by David Grant
Once again, Arrian’s references to Onesicritus verge on the dismissive, and they additionally fail to confirm he actually read his original campaign account;64 his rejection of Onesicritus’ claims to naval authority, for example, looks to be sourced from Nearchus.65 Even Plutarch’s references to the Cynic-trained historian leave us unsure whether he had a copy of his The Education of Alexander. Certainly a retort from Lysimachus, Alexander’s prominent Bodyguard who became king of Thrace and the adjacent lands after his death, and which questioned the philosopher’s credibility over an ‘Amazon affair’, did not come from Onesicritus’ own manuscript, for that would have been wholly self-incriminating.66
Gellius’ statement on plentiful ‘Onesicritus’ material on sale, as Pearson observed, may once again refer to something other than the biography of Alexander, and his campaign account may have followed Callisthenes’ into oblivion rather earlier than we assume. The meagre length of Diogenes Laertius’ doxography on the philosopher from Astypalea certainly indicates he found little biographic detail worth extracting, though his opinion of Onesicritus’ work in comparison to that of Xenophon’s, probably explains why: ‘Onesicritus, as is to be expected of an imitator, falls short of his model.’67
Callisthenes and Onesicritus were the principal spin-doctors on campaign with Xenophon possibly inspiring them both, for his earlier Anabasis (in fact it became more of a katabasis, a march ‘out to the coast’) had detailed a previous Greek military venture in the Persian hinterland; as Plutarch commented on his legacy: ‘Xenophon became his own history.’ Here, on campaign with Alexander, it appears once again that partiality was never a compromising factor. Eunapius (born ca. 346 CE), the Sardian sophist-cum-historian, later made the proposition that: ‘Alexander the Great would not have become “great” if there had been no Xenophon.’68 Could this have been what he meant?
THE CRETAN ARCHIKYBERNETES
Nearchus son of Androtimus, a Cretan by birth but a citizen of the newly Macedonian city of Amphipolis, was a syntropos raised at the Macedonian court and one of the coeval hetairoi of the young Alexander. Other philoi were principally Macedonians of noble birth and veteran officers from Philip’s military ventures, though highborn Asiatics controversially entered the ranks later in Alexander’s campaign.69
Nearchus had reputedly once been exiled from Pella along with Ptolemy (as well as Laomedon and his brother, Erygius, and Harpalus who may have been a nephew of Philip’s wife Phila) for his part in the Pixodarus affair, most likely in 337 or early 336 BCE in the final years of Philip’s reign, though the veracity of the episode has now been called into question.70 If true, the exile suggests Nearchus was amongst the few who were truly trusted by the then teenage Alexander.
By 334/333 BCE, with Philip II dead and Alexander’s own invasion force in control of much of Asia Minor, Nearchus was appointed as governor of Lycia and Pamphylia, thus he became a prominent strategos (general or military governor of a region) with a pan-provincial brief. The role most likely required his naval experience to deny any Persian flotilla access to the numerous harbours on that rugged coastline, and potentially (with the navarch Amphoterus) to deal with pirates, the scourge of the Eastern Mediterranean since Homeric times when the Cilician coast, Skyros and the Thracian Chersonese (peninsula) were notorious for piracy; in fact as early as 380 BCE Isocrates’ Panegyrikos had laid out how Greek mercenaries were to deal with the freebooters (harshly).71 Additionally, the Persian fleet had commenced naval attacks in the Aegean in 333 BCE so that Athens needed well over one hundred ships to protect the grain shipments arriving from Egypt. Nearchus’ post, crucial to watching Alexander’s back, lasted some six years until 328 BCE when he was called to the East with new recruits once the naval threat had subsided with the end of Archaemenid rule.72
