In Search of the Lost Testament of Alexander the Great

by David Grant

  Suetonius recorded the presence of a comet, possibly Halley’s in 66 CE (visible in January), and another graced the Jerusalem night and might have preceding the capture of the historian Josephus following the battle and siege at Jotapata.48 A brilliant comet was visible for forty days in 72 CE, the year that followed Vespasian’s accession, and a further sighting occurred in 73 CE, the year he expelled philosophers from Rome. One followed in 75 CE when Vespasian made a dedication to peace at the temple in which he housed the works of art he had dubiously amassed during his term.49 And in 79 CE Vespasian is recorded as having declared, ‘the “hairy star” is an omen not for me, but for the Parthian king, for he had long hair where I am bald’; portents are littered across Suetonius’ biography of Vespasian.50

  Solar eclipses carried similar predictive gloom, and with them came a verifiably ‘darkened world’; it could cause panic in the ranks as it did with Darius III’s troops at Gaugamela, when it provoked Sulpicius Galus to explain the phenomenon to the shaken Roman army amassed against the Macedonians at Pydna in 168 BCE.51 So an eclipse potentially brought Curtius’ ‘last night’ with it. According to Pliny, himself an ambitious politician who became a procurator,52 a protracted eclipse also occurred shortly after Julius Caesar’s death in 44 BCE, though modern calculations suggest none was visible from Europe until 49 CE; this has led some scholars to question the whole chronology of the Julio-Claudian era. A further solar eclipse was described by Cassius Dio as one of the portents of Augustus’ death, though this cannot be substantiated by modern calculations either.

  Cassius Dio further recorded a partial eclipse of the sun in 26 CE and a further event in Claudius’ rule prompting the emperor to enquire of his astronomers the date of the next occurrence. It actually coincided with his birthday on August 1st (45 CE), and to forestall panic, Claudius issued a proclamation detailing the time and duration of the darkness, with a full scientific, though non-heliocentric, explanation.53 Dio detailed a lunar eclipse that accompanied a comet before Vitellius’ short emperorship in 69 CE. Although two lunar eclipses would have been visible from Rome on April 25th and October 18th, modern reckoning dates the unusual double-event (eclipse and comet) to the summer of 54 CE, and once again this broadly coincided with the death of Claudius and the beginning of Nero’s term. It has been further speculated, in the case of Curtius’ encomium, that the use of caliganti, ‘darkened’, was a deliberate pun on ‘Caligula’ (alternatively Gaius) whose rule had ended in 41 CE, still recent enough to have the desired literary effect by a writer who might have published in the colourful imperium of Nero.54

  So does Curtius’ dual reference to ‘new star’ and ‘darkened world’ give us a more specific date? We should appreciate that encomia of this nature were two-dimensional at best, here relating to the breadth of an emperor’s achievement and the ‘height’ of their exulted standing. We can hardly expect the author to embody any literal ‘length’ – the more useful chronological dimension – within a few lines. Thus, civil war, dark nights, peace and prosperity were rolled into a single paragraph in which a decade of colour might be compressed to a sycophancy as brief as a Spartan witticism. So where does this leave us?

  EXITUS ILLUSTRIUM VIRORUM: ARGUMENTS FOR PUBLICATION UNDER NERO

  And in our own age, about the time when Claudius Caesar was poisoned and left the Empire to Domitius Nero, and afterwards, while the latter was Emperor, there was one [comet] which was almost constantly seen and was very frightful…55

  Modern calculations confirm a comet would, indeed, have been visible at the accession of Nero in autumn 54 CE (Nero succeeded Claudius on October 13th); both Suetonius and Cassius Dio recorded the noteworthy sighting that ‘lasted for a long time’ and Pliny termed it ‘frightful’.56 Tacitus mentioned two further comets (‘omens of impending misfortune’) and a lacuna in the Annals would surely have included the Halley’s Comet sighting in January 66 CE.57 No one became more firmly associated with the night sky, stars, the sun god Apollo, and Helios the Charioteer streaking across the firmament, than Nero, in what has been termed his ‘solar monarchy’.58 And nowhere is this more evident than in the aforementioned Apocolocyntosis that eulogised him. One extract reads:

  He brings glad days, to muted law a tongue,

  As the Morning Star, setting the stars to flight,

  As the shining sun, when his chariot moves first from the line,

  So Caesar comes, so Nero appears to Rome,

  His bright face glowing with gentle radiance,

  His neck all beauty under his flowing hair.59

  Comparisons with elements of Curtius’ laudation are unavoidable despite varied liberal translations. The dawn of Nero heralded in an imperium that required new obeisance, for the dangerous scaenici imperatoris, the ‘actor-emperor’, managed thirteen years and eight months in the purple trabea despite his bankrupting the empire.60 As Erasmus later noted, Dawn is a friend of Muses, who, Nero believed, could not rival his own sweet voice, and it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that one encomium drew inspiration (if not parallel wording) from the other.61 But which came first?

