by David Grant
He was a parallel to Solomon in his wealth, surpassing that of any other king of his time… Perhaps it was less the real Solomon to whom Ptolemy II was a parallel than the ideal Solomon portrayed in the Book of Ecclesiastes – the book written by some world-weary Jew at a date not far off from Ptolemy’s time. Ptolemy, too, was a king who had ‘gathered silver and gold and the peculiar treasure of kings and of provinces’, who got him ‘men-singers and women-singers, and the delights of the sons of men, as musical instruments, and that of all sorts’, who had ‘proved his heart with mirth and enjoyed pleasure’, who had ‘made great works and builded him houses’…74
This approaches the fabled tones of Polo’s description of Shangdu (Xanadu) and the summer court of Kublai Khan that was immortalised in poetry by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Although Solomon existed historically, two millennia hence, will history be able to differentiate between Rider Haggard’s Allan Quatermain and his real-life model, the British explorer and hunter, Frederick Courtney Selous – who ‘led a singularly adventurous and fascinating life, with just the right alternations between the wilderness and civilisation’ – in the fictional search for Solomon’s mines?75
THE MUTHODES OF MIEZA AND PROPAGANDA OF PELLA
Chimeral characters frequent the most influential of ‘historical’ episodes, and nowhere more vividly than when early classical Greece emerged from its Dark Age.76 In the Iliad the 1,186 troop transporters comprising the Greek flotilla to Troy (the Catalogue of Ships; a number frowned upon by Thucydides) may in fact represent a hundred late Bronze Age and Mycenae-led invasions across the Aegean; it was the start of an ongoing saga continued in the Aethiopis, Ilias Mikra (Little Illiad), the lost Iliou Persis, The Sack of Ilium, Nostoi, Odyssey and the Telegony which completed the Epic Cycle.77 Hittite texts suggest the invading Ahhiyawa (linguistic links to the Akhaioi, the Achaeans, are hard to dismiss) may have been Mycenaen Greeks based in coastal Asia Minor who were fighting for control of Wilusa, likely the Hittite name for Troy.78
A photo of Wilhelm Dörpfeld and Heinrich Schliemann at the Lion Gate of Mycenae ca. 1884/5.
Some of the underlying imagery, if not its application, is sound. There is much evidence, for example, that the legend of the Wooden Horse of Troy started life as an Assyrian-style battering ram, for many were ornately horse-headed in design and fully enclosed to house and protect the men who inched them forward to the walls.79 On the other hand, the now lost On Rhetoric According to Homer by Telephus of Pergamum exposed the narratives within the Trojan epics for what they really were: flights of epideictic fancy that reinforced the dominant value systems underlying the tale: the aidos and the nemesis that framed honour and revenge.
Whether there ever was a ‘Homer’ is doubtful, whether blind as one tradition claimed, or indeed far-sighted and as many as seven cities staked their claims as his home: Cyme, Smyrna, Chios, Colophon, Pylos, Argos, and Athens.80 In one view, ‘the works ascribed to Moses and Homer were libraries’, and ‘to deprive a library of an author would be to consign it to the realm of the anonymous’;81 ‘Homer was a sort of shorthand for the whole body of archaic hexameter poetry.’82 As with the thirty-three poems comprising the Homeric Hymns, a collection of different authors from many periods coalesced into something approximating a genre; the epics were collected into a ‘book’ sung by the Homeridai, the guild of the ‘sons of Homer’ that kept the ancient accounts alive orally at the Panathenaia.83 Certainly the Life of Homer (one of many ‘lives’) by a Pseudo-Herodotus betrays the fictional traits of a later age.84 The still anonymous Greek Anthology proposed more divine origins: ‘Whose pages recorded the Trojan War and of the long wanderings of the son of Laertes? I cannot be sure of his name or his city. Heavenly Zeus, is Homer getting the glory for your own poetry?’85
The Roman poet Horace (65-68 BCE) coined the term ‘Homeric Nod’ in his Ars Poetica to describe the continuity errors Homer repeatedly made through the Iliad, and this perhaps supports the ‘multiple-author’ theory over a single compiler of the epic of prehistory.86 Today the corpus of literature contained in the Homeric or Trojan Epic Cycle, or rather in its scholia, the critical and explanatory commentary in the margins, has spurred its own investigative science: Neoanalysis.87
A gypsum wall panel relief from the palace of Tiglath-Pileser III (reigned ca. 744-727 BCE) at Nimrud dating to ca. 730 BCE, showing an Assyrian battering ram in front of the walls of a city under siege. The fully enclosed and wheeled battering ram may be the inspiration for the legend of the Trojan Horse. The panel is now in the British Museum. BM 118903.
