by David Grant
A cuneiform tablet known today as the East India House Inscription by Nebuchadnezzar II sits in the British Museum. It recorded the Great King’s reconstruction of Babylon, including the Esagila Temple and shrines in the city.14 This inscription also failed to mention gardens, as did the collection of tablets listing the topographical make-up of the city known as Tintir, copies of which were kept in Nineveh.15 Herodotus’ Histories bypassed them completely and Xenophon’s Cyropaedia described the great walls but conspicuously he saw no hanging vegetation either, and for all its alluring fabula, the marvel-hungry Greek Alexander Romance is devoid of gardens at Babylon.16
But at the ancient Assyrian capital of Nineveh, supposedly destroyed in 612 BCE (though it may have seen a resurgence under the Seleucids), clear signs of horticulture and an irrigation system exist, with descriptions confirmed by tablets and in panel sculptures. These intricate gardens, which also existed at Kalhu (later named Nimrud) and Dur-Sharrukin (‘Fortress of Sargon’, modern Khorsabad) called upon Assyrian knowledge of dams, weirs, aqueducts, canals, sluices and bronze casting techniques that could manufacture large irrigation screws, technology that had already been employed by Ashurnasirpal II in the 9th century BCE.17 Alexander’s army would have passed the Jerwan aqueduct in the proximity of Gaugamela in 331 BCE, the ruins of which suggest concrete was in use centuries before Rome ‘developed’ it.18
Interestingly, Berossus, the inventor of the sundial according to Vitruvius (ca. 80/70-post 15 BCE), produced a work on Assyria besides the Babylonaika penned in Hellenistic koine.19 Sennacherib (ca. 705-681 BCE), son of Sargon II and the most prominent of the kings of the Assyrian Empire centred at Nineveh, left detailed botanical inscriptions with mature gardens clearly depicted on the sculptures of his grandson, Assurbanipal.20 On the octagonal stone Sennacherib Prism he described a construction that was fed by the River Khosr and he referred to his irrigation device in intriguingly familiar terms:
… in order to draw water all day long, I had ropes, bronze wires and bronze chains made; and instead of a shaduf I set up great cylinders and alamittu-screws over cisterns… I raised the height of the surroundings of the palace. A park imitating the Amanus mountains I laid out next to it…21
The description is familiar because Robert Koldewey’s 1898-1917 Babylonian excavations claimed to have unearthed a hydraulic machine with ‘buckets attached to a chain on a wheel’, though archaeologists now suggest this was nothing more than his overactive imagination.22 Sennacherib rebuilt the ancient Assyrian city at Nineveh and he named it as his new capital. He was later murdered by his own sons, not necessarily there however, but possibly at Babylon.23 And yet the Book of Judith in the biblical Apocrypha commenced with the statement that Nebuchadnezzar II, the Chaldean king of the Neo-Babylonian Empire, was in fact the king of the Assyrians who ruled in Nineveh, with rabbinical literature that detailed the invasions of Jerusalem placing him as the son-in-law of Sennacherib. Here it claimed the latter was ‘king of Babylon’; Jewish texts, it appears, frequently confused either the two kings or the cities.24
‘Confusion’ then is the better etymology for ‘Babylon’, and it is a wholly appropriate reminder of the poor soil in which traditions may have sunk their roots. This fusion of fable and hanging flora remains relevant to the ‘legend’ of Alexander’s death, for that too was born in the ancient campaign capital that straddled the Euphrates River.