Nearchus became an accomplished commander of light infantry as well as a trierarchos of the Indus-Hydaspes flotilla, an esteemed role that would have seen him relieved of significant funds by Alexander to equip a troop barge without the benefit of bottomage.73 He finally became admiral of the sea fleet and he recorded the unique two-and-a-half-month 1,700-mile paraplous, a coastal voyage of the Erythrean Sea (alternatively named the Red Sea by some sources) from the Indus delta to the mouth of the Euphrates, a route that allegedly (and mistakenly) provided him with calculations that ‘proved’ he crossed the Tropic of Cancer and the Equator.74 His Indike (or Indica, broadly ‘about India’) took a swipe at his co-pilot, Onesicritus, along the way, for they clashed on claims of nautical authority and who bore the title nauarchos and archikybernetes, chief helmsman and admiral, and thus who was potentially epiplous, vice-captain, to the other.75
Nearchus’ lost work, though substantially preserved in Arrian’s book of the same name (Indike), was most likely written in old Ionic dialect in the style of Herodotus, and his geographical digressions on rivers, monsoons and floods were rooted in Herodotean tradition as well as his own understanding of Skylax’s similar journey almost two centuries before.76 Nearchus appears to have sensibly bypassed the land campaign in his memoirs in favour of Indian geography (in Herodotean style), customs and military organisations; he may have concluded his book at a point before Alexander’s death in Babylon as Arrian deferred to Aristobulus for detail on the fleet preparations being carried out there at the time. But he was certainly present; Plutarch and Diodorus claimed Nearchus warned Alexander against entering the city due to adverse portents the Chaldean priests had observed (T21, T22).77
Ernest Badian, the renowned Austrian-born classical scholar, commented that Nearchus, who uniquely had a major achievement of his own amongst the officers of Alexander, ‘… shines like a good deed in the admittedly naughty world of Alexander historians.’78 An earlier summation by Lehman-Haupt considered the conclusion to his sea voyage (as it was portrayed by Arrian) unsurpassed ‘… in loyalty and depth of penetration into human personality.’79 Yet much of it appears ‘epic adornment’ inspired by the Odyssey, whilst the extensive list of thirty-three trierarchs (officers commanding, and funding, a trireme; here twenty-four Macedonians, eight Greeks and one Persian) he provided reads like the Catalogue of Ships from the Iliad.80 Nearchus was most likely attempting to emulate the notoriety of the Periplous of Pseudo-Skylax and possibly Phileas of Athens; ultimately his account ended up as another ‘philosophical geography’.81
Strabo grouped Nearchus alongside Onesicritus, Deimachus (mid-3rd century BCE) and Megasthenes, who also wrote an Indike, as someone who could not avoid the obligatory mirabilia in his work. On the other hand, Arrian, perhaps unsurprisingly in light of his own same-named book, considered Megasthenes a ‘distinguished writer’; he had, in fact, held an ambassadorial role under Alexander’s Bodyguard and dynast, Seleucus, to the Mauryan court of Chandragupta some years after Alexander’s death.82
Crowned at Susa for his loyal service (as was Onesicritus), Nearchus played a prominent part in the Successor Wars in which his legacy was significant.83 He was usefully employed by Antigonus Monophthalmos until the battle at Gaza in 313/312 BCE, at least, where he was cited as one of the advisers to Antigonus’ son, Demetrius Poliorketes. Nearchus was in his middle forties by then (assuming he was broadly coeval with Alexander) and he was never mentioned thereafter. If he perished in the disastrous outcome when ‘most of Demetrius’ friends fell… the majority of which were cavalry or men of distinction’, then he must have published his book in the unattested years before his attested Successor War activity (ca. 318 BCE) and possibly as early as 320 BCE, supported by the fact that it may have been referred to by Theopompus (who cited ‘authors of Indike’), who was thought to have died that year on the orders of Ptolemy.84
A plate subtitled Nearchus leading on his followers against the monster of the deep, from Jules Verne’s Celebrated Travels and Travellers, Exploration of the World, 1882. The narrative accompanying the image reads ‘just as they entered the Persian Gulf they encountered an immense number of whales, and the sailors were so terrified by their size a
nd number, that they wished to fly; it was not without much difficulty that Nearchus at last prevailed upon them to advance boldly, and they soon scattered their formidable enemies.’ This follows the detail in Arrian’s Indike. Made available by the Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries via Project Gutenberg.