  Agrippina crowning Nero with a laurel wreath. Agrippina carries a cornucopia, the symbol of plenty, whilst Nero is outfitted as a Roman commander. The scene suggests Nero’s accession of 54 CE and certainly the imagery would be invalid after he murdered Agrippina in 59 CE. Aphrodisias Museum, Turkey. Image by Carlos Delgado; CC-BY-SA.

  The issue is complicated by the suggestion that this extract from the Apolococyntosis was a later addition to an original draft that had been published soon after Nero’s succession in 54 CE, perhaps by Seneca himself, or by an anonymous compiler writing with the hindsight of events, possibly as late as 59 CE (or 60 CE) when laudation would still have been relevant. Because in that year Nero’s true colours began to emerge following the death of his mother, the universally hated Agrippina (15/16-59 CE), the great-granddaughter of Augustus who had previously manipulated her way to becoming Claudius’ fourth wife.62 It was Agrippina who had Seneca recalled from exile, for she saw the value of his educating and counselling her impressionable son.

  Nero had distinguished himself in the first five years of his rule (thus 54-59 CE), taking an interest in civic affairs: taxes were reduced, legal fees capped, he empowered freedmen and had corrupt officials arrested. Seneca’s own reference to the comet of 60 CE (six years into Nero’s emperorship) was still accompanied by ‘in the happy principate of Nero’.63 Striking likenesses were captured on coinage by the emperor’s caelatores (engravers) and struck at the new mint at Lugdunum (Lyons), and though much of the ‘happy’ spin stemmed from his obsession with popularity, Trajan appears to have later commended Nero’s early years too, whilst Otho used ‘Nero’ as a surname to boost his appeal.64 Dio Chrysostom recalled the nostalgia with which the populace, especially that in the East, mourned his eventual death in 68 CE.

  Seneca’s poem (if it was Seneca’s), possibly written with genuine optimism, appears elegant with a completeness that suggests a smooth original composition and not one awkwardly absorbing a forerunner’s prose.65 If that is the case, Curtius’ encomium (assuming one of the texts was inspired by the other) was published after. It is notable that Curtius’ description of a state with limbs lacking a head contains striking similarities to Seneca’s Of Clemency published in 56 CE.66 Further, as Bosworth notes, Seneca and Curtius employed identical phraseology to describe Alexander’s devastation ‘of peoples so remote as to be unfamiliar with even their neighbours’; this is wording that does not appear anywhere else in literature.67

  But what of the ‘extinguishing of torches’? If we are associating Curtius’ encomium with the term of Nero, we arrive inevitably at ‘fire’. Yet fires were common; noteworthy conflagrations destroyed parts of the city under both Titus and Trajan. Yet the Great Fire of Rome of July 64 CE was exceptional, and so was Nero’s part. On the night of July 19th, while the city burned, we have the popular image of Nero playing the fiddle, an instrument that was, in
fact, developed some 1,500 years later; Nero was in fact a citharoedo principe, a player of the cithara (lyre), and a bad one according to Vindex, his rebellious governor in Gaul.68 And though Suetonius and Cassius Dio claimed Nero was the arsonist who sang The Sack of Ilium while the fire spread (thus paving the way for his new-planned city, Neropolis), Tacitus claimed Nero organised a relief effort and paid for it himself.69 He even opened his palace grounds to shelter the homeless and followed up with stringent fire codes governing new construction.

