In Search of the Lost Testament of Alexander the Great

by David Grant

  Once again, opinion is inclining towards a reinstatement of his credentials as a judicious historian; scholars including Seibert and Schachermeyr and more recently Errington and Baynham in particular, have done much to salvage him as worthy of respect.222 His technical descriptions are at times superior to Arrian’s even if his ‘… monograph remains something of a cliché of the Graeco-Roman rhetorical tradition.’ Daniel Heinsius went as far as terming him Venus Historicorum.223 A good summation comes from Olbrycht: ‘Scholarly research has overestimated the rhetorical and artistic contribution of Curtius while neglecting its actual relation to historical events.’224

  The monographs by Cleitarchus and Curtius may have been one-time bids for fame, for we are not aware they authored anything but a book on Alexander. Prising them apart is not an easy task as time firmly has laminated them together. But why did Curtius’ work survive when Cleitarchus’ account, once so popular in Rome, did not?225 Although his had become the perfect pizza base for new moralistic toppings, Cleitarchus may have been disdained by the literati with pretensions. But the most significant answer to Curtius’ survival is perhaps summed up with ‘Latin’. Cleitarchus had published in Greek, the language later used by Roman intellectuals but not by the populace in general, and the effort required to translate a Greek work was greater than producing a new Latin text, so copies dwindled as Latin books proliferated in the later empire. That proliferation was especially true of books written by the politically connected, in which context it remains vexing why Curtius, likely himself a politician, is unreferenced before the Middle Ages.226 The owners of the relatively few manuscripts most likely had no idea of their frailty and proximity to extinction, and when Rome’s own borders finally broke and libraries were burned by barbarian torches, her own Latin productions followed the Greek tragedy into the flames.

  Trogus and Curtius, at the heart of the Vulgate genre, were peddling their rhetoric just as the Athenian sophists and rhetors had honed their oratory skills in the courts, where, like ships ‘before a veering wind, they lay their thoughts and words first on one tack then another…’ And though Diodorus considered that ‘history also contributes to the power of speech’, we have reason to believe it was in fact the other way around.227

  PORTENTS OF THE PRIEST AND EPIDEICTIC PREACHER

  There is no doubting the eloquence of Plutarch, the author of the fourth surviving profiling of Alexander. He multi-sourced ‘from the best to the very worst’ with vigour to sculpt the character he wished to display, or rather its face, expression and eyes, for he mused ‘our senses are not meant to pick out black rather than white’ but to receive ‘reflected impressions’.228 Much of the detail that featured in his rendering of Alexander was derived from the oft-cited corpus of letters he believed to be authentic, though he also implied his access to books was limited in provincial Chaeronea, a town that still displayed the tree known as Alexander’s Oak in his day. But, as we know, the composition of letters was a popular template in rhetorical training and sophists’ lectures (epideixeis, ‘digressions illustrative of character’) with their harsh suasoria as part of learning declamatio, when deceit was not the aim but rather accomplished emulation.229 In 1873 Hersher published his Epistolographi Graeci containing some 1,600 examples.230

  Plutarch also indicated that his understanding of Latin was imperfect, and the appreciation of ‘the beauty and quickness of the Roman style, the figures of speech, the rhythm, and the other embellishments of the language’ did not come easy to him either.231 In contrast to Diodorus’ more monogamous method, Plutarch’s frequent changing of source partners renders any attempt to identify the authors underpinning his biographical compendiums near impossible.232

  Often labelled a ‘Middle Platonist’ for his philosophical stance (thus elements of Stoic and Peripatetic doctrine had been absorbed), Plutarch produced a number of ‘educational’ works; his Moralia (containing the possibly spuriously assigned De Alexandri Magni Fortuna aut Virtute) offers auxiliary insights from a complex commentator on the nature of men and their adherence to, or divergence from, the honour code and behavioural ideals of classical Greece. As a former pupil of Ammonius the Peripatetic (though he may have been a Platonist) in Athens, convictions from Aristotle’s Ethics and Politics frequently raise their head. Whitmarsh has termed these essays ‘virtual history’, noting that the above collection, alongside On the Fortune of the Romans (also Roman Questions and Greek Questions), reflect Plutarch’s political influence in both Greece and in Rome at its zenith.233

