In Search of the Lost Testament of Alexander the Great

by David Grant

  Socrates’ nobility in the face of hemlock magnified Athens’ sin against philosophy, though somewhat more satirical was Lucian’s summation:

  Yes; and very serviceable his dissertations on Justice were to him, were they not, when he was handed over to the Eleven, and thrown into prison, and drank the hemlock? Poor man, he had not even time to sacrifice the cock he owed to Asclepius. His accusers were too much for him altogether, and their philosophy had Injustice for its object.129

  Cicero’s humble courage sat beside a warning on political meddling, and Nero’s poor theatrics recalled his destructive self-deluded life on both the political and thespian stages. As far as his final exclamations, it has been pointed out that they were ‘self-consciously bathetic’ and doused in a sarcasm to highlight how far he had tumbled. Qualis artifex pereo, alluding to his dying artistic talent, was, according to Cassius Dio, oft-quoted and in general use. And quite in contrast, Demosthenes’ clever and pithy riposte to Archias recalled the opening of a prosecutor’s speech worthy of the formidable logographos.130

  Because Aeschylus was the ‘father’ of the tragedians (Callisthenes thought he ‘wrote his tragedy in wine which lent vigour and warmth to his work’) a sense of the calamitous was required to frame his final day.131 Both Pliny and Aelian recorded that he perished when an eagle dropped a tortoise from a height, mistaking his bald head for a stone, a suitably sorrowful conclusion for the man who had fought bravely at Salamis and Marathon, and who humbly termed his plays ‘nothing but crumbs from the rich-laden banquet of Homer’.132 Equally tragic, though from a different angle, was the death of Archimedes the geometer; he was reportedly stabbed by a common Roman soldier after resisting arrest with ‘noli turbare circulos meos’, ‘do not disturb my circles’, a perfect geometric epitaph. The attacking general, Marcellus, had ordered that he was taken alive, so impressed were the Romans with his defensive techniques at the siege of Syracuse that ended in 212 BCE; his tomb, constructed on the orders of Marcellus, was nevertheless left unattended and overgrown until Cicero rediscovered it in 75 BCE.133

  Pyrrhus, who fought at the Battle of Ipsus in 301 BCE at the tender age of eighteen beside his new patron and brother-in-law, Demetrius Poliorketes, was to become one of history’s greatest commanders. He resembled Alexander ‘in appearance swiftness and vigorous movement’ as well as in his descent from the heroes Achilles and Heracles. ‘The other kings, they said, represented Alexander with their purple robes, their body-guards, the inclination of their necks, and their louder tones in conversation; but Pyrrhus, and Pyrrhus alone, in arms and action.’134 He went on to gain a reputation for unsustainable ‘Cadmean’ (today we use ‘Pyrrhic’) victories in Italy.135

  Having himself skirted with death by poison at the hand of his cupbearer (who in fact betrayed the plot arranged by his co-king, Neoptolemus, the son of Cleopatra, Alexander’s sister), and in return for all his hubris and unrelenting hostility, Pyrrhus was finally felled by a roof tile that defied the stoutness of his iconic goat-horned helmet; it was thrown down by an old woman defending her son when Pyrrhus was trapped in the narrow streets of Argos after his famous elephants had fallen and blocked the escape route out of the city’s main gate.136 Pyrrhus finally collapsed and fell from his horse by the tomb of the Homeric Licymnius, an Argive warrior killed by Heracles son, Tlepolemus, who was then banned from the polis for the homicide.137 Pyrrhus’ own instruments of war finally had sealed his fate and the grave on which he crumpled sang of his own sin against the city.

  The Successor Wars in which Pyrrhus and Demetrius Poliorketes immortalised themselves were brutal, and the penalty for speaking out inappropriately was just as harsh: we recall that Hyperides, who is said to have proposed honours for Alexander’s poisoner, reputedly lost his tongue on Antipater’s orders; if anecdotal it surely captured the danger of the day.138 Anaxarchus, a campaign philosopher who had accumulated great wealth, supposedly suffered the same fate when Nicocreon the Cypriot tyrant ordered him crushed by mortar and pestle after his tongue had been non-surgically removed; it was all for an indiscretion in which he had earlier suggested to Alexander at Tyre that he should serve up Nicocreon’s head on a platter.139 Diogenes Laertius recorded Anaxarchus’ bold, but unlikely, retort: he bit off his own tongue and spat it at his tormentor. This too was a less than original epitaph for it was one he shared with Zeno of Elea.140 Known in life as eudaimonikos, ‘a happy one’, the rendering of Anaxarchus’ execution was, no doubt, a contrived lesson on careless talk and perhaps on the false tenets of eudaimonic philosophy.141