THE MACEDONIAN PHARAOH
Arrian’s principal court source, Ptolemy I Soter, the putative son of Lagus of Eordaea, lies at the heart of our suspicions of the suppression of Alexander’s Will and features prominently in later chapters. His mother, Arsinoe, was a former concubine of Philip II and possibly from a lesser branch of the Argead royal house. This fostered the rumour that Ptolemy was Alexander’s half-brother, a loud whisper Ptolemy may have propagated himself.85 As Pausanias put it in his Guide to Greece: ‘The Macedonians consider Ptolemy to be the son of Philip, the son of Amyntas [Philip’s father], though putatively the son of Lagus, asserting that his mother was with child when she was married to Lagus by Philip.’86 This could explain why Ptolemy had the controversial Theopompus executed when he inherited governance of Egypt, for the Chian chronicler had conspicuously damned Philip and his court.87
In 330 BCE Ptolemy became one of the Somatophylakes basilikos, the king’s seven personal Bodyguards, after which his prominence continued to grow, in his own account of the campaign at least.88 A statement from Curtius – that ‘he was certainly no detractor of his own fame’ – suggests Ptolemy’s self-promotion had not gone unnoticed (though such wording was not unique and similar statements appeared in the Roman narratives of Livy and Tacitus).89 A syntropos at the Pellan court, Ptolemy was, and always had been, one of those destined to exert influence over men if he showed loyalty, military acumen and political agility. Certainly the latter two were on display until he died at age eighty-four.
Waldemar Heckel, a leading Alexander scholar who ‘has made the prosopography of the late 4th century his special preserve’, neatly summed up the problem we face when interpreting the texts citing Ptolemy’s campaign contribution: ‘Much of what we know about his career in Alexander’s lifetime derives from Arrian and, ultimately, from Ptolemy himself’; yet we have just thirty-five fragments of his writing.90 A parallel autopsy of Xenophon’s Hellenika articulates the challenge of dealing with a self-documenting source: it ‘thus requires delicate handling by the historian. What it says, and the way it says it, is always to be weighed against what it does not say, and the reason why it does not’; certainly Ptolemy appears to have avoided commenting on Alexander’s darker episodes, for they in turn blackened him by the close association.91
By the time Ptolemy published his campaign account, his unchallengeable position as king and pharaoh of Egypt provided him with the power to manipulate character portrayals; those who opposed him in the Successor Wars no doubt suffered a damnatio memoriae as a consequence. Others were simply not spoken of; the anonymae remain, to quote Heckel, ‘… like the unhappy souls of Asphodel, on the marches of historical and prosopographic studies.’92 It was a far more enduring victory than any under arms, but for all that, Ptolemy’s campaign history appears to have been a dry and pedestrian military-focused affair that failed to ignite the Roman imagination, and it was less widely read than, for example, Cleitarchus’ more colourful account.93
Recalling the guidance to historians offered by Voltaire – ‘A historian has many duties. Allow me to remind you of two that are important. The first is not to slander; the second is not to bore…’ – it seems Ptolemy was, in fact, guilty of both.94 Modern studies including those by Strasburger, Badian, and more recently Errington, have conceded Ptolemy was unreliable. Fritz Schachermeyr concluded he got what he wanted from ‘a lie, a fraud, and an intentional omission’ just as Badian noticed his ‘mixture of suppressio veri and suggestio falsi’.95 Peter Green simply branded Ptolemy ‘a conniving pragmatic old shit’.96
A FLATTERING TECHNICIAN, A GOSSIPMONGER EISAGGELEOS AND MERCENARY REMINISCES
The second of Arrian’s ‘court’ sources, Aristobulus, lived to old age, beyond ninety, supposedly commencing his writing when he was a tender eighty-four, a literary achievement that was not, however, unique: Isocrates’ output was prolific through his eighties and nineties and we encounter a number of long-lived historians and philosophers in the classical texts.97 We have no title for Aristobulus’ book, and the sixty-two genuine-looking fragments provide no chapter numbers, so we cannot gauge its length.98 His interest in river systems and flood plains and his accurate descriptions of monuments (some he was tasked to repair) as well as the siege of Tyre reveals a technical eye with a geographical slant and leads scholars to believe he was employed as a technician or engineer on campaign.99 Like Nearchus and Onesicritus, he was eager to recount the colour of India, though apparently without the blatant exaggerations and the overt thauma. But the gods still had their place in Aristobulus’ reckoning and their divine intervention always fell on the side of his king, that is until Alexander’s ill-omened return to Babylon in 323 BCE (T21, T22, T23, T24).100
