In Search of the Lost Testament of Alexander the Great
Page 45
Today in Greece the best-known Romance derivative is the He Phyllada tou Megalexantrou, first published in Venice in 1670 and never out of print through the three centuries that followed. The text represented the first attempt to ‘fix’ the fluid Romance recensions in circulation. Emerging ‘from the Byzantine preoccupation with the classical past’, the conflicts between the former Eastern Roman Empire and Ottoman Turks were inevitably dragged into the story.38 The Phyllada portrayed Alexander as the protector of Greek Orthodox Christian culture, and ultimately as kosmokrator, the ruler of the world.
Through the romance genre Alexander’s story finally infiltrated the East in a more permanent way than his own military conquest managed to. He entered the Qur’an texts, reemerging as Dhul-Qarnayn, the ‘two-horned’ who once again raised unbreachable gates to enclose the evil kingdoms of Yâgûg and Mâgûg (Gog and Magog) at the world’s end; the reincarnation, with roots in the Syriac version of the Romance, had its earlier origins in the silver tetradrachms issued by Alexander’s successors that depicted him with rams’ horns. A Persian Romance variant was the Iskandernameh and alongside it Armenian and Ethiopian translations circulated imbuing the tale with their own cultural identities. An interesting textual ‘rediscovery’ appeared in the 8th century Syriac Secretum Secretorum; it included what was purported to be Aristotle’s lost doctrine on kingship dedicated to Alexander.39
Ironically, it was not a Greek book, but the Lives of the Physicians (1245/46) by Ibn Abi Usaib’a (ca. 1203-1270), that preserved much of Aristotle’s biographical detail, and yet it hardly merits a mention in debates on Peripatetic scholarship. Neither does the Kitab al-Fehrest of Ibn al-Nadim (died ca. 998 CE), a remarkable compendium of pre-Islamic text he himself described as ‘an index of all books of all nations’.40 Where Western texts vanished with the fall of Rome and with the torching of private collections and libraries at Pergamum and Alexandria, ‘… most of the surviving Greek literature was translated into Arabic by 750 CE; Aristotle became so widely studied that literally hundreds of books were written about him by Arabic scholars.’ Even his Will survived intact in the writing of An-Nadim, Al-Qifti and Usaib’a.41 The Muqaddimah of Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406), a universal history rich in new political, economic and historiographical theory, much of it again influenced by Aristotle’s ideas, only reappeared in the West in the 19th century, as the Prolegomena. Trade with the Muslim world had flourished through Constantinople, but the voices of these authors are rarely heard west of the Hellespont; ‘East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.’42 There was however one exception to this cultural irreconcilability: Alexander himself, a historic genre not as separable from romance as we might imagine.
Many parallels to the Alexander romance corpus have appeared in literature: the rabbinic aggadah for example, with its folklore, historical anecdotes and moral exhortations dressed like biblical parables with attendant mythical creatures. We have the Norse Sagas which recapture a similar legendary past, and Beowulf, the Anglo-Saxon poem (ca. 1,000) of Scandinavian pagan legends and heroic exploits that emerged at the end of the Dark Ages when barbarism still triumphed over classical civilisation.43 However, the enduring tale of King Arthur has the most significance for us, and somewhat predictably, Alexander and Arthur crossed paths in the 14th century French romance, Perceforest. Stock to Greek playwrights was the storm at sea, a neat mechanism for a dramatic location shift and one reused, for example, effectively in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Perceforest upheld the tradition, and Alexander was swept off course to a mythical visit to Britain.44
Transformed by Malory into Morte D’Arthur (ca. 1470), the Arthurian canon dominated British historiography for centuries. The ancient sources behind the legends of Brut, Arthur and his knights, have disappeared, leaving us in the dark on their identities, real or imagined.45 Malory penned the Arthurian romance based on the earlier account of Geoffrey de Monmouth, whose Historia Regum Britanniae (ca. 1135) and Chrétien de Troyes’ French ‘grail’ romances, appeared in the mid-12th century. The debate on Monmouth’s work goes on regarding the extent to which it was purportedly derived from early Welsh or Breton manuscripts of an Archdeacon Walter. As early as 1190 the historian William of Newburgh declared of Monmouth’s work, which traced the lineage of English kings back to Troy, ‘… only a person ignorant of ancient history would have any doubt about how shamelessly and impudently he lies in almost everything…’ He followed with:
