Soldier, Priest, and God

by F S Naiden

  One night, as the king was lying in his bed and could not sleep, he rose and opened his window, and saw before him an angel dressed in linen holding a sword. He trembled and bowed down, and said, “Why will my Lord smite his servant?”

  The angel answered, “Am I not he who subdues kings for thy sake? Why, then, wilt thou do evil in the eyes of the Lord?”

  Alexander said, “I shall do whatever you tell me.”

  The angel ordered him to go to Jerusalem and give up his treasure and dedicate it to God. “If thou dost rebel against my word, know that thou shalt surely die, thou and all thy companions.”

  The king and his host journeyed to Jerusalem. When he arrived at the gate, the high priest and eighty-eight Levites clad in holy garments came forth to meet him. When Alexander saw the high priest, he alighted from his horse and prostrated himself on the ground, kissing the priest’s feet. The soldiers of Alexander became angry and said to the king, “Why do you humble yourself before this old man? What will the world say?”

  “Alexander the Great in the Temple at Jerusalem,” by Sebastian Conca, 1737. Oil on canvas.

  Prado Museum, P00101, Art Resource.

  “Do not be surprised,” answered the king. “This old man is like the angel who goes before me in battle, and tramples the nations that are my enemies, and so I honor him.” To the high priest the king said, “Show me the temple of the god who subdues nations before me.”

  The king brought forth vessels of gold and silver and precious stones and went into the temple and placed them in the treasury. He told the high priest and the others who took the gold and silver to make a statue of him and place it in the temple as a remembrance.

  The high priest replied, “We cannot do this thing and make a graven image in the temple. Listen to our advice. Take this gold that you want turned into a statue and give it to the priests so that the poor and the crippled of the city will be maintained. As for thy good name, all the males born this year will be named Alexander.”

  This thing pleased the king, who weighed forty talents of gold and put it in the hands of the high priest and the other priests, and said, “Pray for me always.” After leaving the temple, Alexander and his host stayed in the city for three days, and he lavishly gave away his gold and silver, so that learned men said such riches had never been seen in Jerusalem since the days of Solomon. All the country people brought food and drink to Alexander’s host.

  The king then journeyed from Jerusalem, passed over to Galilee, and left the land of Israel.77

  Stories like this one, which surely went back to a time not very long after Alexander’s death, marked the beginning of a new phase of his career. Besides dealing with religions that he sought out himself, he would deal with religions that sought him out. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam would all do so in the hope of turning the king into one of their own. This hope was not original with these three religions. In turning Alexander into a half-brother of King Dara, the Persian poet Firdausi was trying to do the same thing. The religions of the book added a new dimension to this project: they would try to convert Alexander as well as nativize him.

  5

  The Throne of Egypt

  after the fall of Tyre, Alexander and the army marched straightaway to Gaza, arriving in late 332. They feared any delay would encourage the Persians in Egypt to resist the invaders, or would even encourage the Egyptians to overthrow the Persians and become independent. Only six years before, the Persians had struggled to reclaim Egypt from the last native pharaoh, Nakhtnebef, who had been betrayed by some of his Greek mercenaries. Barsine’s father had fought as a mercenary in Egypt.1

  As the army drew near to Gaza, it began to run out of water, and the Phoenician-ruled towns where the army was stopping did not have enough. No amount of gold could buy it. Hephaestion, the quartermaster, had to transport water by boat. All along the 300 miles from Lebanon to Gaza, his little saltwater navy carried fresh water for the army. Like the troops, the boats hopped from town to town. Otherwise they would run out of water, too.

  When the army reached the hilltop fort of Gaza, the garrison of Persians and Arab mercenaries refused to surrender. The engineers threw up their siege towers, only to jump for their lives as the structures sank into the sand and toppled over. As Alexander offered a sheep to the gods in the hopes of reading its liver and finding a good omen, a crow passed overhead, dropped a clod of dirt on him, and alighted on one of the towers. It got stuck in an oily spot and could not flap its wings. Aristander said the clod of dirt spelled risks for Alexander, but the stuck bird showed the city would fall. The soothsayer was again administering a religious sedative laced with a warning.2

  This time Alexander ignored Aristander. Rather than avoid taking risks, the king led the defense of an artillery emplacement. A bolt from a Persian catapult struck him in the breastplate and lodged in his shoulder. When Alexander’s doctor and his assistants cut away the breastplate and pulled out the bolt, Alexander fainted from loss of blood and for a moment appeared to be dead. Before the bleeding stopped, he was back in command, taking more risks.3

  The ceremony of supplication also turned against the king. An Arab pretending to be a deserter threw himself at the king’s feet, and when the king bade him rise, hoping for some intelligence about the enemy’s dispositions, the suppliant drew a sword and tried to stab him in the ribs. Alexander had been unkind to suppliants in Thebes but kind at Miletus and Tyre, even if his men had not. Now he found himself traduced. He ordered the engineers to throw up higher towers, and the Macedonians finally built platforms so tall that their catapults could bombard the city from above. In spite of having to work in the sand, sappers brought down a rampart. Using ladders put against the damaged walls, regiment after regiment entered the city. None of the males in the city asked for mercy, or got it. Alexander ordered the women and children sold into slavery. They surely supplicated, but that did not keep them from being enslaved.4

  The Route of the Expedition Through Egypt, 332–331 BC.

  Ancient World Mapping Center.

  The garrison chief, Betis, died in combat, depriving Alexander of any chance to capture him and watch him fruitlessly beg for mercy. Alexander’s anger inspired some companion or other—we do not know which one—to tell a false tale that the king not only captured Betis but killed him when he failed to submit, then dragged the corpse around the city, just as Achilles had dragged the corpse of Hector around Troy. (To do that, Alexander would have had to tie Betis to a wagon or a chariot, and Alexander never drove wagons or chariots. He was a Macedonian, and rode a horse.) Alexander merely killed the men and enslaved everyone else. The Gazans had wounded him, and also wounded his pride.5

  The Macedonians commandeered the most valuable spots in the city, the wells, and began drawing the water they would need for the march across the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt. Gaza had little else to offer besides incense imported from Yemen. (Poor Greeks and Macedonians used pinches of it as a substitute for sacrificial animals.) Alexander now seized fourteen tons of the stuff and sent it to his tutor Leonidas, who had once told him to be parsimonious when making offerings. Now Leonidas would have more incense than even a profligate could use. Selling it would make the prim old tutor a fortune. With this sardonic grand gesture, Alexander bade farewell to Syria and to the Greek world, too, and made ready to enter Egypt.6

  Loaded with water, Hephaestion set sail again, periodically stopping to set heaps of water jugs and bags of fodder on dunes close to shore. The army marched along the beach, on the damp strip of sand that would not be too wet or too dry for men and horses. Just inland ran a long, marshy lake that protected them from attacks by hostile Arabs. In any event, the Arabs were nowhere to be seen. They had expected the Macedonians on the roads.

  The troops marched for a briny, searing week before reaching Mount Kasios, the Zeus of all sand dunes, on the edge of the Nile delta. In several more days they came to the Persian fort at Pelusium. Surprised by the arrival of the Macedonians, the Persia
ns surrendered. While the army drank the local beer, the officers learned the news from Egypt. The local satrap had died defending Darius at Issus, and the Macedonian exile Amyntas had escaped and invaded Egypt with his 4,000 mercenaries. Hoping to become satrap of Egypt, Amyntas seized Memphis, but he made the mistake of plundering the country. The Egyptians turned against him and exterminated him and his troops.7

  After several days in Pelusium, the army headed for the easternmost tributary of the Nile. The generals put as much of the army as possible aboard boats and headed to Memphis, some eighty miles upriver. They waited there for Alexander, who marched behind them, accompanied by a few mounted companions and other troops. Nobody challenged him, not even the son of the native pharaoh Nakhtnebef, who lived some thirty miles away.8

  Alexander rode on to his destination, the City of the Sun, or, as the Egyptians sometimes called it, the Place of Pillars. Several large temples and a village stood atop a mound beside the river, like a college on a hill.

  At the temple of Re priests came out to greet Alexander, and so did those of another great temple, that of Atum, the god of sundown. The temple of Re was the chief depository of Egyptian royal records. Herodotus visited it about a century before, and now Alexander came, hoping to be acknowledged as pharaoh. The priests welcomed him, but how did they address him? The companions, left outside, could not be sure. Perhaps the priests coached him in his first offerings to Re, a falcon-headed god with a sun disk hovering over him. The companions did know that the gold and silver vessels on display in the shrine surpassed anything Macedonian or Phoenician. The statuary was huge, even by the standard of Zeus at Olympia, the biggest statue any of them had ever seen.9

  The Persians had taken the biggest piece of all, a statue of a Persian king, back to Susa. This ruler was the first Darius, who had invaded Greece. The inscription on this statue read: “The king commanded that this stone statue be made in Egypt. Let all who see it know that the Persian holds this land.” Yet “the Persian” was no longer in Egypt. Like the statue, he had vanished.10

  Before bidding Alexander goodbye, the priests took him to the shrine’s tree of life, called the ished. The gods Seshat and Thoth would write the king’s name on the leaves.11

  like amyntas, alexander wished to seize Egypt. Unlike him, he wished to become pharaoh. The twenty-five-year-old king of the Macedonians had much to learn, and limited time to learn it.12

  The pharaoh made offerings, but far more than any Greek king or priest, he received honors. He was the son of the chief god, Amon-Re, who bequeathed Egypt to him as his personal property. Unlike any Greek god, Amon-Re was a double or a composite. As Re, he was the sun god, at home in the City of the Sun. As Amon, he was the god of the heavens, the earth, the underworld, the air, and the water, at home in Thebes, far upriver. The priests at the City of the Sun called him

  The one who made millions of himself,

  The one who forms his name with his own hands, in any shape he likes.

  He lights up the sky’s circle with his diadem

  While he travels the sky like the sun

  And wanders nightly through the Underworld.

  He makes the Nile overflow and rise in the fields,

  The earth submits to his plans, the gods are under his hands,

  Men under his feet.13

  Amon-Re gave life without procreation. To bring some creature into being, the god spoke its name. Then the god vivified the creature by imparting a liquid ray of sunlight. So much for mothers—for Ada, Olympias, or even Hera.14

  As son of Amon-Re, the pharaoh was obliged to imitate, or merge with, Horus, Amon-Re’s chief offspring. When the pharaoh made offerings to Amon-Re, received oracles from him, or built shrines for him, he must do so as Horus.

  Horus bestowed a life force, or ka, on each pharaoh. Only the pharaoh possessed a life force of this particular kind, and so the pharaoh’s ka, unlike the life force bestowed on other people, had a personal name. So long as his ka was with him, the pharaoh could play all his roles—son of the god and successor and heir to the god. If the ka departed, the pharaoh lost his powers. Egypt’s leading priests would know whether the ka had come or gone, much as Tibetan monks know how to locate the soul of the Dalai Lama once it has been reincarnated in his successor.15

  Since the pharaoh had to perform rites in many places, he could not carry out all his duties, and priests acted as substitutes. In some rites, priests impersonated gods. When the pharaoh was crowned, a priest impersonating Horus brought the candidate before a priest impersonating Amon-Re, and the threesome repaired to the “king’s house,” which was Amon-Re’s, where the disguised priests purified the candidate, and Amon-Re’s “daughter,” a priestess, imparted divine fluid to him. To the acclaim of the nine chief gods, the Amon-Re of the ceremony crowned the candidate and gave him his royal insignia. Later in the ceremony, the priestly impersonators proclaimed the new king. No Greek tragedy presented so many impersonated gods, or ever presented them in a temple rather than on a stage. Missing was the audience for the performance. Only priests and royalty attended.