  Ultimately death does not belong to the deceased but to those recording it, whether accompanied by a ‘do kill me properly’, ‘a cock to Asclepius’, or an empire ‘to the strongest’. In Alexander’s case, the reply (to the question on succession) was something of an hysteron proteron, a rhetorical device that places the later event first, for his vision of posthumous ‘funeral games’ had already been uttered. Those words, if ever said, would have been an act of ‘consummate irresponsibility’, as one scholar points out.142 But these details, in Plutarch’s opinion, graced the scrolls because ‘… certain historians felt obliged to embellish the occasion, and thus invent a tragic and moving finale to a great action.’143 The real deaths, and the actual last words, are lost from biographies; they were most likely panic-stricken, god-fearing, bile and blood-spitting utterances that served no rhetorical purpose. A quick read of Ovid’s depiction of Heracles’ agony from the poisoning of the Learnean Hydra would well illustrate the point.144

  So what of Cyrus the Great and his tranquil deathbed meditations on a fulsome life, as presented in Xenophon’s eulogy of the Achaemenid king? Well, other accounts corroborate a blood-soaked death at the hands of Tomyris, queen of the promiscuous, carnivorous and bronze-bladed Massagetae; his severed head was pushed into a skin filled with human blood, after which the queen proceeded to harangue him.145 Another version, captured in Ctesias’ Persika, saw Cyrus perish when fighting the Hyrcanian Derbices in the Upper Provinces, whilst Berossus claimed the kill came from Dahae archers near the Caspian Sea. Both Ctesias and Xenophon were present at, or fought in, the formative battle at Cunaxa, but with opposing armies, Xenophon fighting for the later pretender to the throne – Cyrus the Younger – and Ctesias allied to his throned brother, King Artaxerxes II. Ctesias’ report of Cyrus’ death in the battle was so drawn-out that Plutarch quipped: ‘As with a blunt sword, he is long in killing Cyrus, but kills him at last.’ So it is unsurprising that their history of Cyrus the Great maintained a similar conflict to the end.146 Ctesias claimed the Susa archives as his source for detail – spuriously so. Xenophon claimed nothing except a heightened sense of theatre; nevertheless, it is his account that has gained the greater literary following.147

  The Athenian-born Xenophon, almost ‘immortalised’ in his capacity as the only 4th century historian whose accounts survive, also chose epitaphs that suited his pro-Spartan biographies. In his Agesilaus he omitted his patron’s death altogether so as not to detract from the impact of his life, just as he did for Alcibiades in his Hellenika.148 Even Xenophon’s Anabasis is missing three months; a gap that suggests it was a ‘black period’ for the 10,000 stranded Greeks.149

  The Death of Archimedes. Engraving by the French painter Gustave Courtois (1853-1923). His alleged last words to an approaching soldier were: ‘Do not disturb my circles’.

  THE WARPED REFLECTIONS OF NATURE’S MIRROR

  Birth was just as exploitable as death, both its timing and genealogy. But the dating of birth and death was not determined by science and was often guided by the author’s floruit, literally his ‘flowering’. For without an attested date, standard procedure was to deduct fifty years from the production of a first masterpiece to arrive at the author’s birth, and then to add on the attested lifespan to arrive at his date of death. Thus we arrive at the tenuously approximated arrivals, alongside the spurious expirations, of Thucydides, Aristophanes and Aeschylus.150 Suspiciously, Socrates’ birth w
as said to have been on the 6th of the month of Thargelion, and the Persians were defeated at Marathon on the 6th of Beodromion, the day of the month that Alexander reportedly faced Darius at the Granicus River, and the day (the 6th) the Macedonian king was said to have been born.151 But where the former events brought luck to Athens, the last date did not. As conspicuously dubious was the birth of Euripides, allegedly born on Salamis the very day of the epic sea battle against Xerxes on 23rd September 480 BCE in the Euripus Strait (hence his patronymic); though the coincidence may have been propitious in the psyche of the Macedonian king, the Parian Chronicle records that Euripides arrived some years before.

