Soldier, Priest, and God
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Soldier, Priest, and God
Soldier, Priest, and God
A Life of Alexander the Great
F. S. Naiden
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Naiden, F. S., author.
Title: Soldier, priest, and god : a life of Alexander the Great / F.S. Naiden.
Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018011264 (print) | LCCN 2018036455 (ebook) | ISBN 9780190875350 (updf) | ISBN 9780190875367 (epub) | ISBN 9780190875343 (hardback : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Alexander, the Great, 356 B.C.–323 B.C.—Religion. | Greece—Kings and rulers—Biography. | Generals—Greece—Biography. | Middle East—Religion. | LCGFT: Biographies. Classification: LCC DF234.2 (ebook) | LCC DF234.2 .N35 2019 (print) | DDC 938/.04092 [B]—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018011264
Endpapers: A Topographical View of the Asian Expedition, 334–323 BC. Ancient World Mapping Center.
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Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America
Ζει ο βασιλιάς Αλέξανδρος;
Ζει και βασιλεύει
—From a Greek Folktale
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. The Mediterranean Comes of Age
2. A Macedonian Priest-King
3. The S-Curve
4. The Throne of Tyre
5. The Throne of Egypt
6. The Throne of Babylon
7. A Vacant Throne
8. Sogdian In-laws
9. Self-Defeat
10. Persian In-laws
11. The Waters of Life
12. Dead Men and a Living King
Chronology
A Glossary of Gods and Lesser Beings
Appendices
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
this book owes much to audiences at New York University’s Institute for the Ancient World, the University of California at Berkeley, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of Reading, Tulane University, Washington and Lee University, and Camp Schwab, United States Marines, Okinawa, who all heard lectures of mine on Alexander. I also thank audiences at the conventions of the Association of Ancient Historians, the Society for Classical Studies, and the Society for Military History, and I gratefully thank Stefan Vranka and Oxford University Press for shepherding this book to publication. For work on the maps thanks go to the Ancient World Mapping Center, especially director Richard Talbert, and to the Loeb Classical Library Foundation, which defrayed the cost.
Special thanks for comments, corrections, or suggestions go to Eugene Borza, Andrew George, Peter Green, Waldemar Heckel, Julith Jedamus, Joseph Manning, Francesca Rochberg, Robartus Van der Spek, Andrew Stewart, Richard Stoneman, Dorothy Thompson, Christopher Tuplin, and Everett Wheeler. I cannot adequately thank Ann Loftin, who copyedited most of the manuscript, except to say to her, as I would to each reader I have named, that the errors are mine and the felicities yours, insofar as they are not treasures deposited by centuries of tradition.
Soldier, Priest, and God
Introduction
in 336 bc, the twenty-year-old Alexander succeeded his father, Philip, as king of the Macedonians, a rural Balkan people. Within a decade or so, a tale spread that Zeus and not Philip was his father. This tale was no more improbable than what happened in the meantime. Alexander and his army had overthrown the Persian Empire, which stretched from Asia Minor to India by way of Egypt. Bigger things have happened, such as the spread of Christianity and Islam, but more slowly. It took several centuries for Jesus’s followers to spread his message across the Roman Empire, and followers of the Prophet Muhammad fought for nearly 200 years to spread Islam from Arabia to Spain and Central Asia.1
Whatever we may think of Alexander—whether great or only lucky, a civilizer or a sociopath—we do not regard him as a religious leader. We do not expect that much religion from a military commander. Before deciding when to cross the English Channel in 1944, General Eisenhower consulted meteorologists, not diviners. He encouraged his men with prayerful words, but he accepted enemy surrenders without ceremony and assigned the burial of the dead to chaplains. Alexander depended on diviners scrutinizing sheep livers to learn when to cross the Hellespont and the Indus. Along with prayerful words, Alexander made a display of hacking sacrificial animals to death. When enemies surrendered to him, he often obliged them to perform a ritual of supplication. Rather than assign the dead to chaplains, Alexander conducted funerals himself. Every dead comrade could turn into a friendly or unfriendly ghost, a being to be pleased or placated.2
Religion was much more than these rituals. Temples were also treasuries, so religion affected war finance. Many rituals were very public events, so religion affected diplomacy and the administration of conquered territory. Religion provided legitimacy, and so it affected the solidarity felt among soldiers and the loyalty of subjects.
Religion dominated warfare because gods dominated everything. The Indus River was a god, and Zeus controlled the weather. Zeus also watched over suppliants, and he blessed a special religious fraternity, called the cult of the companions, to which Alexander and his subordinates belonged. Alexander claimed Heracles and Zeus as ancestors. In this sort of world, atheism was virtually impossible, and religious freedom was a risk no community would take. If the gods abandoned a community, an eclipse might pluck the sun or moon out of the sky, a hostile river might leap out of its bed, or an earthquake pitch a city into the sea.
All ancient commanders played religious parts, but Alexander played the most. He uttered or inspired the most prayers and made the most sacrifices, and he did so in the most places, languages, and rituals. We may think of him as the Pope, the Holy Roman Emperor, and the head of the Church of England, all in one.
Piety did not make Alexander overly scrupulous. As a priest, he mostly observed festival days on which fighting was forbidden, but he sometimes found religious reasons to ignore festival days and fight anyway. Told by a seer to defeat the enemy by the end of the month, he lengthened the month. Told not to sacrifice in a temple, he besieged the city where the temple stood, and persevered until he captured the temple and made the sacrifice, even though—or just because—the city was Tyre, the Manhattan of the ancient world.
When Alexander used religion astutely, he and his army prospered. At the start of his reign in Macedon he rallied his late father’s companions, and in neighboring Greece he gained kudos by refurbishing temples and sponsoring festivals. In Egypt he performed the c
eremonies needed to be pharaoh and thus became a god as well as a priest. Babylon surrendered to him partly because he agreed to become a sacred king of another kind. All over the Levant, he demoralized enemies and pacified subjects by worshipping as the locals did.3
When Alexander neglected or mismanaged religion, he and his army suffered. The farther he got from the Mediterranean, where he knew some of the gods and had a feel for others, the less skill he displayed, and the more men he killed or lost. In Iran, where he refused to be crowned and even destroyed a shrine, resistance against him mounted. In India, the Buddhists, Jains, and Hindus baffled him, and he killed them by the hundreds of thousands. Then his officers, men he regarded as companions of a religious kind, rebelled against him and forced him to abandon his campaign of conquest.4
Although he never fully recovered from this disappointment, he continued to perform his priestly duties. As far as we know, the last time he rose from his bed was to sacrifice.5
among the hundreds of Alexander biographies, none has focused on the topic of religion. Well-known lives of Alexander in English mention the subject incidentally. Peter Green’s biography notes episodes such as Alexander’s sacrifice at Tyre but does not ask why any act of sacrifice should be important. Robin Lane Fox’s longer biography mentions some Greek and Macedonian religious practices but is largely silent about the religions of the Near East. Mary Renault’s novel delves least into religion, apart from its psychological treatment of Alexander’s becoming a kind of god in Egypt.
These writers assume religion meant little to Alexander. Many British writers have thought of Alexander as a proto-Anglican, punctilious in matters of ceremony but otherwise indifferent.6 In riposte, German writers seized on Alexander’s becoming an Egyptian god and interpreted this event as a psychotic break.7 For late twentieth-century German writers, Alexander was a pagan Führer and his men were virtual Nazis. For some Americans, Alexander was a religious cynic, like a gangster dropping occasional contributions into the collection plate.8
Some modern soldiers have written about Alexander, notably the British general J. F. C. Fuller, but they say nothing about religion. Fuller preferred military operations, and others have concentrated on logistics and equipment. Writers on Alexander’s strategy omitted religion despite the importance of the gods for war aims and propaganda. Recent writers on the role of religion in ancient warfare omitted Alexander and his campaign.9
It is easy to understand why writers have not attempted a religious portrait of Alexander. Ancient sources take religion for granted. They record Alexander's daily morning sacrifices during his last days, but not at other times. Although they record a few rituals that went wrong, they skip many that went right, and they seldom pay attention to any religion other than that of the ancient writer and his original readers. For that matter, only a few sources from Alexander’s own time exist. He kept no record of his religious activity, and indeed wrote nothing except letters, only a few of which survive. What we do know comes from memoirs by the companions who worshipped alongside Alexander. Of these books only fragments remain—scattered glimpses of sacrifices, coronations, and omens.10
The best-known companion, Ptolemy, a boyhood chum of Alexander’s who succeeded him as pharaoh, glorified Alexander and himself at others’ expense. His Alexander was a flawless priest, impeccably Greco-Macedonian among his own men but suavely adaptable among foreigners. What Ptolemy thought of Alexander’s deification is impossible to say, except that Ptolemy thought it was good policy in Egypt. The writings of less servile generals, such as Alexander’s viceroy Antipater, are lost.11
The Greek admiral Nearchus and Alexander’s helmsman Onesicritus mentioned religious matters mainly with respect to India, and Onesicritus indulged in fanciful propaganda. Alexander was realistic about him. After listening to Onesicritus read from his manuscript Alexander said, “How I should like to return from the dead some time, and see how your stuff strikes people. … For now, they have good enough reason to praise and welcome it. That is their way of angling for a share of my favor.”12 More propaganda came from companions who became governors and minted coins that likened Alexander to Heracles and other heroes or gods.
