In Search of the Lost Testament of Alexander the Great
Page 54
With less space allocated to the extended didactic speeches we find in Thucydides, for example, and yet clearly influenced by what appears to be Ephorus’ sentiment (derived from Isocrates) on ‘moral utility’, Diodorus once more focused on ‘great men’, and he seems to have scorned democracy with its ‘vast numbers that ruin the work of the government’ in the process.164 Polybius had already commented on Athens’ political system and perhaps set the tone: ‘It naturally begins to be sick of present conditions and next looks out for a master, and having found one very soon hates him again, as the change is manifestly for the worse’,165 a statement that conveniently appears to back-up his anacyclotic model.
In his philosophical introduction, Diodorus informed us that his Bibliotheke Historika covered 1,138 years and was arranged into three distinct sections.166 The first was the ‘mythical’ in which he introduced Greek and Egyptian creation theories and narrated events through to the Trojan War. The second was a compendium of accounts ending at Alexander’s death, and he originally planned the third, the last twenty-three books, to run past the first ‘unofficial’ Roman Triumvirate of 60/59 BCE formed between Julius Caesar, Crassus and Pompey, and through to Caesar’s Gallic Wars of 46/45 BCE. But he ceased at the earlier terminus, though later events were mentioned; the halt was probably prudent considering the danger of commenting on contemporary events during the bloody Second Triumvirate.167 Of his original ‘library’, only books one to five, and eleven to twenty, survive anywhere near intact, though fragments from the remaining sections can be found in the 280 surviving epitomes of Photius.168 Fortunately, Philip II, Alexander and the Successor Wars years under scrutiny, reside in books sixteen to twenty.
Diodorus’ work has been a weapons testing ground for the deployment of Quellenforschung and yet we know little about his life beyond what he himself told us, along with one further reference by the Illyrian Eusebius Sophronius Hieronymus (ca. 347-420 CE), otherwise known as St Jerome: ‘Diodorus of Sicily, a writer of Greek history, became illustrious.’169 Diodorus hailed from one of the oldest and formerly wealthiest, and yet now (according to Cicero) one of the most impoverished, settlements in the interior of Sicily, Agyrium, where a surviving tombstone inscription is dedicated to a similar named ‘son of Appollonius’ – we assume the historian. In 36 BCE, in the decade in which Diodorus was likely publishing, Octavian stripped the Sicilians of their Roman citizen rights, Latinitas, previously granted to them by Sextus Pompey.170
Nevertheless, Diodorus afforded Agyrium – which may have suffered as a result of opposing Roman interests in the First Punic War – and its Heraclean cult (Heracles had supposedly visited the town) an importance out of context in the scale of his overall work (Timaeus was accused of much the same); he made ‘events in Sicily finer and more illustrious than those in the rest of the world’.171 Ephorus, too, had repeatedly assured his readers that the population of his home, Cyme in northwest Asia Minor, was ‘at peace’, possibly taking Euripides’ words at face value: ‘The first necessity of a happy life is to be born of a famous city’, and apart from attachments to Homer and Hesiod, Ephorus inferred every Spartan or Persian military action had some strategic link with Cyme.172 So when Diodorus digresses into a Cymian saga we can confidently pinpoint his source.173
Evidence suggests Diodorus’ information gathering took place broadly between 59 BCE and the publication date somewhere between 36-30 BCE, a period in which Roman authority reached ‘to the bounds of the inhabited world’, a state of affairs that concerned him despite his admiration for Rome’s earlier achievements.174 But parts of his first books appear to have circulated earlier, released as a separate packet.175 He seems to have spoken imperfect Latin (though living on Sicily gave him a ‘considerable familiarity’ with the language) and the jury remains out on whether he drew from Latin texts at all for detail on Roman affairs. Like Herodotus, he claimed to have travelled widely in the continents he would have termed ‘Europa’ and ‘Asia’, but at times his geography is just as shaky as Herodotus’, in whose Histories we see the first references to those continental names. It is clear from his eyewitness testimony, however, that he did spend time in Egypt (from ca. 60/59 BCE) and he appears to have consulted the ‘royal records’ in Alexandria before basing himself in Rome (from ca. 46/45 BCE) for a ‘lengthy’ time, though no patrons nor reading circle associates were ever mentioned.176
