In Search of the Lost Testament of Alexander the Great

by David Grant

  Overall verisimilitude would have demanded a testament that appeared complete. For that reason the collaborating pamphleteers left untouched what they could and what had no value in changing. Eumenes also knew he could not alchemise what was too widely known, indiscriminately elevating those who turned ‘ally’, for example, or downgrading those who opposed him, beyond a believable level. This is probably why the Pamphlet narrative appears to have referred to the suspicion that Alexander’s death was being kept from the infantry which attempted to storm his bed chamber, for this likely correlated with what did take place at Babylon, though we must accept the possibility of its reverse origination: Cleitarchus incorporated this detail from the by then famous partisan publication.244

  The passing of the ring to Perdiccas was clearly broadcast too, for this justified Eumenes placing initial support in him, and it reinforced the heinous nature of Perdiccas’ murder in Egypt (in which Ptolemy was not implicated).245 Eumenes would not, however, have been motivated to restate the grander untenable last wishes that were absorbed into Diodorus’ ‘last plans’, for they were irreverently cancelled by Perdiccas at Babylon. The reasonable scale of Alexander’s commemoratives is the carefully edited result, though they have since been contaminated in the surviving texts.246

  Alexander’s secretary, in collusion with Alexander’s mother, was reissuing the Will as a genuine Ephemerides-recorded testament into a world in which knowledge of the original still carried dangerous connotations. Beside it they poured a toxic concoction of threat, bribery, exoneration and falsification into a deep propaganda cup, whose content was washed down with the fluid authenticity its complicitors could uniquely provide.

  Ironically, Aristotle was at some later point dragged into the frame and not in a minor role; a Vulgate tradition embellishing the original conspiracy claims cited the great Peripatetic scholar in the role of providing the poison, and encouragement, to Antipater. By appointing the Macedonian regent as executor of his own Will, Aristotle might have unwittingly laid himself open for posthumous implication; it lent the plot a weighty audacity and something of a philosophical gravitas (T9, T10).247 Before the Pamphlet was published, Aristotle’s student and successor, Theophrastus, may have already published his Enquiry Into Plants in which he recommended disguising the bitter taste of the poison strychnine by serving it in undiluted wine, inspiring the Pamphlet authors’ conspiratorial imaginations in the process.248 After all, everyone knew that ‘regicide was something of a Macedonian tradition’.249

  THE LEGACY OF THE PAMPHLET

  The immediate effect of the publication was short-lived, despite its contents reaching Greece. Cornered on a Macedonian chessboard himself, Eumenes had castled out of trouble with a folio of fakes, but he sacrificed too many pieces in the process. Once Cassander had engineered a guilty verdict at a sham trial of Olympias and overseen her execution near the fortified town of Pydna, the Pamphlet became as dangerous to quote as one of Callisthenes’ sophisms.250 Here Curtius’ contention – echoed in other Vulgate texts – that ‘whatever credence such stories gained, they were soon suppressed by the power of the people implicated by the rumour’, finally comes to life.251 In the vacuum that was left behind, Antigonus expediently broadcast his new ‘royalist’ side by demanding Cassander restore the imprisoned Roxane and Alexander IV ‘to the Macedones’.252 This was the veneer of loyalty and court-sanctioned legitimacy he had once hoped to obtain from an alliance with Eumenes, and Alexander’s sons now started to glow with a lustre that failed to shine at Babylon.

  In response, Cassander had his henchman, Glaucias, murder mother and son, possibly recalling the verse ‘a fool is he who slays the sire and leaves the sons alive’.253 Soon after, the polemical noises from Greece started haranguing the behaviour of the conquering Alexander, and that, suggested Tarn, was broadcast by the Peripatetics under Cassander’s shield.254 It was now 310 BCE, the ‘seventh year of Alexander IV’ according to the Babylonian Chronicle (here calculated from the death of Philip III, suggesting that had indeed been in 317 BCE), the same year that Antigonus commenced a concerted campaign to remove Seleucus from Babylon.255 Diodorus described the mood:

  When Glaucias had carried out the instructions, Cassander, Lysimachus and Ptolemy, and Antigonus as well, were relieved of their anticipated danger from the king, for henceforth, there being no longer anyone to inherit the realm, and each of those who had ruled over nations and cities entertained hopes of royal power…256

