In Search of the Lost Testament of Alexander the Great
Page 77
Craterus and his veterans (including the commanders White Cleitus, Polyperchon, Antigenes and Gorgias) were still camped in Cilicia when Alexander died, though why they had delayed there remains unexplained. News of the king’s death could conceivably have reached Cilicia in ten to twelve days by royal relay and faster by crier, and yet there is no record of Craterus immediately stirring to action.89 He may well have been watching events at Babylon unfold, and he may even have considered making a bid for Perdiccas’ post if the winds blew favourably, possibly soliciting reaction first from Antigonus in Phrygia; he, in turn, was no doubt making contact with Antipater in Pella. Craterus and Antigonus might between them have discussed a united front against the Perdiccan royal army in Asia Minor on the expectation of defections, as they did later.90 Even when news of the Lamian War reached them, they may have contemplated letting Antipater embroil himself in trouble in Greece; having dealt with Perdiccas, they would then cross the Hellespont to save the day and re-administer Hellas and Asia on their own terms.
Many were the permutations (and unhatched schemes we may never know of) and many were the risks; in the end, both Craterus and Antigonus decided to cross to Macedonia, but not until clear threats on both sides of the Aegean had emerged.91 As it turned out, the Lamian War in Greece, which commenced soon after news of Alexander’s death reached Athens, initially benefited Perdiccas (it is not beyond reason that he was in touch with the Greek uprising) – as it prevented any concerted action being taken against him for a year or more (and it vacated their satrapies) – but it ultimately played a major part in uniting the veteran generals against him.
The textual positioning of the ‘last plans’ in the extant manuscripts of Diodorus’ Bibliotheke Historika has led historians to link Craterus to certain other of these cancelled projects, for the hypomnemata entry began (immediately after the allocation of satrapies):
It happened that Craterus, who was one of the most prominent men, had previously been sent away by Alexander to Cilicia with those men who had been discharged from the army, 10,000 in number. At the same time, he had received written instructions that the king had given him for execution; nevertheless, after the death of Alexander, it seemed best to the successors not to carry out these plans.92 (T25)
A description of each project immediately followed. Quite credibly, Craterus could have been given a shipbuilding task by Alexander, for Cilicia was rich in timber from the Taurus ranges and in high-grade iron. Pitch, tow, copper, cloth, shipwrights, carpenters, sawyers and smiths would have been additionally required; canvas, goat hair, flax and papyrus for ropes and sailcloth, bitumen, bailing buckets, anchors, anchor chains and other tools and accessories needed procuring, and that would have taken time. We are told copper, hemp and sails had been requisitioned from Cyprus, and cedar wood from Mount Libanus (Lebanon) whose forests were made famous by the Epic of Gilgamesh and eulogised by Diodorus; sailors and pilots from all parts of the world were already collecting at nearby Thapsacus on the Upper Euphrates some 700 km from Babylon for the planned Arabian-African circumnavigation.93
As part of this grand expedition, Cilicia might have been a recruiting point for deck soldiers (epibatai), oarsmen (nautai) under a rowing master (keleustes) and helmsman (kybernetes), with naval officers (hyperesia) operating under fleet trierarchs.94 The royal treasury at Cyinda would have been called upon to fund it, assuming the Eastern treasury hauls had already been deposited there; possibly the movement of gold and silver was a part of Craterus’ brief, aided by the Silver Shields brigade – the Argyraspides – on their journey westward from Opis, and that would explain their slow progress as well as their continued presence in Cilicia.95
Craterus’ brief may have additionally tasked him with transporting his veterans in part of the new fleet back to Macedonia, and then sending Antipater back with new recruits, that is if claims that the aged regent had been summoned are genuine; certainly Alexander would not have left Macedonia devoid of a regent and an army.96 ‘White’ Cleitus did construct (or inherit) a navy in Cilicia that was to clear the path for Craterus’ re-crossing the Hellespont two years on; using part of a 240-strong Macedonian fleet Cleitus successfully engaged the Athenians in two battles off Amorgas and the Echinades in the Lamian War.97 A sea voyage home by Craterus could have even included a punitive action against Athens, for Alexander must have been aware of the mercenary concentrations at Cape Taenarum and the polemical noises filtering out of Greece in the months before his death.98
But the overriding instruction to Craterus was clearly to relieve Antipater of his regency, and the link-line in Diodorus’ paragraphs dealing with the conglomerated plans – ‘at the same time, he had received written instructions’ – could equally have referred to Alexander’s orders to Perdiccas.99 Moreover, Diodorus’ previous paragraph closed with an account of the preparations for Alexander’s sarcophagus and its journey to Egypt: ‘The transportation of the body of the deceased king and the preparation of the vehicle that was to carry the body to Ammon they assigned to Arrhidaeus.’100 The whole passage is badly constructed and the true division of the historian’s original intent has been lost.
