In Search of the Lost Testament of Alexander the Great

by David Grant

  Another of Alexander’s famous liaisons involved Cleophis, the mother of the Indian dynast, Assacenus, and whose robust defence of Massaga (today’s Swat region of Pakistan) brought her to Alexander’s attention. Latin tradition (only) portrayed Alexander as impressed with her beauty and Justin went as far as claiming he fathered a son with her, also named Alexander, with Cleophis retaining her position through ongoing sexual favours; Curtius simply stated she bore a so-named child. The historicity of the story is, however, clouded by Alexander’s massacre of the mercenary contingent of Massaga which ‘stained his career’; if, on the other hand, this dishonourable conclusion was Roman-era scandal from Trogus or Timagenes, and recalling Cleopatra’s similar seduction of Julius Caesar and Mark Antony, the Cleophis affair may well have inspired the legend behind Alexander’s affair with Candace of Meroe in the Romance.167

  Clearly, this genre of ‘romantic’ material, based on the seductions of, and by, the Macedonian king, has endured in the ‘mainstream’ accounts. Should ‘romances’ then be so easily dismissed and relegated behind their ‘serious’ counterparts? Our point, illustrated from various angles, is that the dividing line between fiction and fact is subtle, like the ‘all-too-narrow isthmus’ Lucian proposed marked off ‘history from panegyric’.168 And it was often muddied over by the debris of romance, leaving us guessing if we are dealing with plausible impossibilities, or rather, implausible possibilities.

  THE KALEIDOSCOPIC BIRTH OF THE LEGEND

  What made Alexander’s story so ripe for ‘romancing’ when, as an example, the life of Julius Caesar – paralleled with Alexander’s in Plutarch’s Lives – was not? Certainly without the thauma, the marvels developed by the fabulously inclined biographers, Ptolemy’s sober military treatise would not have provided sufficient flammable tinder either. It required hagiographies and panegyrics to blow on the fire, and a death in distant Babylon, not on the steps of the Theatre of Pompey in a no-nonsense and fractious Rome. Strabo sensed it when he wrote of Alexander historians: ‘These toy with facts, both because of the glory of Alexander and because his expedition reached the ends of Asia, far away from us.’169 Caesar had in fact stood before the statue of the Macedonian with its outstretched arm in the Temple of Heracles (now Roman Hercules) at Gades, modern Cadiz, when he was quaestor of Hispania Ulterior; vexed at his comparatively slow progress to greatness, he is said to have sighed impatiently. The statue remained standing until the 12th century by which time Arab authors proposed Alexander had himself excavated the Straits of Gibraltar.170

  Both Caesar and Alexander had understood the need to lay their achievements down in writing when fresh, pliable, and untarnished by partiality and the reasoned balance of hindsight. Alexander had Callisthenes and Onesicritus on the spot to do the job, whereas Caesar himself penned his own Gallic War diaries, ‘… incomparable models for military dispatches. But histories they are not…’ There are ten surviving manuscripts of Caesar’s commentaries on the war in Gaul and none of them mentioned the estimated one million slaves taken between 58-51 BCE.171 But Quellenforschung would rule both approaches unfair, a partiality uniquely manifested when the recorder of the episodes was either employed by their architect, or the architect himself; as far as Caesar’s Commentarii, as Wilkes points out, they ‘acquired authority in later years, not because they were invariably more reliable’ but because his followers ‘could allow no other version to prevail’.172 Nevertheless, Cicero praised them for their simplicity, straightforwardness and grace, and he found them ‘stripped of all rhetorical adornment’, so much so that it ‘kept men of any sense from touching the subject’.173 Had Caesar wanted an enduring romance, it seems he ought to have outsourced to an author in Egypt.

  Highly readable romances were more easily assimilated than the more challenging and often lengthy classical histories, in much the same way that Cleitarchus’ Alexander eclipsed the primary sources it subsumed. This was something of a literary Oedipus complex, when the parental work is rejected by the collusion of later sibling texts that were drawn to the story. But it remains impossible to pinpoint Alexander’s Romance equivalent of ‘Chrétien de Troyes’, the first writer to mention the Arthurian Holy Grail.174 Yet, as with the jongleurs, the Middle Age troubadours who kept Arthur in circulation, and the authors of the Four Continuations who diversified and accessorised the tale, there was probably no single influence that gave the Romance its birth, and there would have been a number of ‘pre-texts’, as Fraser termed them, behind the first edition.175

