In Search of the Lost Testament of Alexander the Great

by David Grant

  These vivid and influential Greek characters were already associated with magic by Aristotle’s day; Empedocles, the founder of the Italian school of medicine, raised the dead and was said to be able to manipulate the weather; he was possibly the first philosopher to propose the existence of four divine primordial cosmic elements: earth, wind, fire and water, and his passing provides us with an early example of the ‘multiple death tradition’.10 Pythagoras was in two places at once, sported a golden thigh and reportedly once turned a wild bear to vegetarianism, so the legends go,11 and after his death, honey growing on Hippocrates’ grave was, unsurprisingly, said to have medicinal powers.12

  Hippocrates, already epitheted ‘the great’, according to Aristotle, had several deaths too – at the ages of 80, 90, 104, and 109. The latter numbers were apparently shared with his friend, Democritus of Abdera, so meriting a place in Pseudo-Lucian’s Makrobioi, a compendium of the ‘long lived’,13 Pythagoras’ own numerical preoccupation concluded with the statement ‘all things are numbers’ and he is oddly said to have lived to 104 as well, sharing the illustrious age with Hieronymus the Cardian historian.14 That may not be coincidence: as pointed out by the historian Truesdell Brown, 104 – thus the 105th year – is a mystical numerical combination and the sum of the first fourteen integers.15

  Competing stories in circulation would have us believe that Pythagoras was slain twice: he was either foiled by a bean field he refused to enter leading to his capture and burning at the stake; alternatively, he withered away from a self-imposed starvation when philosophically pondering a world that had rejected him.16 Yet ‘any chronology constructed for his life is a fabric of the loosest possible weave’,17 a conundrum facing Hermman Diels when attempting to separate direct quotations (‘B’ fragments) from the later testimonia (‘A’ fragments) related to the Samian polymath and other pre-Socratic thinkers in his 1903 Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker.

  Doxographies, as we have noted, were apparently highly exploitable and early doxographical material was particularly susceptible to becoming pseudepigrapha, for so little was known about the lives and writings of Neo-Platonist philosophers, who, by then, were already wrapped in the climbing ivy of myth. The Neo-Pythagorean scholars, for example, tended to attribute their own written treatises back to Pythagoras himself. Prizing apart the originals from the latter-day treatises demands every weapon Quellenforschung and the ancillary disciplines of historiography can muster in stripping away the accretion. Diels, the originator of the term ‘doxography’ which was originally linked to philosophical opinions (doxai) on theology, cosmology, metaphysics and other sciences, attempted to narrow down their tenets to the original sources in his monumental 1879 Doxographi Graeci.

  And here we encounter the first of many of history’s many ironies, as none of the influential philosophers, including Pythagoras himself, preserved their own doctrines in writing either. Anaximenes, Socrates, Thales (ca. 624-546 BCE), Arcesilaus (ca. 316-241 BCE), Carneades and Pyrrho of Elis (ca. 360-270 BCE) each relied on oral tradition, and yet their ideas are better preserved than written works of ‘Philippic’ proportion, Theopompus’ fifty-eight-book Philippika amongst them.18 But do the doxographies we have truly preserve ‘their’ ideas? Or are they the oversimplifications, or later interpretations of the students and disciples that were neatly systemised by Theophrastus in his Physikon doxai, often translated as Tenets of the natural philosophers?

  Chrysippus (ca. 279-204 BCE), the Stoic sophist who taught ‘divine logic’ and supposedly authored some 705 books, gave wine to his donkey and finally died of laughter as he watched its ungainly attempts to eat figs.19 A different end comes from Hermippus who reported that he expired from the effects of unmixed wine at a sacrificial feast.20 Zeno of Citium, the founder of Stoicism, was an austere character who nevertheless enjoyed drinking at symposia too; his experiences prompted his sober advice: ‘Better to trip with the feet than with the tongue.’ Diogenes Laertius reported the irony: ‘When he was going out of his school, he tripped, and broke one of his toes, and striking the ground with his hand, he repeated the line out of the Niobe, “I come: why call me so?”… he immediately strangled himself, and thus he died.’21 Lucian, on the other hand, suggested that after his famous stumble (when entering the assembly) he starved himself to death at home alone.22 So it seems Plato was insightful when composing his Symposium in which it was successfully argued that tragedy and comedy may reside together in the composer’s pen.23

  Diogenes the Cynic had an assortment of conflicting demises that spawned a whole literary genre, with none of them taking place in his famous Corinthian barrel. One version claimed he was seized with colic after eating a raw octopus, and another beleived he was actually feeding the octopus to a group of dogs, one of which fatally bit the sinew of his foot. A variation proposed his last wish was to be thrown naked to the hungry pack; the canine attachment is surely an allusion Diogenes’ dog-like behaviour, his epithet kynikos, and possibly to his consent of cannibalism.24 A further tradition claimed he died by voluntarily holding his breath for two days; his friends found him wrapped in his cloak intact whereafter they quarrelled over the honours to bury him, despite his wish to be thrown in a ditch for nature to consume him.25 He was reportedly aged eighty-one, or perhaps ninety.26 Ironically, for all his cynical attributes, he was ‘canonised’ by the Stoics, though both philosophical sects must have found some personal harmony in his ideas, for many of them lived long as well and qualified for inclusion in the Makrobioi, a point its author duly noted.27

  THEATRICAL LINES FOR A CLASSICAL STAGE

  Portentous births and mysterious deaths – life’s beginning and end – were fully exploited for their didactic contents and for the symmetry that the Epicurean Lucretius (ca. 99-55 BCE) philosophically likened to ‘nature’s mirror’; after all, ‘the art of living well and the art of dying well are one.’28 Do dying men speak, even those who have been poisoned? Well, apparently Socrates did after a shock dose of hemlock; his last recorded words were: ‘Crito, I owe a cock to Asclepius; will you remember to pay the debt?’29 It was the perfect utterance from a man at peace with himself and possibly an allusion to life’s debt to the healing god.30 The words were immortalised by Plato (whose real name was Aristocles) in his Phaedo, a notable yet unlikely absentee from Socrates’ final hour. Plutarch added that after Socrates had downed the fatal draught, ‘he engaged in philosophy and invited his companions to do the same.’31

  As one scholar points out, Socrates had ‘spent his entire life trying to fathom the mysteries of life: what is virtue? what is justice? what is beauty? what is the best form of government? what is the good life?… What Socrates found was that no Athenian citizen could give him a definition of any moral or intellectual virtue that would survive ten minutes of his questioning.’32 Hemlock was his reward, and it made Plato reconsider the ideal state; his Seventh Letter betrayed his disenchantment with Athenian politics, a state of affairs that would only change, he proposed, when its leaders philosophised once again. Plato’s account of Socrates’ death so affected the stoical Cato the Younger that he read the Phaedo twice the night of his own suicide in 46 BCE.33 On hearing of Cato’s self-murder, Caesar reportedly lamented: ‘Cato, I grudge you your death, as you would have grudged me the preservation of your life.’34

  The great speaker Demosthenes was, as we might imagine, credited with rather immortal lines for his epitaph, when Archias, the thespian-turned-assassin, had him surrounded in the (supposedly sacred) Temple of Poseidon on the island of Calauria (Poros). Contemplating the pledges of fair treatment Antipater was delivering via his ‘exile hunter’, Demosthenes replied with, ‘Archias, I was never convinced by your acting, and I am no more convinced by your promises’, whereupon he sucked poison from his reed pen and rounded off with a speech from Sophocles’ Antigone as the effects took hold.35

  Tradition was not content with the one recital (which may have originated with Duris’ allusion to tragic drama) and Plutarch dedicated th
e next chapter to recording its many pluralities. The wording on the bronze statue supposedly erected by the Athenians to his memory is even questioned and it was rumoured that Demosthenes composed the eulogy himself.36 Lucian took up the mantle in his usual satirical style, claiming Antipater did indeed lament the death of the anti-Macedonian orator:

  Archias! methinks you comprehend neither the nature of Demosthenes, nor my mind. No man that ever lived do I admire more than Demosthenes… the Attic orators are but babes in comparison with his finish and intensity, the music of his words, the clearness of his thoughts, his chains of proof, his cumulative blows…37

  Aristotle was to follow Demosthenes to the Elysian Fields soon after: ‘Eurymedon, the priest of Deo’s mysteries, was once about to indict Aristotle for impiety, but he, by a draught of poison, escaped prosecution. This then was an easy way of vanquishing unjust calumnies.’ The charge of impiety (asebeia) was difficult to counter; Aristotle ended his life by taking aconite at the age of seventy at Chalcis in 322 BCE. Of course, a host of other sources simply claimed he died of a stomach ailment after placing ‘a skin of warm oil on his stomach’ to alleviate the pain.38

  Rome was no less creative with its renderings of famous deaths. On the Ides of March (15th) 44 BCE Julius Caesar, dictator perpetuo, managed to utter (in Greek no less) ‘Kai su, teknon?’ – popularly translated as ‘you too, child?’ – upon seeing Brutus amongst those who delivered the twenty-three stab wounds that came in thick and fast. Inevitably, portents foretold Caesar’s end, just as they had Alexander’s, for livers with no lobes were ‘tokens of mighty upheavals’.39 Suetonius gave us the tradition, though Plutarch was more dubious about any such lines, and Kai su may have carried a more accusatory and threatening tone towards Caesar’s young protégé, and that is what we might expect to have come from the dictator’s mouth.

  The Death of Demosthenes. Litho illustration from Hutchinson’s History of the Nations, ca. 1910, after a picture by Bramtott. He reportedly took poison in the Temple of Poseidon on the island of Calauria.

  The classical portrayal failed to deter Shakespeare from giving us the immortal epitome of betrayal, the macaronic line, ‘et tu Brute? Then fall, Caesar’; it was a pastiche already popular in the bard’s day.40 In the six of his plays that were constructed around Greek and Roman historical themes, Shakespeare gave new lives, deaths and voices to characters from the past, and he didn’t get away scot-free himself; his tomb at Holy Trinity Church, Stratford, bears a highly inauthentic sounding god-fearing curse that was supposedly the bard’s very own.41

  It is not Caesar, however, but Cicero who has a special bearing on our case, for the conclusion to his story was reported by a corpus of heavyweight historians: Plutarch, Appian, Cassius Dio, Seneca, Asinius Pollio (a successful defence lawyer in accusations of poisoning) and Livy.42 Cicero’s departure has been described as ‘the most widely-evidenced of “famous deaths” in the ancient world’, in which ‘obfuscation, anomalies and contradictions exist, suggesting blatant manipulation of his story’.43 Cicero had pointed out that all who wish death upon a man, whether they clutch the knife or not, are as guilty as one another; this was a dangerous premise to make considering Brutus, who was in fact rumoured to be Caesar’s son (from the dictator’s affair with Servilia), had called for him to restore the republic when plunging his dagger into Caesar.44 In a later letter to Scribonius, one of the conspirators, Cicero, who already enjoyed the honorific Pater Patriae for his part in suppressing the Cataline conspiracy, began with: ‘How I could wish that you had invited me to that most glorious banquet on the Ides of March.’45

  Cicero labelled his subsequent attacks on Mark Antony in the Senate ‘Philippics’ in emulation and admiration of Demosthenes’ earlier verbal assaults on Alexander’s father. An unsurprising victim of the proscriptions of Antony and Octavian, Cicero is credited with six deaths, just ahead of Callisthenes’ five and the four attached to Pyrrhus of Epirus.46 Cicero was beheaded and had his hands chopped off, for they were the damning instruments that penned his scathing polemics against the wayward triumvir. They were nailed to the rostra, either one, or both.47 His last words are recorded as, ‘There is nothing proper about what you are doing soldier, but do try to kill me properly.’ In yet another version, Fulvia, Antony’s wife, pulled out his tongue and repeatedly stabbed it with a hairpin.48 The popularity for oratorical declamation against Cicero’s killers seems to have added new wood to the allegorical fire and his death soon frayed into many competing strands.49 Octavian is said to have hesitated for two days before adding Cicero to those sentenced, and so regretted the act in later years that he assisted Cicero’s son to a co-consulship.50

  Roman deaths were brutal and just as vividly reported. The emperor Valerian (ca. 190s-260s CE) was skinned and stuffed with straw, whereas the decapitated head of Gaius Gracchus was filled with molten lead to a weight of ‘seventeen and two-third pounds’ to exploit the promise that it would be worth its weight in gold once handed to his enemies.51 Of course, less dramatic versions existed, and there are claims Valerian’s death was simply the stuff of Christian propaganda. Others were ‘cleaned-up’ before sale in their endeavour to instruct. No one mentioned the real effects of hemlock, the ‘sin of Athens’: choking, nausea, bile and convulsions, for none wished to imagine Phocion or Socrates writhing on the floor in their own vomit.

  Aristophanes had described the drug’s more benign symptoms in his Frogs written six years earlier,52 and, in fact, Plato’s Phaedo, which described Socrates’ final hours in 399 BCE, has led to the question of whether hemlock was used at all, for it was never specifically named.53 Theophrastus helps us out with his suggestion that a cocktail of hemlock, poppy and herbs would render death more peaceful.54 Phocion, once a pupil of Plato and who had been elected city strategos forty-five times (once turning down a 100-talent gift from Alexander), was to suffer for his pro-Macedonian policy; condemned to die on the day of the Athenian festival of Olympia, he had to pay 12 drachmas to his executioner for more hemlock to be bruised.55

  Although Plato gave Socrates some dignity, hemlock was unpredictable. When Nero ordered Seneca’s death, his stoic teacher severed the arteries of his own arms, legs and knees, but his frail body lingered on, and so he resorted to asking a friend to provide the poison of ‘those condemned in Athens’. It failed to take hold because his limbs were too cold for the blood to circulate and he had to be content with suffocating from the steam of the bathhouse, according to Tacitus’ account.56

  TOXIKON PHARMAKON: POISON ARROWS FROM AN AUTHOR’S BOW

  The use of hemlock and other poisons was widespread; when laying out the basis of his ideal state, Plato had divided magic into two categories, and the first focused on harm to the body caused by food, drinks and unguents – pharmaka deleteria, thus by poisons.57 A 5th century BCE Athenian law prohibited their use, as did the Tean Curses, read each year by city officials and banning production of harmful drugs.58 Hippocrates had reported on the use of arsenics for skin ulcers and the methods to control the absorption of poisons a century and a half before Alexander’s day.

  Strabo claimed that more than sixty citizens of the island of Kea were ordered to take the poison in the 4th century BCE during a food shortage to ensure the survival of others.59 Theophrastus (and later Juvenal) described the skills behind aconite poisoning along with masking techniques, recommending strychnine for practical purposes since the poison’s taste, pertinently, could be disguised in wine.60 Ovid dated the use of aconite (also named wolfsbane) back to the Bronze Age, terming the plant the ‘stepmother’s favourite brew’.61 In legend its effect commenced when Heracles dragged the hellhound, Cerberus, from the underworld to the daylight; the beast was so terrified that foam from its slavering mouth took root in the soil and spontaneously grew into the plant.62 Perhaps Ovid even contemplated taking it himself after his life banishment by Augustus to Tomis on the Black Sea at the fringe of the Roman Empire; now a relegates, he published his Tristia, a sorrowful ‘exi
le poetry’ that was in fact a veiled suasoria (‘persuasion’) in pleading his case to the emperor against the still unknown charges.63

  There can be no doubt then, that the art of poison was highly developed by Alexander’s day. The craft was truly ancient and spears and arrowheads are a good place to start. Deadly nightshade (possibly Pliny’s strychnos) is one candidate for the ingredient in Latin dorycnium, ‘spear poison’, suggesting a widespread use of the sap that would have been smeared on a blade.64 The Greek word for bow was toxon, the arrow was toxeuma (also oistos), and poison was pharmakon, thus arrow poison was known as toxikon pharmakon. The Roman derivative was toxicum when referring to poison alone, though it still originally implied an archer’s toxin.65 The weapons wielded by toxotai, the formidable horseback archers, were renowned for their poison tips in Scythia; the viper-extracted scythicon they used on arrowheads was lethal and so were the circling cavalry that could unleash 200 to 300 arrows per gorytos, the two-compartmented quiver that accompanied their compact ‘cupid’ bows.66 Toxic plants would have been collected by rhizotomoi, skilled ‘root-cutters’ who used knives to dig out what they dared not touch themselves.67

  In the Odyssey Homer related that Odysseus made a special voyage to obtain supplies of a deadly poison to coat the bronze tips of his arrows, and he further described the ‘drugs mixed together, many good and many harmful’ that were used when Helen spiked the drinks of Telemachus and Menelaus.68 Heracles famously dipped his arrows in the poison of the slain Lernean Hydra and Alexander’s troops suffered the consequences of malevolent archery in India when both the enemy arrows and sword blades were coated with viper and cobra venom; this was in contravention to the Hindu Laws of Manu, for Brahmins and the higher castes prohibited their use. Local Indian physicians had to be employed by the Macedonians to neutralise the effects and in the Vulgate texts Ptolemy almost succumbed before Alexander reportedly found an antidote, though this sounds suspiciously like Cleitarchean propaganda.69