In Search of the Lost Testament of Alexander the Great

by David Grant

  It is possible that Ptolemy avoided commentary at this point, as he did not wish to boost either the profiles of his Successor War opponents or the status of Alexander’s children and their politicking guardians. Ptolemy’s alleged Babylon speeches and his rejection of Asiatic unions could support that conclusion; after Alexander died Ptolemy married solely Greek and Macedonian wives despite his attempts to integrate his kingship into the Egyptian dynastic mode.

  Other solutions have been proffered to explain Arrian’s ‘slip’; one of them supposes that because his source, Aristobulus, wrote late in life he was by then confused on names.204 But this seems extremely unlikely; if the Cassandreian engineer-cum-historian was lucid enough to pull together a history of the campaign, then the detail as momentous as the Macedonian king’s brides would have surely remained unsullied in his mind. If he was that unreliable, Arrian would surely have highlighted many more obvious discrepancies and probably questioned his veracity in his opening rundown of his sources.

  A second solution, backed by recent studies of Persian tradition, suggests Darius’ daughters may have been referred to under different titles at different stages of their lives: formal court monikers and informal family names.205 Thus a daughter of Darius, referred to as ‘Barsine’ in early life, could have assumed the royal title ‘Stateira’ (or vice versa) once proclaimed a queen, either of which could have more generally denoted ‘royal daughter’, or ‘queen to be’.206 We recall Adea became ‘Eurydice’, a name by then synonymous with Macedonian queens; Audata, Philip’s first Illyrian wife, his mother, and possibly Cleopatra, his last wife, had assumed the title too.207

  Another onomastic parallel might exist: the name of Candace (Kandake), the legendary Queen of Nubia (or Kush) with whom Alexander had a Romance affair, was, it seems, derived from the Meriotic ktke, or kdke, meaning ‘queen mother’, and it was used for all Ethiopian female sovereigns.208 We know ‘Semiramis’ was attached to prominent Assyrian queens, and, according to Strabo, a host of monuments across the western Persian Empire.209 Alexander’s mother, Olympias, had at youth been called ‘Polyxena’ (named after a Trojan heroine), after marriage (or as a girl) ‘Myrtale’ (perhaps from Myrtle, Myrtos, the sacred plant of Aphrodite), and later in life she was known as both ‘Olympias’ (possibly after Philip’s victory at the Olympic Games at the time Alexander was born) and as ‘Stratonice’; presumably she was never given the title ‘Eurydice’ herself as Audata (now Eurydice) was still residing at the Pellan court when she married Philip.210

  Heracles’ maternal identity aside, could a true son of Alexander have really been ignored for so long? This was a bone of contention that persuaded Tarn to conclude the boy was a pretender. But Heracles may not have been ‘forgotten’ at all, neither at Babylon as evidenced by Nearchus’ speech (and its rejection), and surely he was never forgotten by Perdiccas and Roxane either; no doubt Eumenes and Olympias pondered his part, or removal, in their developing plans. It was simply Hieronymus’ later literary silence on Antigonus’ tenure of the boy at Pergamum that made Heracles’ re-emergence appear ‘sudden’.

  But what of Heracles’ fate in Alexander’s original Will? As the outcome of Roxane’s pregnancy was unknown in summer 323 BCE, Alexander would have recognised his existing son. If he was to have two boys, the immortal Vulgate lines, ‘to the strongest’, or ‘to the most worthy’ (T6, T7, T8, T9), if ever truly uttered, were perhaps an answer to the question posed to a dying king on which son he wished to eventually take the diadem when of throne age. Justin concluded his narrative of the Babylon settlement with: ‘A portion of the empire was reserved for Alexander’s son, if a son should be born’ (T20). Though this clearly referred to Roxane’s child, and supposedly to the compromise reached, such a concession for two princes would not have been without precedent. For in his testament Cyrus appointed one son, Cambyses, as king, and he granted the other a ‘portion of the kingdom’ to avoid an inevitable conflict. Insightfully, Xenophon’s reinvented Cyrus predicted more happiness for the son without the crown – free from the ‘plots and counter plots’ that plagued Persian politics.211