  Pearson aptly noted that: ‘The distinction between different streams of the tradition is an artificial one… nor is there any fixed rule that a story acquires new miracles or discards them as it grows older: the methods of mythological criticism are not applicable to anecdotes about historical personages.’176 He was referring to what he termed ‘the historical, the rhetorical, the philosophical, the political and the purely romantic publications’.177 But if the kaleidoscope of colourful protomatter behind the Greek Alexander Romance coalesced into focus for a moment, we would likely see Callisthenes’ Praxeis Alexandrou with its apotheotic spice, Onesicritus’ encomium on education replete with the quasi-utopian land of Musicanus (likely a tribe, not a king) and Brahmin sophistry, with Chares and Polycleitus of Larissa, and even Ctesias, in the melting-pot beside them.178

  Much of their writing had already been synthesised by Cleitarchus into an early colourful account that laid the foundations of the quasi-historical texts that added dramatikon and plasmatikon, the drama and exaggeration. Toss in the epistolary corpus that Plutarch (and to an extent Arrian) believed was genuine for extra biographical seasoning (some of it appears to have exonerated Callisthenes from guilt), and then simmer with Nearchus’ own Indian mirabilia before baking it in the ovens of the Kynikoi and Stoikoi.179 We might further season it with Demetrius of Phalerum’s On Fortune, for it linked God, man and the mercurial nature of divine intervention, and this may also have infiltrated Cleitarchus’ texts. The Nectanebo cycle and the Alexandrian Lists were each condiments ground in, and the result, a rich new Hellenistic recipe for the Macedonian king, was ‘now not about who Alexander was, but what Alexander meant’.180

  If all this gave us the cast and the plot, the unique cultural diversity of Alexandria, where Alexander’s body now resided, tuned up a script which claimed the corpse’s final resting place was apparently prompted by an oracle of Babylonian Bel-Marduk; the god demanded his interment in Memphis, though the local priests thought otherwise.181 The most influential element was Egypt, as Wallis Budge, an expert in this genre, sensed; The Demotic Chronicle, The Dream of Nectanebo and Romance of Sesonchosis (Alexander is supposed to have declared himself the ‘new Sesonchosis’), and many more of the themes that were regurgitated in the Romance originated here.182 Budge’s famous acquisition of the Egyptian Book of the Dead for the British Museum was a fitting triumph for his career, for he himself was a believer in the paranormal and the occult; perhaps it was a result of his friendship with H Ryder Haggard, whose gothic fantasies recalled genealogies that traced lineages back to the generals of Alexander the Great.183

  In Hellenistic Alexandria, where Eratosthenes was to place the Prime Meridian when carving up the Earth in longitudinal lines, ‘magic’ was the watchword; the compressed air water pumps and musical instruments of Ctesibius (floruit ca. 270 BCE) and later the mechanical devices of Heron (ca. 10-70 BCE) mysteriously opened temple doors and turned visitors into cult believers, anticipating the ‘golden age of automata’ by almost two millennia.184 The Book of Thoth (a god paralleled to Greek Hermes) inspired the Corpus Hermeticum, the book of knowledge in which wisdom was fermented with alchemy, prophesy and prayer-spells. The new arts in thaumaturgy, along with the influential local Jewish predilection for narrating tales, provided a suitably atmospheric set. Josephus, the Jewish scholar, claimed that Alexander had visited Jerusalem, linking him to the Persian Empire-destroying prophecy of the Book of Daniel; Ptolemy I, when taking Judea in his Syrian campa
igns, ferried captives (many of them willing) back to Egypt to bolster its creative population, and the Jewish Quarter in the eastern section of Alexandria, governed by an ethnarch, became almost as large as the Greek.185 Scholars estimate that the Jewish population may have comprised ten per cent of the population of Egypt (which was perhaps five million in total) and possibly twenty-five per cent of the population of Alexandria estimated by Diodorus to be 300,000 in his day, excluding slaves.186

  ‘For a time, Alexander is lost to the practical, political and military world of the West, having been subsumed into an oriental idyll. His eventual return to the “Western” world is only accomplished with the growth of humanistic studies.’187 That reality check arrived with Quellensforschung when the irreconcilability of East and West was finally put under the microscope, and when any mystique that survived through the Renaissance was finally extinguished. As TB Macaulay neatly put it: ‘History commenced among the modern nations of Europe, as it had commenced among the Greeks, in romance.’188 Macaulay’s rather prejudiced methodological treatise, History, was published in the Edinburgh Review in May 1828 to great critical acclaim, although his History of England was described as ‘a sad testimonial to the cultural regression of our times’;189 so much then for one of history’s own methodological guards. An elitist Europhile, as firmly as Aristotle had been a bigoted xenophobe, Macaulay, nevertheless, provided a relevant historiographical summation that is particularly apt:

