In Search of the Lost Testament of Alexander the Great
Page 62
Egyptian residents of Babylonia could have twinned its temple of Bel-Marduk with that of Oserapis if they saw a religious overlap; moreover, it was not uncommon for authors to employ contemporary names and terms to describe an earlier equivalent for the sake of clarity for the reader;132 Herodotus equated Egyptian gods with Greek gods, and vice versa, long before Alexander’s day.133 We also know the new syncretised ‘Serapis’ was in effect the cult of Asclepius reinvented with a twist: it fused the Memphite cult of the bull Osiris-Apis with elements of Zeus and indeed Pluto.134 Alexander is specifically cited as having destroyed the temple of Asclepius in Ecbatana following Hephaestion’s death, and so the healing god, at least, was an Eastern resident by then, if not another divine approximation.135 As a further parallel, Zeus-Ammon was itself a Hellenisation of Egypt’s Ammon-Ra. Why then all the fuss?
A statue of Asclepius with a sacred snake, exhibited in the Archaeological Museum of Epidaurus, Argolis, Greece. This is a copy of the unearthed original now in the National Archaeological Museum of Athens.
The theonymic hubris may be necessary because the reference to Serapis seems, nevertheless, self-damning if scholars upholding the ‘late’ emergence of the god in Egyptian are correct on the dating and naming conventions; the Journal may have been promoting a new anthropomorphic god, but an original secretarial entry compiled in 323 BCE would have used the Eastern title of the deity, or specifically ‘Oserapis’, if there were ‘striking similarities’. But after Ptolemy’s reshaping of the god with elements of Greek religion, that identification no longer held. If it was the new Hellenistic god that was being referred in the Journal, as the name we read implies, that would have been back-formation by the Journal author, and at best, the Ephemerides entry was edited, with Serapis’ development in Egypt again pointing to Ptolemaic Pamphlet origins.136
There is a further reference to Serapis in Plutarch’s narrative of Babylon, linked to an imposter who fatally adorned himself with the royal robes and irreverently took the throne while Alexander was exercising. When questioned on his treasonous behaviour, he claimed Serapis’ divine will had unchained him and he blamed his otherwise inexplicable actions on the god’s command137 (T21, see T22 also). This account was obviously complied many years later, so the use of a familiar deity to approximate an eastern god is less troubling. We know Arrian cited Aristobulus as his source on similar episodes such as the Chaldean prophecies, but not specifically for this epoptic event. So here the Serapic reference could be further evidence of Ptolemy’s own strategic interweaving of ‘his’ god and the portentous into the end of his book to signal the king’s imminent, inevitable and fate-determined end, though one clearly hastened by his unrelenting alcoholism, as the Journal made clear.138
If the cult of Serapis was connected to the snake, as some scholars suppose, then Ptolemy’s claim that two talking serpents (Aristobulus mentioned ravens, Strabo stated crows) guided Alexander and his entourage to the Egyptian oracle at Siwa in the Libyan desert,139 alongside Alexander’s dream vision of an antidote-bearing serpent in India used to cure Ptolemy’s own wound, suggest he was introducing his new deity more insidiously through his work.140 The snake-god, Glycon, was after all the alleged reincarnation of the healing god Asclepius, Serapis’ forerunner, and the Romance wove in the legend of the ‘good fortunate’ serpents (representing Agathos Daimon, the good fortune spirit) that appeared at the founding of Ptolemaic Alexandria.
