In Search of the Lost Testament of Alexander the Great

by David Grant

  Tarn was correct in stating that the Pamphlet Will – in the form we inherited it – has been contaminated to some degree. Unsurprisingly, in the Latin Metz Epitome it is the Roman gods who are called to witness the content of the Will: Jupiter, Hercules, Minerva and Mars, rather than the Olympian Zeus, Heracles, Athena and Ares, the deities beseeched to punish any who acted in contravention of its dictates. Obviously the ‘senate’ at Rhodes is Roman overlay too.47 In the Romance equivalent there appear to be later textual additions and even some omissions, again possibly politically motivated. It has, for example, been proposed that Julius Valerius’ first Latin translation of the original Greek Romance text deliberately omitted the prediction – reportedly emanating from Serapis, the new deity conceived in Ptolemaic Egypt – that Alexandria would surpass ‘the more ancient cities’, for Rome had by then supplanted the Egyptian city as the universal metropolis.48

  Of course Wills could be updated and amended during the testator’s life. Alexander is portrayed as penning or, we suggest revising, his Will throughout the night, when a slave boy, Hermogenes, recorded the words, and another, Combaphes, held a lamp. Those named as present with them were Ptolemy, Lysimachus and Perdiccas, while Holcias read out the finished document.49 Along with Eumenes, not specifically mentioned in this scene (his presence as royal secretary may have been implied), these comprised five of the six innocents, and so there can be no doubt that the allegations of conspiracy, and the setting of the Will, were penned by the same hand as a cohesive packaged product.

  If Eumenes was behind the authorship of the Pamphlet, why did he absent himself from his description of the Will’s drafting? Was that not as self-defeating as Polyperchon’s absence if he had written it? Well, as a jealous Neoptolemus once reminded the men gathered in post-Alexander Babylon, Eumenes’ fame with the royal pen was well known empire-wide; it would have naturally been assumed that it was he who turned the papyrus draft into an officially sealed vellum testament, just as Aelian assumed Eumenes prepared the Ephemerides (T5).50 By citing himself (and Perdiccas whose orders he followed) as ‘innocent’, as well as re-broadcasting his own significant satrapal inheritance (Cappadocia and Paphlagonia), Eumenes achieved all he needed to without the suggestion of overt manipulation. And this is exactly why, as we shall argue, Ptolemy did not include himself more prominently in the Journal.

  HOLCIAS THE TAXIARCHOS AND HAGNOTHEMIS THE LOST TEAN

  So who was Holcias, the man who features so prominently in the Pamphlet and who read Alexander’s Will at the initial private gathering? Did he perhaps have some significance to the pamphleteer(s)? The answer is yes, if Eumenes, in league with Olympias, was author.51 Care of a passage in Polyaenus’ Strategemata (Stratagems of War), we find Holcias who was apparently sympathetic to the Perdiccan cause, and thus to Eumenes. He defected, or escaped, from the army of Antigonus; Holcias and his 3,000 heavy-armed Macedonian renegades were finally rounded up when Eumenes was under siege at the fortress of Nora in late 319 BCE.52 So it appears he was a prominent and trusted commander despite Tarn’s conclusion that Holcias was nothing but a ‘ringleader of some mutinous soldiery’; but then Tarn believed: ‘Alexander’s fictitious Testament is not historical evidence for anything.’53 Curiously, Holcias was offered a pardon and paroled to Macedonia on the promise of inactivity. His subsequent disappearance suggests he was either disposed of in Macedonia when Cassander came to power, or that contemporary historians decided to ‘write him out of Hellenistic history’, in the same way, Bosworth suggests, he may have written himself in.54

  The same identity questions may be asked of the otherwise unreferenced Hagnothemis (or Agnothemis); could this be a corruption of ‘Hagnon (or Agnon) of Teos’, as both characters appear in Plutarch’s Life of Alexander?55 Hagnon was a flamboyant flatterer and influential figure at the campaign court and he was apparently hostile to Callisthenes.56 An extract from Plutarch’s How One May Discern a Flatterer from a Friend suggested Hagnon managed to deceive Alexander with his fawning.57 Arrian’s Indika captured his role as a trierarchos selected to fund and equip a barge in the mammoth Hydaspes-Indus fleet, a clear indicator of his wealth.58 Further, Plutarch and Athenaeus claimed a Companion named Agnon wore golden studs in his sandals (or boots) at the court banquets, and this is surely the same man (Arrian appears to have named him Andron, or more likely, a manuscript corruption did).59

