by David Grant
So here we take a closer look at the background of the ‘people’: those who preserved the tale of the Alexander we just attempted to survey. They became kings, or the generals and court favourites of kings who were themselves veterans of the campaigns, and their recollections were the stock for the secondary and tertiary stews served up in the 500 years that followed, a few of which survive on the classics menu of today.
Strabo considered that ‘who wrote about Alexander preferred the marvellous to the true’, and even Arrian, who looked to court sources for reliable detail, summed up his frustration with pessimistic lines: ‘So, we see that even the most trustworthy writers, men who were actually with Alexander at the time, have given conflicting accounts of notorious events with which they must have been perfectly familiar.’13 So we are standing on uncertain ground with the historians who both educated Alexander, and as those who educated us on him. It is in this light we need to adjudicate on what we read today, recalling the sobering advice: ‘Study the historian before you begin to study the facts.’14
It has been proposed that Alexander’s contemporaries, the men who accompanied their king on his anabasis, the campaign ‘up country’ through the Persian Empire, wrote for their own ‘literary’ purposes rather than for any higher ‘historical’ ideals.15 But as products of a brutal and cataclysmic age, when royal sponsorship was key to survival, they were inevitably partial and self-interested and this is why their commentaries frequently conflict. Their retrospective words in ink, sharper-tongued than a Greek logographer, slashing reputations like scythed chariots and removing textual entrails like the blade of a deft diviner, were capable of obscuring the truth like a total eclipse, leaving us one more example of ‘history eavesdropping on legend’.16
THE INDISCREET PHILOSOPHER – ‘A SAGE BLIND TO HIS OWN INTERESTS’
We start with Callisthenes the son of Demotimus of Olynthus, as he was the first to put pen to ink in Alexander’s name. Callisthenes was appointed by Alexander as what amounted to ‘official’ campaign historian, most likely through the influence of his relative, Aristotle, who reputedly warned his protégé on his indiscreet tongue when quoting lines from the Iliad, here poetically translated as: ‘Alas! My child, in life’s primeval bloom, such hasty words will bring thee thy doom.’17 Plutarch reported an ulterior motive for Callisthenes joining the Macedonian adventure: it was to convince Alexander to re-settle his native city, Olynthus, destroyed by Philip II in 348 BCE for its part in sheltering the king’s half-brothers, both of whom were destined for the axe.18 In fact Callisthenes was following Aristotle’s lead with this request, for he had likewise petitioned Philip to restore his birthplace, Stagira, destroyed in the same year when Macedonian forces annexed the Chalcidian Peninsula.19
Callisthenes was now mandated to toe the Argead corporate line; his new role was more akin to front-line reporting by a journalist employed by a state newspaper: a Macedonian Party Pravda. Although his account was to be a political manifesto, it became something of a biographic encomium that attempted to embody ideals that would appeal to Greek consumption.20 Callisthenes had already proven himself an able historian having completed a Hellenika (Greek history from ca. 387-357 BCE), a Periplous (circumnavigation) of the Black Sea, and On the Sacred War (which may have assisted Philip’s cause in that conflict in Greece), amongst other works, before joining Alexander.21 He, like Theopompus, Anaximenes, Ephorus of Cyme and other writers of the 4th century BCE, attempted more than one literary genre.22
We can assume that aside from the sycophantic and semi-hagiographic content displayed in surviving fragments, his Praxeis Alexandrou (Deeds of Alexander), if indeed this was his title, was on the whole coherent and valuably replete with dates, names, and numbers, even if a work of lower quality than his previous publications, as he himself admitted; when questioned on why his Hellenika was superior Callisthenes is said to have replied: ‘Because I wrote it when I was hungry, and the other work when I was well fed.’ That is until he was arrested and reportedly kept in a cage after losing favour on campaign.23 Possibly anecdotal, and yet suitably cynical, this retort was preserved in the Gnomologium Vaticanum, a Byzantine collection of chestnuts by ancient Greek philosophers and other exploitable sources.