Admitting he followed ‘subject-system’ subdivisions, Diodorus dealt with the fate of individuals sequentially, separating biographical threads rather than developing them in parallel, a method that complicates our understanding of the chronological progression; the result is at times akin to a ‘kaleidoscopic disjunctiveness’.177 Whilst dubbed ‘universal’ in approach, and indeed at times he was panoramic in his scope, Diodorus all too often provided us with a monographic narrative that Polybius would have termed historia kata meros, history ‘bit by bit’, a definition close to the criticism afforded to Thucydides (only mentioned once in the extant chapters of Polybius) by Dionysius of Halicarnassus, whose books, beside those of Polybius and Diodorus, represent the only surviving works of the Hellenistic era sufficiently intact to be of use to modern historians.178
Diodorus was cutting and pasting ‘the numerous treatise from divers authors’, squeezing them into a highly generalised timeframe, though he was not blind to the shortcomings of his method, as he himself explained:
… it is necessary, for those who record them, to interrupt the narrative and to parcel out different times to simultaneous events contrary to nature, with the result that, although the actual experience of the events contains the truth, yet the written record, deprived of such power, while presenting copies of the events, falls far short of arranging them as they really were.179
Polybius had encountered a similar problem, and Ephorus had preceded Diodorus with this approach: a balancing act of grouping related events together and yet fitting the whole into an annalistic (year by year) framework, earning the Cymian writer Polybius’ praise as the ‘first universal historian’.180 In contrast, Seneca felt: ‘It requires no great effort to strip Ephorus of his authority; he is a mere chronicler.’181 Sempronius Asellio (ca. 198 to post-91 BCE) had already stated the flaw with the annalistic approach: ‘Annals make only known what was done and in which year it was done, just as if someone were writing a diary, which the Greeks call ephemeris. I think that for us it is not enough to say what was done, but also to show for what purpose and for which reason things were done.’182 A more modern interpretation: we get the ‘gleam but no illumination: facts but no humanity’.183
In Diodorus’ chronological progression, Alexander’s achievement sat like a huge boulder – the greatest in history he believed – in the literary road from prehistory to the increasingly turbulent present, and one that could not be split this time with fire and sour wine.184 In his opinion: ‘Alexander accomplished greater deeds than any, not only of kings who lived before him but also of those who were to come later down to our time.’185 And that would have been a slap in the face to the career of Julius Caesar had not Diodorus additionally and expediently stated that Caesar was the historical character he admired the most.186
The chapters focusing on Alexander in Diodorus’ Bibliotheke are considered to be about one-tenth as long as Cleitarchus’ narrative (estimated from scant evidence), whereas Curtius’ biography roughly tracked Cleitarchus’ original length; this uneven abridgement would explain many of the discrepancies within otherwise comparable Vulgate profiles.187 And though a subject of intense debate, it remains easier (though less tantalising) to swallow the idea that the tones and nuances attachable to earlier Hellenistic historians that we see in the Roman-era Vulgate, also came from Cleitarchus, who, publishing in the 370s or 360s BCE, had himself incorporated these influences. The alternative requires us to accept that each Vulgate historian flitted between a number of earlier sources and yet still produced a markedly similar result. Any remaining variation in commentary we see simply re
flects the ethnic backgrounds and social climates attachable to the latter-day authors and the varying degrees to which they compressed Cleitarchus’ account.
For details of events that followed Alexander’s death, scholars have reached a ‘somewhat uneasy agreement’ that Diodorus shifted sources to Hieronymus of Cardia, once again with a heavy compression of text.188 Faced with the complete loss of Hieronymus’ original account, the slant of Diodorus’ chapter-opening proemia (prologues, which sometimes, however, conflict with his narrative) and the identification of unique diction may provide a valuable path back to his original sources.189 As examples, idiopragia (‘private power’ rather than ‘mutual gain’) and the technical terms katapeltaphetai (literally ‘catapultists’) and asthippoi (elite cavalry units whose role is still debated) uniquely used by Diodorus to describe episodes we believe Hieronymus had eyewitnessed, act as tell-tales to his presence when we see them reused elsewhere.190 Inevitably, in this shifting of sources at the point of Alexander’s death, there was an overlap in information, and the result was untidy and conflicting with his later narrative.