Herodotus’ semi-mythical battle between the champions of Sparta and Argos in the mid-6th century BCE at Thyrea described a single sun-baked blood-soaked day which might in fact have similarly recalled many campaigning seasons that witnessed similar hoplite clashes on the plains of Lacedaemonia in the heart of ‘the dancing floor of Ares.’88 Reminiscent of a gladiatorial arena, the format at Thyrea, designed to limit casualties, allocated victory to the last man standing, in this case a lone Spartan who committed suicide for fear that his valour would be questioned in the face of the deaths of all his comrades. But the outcome of the battle reads more like a tutorial on the prevailing warrior honour code. Some 300 in number from each city, the Thyrean champions are reminiscent of the elite Hieros lochos, the Theban Sacred Band, the shock troop corps of paired lovers that Alexander annihilated in 338 BCE, and whose remains were likely discovered in the 19th century.89
The battle at Chaeronea remains well attested, as does Philip’s harsh treatment of Boeotian soldiers who left their crack unit isolated: Boeotian corpses had to be purchased by their relatives, and captives were ransomed or sold into slavery. But was the Theban Sacred Band, a unit modelled on Spartan example, really annihilated to the last man as texts record, as a total of 254 skeletons were excavated from the tomb guarded by the Lion of Chaeronea? ‘Perish any man who suspects that these men either did or suffered anything that was base’, exclaimed Philip II upon seeing their corpses after the battle.90 Perhaps the more poignant testament to their bravery is a tumulus 230 feet around and some 23 feet high that bears witness to the polyandreion, the mass grave, of their Macedonian attackers who were inhumed with their weapons.
The 20-foot tall Lion of Chaeronea as it appeared ca. 1907 in Outlines of European History, after earlier repairs and reconstruction of the fragments in 1902. According to Pausanias, the original statue was erected to guard the graves of the Theban Sacred Band who fell at the battle in Boeotia between Mt Helicon and Mt Parnassus. There is no surviving inscription. Excavation of the quadrangular enclosure revealed the remains of 254 corpses laid out in seven rows. Similar statues and a communal tomb (polyandreion) have been found at Thespiae and Amphipolis.91
But monuments to valour date further back. The battle at Marathon in 490 BCE clearly epitomised Greek arete and aidos, the classical codes of valour and duty. However it was likely Thersippus, or more popularly Eucles, and not the hemerodrome (day-runner) Pheidippides (famed by the 1879 Robert Browning poem of the same name) who delivered the news of victory at Marathon to the expectant Athenians; the proud motto of such messengers (in fact of their Persian counterparts) read, ‘… and neither snow nor rain nor heat nor night holds back from the accomplishment.’92 According to Plutarch, Eucles was a self-sent messenger who arrived in full armour from the battle he fought in himself. The Athenian Pheidippides (or Philippides, according to Lucian) apparently ran to Sparta to request help before the battle commenced, and he met the god Pan on the way, for legend had it that the god’s cave in the Parthenian ridge overhanging Tegea, was en route. In fact it was Euchidas, running the route to Delphi, who allegedly died on the spot.93 An amalgam of truths with popular fiction is what we recite today, when ‘eager to adopt and adorn the fable’, writers embellished the subject ‘as if it were the soil of a fair estate unoccupied’.94
Sparta’s own heroic holding of the pass against Xerxes’ Persian horde is itself shrouded in legendary misattr
ibution, for the 4,200 reported defenders at Thermopylae are widely bypassed in eulogies that alone immortalise the alleged 300 Spartans who led them, though the numbers given by Herodotus (who claimed to know the 300 by name) are open to question (perhaps short by 700 or more in total), as is the Spartan-led night attack on Xerxes’ tent mentioned by Diodorus who was likely drawing from Ephorus, who in turn took this detail from an unknown source.95
And this leads us to the exemplar of a laconic retort by Leonidas to the Great King’s demand that the Greeks hand over their arms: molon labe – ‘you come and take them’. It is a bold riposte, and yet one taken from the Apophthegmata Lakonika, Laconian Sayings, attributed to Plutarch (now grouped with his Moralia) and compiled over 500 years after the event. Moreover, the historical pragmatist would ask: if the defenders died to the last man, could a Greek have recorded Leonidas’ reply? The son of the seer, Megistias, sent home the penultimate day, is a possible contender, and the exiled Spartan king, Demaratus (ruled 515-491 BCE), who accompanied the Persians on the north side of the Hot Pillars (the literal translation of Thermo Pylai) is perhaps a stronger candidate, though we should recall, when dealing with Spartan legend, that Lycurgus (ca. 390-324 BCE), the forefather who supposedly gave Sparta its polity, has been termed nothing more than a ‘benevolent myth’.96