Callisthenes was employed at a turning point in history. Philip II had defeated the Greek alliance at the battle at Chaeronea and Alexander had levelled Thebes after which he enforced his father’s edicts: the Boeotian League (headed by Thebes) was abolished and the Greek city-states had already been reorganised into an uneasy alliance in the form of the Hellenic League, more commonly referred to as the League of Corinth and its imposition of a Common Peace. The notion of ‘freedom’, underpinned by Isocrates’ calls for Greek unity in an environment where perennial city-state war was crippling the land, was now revived in a war of revenge on the Persian Great King, Darius III, and Callisthenes performed his part. His description of the Battle of Gaugamela and which ended Achaemenid rule, has been termed ‘nothing short of a Pan-Hellenic set piece’.24 It was the last major battle the campaign historians would ever witness.
Callisthenes reportedly proposed, in Thucydidean style: ‘In attempting to write anything one must not prove false to the character, but make the speeches fit both the speaker and the situation’; it dovetailed neatly with his contention that ‘history’ was ‘philosophy teaching by example’.25 But Polybius later warned, writing as he was when Macedonia fell to Rome, ‘discursive speeches destroy the peculiar virtue of history’,26 and many we read in classical accounts do appear self-constructed, much like the dialogues that formed almost twenty-four per cent of Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War in which speech and narrative is bound together as firmly as in the Iliad.27 This questions the extent to which words defined our history or events truly defined the words.
But self-righteous statements of method on reconstructed dialogues like these, repeated in various guises throughout Greek and Roman history, at once reveal an epideictic addiction and its supposed antidote, although mimesis, the ‘imitation of characters and emotions’, was considered a virtue of historical prose style.28 But rather than narrowing the corridor of artistic license, this implicitly widened the path for a logos pseudes, untrue discourse, for the character and situation were both the historian’s to originate. In the case of Callisthenes, by merging didactic discursions into his history with antiquarian scholarship, he was now writing in ‘an almost rhetorical’ manner, according to Cicero, who termed him a ‘hackneyed piece of goods’; Polybius thought Callisthenes’ statements were simply ‘absurd’.29
Extant fragments of Callisthenes’ campaign account reveal a systematic denigration of the influential old guard general Parmenio who was executed on Alexander’s orders in late 330 BCE.30 Knowing when Parmenio died, and supposing when Callisthenes followed him (conflicting reports make exact dating impossible, but no later than 327 BCE), we have our termini within which this latter part of his work might have been released. Campaign-related detail is limited and not all testimonia we have is necessarily first-hand.31 Fragments contain geographical digressions on Asia Minor linking sites to Homeric legend, and they do not suggest a coherent or progressive campaign log; they may, in fact, be taken from Callisthenes’ earlier works.
A Thucydides he was not, but Callisthenes’ book was official, vetted and, we assume, sanctioned by Alexander before publication, and thus not easily contradicted by his contemporaries. Moreover, written in ‘real time’, it was a veritable campaign atomic clock when personal memories faded, as well as an invaluable spinal column for new flesh to be grafted onto. So modern historians remain vexed by the paucity of references to Callisthenes in the extant sources. Why do the histories we have, based on the books by Alexander’s contemporaries such as Ptolemy and Aristobulus, stay silent on his contribution? In the case of Ptolemy’s testimony the answer is easily deduced: citing Callisthenes as the source would have undermined his own eyewitness position, and furthermore, the tactless sophist had b
een controversially executed in his presence and possibly with Ptolemy’s encouragement.32
Hemmed in on one side by his philosophical precepts, and with an ever more censorious king the other, Callisthenes should have trodden carefully when sermonising on campaign, as Aristotle warned.33 Yet it appears he did not, for according to Arrian he tactlessly claimed that Alexander and his exploits (along with a share of divinity) would be forgotten without him and his pen.34 His aphorism has undertones of the more cynical quip: ‘Any fool can make history, but it takes a genius to write it.’35 Callisthenes had ‘kept his superfluous wit but had thrown away his common sense’ and that may have spelled the end.36 But his reminder proved prophetic and with him went valuable detail no one has since recovered.