  Hippocrates’ legendary genealogy traced his heritage directly back to the healing god, Asclepius, whilst his maternal ancestry found its way to Heracles. Genealogical engineering was a popular pastime in Greece and Rome for those in search of a personal theogonia. Mark Antony invented ‘Anton’, a son of Roman Hercules, and the emperor Commodus wielded his Herculean gladiatorial clubs with lion skins draped over his shoulders to certify similar heroic links.152 He then refashioned the head of the Neronian Colossus, later Sol Invictus, to represent himself as the hero.153 Sparta claimed descent from the sons of Heracles, and not to be left out, the Attalid dynasts later carved a frieze of Telesphorus, Heracles’ son, on the altar at Pergamum, so staking their own claims to the mythical past.154

  Birth, death and genealogy: the malleable clays pinched, kneaded, spun, and finally fired into the legendary earthenware in which colourful lives, deaths, and the posthumous philosophical debates on them, were finally served up. The Pythagorean Golden Verses were almost certainly a later syncretic compilation; Pythagoras most likely took the ideas of a ‘numerological harmonious’ celestial world from Mesopotamia, transposing them into his ‘music of the spheres’.155 Plato then absorbed his teachings into his own metaphysical concepts, culminating with his declaration that ‘God forever geometrises’.156 And for all Pythagoras’ ‘greatness’, anti-Pythagorean rebellions expelled their communities from southern Italy, sick of their secret elitist cliques with oligarchic aspirations, a picture which rather undermines the tradition of their ascetic vegetarian advice. Pythagoras was, as Bertrand Russell once termed him, a ‘… mixture of philosopher, prophet, man of science and charlatan.’157

  Hippocrates’ revered medical teachings were far from universally accepted; his school on Kos, and the rival school at Cnidus, vied for credibility over the merits of ‘prognosis’ and ‘diagnosis’, though neither could perform an autopsy on one another’s opinions for the code was strictly opposed to post-mortems. The penultimate verse of the Hippocratic Oath reads (broadly) in translations: ‘All that I may see or hear (even if not invited)… I will keep secret and will never reveal.’ And he was true to his pledge, for whilst medicine and Hippocrates are inseparable today, very little is actually known about what he truly advocated in his lifetime, and none of the Hippocratic Canon can be attributed to him for certain. As with the corpus of Aristotle’s extant treatises, much material is surely the product of ‘disciple’ notes and not his original ink.158

  Hippocrates supposedly espoused: ‘Life is short, opportunity fleeting, judgement difficult, treatment easy, but treatment after thought is proper and profitable’; this is not a surprising conclusion considering that he charged for his work. He also determined: ‘If the eyes move rapidly, it is highly probably the patient is mad’, and further, ‘chilling combined with stiffening is fatal.’159 No wonder that the physician Asclepiades (ca. 120s-40 BCE) ridiculed Hippocrates’ work as nothing more than ‘a meditation on death’, that is until we recall that Asclepiades was himself termed a penniless professor of rhetoric who talked his way to medical fame.160

  The attested ‘lives’ of Hippocrates, Asclepiades and Pythagoras the meta-physicist who dreamed up the kosmos, were proto-romances, and if not as fulsome as Alexander’s, they were sufficiently developed for their deaths to take on an air of mystery. But our attempts at classical myth-busting are certainly not new. True to his iconoclastic style, Timaeus rejected Empedocles’ volcanic end by claiming he simply went to the Peloponnese,161 whilst a notebook with the formula to Mithridates’ mysterious mithridatium, the supposed super antidote of legendary efficacy, was unearthed by Pompey and found to be a simple mix of rue, salt, nuts and figs which suggests it was no more effective than a cup of Hyppokras.162 Mithridates most likely had a duck do his toxic ingesting for him, but not to be outdone, according to Celsus’ De Medicina, the Romans added new ingredients to his recipe to bring them up to thirty-six in total; Galen (ca. 130-200 CE), whose own medical treatises remained in use for over 1,300 years, signed it off, and Agrippina supposedly enjoyed its benefits, vexing Nero’s attempts at matricide, and no doubt Locusta’s efforts too.163