This may have been due to Diodorus’ own confusion on a Will that appeared nowhere in Cleitarchus’ account of Babylon, but which might have featured in Hieronymus’ summation of events in which the testament wishes were, nevertheless, ambiguously distinguished from expedition hypomnemata – cloudy water made murkier by Diodorus’ own précising. Or it was because we are reading incompetent transmissions by scribes who were themselves unclear on the separation.
We know that in classical Greece the word diatheke would have most commonly been used when referencing a Will, yet it was more specifically a covenant in the legal sense of a contract. Derived from diatithesthai – ‘putting aside’ – the structure katalipein diatithemenon – ‘to leave by testament’ or by ‘covenant’ – may indeed have been used by Hieronymus somewhere in this narrative.101 And unless the immediate text was accompanied by clear Will-invoking dialogue (Aristotle’s Will, for example, quoted in full by Diogenes Laertius), the ‘contract’ was easily shadowed in ambiguity for later historians. If Hieronymus had simply stated ‘as the king had covenanted’ against these projects, there was little to support a Will further in the context of Perdiccas’ speech. This would explain the military nature of some of the ‘last plans’ and the commemorative nature of others.
As a result, the references to Craterus were sandwiched confusingly between the division of the empire, and Perdiccas’ dilemma with the ‘last plans’, potentially with the Will bequests within them.102 But the final instruction, which concerned Alexander’s funeral hearse, would have been one Will-demanded project that Perdiccas and the Assembly dared not reject; they may simply have acquiesced to it as posthumous compensation to their king.
What Diodorus did make clear was that he was openly excerpting from a fuller list – ‘the following were the largest and most remarkable items of the memoranda’ – while he added that others ‘were many and great’ (T25).103 We would imagine that the list included journal entries from the Eumenes-supervised Ephemerides that detailed still more demands and projects with their scheduling and costs.104 It takes no great leap of faith to appreciate how a ‘journal’ – generically ephemerides to Plutarch and Arrian – became hypomnemata. Neither is it difficult to appreciate how a reference to ‘last wishes’, a term often associated with a Will, became part of ‘last plans’ by a historian merging detail from conflicting sources.
Hieronymus was not looking to delve into the campaign past too deeply as his own forty-plus years of active service were begging their space on parchment. He may not have been a dispassionate Thucydides but neither was he a sensationalist; we recall Dionysius described his book as ‘longwinded and boring’.105 Judging from Arrian’s précis of it, his Events After Alexander, Hieronymus’ summation of Babylon appears to have been ‘matter of fact’, not plumped up with rhetoric. Moreover, he would not have spent ti
me dissecting a Will whose boundaries and bequests were challenged by his patrons from the outset, and his narrative was dull testate ash when compared to Cleitarchus’ intestate flames. It could have conceivably looked something like this:
Perdiccas dispensed the regional governorships as the king had covenanted and arrangements were made for the transport of the king’s body to its final resting place; the task of preparing the funeral bier given to Arrhidaeus. Perdiccas brought before the Assembly the king’s list [hypomnemata] of last wishes which included… [here followed the list Diodorus précised]… At the same time he cancelled the other projects found listed in the royal diaries [Ephemerides] for the completion of a funeral pyre for Hephaestion, and the plans Craterus had been given for the repatriation of 10,000 veterans to Macedonia, as well as for his construction of 1,000 warships larger than triremes for a campaign West, and a road to run through Libya to support the campaign; the construction of new cities with population transfers between them were also cancelled due to the financial situation and uncertainties that faced them… All these final plans were then presented before the Assembly…
