Philip of Macedon wrote to the Spartans: “If I invade Laconia, I’ll drive you out.” The Spartans wrote back: “If” (Plutarch On Talkativeness 511a).
When Philip entered their territory and wrote asking whether they wanted him to come as a friend or as an enemy, the Spartans replied, “Neither” (Plutarch Sayings of the Spartans 233e).
He had a field smaller than a letter sent from Sparta (a line from a lost comedy quoted at Ps.-Longinus On the Sublime 38).
VIII
ALEXANDER THE GREAT
When asked how he was able to achieve so much in such a short time, Alexander replied, “By not procrastinating about anything”
(Gnomologium Vaticanum 74).
Because he had only one eye, King Philip of Macedon, the father of Alexander, used to become angry if anyone mentioned the Cyclops or referred to eyes at all. And Hermias, the ruler of Atarneus, for all that he was otherwise easygoing, could not tolerate anyone referring to knives, or cutting, or surgery, since he was a eunuch (Ps.-Demetrius On Style 293). Philip was struck in the right eye by an arrow or a spear at the siege of Methone in 355/354 B.C. Through the will of some divinity, at a music festival just before he suffered this misfortune, each of the three musicians in a flute contest chose to play a different version of the Cyclops story (Didymus Commentary on Demosthenes 12).
Three pieces of good news were reported to King Philip at the same time: the first was that his team had won the four-horse chariot race at the Olympic Games; the second that his general, Parmenion, had defeated the Dardanians in battle; the third that his wife Olympias had borne him a son. Stretching his hands up to heaven, he said, “Oh God, grant me some minor misfortune to offset these good things!” For he was well aware that Fortune tends to begrudge us great prosperity (Ps.-Plutarch Condolences to Apollonius 105a).
Alexander gained possession of the whole of Asia in fewer years than it took Isocrates to write his Panegyric urging war against the Persians (Ps.-Longinus On the Sublime 4.2).
When someone asked Alexander whether he would rather be Achilles or Homer, he replied, “What do you think yourself? Would you rather be an Olympic victor or the herald who announces other people’s victories?” (Plutarch Sayings of Kings and Commanders 185a).
Alexander once saw a messenger running joyfully toward him, stretching out his right hand. He asked him, “What news have you for me, my friend? Has Homer come back to life?” For Alexander thought that the only thing his achievements still needed was someone to give them lasting fame (Plutarch How to Assess One’s Progress in Virtue 85c).
Alexander went to Troy and sacrificed to Trojan Athena. He dedicated his own armor in her temple and took instead of it some armor that had been set up during the Trojan War. They say that his attendants used to carry these weapons into battle in front of him. There is a story that he also sacrificed to Priam at the altar of Zeus of the Hearth, as a way to avert Priam’s anger from the family of Neoptolemus, from whom he was descended (Arrian Anabasis of Alexander 1.11). Neoptolemus, the son of Achilles, had butchered Priam at this altar.
The people of Lampsacus erected a statue of Anaximenes at Olympia for averting the wrath of Alexander from them in the following way. Lampsacus supported the Persian king, or was at least suspected of doing so, and Alexander seethed with anger and threatened the citizens with the direst punishment. Fearing for their wives, their children, and their state itself, they sent Anaximenes to intercede, since he was acquainted with both Alexander and Philip before him. They say that when Alexander found out why Anaximenes was coming, he swore by the Greeks’ gods, whom he called by name, that he would do the opposite of whatever it was that Anaximenes asked him to do. Anaximenes said, “Grant me this favor, your majesty: enslave the women and children of Lampsacus, raze the whole city to the ground, and burn their temples.” Alexander could find no way to counter this trick; constrained by his oath, he reluctantly pardoned the people of Lampsacus (Pausanias Guide to Greece 6.18). For Anaximenes’s deviousness, see also p. 154.
Most of Alexander’s officers were afraid of the depth of the river Granicus and of the rough and uneven terrain on the far bank, which they would not be able to occupy without a fight. Some of them also thought they should adhere to the usual observations for the month—the Macedonian kings were not accustomed to lead out the army in the month of Daesius [May–June]. But Alexander bolstered their morale by ordering them to repeat the month of Artemisius [April–May] (Plutarch Life of Alexander 16).