… it is quite clear that everything this man wrote about Arthur and his successors… was made up, partly by himself and partly by others, either from an inordinate love of lying, or for the sake of pleasing the Britons.46
Any truth behind the identity of Arthur is lost and his very existence is questioned. Yet so was the existence of Troy until Heinrich Schliemann claimed to have dug it up in 1873 in his search for King Priam’s treasure. Whether part of Mycenaen legend, or steeped in historical fact, Troy still faces the same hurdle as Plato’s (or Solon’s) Atlantis, Arthur’s Camelot and the once-ridiculed 4th century BCE journey by the explorer Pytheas to Thule.47 In the case of the ‘biblical-only’ Hittites, we were ignorant of the existence of a once-great empire for three millennia until Hattusa, the capital, was stumbled upon in 1834 and yet it defied identification for almost another century until detailed tablets were finally translated.48 If the Vandals, Visigoths, Franks or Huns and the later Arabic invasions had between them managed to destroy every library in Europe, leaving Wallis Budge and the British Museum only with exotic Ethiopian Romance redactions, would we be able to say with any certainty that Alexander had really existed?
To some extent, Rome participated in the rise of both the romances of Arthur and Alexander: the fall of the Roman Empire, which saw the loss of the libraries that guarded primary historical testimony, allowed for a further metamorphosis in Alexander’s story, and Rome’s abandonment of Britain set the scene for Arthur’s legend to emerge. For when sheep began to graze in Rome’s Field of Mars, European history entered a millennium that put more stock in colourful fables than the accounts of, for example, the pedantic and stoic Arrian, whose Anabasis fell out of circulation until the Renaissance as a result. The change in biographical slant was not sudden and character portrayals were remodelled over time: compare the no-nonsense Sallust with Plutarch’s didactic profiling a century on, then place them beside the biographies of the Scriptores Historiae Augustae penned perhaps a further two centuries later.49
These controversial texts, first termed Scriptores Historiae Augustae by Isaac Casaubon (1559-1614), are a remarkable collection of source-rich documents of ‘dying Paganism’. In this self-labelled mythistoricis, the biography of Alexander Severus (ruled 222-235 CE) is an ‘awkward imitation’ of the Cyropaedia, according to Edward Gibbon.50 It is appropriate, then, that the Latin romanice scribere – to write in a ‘romance language’ – formed the origins of ‘romance’.51 These biographies were supposed to pick up where Suetonius’ Lives of The Twelve Caesars ended, a logical claim if ever the biographies of Nerva (emperor 96-98 CE) and Trajan (emperor 98-117) are found. The compendium, like the equally vexatious and still anonymous two sections (of three) of the Origo gentis Romanae, provides unique biographical details of late emperors (spanning 117-284 CE) presented as a corpus of texts by six historians written during the reigns of Diocletian (ca. 245-311 CE), the emperor who managed to push the barbarians back over Rome’s borders, and Constantine (272-337 CE).52
Possibly the works of a single ‘rogue scholiast’, the authenticity and accuracy of the Scriptores Historiae Augustae are hotly debated, but it remains the sole account of a period when little other information exists. Debate on its dating and origins continues, and though the compilation is lucid at times, with some 130 supporting documents cited as the ‘evidence’, the web of home-spun sources descends into fable and rhetorical flights of fancy, heading in the direction of full-blown romance.53 Nevertheless, the Scriptores were used as a source in Gibbon’s The History of the De
cline and Fall of the Roman Empire (published 1776-1789), a treatise not short on irony (and a little plagiarism), and which concluded that the social process underpinning the title had been ‘… the greatest, perhaps, and most awful scene in the history of mankind.’ Gibbon’s research method was initially widely praised for he opened with:
I have always endeavoured to draw from the fountain-head; that my curiosity, as well as a sense of duty, has always urged me to study the originals; and that, if they have sometimes eluded my search, I have carefully marked the secondary evidence, on whose faith a passage or a fact were reduced to depend.54
Momigliano was scathing of the impression Gibbon attempted to perpetuate about his methodology and his pedantic footnotes, summing up his use of the Scriptores with: ‘Theirs was an age of forgeries, interpolations, false attributions, tendentious interpretations. It would be surprising if the Historia Augusta should turn out to be more honest than the literary standards of the time required.’55 Yet is it just another example of where ‘romance’ had clearly infiltrated ‘history’ with a dividing line we cannot readily see today.
