In Search of the Lost Testament of Alexander the Great

by David Grant

  A Nicanor was named as Cassander’s garrison commander at Athens; if, as many commentators believe, he was Aristotle’s nephew (who married Aristotle’s daughter under the terms of his aforementioned Will), we have further evidence of those close relations.55 But above all, Aristotle’s testament indicates that the Macedonian nobles, at any rate, were familiar with the Will as a mechanism of estate planning, for it is hardly likely Antipater would have been enrolled in such a pivotal role if not willing to recognise and uphold its legality. Aristotle may himself have been granted full Macedonian citizenship by the time he died, either for his services to the monarchy, or simply because Stagira where he was born was now part of a greater Macedonia.

  The appointment of Antipater as the executor may additionally suggest Aristotle was seeking the regent’s protection, for it appears he fled Athens after Alexander’s death, fearing reprisals for his long career supporting (and supported by) the Macedonian monarchy. Yet the city-state of Chalcis was not significantly safer or much further from assassins’ reach. A well-documented enmity had existed between Olympias, the queen mother, and Antipater;56 if Hyperides had indeed already lost his tongue for proposing honours to Iolaos for his part in the Babylonian plot (and even if not) we wonder if Aristotle feared the agents of Olympias rather more than those of Athens.57 A few years on, Olympias did wreak vengeance on Antipater’s sons, no doubt guided by, or at least legitimised by, the plot ‘revealed’ in the Pamphlet. So it may have been Olympias who dislodged Aristotle’s honour plaque (he was feted along with Callisthenes) that was recovered from the bottom of a Delphian well.58

  In his own Will Aristotle, notably, asked that life-size stone statues to Zeus and Athena the Saviour be erected, just as Alexander’s extant Will requested statues of himself, the gods and his parents to be set up in the most noteworthy of cities.59 As neither Alexander nor Athens was mentioned in Aristotle’s Will, Chroust suggests that it was probably penned in Chalcis in 322 BCE after the king’s death (his birthplace, Stagira, may have formerly been a colony of Chalcis).60 For Aristotle was a metoikos, a guest-resident of Athens who would usually pay the non-resident tax (metoikion) of 1 drachma per month for males (half for females, unless they or the males had exemption by equalisation, isotelia), and as such the Will would traditionally have carried no authority in the city, though as a possible former colony of Athens and member of the Delian League, Athenian law may have been observed in Chalcis.61 Obtaining Athenian citizenship was not a formality; we read of just fifty grants of citizenship between 368 and 322 BCE, and as a resident alien Aristotle would have been banned from owning property in the city-state and, in fact, in Attica too.62

  If Peripatetic-era Wills were rhetoric free, they were not necessarily safe from rhetoric. Demosthenes’ father’s Will had been exploited by his guardians and that prompted his first judicial speech at the age of twenty to reclaim what was left of the estate, thus setting in motion his oratorical career. His inheritance included over thirty sword-making slaves, and twenty slaves engaged in the manufacture of furniture, bringing in a total of 4,200 drachmas annually; there were also interest-bearing loans out at twelve per cent besides property and chattels.63

  Many were maritime credits set up between the emporos (merchant) and naukleros (shipowner) in a sophisticated contract and cargo obligation system outlined in Demosthenes’ cases against Aphobus, Lacritus, Zenothemis, Phormio and Apaturius, in which he claimed he had been swindled. A new law for commercial action, dike emporike, allowed for the speedy settlement of disputes, though, interestingly, loans were dissolved in the case of a shipwreck; this led to many false claims of cargoes being lost at sea, a loophole widened by the fact that maritime-loan interest was only payable at the expiration of the contract period (unlike monthly interest on land mortgages).64

  But we do have one later example that clearly testifies to the existence of Macedonian royal Wills: that of Antigonus III Doson (ca. 263-221 BCE), the grandson of Demetrius Poliorketes (and great-grandson of Ptolemy I Soter); Polybius knew the details and he stated that Doson nominated to power a loyal top echelon ‘in order to avoid conflicts’; the testament further demanded that its content be read in public, though whether that meant to a convened Assembly of Macedones (the Pamphlet claimed Alexander’s Will had been similarly read out at such a gathering) or to a wider audience is not clear.65

  We are not proposing that the typical tribesmen who made up the Macedonian infantry ranks would have been adept in the subtleties of inheritance; nevertheless, Alexander’s veteran campaigners had possessions, booty and possibly land grants too with relatives still at home and now in Asia by virtue of wives and sons accumulated over the years. Death on campaign was only ever a spear point away and mobile bank deposits took a primitive form: pursers in charge of heavily guarded waggons. Some form of written covenant must have existed to ensure the wealth was distributed as the campaigners would have wished, should they perish in the phalanx or from a snakebite in India.66 Further, we contend that the Macedonian monarchs required more than the Common Assembly’s traditional beating of spear on shield to shepherd through the intricacies behind succession, for the ‘back office’ of regal power would have required that the dissemination of inheritances, appointments and bequests be honoured and documented.

