by David Grant
The 22.5 cm clay Cyrus Cylinder, inscribed with Akkadian cuneiform, tells of Cyrus’ conquest of Babylon in 539 BCE and the capture of King Nabonidus. The account details Cyrus’ benevolence and tolerance, which followed a long tradition of Mesopotamian victory declarations. Discovered in 1879, it resides in the British Museum.
THE THEOGONIA OF THE ELUSIVE COMPARANDUM
Whether Alexander displayed a genuine Graeco-Oriental spirit unique for his time, or simple political expediency, is perennially debated, but few men in history have been subjected to so many post-mortems through the ages; his body of literature was bruised by, or benefited from, the ebbs and flows of the philosophical movements and social tides that washed back and forth across the ‘universal Comparandum’, as Alexander has been termed.22
In his Prior Analytics Aristotle proposed that it is possible to deduce a person’s character from their physical appearance, though the contradictions found in the descriptions of Alexander render any conclusion suitably ambiguous.23 We are told that though he was of average height, he was striking and menacing even, with a melting glance of the eyes. His breath and skin, according to the Memoirs of Aristoxenus of Tarentum (a pupil of Aristotle), exuded a sweet odour, but they were the by-products of his hot and fiery temperament, so his contemporary, Theophrastus (ca. 378-320 BCE), believed. His voice was described as harsh yet also femininely high-pitched; he sported a gold leonine-mane with anastole in the heroic style, but he chose to remain beardless; this became a new vogue for him and his men.24 Alexander appears to have been heterochromatic, with one pupil black and the other grey, and his widely reported neck tilt suggests torticollis (wry neck). His teeth were asserted to be sharp and pointed like those of a snake, but this comes from the Greek Alexander Romance with its many serpent associations.
Clearly, many of the descriptions, like other detail relating to his life, come down to us from the Roman era and from anonymous, dubious and romanticised sources with little court authentication.25 Yet it is not Alexander’s physiognomy but his character and mindset that remain the more elusive, despite the best attempts of Quellenforschung to unmask the man behind the rhetorical veil. Modern historians soon discovered they lacked the vocabulary to cope with him, and word hybrids like verschmelzungspolitik appeared to describe what some have romantically believed was his ‘policy of racial fusion’.26 So perhaps we should try and appreciate how Alexander III originally viewed himself in the light of his unique and privileged, though hazardous, Macedonian heritage and upbringing.
Some modern scholars accept that the origins of the ethnic, Makedones, approximated ‘men from the highlands’ or even ‘high-grown men’, though the ancient authors that shepherded Greece out of the Dark Ages proposed a more colourful, though conflicting, genesis.27 Hesiod’s Theogonia (likely 7th century BCE) and the Catalogue of Women, a supposed continuation that was attributed to him in antiquity, were cosmogonies that provided the archetype of mythical genealogical claims, though they made little of nationalist distinctions and some of this early material was even influenced by the religious doctrine of Babylonia and Mesopotamia, including the Epic of Gilgamesh.
In Hesiod’s legends (and those attached to him) the origins of tribal Greece and Macedonia started with Deucalion who bore a son, Hellen, from whom the ‘Hellenes’ were derived. He in turn bore three sons who became the founders of eponymous tribes: Aeolus, Dorus, and Xuthus who bore Ion and (according to other writers) Achaeus. By Zeus, Deucalion’s daughter, Thyla, produced two sons, Magnes, and Macedon who ‘rejoiced in horses’; Magnes journeyed south into Thessaly and Macedon remained in the region of Mount Olympus and Pieria, the heartland of what was once Emathia, the ‘prehistoric name for the cradle of the Macedonian kingdom’. A fragment of the Makedonika of Marsyas of Pella (broadly contemporary with Alexander) informs us that it was the two sons of Macedon, Amathus and Pieria, who became the eponymous founders of these two regions.28
But whether Alexander considered himself ‘Macedonian’ in the tribal sense of the word is open to question; he was in any case half-Epirote through his mother, and he likely embraced a more Aristotelian definition of identity approaching ‘to Hellenikon’. To Herodotus (ca. 484-425 BCE) the ‘Hellenes’ were a people bound together by blood, speech, religion and a common mode of living. Of course if your tribe was lucky enough to appear on Homer’s Catalogue of Ships which listed the assailant fleet to Troy, then your ‘Greekness’ – or allegiance to Hellas at least – was beyond question, though the Iliad appears to have portrayed the Trojans as Greek-speaking as well.29
In the Homeric epics, the ethnonyms and endonyms of early tribal appellations were not always easy to follow; the ‘long-haired Achaeans’ (Akhaiwoi in ancient Greek, Akaiwasha to the Hittites) that followed Achilles to war are at times ethnically distinct, and in other cases they represented the total ethne of mainland Greece.30 The Catalogue of Ships itself presented the diversity of the invading ‘Achaean’ army heading to Asian shores; Homer declared (sometime in the 9th century BCE, debatably): ‘For I could not count or name the multitude who came to Troy, though I had ten tongues and a tireless voice, and lungs of bronze as well.’31 In the Illiad and Odyssey, the Danaoi (or Danaans, possibly the Danuna mentioned in Hittite and Egyptian records) and ‘Argives’ were repeatedly cited in some collective tribal fashion representing the invading Greeks led by Agamemnon.32