  In other rites, the priests used a statue to impersonate a god. This kind of impersonation happened in Greece and many other places, but in Egypt the priests did not merely carry the statue or escort others who were carrying it. They tilted the statue to show favor or disfavor to worshippers.

  The priests also staged festivals and mythic reenactments meant to reinvigorate the pharaoh’s authority. Every year the pharaoh celebrated the victory of Amon over the dragon Aphet, as well as that of Horus over the monster Typhon. The pharaoh played the part of Horus, and the priests played other parts. Or, if the pharaoh was absent, the priests played all the parts.

  The pharaoh, the priests, and the pharaoh’s architects and builders collaborated in the pharaoh’s building programs. Next to conducting rituals in shrines, building and repairing them was the pharaoh’s chief religious duty. Sometimes he performed this task in person, and sometimes he delegated it. It took him up and down the country and into the desert, where shrines stood at the important oases.

  For Alexander, all this was novel. A king of Macedon was a descendant of Zeus but not the god’s son. He did not treat his kingdom as personal property and could not be impersonated. Antipater was a viceroy, not a double, and Alexander’s brother, Arrhidaeus, was an occasional substitute, not a double. A Macedonian king had to fight in person and lead councils, and no double could do it for him. Instead of a double, the Macedonian king had companions. He shared some powers with them. Alexander let Leonnatus receive suppliants under false pretenses, and he let Parmenio command the main body. He left Antigonus and others to their own devices. The only important priest was the king himself. No one, not even a king, impersonated a god. At his most theatrical, Philip merely led a parade of divine statues that included one of himself. His statue was built for the occasion. The divine statues came from shrines.16

  Alexander wished not only to become the pharaoh but also to become a more popular ruler than his Persian predecessors. After Cambyses, Cyrus’s son, only two of the Persians had spent time in Egypt. (One was the Darius who was Alexander’s opponent. He had fought there.) The priests had impersonated these Persians from start to finish, and the many decades in which the Persian pharaohs had been absent encouraged the priests and the population to regard them as illegitimate. Only Darius I made a strong, positive impression, revising Egypt’s laws and repairing a Red Sea–Nile canal. Alexander would try to outperform Darius. He also wished to outperform Cambyses.17

  These two goals did not match those of the priests he would encounter at Memphis and Thebes. They would tell him what he wished to hear about Darius and Cambyses, but they intended to direct him, not help him. They did not expect him to settle in Egypt. They did not require that, and did not want it. Let Alexander’s ambitions take him elsewhere. They would remain in control.

  Alexander’s goals would eventually displease the companions. They regarded Egypt as a piece of
pelf for Alexander to divide among them. They regarded the ka, the divine fluid, and the mummery as nonsense, and they did not wish for the Macedonians to be popular as well as powerful. They did not want the duties of being priest-king to delude Alexander. That had already happened at Tyre.

  They may have noticed that not a single Egyptian had supplicated Alexander. This defeated people acknowledged him, but they did not beg. Rather than exalt him that way, something the Macedonians welcomed, they exalted him in another, which the Macedonians did not.

  from now on, Alexander would travel mostly by boat, the preferred mode for pharaohs and divine statues as well as generals. On the Nile, boats could make twenty miles a day, triple that with wind in their sails. On the best roads anywhere—the royal roads of the Persians—a soldier could make fifteen to twenty miles a day at most, about the same as a mule. A man riding a horse all day would not do much better. For the first time, Alexander and his entourage would be able to outpace the army.18

  Sailing for Memphis, he and they passed the pyramids and the island fort known as Babylon, which the Athenians had once besieged. At Memphis, Alexander’s generals and the remaining Persians received him at the royal pier, beside the official Nilometer for measuring the level of the river. The priests now took him in hand, and his companions surrendered themselves to the local Greeks, who would tell them which god was which as they passed countless Egyptian temples and headed for the main Greek shrine in the city, amidst the coops of pigeons bred for manure and geese bred for sacrifice.19