  The short-lived ‘Peace of the Dynasts’ of 311 BCE had in fact been ‘a disguised invitation to the jailers to eliminate any members of the family they held’, and by 309/308 BCE, with the murder of Alexander’s older son, Heracles, who was then approaching adulthood, and with Antigonus’ execution of Cleopatra when she attempted to depart Sardis in 308 BCE to marry Ptolemy, the Pamphlet faded into romantic obscurity.257 The original Will had now outlived its useful sell-by date and the royal charade was gone, almost, for Cassander had extracted the Argead Thessalonice at the conclusion of the siege at Pydna and took her as his bride, forcefully according to Antigonus, a potentially valid accusation when recalling she was Olympias’ ward.258

  Cassander’s treatment of Olympias (he refused her a proper state burial), Roxane and Alexander IV (imprisoned and then executed) suggests, as one scholar put it, that he tried to categorise Alexander’s ‘branch of the Argeads as illegitimate’ while seeding his own.259 Cassander did, in fact, clear the way for the rise of the Ptolemaic, Seleucid and Antigonid dynasties when weeding the path for his own. Soon, once Pyrrhus had killed Cleopatra’s son who reigned as Neoptolemus II in Epirus for five years (to 297 BCE, if that identification is correct), the only surviving males of any Argead blood were, ironically, the next generation Philip, Antipater and Alexander, Cassander’s sons by Thessalonice.260

  In his Parallel Lives we recall that Plutarch rather fittingly paired Eumenes with the brilliant Roman outcast, Quintus Sertorius, whose craft and ability was additionally compared to the achievements of Philip II, Antigonus Monophthalmos and Hannibal. Plutarch’s obituary to both men is a fitting way to close the chapter:

  With him [Sertorius] we may best compare, among the Greeks, Eumenes of Cardia. Both were born to command and given to wars of stratagem; both were exiled from their own countries, commanded foreign soldiers, and in their deaths experienced a fortune that was harsh and unjust; for both were the victims of plots, and were slain by the very men with whom they were conquering their foes.261

  The final lines were of course referring to the Silver Shields’ treachery at Gabiene, when Eumenes had been ‘unable to fly before being taken prisoner’.262 The influential biographing historian from Chaeronea gave us a vivid picture of a man contemplating his fate upon hearing of the fermenting treachery:263

  … Eumenes… went off to his tent, where he said to his friends that he was living in a great herd of wild beasts. Then made his Will, and tore up and destroyed his papers; he did not wish that after his death, in consequence of the secrets contained in these documents, accusations and calumnies should be brought against his correspondents.264

  This rather contradicts the allegation that followed from Plutarch: Eumenes ‘neither took good precautions against death, nor faced it well’, possibly echoing the continued hostility of Duris of Samos.265

  What else did Eumenes have in the box of secret correspondence? The blueprint of the grand plan he was hatching with Olympias? Perhaps a copy of Alexander’s original Will as a template to draw from? Or, possibly, the first written copies of the Pamphlet and other homespun Pellan letters of empowerment that were supposedly signed by Polyperchon and the kings? We might guess who the counter-correspondents were apart from Cleopatra in Sardis, Olympias in Epirus and then Pella: other promising, but vacillating, satraps waiting to see which way to jump. And whom would Eumenes have chosen to pass the incendiary folio to and then appoint executor to his own Will? Hieronymus must be the obvious choice on both accounts, in which case the Cardian histori
an became the guardian of the knowledge of two vanished Wills.

  Here it is tempting to pinpoint the third, and possibly the most poignant, date for the release of the Pamphlet: before, or immediately after, the final battle at Gabiene on the Iranian Plateau. Eumenes was not immediately seized and handed over to Antigonus, for when negotiating the return of their baggage the Silver Shields complained ‘… that their wives should be spending the third night in a row in the arms of the enemy.’266 During this time and withdrawn in his tent, Eumenes had nothing to lose by drafting the toxic document while destroying the evidence behind it.

  ‘Among the wounded there was also brought in as a captive the historian Hieronymus, who hitherto always had been held in honour by Eumenes, but after Eumenes’ death enjoyed the favour and confidence of Antigonus.’267 Did Hieronymus reveal the folio to his captor? Not burdened himself with guilt in the Pamphlet and with his satrapies still intact, and, moreover, intent on subduing those who were dammed by the publication and yet still in league with those who were not, how much would Antigonus have had to lose from letting the incendiary scrolls past his sentries, or in passing the garnishing detail to Hagnon of Teos (Hagnothemis) who is said to have first broadcasted it aloud, obviously before his squadron was captured in a naval battle off of Cyprus?268

  Following his victory at Gabiene, Antigonus must have heeded Lysander’s Spartan advice: ‘Where the skin of the lion does not reach, it must be patched with the skin of a fox’, or perhaps in this case a jackal.269 For upon Eumenes’ death, he certainly patched up his differences with the now-bested Polyperchon and had him battling in his own interests against Cassander in Greece. This raises the question whether Antigonus himself was the source of the added slander against Aristotle, for he and Cassander’s father had clearly been confidants.