As with all else he touched, Alexander’s teacher, Aristotle, attempted to bring some rationalisation to the ‘pre-history’ of Greece after the fall of Mycenaean civilisation; he described ‘ancient Hellas’ as being occupied by Selloi (Zeus’ priests, likely an alternative of Helloi) and Graikoi, who later became known as the homogenised to koinon ton Hellenon, which we might loosely term a ‘Hellenic commonwealth’.33 The Periegetes Hellados of Pausanias (ca. 110-180 CE), his unique Guide to Greece (though a Greece whose northern boundary was the pass at Thermopylae) in the form of a straight-talking guide interwoven with the history, architecture and ancient Greek myths, mentioned that an inscription by Echembrotus dating to the 48th Olympiad (584 BCE) employed the term ‘Hellenes’ in a dedication to Heracles at the Amphictionic Games.34 A similar dedication at Delphi celebrating victory over Persia credited another Pausanias as the leading general of this ethnic group; it was a unity further endorsed at the fourth Panhellenic Games in which ‘non-Hellenes’ could not participate in any of the disciplines.
Plato (ca. 428-348 BCE) believed the most ‘Greek of the Greeks’ were the Athenians, and in the dialogue of the Menexenus (attributed to him), Aspasia, the mistress of the Athenian statesman Pericles, (ca. 495-429 BCE) proposed only Athenians were pure and free from barbarian blood.35 According to Herodotus, Athenians (and other pre ‘pre-Hellenised’ tribes) were once Pelasgians, arriving through migration, or the autochthonic inhabitants.36
Clearly, there had been no original Pan-Hellenic name for what became the Greek homeland, populated as it was with at least two major tribal migrations, the first by the Ionians and Aeolians (perhaps 16th century BCE, if so, this coincided with the emergence of what we now term the Mycenaean civilisation) and later the Dorians (11th century BCE), though from exactly where (and why) they came is unknown.37 These racial exoduses took place in mytho-historical eras between which the mysterious ‘Peoples of the Sea’ (perhaps including Greek tribes) caused such destruction around the Eastern Mediterranean in the late 13th century BCE. But questions and theories of population displacement go back further; new studies of the sudden flooding of the land basin that is now the Black Sea (expanded from a lake ca. 8,400 years ago) suggest the resulting refugees became the farmers of Macedonia and northern Greece, a theory some scholars link to the true origins of the deluge behind Noah’s legendary ark, or perhaps to the myth of Deucalion and Pyrrha.38
A fragmented synoikismos (synoecism) – a population amalgam – existed through the Helladic period and Greek Dark Ages (ca. 1100-850 BCE) before the city-state culture of the Archaic period (ca. 800-480 BCE), and i
t resulted in a dioikismos of independent communities in which symbola, the rudimentary agreements between pairs of states, nevertheless, provided a basis for trade and law between the ethnic groups.39 Tribal identity was then far more relevant than today’s homogenised terms, possibly because linguistic palaeontology does provide overwhelming evidence of a ‘pre-Greek’ population inhabiting the region: the names Corinth (Korinthos), Knossos, Larissa, Samos, Mycenae (Mykenai) and Olympus even, are thought to be of pre-Hellenic construction. The name Cadmus (Kadmos), the legendary Phoenician founder of Thebes who introduced the alphabet into Greece, is also considered pre-Greek.40
The Latin term Graecus and the land of Graecia developed later, perhaps from the Graikoi who assisted the citizens of Euboea to migrate to Cumae in Italy through Epirus in the 8th century BCE; they were from the ancient city of Graia linked to Tanagraia, the daughter of Asopus (and so to the eponymous city of Tanagra and to Oropus), by Hesiod, Homer, Aristotle and Pausanias after them. According to Aristotle and the Parian Chronicle it was the Graikoi who were the renamed Hellenes, though early attachments still restricted them to Epirus and the Dodona region and its Homeric links to the age of Odysseus and Achilles. Hesiod referred to this region as Hellopia and Stephanus of Byzantium later named Graikos as the son of Thessalus the woodcutter who was first shown the shrine at Dodona dedicated to the cult of Zeus Naos.41
In time, the Romans, whose early continuous contact was likely with northwestern Greece, came to term Hellenes (now meaning all Greeks) Graeci.42 In return, the Greeks were partly responsible for the widening use of the appellation Italia; it stemmed from the Latin for ‘land of calves’ or ‘cattle’ (calf, vitulus), thus Vitalia. Lacking a ‘v’ in their alphabet, the Greeks in southern Italy settled on a name that spread north from Calabria and was eventually adopted by Rome itself. Some 600 years on from Alexander’s day, both the Greeks and the Italians of the Eastern Roman Empire were to become grouped together as the Rhomaioi, Romhellenes and the Graecoromans of a new Byzantine Empire.
