by David Grant
GRAECIA CAPTA FERUM VICTOREM CEPIT ET ARTES INTULIT AGRESTI LATIO113
Cato blamed the campaign against Macedonia in 168 BCE for importing more Greek moral laxity into Rome, claiming, ‘… the surest sign of deterioration in the Republic [is] when pretty boys fetch more than fields, and jars of caviar more than ploughmen.’114 His austerity continued to prevail, for a while, and in 161 BCE rhetoricians were expelled from the city. Some seven years earlier the still-circulating Alexander-styled currency had also been banned.115 But in 155 BCE Athens impressed Rome with a ‘philosophical embassy’ sent to argue for the repeal of a 500 talent fine; it included the Stoic, Diogenes of Babylon (ca. 230-145 BCE), the Peripatetic, Critolaus (ca. 200-118 BCE), and the Sceptic, Carneades (214-129 BCE). Between them they disarmed all opposition by the magic of their eloquence so that the youth of the city flocked to hear them plead their case and became immediately ‘possessed’.116
Although Cato, now almost eighty, arranged their speedy departure, the door to new ideas had been irreversibly opened and soon ‘Rome went to school with the Greeks’.117 When the official philosophical schools at Athens were closed in 88 BCE by edict of the Roman Senate,118 Greece experienced a ‘brain drain’ as philosophers and rhetoricians journeyed west to become ‘household philosophers’ in Rome, though whether they too inscribed Probis pateo – ‘I am open for honest people’ (inscribed on city gates and on entrances to schools) – above the door is debatable.119 And with them arrived the topic of Alexander on a tide of new philosophical doctrines and their associated ‘wisdoms’.
The Attic style of epideictic flourished elsewhere, in Rhodes for example, where it perpetuated the tradition until Apollonius Molon settled on the island and taught Caesar and Cicero to orate.120 As Lucian imagined it in the cultured centres, there were ‘everywhere philosophers, long-bearded, book in hand… the public walks are filled with their contending hosts, and every man of them calls Virtue his nurse… these ready-made philosophers, carpenters once or cobblers.’121 But ‘Virtue lives very far off, and the way to her is long and steep and rough…’,122 and so we can only speculate on the quality and experience of the ‘beards’ arriving from Greece.
The Hellenistic era had witnessed the emergence of the philosophical schools of the Kynikoi, Stoikoi, Skeptikoi and the happier followers of Epicurus at the expense of the Academy and Lyceum of Plato and Aristotle, as thinkers tried to rationalise a radically changing world, or, as Epicurus espoused, withdraw from it, for he suffered from perennial bad health. Inevitably, Alexander became the perfect canvas on which to project their new ideas for Roman contemplation; the Macedonian king was used as an exemplum and his life a propaedeutic to a full-blown syllabus on rhetoric and in the process he became a punch-bag for a Roman conscience being newly tested by its own aggressive expansion in the East. As one scholar put it, Alexander was ‘… both a positive paradigm of military success and a negative paradigm of immoral excess, of virtus and vitia in a single classroom incantation.’123
Despite a further castigation of rhetoricians in Rome enacted in 92 BCE by the censors in an effort to stem their influence in the Senate,124 a manual on rhetoric from the articulate politician Marcus Antonius had appeared sometime between in the decade before, though the still anonymous Rhetorica ad Herennium may have been the first Latin manual on the subject, a possible remodel the Rhetorica ad Alexandrum once attributed to Aristotle.125 Cicero’s De Inventione Rhetorica was published when he was still an adolescent (likely in 88-87 BCE), his De Oratore followed (55-46 BCE?), and soon after his Partitione Oratoriae and his Brutus Or A History of Famous Orators.