  Pliny asked: ‘Which of the gods, in the name of Truth, fixed these absurd proportions?’ It could have been a statement about the empirical weight of dubious deaths, but in fact he was referring to mithridatium itself. Somewhat appropriately, when Pliny recorded the ingredients of the Pontic formula, he included the phrase ‘to be taken with a grain of salt’, Rome’s cum grano salis, from which we derive our sceptical expression. And that is surely how we should read the description of Mithridates’ own toxin resistance when finally captured, for Rome was rather good with poison by then.164

  When describing the source of the drug that professedly felled Alexander, it appears that the obviously educated originator of this story (which now implicated Aristotle) was exploiting a well-known legend. In Greek mythology the gods swore their oaths upon the dark waters of the Styx (possibly the modern Mavroneri River) at Nonacris; if their word was broken, Zeus forced them to drink a cup of the icy cold flow causing coma and loss of speech.165 Pliny, Aelian and Strabo all report the tradition of deadly sulphurous streams trickling from the mountains; Pausanias commented the ‘lethal power’ of the Styx, ‘seemingly invented for the destruction of human beings’, was first recognised after goats drank from the watercourse and subsequently perished.166 Through time the locals renamed it the ‘Black’ or ‘Terrible Waters’ in support of its deleterious effects on metals and clay containers.167 If there is any truth to this, there must have been many who would have suffered the consequences.

  But history doesn’t recognise the ‘middle men’, the ‘un-dead’. There are, for example, scant references to the fate of the wounded on Alexander’s campaign; the snow-blinded, frostbitten, the leprosy-afflicted, or the malaria-ridden who languished forever in a mud-brick Alexandria rather than returning to families across the Hellespont.168 None of the opomachoi, those unfit for battle, the bone-shattered, limb-lost and dysentery-emaciated infantrymen, were feted by fanfare or captured by Lysippus and Apelles in bronze or paint. Nor were the vulnerable skeuophorio, the baggage handlers targeted in the thick of the fight when possession of booty could decide a battle’s outcome. For there was no epideictic value in those whom fame had bypassed and Tyche had neglected. The Macedonian conqueror was indeed fortunate to have died so thoroughly, for a partial recovery, or even maiming, might have taken the ‘Great’ out of his name.

  But Alexander did not endure completely unscathed. Plutarch’s sources claimed the king became excessively paranoid, assuaging his fears with drinking and sacrifices and with ‘foolish misgivings’ concerning his hetairoi, and it has also been suggested that this was the direct effect of mind-altering drugs covertly administered by those planning his death. Alexander filled the palace at Babylon with soothsayers of every description, and ‘now distrustful of the favour of Heaven and suspicious of his friends’ he became a ‘slave to his fears’; an intruder in the throne room was ‘put out of the way’ when possibly doing nothing more than enacting the ancient ritual of the ‘substitute king’ in the Babylonian New Year festival.169 We have, it seems, been passed the description of a man losing his sanity; it captured something of the excess and paranoia of Caligula (who reportedly died leaving a trunk filled with poisons behind) and Nero rolled i
nto one.170 And in Alexander’s case, the poison, the intrigue and his famous last words were all stirred together in a rhetorical mortar and pestle and ground into a textual mithridatium that inoculated history against the truth in an era of stoic reflection.

  TESTAMENTAL SUICIDE AND THE STOIC OVERLAY

  Stoicism has been termed ‘a system put together hastily, violently, to meet a bewildered world’; it was more of a therapy than a philosophy, and that was certainly needed, for following Alexander’s death, the world was thrown into turmoil by the early unsettled Hellenistic monarchies, ‘when political freedom became a simple political catchword, rather than a battle cry’; the polis, the Greek city state, became subordinated to new and revived leagues, kingdoms and the ever eastward-lengthening shadow of Rome.171

  Zeno of Citium (in Cyprus) established the school of the Stoikoi in 301 BCE from his Stoa Poikile, the painted arch in the Athenian Agora, directly after the Battle of Ipsus. Thereafter almost all of the successors of Alexander professed to be Stoics who believed logos could explain the order and coherence of the universe in which a man could plan and rationalise against overwhelming odds.172 Stoicism became the dominant philosophy for the Roman era literati once Panaetius arrived from Athens for a tour of indoctrination, despite the century and a half of attempts by the Sceptics (and Cato) to combat the spreading doctrine. The Stoa managed to maintain its existence until 529 CE when Justinian (ca. 482-565 CE) closed the philosophical schools at Athens to prevent ‘paganism’ undermining the purity of the Christian Church; it was an event that was to usher in the Dark Ages of Europe.173