Statuettes recovered from the city appear to show Alexander in a snake-fringed aegis (an animal-skin throw) and we should recall the claims that Olympias was seen with snakes in her bed; she was reportedly entwined by a huge serpent when she conceived her son, though this may be a product of Plutarch’s hostility to her involvement in the Orphic rites and cults of ‘magic’.141 But in this tradition, Alexander’s alleged father was Nectanebo II (ruled 360-342 BCE) of the Thirtieth Dynasty, the last pharaoh of Egyptian stock; if Alexandria was the birthplace of this Romance claim, then the Ptolemies were truly immersing themselves in a realm of demi-gods. It was the perfect amalgam for a dynasty that had assisted Alexander in his deeds and which was nevertheless conscious of its ‘new’ ancient subject population.142
Demetrius of Phalerum, Ptolemy’s learned court philosopher who had been expelled from Athens in 307 BCE by Demetrius Poliorketes, the son of Antigonus Monophthalmos, is said to have written five books focusing on ‘true dreams’ surrounding cures deriving from Serapis, composing paeans in the god’s honour after his own blindness had been healed.143 Demetrius appears to have been a major part of Ptolemy’s fast-developing PR machine in the post-Ipsus years, which culminated in Alexander’s prayer to Serapis, a section of which was discovered in fragmentary form on a papyrus dating to the 1st century BCE.144 Demetrius’ Peri Tyches (On Fortune), published around 310 BCE, which gave fortune the lead role over virtue in Alexander’s success, may well have stirred Ptolemy to remind the world of his own part in the campaign.145
Under the sanctuary of Ptolemy I Soter, after a term in Thebes (in Boeotia), Demetrius of Phalerum shepherded the expansion of the Alexandrian Library from the Palaces in the Brucheion, otherwise referred to as the Royal Quarter and which would soon house the Mausoleum where Alexander was buried. Demetrius’ initial good fortune did not last forever; he was exiled once again by Soter’s son, Ptolemy II Philadelphos, most likely for backing his half-brother, Ptolemy Keraunos, upon his father’s death; Demetrius’ was an unsurprising stance since Keraunos was the son of Eurydice, the sister of Cassander who had initially installed Demetrius in Athens. The learned and experienced philosopher from Phalerum, who reportedly died of a snakebite in Upper Egypt where he was continuing his literary pursuits,146 is said to have once advised Ptolemy I ‘to acquire the books dealing with kingship and leadership’ and to read them ‘for the things their friends do not dare to offer to kings as advice, are written in these books’.147 It seems that Ptolemy quickly learned his lessons on kingship and subterfuge.
A bust of Serapis wearing a kalathos, a ceremonial basket used in religious processions and a symbol for the land of the dead. Statues of Serapis depicted a figure resembling Hades or Pluto, gods associated with the underworld, often with a sceptre and the hellhound Cerberus at his feet along with a serpent. Graeco-Roman Museum, Alexandria.
POLITICS OF THE PORTENTOUS
Serapic involvement with the Journal brought divine judgement into the picture, and this, in turn, worked well beside the biographical elements questioning Alexander’s sanity, for the picture painted by Plutarch is one of a king losing his reason:
His confidence now deserted him, he began to believe that he had lost the favour of the gods, and he became increasingly suspicious of his friends… Meanwhile Alexander had become so obsessed by his fears of the supernatural and so overwrought and apprehensive in his own mind, that he interpreted every strange or unusual occurrence, no matter how trivial, as a prodigy or a portent…148 (T21)
The message is clear: the king had become ‘a slave to his fears’. Did eyewitness historians dare to go this far, or was this fabula scooped up later? For death-heralding omens do, as we know, proliferate Alexander’s final chapter (T21, T22, T23, T24), in both the Vulgate accounts and the court genre. Arrian’s account corroborates this in a more sanitised way, but we know he demonstrably ‘whitewashed’ Alexander where necessary.149 Nevertheless, this suggests a court source (or sources) may indeed have allowed this degenerate image to creep in.