  A history in which every particular incident may be true may on the whole be false… the changes of manners and morals, the transition of communities from poverty to wealth, from knowledge to ignorance, from ferocity to humanity – these are, for the most part, noiseless revolutions. Their progress is rarely indicated by what historians are pleased to call important events. They are not achieved by armies, or enacted by senates. They are sanctioned by no treaties, and recorded in no archives…

  Of course those ‘noiseless revolutions’ include the ‘important events’ that have so far evaded detection: the deceptions, manipulations, interpolations and recreations that remain in history’s pockets. For in the ‘headlong, dramatic, breathless rush of its narrative’, as Braudel termed it, history often fools us into rushing past subtler detail too.190 In this context it is paradoxical that historians have not further questioned why Alexander has been credited with three conflicting deaths.

  One of our chapter-heading quotations comes from Sir William ‘Oriental’ Jones, who relied on Newton’s earlier treatise on biblical chronology when developing his own euhemerist views. As did the Romance texts, Jones managed to find a common ground for East and West, though his notions were initially considered politically dangerous to a world that clung to the divide. In his 1786 speech to the Asiatic Society of Bengal, he successfully proposed, for the first time, that many European languages, some of them already identified by Renaissance scholar, Joseph Scaliger (1540-1609), had a common ancestry and additionally shared their roots with certain Asiatic languages; this was a theory already advanced by James Parsons in 1767 in his The Remains of Japhet, being Historical Enquiries into the Affinity and Origins of the European Languages. Yet that publication, as the title might suggest, was too tedious to merit serious attention. Jones further argued that these linked languages descended from a lost common ancestor, which, thanks to Thomas Young, we now term ‘Indo-European’.191 Thus he paved the way for further studies into, and an appreciation of, the common heritage and migrations of the Indo-European peoples; no publication has absorbed, or been absorbed by, more of those diverse peoples than the various recensions of The Greek Alexander.192

  A sharp, coherent, and confidently structured Last Will and Testament sits at the conclusion to the Metz Epitome and the Romance (T1, T2), in contrast to unlikely Vulgate deathbed noises (T6, T7, T8) and the silence of the Journal (T3,T4). Have the wrong historical bodies been attached to the wrong biographical heads? If so, how could such a wholesale misinterpretation occur? In part, the question has already been answered: because Alexander’s story had its provenance in Alexandria. ‘Legends and lies about Alexander were given currency by authors who had actually seen him or accompanied his expedition: there had been no Thucydides to strangle such monsters at birth.’193 The conqueror of Persia may have bemoaned that he had no Homer to immortalise him, but equally his politics never would have permitted a Thucydides, a Polybius, or even a Tacitus, to set the record straight.

  No attempt has been made to reincarnate Alexander’s original Will, principally because few historians have given credence to the idea that it ever existed, and yet Alexander’s intestacy is the mytheme in his mythology, for the testament was too tenacious a tradition to disappear completely. The Pamphlet resurrected it, Curtius claimed other historians had mentioned it, Diodorus clearly linked the testament to Rhodian guardianship, and the preservers of the Metz Epitome, along with the compiler of the Kronika Alexandrina, preferred it over Alexander’s alleged silence and his incendiary last words.194 Nevertheless, Curtius branded the Will nothing more than an imposter, and on the whole the Roman-era historians wrapped their cloaks against the uneasy breeze it arrived upon, deeming it nothing more than romantic driftwood floating past. So it was boat-hooked aboard and into the safe haven of the Greek Alexander Romance in whose final chapter still lay a welcoming and empty bed. Truth and romance make unlikely bedfellows, and yet in Alexander’s story they never slept apart.

  NOTES

  1.Herodian 1.1-3, translation by CR Whitaker, London, 1969-70 and quoted in Pitcher (2009) p 40.

  2.Green (1974) p 479.

  3.Sir William Jones On the Gods of Hellas, Italy and India 3.320-322, 1784. Discussion of Jones’ work in Lincoln (2002) pp 1-18.

  4.Wallis Budge (1896) p VI. Also see Stoneman (1991) pp 14-16 on early Alexandrian literature.

  5.Stoneman (1991) pp 8-10 for Egyptian origins of the Romance. The Septuagint derived its name from the seventy-plus translators who, ancient tradition tells us, worked on the manuscripts; see Casson (2001) p 35. For discussions of the various origins of the Septuagint see Jobes-Silva (2001), for the Corpus Hermeticum see Copenhaver (1992), Sundberg (1958) pp 205-226 for the Alexandrian Canon.

  6.A sentiment more recently restated by Momigliano (1966) p 116. Budge’s work was published as the Life and Exploits of Alexander the Great. Ethiopic Histories of Alexander by Pseudo-Callisthenes and other Writers.

  7.Aristander’s prophecy is detailed at Arrian 3.1.2, Aelian 12.64 (though here after Alexander’s death). Other ‘seer’ prophecies regarding the city appear at Curtius 4.8.6, Plutarch 26.5-6 and Strabo 17.1.6.

  8.Diodorus 18.14.1. Ptolemy apparently found 8,000 talents in the treasury amassed by Cleomenes’ tax collections. Cleomenes was eventually executed by Ptolemy, possibly for his Perdiccan sympathies. Heckel (2006) pp 88-89 for ‘over-zealous tax collection’.

  9.Formerly Heraclion (also known as Thonis) was the dominant seaport positioned on the Nile Delta. Heracles, Paris and Helen are all associated with the city. The city was lost until recent excavations confirmed its legendary status. In ancient texts Heraclion was mentioned by Diodorus 1.9.4, Strabo 17.1.16 and Herodotus 2.113 amongst others.

  10.Macaulay (1828).

  11.Quoting C Gill in Gill-Wiseman (1993) p 41.

  12.Herodian 1.1.3 for a further example. Herodian’s History of the Empire from the time of Marcus claimed that the portraits of previous imperial biographers were romanced ‘because they wanted to give flattering praise to an emperor or a city of a private individual’ and yet he, like Thucydides reconstructed their speeches.

  13.Sallust Of Gods and the World IV. Quintilian 4.44-45 termed Sallust ‘terse’.

  14.Quoting Pearson (1960) p 9.

  15.Quoting Wood from Gill-Wiseman (1993) Prologue xiii and de Polignac (1999) p 3 quoting Goukowsky.

  16.Following Stoneman (1991) p 10 on ‘a process of accretion’.

  17.Müller combined recensions A and B to create a continuous text; see Fraser (1996) p
p 205-227 for a useful summary of the Romance recensions. Heckel (1988) pp 2-3 for ‘peculiarities’ and a useful summary of Ausfeld’s work.

  18.Quoting Stoneman (1991) p 28. Fraser (1996) pp 205-207 for discussion of the origins of the recension A manuscript, p 206 for ‘ill-written, lacunose, and interpolated’, and p 210 for ‘flimsy continuum’.

  19.Tarn 1 (1948) p 144 for the numbers of versions and languages.

  20.Strabo 11.11.1 reported the expansion of the Hellenistic kingdoms and expeditions that might have travelled as far as the Seres (China) and the Phryni. Pseudo-Lucian Makrobioi 5 for living to 300. The Seres were inhabitants of Serica, the land of silk, so China. Strabo 11.11.1 first referred to them, though their whereabouts and cultivation method remained unknown, as evidenced by Pliny 20 The Seres, when he referred to the woollen substance as forest-derived.

  21.Seneca Phaedra and Virgil Georgics both referred to silk as a ‘tree’. Pliny 11.76 corrected them.

  22.Seneca Declamations volume 1 for the Senate’s edict. Pliny 12.84 for the trade imbalance figure.

  23.The loss of geographical knowledge discussed in Fraser (1996) p 86 ff. Pliny named Isidore as ‘Dionysius’ of Charax.

  24.The dactylic hexameter was the poetic meter of the majority of Latin verse of the medieval period, as well as of Homer, Virgil and the Silver Age of Latin; discussion in Townsend (1996) Introduction xxiii. Discussion of the manuscripts and print history of the Alexandreis in Townsend (1996) Introduction xi.

  25.Discussed in Townsend (1996) p 15 quoting Henry of Ghent’s statement on the popularity of the Alexandreis.

  26.Gautier de Chatillon Alexandreis book 3, verses 400-407 and quoting Townsend (1996) Introduction xviii and xxiii.

  27.Details of the interpolation authors from discussion in Townsend (1996) p 18.