  Conflicting reports have the conflagration raging anywhere from five to nine days, despite the 7,000 city vigiles of the fire brigade who were armed with two-handled water pumps, a fire-suppressing vinegar mix and fire-smothering patchwork quilts. The destruction recognised no class; starting close to the Circus Maximus, the blaze spread down the Triumphal Way to the Forum, decimating the finest villas and temples as well as the vulnerable crowded slum, the Suburra.70

  Augustus had earlier divided Rome into fourteen administrative regiones and after the fire of 64 CE only four remained standing.71 If blazes were common, so were scapegoats. Members of a mysterious sect called the Chrestiani were burned, crucified and thrown to the dogs.72 The religious order was not popular; some years later under Trajan, Pliny the Younger, a ‘moderate man’ who befriended Tacitus and employed Suetonius, conducted show trials as a public prosecutor (Tacitus held the same post) and hunted down Christians, detailing the recommended methods of torture he used to exact the ‘truth’.73 Tacitus described the contemporary view of the religious sect: Christianity was a ‘most mischievous superstition’ … ‘coming from Judaea, the first source of the evil’ and ‘a class hated for its abominations’.74

  The great fire heralded in the most ambitious civil construction project ever undertaken in the city, and one that included a financially ruinous colossus of Nero in the new Domus Aurea. Nero’s immediate financial fix was to rob the temples of their votive offerings. After his death, the statue’s face was modified to represent Sol Invictus, the unconquered god, and moved by the Emperor Hadrian with the help of twenty-four elephants to a new home beside the Flavian Amphitheatre which became known as the Colosseum.75

  Curtius’ encomium additionally called for the ‘long life’ for the ‘same house’, a clear reference to the emperor’s line. Pertinent to his final chapter on the Macedonian king, Curtius knew from his sources how short-lived the reign of Alexander’s half-brother, King Philip III (formerly Arrhidaeus), had proved to be after the settlement at Babylon in 323 BCE, and recalling the fate of Olympias and Alexander’s sons soon after, he was therefore obliquely beseeching the gods for a better destiny for his Roman emperor.

  Like Caligula and Claudius before him, Nero was of the line of the much-loved Germanicus, whose suspicious death was still greatly lamented in Rome, despite the damage Caligula had done to the reputation of the so-called Julio-Claudians.76 Whilst Curtius’ phraseology suggested a new line of imperial hope, it was again a general motif that heralded in each new princeps. Nevertheless, he would have been unlikely to pin such hopes on emperors who were disinclined, or obviously unable, to produce heirs. Excluding female issue and adopted sons, that would rule out Galba (who was in his early seventies at the close of Nero’s rule) and possibly Otho too, for both were rumoured to prefer males as partners. In Otho’s case that meant Nero, perhaps with a similar affiliation to Caligula before him, though we must recall that Otho had two (now dead) sons, so whilst procreation was not impossible, his short tenure as emperor makes him a rather unlikely candidate for Curtius’ wording. Notably, each of the ‘five good emperors’, comprising the Nervan-Antonian dynasty from Trajan to Marcus Aurelius, were no more than adopted sons.77

  Interestingly, this state of affairs, partly stemming from infertility, has been recently blamed on poisoning from the lead-lined aqueducts and water pipes in Rome (plumbum, lead, is the root of ‘plumbing’), as well as from lead-II acetate that was used to sweeten wine, and from defrutum, a food preserving must-reduction often boiled in lead pots. Despite a warning from the Roman architect Vitruvius and from Pliny who knew the risks of morbi metallici, recent tests of lead isotopes from the Tiber River confirmed huge concentrations when compared to the spring water of the region.78

  More relevant to Curtius’ dynastic hope, Nero’s second wife, the ‘proud whore’ Poppea Sabina, was pregnant in 65 CE with their second child, that is until Nero is recorded to have kicked her to death.79 Poppea had been previously married to Otho who subsequently became emperor himself in 69 CE for three months until he killed himself after the battle of Bedriacum at which the historian Suetonius earned his equestrian spurs. Obsessed with Poppea Sabina, Nero had taken her first as mistress and then when he became emperor, he removed Otho from Rome by appointing him governor of Lusitania, a region more or less equivalent to modern Portugal.

  Tacitus suggested Poppea deserved her fate for the intrigues that led to the death of Agrippina and Nero’s first wife, the childless Claudia Octavia.80 Although Tacitus, Cassius Dio and Suetonius each recorded versions of Poppea’s violent death, their accounts might be nothing more than a polemical tradition, for fatal miscarriages were not uncommon. Nero mourned her lavishly; he embalmed her body in the fashion of the royalty of Egypt and had it incarcerated in the mausoleum of Augustus. Their first child, Claudia Augusta, had lived just four months; Nero was again childless and hopes for the continuation of his line now had particular relevance.

