In Search of the Lost Testament of Alexander the Great
Page 81
With origins in Egypt it was somewhat inevitable that the relocation was foretold by portents in the Romance texts: contrary to earlier predictions of Alexander’s seers, the chief priest of Memphis predicted that wherever the body rested would be ‘constantly troubled and shaken with wars and battles’.249 A myth emerged which held that the empty green breccia (granite) sarcophagus of Pharaoh Nectanebo II, never used by him and so ferried to Alexandria from Memphis, was its possible first resting place. If Alexander’s mummified body was placed in Nectanebo’s coffin it would help explain why the latter featured so prominently in the Romance, which claimed the last Egyptian-born pharaoh had impregnated Olympias.250 In a later age, this stone sarcophagus was used as a ritual bath in the Attarin Mosque, as suggested by the twelve drainage holes drilled around the base. Ptolemy’s alleged reuse of the pharaonic granite casket which now resides in the British Museum, does paradoxically support Aelian’s contention that the hearse with the original gilded sarcophagus was just a decoy while Alexander’s casketless remains were sped to Egypt by a secret route.251 But there is scant evidence to support these alluring ideas.
What was an original sarcophagus of gold did become a tempting prize; Strabo reported that it was plundered by Ptolemy Pareisaktos of Syria (the ‘Usurper’, alternatively known as Kokkes, ‘scarlet’, possibly identifiable with Ptolemy XI, installed by Sulla ca. 80 BCE). Strabo added that by his day, however, Alexander’s body resided in another coffin of alabaster (some translations say ‘glass’).252 How or when it lost its illustrious inhabitant, remains one of history’s great mysteries. But as Erskine has pointed out: one way or another, Alexander had travelled further after his death than most Greeks travelled in a lifetime.253
A drawing of the sarcophagus of Nectanebo II found in the Attarin Mosque at Alexandria. The idea that it once contained the body of Alexander is still widely propagated; an engraving, for example, by Thomas Medland and William Alexander was featured on the cover of The Tomb of Alexander the Great, a dissertation on the sarcophagus brought from Alexandria and now in the British Museum by ED Clarke published in 1805. The decorative carving on the sides, however, narrates the Egyptian Book of the Underworld without reference to Alexander. The sarcophagus was obtained by the Napoleonic Expedition to Egypt, and arrived in the British Museum in 1802 under the Treaty of Alexandria.
Diodorus provided an extremely detailed description of the funeral cortège and the hearse that departed Babylon, most likely in late spring 321 BCE, in which Alexander travelled many of those miles. Some historians believe this detail could be of Cleitarchean origin too (perhaps originating with Duris) despite Athenaeus’ statement that it came from Hieronymus.254 If Cleitarchean, we would have expected the Vulgate wrap-ups to have been lured a page or two further to capture the fulsome colour of the ‘Ionic temple on wheels’.255 The description of its friezes, carvings and adornments is long, precise and rhetoric-free in line with Hieronymus’ style. It has been insightfully noted that ‘not a single image of peace was included among these awesome tableaux of Macedonian military might’, and further, that the description failed to feature the regular phalanx at all, a punishment perhaps for the infantry dissent at Babylon.256 But the clue to the original source of the description comes from Diodorus’ concluding words: ‘and it appeared more magnificent when seen than when described’, because ‘seen’ is the regurgitation of a statement that could have only been made by an eyewitness historian.
The construction of the bier required almost two years.257 Hieronymus may have returned to Babylon with Eumenes following the unsuccessful Cappadocian invasion, or more likely, he witnessed the bier on its journey to (or in) Syria (where we propose Perdiccas was based) before it was seized.258 An intimate description would have reinforced Hieronymus’ credentials and acted as the perfect badge of authenticity for the opening of his book. For similar reasons we should not discount the Cardian historian as the source of the lengthy detail on Hephaestion’s funeral pyre; he was after all campaigning with Eumenes in the six and a half years of war that followed Alexander’s death, when much information would have been passed between them. So the last pages of Diodorus’ seventeenth book, and the early pages of his eighteenth, were indeed a ‘patchwork’ of the interweaving of Cleitarchus and Hieronymus with confusing repercussions.259
A mid-19th century artist’s impression of Alexander’s funeral hearse, an ‘Ionic temple on wheels’, on its way from Babylon towards Damascus, pulled by sixty-four mules following the description by Diodorus.
