Both for the visitors and the visited this sudden arrival was momentous. Alexander had been travelling for at least eight days through country of the most fantastic outlines, illusion and miracle around him at every mm. He was lucky to have survived, and his sense of relief on reaching the oasis is not difficult to imagine. The people of Siwah would have been no less excited. Historically, their oasis had long been a backwater, never visited by Pharaohs and sheltered from modem life by its surrounding desert; even in the twentieth century its local customs were still thriving, including homosexuality to the point of all-male marriage. A visit from a Macedonian conqueror would have stirred all the natives from their homes, and no doubt Alexander would have promptly made himself known to the ruling family who, like all Libyans, were identifiable by the single-feather headdress which they wore tied into their hair. Gossip claimed that Alexander also bribed Amnion's priests in order to be sure of receiving the answers he wanted, but any consultant of a Greek oracle would first pay the god honour, and it is unthinkable that Alexander gave advance warning of his questions and desired answers; his whole consultation depends on secrecy and ambiguity.
By a present, then, the temple staff had been forewarned and the natives would have led Alexander through their houses at the foot of the citadel and set him on the steps to the temple, traces of which can still be seen. With his friends, he would have climbed up to the pedimented gate of the outer temple yard; at the entrance, or just inside the first court, the senior priest came forward, greeting the king in full hearing of his followers. He was aware of his visitor's high rank, as he allowed nobody but Alexander to enter the inner courts and did not ask him to change his everyday dress; all the other Macedonians waited outside, probably on the steps of the temple rather than in the inner courtyard, and could only hear the oracle at work through the barriers of two, if not three, stone walls.
'The oracles were not given in spoken words as at Delphi or Miletus,' wrote Callisthenes, repeating what Alexander wished to be known, 'but for the most part they were given by nods and tokens, just as in Homer, "Zeus the son of Cronos spoke and nodded with his dark eyebrows"; the priest would then answer on Zeus's behalf.' This publicity has much to tell. There are four ways to treat foreign gods: fight them, disbelieve them, accept them or identify them with one's own at home. At Siwah Alexander chose identification, just as the Athenians and other Greeks had long paid worship to Ammon by a link with their own Zeus. It is a tribute to Callisthenes's tact, and an insight into his patron's tastes, that for the new Achilles the god's procedure was explained by a reference to Zeus in Homer's Iliad.
As for the nods and tokens, they match all that is known about the workings of an Egyptian oracle. Like the Greeks and Romans, the Egyptians imagined their gods in terms of the society in which they lived; just as Christ in the Roman Empire was to be hedged about with the protocol of a Roman emperor, so the lord god Amun was thought to behave in the manner of a Pharaoh of Egypt. He could not be approached in his own apartments, and if any of his people had a problem they could only pose it on high days and holidays when the god, like the ruler, left his court and came out into the streets. Just as the Pharaoh was carried in public on a platform which rested on his attendants' shoulders, so too the image of Amun was placed in a sacred boat, hoisted aloft on a board and borne before the people by his purified bearers; the god, like the Pharaoh, was kept cool on his journey by carriers of feathers and fans. At Siwah, ever since the Egyptians had identified the natives' god with Amun, tile same procedure had been observed: the god was treated like a Pharaoh. 'When an oracle is wanted', explained witnesses with Alexander, 'the priests carry the bejewelled symbol of the god in a gilded boat, from whose sides dangle cups of silver; virgins and ladies follow the boat, singing the traditional hymn in honour of the deity.'
This apparatus would have startled Alexander, and its giving of oracles was suitably eccentric. In Egyptian ritual, the questioner might read out his problem to the god, or write it in simple form on a potsherd token, or tell it first to the priest who would then repeat it to the boat. The bearers would heave the sacred vessel on to their shoulders and prepare to move like table-turners in whichever direction they felt it pressing them. If the god meant 'no', he would force the boat-bearers backwards; if he meant 'yes', he would force them forwards; if he lost his temper at the question, he would shake furiously from side to side. The priest would interpret his movements, 'answering on behalf of Zeus'; written questions could also be laid out on the ground in alternative versions of 'yes' and 'no' so that the god could lunge towards whichever answer he fancied. This ritual lasted in Egypt for two thousand years, until the coming of Islam, and it still has a parallel in certain African tribes; just as Sheikhs in their coffins have sometimes weighed heavily on their pall-bearers to stop their body being taken to its funeral, so in the Sudan, worshippers are still driven to and fro by the momentum of a holy image on their shoulders.
At Siwah nods and tokens were only given 'for the most part', and so Alexander also went through the boat's small courtyard and entered the holiest shrine behind, a small room about ten foot wide and twenty foot long which was roofed over with the trunks of palm trees. In this sacred chamber he could put his questions direct to the god, a privilege that was perhaps reserved for Pharaohs and rulers only; he would not be aware that a narrow passage, still visible on the site of the temple, ran behind the righthand wall and was linked to the shrine by a series of small holes. Here, the priest could stand out of sight in a cubby-hole and give answer through the wall to his visitor as if he were Ammon speaking in person. Perhaps Alexander revealed his question inside the shrine to the high priest alone, who then put it to the boat outside and returned to announce the result; perhaps Alexander first consulted the boat and then asked more intimate questions inside the shrine. Whatever the order of events, his friends outside had no idea of the questions which their King was asking. The most they would hear would be songs from the virgins and the tramp of the boat-bearers' feet; the mention of 'tokens' suggests that Alexander may not have spoken but written his questions on a potsherd and sent them out to the boat for an answer. His friends could only have watched with puzzlement.
Alexander never revealed what he had asked, but 'he used to say that he had heard what pleased him'. His questions, however, are not all irrecoverable. Four years later, at the mouth of the river Indus in India, he offered sacrifice to the 'gods whom Ammon had bidden him honour', and did the same on the following day, this time to a different set of gods; evidently he had asked the oracle which gods he should propitiate at particular points on his journey eastwards, a request which had been made at Delphi by Xenophon, the last Greek general to have marched inland into Asia. Ammon advised, among others, Poseidon and the other sea gods, perhaps because Alexander asked specifically whom to honour if he reached the outer Ocean. It is unlikely that this was Alexander's only question, as his secrecy and his lasting honour for Ammon only make sense if he had asked something more personal, probably whether and when he would be victorious. But camp gossip had its own ideas, and within twelve years of Alexander's death, two questions to Ammon had gained favour: Alexander, it was said, had asked the god whether he would rule the whole earth and whether he had punished all his father's murderers, but the priest warned him that Ammon, not Philip, was now his father. These fanciful guesses are most interesting evidence of how his soldiers remembered him. The first picked up the themes of invincibility and mastery of the world, both of which were encouraged by Alexander himself; it is also noticeable that the 'sacrifices according to Amnion's oracle' are first mentioned on the borders of his Indian march, when he had reached what he believed to be the outer Ocean; he also made two distinct sacrifices, as if Amnion's advice had been detailed for that particular moment. The second 'question' showed none of the contempt for Philip which others later attributed to him, and it raised the problem of his own relationship to Amnion. It is this which gives the consultation its peculiar importance
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After the visit to the oasis Alexander took Zeus Ammon closely to heart for the rest of his life. He invoked his name among his close friends and he sacrificed to him throughout his march as one of his usual gods; at a most emotional moment, when his exact words are known for certain, he swore an oath in Ammon's name as proof of his own deep gratitude. Personally, he turned to Zeus Amnion at the most painful crisis of his life, and when his beloved Hephaistion died, he sent envoys from central Iran to the Siwah oasis to ask whether his dead lover should be worshipped as a god or hero; when he died himself, it was announced that he had asked to be buried at Siwah, and although this request is as dubious as his other alleged last plans, Siwah was evidently felt to be a plausible choice for his Successors to put about among his troops. No Macedonian king nor Alexander himself had ever had any link with Ammon or Siwah before, and this personal attachment can only have sprung from the visit to the oracle. In art, the link was drawn especially close, for on local city coinage Alexander was shown dressed in the symbolic ram's horn of Ammon, probably soon after his visit; within three years of his death, his lifelong friend Ptolemy depicted him with the ram's horn on his earliest coins in Egypt, and Ptolemy had known Alexander as intimately as anyone. Zeus Ammon and Alexander were to become a natural pair for succeeding ages, and it was Alexander who had confirmed their close relationship; he favoured the god of the oasis but from Siwah onwards he also liked it to be known that he was Zeus's begotten son.
This was a startling theme. At Siwah, wrote Callisthenes, 'the priest told Alexander expressly that he was son of Zeus', and on his return to Memphis he was met by envoys from Greek oracles in Asia Minor, one of whom, wrote Callisthenes, had broken its silence of the past hundred and fifty years in order to greet the new avenger of Persian wrongs as Zeus's son. Six months later, wrote Callisthenes, on the verge of his greatest battle Alexander prayed to the gods to help him 'if he were indeed sprung from Zeus'; Callisthenes wrote to please Alexander and he can only have stressed this divine sonship because it was to Alexander's liking. Other contemporaries followed suit and the connection between the visit to Siwah and the sonship of god remained a lively one; Seleucus, Alexander's eventual successor in Asia, actually developed a story thirty years later that he had visited a Greek oracle in his Asian kingdom and been similarly recognized as the begotten son of Apollo. To those who had known Alexander personally, the scene at Siwah had lost none of its credibility.
Later, Alexander's divine sonship was wrongly derived from the answers which he received inside Amnion's shrine, but as he never revealed what he asked or heard, it cannot have been these which first gave the cue to Callisthenes. When he wrote that the 'priest had expressly told Alexander he was son of Zeus', the priest must have done this publicly, where Callisthenes could hear him, presumably therefore in his greeting on the temple steps. Either the priest may have heard that Alexander was the new Pharaoh and greeted him by 'son of Amun', one of the five Egyptian royal titles, which Callisthenes then translated as 'son of Zeus' for his Greek audience. Or, more probably, he intended to address Alexander in Greek as 'my boy' (o paidion), but erred and said 'o paidios' instead, which sounded to the listening Macedonians like the two words 'pat dios or 'son of Zeus'. This slip of the tongue was widely believed in antiquity, and as Greeks believed such fortunate errors at a solemn moment to be favourable omens, Alexander would have taken it to be another sign from heaven. Frequent visits from Greek envoys had ensured that many of the temple staff could manage a few words of Greek, but there is no reason to suppose that the high priest's pronunciation was ever perfect.
The priest's precise greeting matters very much less than what Alexander wished to be believed of it; according to his own historian, he was the begotten son of Zeus as a result of his visit, and it is very arguable how and why this belief had arisen. Egyptian kingship, at first sight, seems to promise an explanation; in Upper Egypt, the Pharaoh had always been worshipped as 'son of Amun' and whenever the dynasty of the Pharoahs changed, whether for the usurping Tuthmosis III, the native Saites or the invading Persians, the new line had been fitted into the past by this myth of divine fatherhood. Psamtik I, more than three hundred years before Alexander, had begun a new line, but instead of stressing his earthly mother, perhaps because she was Libyan, he publicized his sonship of Amun 'who has begotten me for himself, to please his heart', because Amun was a father whom he could share with the native Pharaohs before him. Like Psamtik, Alexander was founder of a new and foreign line; his sonship of Amun must have been emphasized by the priesthood to suit the old traditions and Alexander's staff may have picked it up, translating Amun into Zeus, as had always been Greek custom. Alexanders sonship, then, would have been known before he set out for Siwah; when he returned to Memphis, he was met by envoys from Asian Greek oracles with messages to confirm his divine father, and if the 'son of Zeus' was nothing more than the Pharaoh explained in Greek terms they could have been forewarned before he left Alexandria to travel into the desert.
This Egyptian influence may well be a part of the truth: it is not necessarily the whole of it. Alexander's lasting reverence for Zeus Ammon suggests some sort of a revelation had indeed taken place at Siwah, and there is no room for this if his sonship was only a Greek translation of a Pharaoh's title; he was probably Pharaoh by the time he reached Siwah, and whether or not he had been crowned officially in Memphis, he would already be familiar with his new royal titles: he may not have understood them fully, but he had certainly heard them, perhaps from native priests.
