by David Grant
This text is possibly incomplete, for though it is clear the Ephemerides was being referred to, the source was never formally introduced. Like much else in Aelian’s compendium of historical titbits, the detail was tersely thrown in beside other non-relevant text. But here again alcohol abuse served to illustrate the decline in Alexander’s behaviour against a background of earlier finer Homeric qualities and restraint. However, Aelian’s excerpt made calendar references that contradicted Arrian and Plutarch, and thus, some scholars have argued, it was referring to a totally different event. One proposal for that is Alexander’s previous visit to Babylon in 331 BCE, or his stay in Ecbatana, the summer residence of the Great Kings, in the autumn of 324 BCE, the year before his death.90
This last interpretation is linked to the decline in health of Hephaestion, the king’s closest friend and first chiliarchos, perhaps prompted by a fragment of Ephippus’ scandeleuse which claimed this too was preceded by prodigious drinking bouts.91 Moreover, an enmity had existed between the alleged Ephemerides author, Eumenes, and Hephaestion (whose above reported slip of the tongue may be evidence of that),92 so the alcoholic slant supposedly deflected blame away from Eumenes, for Alexander suspected his friend’s death was due to deliberate poisoning. Attaching this Ephemerides extract to a different campaign episode would, of course, back up Hammond’s contention that various portions of the official campaign log were in circulation.93 But that is a vexing conclusion, for Aelian’s chapter is headed Of Alexander, and Hephaestion was never mentioned at all.94 And if taken together as two distinct episodes, these extracts would suspiciously confirm that any surviving Ephemerides fragments recorded little more than a string of decadent symposia and fatal illnesses.
Aelian’s text is deemed to conflict with that of Plutarch and Arrian because it commenced on the 5th of the Macedonian month of Dios, the month of Zeus linked to the moon of October, with the main narrative focusing on drinking bouts that followed on the 6th, 7th and 8th, then to the 15th and 16th, after which it jumped to the king’s dining on the 27th, and sleeping on the 28th. Yet here no sign of illness or fever had taken hold of Alexander and Medius’ party is not mentioned at all.95 But a little lateral thinking offers some reconciliation, and the clues lay in the opening statements of Plutarch and Arrian. Plutarch told us that previously (that is before the commencement of Alexander’s two-week decline) and upon hearing the news of Hephaestion’s posthumous elevation to hero (or god) as approved by the oracle at Siwa, Alexander had allowed himself to indulge in a number of sacrifices and drinking bouts.96 Arrian also mentioned that Alexander had previously celebrated the customary sacrificial rites with a view to his success. Diodorus also commented on these earlier events claiming that following Hephaestion’s funeral, the king turned to amusements and festivals.97 How then can this help unite the texts?
The answer is to assume Aelian’s ‘Dios’ (Δίος in Greek) was a corruption of ‘Daisios’ (Δαίσιος) and then to insert Aelian’s detail of banquets from the 5th to the 15th into the narrative before Medius’ komos which took place on the 15th/16th whence Plutarch and Arrian began their Journal entry (as implied by the date references in Plutarch’s text). The result is a neatly dovetailed account of a full month’s activity including the ‘previous’ celebrations Plutarch and Arrian referred to, and this is where Plutarch’s references to hunting would have originated. A corruption of names in Aelian’s text appears an inherent part of the confusion, for we would expect his reference to Alexander’s drinking at the residence of ‘Eumaeus’ (Eumaios) on the 5th should read either ‘Eumenes’, or perhaps ‘Ptolemaios’ – so Ptolemy.98
To finally resolve the conflict, the banquets described by Aelian on the 24th, 27th and 28th would have taken place at the end of the previous month, erroneously repositioned by a manuscript copyist trying to make chronological sense, possibly due to the lack of any introduction in Aelian’s account; as we will discover, the extant manuscripts are studded with scribal errors. Repositioning the activities of the 24th, 27th and 28th to the previous month makes better sense considering the gathering took place at the residence of Bagoas 10 stadia (1.25 miles) from the royal palace, an unlikely journey if Alexander was already at death’s door. Considered this way, the middle-month date references finger-join too well for us to dismiss any coincidence out of hand.