The bust of Cicero at the Capitoline Museum, Rome
But by then free speech was dying in Rome; Cicero’s manuals could not be fully exploited when civil wars threatened and proscription lists appeared, and his De Optimo Genere Oratorum was only published posthumously.126 Some rhetors like Potamon of Mytilene, a renowned expert on Alexander, soon enjoyed the patronage of the Roman emperors, in this case Tiberius. Yet even for that notoriety, Potamon’s works, including On the Perfect Orator, did not survive.127 Finally, funded by a salary from the Privy Purse, Quintilian’s twelve-book Institute of Oratory (written through 93-95 CE) and Tacitus’ Dialogue on Orators emerged; Romans had finally ‘submitted to the pretensions of a race they despised’.128 So there appeared the claim from Horace: ‘Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit et artes intulit agresti Latio’ – ‘Captive Greece conquered its fierce conqueror and civilised the peasant Latins.’ Virgil had been right to warn of Greeks bearing gifts.129
THE RETURN OF THE RHETORICAL SON
When searching for the remains of the original Alexander, we have to deal with the realities of historians living within the literary Pax Romana (‘absolutism as the price for peaceful order’) for censorship was tangible and authors were fair game.130 Precedents had been set and the sound of Praetorian Guards marching into the atrium was never difficult to imagine, and neither was the drifting stench of the Tullianum, Rome’s notorious prison. If we detect Livy himself was attached to the idea of a Republic, he never quite told that to his emperor, Augustus, who had by then suppressed publication of the Acta Senatus, the official records of senatorial debates at the dawn of the Principate.131 Livy, ‘peculiarly Roman’ with ‘a hundred kings below him, and only the gods above him’, had by now published much of his monumental 142-book Ab Urbe Condita Libri.132 He was given the young Claudius to tutor and sweetened his history lessons by suggesting the Macedonians ‘had degenerated into Syrians, Parthians and Egyptians’ when referring to the Hellenistic kingdoms of Alexander’s successors.133
It seems that there was still sensitivity to the lingering power of the Diadokhoi-founded dynasties in the wake of the self-serving propaganda of Octavian which held that ‘the last of the Ptolemaic dynasty was threatening to hold sway in Rome itself’; that is, with the help of Mark Antony who fell under the spell of Cleopatra.134 Livy, who commenced his long work when Diodorus (broadly) ended his, felt he needed to defend Rome from insinuations that she would have fallen to the Macedones:135
Anyone who considers these factors either separately or in combination will easily see that as the Roman Empire proved invincible against other kings and nations, so it would have proved invincible against Alexander… The aspect of Italy would have struck him as very different from the India which he traversed in drunken revelry with an intoxicated army; he would have seen in the passes of Apulia and the mountains of Lucania the traces of the recent disaster which befell his house when his uncle Alexander, King of Epirus, perished.136
Livy, Lucan (39-65 CE), Cicero, and the stoical Seneca, managed to frame Alexander as an example of moral turpitude when highlighting the depravity of absolute power, and their Epistulae Morales and Suasoriae (persuasive speeches) flowed. Arrogance and false pride were the two principal vices of Stoic doctrine and the opening pages of Seneca’s On the Shortness of Life could be an unfriendly dedication to Alexander, with its rejection of insatiable greed and political ambition, the squandering of wealth and the foolhardiness of inflicting dangers on others. In the case of Seneca, a tutor to young Nero, the Alexander-Aristotle relationship was clearly being relived. Lucan’s De Bello civili, better known as Pharsalia and treading dangerous polemical ground under Nero, termed Alexander ‘the madman offspring of Philip, the famed Pellan robber’; he was further described as nothing short of mankind’s ‘star of evil fate’. Lucan added: ‘He rushed through the peoples of Asia leaving human carnage in his wake, and plunged the sword into the heart of every nation.’137
Seneca took at face value Trogus’ claim (preserved by Justin) that Alexander caged Lysimachus with a lion as a punishment for his pitying Callisthenes; he had allegedly handed poison to the caged historian to end his suffering.138 It was useful as a character defamation and yet Curtius clearly stated the report was nothing but a scandal; moreover, this Lysimachus was likely Alexander’s Arcanian tutor and not the Somatophylake who inherited Thrace.139 Sene
ca likewise accepted the ill-fated quip made by the Rhodian, Telesphorus, about Lysimachus’ wife, Arsinoe (the daughter of Ptolemy by Berenice), along with his subsequent mutilation at Lysimachus’ hand.140 Athenaeus had read no evidence of mutilation and Plutarch credited the remark to Timagenes.141 Neither episode was challenged, for each provided the perfect dish for a polemic on the corruption of kings and tyrants.
Alexander’s deeds inspired the republican iconoclasts to vilify him publicly and the city’s first men to emulate him privately; in Valerius Maximus’ nine books of Memorable Deeds and Sayings (published sometime under Tiberius) the Macedonian king appears at the centre of the frequent exempla on behaviour encompassing both virtues and vices, suggesting a transition was in progress.142 And despite their thunderous tirades and the continuous cloud-cover of the earlier Greek invective, the rays of grudging admiration managed to shine through.