  More specifically, we contend that Alexander, in the never-before-witnessed ‘impious’ position as Great King of Persia, ruler (if not the formalised pharaoh) of Egypt, ‘King of Lands’ in Babylonia, tribal King of Macedonia as well as hegemon of the League of Corinth, would have needed a particularly well-constructed and clear legal document to pass on the expanded reins of power in a meaningful way. For the territory now nominally under Argead rule was immense, and at the point of Alexander’s death there still existed his own sons in Asia and sisters (and half-sisters) in Epirus and Pella who could maintain the Macedonian royal line.

  THE SEV’NFOLD, VAST, IMPENETRABLE SHIELD

  There can be no doubt that Alexander, along with those of his higher echelons at the Macedonian court, would have been well acquainted with the construction and legal basis of the Will, a far surer mandate for influencing the future than fate, fortune, friends, and the fickle will of the gods. If he was as attached to Homer and the heroic past as sources suggest, then he would have been familiar with the pre-suicide speech of Ajax in the Sophocles tragedy that had the airs and form of an oral testament in which, and against the norms of a warrior protocol which requested burial with armour, Ajax left his ‘vast sev’nfold shield’ to his son, Eursaces.67 The Iliad made references to the oral disposition of estates linked to Agamemnon and Hector, whilst Sophocles’ Trachiniae (Women of Trachis) described the hero uttering an oral Will in the madness of dying.68

  As for Alexander’s generals, they would have demanded clarity on succession long before their eventual return to Babylon in 323 BCE, and probably before the Macedonian war machine headed into Asia. Alexander may indeed have satisfied their early demands by penning a fulsome testament that dedicated his own panoply to temples and shrines as we read in the Pamphlet.69 We must not forget that Alexander had borrowed handsomely from his nobles to fund the crossing to Asia, no doubt on the promise of land grants and commercial concessions, repayments that would have needed documenting and underwriting in some way should he die.70

  Perhaps a Will was first drafted when Antipater and Parmenio pleaded with their king to take a wife and produce an heir before crossing the Hellespont.71 It may have been updated at various stages as influential strategoi were killed, executed or elevated, following the murder of Parmenio, for example, or the running through of Black Cleitus, or perhaps after Alexander’s near-death experience in India when Craterus and Ptolemy echoed the common fear that: ‘He should set a limit to the pursuit of glory and have regard for his safety, that is, the safety of the state.’72

  We could imagine that the new marriages at Susa would have prompted the discussion of a succession document as a new military and administrative orde
r was clearly then emerging. Surely additional provisions would have been added when his wife fell pregnant and his closest friend and chiliarchos, Hephaestion, died at Ecbatana in 324 BCE. If the future of empire administration had been planned and documented by Alexander in some form of covenant, beside the contingency for a world without him, then the most influential of Alexander’s Bodyguards and Companions were probably privy to its content. In which case we should not visualise a last-minute and hastily drafted diatheke or oral whisper as Alexander approached death, for that could have come at any time on the decade-long campaign. Wills are about planning ahead, and about catering for all possible scenarios.

  Aristotle had already laid out his Nicomachean Ethics when Alexander was a child. In it he had proposed ‘we should as far as possible immortalise ourselves’.73 In life and deeds Alexander followed his advice and attempted homoiosis theoi, a likeness to the gods. Yet historians believe he failed at the final hurdle in prolonging the influence of all he had achieved. Why, having seen the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, and having admired and repaired the humbling tomb of Cyrus, having marched past the Pharaonic pyramids at Cheops and after demanding a funeral pyre of Babylonian proportion for Hephaestion, would Alexander have not planned such a monument for himself?74 We will make a case that the rejected so-called last plans found at Babylon are a missing piece of this intestate puzzle (T25).