Egyptians at his court or from the Greeks who had long lived near the site of his new Alexandria. True, a queen of the Ptolemies was later honoured as 'child of Ammon', simply as a loose politeness to match her official link with the Pharaohs' Amun through her husband; the Roman emperor Vespasian was perhaps feted as 'son of Ammon' when he entered Egypt as Pharaoh. But those mild parallels for future western rulers belong later, when Egypt had been hellenized and when Alexander had made the sonship of Ammon famous. Only in one posthumous Greek statue is Alexander ever shown with the crown and symbols of a Pharaoh; none of his friends or historians is known to have alluded to his kingship in Egypt at any other time, and it did not influence his life, any more than later, when he became king of Persia, did he show any grasp or concern for the equally holy doctrines of the god Ahura Mazda. And yet Siwah and his sonship of Zeus were to remain lively themes until the very last year of his reign when Egypt had been forgotten; it is possible to look for a deeper source and it lies, moreover, near to home.
Among Greeks also, to be 'sprung from Zeus' was a mild and intelligible claim. The first Macedonian, for example, was believed to have been Zeus's son; 'Zeus-born' was a frequent description of Homer's epic kings, and in Alexander's day, the foreign royalty of Cyprus maintained that Zeus stood at the head of their family-tree, while the kings of Sparta could be described as the seed of Zeus. Descent from a god could also be used figuratively: Plato the poet and philosopher was praised as a 'son of Apollo, by his cleverest Athenian pupil, but this may have meant no more than that Plato too had a divine mastery of the arts. But Alexander's descent from Zeus was described by the Greek word genesis, and this most naturally meant that he was Zeus's begotten son, not his distant descendant.
Surprisingly, there was a Greek precedent for this claim too. In Homer's poems, several kings and heroes had a god as their acknowledged father, and this bluest of all blue blood was a point of especial honour for their reputations, while in Greek Sicily, some ten years before Alexander was born, this heroic fancy had found a true expression. Dionysius II, ruler of Syracuse, had maintained that he was fathered by Apollo, and had composed a verse inscription for his statue to stress this publicly and unmistakably. Without the influence of Egypt, therefore, a claim to be begotten by a god could be shared and understood by Greeks and it is fair to consider whether Alexander had drawn his new sonship as much from his own Greek background as from a pharaonic title which he scarcely understood.
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A close attachment to Zeus was in no way remarkable for him. His father Philip had been acknowledged as specially protected by Zeus, and on coins, Philip's bearded features had shown a clear resemblance to the king of the gods. Macedonian kings numbered Zeus among their ancestors, and they may have worn his symbolic aegis or goat-skin cloak in daily life, just as Alexander was shown wearing it on posthumous statues in Egypt, and his friend Ptolemy was shown with it on coin portraits during his lifetime as Pharaoh. In his sacrifices and dedications, Alexander repeatedly honoured Zeus, who remained the most important god in his life: when, in his last months, he received envoys from Greek temples all over the Mediterranean and admitted them to his presence in order of their importance, the representatives of Olympian Zeus came first, those of Ammon at Siwah second, for he still regarded Ammon as his own Greek Zeus in Libyan form. It is not true that after Siwah, Alexander believed himself to be son of a foreign Libyan god, whom he honoured before all the Greek gods of his childhood until the day he died; rather, at Siwah, a Libyan oracle which spoke for the Greek Zeus had supported the belief that he was the Greek god Zeus's son. He had been familiar with Zeus, if not Ammon, long before he journeyed to Siwah, and it is possible, therefore, that Amnion's oracle had only confirmed a belief which had long been growing on him. A fortunate slip of the priest's tongue, against his mystical role as the new Pharaoh, might have turned suspicion into conviction from Siwah onwards for the rest of his life.
There is evidence, by no means negligible, to support this. During Alexander's early lifetime, an educated Greek recorded that at the moment of conception Olympias's womb had been sealed with the mark of a lion, proving that her son would be lion-like; others said that her womb had been struck by a thunderbolt, emblem of Zeus, and these uncertainties may have been known to Alexander himself. In a letter, which may, however, be a forgery, he is said to have told Olympias that he would reveal the 'secret prophecies' of the Siwah oracle to her as soon as he returned to Macedonia; she died before he returned, but because this promise was made to his mother, it suggests that he had asked a question about his parentage and that this had already been discussed privately between the two of them. Morover, Olympias seems to have held views on the topic herself.
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