  Likewise, two sons raised at Pella would have been a recipe for court intrigue and yet more Macedonian fratricide that would pit one guardian against another. Moreover, the sons each had family claims in different regions, Alexander IV with hereditary residencies in Bactria (or Sogdia) and Heracles in Hellespontine Phrygia. But what testament strategy was not dangerous in Babylon, given one full-sister, two half-sisters, two sons, three or possibly four wives, and at least seven ruthlessly ambitious Bodyguards overseeing even more regional satraps with discontented garrisoned veterans and mercenaries accumulating under them? And what alternatives existed? In his heart Alexander himself may have doubted whether his half-barbarian sons would ever be named as kings of Macedonia. But if he was to truly defy Themistocles’ words and so challenge the gods and heroes with an ‘ungodly pride’ by ruling Europe and Asia, it would now take sons of royal blood from both sides of the Aegean to carry the title ‘King of Kings’.

  DONATIVES, TEMPLES AND MAUSOLEUMS: SOUND PLANNING FROM AN UNSOUND MIND

  Can the references to temples, statues and the tombs Alexander demanded in the ‘last plans’ ‘discovered’ at Babylon be reconciled with the surviving Will texts (T1, T2)? They can, but only if we accept corruption at the edges: Romance accretion and Roman-era contamination from one side, and deception in the Pamphlet on the other, for the pamphleteers had a clear agenda and it was not to bring attention to any Will-demanded monuments that Perdiccas had cancelled.212

  In return for their hardly unexpected ‘gifts from the fates’, the extant Will texts demand that the most notable of the hetairoi erect statues of Alexander, Heracles, Olympias, Ammon, Athena and Philip II in their respective territories, whilst offerings were to be sent to other notable religious sites such as Delphi and Olympia. Ambitious, but not unreasonable, this is the content we would have expected the pamphleteer(s) to preserve in a testament focusing on satraps and satrapies and not diversionary costly commemoratives. So the temples we see in the ‘last plans’ to be built at Delos, Delphi, Dion (the most important centre of worship of Zeus at the foot of Mt Olympus), Dodona, Cyrnus (Thrace) and Amphipolis, with one to surpass them all at Troy, appear to have been expediently dumped, if they were indeed from Alexander’s original Will (T25).213

  The testament may well have attempted a sound strategy for what were nevertheless fundamentally unsound circumstances. If our conclusions are valid, it featured the sensible deployment of the Somatophylakes and the leading generals as empire pan-provincial governors with multiple satraps under them, power counterbalanced by strategic Argead marriages at the top of the chain of command. On the other hand, those grandiose last plans – that conglomerate of untenable Will demands and campaign projects – were the product of a deeply troubled man whose sense of scale had been corrupted by Tyche’s unswerving companionship, the poetasters’ fawning verses, and by the profound but not bottomless depths of the Great Kings’ treasuries. ‘For whilst Fortune blinds herself, as a rule she even blinds those whom she has embraced.’214

  Whilst ‘the mind boggles’ at the arrangements Alexander ‘might have made for his own obsequies’, a laconic, humble and yet piercing inscription found on Cyrus’ single-storey tomb was said to have deeply moved Alexander; he was ‘reminded of the uncertainty and mutability of life.’215 Aristobulus stated he was recalling the carved epitaph ‘from memory’ in his book:

  Passer-by! I am Cyrus son of Cambyses,

  who founded the Persian Empire,

  and was King of Asia.

  Grudge me therefore not my monument.216

  Poignant as it reads, laconic philosophical epitaphs of this nature were not the norm on Achaemenid funerary architecture.

  Other ‘modest’ inscriptions do exist elsewhere at Pasargadae and they possibly provided the model for Aristobulus’ claim. Cyrus’ unassuming monument with six steps, a stone-roofed chamber and an entra
nce door ‘so small that even a short man would struggle to pass through it’, was portrayed by Onesicritus as a ‘tower with ten stories’ with Cyrus occupying the top floor.217 When Alexander wished to pay honours to the corpse within, rather than finding the golden couch and coffin, table, robes and gem-studded earrings they had once seen in the tomb guarded by the Magi, or the 3,000 talents of gold and silver allegedly buried with his insignia, he found ‘Cyrus’ decomposing shield, two Scythian bows and a scimitar.’ It had been looted – by Polymachus of Pella said Plutarch, or by the satrap Orsines implied the scheming eunuch Bagoas, recently snubbed by him.218 Ultimately, it was Alexander’s upheaval that was to blame for the sepulchral chaos, but the Magi were summarily tortured and the entrance was resealed.

