In Search of the Lost Testament of Alexander the Great

by David Grant

  Finally, bested by Seleucus and with his own forces stretched across Asia Minor and the Levant, Antigonus extracted what remained of his army from Babylon in late 309 BCE; it was his return west that probably put a halt to Ptolemy’s own successful campaign in Greece.303 And with that withdrawal Antigonus lost hope of seeing any revenue from the lands to the east; in fact Demetrius’ short incursion the year before marked the beginning of the ‘official’ Seleucid era and the arrival of Seleucus’ epithet, Nikator, ‘bringer of victory’.304

  Diodorus’ brevity may of course be due to an undetected lacuna, but it seems more likely it was Hieronymus sanitising detail of the unhappy campaigns. A year or so earlier, the treaty that followed the ‘Peace of the Dynasts’ in 311 BCE between Antigonus, Cassander and Lysimachus (and only later Ptolemy, who lost his claims to Syria and Phoenicia) and under which the empire was redistributed ostensibly in the name of the now teenaged King Alexander IV, omitted Seleucus completely. Diodorus’ text implied the parties had agreed Babylonia was to be absorbed by Antigonus himself as part of his ‘first place in Asia’, and this was possibly Hieronymus’ means of justifying the failed campaign that followed. But ceding Antigonus Babylonia was unlikely to have been tolerated by Ptolemy who had been operating with Seleucus, for at that stage Antigonus remained powerful enough to absorb them both, a prospect less likely if they led two satrapal armies.305

  Other counterproductive episodes never featured in Diodorus’ texts, Demetrius’ cold blooded execution of Cassander’s garrison commander, Dionysius, at Munychia in 307 BC, for example, and there is one further explanation for that: Hieronymus was less inclined to expand on events he did not himself witness.306 As he initially campaigned with Eumenes after Alexander’s death this would explain Seleucus’ absence from the extant accounts for almost three years between his role at Triparadeisus and his hostility to Eumenes in Babylonia in 317 BCE; this was itself an event which followed Eumenes’ failures in Phoenicia which were once again reported in greater detail elsewhere.307 And yet Diodorus’ later description of Seleucus’ behaviour in the eastern satrapies as ‘generous and gracious’308 suggests Hieronymus (unless we are crediting him with too much influence on Diodorus) was not attempting a complete character whitewash of his patron’s eastern foe, despite the treatment he afforded him in his dealings with Demetrius in the wake of defeat at Ipsus:

  It seemed a violent and outrageous proceeding that one [Seleucus] who had possessed himself of the whole domain from India to the Syrian sea should be so needy still and so beggarly in spirit as for the sake of two cities to harass a man [Demetrius] who was his relative by marriage and had suffered a reverse of fortune.309

  When he finally settled down to put memories on scrolls, Hieronymus would have been looking out on a Seleucid Empire that encompassed almost all of the Asian satrapies his masters had fought to acquire, a bitter reflection perhaps assuaged by the knowledge that Seleucus’ son, Antiochus I, was besotted with Antigonus II Gonatas’ sister, Stratonice, who thus became queen of the eastern Seleucid realm.

  Although Seleucus had once rejected Eumenes’ overtures, he must have watched his duplicities with a developing interest, for he appears to have taken a leaf from the Cardian book of war, as Pyrrhus may have after him. For some three years after the battle at Gabiene, and when heading through Mesopotamia on his way to reclaiming Babylon, Seleucus motivated his own outnumbered and terror-stricken troops by relating his previous ‘dream-sleep’ vision of Alexander:

  … when he had consulted the oracle in Branchidae, the god had greeted him as King Seleucus, and Alexander standing beside him in a dream had given him a clear sign of the leadership that was destined to fall to him in the course of time.310

  Appian’s Syriaka claimed the oracle at Didyma had foretold Seleucus’ ascendancy in Asia when he was still serving under Alexander. So if Hieronymus’ history appears free from much of the didactic digression that infected later Hellenistic-era reporting, he did see the literary value of tyche, the epoptic, proto-cults and logoi as military ruses in what was otherwise a secular history; the predictions of Seleucus’ kingship may have been Hieronymus’ means of accounting for such great ‘enemy’ success in the face of his own patrons’ failures, if it was not later Seleucid propaganda.311

  Portentous episodes do frequently appear in the Diadokhoi accounts of Diodorus, Arrian, Appian and Plutarch who claimed that even the Pamphlet-damned Medius was granted a dream vision.312 When we consider the immense task Diodorus had set himself, it seems unlikely that the philosophical reflections that often accompanied these events originated with him, because his Bibliotheke otherwise exhibited little interest in such ‘proto-stoic’ reflectivity. Then again, we must recall his attachment to Polybius, and in turn, his quoting of Demetrius of Phalerum who embraced Tyche in no small way.313 But for Hieronymus the real gods were the generals he served, and in the absence of a wider debate on aition, causality, his deference to fate and omens was perhaps simply a neat means of cauterising its strands. His ‘legitimisation and delegitimisation of actions and agendas’, was, as Roisman commented, ‘a broadly elitist approach towards actors and history, with little credit given to their followers’.314

  Hieronymus, purportedly long-lived and with his faculties about him to the end, was essentially a captive of his times, swept along on a Macedonian storm he could neither shelter from nor outrun.315 His history was demonstrably, and yet understandably, partisan. An omitted campaign here, a swerved satrapy there, a character painted as capricious in-between; all grist to the mill for a ‘court’ historian with the power of ‘judicious selection, rejection, and arrangement’.316 In negotiating the political tides washing over him Hieronymus knew exactly which subterfuges would stick; he was after all the only (attested) person still alive in the 270s BCE who had enjoyed such an influential eyewitness position in the Diadokhoi intrigues. Of the hostile dynasties, only the Ptolemies and Seleucids remained powerful enough to dispute any content that unduly promoted the claims of his patrons. But, by now, these warring epigonoi were intermarried and they were unlikely to have cared less how the original satrapies were portioned out at Babylon, or won by the spear by their progonoi a half century before.

  Alexander, however, did not reside within Hieronymus’ pantheon of gods, and his legacy was manipulable for political effect. So when viewing the list of satraps and satrapies that sit within the distribution of power at Babylon, and then those within the Pamphlet Will, we may well be looking at the outcome through two distorted lenses. This is why historians need to beware when analysing the slant of the testament against what they consider the ‘real historical situation’ in 323 BCE, and even at Triparadeisus two or three years on, for Hieronymus was formative in the construction of each: he provided both the benchmarks and the comparison data.317

  Pausanias the Greek travelographer-cum-antiquarian was a realist who understood Hieronymus’ bias: ‘For a man who associates with royalty cannot help being a partial historian.’318 If Pausanias’ declaration was in fact a veiled character slur, its denunciation of regal association would have encompassed all of the ‘primary’ Alexander historians including the Pellan Marsyas, half-brother we believe to Antigonus himself.319 Marsyas’ position must have been a very delicate one and it may explain why his history appears to have tailed off in Egypt before, or soon after, the Diadokhoi became the ruthless giants who surrounded him in adulthood.320

  If Hieronymus’ pages were slanted towards his patrons, encomia they were not, and neither did they encroach upon Lucian’s narrow isthmus that divided history from panegyric. His admiration was anything but monotone; as Billows points out, the sibling works of Diodorus and Plutarch include some twenty-one passages that illustrated Antigonus’ excessive ambition, if that latter was not Duris sourced once more. We can, in fact, see a subtle dimming in the image of the father to the brightening of his son’s, in which condemnation of Antigonus’ lust for power was merely an abrasion that polished the story of Demetr
ius’ extraordinary bid for survival.321 Pausanias concluded that Hieronymus was ultimately hostile to all kings except Antigonus II Gonatas, who was, ironically, the grandson of Antipater and so the nephew of Cassander.322 Modern studies go further still and even propose an anti-Macedonian element underpinned Hieronymus’ elitist narrative.323

  Although Seleucus, Peucestas and Lysimachus faired badly in Hieronymus’ pages, as did Pyrrhus in the historian’s desire to please his last king, Polyperchon was afforded more mercurial treatment.324 Hieronymus’ agenda was clear: his portrait reflected Polyperchon’s alignment with, or opposition to, his own patrons, firstly his support for Olympias and (it is claimed) Eumenes, and then Antigonus from 315 BCE, and finally his alliance with Cassander who arranged the termination of Alexander’s Argead line. The historian’s tone towards Polyperchon changes at, or soon after, Eumenes’ final capture in late 316 BCE, when the previously loyal (if not dominant) epimeletes and regent was painted as ever more ineffectual. The final character assassination came when Alexander’s son, Heracles, faced his. The last episode may have genuinely disgusted the historian, for Polyperchon’s submissive surrendering up of the teenage Heracles in 309/8 BCE in Cassander’s interest for 100 talents and a share of power ended a scheme that may well have been crafted at Celaenae, for Polyperchon’s survival in the Peloponnese in the years leading up to Heracles’ re-emergence must have been down to Antigonus’ sponsorship; this suggests a common agenda for the boy and a plan in the making.325