  A surviving Greek inscription suggests that at some point in the Successor Wars Hagnon joined Antigonus, possibly upon the death of Craterus (arguably the most influential of Alexander generals in Asia when Alexander died), for we find Hagnon operating in Caria in the region of Ephesus in the period 320-315 BCE (he was granted citizenship of the city in 321/320 BCE), an understandable location if he hailed from nearby Teos. Plutarch claimed that ‘Hagnothemis’ was the first to hear and rebroadcast Aristotle’s part in the Pamphlet allegations; he in turn had garnered the detail from Antigonus at a time, we suggest, when he was on his way to becoming the most powerful man in Asia, a position he achieved with his eventual defeat and execution of Eumenes at the close of 316 BCE.60

  THE EPHEMERAL EPHEMERIS AND THE JOURNAL JURY

  We know that everything claimed by the Pamphlet was thoroughly undermined by the content of what we term, for simplicity, the Journal. Cited by Plutarch and Arrian at the close of their books (T3, T4), this was presented as a fragment extracted from hai basilikoi Ephemerides, the king’s official campaign journal or diaries. Arrian stated that both Aristobulus and Ptolemy either ended their accounts at this point, or that they had no more detail to add on Alexander’s death other than that claimed in this Ephemerides extract.61

  It is tempting to visualise this entry as part of a log of the king’s daily orders and movements, as Arrian and Plutarch probably did. More likely there existed, for a time, a vast corpus of campaign correspondence covering ordinances, requisitions and ledgers that comprised of a record of the camp and army activity, and the king’s movements would have been an integral part. Some commentators argue the Macedonian kings had enjoyed a long tradition of journal keeping, and certainly Lucian later referenced the Makedonika hypomnemata tes basilikes oikias, which covered the movements of the Macedonian regent, Antipater, through 322-319 BCE. Although this may be no more genuine than the epistolary corpus cited by Plutarch as emanating from the Macedonian court, it was, nevertheless, conceived from a well-known practice, and one that was continued by the Antigonid kings.62 Polybius referenced the basilika grammata that the Antigonids tried to keep from Roman hands, and Hieronymus would later extract from Pyrrhus’ own hypomnemata, his official memoirs (hypomnemata can additionally be translated as ‘drafts’, ‘accompanying notes’, or even ‘inventories’).63

  According to some commentators, the practice of maintaining court journals commenced with Alexander himself, following the Persian archive tradition.64 If the tradition went back further, we could imagine Eumenes had maintained records for Philip II in Pella when employed at the royal court from aged twenty, and if the former conclusion is correct, he maintained a similar role as the campaign advanced through Asia.65 Lucian did refer to (perhaps tongue in cheek) a letter sent from Eumenes to Antipater in Pellan detailing Hephaestion’s embarrassing slip of the tongue before battle at Issus in 333 BCE, a probable by-product of Eumenes’ secretarial role.66

  Adding to the breadth of arguments is the idea that the Ephemerides actually existed in the form of cuneiform clay tablets at Babylon and only concerned Alexander when he was in residence.67 But such tablets only had room for the briefest of detail; we actually have the inscription relating to the very day that Alexander expired: it simply related: ‘The king died, clouds made it impossible to observe the skies.’68

  The Babylonians were hoarders of inscribed cuneiform tablets;69 Callisthenes encountered thousands of years of astronomical diaries (said to date back 31,000 years) in this format and he set about sending them back to Greece; the oldest extant diary we know of, however, dates to 651 BCE, though
records for the 8th century BCE are referenced elsewhere: Berossus, the resident Chaldean priest of Bel-Marduk, did claim they dated back far further into antiquity, but any explanation of events or causal links we might have hoped to find in them was, it seems, subordinated to temporal precision by celestial observation.70 As one scholar points out, clay is far more durable than papyrus; a city set ablaze only hardens the material; as a result, the surviving corpus of Babylonian and Assyrian clay inscriptions exceeds the entire library of extant Latin texts, on a word count basis.71