To flatter Alexander, the architect Dinocrates planned to carve Mt. Athos as the statue of a man, with the walls of a very large city in his left hand and a huge cup in his right hand to collect the water of all the rivers on the mountain, and then to pour them out of the cup into the sea (Vitruvius On Architecture 2 Preface).
Choerilus was a bad poet who followed Alexander and described his wars. Alexander is said to have commented that he would rather be Homer’s Thersites [the ugliest and most worthless Greek soldier] than Choerilus’s Achilles. He agreed with Choerilus that he would be given a gold coin for every good verse he wrote, but a punch for every bad one. Because his poetry was far more often bad than good, Choerilus was punched to death (Scholion to Horace Art of Poetry 357).
Callisthenes, the great-nephew of Aristotle, accompanied Alexander on his march to the east, writing an account of the campaign. He recorded how the sea did obeisance to Alexander by retreating to allow him to pass (Eustathius on Homer Iliad 13.29).
Since the philosopher Callisthenes opposed the Persian custom of obeisance, Alexander trumped up a charge of conspiracy against him: he had all his limbs chopped off, along with his ears, his nose, and his lips, and then he had him paraded around, shut up in a cage with a dog, as a wretched and sorry sight to intimidate everyone else (Justin Epitome 15.3).
When Alexander was besieging Tyre, many of the citizens dreamed that Apollo told them that he was going over to Alexander. They reacted as if the god were a mortal whom they had caught in the act of deserting. They put ropes around his colossal statue and nailed it to its base, calling him an Alexandrist (Plutarch Life of Alexander 24). The statue had originally stood outside the Sicilian city of Gela and was taken as plunder by the Carthaginians, who sent it to Tyre [their mother city]. … Alexander captured Tyre at the same hour of the same day of the year as the Carthaginians had seized the statue (Diodorus Siculus The Library 13.108).
Alexander’s anger afforded the victors a gruesome sight: when his madness was exhausted in butchering the Tyrians, two thousand more were hung up, fixed to crosses, all along the shore (Quintus Curtius History of Alexander the Great 4.4, describing the aftermath of Alexander’s seven-month siege of Tyre).
Alexander was clearly distressed by King Darius’s assassination. He took off his own cloak and covered his corpse with it. When he subsequently caught Bessus [Darius’s killer], he had him ripped apart. Two straight trees were bent over toward each other, and part of Bessus’s body was tied to each of them; when they were released and sprang forcefully up, the part of Bessus’s body that was attached to each tree went with it (Plutarch Life of Alexander 43).
Alexander was angry with one of his bodyguards, a Macedonian named Lysimachus, and locked him in a room with a lion. When he found that Lysimachus had overpowered the beast, he admired him greatly and honored him as much as any of the Macedonian nobles (Pausanias Guide to Greece 1.9). After Alexander’s death, Lysimachus ruled vast territories in Europe and Asia Minor, but failed to found a dynasty. Lysimachus frightened one of his own courtiers by throwing a wooden scorpion into his lap. His victim jumped up in a panic, but when he realized it was a joke, he said, “Your majesty, now it’s my turn to frighten you: give me a talent of silver!” (Plutarch Table Talk 633b).
Alexander captured an Indian archer who was said to be so skilled that he could shoot an arrow through a finger-ring. He told him to demonstrate his ability, but the archer refused. Alexander became angry and ordered him to be executed. The Indian told those
who were leading him away that he had not practiced for many days and was afraid he might not succeed. When Alexander heard this, he was amazed and had the man released, sending him off with a reward, because he preferred death to seeming to be unworthy of his reputation (Plutarch Sayings of Kings and Commanders 181b).
Alexander’s camp in India was attacked by
• White lions, bigger than bulls;
• Huge pigs of various colors;
• Bats as big as doves with teeth like those of humans;
• An Odontotyrannus, with three horns and bigger than an elephant;
• Poisonous shrews, bigger than foxes.