At the heart of our debate lies the ‘Babylon settlement’ whose calamitous conclusion narrowly avoided a full-scale confrontation between the cavalry command led by the aristocratic Bodyguards, and the peasant-recruited infantry under their veteran commanders. Just as cultures and armies clashed here, so did our sources. The textual result sits like a badly erected bridge between the closing pages of the Alexander biographies and the opening chapters of the follow-on accounts that marched into the calamitous years of the Successor Wars. We sense the Roman-era historians were not entirely comfortable with what they saw in the earlier sources, particularly in the eyewitness testimony, but true to their reputation as engineers, they soon shored-up the span with their own rhetorical timbers, just as Nietzsche warned they were apt to.26
A reconstruction of the palace of Sennacherib at Nineveh by artist Terry Ball. It follows Sennacherib’s own description and Josephus’ account of gardens set outside the palace on a high citadel and ‘to be a Wonder for all peoples’, ‘employing aqueducts, screws, lake and drainage’. Much evidence suggests the Hanging Gardens of Babylon were actually at Nineveh. The ziggurat of the Temple of Ishtar is shown in the background. Provided with the kind permission of Stephanie Dalley, Assyriologist, Oriental Institute and Wolfson College Honorary Senior Research Fellow, Somerville College, University of Oxford.25
REFOCUSING THE BLIND CYCLOPS
Unravelling the events that took place between Alexander’s death on the 10th or 11th of June 323 BCE, and the fragile accord that was reached some indeterminate days later, becomes essential if we are to understand how, and why, the Will was whitewashed from the mainstream accounts. In the process we reveal an unsung hero, Eumenes, who helped make the settlement possible. Two early narratives of the conflict that ensued survived through later intermediaries: Cleitarchus’ syncretic account that lives through Curtius’ closing pages (T11), and the opening chapter of Hieronymus’ history of the fifty years that followed, preserved most completely in Diodorus’ eighteenth book (T13). Further pixels from the picture are visible, thanks to Photius, the Patriarch of Constantinople (ca. 810-893 CE), in the epitomised fragments of Arrian’s Events After Alexander and Dexippus’ derivatives of that, which, once again, originate with Hieronymus’ History of the Diadokhoi or Epigonoi (T14, T15).27 Alongside them we have Justin’s thirteenth book in which précised elements of both Cleitarchus’ and Hieronymus’ accounts appear to be bound together (T12).
The accounts of these two historians conflict; this is unsurprising as they lived and worked under opposing political regimes: Cleitarchus under the Ptolemies, and Hieronymus at the Antigonid court. Cleitarchus provided the pre-packaged drama that filled the final chapter of the Vulgate biographies, whilst Hieronymus’ summation was attractive to any writer extending their work into the Successor Wars, for it set the scenery for the follow-on events; thus Arrian, Diodorus and Trogus (visible through Justin) used it to open their own accounts of those post-Alexander years.
Judging from Diodorus’ text, Hieronymus commenced with a summation of the fallout from the king’s death: he listed the ‘chief and most influential commanders’ and he went on to describe the embassies between the rival factions, the compromise reached, the punishment of the dissenters, the crowning of Alexander’s half-brother, Arrhidaeus, and Perdiccas’ precarious retention of overall command which was aided by Eumenes who remained inside the city walls to broker a compromise.28
In this environment, Perdiccas, the king’s former acting chiliarchos, now represented something of an uncomfortable hybrid authority that arguably encompassed the regency of a kingdom, the guardianship of new kings, and a mandate to oversee the empire, under one, or all, of the contentious titles of epimeletes, prostates and strategos (though now he was effectively strategos autokrator). Therein lay the dilemma and the source of the hostility towards the senior custodis corporis, the Latin rendering of ‘Bodyguard’, for whatever authority Macedonian tradition attached to these titles, here, emerging from a series of unique events at Babylon, their boundaries were being self-determined. It was in this new post-Alexander world that the term chiliarchos, used to denote the king’s second-in-command (and possibly only meant for Hephaestion, initially), was contested and appears to have fallen out of use after Antipater died (late 319 BCE), though others would certainly act as if they had inherited the title.29
