University Press and copied from PM Fraser Cities of Alexander the Great, Clarendon Press (1996).

  The Hellenistic world saw exotic tales arriving from the fabled lands of Kush to the south of Egypt and from the distant East, carried down the Silk Road with the help of the settlements Alexander had founded or simply renamed along its route. According to Strabo, who studied in Egyptian Alexandria, the ‘city’ of Alexandria Eschate (‘the furthest’) in the Fergana Valley had brought the Greek settlers and the Graeco-Bactrian Kingdom into contact with the silk traders of the Han dynasty of the Seres (the Chinese, who lived to age 300, claimed Pseudo-Lucian) as early as the 3rd century BCE.20 Within 200 years the Romans would have a voracious appetite for silk and they obtained cloth through the Parthians who most likely encouraged the belief that silk grew on (or as) trees.21 Pliny dispelled that myth and described the role of the silkworm, and yet the Senate issued edicts in vain to prohibit the wearing of silk due to the trade imbalance it caused; one decree was based on accusations of immodesty for the way silk clung to the female form. In Pliny’s reckoning, India, China and the Arabian Peninsula extracted ‘from our empire 100 million sesterces per year – that is the sum which our luxuries and our women cost us…’22

  Ptolemaic Egypt had fostered trade eastward as far as India with the help of Arabs and Nabateans, and the resulting contact fertilised Hellenistic literature. But, paradoxically, much of the geographical knowledge of the former Persian East was lost in the period between Megasthenes’ eyewitness reports from India in the generation after Alexander (ca. 290s BCE) and the Parthian Staging Posts of Isidore of Charax in the 1st century CE, principally due to the collapse of the Seleucid Empire and its dynasty established by Alexander’s former Bodyguard, Seleucus.23

  It was a millennium later that Marco Polo’s twenty-four-year adventure and travelogue opened up knowledge of the East once more. His account appeared under a number of titles including Livre des Merveilles du Monde, The Book of the Marvels of the World, first published in the descendant of Old French (langues d’oïl), and Il Milione written in Italian, which brought back stories of Cathay and Kublai Khan, lending further colour to developing European fables. The authorship of what we have come to name The Travels of Marco Polo is, in fact, contested, as is its original transcribed language; tradition holds that Polo dictated the book to a romance writer, Rustichello da Pisa, while in prison in Genoa between 1298 and 1299, and we would assume in Italian. Rustichello had already written a work in French, Roman de Roi Artus (Romance of King Arthur), and certainly much interpolated material was included, so we might speculate how much of Polo’s original detail remained unsullied in the hands of an established story-philanderer. The oldest manuscripts differ widely in content and length, and what we read today has been ‘standardised’ like other romances and the Iliad.

  The Greek Alexander Romance was similarly developed. As examples of the genre offspring we have the Latin Epitome of Julius Valerius (probably 4th century) and the Historia de Preliis Alexandri Magni (The Wars of Alexander the Great) of Archpriest Leo of Naples (10th century), first put to print in 1487 and giving rise to a whole new generation of re-renderings of the story. With over 200 surviving manuscripts, the Historia de Preliis drew much inspiration from Curtius’ history of Alexander, as did the Alexandreis siva Gesta Alexandri Magni, a Latin poem in epic-style dactylic hexameter by the theologian Gautier de Chatillon (ca. 1135-post 1181), with a similar Curtian ten-book layout and much credit paid to the goddess Fortuna.24 The verses were so popular that they displaced the reading of ancient poets in grammar schools.25 De Chatillon’s production, ‘a tissue of other texts’ (Virgil, Lucan, Ovid, Horace and Claudian among them), could not avoid alluding to the recent death of Thomas Beckett (1170) and the failures of the first Crusades; it even housed the crucifixion of Jesus some three and a half centuries out of context.26 De Chatillon was fluid with his metre, ranging back and forth between dactylic hexameters, iambics and trochaics; fortunately these provided a stylistic rhythm that identified much of the imported syncretism.27

  The Alexandreis had other siblings and more distant relatives too: the distinctive Li romans d’Alixandre, for example, fed by the ‘alexandrine’ verses of Lambert de Tort, and the Mort Alixandre credited to Alexandre de Bernay, alongside the Roman d’Alexandre by Albéric de Pisançon which was the possible source of the German Alexanderlied (ca. 1130) of Lamprecht ‘The Priest’.28 These were hugely influential in the Middle Ages and they were amongst the earliest texts translated into the vernacular literature that emerged in the Renaissance. Like the oil paintings of the period, they were cultural palimpsests, absorbing textual supplements and stylistic elements from other classical works as well as the iconography of their day. The Alexandreis has the Macedonian king and his men fighting in chainmail with axes and broadswords against Arabs who fled in terror, scenes more representative of crusaders than ancient Greek hoplites; we additionally read of Spanish, Teutonic, Gallic and Flemish envoys arriving at Babylon to pay homage to the Macedonian king.29 If Tarn’s criticism of ‘invented embassies’ is indeed correct, then every age wished to communicate with the Macedonian ruler of the Graeco-Persian world.30

  The Saracen threat from the Ottoman Empire loomed large in the minds of the romance writers, and it led to the emergence of vivid characters born out of fear or misplaced hope. In 1165 the Letters of Prester John entered circulation; this was an ep
istolary fantasy that convinced Pope Alexander III of the existence of a lost Nestorian Christian kingdom somewhere in central Asia.31 The character’s provenance might be found in the Historia Ecclesiastica of Eusebius (ca. 260-340 CE), the Bishop of Caesarea, and the fabled Prester John and his Christian outpost was an alluring enough idea for the Portuguese to venture to Ethiopia in search of his kingdom.32 He, and the appropriately named legendary Gates of Alexander, were supposedly constructed to hold back the pagan hordes, imagery with direct parallels in the Arabic Qur’an. The gated wall at the world’s end was in fact the narrow geographical feature that formed the Caspian Gates.

  Josephus may have played a part in the legend, for in his Jewish Wars he claimed Alexander had indeed blocked the pass with huge iron gates.33 That is somewhat ironic as Josephus had expounded: ‘It is often said that the Greeks were the first people to deal with the events of the past in anything like a scientific manner… but it is clear that history has been far better preserved by the so-called barbarians.’34 He added: ‘Nevertheless, we must let those who have no regard for the truth write as they choose, for that is what they seem to delight in.’35 But the fantasy was seductive and ‘breaking the bolts’ or the ‘gates’ of the earth had been a popular Roman locus (Greek, topos) when Alexander was under the knife.36

  A map titled A Description of The Empire of Prester John, Also Known as the Abyssinian Empire. Produced in Antwerp in the 1570s by Abraham Ortelius, it outlined Prester John’s fabled empire with both real and imagined names. Ortelius’ Theatrum Orbis Terrarum is regarded as the first atlas and was the most expensive book ever printed. Nevertheless, some 7,300 copies were printed in four editions from 1570 to 1612.

  At the height of the Crusades it was alleged that John, the supposed Presbyter of Syria, had re-taken the city of Ecbatana.37 Yet much of Middle Age literature was about historical alchemy and Prester John was just one base metal alloyed with the superstitions and apprehensions of the age. But for an influential time he was as real as Alexander had been in the minds of his chroniclers and he became a regular feature in medieval texts. His legend was finally laid to rest when his mythical kingdom was removed from maps by the German Orientalist Hiob Ludolf (1624-1704) who exposed the seductive fancy for what it was.