THE ARCHETYPE OF THE SATRAPAL LIST
There remains some uncertainty as to the identity of the archetypal source behind the lists of governors and satrapies in the division of the empire at Babylon (T16, T17, T18, T19, T20). Yet, again, there really is no need to look any further than Hieronymus; many of the governorships were short-lived, providing a tight temporal triangulation. But lest we be accused of textual goropism, we should take a closer look at the evidence.260
As Diodorus and Trogus were writing continuous world histories, and not simply monographs on Alexander, their rundown of the satrapal list sat in the logical position: at the opening of their books heralding in the Successor Wars, consistent, we suggest, with its position in Hieronymus’ own account. As expected, their texts, alongside Photius’ epitomes and Arrian Events After Alexander, are remarkably similar in content, pace and non-florid style, with the inevitable compression scars epitomisers leave.261
Curtius, on the other hand, did not have the luxury of extended spacing, for he was not writing a follow-on account. So to retrieve the detail he needed, he alone delved ahead into Hieronymus’ first chapter to retrieve the satrapal list for his biographical summation. This is exactly where he may have seen Hieronymus’ reference to the Will he so vocally rejected. In that interpolating process, Curtius shunted Cleitarchus’ conspiracy detail back to his final page to give it the dramatic Vulgate wrap-up position.
Curtius wound up his book with a reference to Cassander’s murder of the remaining Argead line in 310/309 BCE.262 Doubting Cleitarchus’ book reached forward this far, it once more backs up our contention that Curtius extracted detail from Hieronymus. Plutarch also extracted his own concluding lines on Olympias’ revenge (and much detail for his Parallel Lives) from Hieronymus, and for similar reasons: biographies required suitably rounded-off epitaphs where ongoing universal histories did not. Of course, Curtius could have extracted this detail on Cassander’s retribution ‘second-hand’ from an earlier Hieronymus-derived source, so Diodorus or even Trogus,263 but this would still leave the origin of his polemic on the Will unexplained (unless he was referring to Diodorus’ later reference to it); but as Pearson pointed out, no Latin author seems to have respected Diodorus or used him extensively.264
Could Cleitarchus have detailed the divisions of the empire? The positioning of this tight and specific detail in the follow-on histories (including that of Arrian, who was not a Cleitarchean adherent) argues against that. Moreover, the list dovetails too neatly with the direction of Hieronymus’ geographical treatise and the detail does suggest a single source. With some minor discrepancies aside (which can largely be blamed on lacunae and brevity), the surviving satrapal lists agree on the core territorial claims, or roles of, Ptolemy, Peithon, Lysimachus, Peucestas, Eumenes, Antigonus, Leonnatus, Laomedon, Antipater and Craterus.265 The first three named Bodyguards, and the order of their names, remain identical in all accounts, as broadly do the Asia Minor divisions.266
Additionally, if we take each account up to this point, we see striking concord markers; any variation in expansiveness of some provincial detail would have occurred when the list was alternatively sourced from Hieronymus’ original (Diodorus, for example, T16) or from epitomes (or summaries) of them (so Justin, Photius’ précis of Arrian and Dexippus, T17, T18, T20). Clear stemma clues begin with a short digression mentioning Cleomenes in Egypt, thus linking Photius’ précises with Justin’s (T17, T18, T20). We have references to Antigonus alm
ost identically transmitted in Curtius, Diodorus and Arrian’s précis by Photius (T19, T16, T17) as far as the specificity of his domain: ‘Pamphylia, Lycia, and what is called Great Phrygia’, while the eastern border of Eumenes’ territorial boundary is uniformly marked with ‘as far as Trapezus’ in Curtius and Photius’ epitomes. Diodorus additionally referred to Eumenes’ task of pacifying his domain with ‘all the lands bordering these, which Alexander did not invade’; this concurs (though less closely) with Curtius’ reference to Eumenes ‘conducting hostilities’ with Ariarathes, king of the still-independent portion of Cappadocia.267
Photius and Dexippus were both epitomising Arrian’s Events after Alexander, itself a long summary of Hieronymus’ successor history.268 If the lists of Justin and Curtius can be linked to these accounts by what cannot be casual coincidences, and if Curtius is linked to Diodorus by a similar territorial digression, then the conclusion starts to appear axiomatic. There is, however, some divergence in the second part of the roll call of satraps in the eastern and upper provinces where governorships were to remain largely unchanged, and in particular with the roles linked to Seleucus, Craterus and Perdiccas.269 But these were the most difficult appointments to decipher due to what we propose were overarching authorities or pan-provincial mandates with regional satraps under them. The relative authorities of what were once the chiliarchos of the empire, the epimeletes to the new kings, and the prostasia of the remaining strategoi, as well as Seleucus’ first hipparchy cavalry command, were easily misinterpreted; Hieronymus himself may have transmitted them ambiguously, or misrepresented them deliberately as a client of the Antigonids.270