Outside Greece’s borders were the barbaroi. The verb barbarizein described the imitation of non-Greek sounds and followed Homer’s use of barbarophonoi for those of incomprehensible speech.43 In Plato’s view, much of it adopted by Aristotle, barbarians were ‘more servile in their nature than the Hellenes, and the Asiatics more than the Europeans’, and thus they ‘deserve to be slaves’, though curiously, Aristotle put this differentiation down to climate; in his Politics, Aristotle even seems to have implied that the Macedonians, alongside the Celts and Scythians, were barbarians too, whilst Isocrates (ca. 436-338 BCE) likened the Greek-barbarian divide to nothing short of that between mankind and beasts.44
The ‘closed world’ of some 750-1,000 introspective and independent mainland Greek poleis, city-states (originally ‘strongholds’), had acted as a natural buffer to the integration of barbarians and to the concept of national monarchy as well, unlike the development of Greece’s northern neighbours.45 But the need for foreign commodities meant a polis could never remain totally isolated, thus the appearance of 300 or so Greek settlements overseas where they had to live side-by-side with the indigenous population and probably developed a less xenophobic attitude as a result.
The Greeks, and later the Romans, repeatedly referred to all northern barbarian tribes (including the Goths) as ‘Scythians’ or ‘Thracians’.46 Thucydides considered the Acarnanians, Aetolians, Epirotes – the northern Greek tribes – and Upper Macedonians (more akin to the ethne of the Epirotes, thus Molossic) as barbarians, though he did distinguish ‘proper Macedonians’ (the ‘Lower Macedonians’) from the Balkan tribes to the north (as did Ephorus of Cyme ca. 405-330 BCE); it was these upper cantons (including Paeonia, Pelagonia, Lyncestis, Orestis, Eordaea, Elimea, Tymphaea and Almopia) that Alexander’s father, Philip II, effectively absorbed into a ‘greater Macedonia’.47 Polybius (ca. 200-118 BCE), who once implied the Romans were a tribe of barbaroi as part of a (long) rebuttal to his forerunner, the historian Timaeus (ca. 345-250 BCE), provided a more nuanced distinction of ethnicity, and it appears that by his day (the 2nd century BCE) the widespread use of Hellenistic koine (a dialect) had begun to break down the ancient divides.48
Defying the older Homeric-era definitions, Alexander may indeed have been an original kosmopolites, a self-declared ‘citizen of the world’, a term that first became attached to Diogenes the Cynic who he famously met in Corinth. For political purposes Alexander might have presented himself as philhellenos, the cognomen taken by his Temenid predecessor, King Alexander I (ruled ca. 498-454 BCE), though the titles Proxenos and Euergetes (‘guest-friend’ and ‘benefactor’) granted by Athens to King Archelaus I (ruled Macedonia 413-399 BCE, his name broadly meaning ‘leader of men’), were hardly likely to have come Alexander’s way now that Greece was garrisoned.49 Macedonia itself had been infused with foreign settlers through tribal and city state migrations and the displacement of war: when Mycenae was destroyed by Argos, over half the population relocated to Macedonia on the invitation of Alexander I.50 Justin summed up Philip II’s own empire forging and repopulating in more recent times:
The cantons of ancient Macedonia.