  Who in Alexander’s retinue would have been the likely candidate to draft the king’s Will? Eumenes’ Curriculum Vitae needed no explanation then and needs none today; Hieronymus, Plutarch and Cornelius Nepos saw to that with their biographing of the Cardian royal secretary. Eumenes knew the intimacies of the treasury, the politics in Pella and the administrative shape of the empire, and this neatly leads us to one significant piece of evidence that points towards the use of Wills on campaign: the testament of Eumenes himself. Plutarch tells us that he wrote, or amended, his own Will on the eve of his final battle at Gabiene at the close of 316 BCE. Learning of the coming treachery of his men, Eumenes retired to his tent and drafted his last wishes, in the process tearing up and destroying his papers so that none of the secrets they contained would be known.75

  Plutarch compared Eumenes to the Roman general Quintus Sertorius, and he found an obvious corollary for Alexander in Julius Caesar.76 Like Eumenes who had helped avert civil war at Babylon, following Caesar’s death it was Mark Antony who presented the compromise that temporarily reconciled the Caesarean faction – along with the Senate and the army – with the Caesaricides (who believed they were liberatores) led by Cassius (ca. 85-42 BCE) and Brutus (85-42 BCE). On 19th March 44 BCE Caesar’s Will was opened and read, and it appointed as his principal heir the nineteen-year-old Gaius Octavius Thurinus (‘Octavian’ after his adoption through the Will), who was then stationed with the Roman legions in Macedonia (though in Apollonia in Illyria when he heard the news).

  A decade later, in the autumn of 34 BCE, Antony, Cleopatra and Ptolemaic Egypt issued the Donation of Alexandria, which distributed Rome’s Eastern Empire (brazenly including the undefeated Parthia) between their children. The young Alexander Helios was appointed king of Armenia, Parthia and Media (also unconquered); his fraternal twin, Cleopatra Selene II, was to rule Cyrenaica and Libya, whilst their third child, the infant Ptolemy II Philadelphos, was given Syria and Cilicia, and he was dressed for the occasion in Macedonian garb. Caesarion (‘Little Caesar’, formally Ptolemy XV Philopator Philometor Caesar), Julius Caesar’s son by Cleopatra, became ‘king of kings’ and the co-ruler of Egypt. A festival imitating a Roman triumph was held in which Antony was dressed as Dionysus-Osiris with Cleopatra garbed as Isis-Aphrodite.

  The tomb of the Carian satrap Mausolus and Artemisia II at Halicarnassus, modern Bodrum, Turkey and built between ca. 353-350 BCE. Some 148 feet high and with reliefs carved by four celebrated Greek sculptors, Leochares, Bryaxis, Scopas and Timotheus, Antipater of Sidon considered it among the Seven Wonders of the World. Alexander surely visited the tomb after taking the city. Earthquakes destroyed it between the 12th and 15th centuries after which many of the marble blocks were used by the Knights of Saint John to fortify Bodrum Castle. Image from Vitruvius’ Ten Books on Architecture, e-text made available by the Gutenberg Project.

  The legitimisation of the half-Roman Caesarion as Julius’ bloodline heir undermined Octavian, just as Alexander’s own half-barbarian sons threatened the potential power of his Somatophylakes. Antony claimed Octavian had earned his adoption through unnatural relations with Caesar (further rumours suggested Caesar’s last Will did not recognise Octavian as his heir, but Caesarion instead), and allegations had already surfaced (through Cicero) that Antony had a part in Caesar’s murder; the rift with Rome was complete.77 Octavian and his innovative general, Agrippa (ca. 63-12 BCE), now with his naval crown and bronze-plated heavy ramming quinqueremes (‘fives’, referring to the rowing configuration) with their new grappling irons, would soon meet the threat from Egypt off the coast of Actium in western Greece.78

  Antony and Cleopatra, who had herself inherited power with her brother (Ptolemy XIII) under the Will of her father, Ptolemy XII Auletes (‘piper’ or ‘flute player’, or alternatively, Nothos, ‘bastard’, ca. 117-51 BCE) had come within a battle of making Rome a tributary (‘Capitol Hill would bow to her isle of Canopus’) or dividing her empire. So the horror at Antony’s exposed ‘oriental’ testament was understandable in Rome.79 Appreciating that Egypt had the financial resources to outfit a significant army, Rome never allowed a senator to become proconsul of the region and filled influential posts there from the lower equestrian ranks.80