  The greatest beneficiary of Hieronymus’ pen remains Eumenes, and were it not for his fellow literary Cardian, the former royal secretary might have been portrayed as an undeserving Greek pawn hounded around a hostile Macedonian chessboard. On the contrary, Hieronymus made sure he was remembered as a master strategist, consummate general, friend of the queen mother, and, for a time, the most ‘legitimately’ backed successor east of Macedonia. This was something of a ‘cleaning symbiosis’ between the historian and his patron for mutual historical gain.326 ‘It is not the strongest that survive, nor the most intelligent, but those most responsive to change’; and this sums up the careers of both of famous Cardians.327

  Aside from Alexander himself, no one of the age attracted more biographers than Eumenes. None of the long-lived dynasts, Antigonus, Ptolemy, Seleucus, nor Lysimachus, merited Plutarch’s biographical attention, and it has been insightfully suggested that as Macedonians who had oppressed Greeks they presented negative models.328 Unsurprisingly, the portrait of Eumenes embodied in the extant texts is one of outright admiration, and yet no biographer has ever proposed him as author of the Pamphlet.329

  Although Eumenes left us no history ‘book’, if he was indeed the keeper of the royal Ephemerides as Aelian and Athenaeus supposed, then his entries were a truly unimpeachable account of the campaign years.330 In which case, we should add him to our illustrious list of exiled ‘historians’, for in the summation of his biography of Quintus Sertorius, Plutarch stated that Eumenes had been alienated from Cardia, and in earlier corroborating text from Plutarch’s Life of Eumenes it is clear this was courtesy of the tyrant Hecataeus.

  But exile suggests his humble beginnings as a waggoner’s son, so a kakopatrides from a lowborn father, are highly unlikely, as Plutarch surmised.331 Yet this, like much else, was propaganda of the Diadokhoi type, for even Antigonus was termed a simple ‘common labourer’; the same passage in Aelian reported that both Darius III and Demetrius of Phalerum were born as slaves, and it further termed Polyperchon a ‘bandit’.332 Unable to challenge his obviously important roots, someone even released a disparaging character portrayal in which Antipater denied Cassander, then aged thirty-five, the right to recline at symposia because he had not speared a wild boar without a net.333 It is impossible to say just how early this material emerged but it was designed to suggest Cassander had not advanced beyond the status of the basilikoi kynegoi, the hunting corps of royal pages.

  If Duris was the source behind claims of Eumenes’ humble parentage, he may have drawn inspiration from his brother, Lynceus, for he was an author of comedies and light-hearted anecdotes. Furthermore, Duris is alleged to have studied under Theophrastus,334 whose mentor, Aristotle, was much maligned by his association with the conspiracy to poison Alexander, claims that may (is his time) have been pinned on Eumenes.335 With a son (or father) who won a title as an Olympian boxer, Duris may have admired Eumenes’ reported talent as a wrestler, but that seems as far as his admiration went, for ultimately Eumenes was a supporter of one faction of the Macedonian regime, which, as we know, overshadowed Duris’ own authority on Samos.336

  The melded careers of Hieronymus, Eumenes and Antigonus who could have once joined forces as the outcome at Nora, were formative in the shaping of events of the early Successor Wars, and one of the most significant first publications to emerge from the era, we believe, was the still anonymous Pamphlet. Taking into account everything we know about Eumenes’ brief career, between his incarceration at Nora and his death after battle at Gabiene some three years later, he alone ought to be proposed as the architect of the ‘partisan scrap’.337 It fits his behavioural patterns perfectly: he was demonstrably a born pamphleteer. From whatever angle we inspect the Pamphlet Will alongside the conspiracy allegations, there was only ever one man and one woman who in those years had cause to line up the names with the peculiar associations we see them in the Liber de Morte Testamentumque Alexandri Magni: Eumenes and Olympias.

  If the three Alexandrian-influenced historians – Ptolemy, Aristobulus and Cleitarchus – had a monopoly on the recording of events up to the point of Alexander’s death, the ‘tragic triumvirate’ of Hieronymus, Eumenes and Antigonus, dominated the shaping and the recording of the history of the next twenty years and beyond; it seems things had a way of evening out under the unique and exigent demands of the day.

  NOTES

  1.Plutarch Eumenes 3.3.