In his opening proem, Diodorus expressed the fear that future compilers may copy or mutilate his work; perhaps this is suggestive of his own guilty conscience.191 Classical writers frequently regurgitated their sources uncreatively, and Diodorus, the ‘honest plodding Greek’ who adopted a utilitarian and stoical approach, was no exception.192 Termed an uncritical compiler, Diodorus took the path of least resistance in completing the ‘immense labour’ behind his interlocking volumes.193 In 1865 Heinrich Nissen reasoned that Diodorus habitually followed single sources due to the practical difficulties of delving into multiple scrolls for alternative narratives.194 As early as 1670 John Henry Boecler (and later Petrus Wesseling in 1746) determined he had been plagiarising Polybius to a scandalous degree and this was no better illustrated than in his digressions on Fortune.195 It has even been suggested that Diodorus took his information through intermediaries, Agatharchides of Cnidus for example, in an already epitomised form. But there is little proof, and to what extent he did use mittelquellen, middle sources, or showed true independence of thought and opinion, remains sub judice.196
Diodorus’ own declaration of method suggests he was not entirely mechanical and the title of his work, Library of History, was honest to the content, for it suggested nothing more than a collection of available texts,197 which under Hegel’s strict definition, would classify him as a ‘compiler’ not a ‘historian’.198 In a sense this is fortunate and we might thank him for lacking any great gift of originality, for a more personal interpretation might have rendered his Alexander sources unrecognisable, where instead (we believe) we receive a fair impression of Cleitarchus’ underlying account of Alexander, and of Hieronymus’ account of the years that followed. As it has been observed, some ‘universal’ historians were more ‘universal’ than others.199
THE FLORUM CORPUSCULUM: THE PETALS OF EPITOME
We would like to say much about Gnaeus Pompeius Trogus, a Romanised Vocontian Gaul writing ‘in old fashioned elegance’ in the rule of Augustus, and the least possible about Justin, in whose epitomised books Trogus’ cremated ashes are compacted.200 Unfortunately, little remains of Trogus’ original Historiae Philippicae (et totius mundi origines et terrae situs), ‘the only world history written in Latin by a pagan.’201 Justin did however provide useful prologoi or summaries of the contents of each chapter in his Epitoma Historiarum Philippicarum libri XLIV in a similar manner to Trogus himself and the anonymous 4th century Periochae compiler who summarised Livy’s lost books. The problem with epitomes, as Brunt proposed, is that they ‘… reflect the interests of the authors who cite or summarise the lost works as much or more than the characteristics of the works concerned.’202
Within Justin’s précis of Trogus there remains a clear bias in content towards Spain, Gaul (which reportedly sent envoys to Alexander in Babylon), Carthage, and the western provinces of the Roman Empire, understandable for an author born in Gallia Narbonensis, broadly modern Provence. Trogus’ work stretched back to the dawn of time covering the successive great kingdoms in the style of Herodotus, but now extending further forward, through the empires of Assyria, Media, Persia, Macedonia and to Rome with its present Parthian challenge.203 Trogus’ family had made its mark in Rome; his grandfather and uncle served under Pompey the Great, and Trogus claimed his father was some kind of secretary-diplomat to Julius Caesar. This last detail suggests a switched allegiance, for Pompey and Caesar were opponents until the final decisive battle at Pharsalia in June 48 BCE, after which Pompey fled to Egypt and assassination by Pothinus, the eunuch of Ptolemy XIII Theos Philopatros (the ‘father loving God’).204
Of Trogus’ forty-four books, those numbered seven to thirty-three focused on the rise and fall of Macedonia, and six of them on the deeds of first Philip II, and then Alexander. If Ptolemaic Egypt is considered an extension of their influence, then Macedonian dynasties dominated the texts through to book forty. All in all, Philip came off badly, a sine qua non of the late Roman republic: he was the terminator of Greek liberty, though both Polybius and Trogus credited him with laying the foundation stone of Alexander’s success.205