Further evidence that Aelian’s passage preceded the other Journal entries comes in the form of his statement that on the 6th of the month Alexander discussed a ‘march’ with his generals, which was supposed to commence early the following morning. Alexander was preparing to follow the progress of the land army into Arabia with the fleet, so the army’s departure was indeed due to commence in advance.99 Arrian discussed how, in the days before his own Journal narrative commenced, fleet exercises were taking place ‘constantly’; troop manoeuvres and army reorganisation was well underway and it seems this new campaign, or as Tarn suggests ‘a voyage of discovery’, was postponed because of the king’s unrelenting fever.100
If we are correct, it appears the archetypal Journal entry cited (a little over) a full month’s activity. So why did the entry of Arrian and Plutarch not cover the whole period? The reason for their brevity is clear: the king’s illness commenced halfway through, at Medius’ komos, and they were simply reporting on how Alexander died. This late start-point is supported by Plutarch’s words: ‘according to the Journal his sickness was as follows…’.101
Aelian’s agenda was different: for didactic purposes he was focusing on serial alcoholism and not the aftermath. He closed his entry with a revealing accusation:
… one of two alternatives follows: either Alexander damaged himself with wine by drinking so often within the month, or the authors of these stories are telling lies: from them one can infer that such writers, who include Eumenes of Cardia, tell similar tales on other occasions.102
The ‘other occasions’ could, of course, include the aforementioned letter to Antipater concerning Hephaestion, or even later invents which established Eumenes’ reputation for brilliant documentary subterfuges in the Successor Wars.103 Aelian’s conclusion, which clearly referred to a whole month, was that ‘a drinking marathon unique in history’ was an impossibility, or suggestive of an author who wished the king’s death to seem it attributable to such.104 Whilst it seems that Aelian believed he was reading a genuine fragment of the royal diaries, he was perhaps the first classical author to (obliquely) question the authenticity of its content. As we know, Athenaeus’ Deipnosophistae, written as a dialogue within a dialogue in the style of Plato, credited Eumenes with exactly the same secretarial role.105 His work is uncertainly dated but its contempt for Commodus (emperor 180-192 CE), the son of the emperor Marcus Aurelius, provides a clear termini post quem, and from that we can conclude that these authors were potentially contemporaries living in Rome.
Aelian’s cynicism raises a fundamental question: could, or would, Eumenes or any other court secretary, have been allowed the latitude to capture such degenerative behaviour in the real-time official Ephemerides? Surely not. Instead we are proffering Ptolemy as the architect of this specific entry, and his penchant for subterfuge may have been more developed than we first suspected; he fabricated a sufficiently convincing extract from the official campaign diary to wind up his authoritative history, whilst heaping responsibility for its content on the royal secretaries. As Eumenes had died some years before Ptolemy came to publish, there was not much he could do about it. Additionally, Ptolemy’s association with the Journal is completely plausible; he was after all behind the foundation of the Alexandrian Library that rapaciously collected documents of all kinds.
Certainly his son, Ptolemy II Philadelphos, left extensive basilikai anagraphai and hypomnemata, the ‘royal records’ that Diodorus was aware of, and which Appian of Alexandria later drew from. An extract from a later royal journal appears in the ‘propagandistic’ Gaurob Papyrus describing events in the reign of Ptolemy III Euergetes, whose twenty-four-volume c
ollection of hypomnemata provided Athenaeus with material. This was possibly part of an epistolary tradition that inspired parallels in the Romance.106 It seems Arrian and Plutarch were satisfied that Ptolemy was guardian of Alexander’s royal Ephemerides too.