  2.Plutarch Eumenes, The Comparison of Sertorius with Eumenes 2, translation by John Dryden 1683.

  3.Plutarch Eumenes 10.2, translation from the Loeb Classical Library edition, 1919.

  4.Pausanias 1.13.9.

  5.The evolving role of the mediator in Ancient Greece discussed in Gutierrez (2012). Demeter was associated with the epithet thesmosphoros, ‘giver of laws’, and through her to Themis.

  6.Plutarch Eumenes 1.1. For other examples of Plutarch’s use of Duris see Alcibiades 32, Demosthenes 19.3. Anson (2004) p 35 cites Aelian 12.43 for the alternative background of Eumenes’ father.

  7.Nepos Eumenes 1.4-6 and 13.1 (aged twenty), also Plutarch Eumenes 1.1-3 for his background.

  8.The most notable rift being the Pixodarus affair; see Plutarch 10.1-2 and Alexander’s fleeing to Epirus following his outburst following Attalus’ drunken toast; Plutarch 9.7.10, Athenaeus 13.557d, Justin 9.7.3-4.

  9.Metz Epitome 116; see discussion in Heckel (1992) p 346. The title hypomnematographos is also discussed in Shipley (2000) p 264. For Eumenes’ first attested cavalry command, Arrian 5.24.6.

  10.Diodorus 18.58-3, Plutarch Eumenes 13.1, Nepos 6.3 for examples of the trust placed in Eumenes by Olympias.

  11.Arrian 7.12.7 and 7.14.9-10 as an example of the tension that existed between Eumenes and Hephaestion.

  12.Arrian 7.14.10. The hipparchy retained Hephaestion’s name out of respect.

  13.Plutarch Eumenes 2.3 for the wealth found in Eumenes’ tent. Discussed in Anson (2004) p 42 and Berve (1926). He was awarded a golden crown at Susa, see Arrian 7.5.6. Arrian Indike 18.7 for the trierarch role.

  14.Plutarch Eumenes 1.3 and Arrian 7.4.6 for Eumenes’ bride; Ptolemy and Nearchus, along with Eumenes, allegedly married into the line of Artabazus; his daughter, Barsine, was the mother of Heracles, Alexander’s older son; discussed further in chapter titled Lifting the Shroud of Parrhasius.

  15.Plutarch Eumenes 3.2 for details of Eumenes’ role in the Babylonian Settlement. Curtius 10.7.1-3 and 10.9.20 used the term bellorum civilium Macedonibus when describing the fighting at
Babylon following Alexander’s death.

  16.Arrian Events After Alexander 1.1-3 based on the translation in Goralski (1989) p 84. Seleucus was not listed in Arrian’s earlier list of the Somatophylakes but he may well have been elevated by 323 BCE. If the number had risen to eight and considering Hephaestion had died and Peucestas was governing Persis and the surrounding regions, then both Seleucus and Eumenes might have been enrolled. Further discussion in chapter titled Lifting the Shroud of Parrhasius.

  17.Full discussion of the Somatophylakes, their numbers and background in Heckel Somatophylakes (1978). It was Berve who identified 14 individuals that could have qualified for inclusion. Tarn 1 (1948) p 12 identified 13 individuals with the role.

  18.Arrian 6.30.2 for Peucestas’ governorship of Persis.

  19.Arrian 1.11.7-8 suggested the hypaspists carried the king’s weapons, taken from Troy, into battle; as Peucestas allegedly carried the shield from Troy at Mallia, then he is credibly a former royal hypaspist of perhaps 200 elites. Arrian 6.28.3-4 for the seven becoming eight. The Pythagoreans associated the number seven with ‘opportunity’, according to Aristotle, whose lost treatise on the Pythagoreans is preserved in fragments by Alexander of Aphrodisias. See discussion in Riedweg (2002) p 194. The number seven was also associated with the wisdom of the Seven Sages of the Epic of Gilgamesh and Mesopotamian and Assyrian Seven Gods (the Pleiades) as well as the seven heavens and earths; Dalley (2013) p 6 for the associations of ‘seven’ in Mesopotamia. Arrian 6.28.4 did not include Seleucus in his line of Bodyguards but this was referring to the Somatophylakes at Carmania in 325/4 BCE. Seleucus was apparently later singled out for marriage honours at Susa; Arrian 7.4.6. Hephaestion died in 324 BCE requiring a further replacement. With Peucestas governing Persis, both Seleucus and Eumenes might have been enrolled as Somatophylakes. Further discussion earlier in the chapter.