As a result, it appears that only a few key episodes from Callisthenes’ campaign account survived for the Roman-era historians to consult. Moreover, Arrian’s references to him come with second-hand wrappings, such as: ‘… it is said that Callisthenes the Olynthan…’ and ‘… the following remark of his, if indeed it has been correctly recorded…’. Hammond puts this down to Arrian’s disdain for the Olynthan and yet Plutarch only twice cited Callisthenes as a source, and he too, like Arrian, could have extracted through an intermediary.37 He is not named as a source at all in the Vulgate genre. If we require further proof that his history disappeared early on, we simply need to recall that the Greek Alexander Romance, still popularly referred to as a Pseudo-Callisthenes production, was at some point (in its earlier less fabulous form) credited to him; this was a misattribution only possible in the absence of the original. But it equally suggests that Callisthenes’ reputation as a marvel-maker, propagated by those few encomiastic episodes, was established at the outset.38
Callisthenes was finally arrested for his reputed part in a plot involving the paides basilikoi, the king’s royal pages (some of whom were his students) to assassinate Alexander.39 It was a huge eyewitness conundrum and one that demanded some form of public relations initiative, executed as the historian was with little evidence of guilt.40 The episode and its outcome, and the speeches couched within, neatly set the tone for the criticism of the conqueror that were to soon emanate from Greece: Alexander, the once model student, had lost his way in the East and had now become a tyrant.41
Arrian noted the disunity in the reports of Callisthenes’ death and as Lane Fox points out, he ultimately experienced ‘five different deaths’ on Alexander’s orders.42 Callisthenes’ incomplete book has an uncertain demise as well, for it disappeared from the corpus of history too gracefully for comfort, with his only epitaph appearing in the On Grief of Theophrastus (a former student of Aristotle and his successors at the Lyceum) which observed that Alexander misused the good fortune sent his way. But this was something of a leitmotif of Hellenistic biography; even the Persian Great King, Darius III, was portrayed as pondering fortune’s vicissitudes in his addresses to his troops before his final battle at Gaugamela.43
Callisthenes’ position was surely compromised from the start; his disapproval of Alexander’s adoption of Persian court protocol, his lack of tact and alleged morose silences (we assume biting his tongue when witnessing indigestible episodes) led Alexander himself to brand the sophist ‘a sage who is blind to his own interests’, or so Plutarch claimed.44
THE CYNICAL EPIPLOUS
Onesicritus of Astypalea (in the Greek Dodecanese) in many ways appears to have been Callisthenes’ successor, and he might have been summoned to replace him at the mobile campaign court.45 This remains a surprisingly undeveloped theory when considering that the first references to Onesicritus appear after Callisthenes’ death. It has been suggested that Alexander didn’t require a ‘political historian’ after Darius had been overthrown, for the initial propaganda mission had by then been fully accomplished. But it is doubtful that the Macedonian king, set to campaign to the world’s end, was prepared to let his future deeds go entirely unrecorded.
Onesicritus was a student of Diogenes the Cynic (as were his sons) whom Alexander reportedly admired, and this might have propelled his credentials to the top of the application pile.46 He and Callisthenes had benefited from dialectic training (reasoned truth through discourse) and philosophical teaching, so perhaps we should refer to them as ‘philosophers with a penchant for history’ rather than the reverse. The amalgam was never likely to have produced a straight-talking narrative, though Onesicritus was certainly the more tactful of the two men; his survival speaks for his political dexterity because the Cynics, and possibly the Peripatetics (followers of Aristotle’s school of philosophy taught at the Lyceum), were a significant part of that decidedly hostile picture later painted of Alexander.47 The new Stoic followers of Zeno of Citium (ca. 334-262 BCE, from Cyprus), who was fortuitously shipwrecked to a career in Athens, look to have been influential too in the shaping of Alexander’s legacy in the generation after his death, for they retrospectively blamed him for the rise of the cults and kingships of his successors that saw their schools censored and closed.48
In his 1953 translation of the extant fragments of the campaign histories, Robinson noted the chapters in which the sources appeared ‘thin’ on campaign detail. More recently a scholar probed into the existence of ‘a lacuna of nearly six months in the chronicle’ of a total ‘missing year’ broadly coinciding with this period.49 Even formative episodes involving Alexander’s meeting with his first wife, Roxane, and her father, Oxyartes, suffered from these conflicts, and if we can trust the anonymous Metz Epitome, the birth and loss of a first child by Roxane fell into the reporting gap as well.50
Callisthenes was executed at some indeterminate point after the battle at Gaugamela in September 331 BCE, possibly in Bactria and as late as 328/327 BCE, though he had already been under arrest for some time before his death.51 The clear lack of synchronicity between the court-sourced account of Arrian (who principally drew from Ptolemy and Aristobulus), and the Cleitarchus-derived Vulgate profiling of the eastern campaign, broadly relating to the period between the winters spanning 329/328 and 328/327 BCE, does suggest the absence of front-line reporting.52 If Onesicritus was called out to replace Callisthenes (before or after his eventual execution), and factoring in the distance a ‘recruitment message’ and its response had to travel – from the eastern Persian satrapies to Greece and back again – Onesicritus may not have arrived until Alexander was already in the upper satrapies (covering today’s northern Afghanistan, Pakistan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan), to which some fragments linked to him refer, or perhaps even preparing to enter India through the Khyber Pass.53
The blurring of detail suggests that the official campaign Ephemerides, from which the brief Journal of Alexander’s illness and death was allegedly extracted (T3, T4, T5), must themselves have been far from perfectly preserved. Plutarch reported that the tent of Eumenes of Cardia had caught fire, or rather was set on fire by Alexander as a prank in India.54 In his regret Alexander made every effort to assist Eumenes, who held the role as the royal hypomnematographos (the diary-keeping secretary), in retrieving correspondence from the generals and regional governors. By this stage a ‘tent’ was more likely a significant pavilion of enclosures that housed the campaign secretariat; much was obviously lost and its recovery was essential to the administration of the newly acquired empire.