Greek historians of the age of Philip and Alexander were accustomed to opening their accounts with a geographical digression to establish the terrain for the reader; Thucydides had established the style for the later chroniclers, and evidence su
ggests the openings of Hecataeus, Timaeus and Ephorus followed suit.30 Hieronymus was not atypical; he explained the shape and extent of Asia, and this provided a framework on which he could pin his list of the newly appointed (and reconfirmed) provincial governors in what amounted to informal prokataskeue (introductions) to place characters in context. All this detail, from the truce between the army factions to the governorship of the empire, is preserved well enough in the Hieronymus-derived summaries, though compressed to varying degrees. But what might once have been a vibrant excursion into the origins and ethnoi of the Persian Empire has since (possibly) crumpled to a ‘tired, perfunctory catalogue of satrapies’ in the condensing.31
Diodorus’ attempt at conjoining what he saw in the scrolls of Cleitarchus and Hieronymus was not wholly successful, and it resulted in an untidy and inaccurate syncretised abbreviation.32 This stemmed in part from Cleitarchus’ own earlier dilemma of blending the claims in the Journal and Pamphlet with non-corroborating eyewitness testimony from veterans in Alexandria, and now with potential contradictory claims from Hieronymus as well. Diodorus additionally opened his follow-on (eighteenth) book with one hugely misleading statement: ‘Alexander the king had died without issue, and a great contention arose over the leadership’ (T13).33 Here he failed to mention the pregnancy of Roxane, though his later books featured her and her son who became King Alexander IV, and he also bypassed any mention of Heracles, Alexander’s existing son when, once again, the boy appeared in his later chapters. Furthermore, no reference was made to a Will at this point, though Diodorus clearly referred to Alexander’s testament when recounting events at Rhodes that took place some eighteen years on, so he was clearly aware of a source that cited its existence.34
The motivation for compression is only so strong and it is usually dispensed when momentous detail is afoot; events at Babylon were momentous. So we may conclude that, like Cleitarchus, some two centuries before him, Diodorus was faced with the irreconcilable, though he chose to sidestep controversy and move speedily on. After all, unlike Cleitarchus’ monograph, his library of world history spanning 1,138 years still lacked the twenty-three books that would cover the next 280 years down to the Roman dictators. Fatally for the Will, the common link preserved in all the conjoined accounts was the distribution of the empire by Perdiccas at the conclusion of the Babylonian settlement, for this suggested the action was necessary because Alexander had failed to transfer power and designate successors himself.
The account of the Roman Curtius, who was most probably a professional rhetorician with political clout, is the most detailed extant narrative of the infighting that led up to that final settlement, and is punctuated by vivid dialogues (T11).35 The themes Curtius overlaid on events do look to be choice Roman reincarnations that were ‘fitted to the occasion’. Considering the trend of his day – the use of comparatio (Greek synkrisis) and declamation for comparative and didactic effect – it is likely Curtius elongated Cleitarchus’ speeches and suitably paired them with counter-speeches in his own sculpting of the dialogue. His use of oratio recta and oratio obliqua (direct and indirect speech modes), employed, for example, when earlier recounting each pre-battle speech (epipolesis) Alexander delivered, kept a momentum-filled hold on his audience.36 Rome’s cursus honorum influenced Curtius’ retrospective view of history and so we must appreciate the Babylonian dialogues for what they really are: thematic echoes of the originals that had been first sterilised of anti-Ptolemaic toxins by Cleitarchus, and which were now reworked by a Roman nobilis to please the Roman populus serving an unpredictable imperium.37 As a result, the occasion was 1st century CE Rome as much as 4th century BCE Babylon, a poetic mimesis that re-rendered ‘Cleitarchean Babylon’ through the Roman Principate.