  The promises of the Donation of Alexandria were short-lived, and within four years the orphans of the Egyptian dynasts were paraded at Octavian’s triumph in Rome.81 Yet Egypt, the fertile land of romance, hadn’t disappointed in developing their legendary lives. After failed negotiations and inconclusive skirmishes, Antony and Cleopatra met their oft-misconstrued ends in Alexandria. But contrary to the popular imagery, Plutarch informed us that no writhing asp was ever found in the monument in which Cleopatra had interned herself; on the contrary, a hollow comb was retrieved that might have contained the poison that vexed the Psyllian snake charmers who were sent in to find the serpent.82

  Their story has a further twist, for Pliny reported that so suspicious had Antony and Cleopatra become of one another before the battle at Actium on 2nd September 31 BCE, he had a praegustatore (a professional taster) sample the food she served him on her royal barge. In response, she dared Antony to drink the wine in which her garlanded flowers (secretly poisoned at the extremities) had been dipped, and laughingly restrained him at the last moment, poisoning a slave instead, as a demonstration of her cunning.83 Whilst the attested malaria attack was, no doubt, debilitating on Antony’s crew,84 we should question why Quintus Dellius defected with the triumvir’s battle plans, for this appears to have coincided with Cleopatra’s sailing over the horizon in the direction of Egypt.85

  The earlier communications between the ill-starred lovers appears to have been bitter too. At some point Cleopatra sent Octavian, who had been wintering on Samos, a gold crown and throne with an offer to defect in favour of her sons. In parallel, Antony offered Octavian his capitulation with an agreement to live as a private citizen in Athens. Only the rejection of both offers, from one side or the other (Octavian demanded Cleopatra kill or expel Antony as part of his amnesty, and he never replied to Antony), saw them reunited in Alexandria, a somewhat less than romantic path to their final tragedy than is commonly envisaged.

  ‘I FOUND IT OF BRICK, I SHALL LEAVE IT OF MARBLE’

  Upon entering Alexandria when the final resistance of Cleopatra and Antony had collapsed, Octavian, who later used a signet ring with a gem-engraved likeness of Alexander to seal official documents, requested that the Macedonian king’s incarcerated body be exhumed from its shrine in the Sema; like Julius Caesar before him, he was interested in seeing little else in the city. When asked if he wished to see t
he tombs of the Ptolemies, Octavian is said to have replied: ‘I came to see a king, not a row of corpses.’ Perhaps the words of his then-present philosopher friend, Areius, had been influential: ‘Not a good thing were a Caesar too many.’86

  The Prima Porta Augustus in the Braccio Nuovo of the Vatican Museums, discovered in 1863 in the so-called Villa of Livia. It is believed to be a copy of a bronze original dating to ca. 20 CE.

  In Cassius Dio’s coverage of the episode the emperor irreverently fingered Alexander’s head and broke off a part of his nose, though this might have been a story propagated by the Alexandrians themselves.87 Octavian’s visit was not just cultural; he ferried its wealth back to Rome whereupon interest rates dropped by two-thirds, and he further laid claim to the 12,500 talents annual income that Egypt was still able to amass.88 Alexandria flourished in the wake of the Battle of Ipsus in 301 BCE and only began its decline after Octavian’s sacking of the city; both are the most widely accepted termini of the Hellenistic era.

  The once frail Octavian became the long-lived Augustus who survived to see the birth of the grandson of his granddaughter.89 He was the precursor of the Principate (still clothed as a republic), founder of the Praetorian Guard and Consilium Principis, and he turned the mos maiorum into Constitutional Settlements and a new legal order; he was in every sense a true empire administrator. His alleged deathbed comment, ‘I found Rome made of brick and I leave her clad in marble’, summed up his tangible achievement; he had spent some 2,400,000,000 sestertii on the city.90 And Augustus may have sensed historic foul play, for as the author of a fulsome Will, he apparently remained vexed at why Alexander, who was no less endowed with titles conferring the absolute power of imperium, ultimately failed to ‘set his empire in order’.91 But Alexander’s long lost Will, suppressed at Babylon we venture, had essentially been an imperial edict; it was the legal mandate that was to indelibly stamp his ambition, vision, and bloodline across the face of his now vast empire. It beckoned in the Hellenistic era in which the former veneer of independent city-states, island federations, client kingdoms and semi-autonomous satraps acting as ‘royal landlords’, vanished in an instant.92