(Alexander’s Letter to Aristotle about India 7)
When the Indian king Porus unleashed huge lions against his troops, Alexander is said to have repulsed them by inducing them to attack heated statues set up in front of his battle line (Life of Alexander, King of the Macedonians 36). We are not told precisely how he heated the statues.
Some say that Alexander did not drink much, even though he did spend a lot of his time in discussion with his friends over wine. But Philinus demonstrates by reference to the royal diaries that this is nonsense: there are very frequent entries recording that he spent a whole day sleeping off his drinking, and sometimes the day after that as well (Plutarch Table Talk 623d).
Alexander saw that his companions had become altogether decadent, with a vulgar and expensive lifestyle. Hagnon had silver nails in his boots, Leonnatus had sand brought from Egypt by a troupe of camels for his gymnastic exercises, Philotas had hunting-nets twelve miles long, and they used more myrrh for their massages and bathing than previously they had used olive oil (Plutarch Life of Alexander 40).
Alexander is said to have exuded very fragrant sweat that gave his clothing a sweet aroma (Plutarch Table Talk 623e).
When his close friend Hephaestion died, Alexander not only sheared the manes of his horses and mules, but also removed the battlements from city walls, so that even cities would seem to be in mourning (Plutarch Life of Pelopidas 34).
The chance survival of a Babylonian oracle recording the ominous birth of a lamb with three heads, three necks, and three buttocks also informs us that it was cloudy in Babylon on the day that Alexander died there in 323 B.C.
Alexander had lain unburied in Babylon for thirty days when it was rumored that the land that received his body would enjoy great and long-lasting prosperity. Ptolemy stole the corpse and set off for Egypt. Only Perdiccas tried to stop him. Ptolemy had a dummy made to resemble Alexander and laid it out on a costly bier, but sent the actual body on to Egypt with no pomp along a secret and little-traversed route. Perdiccas got control of the decoy, and by the time he realized that he had been tricked, it was too late to continue the pursuit (Aelian Miscellaneous History 12.64).
The tomb of Alexander has not yet been located. Perhaps the most remarkable expedition to find it was undertaken by a team of psychic archaeologists, who scuba dived in sordid conditions in the harbor of Alexandria in 1979. The year before, the tomb of Alexander IV, the son of Alexander the Great and the Bactrian princess Roxane, was discovered without psychic aid at Vergina in Macedonia. Another tomb, discovered there in 1977, was long thought to be that of Philip II, Alexander the Great’s father, but some archaeologists now reject this view. Philip’s tomb would have been easy to find if Alexander had lived long enough to carry out his alleged plan to build a pyramid for him as big as the biggest pyramid in Egypt (Diodorus Siculus The Library 18.4). Cleopatra and Mark Antony were also buried in Alexandria; their tomb has likewise eluded detection.
When people addressed him as a god, Alexander said that there were two things that made him skeptical about that, his need for sleep and his need for sex
(Plutarch How to Tell a Flatterer from a Friend 65f).
IX
GREEKS AT SEA
When Anacharsis the Scythian wise man was asked whether the living or the dead were more numerous, he asked, “In which group do you count sailors?”
(Diogenes Laertius Lives of the Philosophers 1.104).
Why is it that fishermen, collectors of purple shells, and indeed all those who gain their livelihood from the sea have red hair? (Ps.-Aristotle Problems 966b).
The thirty-oared ship in which Theseus and his companions sailed to Crete to fight the Minotaur was preserved for many centuries by the Athenians. They used to replace the old timbers with sound new ones, and the ship was an example for the philosophers of the paradox of change, with some of them saying that it was still the same ship, others that it was not (Plutarch Life of Theseus 23).
Anyone who arrives later than the appointed time to prepare for the competition must explain his lateness to the organizers of the games. Valid reasons for being late are illness, capture by pirates, shipwreck (Olympia Inscriptions 56).
Letting down an inverted cauldron gives divers a chance to breathe, for it remains full of air and does not fill up with water (Ps.-Aristotle Problems 960b).