EUHEMERISING THE TESTAMENT
In attempting to extract Alexander’s Will from his Romance we are in fact taking a euhemeristic stance: treating what has been deemed mythical as an echo of historical reality. This is an appropriate moment to introduce Sir Isaac Newton into our contemplations, for his tendentious views as a deeply religious euhemerist could not be easily revealed in his lifetime, and neither could the twenty years he dedicated to heretical alchemy in his search for the Philosopher’s Stone. Newton’s Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended was posthumously published in 1728; it was an exegesis in which he employed his mathematical erudition to recalibrate the events of antiquity to bring them ‘safely’ into the chronology proposed by Archbishop James Ussher. It may have inspired the publication of the multi-authored The Universal History from the Earliest Account of Time to the Present, which also ‘found’, or forged, ‘correlations between the Bible and classical worlds’.56
Newton’s book dated the Creation to 4004 BCE, following which he placed Noah’s flood in 2347 BCE and shifted the fall of Troy from an Eratosthenes-supported date of 1183/4 forward to ca. 904 BCE, arguing that even the most ancient of extra-biblical historical references were post-1125 BCE.57 His euhemerist hermeneutics (here meaning the study of the interpretation of ancient biblical texts) positioned all gods and heroes as factual kings, and he too viewed myths as historically inspired;58 in the process Newton credited atomic theory to one Mochus the Phoenician whom he supposed was the biblical Moses. Newton modestly summed up his introduction with: ‘I do not pretend to be exact to a year: there may be errors of five or ten years, and sometimes twenty, and not much above.’
The full title of Newton’s publication included the prefix, A Short Chronicle from the First Memory of Things in Europe, to the Conquest of Persia by Alexander the Great. It was presented with a covering letter to the Queen from John Conduitt who claimed ‘Antiquity’ had benefited from ‘… a sagacity and penetration peculiar to the great Author, dispelling that Mist, with which fable and error had darkened it.’ Newton’s treatise, consciously or otherwise, supported the methodology of the 1623 On the Plan and Method of Reading Histories by Digory Whear, and ironically so, for Newton is better remembered for the weighty gravitas of his Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, whose publication was delayed when poor sales of the History of Fishes almost bankrupted the Royal Society.59
Newton’s gravitational masterpiece was based on Kepler’s astronomically unpopular law of planetary motion, and that too is ironic, for Kepler, who held the conviction that God had a geometric plan for the universe, fell foul of the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, as did the texts of Galileo with whom he collaborated. Although Kepler’s first publication, the Mysterium Cosmographicum, attempted to reconcile a heliocentric solar-system with biblical geocentrism, his refusal to convert to Catholicism (and dispense with elliptical orbits) ultimately sealed his fate, despite his imperial patronage in Prague. He was banished from Graz where his last astronomical calendar was publicly burned, and his mother was accused of witchcraft, an allegation backed up by spurious claims that his Somnium, the first attempt at ‘science fiction’, had referred to demonic themes. In 1626 the Catholic Counter-Reformation placed his library under lock and key.60 In Newton’s case, as one author has commented in his study of his lesser-known euhemerist life, ‘the hunter turned prey’ when his scientific discipline produced more myths than it dispelled.61
While we are on the matter of euhemerism, it looks wholly suspicious that it was Cassander, the regent’s son accused of ferrying to Babylon the poison bound for Alexander, who employed Euhemerus, the founding ‘mythographer’, at his Macedonian court.62 One result was Euhemerus’ utopian land of Panchaea (surely Platonist in origin), though his employer, Cassander, displayed few of the qualities found on the idealised Indian Ocean island paradise.63 Could Euhemerus have been tasked with attempting an ironical role-reversal: that of explaining away a damaging ‘truth’ – Cassander’s part in the alleged plot – as nothing more than a myth propagated by a scurrilous pamphleteer? Euhemerus’ principal work was his Sacred History.64 So was it perhaps he, without the reverence his title suggested, who tossed the Pamphlet Will and conspiracy into the final chapter of an early redaction of the Greek Alexander Romance?
