Alexander the Great

by Robin Lane Fox

  'Alexander's fame', wrote Callisthenes, very probably, 'depends on me and my history, not on the lies which Olympias spread about his parentage.' The lies, then, were a fact, and on setting out for Asia Alexander is said to have been 'told the secret of his birth' by his mother and 'ordered to act worthily of it', a doubtful story had it not been upheld by one of the finest scholars of the generation after Alexander's death, a man, moreover, who was known to be sceptical of all reports of Alexander's divinity: evidently, he was prepared to believe that Olympias had had views of her own on Alexander's parentage, however mistaken he thought them. To these private rumours, the nuances of an Athenian joke may again be relevant. At Alexander's accession, the orator Demosthenes had dismissed him as a mere Margites, but Margites was not only known as a Homeric buffoon: he was a sexual simpleton, who knew neither the facts of life nor the identity of his mother and father. The joke went down in history, perhaps because it was doubly appropriate: while it ridiculed Alexander as the new Achilles, it may also have mocked at a current rumour that his father had not been Philip, but some god in disguise, perhaps even Zeus himself. Alexander, a mere Margites, did not know who his parents were; Demosthenes had visited Pella in Alexander's youth, so there could be no better Greek witness to the gossip of Alexander's early years.

  This is perhaps too ingenious to be decisive, but there are links with Sicilian Dionysius which suggest the background may be correct. Dionysius's father had had two sons by his two wives, one a Sicilian from his native Syracuse, the other a south Italian foreigner, and it was generally believed that the two sons had been conceived on one and the same night and the wives married on one and the same day. Now it was Dionysius, son of the foreigner, who succeeded his father, although he was the younger of the two; his rights to the succession were not beyond dispute, and a sincere claim to have been fathered by a god would help to give him the necessary pre-eminence. Perhaps this is why he described himself publicly as 'sprung from the intercourse of Phoebus Apollo'; he was also a poet of more pretension than ability and Apollo in particular may have appealed to him as the god of artists. Twenty years later, Olympias's circumstances had been noticeably similar. Though mother of a promising son, she had been dismissed from court in favour of a noble Macedonian wife and she had seen her son's succession threatened. Like Dionysius's mother, she was a foreigner; she was also a queen of heroic ancestry in her own right. Disappointed in her marriage or keen to assert her superiority over Philip's many other women, she might well have spread a story that her son was special because he owed nothing to Philip and was child of the Greek god Zeus. Sexual knowledge in the ancient world was not enough to refute her, for the role of the female in conception was unknown, as it remained until the nineteenth century, and if mares in Thessaly could be believed to conceive through the agencies of a brisk west wind there was no reason why the queen of Macedonia could not have been visited by Zeus in equivalent disguise. The kings and heroes of myth and of Homer's epic were agreed to be children of Zeus: Alexander, like many, may have come to believe of himself what he had begun by reading of others.

  The belief was a Homeric one, entirely in keeping with the rivalry of Achilles which was Alexander's mainspring; if it had been latent when he entered Egypt, the traditions of the Pharaoh's divine sonship and the proceedings at Siwah's oracle could have combined to confirm it and cause its publication through Callisthenes to the Greek world. Perhaps by a fortunate slip of the tongue, perhaps by a private remark inside the oracular shrine as well as by his greeting on the steps, Ammon's priest had confirmed what Alexander may have long suspected from his mother, and the apparent chance of Ammon's confirmation need not discredit Alexander's own sincerity. His favour for Ammon was lasting, as was his new sonship; when his Macedonians mutinied at the end of their marching, they were said to have ridiculed him and told him to 'go and fight alone with his father', meaning Zeus, not Philip. The abuse of mutineers is seldom reported accurately, and as no witness described the mutiny, alternative versions of their insults survived. But the sonship of Zeus Ammon is known, independently, to have remained a topic at court, and discontented men have a way of picking on the insult which they know will be most wounding; Alexander, it seems, had taken his divine father to heart, and his soldiers knew it. But it was because of events at Siwah, not the Pharaoh's titles, that the sonship had first been confirmed.

  This favour for Zeus might be thought to have lowered his respect for Philip, the more so if Alexander had been aware of the plans for his father's murder; psychologists, too, would willingly see Alexander's love for Hephaistion as a search for a father-figure, later found in Zeus. 'You pass yourself on to Amnion,' one of Alexander's officers is made to say, drunk and outraged, in a biography four hundred years later, 'and you have denied the claims of Philip', and yet there is no proof that this alleged complaint was ever justified. Four centuries later, a letter could be quoted, written as if from Alexander to the Athenians on the most vexed subject of Athenian politics of the day, in which Alexander is said to have referred to Philip as his 'so-called father'. Among so much fictitious correspondence in Alexander's name this letter cannot be taken as reliable, especially on so emotive a topic, and there are very strong grounds for dismissing it as later Athenian propaganda. It is more revealing that after Alexander's death, his successors promptly persuaded the army that one of his last plans had been to build a gigantic pyramid in Macedonia in Philip's honour. These plans had perhaps been faked by his officers to ensure their rejection, but they still had to seem plausible to the troops; the plan for the pyramid is proof that the two sick* ro Alexander's view of his father were widely credited by many ordinary men at the end of his life. He could be believed to honour Philip lavishly, for there was no proof that he had disowned him. But he could also be believed to wish to honour him in an Egyptian way, with a pyramid 'as large as that of Cheops the Pharaoh'; in Egypt, men thus were aware, Alexander the Pharaoh had found a truer father who might influence even the honours due to Philip. The plan for the pyramid proves what the troops believed of Alexander, not what Alexander believed of himself. But he was soon to move far beyond Philip's achievements, and the farther he moved, the more the special protection of Zeus Ammon must have appealed to him.

  Legend, meanwhile, gathered rapidly round it, until Ammon was said to have visited Olympias in order to father her son; some said he came disguised as the last Pharaoh of Egypt, others as her pet snake, and even these absurdities became a theme of importance for the future. At Rome, for example, a hundred years later, Scipio the conqueror of Carthage was said by contemporaries to have been conceived by a snake because his glory was thought to rival Alexander's, while similar rumours were put about for Aristomenes, a hero of southern Greek freedom against Sparta, and for the future Emperor Augustus after his adoption by Julius Caesar, himself a momentary rival of Alexander. Not for the last time Alexander's royal myth lasted for more than three centuries as a spur and a pattern to ambitious men, but the myth itself looked back to the Homeric world.

  It is this ability to inspire such personal themes and ratify them for the future by his own achievements that gives Alexander his strongest appeal. The visit to Siwah had not been calculated for the sake of the result that came of it; it was both secretive and haphazard, but its conclusion is perhaps the most important feature in the search for his personality. 'Zeus,' Alexander was later thought to have said, 'is the common father of men, but he makes the best peculiarly his own'; like many Roman emperors after him, Alexander was coming to believe that he was protected by a god as his own divine 'companion', not as a friend of god, like the notable pagans of late Roman antiquity, not as a slave of god, in the grimmer phrase of the Christians who replaced them, but as son of god, a belief which fitted convincingly with his own Homeric outlook, in whose favourite Iliad sons of Zeus still fought and died beneath their heavenly father's eye.

  Alexander did not intend the truth of his visit to Siwah to be generally known and for that reas
on it is impossible to be sure exactly how his published view of himself had found its confirmation. Only the result is certain, and as he left the oracle and headed home to Memphis by a different caravan road through the desert, it would have been wrong to explain his consultation as deception or calculated arrogance. It is too easy to rationalize an age which expresses its human needs in different ways to our own, and as for the arrogance, dwelt on by Romans and elaborated since, it is a charge which can also rebound. The history of Zeus Ammon and Alexander was to be a long one, only brought to a forcible end.

  Nearly nine hundred years later, in A.D. 529, the natives of a small oasis near to Siwah were still paying worship to Alexander and Zeus Ammon, although Christianity had been the recognized religion of their empire for the past two hundred years. The Roman emperor Justinian saw fit to intervene and ban their malpractice, putting an end, it might seem, to the history of a young man's impudent boast. But that same myth had driven a Macedonian to India and the eastern edges of the world and then remained firm, where it first became public, as a focus of loyalty for nine successive centuries in a rapidly changing world. When millions, now as then, still pin their faith on a subsequent son of god, it is not for the historian to explain away the belief which helped Alexander onwards. It is salutary, rather, to remember that claims to be the begotten son of god have been made before, upheld by companions and ended, so men said, in boos from angry mutineers.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  From Ammon to Memphis Alexander followed a direct caravan route eastwards through three hundred miles of desert, a journey which lasted eighteen days or more but involved no notable hazards, apart from the continuing guidance, in Ptolemy's opinion, of two talking snakes. Once back in Memphis, the new son of Zeus relaxed, giving free rein to his generosity and his sense of myth. Sacrifice was offered to Zeus the King, the Greek god whom Alexander believed that he had visited at Siwah in a Libyan form, and in Zeus's honour the army processed, a prelude to literary festivals and more athletic games. Meanwhile envoys arrived from Greek oracles in Asia Minor to find the army alive with rumours of their king's mysterious pilgrimage. 'At the temple of the Branchidac near Miletus,' wrote Callisthenes, meaning to please his patron,

  the sacred spring had begun to flow again, though it had been abandoned by Apollo ever since its shrine had been sacked by the Persian Xerxes, one hundred and fifty years before. Its messengers brought many oracles about Alexander's birth from Zeus and the details of his future victories. The Sibyl at Erythrae, an aged Greek prophetess, had also spoken up about his noble origins.

  The end of Persian sacrilege, the prophecies of victory and divine birth; a year and a half later; these were themes which Alexander's historian intertwined. These envoys may have set sail for Egypt before Alexander returned from Siwah, but they need not have been forewarned of his divine sonship. They had reason to visit him anyway after the recent naval war, and at Erythrae, Alexander was also considering a generous building plan. On arrival at Memphis, they could have suited their message to the new theme of the pilgrimage; at Erythrae, Alexander was worshipped as a god, presumably soon after he had freed the city, and it was only natural to please him with the name of Zeus.

  Having received nine hundred reinforcements from Antipater, who may already have been fearful for the safety of Thrace and southern Greece, Alexander arranged his Egyptian administration. The list that survives may be incomplete, but it reads most interestingly. As under the Persians and native Pharaohs, the country was divided into two, presumably into Upper and Lower Egypt. No satrap is named, perhaps

  because the Persian title was offensive, but two nomarchs were chosen and if their title is official, it had many precedents in the native and Persian past. One nomarch, Petisis, bore a renowned Egyptian name and probably belonged to the highest native aristocracy of lower Egypt, from an area whose other well-known noble family had already been reinstated by Alexander; the other, Doloaspis, had an Iranian name and was probably meant to govern Upper or southern Egypt where he had no doubt held office before. Their duties involved local justice as well as administration, but because they were both Orientals a Macedonian general was set beside them in each half of the country, As before, an admiral was left with a small fleet in the Nile Delta; the two city centres of Memphis and Pelusium were garrisoned with mercenaries, a few Companions and various commanders, including an officer from a backward area of Greece who was awarded a secretary, perhaps because he was illiterate. Libya, so far as Alexander had entered it, was given a district governor, as was the land east of Memphis in which Arabs lived. As usual in Alexander's empire, these commands did little to disturb the pattern he had inherited from Persian rule.