The various terminologies associating satrap with satrapy should not necessarily be considered a source ‘variance’; these are as much the product of modern translation as they were early scribal interpretation. To ‘rule’, to ‘govern’ and ‘take charge of’; and ‘received’, ‘fell to’, or ‘were allotted to’, with the geographical tags ‘adjacent’, ‘close to’ and ‘bordering’, do not require more than a single source. What is surprising is the lack of bandwidth these early historians used in their regurgitations, for they must have been tempted to season the list with additional commentary. Yet they did not, and neither did they significantly rework the order of its presentation. It seems they appreciated the logical geographical progression being made through Asia, from South to North (Egypt to Thrace) in the first part of the list, and perhaps this formative detail was simply too unique to be adorned with rhetoric, even if some original background colour (satrapal history, for example) was stripped away in the process.
So what is the significance of establishing Hieronymus as the historian behind this detail? In short, it helps to explain the Will’s disappearance, as he alone could have referred to it when recounting events at Babylon and linked it to the handing out of satrapies, and yet the following circumstances would have combined to bypass that claim: although Arrian used Hieronymus for his Events After Alexander, he and Plutarch were ultimately adherents to the intestate Journal. If Arrian sidestepped the testament in his Babylon summation, then Photius and Dexippus would not have seen it either. As Diodorus and Trogus were drawing from Cleitarchus for detail of Alexander’s death, a Will could hardly feature in their account of the settlement at Babylon.
And so the Will was crowded out – of accounts we know about, at least – leaving Curtius to remind us that it once existed in an unnamed source (or sources) he was reading. If that did not include Hieronymus, or an early less embellished copy of the Pamphlet, and if he was not making reference to a more sober forerunner of the Romance (still reputationally unlikely), then the Will had found new friends elsewhere; the late-Roman-era Metz Epitome indicates that the detail that we now call the Liber de Morte Testamentumque Alexandri Magni was independently, and still anonymously it seems, floating around the Roman literary world for centuries thereafter, for when Arrian and Plutarch dismissively summarised the conspiracy rumours, neither mentioned the author’s name (T9, T10).271
THE LOST EPITAPHIOS AGON
You must have been present at the funeral of many a hero, when the young men gird themselves and make ready to contend for prizes on the death of some great chieftain, but you never saw such prizes as silver-footed Thetis offered in your honour; for the gods loved you well. Thus even in death your fame, Achilles, has not been lost, and your name lives evermore among all mankind.272
Since Homeric times, funeral games and orations had been a requisite patros nomos, an ancestral custom, at the death of a king, hero or dignitary. Why was no epitaphios logos recorded for Alexander at Babylon, the funerary oration Demosthenes so praised and which was indispensable to the Greeks?273 Hesiod recited a poem at the death of the ‘warlike’ King Amphidamas in Chalcis and won a prize for his delivery, and Pericles reportedly delivered his eulogy for the Athenian dead a century before at the Kerameikos, the city cemetery; it was an oration that appears more a tribute to his own urban reforms rather than to the men who faced Sparta.274 Isocrates’ Panegyric to Evagoras, the Cypriot ‘model’ king who opposed Persian might, would have been the perfect template, for it too avoided detail of an unfortunate death; that encomium earned Isocrates 20 talents.275 Theopompus, famous throughout Greece for his public speeches and 20,000 lines of written epideictic orations, had delivered another at Mausolus’ funeral at Halicarnassus in 353 BCE, three years after Alexander was born.276 More relevant still, we have Demosthenes’ epitaph from the pro-Athenian allies who died at Chaeronea in September 338 BCE facing the new Macedonian sarissa and cavalry wedges.277
When summing up Thucydides’ rendition of Pericles’ speech, Cicero commented: ‘You do not know whether this matter is being illuminated by the diction of his words, or by his thoughts’; he was in fact being complimentary to the exiled Attic historian.278 Yet it remains highly unlikely, as Cicero knew, that Thucydides captured Pericles’ original wording, for he was acutely aware that laudationes funebres sanctioned embellishment and exaggeration on sentimental grounds; little damaging for non-influential dialogues, but when bestowed on the movers of history, the detail behind weighty historiographical judgements on them becomes questionable.