The Roman emperor Domitian (ruled 81-96 CE) once quipped that no one believes there has been a conspiracy unless a ruler is actually killed.150 But here we contend with the opposite, for Plutarch reported that no foul play was suspected in Babylon at the time. This is surprising in light of the regicidal history of the Argead kings and something of a contradiction to his claim that Alexander feared assassination from the agents of Antipater, his regent in Macedonia. Plutarch, who earlier described the portents heralding in Alexander’s end, appears to have immanentised the eschaton
, for this was an environment in which suspicion was unlikely to have ever been absent.151
The inclusion of portents, going back, in fact, to the death of the Indian gymnosophist Calanus a year before,152 would, as Peter Green observed, ‘… certainly suggest that the king’s death was due to natural or divine causes, rather than to human agency.’153 And surely achieving that was the very purpose. Today, at least, this appears a rather obvious misdirection, but in Alexander’s time the gods were not to be dismissed; the naming of Demophon and Cleomenes at the Serapic temple anchored down the legitimacy of its reply: ‘Leave Alexander where he is, for it would be the better thing.’ This, and the collection of divinations that preceded the king’s final decline, had the desired effect; the superstitious and stoical Arrian concluded: ‘The truth was that divine power was leading him on to the point, which once reached, would seal his imminent death.’154
The Chaldean Magi had doubtlessly exploited the portent-gullible Macedonians to their advantage in Babylon when competing with Alexander’s Greek ‘philosophical corps’ for control of his soul, and Diodorus captured something of the mystery that surrounded them: ‘For they are reputed to possess a great deal of experience and to make most exact observations of the stars. Indeed they declare that for many myriads of years the study of these matters has been pursued among them.’155 Numerical cryptograms were even used in haruspicy ‘to mystify the profane’; some Assyrian and Babylonian inscriptions remain undeciphered today; Herodotus referred to the Magi as pharmadeukantes, ‘having performed magical rites’.156
The weight of superstition (‘the mad daughter of a wise mother’, according to Voltaire) in the classical period has probably been underestimated in modern interpretations of events. The huge number (over 1,700) of excavated lead curse-tablets (tabellae defixiones in Latin) housing a spell, katadesmos, with their Homeric verse incantations (epoidai), attests to the wide-held belief in mageia and the daimones of the underworld (commonly Hermes, Charon, Hecate, Pluto, Kore or Persephone), as well as to the belief in bewitchment, pepharmakeusthai.157 These tablets were often folded and pierced with nails, buried in graves, tombs and temples, or thrown down wells accompanied by figurines and invocations in an indecipherable language, supposedly that of demons. This provoked the accursed to wear amulets in defence. Apparently, and as later depicted in Lucan’s De Bello civili, Thessaly was the commercial centre of witches (pharmakes) whose services could be readily hired to send enemies down to Hades ‘where the bloodless, bodiless and boneless endlessly wandered’ around the palace of Pluto.158 Ephesus was the centre of magic and magicians, mystagogos, whose Ephesia grammata, mystical words, were arranged in formulas and incantations hissed in chthonic temples.
Epileptics were thought to have the Sacred Disease and to be possessed by the gods;159 magnetic lode stones were thought to contain souls, and those who died without funeral rites (the ataphoi) were considered condemned to a less than idyllic underworld community. Athens even had a separate court for trials of inanimate objects, including figurines that were held responsible for murder.160
In Greece, four locations had become renowned for their nekyomanteia, prophecy places of the dead, often located in caves and staffed by Sybils, the psychagogoi or ‘evocators’ of the spirits. Here, as at the psychomanteia, the drawing places of ghosts, necromancy was practised, sacrifices made, and the spirits recalled from the underworld for cults, rituals and other chthonic requests.161 The ever-rationalising Aristotle even let daimones feature in his treatise on animals, that is if the work can be truly credited to him; but precedents had been set, for Plato’s Laws referred to prophets, sorcerers and divinely guided healers in a matter of fact way.162
Theocritus, based in Alexandria, was to publish a poem, Pharmakeutria, the Sorceress, that was steeped in magical rites. The protagonist, a young Greek girl, consulted experts on drugs to bring back her lover’s affections; the recommended potion included coltsfoot and pounded lizard, as spells and incantations to Hecate and the Moon were to be recited whilst pounding on a bronze gong. We have evidence that some formulas for the kykeon, the Greek mix of wine, barley and other potentially psychoactive substances, provided hallucinatory results that added to the drama.
The Romans were no less superstitious; a read of Valerius Maximus’ Nine Books of Memorable Deeds and Sayings illustrates the fear of omens and auspices (in Latin literally a ‘bird sighting’ – from avis and spicere) embedded in the belief code of the time. In Rome the Twelve Tables (451-450 BCE) described by Pliny, limited anyone from incanting a malum carmen, an evil charm.163 It did little to deter Gnaeus Calpurnius Piso (ca. 44 BCE-20 CE) from leaving ‘… spells, curses and lead tablets engraved with the name Germanicus, with half-burnt ashes smeared with blood and other magic by which it is believed that living souls are dedicated to the infernal powers.’ Ammianus Marcellinus’ (ca. 325-post 391 CE) retrospective look at Rome (his Res Gestae – broadly, ‘things done’ – continued chronologically where Tacitus’ Histories had ceased) contained repeated references to the menace of the blacker arts of magic.164
A lead curse tablet found in a graveyard in the area of the Agora at the Macedonian capital of Pella. The daimones were being invoked and a curse was being cast upon the marriage of Thetima and Dionysophon by a jilted lover or an existing wife. The language is harsh Doric of northwest Greece, suggesting a unique dialect may have been used in Pella before the 4th century BCE. Found in 1986 it was published in the Hellenic Dialectology Journal in 1993. Now on display in the Archaeological Museum of Pella.