But did the overt grandeur of the projects originate with Hieronymus? Communis opinio holds that their descriptions are more in keeping with Cleitarchus’ sensational style and thus more Vulgate exaggeration that approached thauma with their scale.106 If so, how did the detail end up in Diodorus’ follow-on book, which leaned principally on Hieronymus? The answer is straightforward enough: Curtius made it clear that Alexander had already announced many of the projects, along with his desire to campaign westwards, the previous year, and they remained at the planning stage, or were at least incomplete, with Arrian providing corroborating detail.107 When switching sources at the point of Alexander’s death, Diodorus embellished what he found presented blandly by Hieronymus with this earlier material that was painted in Cleitarchean colour. As one historian has commented: ‘The more austere history of Hieronymus was enriched by supplements from the Alexander Vulgate.’108 Hellenistic, and then Roman imaginations, may have later inflated the scale of the projects. ‘Fascinated by the King’s personality, historians have failed to see that the story of the hypomnemata belongs not to the history of Alexander, but to the history of the Successors’, so concluded Badian, and so we partially conclude too.109
Wrapping up the mystery behind the last plans is the aforementioned reference to Hephaestion’s funeral pyre.110 Debate continues on whether the pyre, supposedly costing 12,000 talents and described by Diodorus in the same detail he afforded Alexander’s funeral carriage,111 was to be burned as a pyra as part of a ritualised funeral ceremony which ‘… not only surpassed all those previously celebrated on earth but also left no possibility for anything greater in later ages’, or whether it was built as a permanent monument, a heroon or hero shrine, as its alleged position (according to Koldewey) inside the Babylonian city walls might suggest.112
Texts, including episodes recorded by Plutarch, Justin and Lucian, are also somewhat ambiguous as to what funerary ceremonies took place at Ecbatana and Babylon, and also when they took place; Aelian certainly included the description of Alexander throwing armour, gold and silver onto Hephaestion’s pyre in his retribution on the acropolis at Ecbatana, but he added that the pyre was actually burned at Alexander’s death – thus at Babylon – the latter backed up by Alexander’s appointing Perdiccas to transport Hephaestion’s body there.113 Backing up the latter part of Aelian’s claim is the suggestion the lavish pyre, or tomb, remained incomplete, possibly because Alexander ‘longed for’ the Rhodian architect, Deinocrates (or Stasicrates, responsible for the building of Alexandria), to construct it and he was not immediately available.114 Yet Diodorus suggested the funeral took place before Alexander ‘turned to amusements and festivals’ following Hephaestions’ elevation to god (or ‘associate god’).115
Hieronymus would not have bypassed a construction as significant as that Diodorus described, with its thirty compartments forming furlong-length sides, with foundations formed from the golden prows of 240 quinqueremes (which must have depleted the fleet) supporting seven ornate tiers soaring to 140 cubits (perhaps 210 feet).116 Unfortunately, a lacuna in Curtius’ final chapter deprives us from seeing what we might then have concluded were clear Cleitarchean origins and Plutarch’s brevity reveals little more.117 An obvious alternative source for the detail is Ephippus the Olynthian, whose alleged work was titled On the Death [or Funeral] of Alexander and Hephaestion; the description certainly fits the extravagances he attributed to the king’s court, though that additionally suggests unreliability.
