In Search of the Lost Testament of Alexander the Great

by David Grant

  Panaetius befriended Scipio Aemilianus, whose Scipionic Circle of intellectuals included the poet Terence (ca. 195/185-159 BCE, collected as a slave on the campaign against Carthage), Sempronius Asellio, and the once-hostaged Polybius. Polybius’ own outlook, and his frequent use of tyche, appears to have stemmed from here.174 Panaetius’ wisdom later found fertile ground in Cicero, in whose Paradoxa Stoicorum we find a plain-language explanation of the doctrine.175 Cicero claimed ‘some Stoics are practically Cynics’.176 The schools had indeed been connected through Crates of Thebes, a follower of Diogenes the Cynic and teacher to Zeno.177

  Stoicism helped shape the suasoria of Seneca, who used Cato the Younger (grandson of the elder paladin of the republic) and his ‘heroic suicide’ as a righteous example of the opposition to tyranny. The imperial tendrils of Stoic prohairesis (moral choices) crept in through Augustus’ teacher, Athenodorus of Tarsus, and ultimately it laid the foundations for the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, the last of the ‘five good emperors’, nostalgically written in Greek and housing reflections on a life that witnessed an empire at its peak.

  Ataraxia (tranquillity), autarkeia (self-sufficiency) and eudaimonia (loosely, ‘happiness’) all took on new relative weights in their associations to Tyche, now Fortuna, and moirai, now fatum, but their roles remained essentially the same. The vocabulary encompassing new doctrines (areskontai) was certainly not new, but only its emphasis, for no radical new philosophies emerged in the Hellenistic era; Pythagoras had already made the distinction that: ‘Fate is determined, orderly and consequent, while fortune is spontaneous and casual.’178 What we classify today as Cyrenaicism, Pyrrhonism, Peripateticism, Epicureanism and Stoicism developed like a palimpsest of derivative anecdotes piled on one another and subtly realigned with the metaphysical inclinations of each new sage. ‘Slight changes were made… in the superstructure. But nobody thought of examining the foundations.’179

  The Megarian school of Stilpo, personally known to Ptolemy and attended by Demetrius Poliorketes, Zeno and Cleitarchus, has, for example, been described as ‘a hybrid produced by grafting ‘Socratic ideas on the Eleatic trunk’; Stilpo himself ‘attempted to fuse Megarian dialectic with the Cynic way of life’.180 What we term Middle Platonism, which absorbed Stoic and Peripatetic doctrine, was another hybrid result, and though ‘men give more renown to that song which comes newest to their ears’, the development of Western philosophy has been described as consisting of nothing more than a ‘series of footnotes to Plato’, who most likely borrowed ideas from Zoroastrianism.181

  Despite the philosophical background noise and their elitist pretensions, Arrian and Plutarch, for example, ought to have raised their heads above the epideictic din to question why Alexander made no attempt to formally arrange his far-reaching estate, and neither of them considered that the king’s Journal they cited is by definition a propaganda document of a royal court. But Ptolemy’s pedestrian treatise appealed to Arrian’s military palate so that he mistook platitudinous competency for historical fidelity. As has been neatly pointed out, what Ptolemy had not written, Arrian could not have read, so he and Plutarch fell into the same Journal-baited trap.182

  Arrian’s misplaced faith took the form of a liturgy to the fidelity of basileia:

  …but my view is that Ptolemy and Aristobulus are more trustworthy on their narrative. Aristobulus accompanied Alexander on his campaigns. Ptolemy not only campaigned with Alexander, but as a king himself, it would have been more dishonourable for him than for anyone else to provide untruths; moreover both wrote when Alexander was dead and so there was no compulsion nor anything to gain from writing anything but what actually happened…183

  The sentiment from Arrian recurs in the speech given by Alexander to his untrusting and debt-burdened men after mass weddings at Susa.184 In his How to Write History Lucian wryly noted: ‘The impossible was believed of Achilles because Homer, preserving his deeds posthumously, would therefore have no motive for lying.’185 Lucian had identified an Achilles’ heel in historical method, and it sounds remarkably similar to Arrian’s prolalia. Had Ptolemy himself opened with a similar self-declaration on his content? We might try and approximate it:

  I write as a King whose word and honour counts above all things, and as a Companion and Bodyguard of King Alexander III of Macedonia, privileged myself to be present at and a part of great events; and just as Homer recorded the deeds of Achilles with no agenda – for his subject was then long dead – I write an account only of things that truly took place, as I witnessed them.