Divers are sometimes provided with devices that enable them to stay underwater for a long time, drawing air from above the water, just as nature has endowed elephants with a huge nostril that they raise out of the water and breathe through whenever they are crossing water (Aristotle Parts of Animals 659a). Elephants do actually breathe this way when crossing rivers.
I ordered a big iron cage to be made, with a glass jar just over two feet wide inside it…. The third time I submerged, I went down almost five hundred feet and saw fish of very many sorts swimming around me. Then a very big fish took the cage in its mouth and pulled me to shore a mile away. There were 360 men in the four boats that let me down into the water, and it dragged them all along. When it reached the shore, it crushed the cage with its teeth and hurled it up onto the dry land. I was panting and practically dead with fright, and I fell down and gave thanks to heavenly Providence for saving me from the awesome beast. I said to myself, “Alexander, stop trying to do the impossible, in case you lose your life in exploring the depths” (The Greek Alexander Romance 2.38).
A dolphin does not panic if caught in a net. It eats its fill of the fish trapped with it and then bites its way out through the meshes. If the fishermen catch it, they sew rushes to its dorsal fin and let it go. If it gets caught again, they recognize the stitching and give it a beating. But this rarely happens, for the dolphins are grateful for the pardon they receive on the first occasion (Plutarch The Cleverness of Animals 977f).
Ship owners protect their vessels from lightning by wrapping the hides of seals or hyenas around the mast (Plutarch Table Talk 664c).
These are some names of ships in the Athenian fleet in the mid-4th century B.C.:
Actis
Sunbeam
Charis
Grace
Comoedia
Comedy
Democratia
Democracy
Eirene
Peace
Eleutheria
Freedom
Halcyon
Kingfisher
Hipparche
Queen of the Horses (a horse transport)
Leaena
Lioness
Lycaena
She-wolf
Nike
Victory
Salpinx
Trumpet
Sophia
Wisdom
Tragoedia
Tragedy
The largest ancient ship of which a wreck survives is the Madrague de Giens, a Roman freighter about 130 feet long with a capacity of almost forty tons, which went down in the 1st century B.C. off the French coast, about twenty miles east of Toulon. The Hellenistic Greek kings, however, had constructed very much larger vessels, as an expression of their wealth and power. Perhaps the largest of all ancient transport ships was the Syracusia, commissioned by King Hieron of Syracuse and designed by Archimedes. It is described in some detail by Athenaeus (Wise Men at Dinner 206d):
• It had twenty banks of oars.
• Its construction required
as much timber as sixty quadriremes.
• It could transport ninety thousand bushels of grain, ten thousand jars of pickled fish, six hundred tons of wool, and six hundred tons of other cargo.
• The officers’ quarters were decorated with mosaic floors telling the whole story of the Iliad.
• It had a gymnasium, promenades with shady gardens, a shrine to Aphrodite, a library, baths, stalls for twenty horses, a seawater pond full of fish, a catapult designed by Archimedes that could throw stones of 180 pounds and spears eighteen feet long.
Unfortunately, it was too big for most harbors, so Hieron renamed it the Alexandris and sent it as a gift to Ptolemy of Egypt, who hauled it ashore at Alexandria. It never sailed again.
Xerxes branded the sea and whipped it (Herodotus Histories 7.35; he gave the Hellespont three hundred lashes and branded it for destroying his first bridge of boats from Asia to Europe). He also sent a letter to Mt. Athos: “Noble Athos, with your peaks reaching to Heaven, do not oppose my project [to cut a canal across the peninsula] with large and unmanageable boulders; otherwise, I shall cut you down and throw you into the sea” (Plutarch On Controlling Anger 455e).
In Xerxes’s camp there was a man named Scyllias, the best diver of the time. He had salvaged many of the Persians’ possessions for them after a shipwreck and held onto many of them for himself. I cannot say for sure how he managed to desert to the Greeks, but I should be surprised if the report of the incident is true, namely that he dived into the sea at Aphetae and did not surface until he reached Artemisium, covering a distance of about ten miles underwater. I personally think he went across in a boat (Herodotus Histories 8.8).
A Cabinet Of Greek Curiosities Page 8