  Just a few years earlier, Antigonus’ son, Demetrius Poliorketes, is said to have defied his father by saving Mithridates, a friend then under suspicion. Demetrius wrote in the sand with his spear without Antigonus noticing: ‘Fly, Mithridates!’ And he did, curiously to an unnamed stone fortress somewhere in Cappadocia.270 ‘Politics is history on the wing’, Cicero is portrayed as declaring, and although ‘unable to fly’ at Gabiene, even though it was alleged he tried, what Eumenes may have initially conceived at Nora, and then sculpted into its final form sometime in the three following years, was indeed a masterstroke of mental warfare that rivalled the best Macedonian machtpolitik.271

  NOTES

  1.Diodorus 18.53.4-6, translation from the Loeb Classical Library edition, 1947.

  2.Plutarch Apophthegms or Sayings of Kings and Commanders 8860 (5), Lysander.

  3.The terrain is described by Polyaenus 4.6.7 and Diodorus 18.44.2-4.

  4.Full title: JM Kinneir, Journey Through Asia Minor, Armenia and Koordistan, In the Years 1813 and 1814, with Remarks on the Marches of Alexander and Retreat of The Ten Thousand, John Murray, London 1818, pp 111-112, in which he stated he had interviewed locals of the region who identified an ancient stone fortress above a deep gorge as ‘Nour’. Also quoted in Thirlwall (1845) p 305. It was also known as ‘Yengi Bar’. For Neroasus see Strabo 12.2.17. For the reference to Taurus, Kinneir (1813) p 4.

  5.Ramsay (1923) pp 1-10. For the battle at Orcynia see Plutarch Eumenes 18.9-10, Nepos 5 (battle name not mentioned) and Diodorus 18.39.7-18.40.4. As it has been noted, Orcynia might have been a Cappadocian district and not a specific battleground. Who stocked Nora, and why, has never been questioned but if it guarded the pass leading to the Cilician Gates, then it is more explainable as a permanently stocked fortress. Antigonus could have maintained its strategic value by keeping it provioned for just such a battle outcome; Eumenes could have likewise provisioned the fortress as a fallback option. Plutarch Eumenes 11.1 and Diodorus 18.41.3 for the water, firewood, grain and salt in abundance but, according to Plutarch, no other edibles. The Journal of the Royal Geographic Society of 1841 p 303 cited claims by Colonel Leake that Cybistra was Nora, though Cybistra is linked to Karahisar which appears too far west to be the location.

  6.For the location see Plutarch Eumenes 10.1; Nepos 5 simply stated ‘Phrygia’. Diodorus 18.41.1-3 did not state a specific location.

  7.This was first made possible by Reitzenstein’s 1888 translation of the two single leaves (a bifolium) of the Vatican palimpsest (ms. Vaticanus 495) and more recently Oxyrhynchus fragment PSI 11 1284; see Simpson (1959) p 377. This was published as Arriani τῶν μετὰ Αλέξανδρον libri septimi fragmenta e codice Vaticano rescripto nuper iteratis curis lecto, Breslauer philologische Abhandlungen Bd. 3, H. 3, Breslau 1888, S. 1-36. See Bosworth (1978) for full discussion. The fragment found at Oxyrhynchus in 1932 gave a detailed description of Eumenes in battle against either Craterus or, in Bosworth’s opinion, Neoptolemus, which appeared to come from Arrian Events After Alexander. For details of the extract from the Vatican palimpsest see discussion in Goralski (1989) p 81 and for additional detail on surviving fragments of Arrian Events After Alexander see Goralski (1989) pp 81-83.

  8.Errington (1970) p 73 and Bosworth (2002) p 22 for discussion on Arrian Events After Alexander filling ten books covering three years to Antipater’s return to Macedonia sometime after Triparadeisus.

  9.Goralski (1989) p 82 and Kebric (1977) p 52.

  10.See discussion in Hornblower (1981) p 101 and Warner (1966) p 30 for dividing up the campaign year.

  11.The Roman Consular Year was set at January 1st to December 29th from 153 BCE onwards. It had previously commenced in March and before that May. See explanation in Polo (2011) p 15. We have no idea how extensively Hieronymus covered events in Greece for example when based in Asia; the coverage of the double-burial of Philip III and Eurydice at Diodorus 19.52.5, as an example, seems Diyllus-sourced as it closely matches Athenaeus 4.155 citing Diyllus.