As unbridled power manifested itself ever more comfortably through dictators in Rome, and as independent power was stripped from the comitia, the concilium, the plebeian tribune, and finally from the Senate, the diluted conscience of the Roman republic was more easily assuaged. When apotheosis was finally muttered and Eastern campaigns planned, Alexander emerged once more into the sunlight of imperial emulation when philhellenism returned to fashion, a somewhat ironic result in light of Macedonia’s own suppression of Greek freedom.143 Finally, emperors embraced Alexander in earnest, portraying him as a giant who turned the course of Hellenic history and ultimately that of Rome. They besieged his name, stormed his historical pages and inhabited the very footsteps he walked in.
Pompey, who shared the epithet invictus (‘unconquered’) with Scipio and Alexander,144 and then Julius Caesar, Augustus, Caligula, Nero, Trajan, Marcus Aurelius (ruled 198-211 CE), Caracalla and Septimus Severus (145-211 CE) who locked up the Alexandrian tomb to deny anyone else a glimpse of Alexander’s corpse, all felt the need to stylise themselves on the Macedonian conqueror in some way. Even Crassus believed he was treading in his footsteps en route to his disastrous invasion of Parthia, and probably Mark Antony did too, with similar calamitous results. Like Alexander, they managed to attach themselves to Heracles and Dionysus, but unlike the Macedonian, neither made it to India where the divine hero and god ‘civilised’ and procreated.145
Septimus Severus is even said (perhaps spuriously) to have reconstituted a Silver Shields brigade in emulation of the elite Macedonian hypaspist corps (mobile infantry, used on special missions). Caracalla, who named his officers after Alexander’s generals, demanded the title ‘Great’, and he even took the name ‘Alexander’ after inspecting his body in its tomb in Alexandria; he deposited his own cloak, belt and jewellery, we are told, in return for Alexander’s drinking cups and weapons.146 Caracalla is said to have persecuted philosophers of the Aristotelian school based on the lingering Vulgate tradition that Aristotle had provided the poison that killed the Macedonian king (T9, T10).147
Alexander, with his unique dunasteia (broadly, his aristocratic house, thus ‘dynasty’), was now being subsumed into the essence of Rome; Gore Vidal said of the emperors: ‘The unifying Leitmotiv in these lives is Alexander the Great.’148 A century and a half ago Nietzsche encapsulated their historical perspective, reminding us why we need to reconstitute Alexander without the Roman-era additives:
Should we not make new for ourselves what is old and find ourselves in it? Should we not have the right to breathe our own soul into this dead body? Being Roman they saw it is as an incentive for a Roman conquest. Not only did one omit what was historical; one also added allusions to the present and not with any sense of theft but with the very best conscience of the imperium Romanum.149
In this environment it was inevitable that a new wave of historians felt compelled to reconstruct the story of the Argead king.
A marble bust of Caracalla by Bartolomeo Cavaceppi (ca. 1750-70) based on a likeness in the Farnese collection in Rome and then Naples, believed to date from the 200s CE. In planning his invasion of the Parthian Empire, Caracalla equipped 16,000 Macedonians as a traditional phalanx despite the fact that it was by now an obsolete tactical formation. They were armed as ‘in Alexander’s day’ with ‘helmet of raw ox-hide, a three-ply linen breastplate, a bronze shield, long pike, short spear, high boots, and sword’. Unless this refers to other brigades outside the traditionally outfitted pezhetairoi, this description is challenging.150
THE EXTANT SOURCES – ‘SECONDARY’ AT BEST
The Roman-era writers who ‘preserved’ Alexander’s history inevitably bemoaned the archaic unreliability of their Graeci literary ancestors, in the same way the historians of Hellas had been critical of their forerunners. Quintilian perhaps epitomised the Roman arrogance when he ranked Sallust beside Thucydides, comparing Livy with Herodotus and Cicero to Demosthenes, though he conceded in the process that the Greeks had provided the models for Rome’s own literary achievements. Cicero himself had once hailed the orator Lucius Licinius Crassus (140-91 BCE) as the ‘Roman-Demosthenes’, yet that was a politically astute encomium for a mentor who became a powerfully wedded consul.151
But the biggest Roman-era historiographical disservice was not to name their sources at all. Even when considered worth preserving, the literary forerunners were, more often than not, publicly assassinated, quietly assimilated and destined to servitude as an anonymous section in voluminous Bibliotheke or a series of biographical Vitae. Moreover, any methodology for working with sources remained a highly personalised affair.