Aristobulus also appears to have avoided the negative campaign episodes and he airbrushed those he could not completely erase; if not a fully-fledged ‘flatterer’ (kolakeutikos) of Alexander, then he might be termed an ‘apologist’. Lucian claimed that a newly penned chapter that Aristobulus was reading aloud was tossed overboard by Alexander in an apparent rejection of its portrayal of him slaying elephants with a single javelin throw.101 But this sounds contrived (if not exaggerated), for Onesicritus was afforded a similar retrospective in the pages of Lucian’s How to Write History.102 Yet to become truly Homeric, a king had to be seen fighting monomachia, in single combat. The episode does, nevertheless, confirm that Aristobulus enjoyed a well-known intimacy with Alexander, as well as a tradition that he was an unreliable historian. But as Pearson noted, Aristobulus’ literary approach falls into no easy category.103
Aristobulus’ post-campaign activity remains unattested, and this is unsurprising because he did not hold a military command; few engineers, architects or city planners were ever referred to in the histories except perhaps in siege situations or concerning noteworthy funerary constructions.104 His birthplace is uncertain though Plutarch, Lucian and Athenaeus linked him to the city of Cassandreia; this had led to one theory that proposes he was a supporter of Cassander who retired to his eponymous city founded in 316 BCE on the ruins of Corinthian Potidaea which also lay on the Chalcidian Peninsula.105 But there is no further evidence of his return to Europe after Alexander’s death. Aristobulus could equally have worked for Ptolemy through the Successor Wars; Alexandria would have been the place to be for an already-established engineer, for the new city was one of the largest civic construction projects ever undertaken, though Cassandreia was a significant other.106 A generation later, the ever-advancing Alexandrian building site was described by the poet Theocritus as having ‘everywhere army-boots and men in military cloaks’.107
Although his was not an uncommon name, the one possible link to his post-campaign service is the ‘Aristobulus’ cited as Ptolemy’s high-ranking diplomat operating in Asia Minor to negotiate the so-called ‘Peace of the Dynasts’ in 311 BCE. The connection is offered in name alone but we would expect him to have been offered some prominent service – and especially in a role that involved dealing with former campaign comrades (as this envoy would have) – if he truly did not commence his writing until an octogenarian.108 The proposal is not conflicting; a career with Ptolemy, whose interests were aligned with Cassander much of the time (he had sons by Cassander’s sister and was allied with him against the threat from Antigonus), followed by retirement to Cassandreia, is supportable for Aristobulus. Moreover, Diodorus suggested much of the population that survived Philip’s destruction of Olynthus was absorbed by Cassandreia, as were other smaller towns, so the city’s footprint and notoriety would have grown fast.109 For a brief period, from 281-279 BCE, Cassandreia even became a ‘Ptolemaic’ city in the Macedonian kingship of Ptolemy Keraunos, the passed-over son of Ptolemy I Soter
.110
A change of employer, as well as city, was not unique. If finally publishing from Cassandreia as a noteworthy resident, Aristobulus’ similarly extensive service would have been so associated in retrospective literary citations; certainly the city officials would have appreciated the public relations opportunity. Although the identification of Aristobulus’ employer and location is not essential to our case, the influences exerted upon him by Cassander, who controlled Macedonia for some twenty years and who lay at the nefarious heart of the rumours of Alexander’s poisoning, alongside the influence of an already-published book by Ptolemy who enjoyed absolute rule of Egypt, cannot be underestimated.
Evidence of that influence may still be traceable, for Arrian concluded his Anabasis with a phrase suggesting that Aristobulus had no more to offer on Alexander’s death than that claimed by the Journal, and, moreover, that corroborated with Ptolemy’s account (T3).111 If Ptolemy (as we will argue) was the originator of this supposed Ephemerides extract, which denied that any formal succession took place at Babylon, then Aristobulus could not easily have provided Alexander with anything more than that silent, intestate and conspiracy-free death, despite what he might have witnessed there or heard after the event.112