  A senior Priest of Apollo at the oracle of Delphi, and employed to interpret the auguries of Delphic priestess Pythia, he maintained that gods never spoke but only gave signs, and that the divine escaped recognition if the belief was lacking.234 Unsurprisingly, Alexander’s death (like much of his life) became a chapter more sympathetic to mysterious portents, Chaldean prophecies, diviners and superstition, as well as the liberating of the soul to higher things, for Plutarch was also a firm believer in reincarnation.235 Thanks to sources like Aristobulus, he, and Arrian a few decades after him, had all the materials they needed (T21, T22).236

  Plutarch had no agenda of preserving history per se, as he himself freely admitted; he was hunting for vices and virtues ‘from a chance remark or a jest that might reveal more of a man’s character than the mere feat of winning battles’, and he was plucking rhetorical leaves to flavour his biographical stews along the way.237 But Plutarch was also dumping non-exploitable chapters, something of both Xenophon and Justin in his approach, and, moreover, he was inconsistent in his methodology too; where it suited his direction, Plutarch introduced fabulae, and where it didn’t, he was quick to scorn exaggeration.238

  The Parallel Lives, his cradle-to-grave biographies in which Greeks were paired with Roman counterparts – Alexander with Julius Caesar for example – illustrated his own political juxtaposition of citizenship in both Greece and Rome; perhaps his pairings were further inspired by Polybius’ adjacent-chapter profiling of Hannibal and Scipio.239 Outside of the requirement for skilled and artful comparison, Plutarch’s was not an approach that fuelled his forensic curiosity. As for his biography of Alexander, Tarn suggested it was written late in life when ‘the fire had burnt low and [he] was swamped by his much reading’, though we know little of the relative chronology behind the production of his Lives.240 The increasing tension between Alexander’s self-control and his temper (disasters are always linked to excessive drinking in Plutarch’s biography) is illustrated, as Mossman notes, by ‘interweaving and contrasting epic and tragic elements throughout the Life’ along with connections to the story of the god Dionysus, whence the call to drunkenness came.241

  As far as Macaulay was concerned, Plutarch ‘reminds us of the cookery of those continental inns… in which a certain nondescript broth is kept constantly boiling, and copiously poured, without distinction, over every dish…’242 It was an unfair summation that belittles Plutarch’s deep curiosity about human nature, and his ‘pottage’ contained ingredients we find nowhere else. Along with the Vulgate historians, and like the more recent restoration of Leonardo Da Vinci’s Last Supper, the faded and flaking primary pigments were retouched in brighter oils and re-rendered in vivid tones that give us vivid moralistic portraits that are inevitably larger than the lives themselves.

  THE STOIC NAIVETY OF A SOLDIER’S SOLDIER

  The final extant narrative on the life and campaigns of Alexander is Arrian’s Anabasis, which was the last one of them to be written. It was penned more than 400 years after the death of the Macedonian king, and some 550 years after Herodotus walked seemingly unawares past both the Hanging Gardens at Babylon and the Sphinx at Giza, for neither were mentioned in his parental Histories.243 Arrian laid down his stylus some 670 years after Cyrus the Great was beheaded by the Massagetae,244 900 years after the first Greek Olympiad, and perhaps a millennium, or more, after the era of Homer, who was, in fact, a Babylonian hostage (a play on the Greek homeros) named Tigranes, jested Lucian
.245 The Anabasis appeared 1,300 years after Troy had supposedly burned to the ground, and some 2,000 years after King Hammurabi (or Khammurabi) had set down the social laws of the Babylonians on a stele.246

  If Plutarch was adorning Alexander with epideictic passages, and Curtius was laying on rhetorical oils, then in contrast Arrian was applying paint-stripper ‘to set the records straight’, or so he would have us believe.247 The conflict and vagueness he found in earlier works irked his precise military mind, as did the fame and choral odes afforded to lesser men than Alexander; the tyrants of Sicily and Xenophon’s Ten Thousand for example, each of whom unfairly outshone his model Macedonian warrior.248 This must explain why Arrian largely marginalised the deeds of Philip II which launched Alexander on his journey.249