Although we remain uncertain of when his account commenced, elements of Onesicritus’ work appear to have survived intact for Roman period autopsy. Aulus Gellius (ca. 125 to post 180 CE) claimed his manuscripts were available when he arrived at Brundisium (modern Brindisi) in Italy and made his way to Rome along the Via Appia, and he linked Onesicritus’ texts to the many fabulae cheaply on sale in the streets.55 Once again, his account or what survived of it appears to have been select titbits rather than a cogent and chronologically organised campaign history.
Onesicritus was keen to preserve the wonders of the East, and some twenty-one of the surviving thirty-eight fragments do refer to India, the ‘third part of the world’ as
it was labelled; he was, for example, the very first Greek to detail a sighting of cotton plants.56 And it was here in India, on the very edges of the Persian Empire, that he was keen to see Alexander accepted as the ‘first armed philosopher’ by the gymnosophistai (literally ‘naked sophists’), the Brahmin sages they encountered, though this approach was steeped in Platonist doctrine. Perhaps it captured something of an idealistic self-reflection as well as an attempt to align the Indian dogma with that of the Cynic school.57 Strabo’s branding him the ‘chief pilot of fantasy’ was no doubt a play upon his attested role as pilot, kybernetes, of the fleet dispatched from the Indus to the Persian Gulf, or his position as helmsman of the royal barge on the Hydaspes-Indus river flotilla.58
These were roles that earned Onesicritus an immortal place in the Greek Alexander Romance. His involvement with the Brahmins hints that he was something of a spokesperson for the king’s propaganda machine on ascetic matters. If new tribes and nations were to be encountered as the Macedonian-led army made its way south towards the sea, a court philosopher and councillor on the metaphysical might win them over more effectively than a soldier and a spear, for the Indian campaign had become mired in blood.59 And this may also explain his presence with Nearchus on the naval expedition of supply and discovery through the Persian Gulf; Onesicritus’ own account of that voyage did not survive, though extracts appeared in the Naturalis Historia of Pliny.60
Onesicritus’ book of wonders and Eastern exotica seems to have dovetailed neatly with Callisthenes’ earlier colour, but we have no idea how one account met and greeted the other. If its title is accurate – Alexandrou Paideia, The Education of Alexander – it was a latter-day Kyrou Paideia (Cyropaedia), we assume in the style of Xenophon’s eulogy of Cyrus the Great.61 And that is not promising, for Xenophon rendered the deaths of his idols unrecognisable; he did, however, warn his readers in his Hellenika (his Greek history down to 362 BCE) which commenced without any introduction at all to give the impression of a seamless continuation of Thucydides’ work (which closed in 411 BCE): ‘I shall pass over those actions that are not worth mentioning, dealing only with what deserves to be remembered.’ And that is tragic, as the works of Xenophon represent Greek historical literature for the entire 4th century BCE, and that legacy has been stripped of the Athenaion Politeia, the Athenian Constitution, once credited to him but now attributed to a still anonymous author we term the ‘Old Oligarch’ due to its anti-democratic tone.62 Yet Xenophon’s statement on ‘deserved’ history was reused by a much admiring Arrian, and it inevitably leads to questions on what Onesicritus may have selectively bypassed too.63