  12.See Anson (2004) p 18 for discussion of Diodorus’ chronology. For the archon dating see Hornblower (1981) pp 108-109. Also expanded in Anson (1986) pp 208-217. Full discussion of the chronological problems and the omission of archon years in Anson (2004) p 77 footnote 2 and Smith (1961) p 283 ff; also Goralski (1989) p 102.

  13.See discussion in Anson (1977) p 251 for the dating of the battle at Orcynia.

  14.‘Passed over in silence’ quoting Billows (1990) p 347. Diodorus occasionally confused himself with his method. One result is the conflicting claim that Eumenes’ victory over Craterus in 321 BCE provided Perdiccas with the confidence for his invasion of Egypt (18.33.1) whereas just several pages later he stated news of that battle arrived only after Perdiccas’ death in May/June 320 BCE (18.37.1), although Eumenes’ victory could refer to that over Neoptolemus some ten days before. Plutarch Eumenes 8.2 supported Diodorus’ latter claim. Earlier, a more generalised approach to time-framing by Diodorus placed Alexander’s Exiles Decree ‘a short time before his death’ (18.8.2) and yet he went on to state it was proclaimed at the Olympic Games of 324 BCE (17.109.1) thus almost a full year earlier.

  15.Anson (2014) pp 58-59 and pp 116-121 for the relative chronologies. Also Hauben (1977) pp 85-120. He cites Manni and others who date Triparadeisus to 321 BCE (the ‘high’ chronology, supported by Diodorus’ event order). The date of Perdiccas’ death, May/June 320 BCE, is backed up by the Babylonian Chronicle extract BM 34, 660 Vs 4 which suggests 320 BCE for the conference (the ‘low’ chronology, also backed by the Parian Chronicle). Also discussed in Errington (1970) pp 75-80. Anson (1986) pp 208-217 made a convincing case that Triparadeisus took place in 320 BCE. For references to the astronomical records of Babylon see Geller (1990) pp 1-7.

  16.See Bosworth (2002) pp 20-21 for discussion and in particular Bosworth (2002) pp 55-81 and p 74 for the inaccuracy of the Parian Chronicle; also Wheatley (1995) p 434. Goralski (1989) p 103 for a full translation of the Parian Chronicle.

  17.The dates and authorship discussed in detail in chapter titled Guardians and Ghosts of the Ephemerides.

  18.Diodorus 18.59.6 describing Eumenes’ change of fortune.

  19.
Diodorus 18.41.7-18.42.1.

  20.Arrian Events After Alexander 1.39, Diodorus 18.37.1-3, Justin 13.8.10-14.1.1, Appian Syrian Wars 53 for the proscription of the Perdiccans. Hornblower (1981) p 11 agreed that Hieronymus would have needed Antigonus’ permission to leave the fortress.

  21.Diodorus 18.47.4-5. It was Aristodemus who later brought news to Antigonus of Antipater’s death. One modern interpretation assumed the journey to Macedonia was in response to Eumenes’ immediate demands, whilst another considers it took place late in the siege when Eumenes saw little hope with local negotiations. See Anson (2004) p 137 and compare to Billows (1990) p 77, accepting Diodorus’ version at 18.41.7. Considering the distance to be covered, and the timing of Antipater’s death; it seems the journey was more likely linked to the early demands. For the first offer see Diodorus 18.41.5-7. Also Diodorus 18.53.2-7 for the bargaining and release. For the full year of the siege, Diodorus 18.53.4-5. For six months, Nepos 5.6-7; either scenario is possible, that is until news of Antipater’s death in late 319 BCE arrived in Phrygia.

  22.Plutarch Eumenes 10.4 for Eumenes’ fame.

  23.Literally translated as either ‘the love of honour’ or the ‘urge to be thought superior’ and ‘love of power’. Aelian 12.16 and 14.47a suggested Alexander had also been alarmed at the extent of his philotimia and philarchia before Antipater was.

  24.Plutarch Eumenes 5.4-7 for Antipater’s offer of an alliance with Eumenes in defeating Perdiccas. Eumenes rejected the offer stating they were old enemies.

  25.For Sardis see Arrian Events After Alexander 1.40 and 24.8, Plutarch Eumenes 8.6-7. Justin 14.1.7-8 for the prestige hoped for. Gothenburg Palimpsest for detail of Eumenes bettering Antipater in Lydia or Phrygia; discussed in chapter titled The Tragic Triumvirate of Treachery and Oaths.