  Could Arrian’s Anabasis, which ended with the notorious Journal extract (T3), have been metaphrasing Ptolemy at both ends of the book?186

  In stark contrast to the views of Plato and Pythagoras, the Stoics (and Epicureans) were tolerant of suicide in extreme circumstances, considering it an appropriate escape from the frustrations of the world.187 Not only was suicide the man’s right, it was also considered a rational means of achieving ataraxia, freeing the soul from the suffering body, if moira or fatum, the Greek and Roman embodiments of ‘inevitability’ and the twist of fate, had decreed an impossible position.188 Although Tacitus, as one example, placed little value on ‘self-murder’, which he considered politically useless, he did incorporate its detail to add dramatic tones to his chapters. He also reported on more widespread suicides which were prompted by the fact that Wills remained valid (and so bequeathed assets) for those who killed themselves, whereas those condemned to death by execution forfeited their estates if they did not.189

  Pliny came to regard suicide as the greatest gift amid life’s hardships.190 Livy recorded that the residents of Marseilles (excluding soldiers and slaves for whom suicide was illegal) had petitioned the Senate and were given permission to end their life by taking hemlock that was provided to them by the state free of charge. At home ‘patriotic suicide’ became widespread; a high proportion of well-known philosophers ended their lives this way (some forced to) including Seneca and Lucretius whose poem On the Nature of Things introduced Epicureanism to Roman culture.191

  The Roman intellect was therefore receptive to what we might term Alexander’s ‘succession suicide’ and his vision on posthumous chaos; his last words, more cynical than useful, somehow became a demonstration of katheikon, moral duty, stoic behaviour espoused by Cicero in his posthumously published De Officiis, encapsulating his own moral code and definitions of moral duty. Moreover, Alexander’s words suggested he was dying content, as Epictetus proposed everybody should.192 Plato had proposed: ‘If a man has trained himself throughout his life to live in a state as close as possible to death, would it not be ridiculous for him to be distressed when death comes to him?’193

  But where did the Vulgate allusion to ‘funeral games’ originate? If Onesicritus had provided a fearful and guarded narrative on Alexander’s passing, as the Pamphlet detail from the Metz Epitome claimed,194 and if the title of his book, On the Education of Alexander, did indeed set out to emulate Xenophon’s account of Cyrus, then Cleitarchus might have been able to extract useful reflections from there.195 For Cyrus, on his deathbed, demanded his sons to throw ‘entertainment that is fitting in honour of a man’. The narrative concluded with: ‘But no sooner was he dead than his sons were at strife, cities and nations revolted, and all things began to decay.’196 It required the lightest touch of the stylus by a historian schooled by the Cynics (as he was) and with a good knowledge of Xenophon to conjure up the now-famous premonition of posthumous chaos.

  Lucian claimed he found the following reflection from Alexander in Onesicritus’ work:

  Dying, I should willingly come back to life again for a little while, Onesicritus, that I might learn how men read these things then. If they praise them and admire them now, you need not be surprised; each imagines he will gain our good will by great deceit.197

  It is perhaps a Homeric allusion to the brief return of Protesilaus from the dead and it might have been another product of Lucian’s satirical imagination.198 But
it hints that Onesicritus was somehow associated with the coverage of Alexander’s death and perhaps he truly did steer clear of revealing too much; was Onesicritus’ closing chapter longer than we suppose? For though Thucydides noted that: ‘fear drives out memory’, Plutarch added, ‘unless philosophy has drawn her chords about them’.199

  We might similarly question who, or what, inspired Cleitarchus to equip Alexander with the now immortal Vulgate reply – ‘to the strongest’ – when questioned on succession (T6, T7, T8, T9). These words may indeed have actually been said, or rumour had it they were uttered, though in a very different context. But if Cleitarchus had been obliged to erase the testament from his account, the vacuum at Babylon needed filling with another epitaphic construction. What further inspiration did Cleitarchus have before him?

  Onesicritus’ sixth question to the wisdom-laden gymnosophists in India – how might a man most endear himself to mankind? – carried the reply, ‘if he were the strongest, and yet an object of fear to no one’.200 In addition, he had the immortal lines originating with Euripides, but possibly recirculating in Cleitarchus’ day with a story now relating to Pyrrhus: for the Epirote king had three sons, named Ptolemy, Alexander and Helenus, by three different wives, and as a boy one of them is said to have asked his father which son would eventually inherit his kingdom. Pyrrhus replied: ‘To that one of you who keeps his sword the sharpest.’ Plutarch revealed: ‘This, however, meant nothing less than the famous curse of Oedipus in the tragedy: “with whetted sword”, and not by lot, the brothers should divide the house. So savage and ferocious is the nature of rapacity.’

  The line came from The Phoenician Women of Euripides, the tragedian Alexander seems to have been most attached to. The play continued with: ‘So they [his sons] were afraid that the gods might fulfil his prayers if they dwell together.’201 It is noteworthy that Cassander, at the centre of the conspiracy, and who did wipe out Alexander’s Argead line, had offered a reward of 200 talents for the infant Pyrrhus so that he could terminate the Pyrrhidae too.202 So was Cleitarchus’ syncretic conclusion a classic oratio oblique built on indirect inferences to already ‘classic’ but well-worn tragic endings, with an outcome that would have freed him from attempting to capture an unspeakable truth? If a part of his intent was to portray a death resonating of selfishness in the face of impending chaos, then Stoicism simply re-rendered that as ‘selflessness’ and that interpretation stuck.

  Alexander’s death scene is of course a didactic pastiche, and yet Justin’s summation provided a perfect example of the Stoic interpretation:

  While they (the soldiers) all wept, he not only did not shed a tear, but showed not the least token of sorrow; so that he even comforted some who grieved immoderately, and gave others messages to their parents; and his soul was as undaunted at meeting death, as it had formerly been at meeting an enemy.203

  The Dying Alexander Receiving his Soldiers by Andre Castaigne, painted 1898-1899.

  Arrian’s mentor, the Stoic Epictetus, is alleged to have taught him:

  Actions do not disturb people,

  but opinions about actions;

  for example, death is nothing terrible,

  or else it would have appeared so to Socrates also,

  but the opinion about death, that it is terrible,

  that is what is terrible.204

  This was a philosophical approach that hardly fostered enquiry, and so Alexander’s end was ultimately chewed over with an apatheia (removed dispassion) that would have made even Zeno proud. As Lucian observed in his True History, the Stoics were still climbing the steep hill of virtue and had little energy left.205 The vita activa of the Roman Republic had given way to the vita contemplativa of philosophical reflection that glanced off the surface of unexplained and troubling events beneath, and inevitably Alexander’s biography fell into its clutches.

  The liberally sprinkled Hellenistic attributions to pothos, an inner yearning that attached itself to Alexander, and to tyche that was first showcased in Demetrius of Phalerum’s Peri Tyches which so impressed Polybius, took on the new mantle of stoic vocabulary and digressions on divine Fate, Providence and Destiny, uniting the various philosophical loose ends.206 Alexander’s campaign historians were not alone in introducing pothos to a tale longing to be told;207 Thucydides, Herodotus and Pindar had all employed it before them.208 However pothos is a misleadingly gentle word for that age of destruction, when pleonexia and philochrematia, greed and the love of money, might have been used instead.

  If the ‘yearning for more’ became the stock rationale for Alexander’s otherwise unacceptable behaviour, then the Greek term pothos, and the Roman equivalent, ingens cupido, have much to answer for. In Greek mythology, Pothos was the son of Zephyr the Westerly Wind, though somewhat more relevantly, it was also the name of the Delphinium flower that Greeks placed on an ancestor’s tomb.209 Its stoical overtones seem to have given off a fragrance that sidetracked investigative minds, leaving Alexander with an unmarked grave and a makeshift headstone with the indelible intestate graffiti, ‘to the strongest’, scrawled awkwardly across it (T6, T7, T8, T9).

  NOTES

  1.Translation from Stoneman (1991) p 33.

  2.Xenophon Cyropaedia Book 1.3.8-10, translated by HG Dakyns, Project Gutenberg.

  3.Epicurus, Vatican Sayings 31.

  4.According to Pliny 33.33-34 antimony found in silver was used as eyebrow cosmetic.

  5.Guthrie-Fideler (1987) p 28. The oath was sworn to the discoverer of the Tetraktys, the triangular formation of the first ten numbers. See also Riedweg (2002) p 29. It was also known as the Mystike Tetras.

  6.Dyskrasia is a term attributed to the Hippocratic imbalance of The Four Humours of the body. Iamblichus Life of Pythagoras 15 and 25. The quadrivium disciplines were: arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy.

  7.Seneca On the Shortness of Life, translation by CND Costa, Penguin edition, London, 1997, p 10.

  8.Diogenes Laertius Empedocles. See discussion in Gottschalk (1980) pp 14-20. Heracleides reported Empedocles’ death in his treatise On Diseases.

  9.Much of the Scriptores Historiae Augustae tends towards romance: examples of pre-death portents can be seen at The Two Maximini 31, Severus Alexander 60, Caracalla 11 and Commodus 16.

  10.Empedocles is considered the first philosopher to bring all four basic elements in a creation theory; see discussion in Collins (2008) p 32.

  11.Aelian 2.26 citing Aristotle’s lost work, On the Pythagoreans (Fr. 191 R). Russell (1946) p 60 ff for Empedocles’ career.

  12.Felix Martí-Ibanez A Prelude to Medical History, MD Publications Inc, New York, 1961, Library of Congress ID: 61-11617.

  13.For Democritus’ age at death see Pseudo-Lucian Makrobioi 18 citing 104 and Diogenes Laertius 9.43 for age 109. The ‘pseudo’ attached to Lucian here denoting that the prosopography is possibly another spuriously assigned work. For reference to Aristotle’s claim see Jones (1886). For several deaths see Margotta (1968) p 66. Soranus penned a doxography and the Suda has further conflicting detail.

  14.Photius Life of Pythagoras 1 and Pseudo-Lucian Makrobioi 22 for Hieronymus’ age.

  15.Brown (1947) pp 685-686.

  16.Diogenes Laertius Pythagoras.

  17.Quoting Huffman (1993) pp 1-16.

  18.Diodorus 16.3.8 for the length of Theopompus’ Philippica; discussion in Plutarch Moralia 328a-b or Fortune 4 for the philosophers who did not write anything of their doctrine down.

  19.Diogenes Laertius Chrysippus 3.

  20.Diogenes Laertius Chrysippus 7.

  21.Diogenes Laertius Zeno 7.28.

  22.Lucian Makrobioi 19.

  23.Plato Symposium 223d: ‘Socrates was driving them to the admission that the same man could have the knowledge required for writing comedy and tragedy – that the fully skilled tragedian could be a comedian as well.’ Translation by NH Fowler, Harvard University Press, 1925.

  24.Brown (1949) p 52 for Diogenes’ approval of cannibalism.

  25.The vari
ous deaths outlined through Diogenes Laertius Diogenes.

  26.Censorinus De Die Natali 15.2 stated age eighty-one and Diogenes Laertius Diogenes claimed ‘nearly ninety’.

  27.See discussion in Brown (1949) p 29 and p 31 for ‘canonised’. The Academy’s rejection of Diogenes is credited for his elevation by the Stoics. Pseudo-Lucian Makrobioi 2.18-22.

  28.Epicurus Letter to Menoeceus for nature’s mirror. Lucretius preserved much of Epicurus’ doctrine in his epic poem On the Nature of Things. The ‘symmetry’ argument was supposed to take away the fear of death.

  29.Plato Phaedo 117e-118a.

  30.See discussion in Griffin (1986) p 199 for reference to Socrates’ alleged last words in Plato’s Phaedo.

  31.Plutarch Moralia 607f or On Exile 17, translation from the Loeb Classical Library edition, Vol. VII, 1959.

  32.Quoting S Kreis (2000) Lectures on Ancient and Medieval European History, Lecture 9, From Polis to Cosmopolis: Alexander the Great and the Hellenistic World, 323-30 B.C., updated 2010.

  33.Plutarch The Younger Cato 68.2 and 70.1 for Cato’s reading of Plato’s Phaedo.

  34.Plutarch Cato 72.2.

  35.Plutarch Demosthenes 29.3 translation from the Loeb Classical Library edition Vol. VII, 1919.

  36.Plutarch Demosthenes 30.5-6. Kebric (1977) p 23 footnote 30 for possible origins with Duris.

  37.Lucian Demosthenes: An Encomium 31-32 translation by HW and FG Fowler, Clarendon Press, 1905.

  38.Diogenes Laertius Aristotle 8, translation from the Loeb Classical Library edition, 1925, and Aristotle 7 for his death by aconite. Chroust (1970) p 650 footnote 90 for the alternative traditions. Eurymedon (or Demophilus) had tried to associate Aristotle’s encomium (or hymn) to Hermias with impiety for casting Virtue as a goddess and for the inscription on his statue at Delphi; Diogenes Laertius Aristotle 5-6.