  But what of the encomium’s reference to the sheathing of swords? If truly a reference to civil war it would narrow the contending emperors down further to Augustus, Claudius, Galba, Vespasian, Nerva and Septimus Severus. But as it has been noted, the use of the verb trepidare, ‘to tremble in anticipation’, suggests a world on the brink and one waiting for something calamitous to happen, not a world that had already been torn apart; here the parallel ‘brink’ is the civil war averted by the eventual settlement at Babylon.81 So the sheathing of swords could simply be a celebration of Nero’s bloodless accession in contrast to the Praetorian bloodletting accompanying the accession of the unwitting Claudius. Perhaps more relevant was Nero’s unravelling of the Pisonian Plot in April 65 CE.

  Gaius Calpernius Piso, literary benefactor and statesman, had rounded up support for Nero’s assassination amongst prominent senators and the joint-prefect of the Praetorian Guard. Yet support for Nero was far from extinct, especially amongst the equestrians who enjoyed his favour; if Piso had been successful there would have been collateral damage and recriminatory bloodletting.82 Swords were certainly sheathed, most notably the emperor’s which struck down the captured conspirators; the aftermath saw Lucan, Seneca, and the satirist, Petronius, summarily forced to commit suicide. After being denied tablets on which to write a Will, Seneca’s last alleged words to his friends were: ‘Who knew not Nero’s cruelty? After a mother’s and a brother’s murder, nothing remains but to add the destruction of a guardian and a tutor.’83

  A 19th century illustration of the death of Seneca, following Nero’s demand for his suicide. According to Tacitus, after severing his veins he resorted to taking hemlock.

  Nero’s behaviour is something of an irony against the cultural background, because the Second Sophistic, with its love of Greek culture and expressive freedom, is reckoned to have commenced with his emperorship. Josephus saw the retrospective problem when ‘aiming for the truth’:

  Many historians have written the story of Nero, of whom some, because they were well treated by him, have out of gratitude been careless with the truth, while others from hatred and enmity towards him have so shamelessly and recklessly revelled in falsehoods as to merit censure.84

  What we now refer to as the Exitus Illustrium Virorum, a compendium written by Titinius Capito containing the names of those banished or killed by Nero, and the Exitus Occisorum aut Relegatorum, a parallel work by Gaius Fannius, were read by Pliny the Younger who coined the former name.85 If published sufficiently early (its dating is uncertain), Taci
tus might have used this material for his depiction of Seneca’s death.

  The ‘sheathing of swords’ was phraseology also used by Seneca in his De Clementia, once again suggesting Curtius could have drawn from his template; in fact Seneca ‘communed’ with Nero to restrain himself in his use of swords throughout book one in favour of the clemency he was advocating, and it rather suggests that Seneca had seen the writing on the wall, even though De Clementia was composed just two years into Nero’s emperorship.86

  The above extract from Seneca’s Apocolocyntosis alluded to his emperor as a ‘charioteer’ who was moving ‘first from the line’; if a literal link, it could refer to Nero’s attested participation in the sport. He appeared in 65 CE at the Circus Maximus, an event that heralded in the peregrinatio Achaica, his tour of Hellas, and so it is likely that he was seen practising or participating in games and festivals in Rome before Seneca died (in 65 CE). Nero repeated his chariot performances at the Olympic Games of 67 CE, advancing them a full year to fit in with his travel plans. Inevitably, he was awarded a crown, despite falling from his ten-horsed carriage; we should note that Alexander was himself portrayed as a charioteer in the Romance.87 Nero went on to become a periodonikes pantonikes, an ‘all conquering champion’ on the circuit of eiselastic games, and a guaranteed ‘victor’ who paid judges to adjudicate ‘wisely’.88 He returned to a triumph through a breach in Rome’s wall, reportedly on the chariot Octavian had used a century before; the crowd now hailed their emperor as ‘Nero Apollo’.89

  As far as Curtius’ references to Parthia, Nero responded vigorously to Parthian incursions into Armenia in the wars of 58-63 CE, and so a fascination with the East and the former Macedonian empire was inevitable at the time. Curtius’ reference to the widespread skill of archery fits here too, for Nero’s general, Gnaeus Domitius Corbulo, faced formidable Parthian mounted bowmen and he had to enlist auxiliary archers himself; no doubt when preparing for the campaign, the city was keenly aware of this requirement and we imagine training was being given to the Roman counterparts.90 Nero was possibly encouraged to campaign in Asia by the early books of Lucan’s Pharsalia published through 61-64 CE, and which recalled Alexander’s legacy in the East with a nostalgia that embodied something of a challenge: