In Search of the Lost Testament of Alexander the Great

by David Grant

  And here, most relevantly, there is plentiful evidence that testators were fearful their Wills could be hidden, manipulated, or subverted in some way, and this was illustrated by the efforts they made to have them recorded and authenticated. One example is Callias, who, returning from his questionably successful mission to Susa to broker a peace with Persia (sometime in the 440s BCE) and fearing he would be cut off by a ‘wicked conspiracy’ in his absence, is said to have made an open declaration of his Will before the popular assembly at Athens.16 Subversions were facilitated when the testator declared a Will before witnesses as a memorium, a verbal recitation without committing it into writing. This required something of an honour-based code, like the timeworn tradition of vocal inter vivos, or the auricular living covenants and the nuncupative testaments of Rome. Confusingly, a commercial covenant was also referred to as a diatheke, thus an assignment or contract, the very word used to denote what we now term a Will.

  The latitude for challenging estate-related bequests narrowed when Solon introduced documented testaments that would be pronounced before several ephetai (judges) and members of the dikasteria, jurors of the popular court; according to Diogenes Laertius, Solon’s own Will (‘injunctions to his relations’) requested that his ashes be scattered around his birthplace at Salamis.17 In Athens the practice of authentication involved depositing Wills at public offices, signed and sealed in the presence of magistrates who were very often at their original drafting; in more notable cases, the city archons were present too. The procedures epitomise Athens’ more general shift from orality to the increasing use of writing.18

  This development unfortunately also locked in Solon’s less attractive legislation, some of it termed ‘peculiar’ by Plutarch, the epidikasi, for example, a procedure that oversaw the law of the epikleroi. These Athenian heiresses, daughters of fathers with no male heirs, were required to marry their father’s closest male relative (agnate) to keep property within the family, with sex provided to her thrice per month as a show of esteem. The ruling often led to the epikleros residing in a household with an existing wife, and it led to further conflict where the heiress daughter was already married herself.19 Married daughters had no claims against an estate if not named in the Will; in the event of the father’s intestacy, unmarried daughters had no claim against their father’s estate except for dowry and maintenance until they wed, at which point their estate went with them to the new male husband. If a daughter subsequently gave birth to a son by the agnate male relative, he would ultimately acquire that part of the estate.20

  Diogenes Laertius stated that it was Ariston of Kea who penned the Wills of the Peripatetic Scholars, testaments whose legal structure was motivated by the desire to maintain the private ownership of the philosophical school itself, including its all-important library. It is likely that all recensions of the Peripatetics’ Wills come from this collection. Apart from those of Aristotle and Theophrastus, the list included the testaments of their successors: Strato of Lampsacus (ca. 335-269 BCE), Arcesilaus (ca. 316/5-241 BCE), Lyco (ca. 299-225 BCE) and Epicurus (ca. 341-270 BCE).21

  Epicurus was born just fifteen years after Alexander and he founded the eponymously named philosophical movement following the Macedonian king’s death. Although only a few fragments of his treatises survived, we know his family was dislodged by the Successor Wars and moved from Samos to Colophon, a city eventually destroyed by Lysimachus. Epicurus, for whom ‘pleasure was the beginning and end of a blessed life’, finally died in Athens aged seventy-two and his sophisticated Will is another lesson in estate planning: he set up a Lifetime Trust and included a Deed of Gift within it so that his Epicurean school and its iconic ‘Garden’ would continue to flourish. The Will provided for the future funeral costs of his family and it contained annuities and marriage directions for children of the prominent members of his school.22

  Arcesilaus, a former pupil of Theophrastus and founder of the Middle Academy which brought scepticism into philosophical debate, attacked the doctrine of the Stoics which claimed that truth is defined by perception alone: kataleptike phantasis. In pure Sceptic fashion, Arcesilaus claimed ‘to know nothing, not even his own ignorance’, and yet he knew how to prepare for death.23 Three copies of his Will were prepared, one deposited at Athens with friends, another at Eretria, and a third was sent home to a relative, Thaumasias, with a covering letter explaining his rationale:

  I have given Diogenes a copy of my Will to convey to you. For, because I am frequently unwell and have become very infirm, I have thought it right to make a Will, that if anything should happen to me I might not depart with feelings of having done you any injury, who have been so constantly in affection to me.24

  He died, according to Hermippus, after delirium caused by an excess of wine, an end he purportedly shared with the great Stoic, Chrysippus (ca. 279-204 BCE).25

  ROME – A TESTAMENT TO THE VULNERABLE TESTAMENTUM

  Wills played a heavyweight role in the subterfuges of Rome, in some cases directing, or misdirecting, the fate of the empire. In his Romulus Plutarch referenced the dying wish of the semi-mythical Larentia (supposedly 7th century BCE) who bequeathed to the people of the city the substantial estate she had herself inherited from a wealthy citizen.26 Not all were so generous in their dealings; in his voluminous account of the city’s rise and fall, Edward Gibbon penned a whole chapter on the intricacies of the Roman testament and one particular extract is worth quoting:

  … the order of succession is regulated by nature, or at least by the general and permanent reason of the lawgiver: but this order is frequently violated by the arbitrary and partial wills, which prolong the dominion of the testator beyond the grave.27

  Wills existed, then, not only to organise the wealth of a past life, but to direct the path of the future; in the case of Roman law, this ability applied solely to those with testamentifactio, the legal capacity to do so, and that meant citizens who were patresfamilias, the male family heads. Only women who were widowed and not in the power of a father, or who remained unmarried after the death of their father, could make a Will, and only then with the consent of her Tutores (broadly, a Will executor).28

  Cicero, whose wisdom and warnings to his son heads the chapter, went on to detail a forged Will brought from Greece which purported to be the dying testament of the wealthy Lucius Minucius Basilus (died 43 BCE). The forgers made themselves joint heirs and ‘the more easily to procure validity for it’ they included as beneficiaries the influential Crassus and the orator Quintus Hortensius (114-50 BCE) who gladly accepted the windfall; this subterfuge took place despite the fact that those who did sign forged testaments were now liable to punishment by the Cornelian Law (Lex Cornelia testamentaria) resulting in deportatio in insulam, the loss of property and citizenship.29 Tacitus recorded a similar ‘remarkable crime’ involving the forged Will of Domitius Balbus: being old, childless and wealthy, his kinsman Valerius Fabianus, along with distinguished accomplices, saw an opportunity to execute his estate in their favour.30

  In his Letter to Cornelianus Pliny mentioned the emperor’s injunction to senators then in consultation on a case presiding over a testament in which some of the codicils appeared fraudulent,31 and Suetonius recorded that Augustus vetoed the law designed to check freedom of speech in Wills, which suggests a tradition of posthumous polemic may have made its way into them.32 Suetonius also gave us the Wills of Julius Caesar (which reappeared in Pierre Hamon’s 16th century adaptation of a genuine Ravenna papyrus),33 Augustus himself, and more relevantly, the blocked testament of Claudius. Suetonius stated that during Nero’s imperium, reforms to Wills were made and ‘it was provided that the first two leaves should be presented to the signatories with only the name of the testator written upon them, and that no one who wrote a Will for another should put down a legacy for himself.’34

  Nevertheless, to fund his megalomania and his new construction projects, Nero incentivised the advocates to pressure individuals ‘ungrateful to the emperor’ to beque
ath their estate to the Privy Purse, often demanding their immediate suicide to set it in motion; even Seneca, his teacher, was implicated in estate-rigging: ‘In Rome, he spread his nets to catch the Wills of childless men.’35 Nero’s targets were given proper burials in the Exitus Illustrium Virorum, the list of illustrious ‘exits’, which became popular reading in post-Nero Rome, and one of them, unsurprisingly, was Seneca himself.

  The young Octavian, the adopted son of Julius Caesar (after which he assumed the name Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus, later titled ‘Augustus’), exposed the Will of Mark Antony, having impiously extracted it from the Temple of the Vestal Virgins to show a conservative Rome the extent of the triumvir’s orientalisation, for Antony had requested burial in Egypt, as Alexander’s extant Will demands; in fact Antony was to be buried alongside Alexander in the Mausoleum of Alexandria. His Will was deemed a testamentum inofficiosum and Octavian later learned of codicils and the means to amend a testator’s last wishes while governing ‘a restored republic’ that was ‘in practice a disguised autocracy’, or, in Herodian’s view, an aristocracy.36 Soon to be hailed as ‘Augustus’, his own Will occupied three scrolls: the first contained funeral directions, another a record of his administration, and the third a troop and treasury summary with directions for future governance. Judging by his Deeds of the Divine Augustus, compiled just before he died in the year 14 CE, and which reads like an Achaemenid commemorative inscription, Augustus was obsessed with numbers and accounts.

  In its breadth the empire Augustus governed was equal to Alexander’s, though the parallel stops there, for the authenticity of his testament has never been called into question. Suetonius described its preparation:

  … he [Augustus] had made a Will in the consulship of Lucius Plancus and Gaius Silius on the third day before the Nones of April, a year and four months before he died, in two note-books, written in part in his own hand and in part in that of his freedmen Polybius and Hilarion. These the Vestal Virgins, with whom they had been deposited, now produced, together with three rolls, which were sealed in the same way. All these were opened and read in the Senate.37

  The foremost of Augustus’ propagandists, Virgil, requested that his Aeneid be burned at his own death and he took the precaution of leaving his emperor a quarter of his estate, no doubt having witnessed Augustus’ early interest in Mark Antony’s last wishes.38 Luckily, his executors impressed upon the author the importance of changing that literary request, and we are fortunate to inherit Virgil’s work.39

  Herod the Great, the Rome-befriending client-king of Judea (later Syria Palestina) died of natural causes in 4 BCE, and his Will directed that his kingdom be divided amongst his three sons, Archelaus, Herod Antipas and Philip. The three heirs travelled to Rome to petition Augustus to ratify their father’s wish. A majority of Jerusalem Jews, however, sent a delegation of their own, asking the emperor to abolish the Herodian dynasty and place the region under direct Roman rule. Their plea was denied; Augustus upheld the dead king’s bequest and so there emerged three smaller territories.

  The arms of Rome stretched far and wide, and even Britain submitted to its authority on succession. Prasutagus, husband of the rebellious Boudicea of the Iceni (died ca. 61 CE), and who had submitted to (or had been reinstated by) Claudius upon his reinvasion, named the Roman emperor, alongside his own daughters, as a co-inheritor of his kingdom to ensure nominal autonomy. According to Tacitus, although he lived long and prospered under the arrangement, the Will was later ignored, allowing Roman plundering of the kingdom and displacement of the Iceni nobles.40

  Similarly, the curious Will of Ptolemy VIII Euergetes II gifted Cyrenaica to the Roman Republic in the event that he should die without issue; the territory had essentially been placed in a fidei-commissa, a Roman trust fund.41 No doubt this was a deterrent against assassination for an ‘unholy’ attempt had (allegedly) been made by his brother, prompting Euergetes to solicit support from the Senate.42 On his deathbed his son, Ptolemy Apion, himself childless, enacted the Will provision which is still preserved in an inscription today, and the province was duly ceded to the Roman Republic.43 It was somewhat inevitable that the Ptolemies, who followed the Argead tradition of polygamy and the Pharaonic tradition of consanguineous marriage, would be in trouble with internecine dynastic intrigue.

  Attalus III of Pergamum followed a similar path with his kingdom in 133 BCE to avert a succession crisis; the Roman popularis, Tiberius Gracchus (ca. 160s-133 BCE), gladly accepted the bequest to fund his grain laws. Hellenistic dynasts were choosing Rome as their favourite heir, but altruism was never the motive. The trend of seeking powerful guardians to deter assassination of the royal line was most vividly expressed in the Will of Nicomedes I of Bithynia who had previously named Antigonus II Gonatas of Macedonia, and Ptolemy II Philadelphos of Egypt, as well as the cities of Heraclea Pontica, Chios and Byzantium, as an illustrious melee of guardians for his children. We also have numerous papyri detailing the Wills of military settlers which followed Greek legal formulae in the era of the Ptolemies, including dowries and the passing down of slaves; typically, the opening lines once again followed the format of Aristotle’s testament.44

  We touched on the corrupting of the Will of the Roman emperor Claudius, and its relevance to our investigation is striking. Suetonius reported that when Claudius composed his testament he had the magistrates witness it, but it was blocked by Agrippina (the Younger), his niece and fourth wife, who was also the sister of Caligula, and fatally for him, the mother of Nero who was by now Claudius’ adopted son (as well as grand-nephew). We may assume Agrippina destroyed the Will when she burned Claudius’ notes and killed his secretary. Suetonius captured the detail:

  Towards the end of his life, he [Claudius] had shown some plain signs of repentance for his marriage with Agrippina and his adoption of Nero… Not long after he made his Will and sealed it with the seals of all the magistrates. But before he could go any further, he was cut short by Agrippina… That Claudius was poisoned is the general belief… His death was kept quiet until all the arrangements were made about the succession… The principal omens of his death were the following: the rise of a longhaired star, commonly called a comet…45

  The conspicuous comet has some bearing on our quest for the identity of Curtius, the intriguing historian behind the most vivid renderings of events on Alexander’s campaigns.46

  Claudius did openly regret adopting Nero, and his Will was certainly drafted to nominate Britannicus, his natural son by a former wife, as his successor. Claudius’ death was not revealed until all arrangements for Nero’s succession had been finalised; the vanished testamentum and the suspicion of poisoning soon fell on Agrippina.47 Later, with Nero in power and with her influence over him waning, Agrippina, ironically, tried to elevate Britannicus once more. However, on the 12th February 55 CE, Britannicus mysteriously died the day before his fourteenth birthday and before the official proclamation of his adulthood. Tradition blamed Nero and poison; Nero blamed it on an epileptic fit but he soon devised methods to do away with Agrippina.48

  No less relevant to the fate of the Roman testamentum are the manipulations of Caligula, whose ancestry could be traced to both the winner (Octavian), and the loser (Mark Antony), of the battle at Actium, and who himself greatly admired Alexander. Concerning the death of Tiberius (in 37 CE), Cassius Dio wrote:

  Tiberius, to be sure, had left the empire to his grandson [named] Tiberius as well; but Gaius [Caligula] sent his Will to the senate by Macro and caused it to be declared null and void by the consuls and the others with whom he had arranged matters beforehand, on the ground that the testator had not been of sound mind as shown by the fact that he had permitted a mere boy to rule over them…49

  Rumour abounded that Caligula, ‘the viper to the Roman people’, had murdered Tiberius to hasten an inheritance that also saw him reinterpreting any Wills that bequeathed estates to his forerunner in order to redirect funds to himself; he is said to have squandered the 2,700,000,0
00 sesterces amassed, deifying himself in the process.50 Although Caligula’s death, less than four years later, lacked the colour of his short life (he died in his twenty-ninth year), it was, inevitably, just as controversial. Reports of his assassination – professedly condoned by the Praetorian Guard, the Senate, army and equestrian order – vary through Josephus and Suetonius.51 It appeared very ‘Julian’ with thirty or so reported stab wounds in the Palatine Hill Cryptoporticus, an underground corridor (unearthed by archaeologists in 2008), with a complicit senator named Cluvius Rufus.52 Caligula was reportedly entombed in either Augustus’ family mausoleum, or at Lake Nemi where, in 2011, police claimed to have unearthed his remains.

  PELLAN INHERITANCE AND THE REGENT EXECUTOR

  If we have successfully illustrated the ubiquity of Wills in Greece and Rome and their place in the legal mechanism for transferring power before, during, and after, Alexander’s reign, we need to ask whether Macedonia adopted the same tradition. On one hand it may be irrelevant, as Alexander was more Greek in education, ‘Homeric’ in spirit, and Macedonian in arms alone. But we have examples of noteworthy testaments attached to men who featured in Alexander’s story, and evidence that Macedonian law recognised their structure.

  A 1st century marble of Claudius. Naples National Archaeological Museum, Farnese Collection. Following his death rumour circulated that his Will had been blocked by Agrippina despite it having been sealed by the magistrates, to enable his adopted son, Nero, to become emperor.

  Aristotle prepared for his own death by appointing Antipater, the Macedonian regent, as the general executor of his Will, and this is significant to us for several reasons. Firstly, it confirms that a bond and a trust existed between the two men, a fact exploited by a tradition which linked them, working in unison, to the plot to murder Alexander; Aristotle supposedly provided the poison ferried to Babylon by Antipater’s sons, a garnish to the claims made in the Vulgate genre (T9, T10).53 Diogenes Laertius knew of nine letters sent from Aristotle to the regent (compared with four to Alexander), and though a tight relationship does not necessarily point at covert activity, it does suggest mutual interests, and ‘ample traces’ of correspondence between them still exist.54