Curious is Koldewey’s claim that he found remnants of the rubble from the Esagila Temple beside evidence of Hephaestion’s commemorative located inside the city walls, east of one of the palaces (there were three inside Babylon’s outer wall) and north of the (probably Hellenistic-era) Greek theatre; sources relate that it had taken 10,000 men two months to move the temple debris when Alexander rekindled his plan to rebuild the shrine to Bel-Marduk after his return from the East.118 But according to Diodorus, Hephaestion’s pyre was being constructed from a 10-furlong demolition of the outer city wall. Was the material, in fact, to come from that inner temple rubble? Because demolishing Babylon’s famous defences would have been extremely counterproductive from both a military and public relations perspective, though it is unclear how much of the outer fortifications were still in place in Alexander’s day; Mazaeus’ hasty capitulation soon after defeat at Gaugamela might suggest the city was already far from impregnable.119
What is clear is that before Alexander’s death each of his generals and ‘friends’ provided gold and ivory likenesses (eidola, like those found in Tomb II at Vergina) of Hephaestion and they surely did this to please a by-then unstable Alexander, and likely at his request.120 At the Assembly in June 323 BCE, however, and with the king dead, the inheritors of power would not permit the treasury to be squandered further on Hephaestion, for Alexander’s former chiliarchos was far from unanimously liked.121
When debating the permanence of the extraordinary memorial we should recall that other monuments to Hephaestion were planned in Alexandria. In a letter to Cleomenes, Alexander had allegedly warned his wayward arabarchos that Hephaestion’s two ‘shrines’, the first on the Island of Pharos, and the second in the heart of the new city, needed to be splendid to exonerate him from the repercussions of his financial mismanagement.122 If shrines were in fact mausoleums, or if one of them had been designed to house his mummified corpse, and recalling Homer’s ‘don’t bury my bones separately from yours, Achilles, but together, just as we were raised in your house’, should we not expect that Alexander planned to inter his former intimate in his new city as a symbolic reuniting with his Patroclus?123
Again there is no evidence that the Alexandrian commemoratives were completed; Ptolemy apparently stopped construction when he decided to terminate Cleomenes for his alleged Perdiccan sympathies, though the more likely motivation was Ptolemy’s desire for treasury control at a time when Egypt was still nominally raising tribute for the kings at Pella.124
A reconstruction of the funeral pyre of Hephaestion based upon the description given by Diodorus. A woodcut by Franz Jaffe ca. 1900.
STORMY SEAS AND THE FIRST FLUSH OF FREEDOM
When addressing the Assembly, it comes as no surprise to read that Perdiccas broached the succession issue by placing Alexander’s ring, crown and robes in front of him for the crowd to see.125 If the king’s Will was known to have been drafted and first read in the presence of the Bodyguards, then Perdiccas was re-emphasising the authority that stemmed from the bequests within the testament. Yet this brought with it the suspicion that he might have unduly influenced the king or the shape of the document itself.
What we consider as an ongoing chiliarchia implied Perdiccas’ authority filtered down through the Somatophylakes to the cavalry officers (ilarchoi), then to the infantry commanders (taxiarchoi) and down to the troops below them. Perdiccas was h
imself of royal stock from the house of Orestis, the westernmost Upper Macedonian canton that lay closest to Epirus, as was Leonnatus. By now, however, the common soldier, whether pezhetairoi, esteemed asthetairoi or other hypaspistai regiments, and the veterans amongst them, found the true source of authority in their immediate commander.126 A later parallel would be the Roman army, whose legionnaires put faith in their centurion ahead of the tribunes or legates – the equestrian classes above. For rather than galvanising an army far from home into a homogenous national unit, Alexander’s campaign had seen the social, political, and even the financial gaps, widen.
So the untested fabric of the Assembly on foreign soil was being stretched further by an army behaving ever more like a mercenary unit than an imperial force.127 The description of the mindset of the Macedonians that the exiled Charidemus provided to Darius III before the battle at Issus – soldiers motivated by ‘poverty’s schooling’ – was by now long redundant.128 Since the mutinies in India and at Opis, their willingness to be swayed by their king – the single tenuous thread that had held the authority chain together – had been tested too.
In Curtius’ portrayal, Perdiccas handed back the ring of authority he had received from Alexander and then begged the Assembly to choose a new leader, adding that he hoped Roxane’s child, due within three months (or sooner), would be a boy (T11).129 Though the Macedonian army had rallied behind royal infants before, the cradled King Aeropus I, for example, who was once carried into battle (reigned ca. 602-576 BCE),130 here, in contrast to Perdiccas’ seeming humility, this final wish appeared to broadcast several tendentious messages. The first was his own vested interest in that outcome, and thus his personal ambition, for he had either been given Roxane’s hand in marriage (as the Pamphlet Will claimed) or he had become Roxane’s de facto protector, which amounted to much the same thing.