In Search of the Lost Testament of Alexander the Great
Page 80
Even if the king had survived his last illness, the new campaigns westward would have necessitated the installation of loyal satraps behind him; Plutarch was specific that the already feverish king ‘… conversed with his officers about the vacant posts in the army, and how they might be filled with experienced men.’ This shortfall is most readily explained by the appointment of Somatophylakes and other prominent officers as governors in Asia.210 If Alexander’s Will did reflect these pre-agreed divisions, it did not preclude last-minute amendments, explaining the overnight drafting we read of in the Pamphlet-derived texts. If the principal men were to become regional overlords, Perdiccas may, nevertheless, have been influential in selecting their under-governors and perhaps in surrounding his own provincial base of operations with men loyal to him.211
Curtius made it clear that Perdiccas ‘exposed the royal throne to public view’ at each Assembly gathering (T11).212 Justin, who reported that a second conclave took place after the lustration, corroborated that: ‘These proceedings they conducted with the body of Alexander placed in the midst of them, that his majesty might be witness to their resolutions’ (T20).213 Arrian’s Events After Alexander added: ‘nevertheless, he [Perdiccas] proclaimed for the satrapies those who were suspected [to receive them], as if under the orders of Arrhidaeus’ (T14).214 Here the reference to ‘Arrhidaeus’ could be interpreted differently if Arrian, or his epitomiser, Photius, misconstrued the phrase ‘in the presence of the king’, or ‘as the king had wished’.
We suggest that each text preserved a key ingredient: Perdiccas, and surely the Bodyguards too when considering the audience they faced, were making it absolutely clear that the regional distribution of power being made came from Alexander’s testament. Perdiccas may have even read aloud something approximating the final lines we see in the Metz Epitome Will: ‘Should any of these named act in contravention of my Testament, I beseech the Olympian Gods to see that he not go unpunished’,215 not an unlikely insertion by a suspicious dying king. Thereafter, Perdiccas took steps to ensure all formal proceedings continued in the same manner, with the king’s insignia making it quite clear whence his own, and inconveniently King Philip III’s, elevations stemmed from. As Atkinson put it, Alexander was never so revered as when he was newly dead.216
When constructing the ‘life’ (and its legacy) of Alexander, Plutarch mined for information outside the texts of Cleitarchus, Hieronymus, and the eyewitness historians, and so he alone tantalised his audience with a unique and politically explosive snippet: following his own claim that ‘nobody had any suspicions [of conspiracy] at the time’, he concluded his Babylon narrative by alleging that Roxane conspired to kill Stateira, Alexander’s Persian wife, and her sister, Drypetis, the widow of Hephaestion. Both were daughters of the deposed Great King Darius III; captured after the battle at Issus in 333 BCE, they were later installed at Susa. Plutarch further claimed that the sisters had been lured to Babylon with a forged royal letter, whereupon they were murdered and their bodies were concealed down a backfilled well.217 Apparently Roxane had Perdiccas’ consent; if the episode has any substance, we might again implicate the royal secretary, Eumenes, a clear Perdiccan, for his secretarial seal would have rendered the correspondence genuine.218 The royal women were, alas, more collateral damage of yet more cancelled plans; Hephaestion’s heroic legacy was already in trouble and so were the members of Alexander’s Persian family.
What finally departed Babylon was an army held together by resented compromises and badly veiled accords. Even Eumenes’ role in brokering peace has been described as a necessary deal at Perdiccas’ expense, though the intent must have been otherwise.219 Essentially, three factions had emerged: firstly the Perdiccans, the most prominent of whom were Aristonus and Eumenes, along with Alcetas (Perdiccas’ younger brother), Attalus the son of Andromenes (soon to be Perdiccas’ brother-in-law) and his brother Polemon, alongside the resourceful Docimus whose future allegiances with Antigonus and finally with Lysimachus (at least to the conclusion of the battle at Ipsus) were punctuated by reported acts of treachery. The soon-to-be-famed Medius briefly joined Perdiccas’ ranks too.220 Apart from a reference by Justin to his command of the guards (again possibly confusing his future post in the post-Perdiccas world) there was no mention of Cassander who had recently arrived in Babylon, and who may, indeed, have departed rather quickly following Alexander’s death to inform his father in Pella and potentially other generals on the way, a state of affairs the Pamphlet later capitalised on.