Many euhemeristically inclined historians accept that romances may be built around a folklore that preserved elements of genuine historicity, a stance Ennius found useful when linking Rome’s foundations to Troy.65 Others more cautiously see myths as ‘symbols of permanent philosophical truths’, and the Greek legends as natural cyclical processes forever recurring.66 If an echo of reality has indeed been captured, these lodestones may still be camouflaged by the incredible. It’s worth re-quoting Peter Green’s conclusion on the issue, though he never linked his observation to Alexander’s Will:
… 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.67
Other ‘legends’ may have similarly been built around misplaced or forgotten events. Jason’s journey in the Argo and the legend of King Solomon’s Mines may all be aggregates of real journeys distilled from explorers’ travel logs along exotic trading routes; the latter inland to the metropolis of Manyikeni in the land of the city of ‘Great Zimbabwe’ through the port of Kilwa in modern Tanzania – termed the finest and most handsomely built towns by Ibn Battuta (1364-ca. 1369) – its name already changed to ‘Quiloa’ (as the Portuguese called it) by Milton in Paradise Lost. Solomon’s legendary mines were perhaps in the lost Land of Punt, ‘Ta netjer’ (‘God’s land’), believed by the people of Egypt to be their ancient homeland. According to biblical references, Phoenician ships traded down the African coast, visiting Ophir at the end of the Red Sea and bringing back ‘gold and silver, ivory, and apes and peacocks’ for Solomon; it was a famed trading city of ‘stones of gold’ that has been variously linked to Great Zimbabwe, Sofala in Mozambique (in Milton’s Paradise Lost) and Dhofar in Oman.68
Under Ptolemy II Philadelphos, in the generation immediately after Alexander, Greek influence extended to Elephantine, an island in the Upper Nile that marked the boundary with Ethiopia (in Greek: ‘the land of men with burnt faces’), though the Satrap Stele erected in 311 BCE appears to reference an earlier Nubian campaign of 312 BCE under Ptolemy I Soter who may have stationed garrisons at Syene (Aswan). Elephantine (the Greek name for Pharaonic Abu at Aswan), previously used by Alexander as a deportation centre, was perhaps an early centre of the ivory trade when Ptolemaic commerce started to penetrate the African interior; Herodotus had apparently visited the trading post ca. 430 BCE. Commercial ties with the kingdom of Kush with its capital at Meroe (in today’
s Sudan) had flourished after Persian expeditions attempted to subdue it, and references to its Nubian ruler, Queen Candace, and to its regional wealth appeared in biblical references.69
A curiosity with the source of the Nile and reason for its annual flooding was a common investigative and well established theme in Greek scholarship since the time of Herodotus, and it reappeared in Aristotle’s now lost treatise, De Inundatione Nili (as titled in a medieval Latin translation); he finally pinned the phenomenon on the Ethiopian summer rains, as Democritus, Thrasyalces and Eudoxus of Cnidus had proposed before him.70 Aristobulus apparently touched on the problem too, and a tradition even existed in Roman times (through Seneca’s description and Diodorus’ polemic on the issue, for example) that Callisthenes claimed Alexander had commissioned an expedition to Ethiopia to ascertain the truth. If so, it could explain the reported presence of Ethiopian ambassadors in Babylon.71
State-employed elephant hunters would disappear into the African interior for months at a time once the Seleucids cut the Ptolemies off from their supply of Indian war elephants; they would return with animals never before seen and which became ‘objects of amazement’. There were reports of snakes 100 cubits long (approximately 150 feet) large enough to devour bulls and oxen and even bring elephants down.72 A live 30-cubit-long python was delivered to Ptolemy II Philadelphos, according to Diodorus, and once exhibited it became a court showpiece.73 To quote Bevan’s 1927 summation of the second Ptolemy: