In Search of the Lost Testament of Alexander the Great
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Yet the Great Tumulus at Aegae, built from layers of clay, soil and rock, and thrown up by unknown hands labouring under a still-unnamed king, seems to have protected some of its finest secrets from historians and looters, both from the marauding Gauls and the invading Romans, who carted everything they could back to Italy following Macedonia’s defeat.29 No doubt there is much more still to be discovered; the recent excavations at the Kasta Hill polyandreion (communal tomb) at Amphipolis some 100 miles from Vergina and the newly unearthed tombs at Pella and Katerini, remind us we have only unearthed a fragment of classical Macedonia, and, we suggest, no more than fragments of the story of Alexander himself.
FORGERY AND PHILOLOGY: THE BAG OF TRICKS PLAYED UPON THE DEAD
‘O wicked Fortuna, Fickle as falling leaves, harsher than tigers, More savage than the deadly Hydra, crueler Than any monster, fearsome as Tesiphone, why do you cut the prince’s flowering years before his day?’30
The Alexandreis of Gautier de Chatillon
‘It is indeed true that the archaeologist has succeeded in exacting from dumb, cold marble or crustated metal, the interesting story of contemporaneous achievements… while their very nature possessed well-nigh all the elements of absolute authenticity, this is far from being the case with written records. For in their transmission from century to century they are all but certain to become distorted or adulterated.’31 In his Literary Fraud Amongst the Greeks published in 1894, Alfred Gudeman saw value in ruins and inscriptions and yet nothing more than ‘disturbing agencies’ in the literature he sensed had misplaced the truth. But as Gudeman pointed out, the better, or perhaps the worse, part of ‘history’ has come down to us through written sources.
Literature and archaeology do, however, collaborate occasionally, and both the surviving texts and Babylonian cuneiform tablets recorded that on the 10th, or more likely the 11th, of June in the year 323 BCE in the 114th Olympiad, or the year 5,176 according to The Greek Alexander Romance, King Alexander III of Macedonia died in Babylon in his thirty-third year; with him died his extraordinary eleven-year campaign that changed the face of the Graeco-Persian world forever.32
Some 2,340 years on, five barely intact accounts survive to tell a hardly coherent story. At times in close agreement, though frequently in opposition, they conclude with a contradictory set of suspicious claims and death-scene rehashes. One portrayed Alexander dying silent and intestate; he was Homeric and vocal in another, whilst a third detailed his Last Will and Testament though it is attached to the end of a book of romance. Which account do we trust?
Since the Rennaisance, and sped along by new techniques developed over the past two centuries, classical scholars, and philologists in particular, have dedicated themselves to separating the ‘historical’ out of the total written evidence Gudeman was so suspicious of. The quest has solicited contemplations from some of the greatest minds of the ages: the philosophers, priests, politicians, antiquarians and polymaths attempting to unlock the gates of the past. In their own way each of them appreciated that the relationship between ‘what actually took place’ and ‘what is recorded to have taken place’ is an uneasy one; some went further and concluded that duplicity of one kind or another, subtle or overt, is endemic to the narrating of ‘history’, so that falsifications and the forensic method to unravel them compete on every page.
‘Forgery and philology fell and rose together in the Renaissance, as in Hellenistic Alexandria’; it is an observation that gives this book much of its momentum, for Alexander’s eponymous city was a key ingredient in the birth of his story, which, with some justification, we could term his ‘legend’.33 Moreover, it was during the Renaissance that Alexander was extracted once more from the moth-eaten scrolls and decrepitated manuscripts that had been hidden in ‘leaky rat-ridden monastery attics’; they were, thought the collector Poggio Bracciolini (1380-1459), ‘looking up at him for help’ like ‘friends in a hospital or a prison’.34
The ‘legend’ and the manuscripts have brought us three competing witnesses all the way from Babylon in June 323 BCE, as the testimony they contain potentially originated with men who were there. The first comes in the form of the ‘Journal’, which documented Alexander’s final twelve-day decline. The Journal detail was allegedly extracted from the official campaign diary, the Ephemerides (plural: day-to-day records, in toto a single diary) and it is found in the final pages of the biographies of the Roman-era historians Arrian (ca. 86-160 CE) and Plutarch (ca. 46-120 CE), as well as in the Historical Miscellany of the Roman antiquarian Aelian (ca. 175-235 CE).35
The Journal’s dry, laconic and deadpan prose sits in stark contrast to the vivid portrayals of pre-death portents appearing in the biographers’ previous pages, and it makes no reference at all to a transfer of power; Alexander was, it claimed, comatose and speechless through his final two days and nights. Known for his attention to detail and meticulous military planning, the Journal implied the dying Argead king employed none of these famous faculties, leaving neither a Will nor any succession instructions for either the Macedonian kingdom or the newly conquered Asian empire. It was this state of affairs, assumed historians, that led to infighting immediately after, and soon to Macedonian ‘civil war’.36
It was left to what we term the ‘Pamphlet’ to provide a more detailed and colourful account of Alexander’s death. This apparently partisan political document is thought to have originated in the first decade of the Successor Wars waged by Alexander’s generals for their share of the divided empire. The Pamphlet alleged there was nothing natural, or even supernatural, to Alexander’s death, for it revealed a conspiracy to poison him at an impromptu banquet thrown by a prominent court friend. Many attendees were implicated, including the king’s royal Bodyguards corps and his closest Companions, whilst six of the guests were cited as innocent and ignorant of the plot.37
The Pamphlet explained the motives behind the assassination and the poison used. It detailed the drafting and then the reading of a lucid Last Will and Testament in which Alexander distributed the empire to the megistoi (‘great men’, the most prominent men at court) as his end approached. This was not a formal ‘partitioning’ or breaking up of the newly-conquered lands, but rather the regional governance of an intact empire on behalf of his son (or sons). The Will bequests were listed beside commemoratives and donations to leading cities and religious sites, and Alexander paired the surviving royal women with carefully chosen generals to secure the safety of his sons, born or still in utero, for they were the future of the Argead (or Temenid) royal line.38 In fact, the Will stands as a voice of reason against the backdrop of competing narratives in which anarchy and treasonous power plays otherwise dominated the scene.
Some indeterminate years later, this Pamphlet-originating detail was most likely absorbed by the quasi-historical Historia Alexandri Magni, as it was titled in the oldest surviving manuscripts. This highly rhetorical and eulogistic template of Alexander’s deeds was erroneously once credited to the official campaign historian, Callisthenes, and hence is often still termed a ‘Pseudo-Callisthenes’ production.39 It soon absorbed the thaumata, ‘wonders’, that were attaching themselves to Alexander and in time it metamorphosised into something of a book of fables, popularly referred to today as the Greek Alexander Romance, a multicultural depository of traditions that grew up around the king.
In this literary environment, Alexander’s death was not immune to the encroaching fabulae and the Romance texts we read today conclude with him addressing Bucephalus, his warhorse standing obediently by his bed. Once the Pamphlet detail had been wholly subsumed by the Romance, Alexander’s testament became something of a pariah and unworthy of further consideration. As a result, the biographies, monographs, universal histories and academic studies over the past two millennia have concurred on one key issue: Alexander the Great died intestate and never made a Will. The irony, a positive one for our contention, is that these fanciful romances, so welcomed in the Middle Ages and translated into myriad lang
uages, significantly outsold them all.