  Marvelling at the size and strength of the country, Alexander is said to have wished no one man to control it. And yet the native Petisis refused the job of nomarch, perhaps because the military and financial commands were loaded against him; Doloaspis is said to have been left as the only supreme official, while in lower Egypt there was one Greek officer with the brains and power to rule in all but name. Cleomenes the Greek had been living at Naucratis in the Delta, before Alexander had invaded; he was a sharp man, and he was well suited to his new office as Alexander's tax-collector in Egypt and Libya. It was a job of peculiar difficulty. The Egyptian economy had always been run in kind, not coin, and ever since the Pharaohs had lost the Nubian gold-mines, there had been no local source of precious metals for a currency. But the hiring of fleets and mercenary armies had needed ready money, and even before Alexander, the Pharaoh Tachos had entrusted his military finances to an experienced Athenian general, who had taxed bullion from the temple priests and nobles who alone still owned it and turned it into coin to pay troops. Clcomenes was alive to this Greek entrepreneurial tradition; his orders were to collect Egypt's taxes without interfering with the nomarch's powers and as he had to raise coined money for the fleet, the mercenary garrisons and the building of Alexandria, which he supervised, he began to enforce the same sort of taxes as his Athenian predecessor. His financial powers made him sole lord of Egypt, even if he was not named satrap; he struck his own coins and may also have prepared the system of state monopolies with which his successors the Ptolemies at last raised Egypt to a centralized economy. His officials, naturally, were no more philanthropic than any others who governed Egypt in antiquity.

  Financial interference was never to the temples' liking, but Alexander had dutifully considered their feelings. One of a virtuous Pharaoh's responsibilities, in the opinion of the priesthood, was to restore and adorn the country's ancient temples, and it was a definite gesture to their wishes when Alexander ordered the building of a new chamber in two ancient temples of the Egyptian god Amun. Each project, moreover, was in honour of Pharaohs who had been dead for a thousand years but were venerated as perfect models of priestly government. These honours were well chosen, but Egypt had to reconcile herself to her foreign Pharaoh in her own way, and she did it, as often, by a myth of the past.

  The last native Pharaoh, Nectanebo II, had fled southwards to escape the invading Persians twelve years before Alexander's arrival, but like Harold of England or Frederick Barbarossa he was believed to be due to return as a young man to redeem his wartime failure, which was anyway blamed on magic or the anger of the gods. Alexander's liberation was the cue for his revival; the new Pharaoh, though not Nectanebo himself, was at least young enough to be his son, and in Alexander's lifetime, or very soon after it was said that when Nectanebo had disappeared, he had gone to Pella, where he had persuaded Olympias to make love to him, impressing her with his skill in astrology and, according to a later version, disguising himself in the robes of Ammon so as to seem like Alexander's divine father. If Alexander could be adopted, he could also be belittled. Already, as a reaction to Persian rule the Egyptians had idealized a past Pharaoh called Sesostris and invented a career of conquest in which he copied and exceeded the feats of Persian Darius I. When Alexander set a new standard of success, even Sesostris
had to be updated to excel him; he was gentle to those he conquered, he took more prisoners than any other king, and unlike Alexander he was 'more than seven feet tall'. After nine years' marching, like his rival, he too was claimed to have died at the age of thirty-three, not through drink or poison, but killing himself, an end which capped the rumours of Alexander's death.

  Before Alexander could violate the holy law of the priesthood, he had left Memphis in early May 331 and bridged the Nile on his way back to Phoenicia. While boating across it, he met with disaster. Parmenion's young son Hector fell overboard and came near to drowning by the weight of his clothing; on struggling to the bank, the boy died, much to the grief of Alexander who ordered him to be buried magnificently. It was left to the Roman Emperor Julian, seven hundred years later, to accuse Alexander of the boy's murder; mischievous guesses to discredit him are not only a modern fashion. It was also said by Ptolemy, perhaps correctly, that Philotas, son of Parmenion, was suspected of conspiracy in Egypt and this 'plot' might have been linked with his brother's drowning. No action was taken against him, and on leaving Memphis he was to give more lasting proof of his methods with rebels.