Alexander’s chief engineer, Aristobulus, cared more about Alexander’s interest in hydraulic engineering than about religious practices. Aristotle’s nephew Callisthenes, who signed on as court historian, pointedly refused to acknowledge Alexander as a god and supplied only a few religious details, mostly about the Levant. More valuable are the surviving fragments of the “Stories of Alexander” written by Chares, the royal chamberlain. While Ptolemy typically noticed brief, standard offerings, such as those made for crossing rivers, Chares described a unique nine-day festival for Zeus that provided sacrificial meat to every man under arms. Chares takes the reader aside to explain that the same trumpet brought worshippers to a sacrifice, companions to a meeting, and soldiers to a muster. Another royal servant, Ephippus, described the funeral of Hephaestion, the companion who was closest to Alexander. A hostile source, Ephippus reported that Alexander performed acts of sacrilege as well as sacrifice.
All these memoirs by Alexander’s companions survive thanks to three writers of the Roman era: Curtius Rufus, Arrian of Nicomedia, and Plutarch. The first two wrote histories of Alexander’s invasion of the Persian Empire, while Plutarch wrote a biography of Alexander to match his life of Caesar. All three take religion for granted, and for the same reason: good relations with the gods remained indispensable for military success. They nonetheless miss important religious distinctions. Curtius, writing in Latin, does not know Alexander’s subordinates were companions. Arrian, writing in artificially classical Greek, knows better, but he often describes the companions as “the king’s friends,” a turn of phrase that lacks any religious accent. Arrian reports no ceremonies performed by companions, as though sacrifice and other rituals were royal prerogatives. Only Plutarch calls the companions just that, and mostly avoids using other terms. He knows about ceremonies performed by several companions. Plutarch, as it happens, was a priest.13
Roman influence shows itself in all three of these writers. Plutarch, characteristically, is the only one who endows Alexander with any personal religious life, and that is decidedly Greek or Macedonian. Arrian, who was a Roman general, is the only one who gives detailed information about meetings between Alexander and the companions. Curtius Rufus reports the most rituals, and also makes a show of knowing Macedonian customs, but does not know one kind of sacrifice from another.
These writers knew little about Near Eastern religions, no doubt partly because it was difficult to travel into the interior of Egypt, to visit Babylon, and especially to visit India. When Curtius Rufus describes relations between Alexander’s army and the worshippers of Yahweh in Samaria, he misunderstands Hebrew henotheism, and when he and the others describe relations between Alexander’s army and the people of India, they fail to distinguish among Hindus, Buddhists, and Jains.
Yet the rest of Greek literature, including Greek public documents, reveals the norms that these writers mostly omit. Whereas Curtius Rufus and others report a few dozen acts of sacrifice, this literature reports thousands. The same holds true for omens, acts of supplication, and the practices that bound Alexander to his companions. And the same holds true for the practices of the various African and Asian religions that he and his men encountered—Semitic, Egyptian, Mesopotamian, and Persian as well as Indian. This cornucopia of evidence reveals part of what Alexander, who was a newcomer as well as an invader, had to understand and accomplish.14
In the last thirty years, Egyptologists and Assyriologists have written the first thorough accounts of Alexander’s religious doings in Egypt and Mesopotamia. A 2008 republication of an inscription proves that Alexander was crowned pharaoh in a religious ceremony. That makes it all the more certain he was crowned king in Babylon. We already knew he made himself priest-king in Tyre.15 Since 2000, a number of scholars led by Pierre Briant responded to this new evidence
by putting Greek and Near Eastern material on a par. Scholars also began writing articles in which “Alexander” and “religion” were keywords, if not words that often found their way into article or book titles.16
Drawing on all these sources, old and new, this book tells a religious version of a familiar but evolving story. It is for lay readers, not specialists, but it includes endnotes for those interested in the sources being used. The sources for religious rites such as acts of sacrifice also appear in several appendices. The endnotes refer to these appendices as well as to the bibliography, which is wide-ranging but not exhaustive.17
This book also draws on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European travel writers’ descriptions of the flora and fauna that were a mainstay of ancient paganism. These adventurers rambled all over Alexander’s empire, especially Iran and Central Asia, places that had changed little since antiquity (but have changed greatly during the last hundred years).
Finally, some Near Eastern legends about Alexander appear in these pages. Most come from the Alexander Romance, an Egyptian story of his life written in Greek in Alexandria in the first few centuries after his death and revised by writers throughout the Near East. Fanciful though the Romance is, it reveals how the people of the region remembered the Macedonian invasion. A religious biography should include the afterlife of the subject, wherever and whatever this afterlife may be.18
Sometimes these legends find humor in Alexander’s improbably successful enterprise. Sometimes they find the enterprise repellent, and transmute it into fantasy, and sometimes they turn it into a kind of miracle and then ask what such a miracle could be for. In this way, Christians, Jews, and Muslims strove to understand how a king and his corps of officers could conquer the known world in about the time it took the Soviet Union and the United States to go from putting dogs into orbit to putting men on the moon.