Opposing them there coalesced an anti-Perdiccan Bodyguard faction that closed ranks in a compact synaspismos that proposed group rule on empire matters to undermine his chiliarchy, at the heart of which were Peithon, Ptolemy and Seleucus (neither Peucestas not Lysimachus were mentioned at the Assembly). The third group, the throng of men-at-arms and their infantry officers, had now empowered themselves under ‘their’ King Philip III, and they called for the voices of Antipater and Craterus to protect their interests. The rejected Heracles featured no more and his backers had to fall in line elsewhere; Nearchus, who likely inherited a satrapy himself and who disappeared from texts for the next few years, appears to have kept his head low.221
The Somatophylakes were dispatched to their satrapies and Eumenes finalised plans to pacify Cappadocia, as his Will grant required. It is unlikely Perdiccas could have departed Babylon until after Roxane had given birth; a boy was born and the result underpinned Perdiccas’ primacy through his immediate guardianship and, not impossibly, through his marriage to Roxane, the terms of the Will that gave Meleager his suspicions. But this was not a time for reflection, it was a time for moving on before any further challenges emerged. Events that followed indicate the anti-Perdiccan league did communicate with Antipater in Macedonia, and its members probably pledged their support for his ongoing regency. Antipater, meanwhile, was offering his daughter, Nicaea, to Perdiccas to leverage his own position (or buy time), an arrangement Perdiccas milked while developing further options.222
To counter the regent’s long-established influence in Greece, Perdiccas is said to have opened a dialogue with Demades, the Athenian demagogue, who invited him ‘to cross over swiftly into Europe to oppose the oligarchs of Antipater’ whom he likened to a ‘rotten thread’. Perdiccas was likely bartering with Athenian ‘freedom’ to undermine Antipater’s regime (the ultimate aim of Greek forces in the Lamian War), and he secretly planned to reject Nicaea in favour of marriage to Cleopatra, Alexander’s full-sister, which suggests further correspondence was taking place with Olympias, likely brokered through Eumenes.223 Perdiccas next installed Docimus in Babylon, removing the previous governor, Archon, who might have assisted Ptolemy’s preparations for capturing Alexander’s funeral hearse, and he supported Cleomenes in his ongoing administrative role in Egypt, so undermining Ptolemy’s administrative control.224
Perdiccas (or Alexander through his Will) had already ordered Leonnatus and Antigonus to assist Eumenes in the invasion of Cappadocia; both refused and ended up crossing over to Greece and Macedonia and linking up with Antipater.225 The first ‘domestic’ clash of arms (outside of the trouble at Babylon) came about with Ptolemy’s hijacking (or ‘rescuing’) Alexander’s funeral hearse, following which Medius and Aristonus were put to use by Perdiccas in an invasion of Cyprus, whose kings were now supporting the Ptolemaic regime. The responses were inevitable, and so commenced the ‘… greatest armed conflict between fellow Macedonians in more than a generation.’226
Peithon, along with Antigenes who commanded the Silver Shields brigade, grudgingly operated under Perdiccas until his (officially, King Philip III’s) failed retaliatory invasion of Egypt, whereupon they (and possibly Seleucus) murdered him in his tent in May/June 320 BCE.227 Perdiccas’ disastrous attempts at canal dredging when attempting to cross the Nile, and his failed attacks at the Fort of Camels at Pelusium and above the delta near Heliopolis on the route to Memphis, may well have been in part due to the lack of army enthusiasm and this treachery in
the planning; Perdiccas had been forced to grant gifts and promises just to keep the officers from defecting to Ptolemy.228
Photius’ epitome of Arrian’s Events After Alexander (uniquely) recorded that Perdiccas aired in front of the army (thus an impromptu Assembly) ‘many charges’ against Ptolemy, who successfully defended himself. It is hardly credible that Ptolemy attended a ‘show trial’. Any speech at this point was simply Perdiccas attempting to prop up morale with accusations before the attack, and, as Diodorus recorded, Ptolemy defended his actions in person when he crossed the Nile to greet the Macedonians the day after Perdiccas’ death.229
The highborn Leonnatus had previously defected to Greece with his own plans for Macedonia, and Peucestas must have been content in being safely installed in Persis (broadly today’s Fars Province of Iran centred at Shiraz) away from the crisis. Lysimachus would have been equally relieved to be governing a satrapy across the Hellespont removed from the initial strife, though Seuthes III, who married a Macedonian bride and tried to re-establish the Odrysian Kingdom, gave him a run for his money in Thrace. Neither Lysimachus, nor Peucestas, had anything to lose from watching those embroiled in the emerging factions begin to self-destruct. ‘Centrifugal forces were at work’, and the fabric of the Will was not resilient enough to hold them together.230 The Babylonian settlement, finalised on the plains outside the ‘gateway of the gods’, had simply been the early sparks of the pyrotechnics of the Diadokhoi Wars.