  Whatever were the origins of the king’s Ephemerides, by the time the army finally returned to Babylon from the eastern satrapies, and when considering the logistical challenge of running a vast empire, Eumenes, who by now had a cavalry command of his own, would have required a whole secretariat dealing with court records, and that would have been the information nerve centre of the expanded Macedonian-governed world.72 Diodotus (or Diognetus) may well have been involved in its management, no doubt supported by others; Myllenas, for example, was additionally referenced by Curtius as a scriba regis, a royal secretary, who, like Eumenes, saw active military service.73

  This clay cuneiform tablet records what we now term Haley’s Comet sometime between 22nd and 28th of September 164 BCE. British Museum, London. BM 41462.

  We have already challenged assumptions that these official records survived the Successor Wars, for the conflicts within the extant accounts clearly suggest otherwise. Suspiciously, the only alleged survivor of the once-vast Ephemerides is the Journal entry cited by Plutarch and Arrian which dealt with Alexander’s death. Their two versions are remarkably similar, and the divergences are easily explained. Plutarch claimed to be reciting the Journal entries almost ‘word for word’ and yet he précised his source more aggressively than Arrian, so what was cited by him was almost verbatim. Still, the style, pace, and daily references undeniably parallel one another so that we cannot doubt they were virtually metaphrasing a single source.74

  The Journal presented a dry and pedestrian account of Alexander’s twelve-day illness at Babylon (a far longer journey to death than the five or so days suggested by the Pamphlet and Vulgate texts), and though short on detail and prosaic in style, the reporting is punctuated by references to the king’s nightly drinking at the Macedonian-style symposia that preceded his decline.75 These gatherings – like the final party at Medius’ residence – more often than not degenerated into komoi, the drinking binges documented at both ends of Alexander’s campaign, though his darkest moments in between were frequently accompanied by alcoholic excess.76

  According to the Journal, at the conclusion of Medius’ party, Alexander experienced a fever after which he bathed and slept with no dramatic decline in health; Aristobulus, ever watchful over his dead king’s reputation, justified the alcoholic consumption by claiming the raging fever moved him to quench a voracious thirst with more wine.77 In fact the Journal depicts Alexander in firm organisation mode for days thereafter, bathing and attending to religious rites (the Macedonian king’s role was to mediate between the men and their gods), fleet logistics and the continued organisation of the army for the forthcoming Arabian campaign, all of it reported in an unemotional and almost sepulchral style.78 Towards the end, the Journal entries become briefer still as Alexander slid into a coma and towards his speechless silent death.

  That silence remains deafening, and, moreover, stylistically the Journal stands out like a torn sepia photo stapled unconvincingly to the end of a Technicolor film, a production that had paused for a moment and then resumed with a personality-changed cast that had been furnished with newly authored scripts. The meek bedside Companions who acquiesced to Alexander’s failure to nominate a successor became lions of ambition in the dangerous days that followed, when the monochrome entries found their colour once again.

  We contended that no matter how comprehensive a cover-up, clues always remain. The Journal entry, silent on the testament and recording no instructions from the king, may have, nonetheless, unintentionally preserved the silhouette of a reading of the Will, for the entry reads:

  On the next day, his condition now worsened, he [Alexander] just managed to make the required sacrifices, and then sent instructions to the generals to wait for him in the palace courtyard and the battalion and company commanders to wait outside his door.79

  At this point, Alexander was only just able to speak, making sacrifices with difficulty and finally commanding his chief officers (down to pentakosiarchai and chiliarchai, commanders of 500 and 1,000 men) to be on close call; so he, and those closest to him, must have appreciated how gravely ill he was.80 In these circumstances the summons was unlikely to have been to provide them with further orders concerning the forthcoming expedition to Arabia. If, as the Vulgate texts claimed, Perdiccas, or Ptolemy, had to prise out of Alexander a decision on succession, and if, as the Journal claimed, he was speechless for his final two days, then here, with the commanders assembled immediately outside his bedchamber, something momentous was being written or being said inside.