To add muscle to our argument for a common Journal fragment, we have a literary ‘gene-marker’ to guide us. Both Plutarch and Arrian noticeably sandwiched their extracts between remarks which inform us when they opened and closed their metaphrasing (T3, T4).107 Uniquely in his final chapter, Plutarch employed the term kata lexin, ‘almost word for word’, to describe his entry, and Arrian added ‘all these details are to be found in the Journals’.108 This is rare evidence of ipsissima verba and logically suggests that Ptolemy had been quite precise on the entry and exit points. The stress Arrian and Plutarch placed on informing us that this was uniquely sourced material rules out any speculation that other parts of their books were Journal derived; Arrian conspicuously omitted any reference to it when detailing his sources on his opening page.109
Could Ptolemy have credibly accessed the original campaign diaries? In 1894 Wilken first proposed he did and later scholars endorsed him.110 Pearson proposed an alternative explanation: the Journal entry was a fake, and yet because it corroborated Ptolemy’s detail, its author was familiar with Ptolemy’s book, and thus a verisimilitude was achieved. Pearson did not contemplate that the authors were one and the same, though he did conclude that its style was Alexandrian by comparison with a papyrus found there in the Roman era.111 If Ptolemy did have the complete campaign corpus, what happened to it and why did he not strengthen the veracity, authority and uniqueness of his history with more frequent references to the campaign logs, most relevantly for events he could not himself have witnessed? The answer is probably straightforward: if he did have the Ephemerides, it would have been foolhardy to broadcast its whereabouts to those who would undermine him by accessing it themselves, for it appears he greatly inflated his own role in the Asian campaign. Like much else surrounding the death of Alexander, the official records, in whatever condition they survived, remained a closely guarded affair.
If any campaign documentation did survive the Successor Wars, which saw Antigonus plundering Babylon (310/309 BCE), then Ptolemy would surely have coveted what remained. Strabo implied that he knew of Babylonian records from which he concluded the campaign historians had provided only cursory geographic detail compared to expert data he found.112 This material may have included the topographical records of Baeton and Diognetus (termed itinerum mensores, ‘measurers of roads’), Philonides and Amyntas, whose names appeared in the texts of Athenaeus, Aelian and Pliny, though these eyewitness accounts seem, once again, to have included the marvels of India, thus we may question their intent.
The polymath Eratosthenes (ca. 276-194 BCE), however, who became chief librarian at the Library of Alexandria around a century later, stated that no copies of such records, the stathmoi (measurements or stages), were available for him to consult, and we would have expected Arrian to use them, or at least reference them, if only to follow the example set by Xenophon who referred to these types of precise records in his Anabasis. This upholds the contention that the campaign Ephemerides, Strabo’s Babylon-originating data aside, disappeared in the Successor Wars.
It is not difficult to imagine how Ptolemy first came into possession of any archival material from Babylon following Alexander’s death. War with Perdiccas commenced in earnest when Ptolemy hijacked, or rescued (depending upon the interpretation), Alexander’s funeral cortège somewhere near Damascus in Syria and ‘escorted’ it to Egypt against Perdiccas’ wishes.113 Aelian provided a colourful addition to the episode in which the bier carrying the coffin of hammered gold and pulled by sixty-four mules, was a decoy that included a replica of the dead king’s corpse; the real body was sped to Egypt by a different route.114
Aelian’s account went on to report that Aristander of Termessus, the by-now famous seer, had predicted at Babylon that whichever land received the body would remain prosperous and forever unvanquished. Whilst this too has the air of a later Ptolemaic device, no one (after Perdiccas) demanded the return of Alexander’s mummified remains, and this suggests some legitimacy to Ptolemy’s action, though it must be said that no one was ever able to cross the Nile to remove him from power. In the Vulgate texts the final destination of the bier does appear to have been the oracular Ammonium at Siwa in the Egyptian desert, the home of the Zeus-Ammon and Alexander’s ‘immortality’, and the extant Wills additionally claim that Alexander chose to be entombed in Egypt, though this may have been politically opportune if Ptolemy was being courted.115
Pausanias concluded that Perdiccas planned to escort the bier to Aegae, the traditional burial ground of the Macedonian royalty. Whether endorsed by the Common Assembly at Babylon, or stemming from Perdiccas’ later opportunism, Pausanias’ interpretation is possibly supported by either of two noteworthy turns of events: the first is the Macedonian regent’s proffering his daughter (Nicaea) to the chiliarch, in which case Perdiccas was probably on safe ground when taking the body ‘home’, for who except Ptolemy’s supporters could object? Aegae, ‘the city of goats’, became the spiritual home of the Argeads when Caranus renamed the Phrygian settlement of Edessa (meaning ‘water’, one of two cities so-named) some four centuries before. Moreover, King Perdiccas I had prophesised the end of the Argead line should any king be buried anywhere else.116
The second event that might have helped Pausanias’ conclusion was the collapse of that initiative with Antipater, following which we read Perdiccas and his generals voted in favour of defeating Ptolemy in Egypt ‘in order that there might be no obstacle in the way of their Macedonian campaign’.117 Perdiccas most likely planned to keep the bier close (in Syria we propose) until events developed sufficiently to escort it to its permanent home in his bid for control of Pella.118
So it is likely that royal archives and campaign correspondence departed Babylon with Perdiccas and remained with him as he planned his attack on the Nile.119 Letters between he and Demades in Athens were reportedly retrieved from the archives immediately after his death, suggesting Perdiccas had indeed journeyed with the tools of bureaucracy about him.120 His initial attack on the Ptolemaic defences at Pelusium, a necessary entry point into Egypt to avoid the marshes of Typhon’s Breathing Hole, and again near Heliopolis further up the Nile, failed, and cost him his life; thereafter, deals were brokered, promises exchanged and possibly court correspondence too. Ptolemy even acquired Perdiccas’ surviving elephants – those his men had not managed to blind with pikes at the battle of the Fort of Camels. Ptolemy was most likely already in league with Seleucus (possibly one of Perdiccas’ assassins) who, we will argue, had already inherited the governorship of Babylonia, in which case further exchanges of court correspondence would have taken place.121
THE CULT OF SERAPIS: A CASE OF ANTHROPOMORPHIC EDITING?