Trogus’ annalistic history did not pander to the audience in Rome whose imperialism is criticised through the device of rhetorical speeches, and Parthia is positioned as the moral heart of the Persian Empire, casting doubts on Roman incursions. Here Fortuna, the new incarnation of the Greek goddess Tyche, played her part in Alexander’s quest to be named king of the world, universum terranum orbem.206 Justin’s epitome suggests Trogus’ original work, though eloquent (sufficiently so for Trogus to have confidently criticised both Livy and Sallust),207 appears to have reinforced the darker themes attached to Alexander, as well as other influences already embedded in Cleitarchus.208 Of course, the closer-to-home exhortations of Roman republican polemic had their effect as well; corruption by wealth is blamed for the downfall of the Lydians, the Greeks, and ultimately, Alexander himself.209
How much of the vocabulary in Justin’s epitome was his rather than Trogus’ remains debatable, though scholars are now inclining to credit him with some originality and even linguistic creativity.210 He was not naively epitomising, however; in his preface, which took the form of an epistle, Justin suggested he was arranging an anthology of instructive passages, omitting ‘… what did not make pleasant reading or serve to provide a moral.’211 These selections were akin to the Greek classroom preparatory exercises, but now arranged as a history, and for all we know Justin might have simply been a student on such a syllabus. As Carol Thomas recently pointed out, Romans grew up with Alexander and: ‘As a schoolroom staple he was a key figure in hortatory texts.’212
The petals of Justin’s self-titled florum corpusculum, a little body of flowers, have sadly fallen too far from the original roots to tell us more about Trogus’ pages.213 Nonetheless, Justin’s brief resume of his history is, sadly, the only surviving continuous narrative of events in the Eastern Mediterranean that spans the whole of the Hellenistic Age. Less optimistic is Tarn’s conclusion of Justin’s efforts: ‘Is there any bread at all to this intolerable deal of sack?’214
OILS ON OIL AND PEARLS IN A PIG TROUGH
Tarn’s 1948 source study also assaulted Curtius’ Historiae Alexandri Magni Macedonis, if that indeed approximates the original title of our third extant book, and so enigmatic, though influential, is Curtius’ work, that we dedicate a later chapter to his identification.215
Curtius was likely aboard the Roman cursus honorum, the senatorial career path, where training as a rhetorician was vital to success; it was not an uncommon twinning of abilities in the so-called Silver Age of Latin. But the dating of Curtius’ work remains uncertain and there is no firm evidence it was widely known or ever used before the Middle Ages, after which interest was reignited.216 The first two books of his monograph, in which Curtius might have identified himself more fully, have been lost. Judging by an encomium in his
tenth chapter he would have prefaced his introduction with an imperial dedication that would have dated him nicely (T11). Frequent lacunae appear elsewhere and yet sufficient remains to propose both he, and Cleitarchus, shared a common bond: they placed the edification of their audience above purer historiographical pursuits, with the earlier production assimilated into Curtius’ restaging of the play.
A ‘gifted amateur’, Curtius has been termed ‘a Roman who wrote for Romans’.217 He filled the gaps in the Cleitarchean masonry with his own colourful grouting and accessorised Alexander, and Darius III too for that matter, with speeches from his own rhetorical wardrobe; thus attired, the Macedonian king was paraded anew as digressions on fortuna and regnum – kingship – were readdressed. This was essentially the same story with a new editor and under a new literary censor, though studded with occasional unique and ‘invaluable facts’.218 Curtius justified his inclusion of less than credible episodes by explaining his journalistic dilemma: ‘I report more than I believe, for while I cannot vouch for matters of which I am not certain, neither can I omit what I have heard.’219 This was, as we now know, a familiar refrain from narrators rather than historians.
If we consider that Curtius embellished Cleitarchus, who had already embellished the agenda-laden works of Alexander’s contemporaries, we appreciate how thick the sugar coating became on his bittersweet biography. Curtius’ method has been described as one that frittered away priceless sources ‘… in the course of a tedious literary concept about the goddess Fortuna and many florid exercises in Roman rhetoric.’220 Tarn and Syme summed him up as nothing more than a ‘hasty irresponsible rhetorician’ who was little more than a ‘superior journalist’, whilst Tarn’s personal polemic is more colourful still: ‘He can slough the rhetoric, as a snake sloughs a dead skin. And one neglects that rhetoric at one’s peril, for scattered through it, like pearls in a pig-trough, are some quite valuable facts and strange pieces of insight; the book is both repellent and fascinating.’221