  The Journal entry in Arrian and Plutarch included two further significant episodes that perhaps tell us, once again, more than the original author may have supposed or intended. The first concerns the Macedonian infantry, which forced its way into the king’s bedchamber where the Bodyguards and select Companions had their king closely quarantined. Fearing his death was being kept from them, the infantry officers smelled intrigue: ‘… others wished to see his body, for a report had gone around that he was already dead, and they suspected, I fancy, that his death was being concealed by his guards.’81 The forced entry, or as Arrian more tactfully put it, ‘insistence’ on seeing the king, suggests there was a huge lack of trust in the senior command whose cavalry status still resonated of the old aristocratic landowner-serf divide that underpinned the Macedonian tribal structure.

  This episode of near mutiny became a permanent fixture in all accounts, and as it closely paralleled what was claimed in the Pamphlet, we would be justified in concluding that this was a genuine state of affairs. At this point, however, the king was still conscious, though conspicuously speechless, as the officers filed past him. According to the Journal, sometime after the intrusion and when all the soldiers had departed the bedchamber, Alexander was pronounced dead. Plutarch was clear that Aristobulus pinpointed that to the 30th of the Macedonian month of Daisios, which corresponded to the ‘moon of May’ (spanning May-June in the modern calendar), some two days after the Journal statement that it occurred on the 28th; Plutarch was obviously drawing from both sources in parallel here.82

  Daisios was a hollow month of twenty-nine days and any reference to ‘month end’, and whether that meant the 29th or 30th, could have caused additional slippage between accounts.83 The latter date for the pronouncement of Alexander’s death – which was two full two weeks after Medius’ party on the 16th – may capture what Ptolemy’s sanitary affair chose not to: two days of confusion as the tenuous life-signs ebbed and flowed, certainly not a fitting epitaph for the Macedonian king. The timing of Alexander’s medical death has often been disputed, for his body professedly stayed fresh for days thereafter. If not more Vulgate thauma, this hints at a huge blunder in the prognosis when a deep coma may indeed have fooled the audience for some time.84

  Considering the ubiquity of these episodes, we are not accusing Ptolemy of complete journalistic invention with what we propose was his brilliant example of pseudo-documentarism, for much we read in the Journal probably did take place; the nightly drinking and frequent celebrations that paint a month of irresponsibility may well be factual, even if it was an already developed Greek topos in Philip II’s day: Demosthenes, and more recently Theopompus, had certainly implicated the Argead court in bouts of extended insobriety.85 Conversely, when upholding the historicity of the Pamphlet Will, we are not claiming all the detail as genuine. Both authors needed to interweave their fictions with verisimilitude if they were to pass them off as genuine to have the desired
effect, and so a rather appropriate symmetry existed in the ranks of this literary confrontation.

  The second contentious episode was a visit by other Bodyguards and court intimates to the Temple of Serapis to ask for divine guidance, and this does appear to be an overtly Ptolemaic device.86

  THE LOST HALF-MONTH: AELIAN’S ORPHANED JOURNAL

  Before we discuss Serapis and its importance in Hellenistic Egypt we need to mention other briefer references to the Ephemerides that have survived, though they provide no additional detail and none of them contradicts the contention that only one event was being recorded. We find the first in Plutarch’s Moralia, in which Philinus, a close friend of the historian, rebutted claims that Alexander drank moderately by citing the drink-laden entries as his witness to excess.87 A second is an earlier reference in Plutarch’s Life of Alexander detailing the king’s daily routine of hunting, bathing and dining, but once more the emphasis is on frequent drinking sessions (Plutarch commented apologetically: ‘but over the wine, as I have said, he would sit long, for conversation’s sake’). Similar is the Ephemerides extract that can be found in Athenaeus’ Deipnosophistae, which additionally claimed Alexander slept two days and nights consecutively following a night of carousing.88

  The water is supposedly muddied by the fragment found in the Historical Miscellany of Aelian (T5):

  The following behaviour of Alexander was not commendable. On the fifth of the month of Dios he was drinking with Eumaeus, they say; then on the sixth he slept because of the excesses. During the day he got up only long enough to discuss with his generals the following day’s march, saying it would commence early. On the seventh he feasted with Perdiccas and drank freely again. On the eighth he slept. On the fifteenth of the same month he drank to excess once more, and on the following day he did what he would usually do after a party. On the twenty-seventh he dined with Bagoas – the distance from the palace to Bagoas’ house was ten stades – and on the twenty-eighth he slept.89