  The small stone monument in what was once a royal park surrounded by a plantation of trees and irrigated lawns, sits in what is today the Murghab Plain, one kilometre southwest of Pasargadae. It is commonly known as the Ma` shad-e Madar-a Solayman, ‘the Tomb of Solomon’s Mother’ and the only remaining inscription is a verse from the Qur’an.219 A proposed dam that would flood the plain between Pasargadae and Persepolis has put the tomb’s fate in peril, just as the Ataturk Dam inundated Lucian’s birthplace in Samosata on the Upper Euphrates.220 Engineers claimed Cyrus’ monument would sit above the water line, archeologists claimed humidity would nonetheless destroy it. Construction of the dam finally commenced in April 2007.221

  A 19th century photo of the tomb of Cyrus the Great on the Murghab Plain near Pasargadae.

  A short distance down the Euphrates, the Birecik Dam dealt the same fate to the ancient river crossing at Thapsacus, possibly identifiable with Seleucia-on-the-Euphrates or with the later Roman Zeugma.222 Gone is the site which witnessed Alexander’s shipwrights reassembling two quinqueremes, three quadriremes, twelve triremes and some thirty light galleys (triaconters) they had portered in pieces overland from Phoenicia, a nautical feat recommissioned by the Duke of Wellington in 1835-37 to explore the ancient watercourses by steamship as a shortcut to India. Also gone are the bridge chains that Pliny thought were a relic of Alexander’s river crossing after the battle at Issus in 333 BCE, the same chains Pausanias described as covered in ivy and vine and used by the god Dionysus himself on his way to India.223

  The upturning of the past, whether deliberate plundering or well-intentioned excavation, has never truly ceased; the Tomb of Eurydice at Vergina was robbed of artefacts as recently as August-September 2001. Even the new excavations at Amphipolis risk causing imminent damage: it is feared that in the face of political turmoil the slowdown in the project leaves the exposed tomb vulnerable to landslides and poor drainage. These are rather symbolic examples of how our responsibilities as guardians of the past have always been subordinated to the needs of the present, a sobering reflection that explains much behind the disappearance of Alexander’s testament, and no doubt his tomb as well. Rather fittingly, that places the Macedonian king alongside Xerxes, Darius III and Augustus as ‘… celebrated rulers whose last resting places were now unknown.’224

  Naqsh-e Rustam in Shiraz, close to Persepolis. The site once contained the tombs of four Achaemenid kings, including Darius I and possibly Xerxes. Image by Amir Hussain Zolfaghary.

  CLOSING THE SOCRATIC ELENKHOS

  In an attempt to better understand the Macedonian-dominated world before, during, and after the death of Alexander, we have been stripping back layers of social, political, rhetorical and philosophical debris that cling to the extant accounts. Somewhere below that exoskeleton lies the bare-boned truth. As a riposte to the acataleptic dogma of the Sceptics that was taking hold of Athens, Aristotle once reasoned that the ‘… proper object of unqualified scientific knowledge is something which cannot be other than it is.’225 Without being able to subpoena a primary witness and one who could prove his unswerving neutrality on the matter to avoid the amphidoxon, we must acknowledge that our conclusions fall short of Aristotle’s stringent definition.226 Like all studies of Alexander’s life and the times of his successors, ours is a brief CAT scan of an infinitely complex body, that dimly lit candle flickering above that still damn dark abyss.227

  Aristotle also warned that ‘men are duped through certain likenesses between the genuine and the sham’; it was a proposition that may well have been known to Eumenes, written, as his Sophistical Refutations was, around 350 BCE.228 Rome similarly had to tackle verum and verisimile, and today’s investigative methodologies can still be thus fooled, for scholars have at times picked out brail-like contours in obscure sources and blindly joined the dots, bringing down the heavy hammer blows of Quellenforschung on the frailest of fragments in a hermeneutical tour de force. We forget the inaccuracies of the original texts themselves, and those of opinioned epitomisers, careless copyists and undisciplined diaskeuasts who render these forensic efforts comparable to an archaeologist reverently restoring words on a wall covered in nothing more than graffiti. As Friedrich Nietzsche wrote of ‘we philologists’, ‘one imitates something that is purely chimerical’ and one ‘chases after a wonderland that never existed’.229 And that somewhat epitomises the enduring ‘standard model’ of Alexander.