Seneca is said to have warned that we ‘should not be surprised, that each man selects the things fit for his pursuits from the same material’, and noting that ‘the dramatist creates’ whereas ‘the historian only disposes’, here, at Babylon, Curtius’ outcome appears ‘pure theatre’.38 We have an uncomfortable melee of anti-barbarian voices that rejected both of Alexander’s sons (one in utero), highly treasonous accusations hurled at Perdiccas, a suddenly articulate halfwit royal, and the contentious suggestion of group rule by other Bodyguards.39 It is worth quoting Ernst Badian at this point, for he captured the shortcomings of reconstructions that adhere too literally to the texts: ‘It is the frequent penalty of excessive concentration of Quellenforschung… that it can become the aim of scholarship to find out what was said by whom rather than what in fact happened.’40
Curtius’ recounting of events at Babylon may have reconstructed ‘constitutional procedures’ on the basis of the few previous examples he saw of the army’s intervention into ‘state’ affairs: the trial of Philotas, for example, an episode he most likely heavily embellished as well.41 Nevertheless, the original deeper Cleitarchean currents can still be felt beneath the rhetorical eddies and riptides that pushed Curtius’ metarepresentations along. For there remains clarity to the emotions emanating from the Assembly gathering that was convened to hear the fate of the empire: the ambition, distrust, uncertainty, divided loyalty and outright jealousy of the gathered generals, ‘lightened only by adventurous hopes and shadowy ambition’. This was all neatly summed up by Justin in the chapter-heading text.42
‘Demades, after the death of Alexander, compared the Macedonian army to the Cyclops after his one eye was out, seeing their many disorderly and unsteady motions.’43 And much work has been done attempting to unravel those ‘unsteady motions’ using the prevailing ‘standard intestate model’. But a reinterpretation of the events at Babylon can be explained equally well, or in fact, better, in an environment with a Will, as we will try to demonstrate.
The claims within the Pamphlet, preserved in the Romance and Metz Epitome (T1, T2), stated that a Will was drafted, or more logically revised, through the day and night when Alexander’s hopes of recovery were fading, though he was still sufficiently lucid to dictate his wishes to his most trusted men.44 Although the content of the testament would have held no big surprises for the top echelons, no one could have been completely satisfied with the result. As we might expect, the first reading was a private Bodyguard affair, but word inevitably got out. But what spread was probably the rumour of a posthumous Will recital, at which point the excluded higher-ranking infantry officers – those already told to wait outside the bedchamber doors – forced their way in ‘suspecting intrigue’ or believing that their king was at death’s door.45
Their right of entry could not be denied under Macedonian court custom; they were acknowledged by a barely conscious Alexander and withdrew to brood on the implications of what the testament might contain, and to ponder whether his wishes would be accurately transmitted, or respected, by those who were destined to inherit power. Though constitutional, the intrusion breached Macedonian military protocol under which the Bodyguards and royal pages restricted entry to the king; it was an episode that foreshadowed the divided loyalties that would manifest themselves so clearly in the troubled days ahead.
Alexander then passed into a deep coma. Once life signs were beyond detection, Perdiccas summoned the Companions and most eminent infantry officers and publically pronounced the king ‘dead’. At this point Curtius provided a two-and-a-half-page digression on the mourning that followed, when ‘conqueror and conquered were indistinguishable’ in their grief. He detailed the regrets of the army at denying their king the divine honours he sought (we recall they derided his attachments to his new ‘father’ Zeus-Ammon at Opis), and he listed Alexander’s qualities and their attachments to fate and fortune.46 Justin’s précis suggests Trogus followed a similar rhetorical template, but here the Macedonians ‘… rejoiced at his death as at that of an enemy, execrating his excessive severity and the perpetual hardships of war to which he exposed them.’47 Whilst these sentiments appear polarised, both the feelings of grief and relief were doubtlessly present at Babylon, and a complex conjoining of bo
th emotions likely existed in many of those then present.
But to understand the framework of the severe discord, we need to unravel the mechanism that drew those colliding parts – the infantry officers, cavalry command, Bodyguards and chiliarch – together, and then summarily sundered them. An insightful comment in Bosworth’s study on the legacy of the Asian campaign captures the challenge of analysing what we have:
… the situation then was constitutionally unique and politically complex. In that light, it comes as quite a shock to read much of the traditional literature on the Settlement. It presupposes that there was something akin to statute law, with fixed positions and procedures for a regency, and deals with a single definitive settlement, which was reached at Babylon and agreed by all the diverse players in the dynastic game.48