Arrian announced a basic and instinctive form of Quellenforschung with: ‘Wherever Ptolemy and Aristobulus in their histories of Alexander, the son of Philip, have given the same account, I have followed it on the assumption of its accuracy; where their facts differ I have chosen what I feel to be the more probable and worthy of telling.’152 But did Arrian appreciate the responsibility that came with the statement? For the version he selected stuck and all else has vanished for eternity, for: ‘Every history written elbows out one which might have been.’153 His approach was surely an emulation of Xenophon who voiced the same sentiment in his Hellenika, which, rather than a history of Greece, reads more like a book of prejudiced memoirs written for ‘those in the know’ (it was hostile to Thebes, in particular, for her ascendancy over Sparta).154 If Arrian unconsciously let the nostalgia of the Second Sophistic slant his prose, and recalling that his primary sources had been politically intriguing, then both conscious and unconscious processes were at work on Alexander.
The result of these unconscious processes: ‘All history is contemporary history, the re-enactment of past experience relevant to the present’,155 and as far as a historian, modern or from the classical past, ‘…time sticks to his thinking like soil to a gardener’s spade’.156 So ‘a fully objective critique’ of history is impossible, as a Horizontverschmelzung, a ‘fused horizon’, blinds interpretation with a ‘historically effected consciousness’.157 In other words, the Roman-era historians re-rendered Alexander in their own philosophies and words. Although individual ideology was not subject to state control (though clearly it was threatened by it), the wider biases of class, value, and culture were as prominent then as today. It is against this backdrop that the extant accounts of Diodorus, Justin, Curtius, Plutarch and Arrian were written under successive Roman dictators and emperors. Their information could not have been better than that they had inherited, though perhaps they thought otherwise, and at this point Rome was not devoid of primary and intermediary sources that had documented the era (in contrast to the period post-Ipsus), as evidenced by the many contributing historians named in Plutarch’s accounts.158
Arrian explained his particular motivation for tackling the subject: no extant Alexander history appeared to be trustworthy, as a group they conflicted, and no single work captured the detail satisfactorily, to his taste at least: ‘There are other accounts of Alexander’s life – more of them, indeed, and more mutually conflicting than of any other historical character.’ He added that
the ‘… transmission of false stories will continue… unless I can put a stop to it in this history of mine.’159 Pearson suggested Arrian’s work was nothing less than a protest against the popularity of Cleitarchus’ ‘unsound history’ which was circulating in Rome.160
But Quellenforschung’s forensic eye is revealing that what have been often termed ‘good’ sources – those behind the so-called ‘court tradition’ of Arrian, for example – include what are now considered deposits of highly dubious material. On the other hand, writers once deemed ‘dubious’ provide us, on occasion, with a core of credible information from genuine lost texts. But identifying where that core separates from the mantle and the crust remains a challenge, so as far as the value of these secondary sources to Alexander’s story: ‘The old custom of dividing their writings into “favourable” and “unfavourable” has now been abandoned for a more sceptical, cautious and nuanced approach.’161 In Peter Green’s opinion, ‘The truth of the matter is that there has never been a “good” or a “bad” source-tradition concerning Alexander, simply testimonia contaminated to a greater or lesser degree, which invariably need evaluating, wherever possible, by external criteria of probability.’ 162
HISTORIA KATA MEROS
The earliest of the five extant writers dealing with the exploits of Alexander, the Greek Sicilian Diodorus, was constructing a ‘universal’ narrative along the lines of Polybius and Ephorus, and with no monographic pretensions towards the Macedonian king. Noting that events ‘lie scattered about in numerous treatises and in divers authors’, Diodorus echoed a rather Polybian case for his thirty years of research and compilation as part of the introduction we cited above:
Most writers have recorded no more than isolated wars waged by a single nation or a single state, and but few have undertaken, beginning with the earliest times and coming down to their own day, to record the events connected with all peoples…163