  Holding the positions of both Consul of Rome and archon of Athens through the decade of 130-140 CE, Arrian was a ‘public intellectual’ with authoritas in both peninsulas, like Plutarch and Polybius (from his association with Roman nobiles) before him.250 He challenged the legends that frequented the Alexander accounts to show a judicial backbone, and Arrian appears to have been deeply religious with the requisite soldier’s superstition. His Anabasis ended with ‘I too, have had God’s help in my work’, implying a favoured client relationship with the divine, and if Alexander was a new Achilles then Arrian was to be his Homer.251 Here he was employing a more subtle rhetoric than his forerunners: that of self-promotion through the façade of truth’s envoy, whilst his personal reflections and pedantic, though shallow, autopsy of his sources at times betrays arrogance thinly disguised as investigative fervour.252

  As a Romanised Greek from Nicomedia in Bithynia (northern Asia Minor) and the author of a Bithynaika,253 we might conjecture Arrian credited Alexander’s success with laying the foundation of Rome’s Eastern Empire, thus furthering his own career. According to the Suda, Dio Chrysostom (ca. 40-post 112 CE, literally ‘golden mouth’), a fellow Bithynian historian, had a generation earlier written On Alexander’s Virtues in eight books and this must have set an influential encomiastic tone.254 Close parallels between Arrian and Alexander certainly did exist: Arrian served in Trajan’s war against Parthia (114-117 CE), a post that would have seen him marching south through Mesopotamia and eastern Babylonia, then down the Tigris to the Persian Gulf. And as with Alexander’s reality check at the Hyphasis River in India, this hard-earned Roman territory was soon lost again to the Eastern barbarian kings.255

  Arrian may have additionally likened himself to Alexander’s secretary-soldier, Eumenes of Cardia, who became a central character in his sequel, Events After Alexander (Ta Meta Alexandron) which was based on Hieronymus’ account, for both were Greeks operating under a foreign regime and each was tasked with pacifying Cappadocia. In Arrian’s case this meant driving back the Alans; his treatise on the tactics used, Deployment Against the Alans, described his dispositions in classical Greek and Macedonian terms. He was literally walking in the footsteps of the Macedonian conquest, which had itself marched in the soleprints of Xenophon’s leather iphikratides; appropriately Photius did term Arrian the ‘young Xenophon’.256 His eastern experiences may explain why Arrian’s first chapters read as a hurried narrative of Alexander’s consolidation of Greece and the Balkans, for he was impatient for his pages to land on the now familiar Asian soil.

  When reviewing his list of sources, Arrian was drawn to Ptolemy, ‘the soldier’s soldier’, and to Aristobulus, likely a supporting engineer, and he only drew from ‘external sources’ for missing detail and useful legomena. This did not stop him from being ‘frequently warped by misunderstanding’ in his narrative; geography, the sequence of events and names too, appear erroneously.257 Whether Arrian was genuinely inspired to use Ptolemy ‘as a king honour-bound to avoid untruth’, or if he was simply being pragmatic in the face of limited sources, is debatable.258 It is nevertheless difficult to fathom how, as an experienced field commander, Arrian could truly give credit to Persian troops numbers at the Battle of Gaugamela, stated at one million (five times larger than Curtius’ estimation) with some 300,000 of them slaughtered. The Macedonians, he claimed, lost one hundred men.259 Arrian did, however, mention that his tally related to Companions alone; he was not about to trivialise by recalling the death of the common soldier. But did he trust his source that far? Curtius has already taken (what appears) a sarcastic swipe at the figures recorded at Issus: ‘so the Persians were driven like cattle by a handful of men’, and ‘… whilst not more than 1,000 horsemen were with Alexander, huge numbers of the enemy were in retreat.’260

  One observer notes that Arrian was ‘engaging in a dialogue with the great historical masters’ in the style of Tacitus, another orating product of the Roman cursus honorum with extensive military experience.261 Influential with the Emperor Hadrian (76-138 CE), Arrian opened his story with ‘I have no need to write my name, for it is not at all unknown among men’,262 a self-introduction that cannot help recalling Livy.263 Arrian went on, not without self-confidence:

  …let me say this: that this book of mine is, and has been from my youth, more precious than country and kin and public advancement – indeed, for me it is these things. And that is why I venture to claim the first place in Greek literature, since Alexander, about whom I write, held first place in the profession of arms.