  It was Aristotle who, in his two Analytics, introduced and developed letters as placeholders in chains of logic.230 If he were here to conclude our investigation, he would encourage us to consider that if ‘a’ is opposed to ‘b’ and either is proved false, then the other may be true. But if both ‘a’ and ‘b’ appear to be fallacious, then ‘c’ must exist as an alternative to them both. Chrysippus, if he had survived a fourth dose of hellebore, would have used numbers in his argument-schemata to come to similar conclusions, and ‘if the gods studied logic, it would be the logic of Chrysippus.’231 But whether Peripatetic syllogisms, Stoic non-demonstrables or Epicurean canons are employed, logic does demand we ask a central question once again: if the Journal appears to be a fake and last words in the Vulgate genre read as pure theatre, why has history never reincarnated an alternative tradition?232

  Are we justified in such extended controversy, or are we, like Diogenes, simply rolling our wine jar up and down the Craneion to appear to be doing something useful?233 Well, scholars have demolished just about every other vivid episode linked to Alexander’s life, but little to date has probed beneath the rubble of his intestate death. Until something momentous turns up, Cleitarchus will ‘haunt the courts of history’ and be its ‘unhappy gibbering shade’, and Curtius will remain ‘decked in false tinsels’ in the absence of an identity.234 And though we are all frogs staring at the same historiographical pond, this ought not to preclude us searching for new streams of thought, even at the risk of appearing eristic, for still water inevitably stagnates.

  In a study of the ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’ embedded within the conqueror’s story, Brian Bosworth observed that: ‘One is constantly looking back to Alexander’s reign to explain what happened after his death and conversely interpreting his reign by references to later events.’235 This is exactly the case, and, of course, a flaw in the former perpetuates a defect in the latter. The irrationalities of the Successor Wars are forever divisible recurring numbers when considered in the light of intestacy.

  If events at Babylon remain cloaked by a literary ‘shroud of Parrhasius’ that Quellenforschung has not yet lifted,236 and if the nets and tridents of rhetorical entrapment still loom large as ever, the great rubbish dump at Oxyrhynchus is giving up lost Sophocles, Euripides and Hesiod and the odd mummy embalmed in Pellan prose.237 But we ask, as part of our elenkhos in Socratic debating style, if Hieronymus’ opening pages were now unearthed listing satrapies linked to a Will, would today’s scholars truly accept a new testate scenario?238 If the sands of Egypt exhaled a new papyrus in which Seleucus inherited by testament the satrapy of Babylonia, would historians not dismiss it as a closing fragment of the Romance? And if Perdiccas’ body were to be exhumed beside a similarly inscribed vellum, would they see a man facing off his assassins with the very mandate that empower
ed him, or simply an early Pamphlet draft?

  To reiterate our central contention when autopsying the Pamphlet: rebroadcasting the existance of Alexander’s testament in the early years of the Successor Wars and the deadly ‘funeral games’ would have only been a tenable strategy if knowledge of the original – or hearsay and rumour, to those not at Babylon – was circulating in the Diadokhoi armies and their courts. And Alexander was ever Alexander; facing death at Babylon, a Will by which his sons would rule under the protection of his few trusted men was the only route to immortality when requests for divinity and isotheos had been so hard to come by in his life.239 So it is high time that the discredited document was de-accessorised of portents and accusations of conspiracy, and extracted from the clutches of ‘romance’. It could bring coherency to Alexander’s ‘last words’ and his ‘last plans’, and it would explain the mechanism behind the division of the empire, as well as the references to the Will made by Curtius and Diodorus.240 Finally, it would demystify the intent of the Pamphlet itself.

  We have already noted that ‘the argument about the “truth” revolves around the degree of trust we place in the instincts of our secondary sources and their immunity to seduction.’ An example of how problematic this is can be evidenced by the above reference we made to Pytheas who possibly made an epic voyage to Thule (perhaps Orkney or Shetland, Norway, or even Iceland) in years not far removed from Alexander’s death, as his story is instructive. Polybius called the explorer from Massilia (modern Marseilles) a liar, preferring instead to believe the geography of Euhemerus, no doubt to preserve the reputation of Polybius’ own extensive travels.241 The fabled isles beyond Albion and Ierne – Britain and Ireland – existed, and yet they were branded a fanciful fiction, but Eratosthenes, who accurately calculated Earth’s circumference, never had any doubts about Pytheas’ log.242