Unlike the rejected Will, the plot to poison Alexander was too alluring to send into exile. This conspiratorial section of the Pamphlet was swept up by mainstream history and it became a colourful adornment to the closing pages of the Roman-era Vulgate accounts (Vulgate here suggesting a ‘popular’ or ‘widely-accepted’ genre) represented by the surviving texts of Curtius Rufus (likely published mid-1st century CE), Diodorus (toponymic Siculus, literally the ‘Sicilian’, published between 60 and 30 BCE) and Gnaeus Pompeius Trogus (late 1st century BCE) whose work is preserved in an epitome by the otherwise unknown writer, Justin (likely 3rd century CE). Their textual similarities point to a common, if not exclusive, source, and many scholars conclude that was the earlier Alexandria-based historian Cleitarchus, a likely contemporary of Alexander’s veterans or their sons.40
According to the Vulgate tradition, Alexander’s final words left his kingdom (not specifically the ‘empire’) ‘to the strongest’ or ‘most worthy’ of men.41 The dying king was still sufficiently lucid to add that he foresaw the wars of succession that would follow, and he cynically referred to them as his ‘funeral games’.42 With this Alexander was recalling the posthumous Homeric contests honouring the fallen heroes of Troy, those Achilles had held for Patroclus in the Iliad, for example, when the late-Mycenaean world seemed perennially at war, and it was a funerary tradition upheld in Macedonia.43 The highly rhetorical epitome of Justin was more lucid on the import of the ‘games’: Alexander ‘… could foretell, and almost saw with his eyes, how much blood Macedonia would shed in the disputes that would follow his death, and with what slaughters, and what quantities of gore, she would perform his obsequies.’ Curtius’ account went on to paint a picture of Persian mourning and dissent amongst the assembled generals, where Justin clearly suggested the Macedonians were glad to see Alexander go.44
The rumours of conspiracy reverberated far and wide; even Arrian and Plutarch, adherents to the Journal silence and dismissive of Vulgate claims, felt duty-bound to report it. When closing his narrative, Plutarch reported that some five years after Alexander had been embalmed, his mother, Olympias, exacted revenge on the architects of the assassination by ‘putting many men to death’.45 Diodorus and Curtius believed that historians had dared not write of the plot when the men at the heart of the conspiracy were still fighting to become primus inter pares in their bid for the Macedonian throne or control of the Asian empire (or both), and ‘whatever credence such stories gained, they were soon suppressed by the power of the people implicated by the rumour’. More specific was the claim (possibly in the Pamphlet itself) that Onesicritus, the court philosopher and campaign historian, deliberately avoided naming the banquet guests for fear of personal reprisals.46 The Pamphlet was clearly virulent and one of our aims is to identify its still anonymous author in our bid to navigate back to Alexander’s original Will.
VIVA ENIM MORTUORUM IN MEMORIA VIVORUM EST POSITA47
The texts available for autopsy have been termed ‘both many and few’; many accounts of Alexander were written but only a few survive as coherent narratives. More often than not our knowledge is reliant upon fragments from philosphers, antiquarians, poets, politicians and propaganda pamphleteers, whose accounts range from the sound and sober, to the downright suspicious and the outright fabrication.48 When summing up this corpus of contradictory evidence in his 1973 biography, Robin Lane Fox stated that he knew of 1,472 books and articles analysing the subject, but that did not deter him from adding his own account. Written with a remarkable degree of acuity when publishing at the age of twenty-seven, Lane Fox advised that his methodology was not pretending ‘to certainty in Alexander’s name’.49
This remains the state of affairs, for when weighing up the probabilities of what might have actually happened, including plausible impossibilities and implausible possibilities, we still do, and perhaps always will, rely heavily upon the five cohesive biographies that date to the Roman era. Their authors represent an eclectic mix of social and ethnic backgrounds: Greek, Gallic, Greek-Sicilian, Bithynian and Italian, each writing under the scrutiny of a Rome now dominating the former Hellenistic world that had coalesced around the kingdoms of Alexander’s successors, the Diadokhoi.50 Written from the distance of some 300 to 450 years after the events they portrayed, these texts were themselves compiled from a corpus of earlier sources. Apart from surviving fragments, all of this earlier material from the Hellenistic era (popularly defined as the period between Alexander’s death in 323 BCE and the battle of Actium in 31 BCE) has been lost. Indeed, without the infrequent references to these archetypal sources that are strewn sparingly across the classical library, the parental Alexander historians would otherwise be unknown, and many are surely still buried in unmarked graves.