But here, preceding Alexander’s death in Babylon, superstition, deisidaimonia, was being harnessed well. The healing god had spoken and Asclepius had finally turned his back on the troubled Macedonian king. The Journal recorded that Alexander was speechless for his final two days. If so, he had by definition spoken the day before. What orders did he give to the officers told to remain on call right outside his quarters?165 What discussions took place with his intimates, his wife, secretary and Bodyguards? No doctor or physician is mentioned in the Journal, and not a purge, poultice, or prayer. There is a troubling lack of zeal to save Alexander after Serapis had spoken. Whatever was said in the dying king’s chamber was truly sanitised, muted and dried by Ptolemy to the brevity of a cuneiform tablet.
One final Journal detail is, however, noteworthy, for its author appears to have provided some valuable PR to both Nearchus and Medius. Alexander is portrayed listening to his navarch’s account of his sea voyage and instructing him on the forthcoming campaign, presumably as admiral of the fleet heading to Arabia, whilst Medius’ intimacy with the king is highlighted by the drinking party he hosted and his playing private games of dice with the king (T3, T4). Both men had become valuable naval commanders, each supporting Antigonus at a time when Ptolemy needed as much sea power as he could muster; moreover, the somewhat negative image of Alexander depicted in the Journal would have sat rather well with the Pamphlet-vilified Cassander, who was now Ptolemy’s ally. So, was the high profile of Nearchus and Medius an overture designed to swing their loyalty Ptolemy’s way?
With this in mind, the most relevant period for its release would have been between late 313 and 307/6 BCE, when both nautical men were known to be active, Nearchus advising Demetrius at the battle at Gaza, and Medius seeing naval action at the battle off Salamis; this was a period in which Antigonus was threatening to invade Egypt itself (he tried unsuccessfully in 306 BCE).166 It raises the question whether Ptolemy might have commenced distributing the home-baked Ephemerides fragment to counter the claims in the Pamphlet (most likely issued sometime between 318 and the end of 316 BCE) ahead of inserting it into the final pages of his book. Of course the uniqueness of the Journal may have also led to it being extracted from Ptolemy’s book and circulated independently some decades on.
So what do modern scholars conclude of the Journal? Generally, though not universally, it is branded a fraud; its historicity appears as valid as the Ephemeris of Dictys of Crete with it
s claims to be an eyewitness account of the siege of Troy.167 One theory concludes, ironically, that the Journal was a production of Eumenes and circulated within two years of Alexander’s death, when he was supposedly under instruction from the Macedonian generals to counter any rumours of regicide. Interestingly, a 1986 study saw the hand of Ptolemy in its fabrication.168 It is worth repeating Heckel’s contention, ‘… that there is no evidence whatsoever that the Journal contained anything of a military or political nature.’ Heckel follows with, ‘given the suspicious nature of the portions cited, there is a strong possibility that the Journal is a fabrication, an attempt to disguise the truth about the king’s last days, with the false claim that details given were extracted verbatim from an official journal’.169 Bosworth rather appropriately rounded-off his detailed appraisal with: ‘paradoxically’ the Alexander Romance ‘is nearer to the truth than the Royal Ephemerides’.170
THE VULGATE: THE HYBRID ‘MUDDY STREAM’
What is the relationship of the Vulgate portrayal of Alexander’s death – represented by the accounts of Diodorus, Curtius and Justin (T6, T7, T8) – to the Journal and the Pamphlet, for the Vulgate stance on Alexander’s last words – which left the kingdom ‘to the strongest’ – contradicts them both? As Lane Fox neatly summed it up for the Journal, if ‘… speechless for two days on his death bed, he can hardly have been so articulate in his utterances to his troops.’171 Furthermore, the clarity of the Pamphlet Will left no room for ambiguity: if the historian at the root of the Vulgate was aware of the claim of conspiracy, he was surely aware of Alexander’s lucid testament that sat beside it. Assuming Cleitarchus was the source from which the Vulgate genre drew, as is widely accepted, the Will’s omission from his final pages was deliberate and clinical; it was an early literary keyhole-surgery that separated out the episodes to create the wrap to the genre Tarn termed a ‘muddy stream… full of flotsam’. 172