On his return to his kingdom, as shepherds drive their flocks sometimes into winter, sometimes into summer pastures, so he transplanted people and cities hither and thither, according to his caprice… Some people he planted upon the frontiers of his kingdom to oppose his enemies; others he settled at the extremities of it. Some, whom he had taken prisoner in war, he distributed among certain cities to fill up the number of inhabitants; and thus, out of various tribes and nations, he formed one kingdom and people.51
If, as a result, Alexander’s view on ethne was even something more eclectic that defied autochthonous norms, it was his ancestral Greek origins that would have rooted him in a distinct cultural upbringing with its vow to excellence and a particular honour code that backboned the Homeric sagas.
But there remains an ongoing philological contention over the original language of the Macedonians, and this stems in part from dialogues within the Alexander histories. As far as Thucydides was concerned, the region had previously been culturally backward (‘a majority of unwalled villages federated into ethne’) and probably linguistically distinct from the population to the south that spoke the more refined Attikoi (Attic) dialect of Greece.52 This is backed up by Curtius’ description of the trial of Philotas, the son of Alexander’s prominent general, Parmenio, for it suggested ‘legal’ procedures were conducted in a tongue (or dialect at least) distinct from the Greek that Alexander’s top echelons apparently spoke.53 Philotas replied that he wished to use the language Alexander had adopted (aedem lingua), rather than the patrius sermo that Curtius’ Latin text referred to, in order that the greatest number of soldiers could understand his defence; the ‘mother tongue’, Philotas stated, had become obsolete because of the wider dialogue with foreign nations. As Edward Anson concluded, Philotas’ practical retort indicates the Macedonians could understand Attic Greek more easily than Greeks could grasp Macedonian.54 The common ‘adopted’ dialect being referred to (aedem lingua) was most likely akin to Hellenistic koine (which became known as ‘Macedonian’ Greek) rather than Attic Greek, for the Ionic dialect (with perhaps an admix of others) which was later infiltrated by Macedonian, was the basis of the lingua franca prevalent in much of the early Hellenistic world.55
Plutarch believed that in cases of extreme emergency Alexander did beckon his Bodyguards in makedonisti, so ‘in the Macedonian tongue’.56 The contention is backed up by a fragment found at Oxyrhynchus (Egypt) by archaeologist Annibale Evaristo Breccia in 1932; it described the clash between Eumenes of Cardia (the former royal secretary, now a governor and general in the post-Alexander world) and the Molossian noble, Neoptolemus, in the early Successor Wars during which Xennias, ‘a man of Macedonian speech’, was sent out to intimidate the opposing ranks.57 Of course the claim may have been made by a historian emphasising Eumenes’ Greek disadvantage, and th
e historian Hieronymus, his client, cannot be discounted as the architect of that. We have a similar anomaly in Plutarch’s Life of Eumenes when the Macedones were portrayed as saluting their fever-ridden general: ‘… they hailed him at once in their Macedonian speech, caught up their shields, beat upon them with their spears, and raised their battle-cry…’58
But noting statements from the Roman chronicler Livy (64/59 BCE-17 CE) and earlier from Herodotus that Greeks and Macedonians shared a common tongue, and with scant references in the texts to makedonizein, ‘to speak Macedonian’, scholars remain split on the case for a national language. A middle ground concludes that the Upper Macedonia cantons to the north and west, which Hatzopoulos terms ‘the cradle of the Macedonian ethnos’, were linguistically distinct from the Lower Macedonian heartlands, the flat fertile plain bordering the Thermaic Gulf, which included Bottiaea (possibly settled by Cretans in the Late Bronze Age ca. 1300 BCE) and Pieria.59 The upper cantons had perhaps adopted the harsh Doric of northwest Greece as suggested by the Pellan Curse Tablet.60
If taken at face value, episodes suggest that any diglossia that had existed in Macedonia rested with the nobility, and not with the peasant-conscripted infantry. Yet a formal approbation, national war cry, or a judicial procedure such as the trial described above, may indeed have followed archaic procedures rooted in the old tribal dialect that retained (or shared) elements of Illyrian, Phrygian and Thracian, which were evidenced by the lexicographer Hesychius of Alexandria in the 5th century.61 As a parallel, we might note that the judicial language of Solon’s legislative reforms of 5th century BCE Athens was sufficiently archaic to cause interpretive problems for later classical-era scholars.