Thanks to Karl Müller’s five-volume Fragmenta Historicorum Graecorum published between 1841 and 1870, and Felix Jacoby’s incomplete Die Fragmente der griechischen Historiker published in 1929, today’s scholars can identify almost 400 fragments directly relating to Alexander from some thirty ‘lost’ writers whose works ranged from serious biography to propaganda pamphlets by the ‘good, sound and important’ and ‘the world’s greatest liars’; paradoxically, those traits often combine in the same source.51 They were translated into English by Charles Robinson (published 1953) and Lionel Pearson followed with a profiling of these lost texts in his influential The Lost Histories of Alexander the Great (1960). But source identifications remain problematic; after historians had sifted through the fragments to identify the truly original reporting from regurgitated testimonia, many were deemed paraphrases and others were labelled ‘spuriously assigned’.52
It would be logical to expect a linear deterioration in the accuracy and detail of this material through time, and it would be reasonable to suppose that the most lamentable losses will always be those compiled by Alexander’s senior staff, the eyewitnesses we define as the ‘primary sources’, or more specifically, ‘court sources’, who, as the title suggests, frequented the king’s palace and campaign headquarters. Yet that would be an oversimplification, for evidence suggests that the magnet of political ambition and the realities of survival in a world torn apart by rivalries, along with the powerful hand of sponsorship that any publication would have required, perniciously drew fabrication, omission, exaggeration and agenda into the first generation texts. ‘Truth’ is, after all, the first casualty of war.53
Plutarch, a voracious collector of detail who paired twenty-two greats in his Lives of Noble Greeks and Romans (otherwise known as Parallel Lives), named twenty-four sources in his profiling of Alexander, and he provided a sober warning on early material in general:
So very difficult a matter is it to trace and find out the truth of anything by history, when, on the one hand, those who afterwards write it find long periods of time intercepting their view, and, on the other hand, the contemporary records of any actions and lives, partly through envy and ill-will, partly through favour and flattery, pervert and distort truth.54
This raises a larger philosophical conundrum: what indeed is ‘history’, and how is the literary evidence to be detached from the ‘historical’? With straightforward Indo-European etymological roots in ‘to see’, ‘to know’, or ‘to gain knowledge from’, the simplicity of the word ‘history’ hides an epistemological complexity with which the answer has evolved. Although Cicero (106-43 BCE), charismatically reminded us that Viva enim mortuorum in memoria vivorum est posita – ‘The life of the dead is set in the memory of the living’ – he rather damagingly considered that orators alone should be entrusted with the care of the past. The solemn Thucydides (ca. 460-395 BCE) saw history as ‘philosophy teaching by examples’, a metaphysical slant we might today term ‘historiosophy’,55 whilst the ever-wary Polybius (ca. 200 BCE-118 BCE) in his language of officialdom, provided a more familiar warning: ‘Readers should be very attentive to, and critical of, historians, and they in turn should be constantly on their guard.’56
More recently, less florid definitions have perpetuated an ever more cynical historiographical perspective in which our knowledge of the past has been likened to a ‘… damn dim candle over a damn dark abyss.’57 But for all the erudition and seasoned metaphysical debate, Samuel Butler provided the most useful insight for our particular purpose: ‘Though God cannot alter the past, historians can.’58
The forensic and systematic analysis of extant sources is epitomised in the word ‘Quellenforschung’. The research was developed most prominently through philological scholarship in Germany in the 18th and early 19th centuries, and is now a broad-based discipline for peeling the historical onion (often with tears) of its täuschung (deception) and fälschung (forgery). Although philology ‘nourishes itself on the erosion of history’,59 in searching for the ‘infallible criterion of truth’ – arrived at by what Brian Bosworth terms an ‘almost Cartesian principle’ (finding a reliable source as a yardstick for the credibility of the rest)60 – the methodologies for tearing apart and reconstructing ancient texts were not always wholly successful:
The German scholars of the 18th and 19th centuries were masters at creating and accepting elaborate hypotheses, some of which rested, like inverted pyramids delicately balanced, on a single point of evidence. Many of them found it easy to believe three impossible things, or more, before breakfast.61