  The self-righteousness here is also somewhat reminiscent of the epilogue to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and it rings of Polybius who dedicated several chapters to the honour of the Scipios, which, nevertheless, read as his own Curriculum Vitae.­

  Scholarly debate is ever divided on Arrian’s value as a historian. If, like Thucydides, he may have thought he was producing ktema es aei, ‘a possession forever’,265 he was ultimately an ‘apologist’, and ‘what emerges is a powerful portrait of Alexander… confident of the justice of his cause, careful of the legitimacy of his crusade, and pious at the moment of his triumph…’266 But the need to combine the best qualities of a king, with the worst of a tyrant, would have produced a character portrait that could only have curdled on Arrian’s pages, and he permitted no Vulgate agenda of moral decline to accommodate Alexander’s transformation; even the king’s drinking binges were, he accepted, ‘a social courteousy to his friends’. So he exploited a lingering bigotry to legitimise the mass slaughter of ‘barbarians’, while praising the exceptional conquered tribes in condescending tones: ‘Like the best of the Greeks, they claimed to know the distinction between right and wrong.’267

  In the process, Arrian was forced to become a master of omission like Ptolemy before him,268 and he dismissed what could not be erased with ‘then there is a story – to me quite incredible’…‘a thing one might have expected from an Oriental despot [Xerxes], but utterly uncharacteristic of Alexander.’269 This last example was, paradoxically, expressing his disbelief in Alexander’s destruction of the temple of Asclepius at Ecbatana, when he had earlier fulsomely reported his burning of the Achaemenid ceremonial capital at Persepolis.270

  For all his posturing, Arrian’s study of Alexander lacked creativity, as did its title, Anabasis, which once again emulated Xenophon’s with its eight-book length. Tarn believed that of the seven surviving speeches in the book, most are once more, an ‘allusion to Xenophon’; it was yet another example of ‘subject matter fitting the moment’.271 In fact, it has been argued that Arrian’s own agnomen, Xenophon, which appeared in his full name, was likewise born of the nostalgia linking him to the pupil of Socrates.272

  Arrian adopted the Ionic Greek dialect of Herodotus for his Indike in which Nearchus’ log and elements of Eratosthenes and Megasthenes were being blended into a formless ‘discussion of Indian affairs’.273 And yet we must recall that the Second Sophistic, in which ‘Greeks were Romans and Romans, it often seems, sought to be like Greeks’, demanded nothing less.274 It was a period that saw Cassius Dio pen a Roman history in Greek in a (poor) emulation of Thucydides, and the Cynic, Dio Chrysostom (most likely his grandfather), who was banished by the emperor Domitian, depar
t Rome with nothing more than the lessons and speeches of Plato and Demosthenes in his bags. The period inspired Quintus of Smyrna to finally bridge the Homeric gap between the end of the Iliad and the start of the Odyssey with an epic fourteen book Ta meth’ Homeron (better known as the Posthomerika), literally ‘things after Homer’, and in one view, when the Roman Empire ceased to know Greek, its decline truly began.275

  Arrian is himself credited with single-handedly preserving the teachings of his Greek-speaking Phrygian Stoic mentor, Epictetus (ca. 55-135 CE, the Greek name meant ‘acquired’), in the form of the Discourses and Enkheiridion Epiktetou, a manual written, unsurprisingly, in the style of Xenophon’s Apomnemoneumata (broadly, ‘records’) which preserved Socrates’ recollections.276 Inevitably, Epictetus’ particular philosophical interpretations of kingship infiltrated his pupil’s summation of the Macedonian king.277

  If classical history was ‘the circulated written works of a social elite’, we have no better examples than these, for both Plutarch and Arrian enjoyed prominent political offices that provided wider publication capabilities, and thus we still read them today.278 Although they were both educated far above the plebeia and the hoi polloi, Arrian and Plutarch were, nonetheless, shackled to the mind-set of the time. Arrian, hamstrung by a lifelong affection for his Pellan conqueror, rarely shone a torch into the undergrowth either side of his hero’s well-trodden path, except where he saw thick clods sitting on an artificial-looking turf. He added nothing truly insightful to the detail found in the Vulgate, and Plutarch was satisfied to ponder, once again, fortune’s tides and fate’s inevitability in stoic fashion. Polybius had frequently deferred to tyche (not the deity Tyche, Rome’s Fortuna, but broadly fate or providence, things beyond explanation), which ‘steered almost all the affairs of the world’, as a final explanation,279 and a similarly stoical Arrian chose an easy route over ‘wholehearted religious or philosophical commitment’.280