So where were the Homeridai and the orators to deliver the encomia at Babylon? They were, it seems, as speechless as Alexander had become. The dual silence is undecipherable, or taking our suspicions aboard, perhaps wholly comprehensible. Apart from a brief and unlikely reference in Arrian in the wake of the festivities dedicated to Dionysus at Ecbatana,279 any details of Alexander’s funeral games were, as it turned out, reserved for his father Philip, his brother-in-law (and uncle) Alexander Molossus, and for the burial of his ‘Patroclus’, Hephaestion.280 Alexander had to wait until Ptolemy secured the sarcophagus and threw ‘magnificent games’ to honour his king, thereby honouring his city, and to no lesser degree, himself.281
What we read today of events at Babylon is an episodic palimpsest of settlements within settlements, by both men-at-arms and by historians in conflict, and it remains as misunderstood as any momentous juncture in history. The tectonic plates of Ptolemy’s Journal, Cleitarchus’ syncretic theatre, Hieronymus’ possibly Will-derived satrapal list and the enigmatic Pamphlet, collided at the point of Alexander’s death. As with all tectonic activity, fault lines open up and something of the substrata is fortuitously revealed.
But the legendary ‘wonder’ linked to Semiramis that made the city famous is still shrouded in fog. ‘Semiramis’ is actually a Greek derivative of the Sumerian Sammuramat, ‘woman of the palace’, perhaps the official consort of the Great King and a title variously attributed to Assyrian queens of repute.282 And ‘wonders of the world’ did not begin in classical antiquity with Antipater of Sidon, as such expressions were used by the Assyrians long before; Sargon used similar eulogistic terms for his gigantic copper sculptures, and in fact Sennacherib used the term ‘wonder for all peoples’ to describe his own palace and gardens in Assyria. The terminology became commonplace and identical p
hraseology attached itself to Nebuchadnezzar’s new Babylonian walls, gates and palaces.283
As for Babylon’s eponymous gardens actually ‘hanging’ – kremastos in Greek, pensilis in Latin – the expressions ‘balconied’, ‘suspended’ or ‘overhanging’ translate equally well.284 And though Curtius did claim they were still in evidence in his day, with descriptions of the ornate irrigation devices provided by Strabo, Diodorus and Philo of Byzantium, the Persian diversion of the Euphrates just twenty-three years after Nebuchadnezzar’s death, would have likely rendered them arid, for a while if not permanently, along with the canals that formed a moat around the city. Ruins may have remained, if indeed such gardens ever existed in Babylon, for none of the above historians seems to have provided, or even drawn from, a recent eyewitness account.285
Nineveh is the more convincing location for the gardens, and Ctesias and Diodorus did place Nineveh, like Babylon, on the Euphrates instead of the Tigris.286 Moreover, the ancient Assyrian capital was referred to as ‘Old Babylon’ in local sources, and numerous examples exist in which one was mistaken for the other; stolen idols were ferried back and forth, and the pugnacious rhetoric of one is remarkably similar to the other right down to the pulling down of walls and the flooding of the city.287 In fact three cities were variously known as ‘Nineveh’ or ‘Old Nineveh’ in antiquity, whilst a further ‘Babylon the second’ was located both at Borsippa (close by), and another south of Cairo in Roman times. Astronomical observations suggest that the Assyrian cities of Nimrud and Sippar were referred to as ‘Old Babylon’ or as the ‘Other’ or ‘Second Babylon’ too, each of them claiming to be the ‘gateways of the gods’; Nineveh had eighteen gates specifically dedicated to the deities.288