The lyric poet Tyrtaeus (likely 7th century BCE) was probably more responsible for the militarisation of the Spartan constitution, if we can believe the claims in the Suda; his military elegies certainly encouraged the nineteen-year Messenian Wars that led to their enslavement of the helots, if the fragments we have are indicative of its overall tone and despite the Attic propaganda that described the poet as ‘a lame Athenian schoolmaster’.97
What did Alexander himself conclude about his sources 2,300 years ago when carrying Herodotus and the philosopher-edited Iliad into an Asia he only knew from their scrolls or from Aristotle’s teachings at Mieza?98 When Alexander finally joined battle with Darius III, where were Herodotus’ famed 10,000 ‘Immortals’ (a description unique to him), the Great King’s elite royal guard that the Macedonians expected to face? The answer is probably reincarnated in the melophoroi, so-called Apple Bearers, who were named after the fruit-like counter-weights on their spear butts, for Herodotus had most likely confused the Persian term ‘Anûšiya’ with ‘Anauša’, which simply meant ‘Companion’.99 Herodotus himself is said to have quipped: ‘Very few things happen at the right time, and the rest do not happen at all. The conscientious historian will correct these defects.’ But who can find the comedic lines within the historian’s work? It was in fact Mark Twain who attributed the words to him in the preface to A Horse’s Tail.100
Given time and propagated convincingly enough, this may well become a ‘genuine’ metaphrase that will further tarnish Herodotus’ reputation, for no historian has been more maligned (perhaps because he was a barbarophile) than the ‘father of history’ from Halicarnassus ‘who attempted to open up the gates to the past’. Plutarch penned a De Heroditi Malignitate (On the Malice of Herodotus), which has been termed literature’s ‘first slashing review’;101 the attack may have been in part due to Herodotus’ religious cynicism that offended the deeply pious Priest of Apollo, and the negative picture he painted of Plutarch’s fellow Boeotians.102 Valerius Pollio, Aelius Harpocration and Libanius followed suit with declamatory texts against the Histories, and Aristotle branded Herodotus a ‘teller of myths’ above anything else.103 Perhaps the greatest disservice paid to him was a two-book epitome of the Histories by Theopompus.104
Herodotus, ‘who blended the empirical attitude of the scientists with the rhapsode’s love of praising famous men’, nevertheless, offered in defence to the accusation, ‘that he sometimes wrote for children and at other times for philosophers’: ‘My business is to record what people say, but I am by no means bound to believe it, and let this statement hold for my entire account.’105 The apologia was a popular prenuptial in the marriage of the historikon and mythistoria. He nevertheless remains unique; as Momigliano concluded simply: ‘There was no Herodotus before Herodotus’, moreover, ‘he was more easily criticised than replaced’.106
This, in turn, draws us by the bridle and halter to Alexander’s breaking of Bucephalus, the king’s Thessalian warhorse which was probably named after its ox-head branding (boos kephale). The rendering of the story fitted the overall encomiastic portrayal of the young prince: he was a Bellerophon mounting a wild Pegasus that could be only tamed by him before an incredulous Macedonian court and an elated horse-dealer, Philonicus. Yet the event, which ‘abounds in circumstantial detail and dramatic immediacy’, was preserved by Plutarch alone, as was Alexander’s quizzing of Persian envoys on military detail at an even younger age, for this anticipated, and set the tone for, his later invasion of Asia.107 Did Onesicritus’ hagiographical The Education of Alexander (or Marsyas’ book of the same name) provide the models, or did Plutarch, in his ‘quiet naivety’, find this detail in the epistolary corpus he uniquely referred to on some thirty occasions?108 Surely neither source was reliable. Was the Bucephalus episode an allusion to the metaphor in Plato’s Phaedra which likened the untamed horse to an unruly youth who must be broken by an education, paideia, itself steeped in Homeric values? In which case it is fully understandable why Bucephalus ‘was born to share Alexander’s fate’ in the Romance.109
The careers of Plutarch, Callisthenes, Demosthenes and Aristotle, each influential to Alexander’s story, have also given birth to a spurious epistolary corpus in their name. Plutarch seems to have had unique access to a folio of correspondences to and from Alexander, so numerous that he commented: ‘In fact it is astonishing that he [Alexander] could find time to write so many letters to his friends.’110 Confirmation that a collection once existed, possibly collated as a book, came with the discovery of papyri in Hamburg, Florence and Oxyrhynchus in Egypt, though suspiciously ‘there is no trace of them earlier than Cicero’s De Officiis’ which referred to epistulae Philippi ad Alexandrum et Antipatri ad Cassandrum et Antigoni ad Philippum filium;111 the title suggests there once existed a corpus of letters between Philip and Alexander, and correspondence between Antipater, Cassander and Antigonus Monophthalmos, the remarkable Macedonian ‘one-eyed’ general.
Arrian also referred to the collection and it is likely a common source was behind the tradition.112 Plutarch’s folio was even more specific; those letters written to Alexander’s mother, Olympias, were ‘private’, and only Alexander’s closest friend, Hephaestion, was permitted to read them. Nevertheless, the detail we garner from them appears, in hindsight, to be fictitious. The authenticity of one of Plutarch’s own works remains just as vexatious; a Greek manuscript attributed to him and titled Pro Nobilitate, In Favour of Noble Birth, resurfaced as recently as 1722 and was not convincingly discredited until the late 1900s. Yet separating deliberate imposters from well-meaning ‘impostures’ is not always achievable.113 And so the authenticity of similar correspondence by the philosophers Plato, Speusippus (Plato’s nephew, ca. 408-338 BCE), Archytas (428-347 BCE) and the influential rhetorician Isocrates, whose pleas for an invasion of Persia arguably motivated Philip II (and then Alexander) to launch his Asian campaign, is still debated.114 But the composition of such letters, in emulation of the great minds of the past, was a part of Greek classroom preparatory exercises, progymnasmata.
Some thirty-plus letters concerning Alexander made their way into the Greek Alexander Romance, a publication unique in ancient fiction in the breadth of its epistolary ‘pseudo-documentarism’. Examples range from what Merkelbach termed wunder-briefe to the almost credible, a state of affairs that epitomises the whole Romance.115 Plutarch may have been unwittingly incorporating letters that had no historical foundation into his own biographies, perhaps fooled by the freehand-form of their intimacy when no stylistic baseline for comparison existed. They may have even originated, convincingly, with a court scandalmonger such as Chares, the king’s chamberlain. So the argument about the ‘
truth’ revolves around the degree of trust we place in the instincts of our secondary sources and their immunity to seduction.
The association of the authorship of Romance with the campaign historian Callisthenes (besides other historians) reminds us that we commonly place credit where none is due, when the real architects of events may disappear without a trace. With a superficial knowledge of characters and the events attached to them, we risk, once again, creating our own modern ‘romances’ when regurgitating the tale. We habitually lay down Mercator-like projections on history’s prosopographic terroir; but this is a one-dimensional mapping that distorts both the shape and the scale of contributions, for the truth lies hidden in contours and grottos time has flattened out.
Examples proliferate the classical accounts: Pythagoras’ theorem still bears his name, yet the triplets had already been in use in Babylon and Egypt for over 1,500 years before his day, since the Middle Bronze Age in fact.116 If Porphyry is correct, Pythagoras took his knowledge of geometry from Egypt, arithmetic from Phoenicia, astronomy from Chaldeans, and principles of religion from the Magi too,117 which is no doubt why Plato is said to have paid the exorbitant sum of 100 minas to purchase three books of Pythagorean doctrine by Philolaus of Croton.118 Plutarch’s Symposiacs provided further detail of his teachings but these were penned some 500 years later using notes left behind by the polymath’s inner circle, the mathematikoi and akousmatikoi, the ‘learners’ and ‘listeners’.119
Pythagoras’ association with the newly ‘discovered’ geometry was in fact first made by Cicero in his On the Nature of the Gods. Cicero had been a political survivor par excellence, until Mark Antony presented Octavian with his proscription list, but without his 800 extant letters would we have known he was a giant of the Julian age? Or would his bit part of just nine lines in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar have swayed us otherwise? If it was not for Petrarch’s discovery of the Ciceronian epistolary collection, ad Atticum, in Verona in 1345, which contained such a wealth of detail that Nepos had believed there was little need for a history of that period,120 we would only have half the correspondence; inevitably some of the corpus does appear less than genuine.121 Petrarch, whose epic but unfinished Africa – a poem perhaps written as a reply to the Alexandreis of Gautier de Chatillon and written in the style of Virgil’s Aeneid – was so excited about his find that he compiled a letter to the long-dead Cicero to tell him (and to Livy too). And could either Cicero, or Julius Caesar even, have made the historical grade if not for Apollonius Molon’s lessons in Rhodian rhetoric?122