CLEITARCHUS’ CORONA GRAMINEA
Throughout his portrayal of the Babylon settlement, Cleitarchus appears to have endowed Ptolemy with a ‘patriotic’ anti-barbarian voice, and to have burdened Perdiccas with a treacherous usurper’s role. Ptolemy was, in addition, presented as the rational, legitimate and even ‘democratic’ voice of the Bodyguards with his proposal of group rule. But Cleitarchus’ reshaping of events fulfilled further aims: Alexander’s leaving an empire ‘to the strongest’ (T6, T7, T8, T9) nullified the significance of Perdiccas receiving the king’s ring, while the Will was neatly removed from the centre of events. It was a literary triumph capitalised on by Curtius and deserving of a Roman corona graminea, a grass-crown, for its influence on later interpretations, and for its challenging the boundaries established by the Pamphlet and the Journal.231
So where did Cleitarchus end his account? Well, as far back as 1874 Rosiger noted the pro-Ptolemaic slant in the post-Babylon narratives of Diodorus (and Justin’s epitome of Trogus), whose detail ought to have been sourced from Hieronymus.232 But that slant makes little sense when considering the Cardian historian served first under Eumenes (a Perdiccan) and then the Antigonid dynasty, both demonstrably hostile to the Ptolemaic regime. And it seems doubtful that Diodorus, based in Romanised Sicily, had such personal inclinations in favour of Ptolemy I Soter, unless it was to highlight Rome’s recent crime of annexing Egypt.233
The first of Diodorus’ uncharacteristic encomia dealt with the transport of Alexander’s body: ‘Ptolemy, moreover, doing honour to Alexander, went to meet it with an army as far as Syria, and, receiving the body, deemed it worthy of the greatest consideration.’234 Diodorus followed with a description of Alexandria ‘lacking little of being the most renowned of the cities of the inhabited earth’, which neatly supported an earlier laudatory reference to the city. This statement may include some personal admiration, as Diodorus had himself spent time researching in Alexandria and Strabo certainly lauded the city following his stay a few years on (perhaps through 25/24-20 BCE).235 After describing the tomb Ptolemy had prepared for the sarcophagus, along with sacrifices and magnificent games that perhaps still included the Archaic hoplitodromos, the race in full hoplite panoply, Diodorus continued:
For men, because of his graciousness and nobility of heart, came together eagerly from all sides of Alexandria and gladly enrolled for the campaign… all of them willingly took upon themselves at their personal risk the preservation of Ptolemy’s safety. The gods also saved him unexpectedly from the greatest dangers on account of his courage and his honest treatment of all his friends.’236
Diodorus’ eulogistic tone dovetailed with Curtius’ concluding paragraph which is backed up by the Parian Chronicle: ‘… but Ptolemy, under whose control Egypt had come, transported the king’s body to Memphis, and from there a few years later to Alexandria, where every honour was paid to his memory and his name.’237 Further, we have Diodorus’ polemic against Perdiccas’ Egyptian invasion which framed Ptolemy’s higher qualities: ‘Perdiccas, indeed, was a man of blood, one who usurped the authority of the other commanders, and in general, wished to rule by force; but Ptolemy, on the contrary, was generous and fair and granted to all commanders the right to speak frankly.’238
The overtly favourable treatment of Ptolemy does look Cleitarchean, and yet that would indicate his account extended past Alexander’s death and even some two or more years into the Successor Wars. What seems more likely is Cleitarchus summed up his book with forward-looking laudations but only extended his main narrative to the logical conclusion for an Alexandrian historian: Alexander’s interment in Egypt.239 And within this wrap-up, Cleitarchus constructed his account of the funeral hearse arriving along the lines: ‘Alexander’s body remains in Egypt where Ptolemy paid it the greatest of respect, despite the hostile attempts of Perdiccas, a man of blood and violence, to cross the Nile and acquire it for his own glory’; this was a sentiment that was dragged into the Successor War accounts by the Vulgate authors writing follow-on books, and so by Diodorus, and Justin. Perdiccas’ failed invasion must still have been a vivid memory in Cleitarchus’ day. Of course, it is not impossible that Cleitarchus was regurgitating Ptolemy’s own self-promoting ending, though neither Arrian nor Plutarch captured any hint of that.
Diodorus followed with: ‘Egypt was now held as if a prize of war.’ A prize it was, ‘due to Ptolemy’s prowess’; its annual income grew to 14,800 talents with an export income from 1,500,000 artabae of grain under his son, Ptolemy II Philadelphos;240 no wonder he could afford to have his ‘enlightened reign’, nurtured by Strato from the school of Aristotle, eulogised in the Encomium by the poet Theocritus.241
Pharaonic Egypt had been divided into forty-two nomes, or provinces, in three major regions: the Nile Delta, the Fayyum (being rapidly drained and reclaimed), and the Nile valley. These in turn were divided into toparchies under a topogrammateis with a sophisticated tax and administration system. We have a papyrus detailing Egypt’s complex revenue laws and it reported on farmed goods and their regional taxation that was overseen by an antigrapheis (checking clerk) appointed by an oikonomos (manager of financial affairs), who in turn reported to a grammataios basilikos, the head of record-keeping in the nome.242 In the delta, inhabited by Greek traders since at least the reign of Pharaoh Psammetichus (664-610 BCE), the centres of business – Pithom (Heroonpolis), Naucratis with its Hellenion (a religious sanctuary for all Greek tribes mentioned by Herodotus) on the east bank of the Canopic branch of the Nile, and even Heraclion (Thonis), if not yet inundated – would have likely fallen under Cleomenes’ revenue net. Alexander had left other administrators, military and civilian, about him, including komarchoi (village headmen) and myriarouroi (new land cultivators).243
The fate of Heraclion, which sunk into the wash of the Nile Delta most likely following seismic tremors (now some 4 miles further offshore and only recently rediscovered) highlights the sound planning of establishing Alexandria in a location protected by a limestone outcrop. The growing city, with its typically Hellenistic grid plan which saw a 100-foot-wide Street of the Soma and Canopic Way dissect its heart, and a new direct canal to a branch of the Canopic Nile, was no doubt established to eclipse its Greek forerunners. We do have some evidence that Alexander adopted a policy of forced resettlement to populate it; Pseudo-Aristotle’s Oikonomika detailed his closure of a town and its established market at nearby Canopus.244
Ptolemy had initially, and expediently, interred Alexander’s body out of harm’s way at Memphis, possibly i
n the Imensthotieion – the Temple of Ammon and Thoth – or in the necropolis of the Nectanebo II Temple at Saqqara. The sources that claimed Alexander wished to be buried in Egypt do look to be Hieronymus-derived, and this lends them authenticity.245 Here the sarcophagus may have originally been surrounded by the life-sized semi-circle of statues of the Greek poets and philosophers most influential to Alexander, and found by excavations in the Avenue of Sphinxes in 1850/51.246 So Diodorus’ stating that ‘he [Ptolemy] decided for the present not to send it [the body] to Ammon, but to entomb it in the city that had been founded by Alexander himself’, appears contradictory, though it was probably the result of his usual compression; it seems Ptolemy I Soter, or his son Ptolemy II Philadelphos (or according to Zenobius, Ptolemy IV Philopatros even later) finally transferred Alexander’s corpse to the Sema at Alexandria sometime after the battle at Ipsus in 301 BCE when borders were under less of a threat.247 The Alexandrian Sema resonated with the heroic connotations found in the Iliad and Odyssey and the bodies of the Ptolemies were now inseparable from that of Alexander;248 the arrival of his corpse may have coincided with Cleitarchus’ own residence in the city, thus again explaining why it featured prominently in his closing paragraphs.