Here we expand on the Journal references to the cult of Serapis through which its author might have made his biggest blunder. Some scholars find this problematic and so the topic has already been discussed, but not quite with the significance it might merit to our particular case.
The Diaries [Ephemerides] say that Peithon, Attalus, Demophon and Peucestas, together with Cleomenes, Menidas and Seleucus spent the night in the temple of Serapis and asked the God if it would be better for Alexander to be carried into the temple himself, in order to pray there and perhaps recover; but the God forbade it, and declared it would be better for him if he stayed where he was. The God’s command was made public, and soon afterwards Alexander died – this, after all, being the better thing.122 (T3, T4 abbreviated)
The Journal clearly named the individuals who spent the night in the temple of the healing god to ask divine guidance on Alexander’s worsening condition. The group appears to have included two of Alexander’s leading seers, Demophon and Cleomenes; it was Demophon who had warned Alexander not to enter the Mallian city in India where he was
nearly killed.123 More intriguing is the presence of Peithon, Peucestas, and Seleucus, the men either complicit in Perdiccas’ murder, or the most prominent of those named guilty at Medius’ komos.124 The list also looks to have included Attalus (initially hostile to Perdiccas but who became his brother-in-law as part of the settlement at Babylon), and Menidas who had recently arrived in Babylon from recruiting in Macedonia, which suggests he could have arrived with Cassander the scheming son of the allegedly scheming Macedonian regent.125 It is a line up which has the distinct air of a Pamphlet riposte.
It is generally accepted by modern historians, and supported by a story in Plutarch’s Isis and Osiris, that the cult of Serapis was started in Egypt by Ptolemy I Soter at least a decade after Alexander’s death, and probably later still;126 the earliest known cult statue in Alexandria was initially thought to have been sculpted by Bryaxis around 286-278 BCE, but this appears to have been a colossal likeness of Pluto (evidenced by its inclusion of Cerberus and a serpent) dating back to 350 BCE that was later shipped to Alexandria from Sinope on the Black Sea to be renamed in its new home by Ptolemy I Soter.127 Plutarch further asserted that Serapis was the Egyptian name for the equivalent of Pluto, either correctly, or guided by this episode. All in all, some forty-two temples to the new god appeared across Egypt with the intention of uniting the Graeco-Macedonian ruling classes with their Egyptian subjects; the most prominent was perhaps in the Egyptian Quarter of Alexandria itself.128 A reference to the Serapeum in Alexandria and to the ‘great Serapis, ruler of all’ appeared in the Romance version of the Will (as well as other chapters), which does rather point to Egyptian influence in the book’s provenance.129
The integrity of the Journal entry as an unedited source rests on the existence of a Serapis cult in Babylon earlier than 323 BCE.130 This appears to counter the evidence (so some studies believe), yet the notion may be challenged by the wording in the Curse of Artemisia which mentions an ‘Oserapis’ who was possibly worshipped at Memphis before Alexander’s Egyptian invasion. But this deity, whilst similarly linked to death and the afterlife, was usually depicted as a mummified human male with the head of a bull, with a solar disk between its horns, and this bears little resemblance to the statues and depictions of the familiar Ptolemaic Serapis.131