Alexander the Great, a Battle for Truth and Fiction

The Ancient Sources And Why They Can't Be Trusted

David Grant

• Editorial: Pen and Sword Military
• Año: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781399094726
• Categoría: Histoire
• Categoría: Histoire de l'armée et de la marine

Most of what we 'know' about Alexander the Great (356-323 BC) comes from the pages of much later historians, writing 300 years or more after these events. But these Roman-era writers drew on the accounts of earlier authors who were contemporary with Alexander, some of whom took part in the momentous events they described. David Grant examines the fragments of these earlier eyewitness testimonies which are preserved as undercurrents in the later works. He traces their influence and monopoly of the 'truth' and spotlights their manipulation of events to reveal how the Wars of the Successors shaped the agendas of these writers. It becomes clear that Alexander's courtiers were no-less ambitious than than their king and wanted to showcase their role in the epic conquest of the Persian Empire to enhance their credibility and legitimacy in their own quests for power. In particular, Grant reveals why reports of the dying king's last wishes conflict, and he explains why testimony relegated to 'romance' may house credible grains of truth. The author also skillfully explains how manuscripts became further corrupted in their journey from the ancient world to the modern day. In summary, this work by a recognized expert on the period highlights why legacy of Alexander is built on very shaky foundations.

Chapter 1

Introduction: ‘Study the Historian before you Study the History’

It is a naive belief that the distant past can be recovered from

written texts, but even the written evidence for

Alexander is scarce and often peculiar.

Robin Lane Fox, Alexander the Great1

Over the centuries, historians have expressed, in one way or another, the uncomfortable relationship between what they deem likely to have happened and what is claimed to have come to pass. In the modern age, this conundrum has sparked a whole industry analyzing our library of written historical sources.

In ancient Greece, however, from the dawn of the oral tradition which gave us the names of gods and heroes, down to the legendary deeds of mortals which gradually emerged from the rubble of Dark Age Greece along with a new alphabet, the convention of campfire listeners entranced by a travelling bard was to swallow this ‘mythistory’ whole, or risk committing impiety. In the case of the royal clan of ancient Macedon – the Temenids or Argeads, as they are alternatively known (depending upon which founding myth they are linked to) – there lies an additional challenge: the nation’s warlord kings willingly fused this paradox together. And there was no greater alchemist of history than Alexander the Great.

Alexander’s lineage was the perfect storm for not just sweeping aside the status quo (his father had already seen to that), but for bridging the growing divide between an ever-more rationalized present (largely thanks to his tutor, Aristotle) and the mythopoeic past (thanks to the epics of Homer). Alexander made sure that his story would forever be more enduring than a mortal lifespan, and less challengeable than fact, and his brilliantly talented entourage had everything to gain from this new apotheosis.

Today, historians are faced with the unique task of unravelling the many faces of the campaigning king: the sensitive adolescent, the ruthless warlord, the classically educated monarch and the oriental Great King-cum-Pharaoh whose legend metamorphosed into romance in the chaos of the Hellenistic world he fathered. Consequently, the age-old question remains: how do we divide Alexander’s biographical pie into the correctly characterized proportions? The answer lies in the ancient sources: that knotted and frayed ball of historically intertwined string.

Interest in the emotional language and source fidelity of the life and times of Alexander was rekindled in the Renaissance when already-ancient manuscripts, discovered lying in damp scriptoriums where they had been forgotten for centuries or ferried West in haste away from the Ottoman threat, were mined for wisdoms of old. But this process of enlightenment, unfortunately, saw a proliferation of new deceits (see chapter 9). Since then, and sped along by new forensic techniques in historiography developed over the last two centuries, classical scholars – and philologists in particular – have dedicated themselves to separating the ‘historical’ out of the total written evidence contained in classical literature. The quest has solicited contemplations from some of the greatest minds of the ages: the philosophers, priests, politicians, antiquarians and polymaths attempting to unlock the gates of the past. Many concluded that duplicity of one kind or another, subtle or overt, is endemic to the narrating of ‘history’, so that falsifications and the forensic method to unravel them competed on every page. A most fertile weapons testing ground remains the life of Alexander.

No modern scholar could complain that we had not been provided with fair warning. Two thousand years ago, the Roman geographer Strabo (ca. 64 BC–AD 24) voiced his concern by writing that ‘all who wrote about Alexander preferred the marvellous to the true’. Even the Stoic soldier-historian Arrian (ca. AD 86–160), a great Alexander admirer who used ‘court sources’ to obtain ‘reliable’ detail, could not help but voice his frustration: ‘no one else has been the subject of so many writers with such discrepancy between them.’ He therefore attempted to set the record straight, as he saw it anyway, or wished it to be seen.

The eloquent observer of human character Plutarch (ca. AD 46–120), a voracious collector of detail who named twenty-four sources when profiling Alexander, provided a more general, sobering warning on earlier source material:

So very difficult a matter is it to trace and find out the truth of anything by history, when, on the one hand, those who afterwards write it find long periods of time intercepting their view, and, on the other hand, the contemporary records of any actions and lives, partly through envy and ill-will, partly through favour and flattery, pervert and distort truth.2

Their frustrations could be directed to the wider history of Alexander’s family line, because fundamental to any understanding of his reign is the twenty-three-year rule of his extraordinary father, Philip II, and the first twenty-three years of warfare between his equally remarkable successors who fought for a chunk of the vast Macedonian-governed empire in the post-Alexander years.3 And yet in few such momentous periods of history has so much had to be extracted from so few scattered and time-ravaged dots: the eyewitness sources for the reigns of both Philip and Alexander have all been lost, save lonely snippets, and the regal and bloody rivalries of the Hellenistic era (popularly defined as the years from Alexander’s death in 323 BC to the Battle of Actium in 31 BC) was brutal for manuscripts documenting the period immediately after.

In the case of Alexander’s reign, we are reliant on five mainstream gap-ridden biographies whose authors represent an eclectic mix of social and ethnic backgrounds: an aristocratic Greek (Plutarch), a Romanized Gaul (Pompeius Trogus, late first century BC; his account survives in an epitome by Justin, likely from the third century AD), an obscure Greek-Sicilian (Diodorus, published between 60 and 30 BC), a Romanized Bithynian commander (Arrian) and a politically connected Roman (Curtius, publication date unknown but likely mid-first century AD). Each wrote under the scrutiny of a Rome which was rapidly swallowing the Macedonian-ruled territories. I refer to these as the ‘mainstream’ accounts to separate them from the sources we attach to ‘romance’.

Written from the distance of some 300–450 years after the events they narrated, these texts were compiled from a corpus of earlier sources, some eyewitness and others penned a generation later, including the influential account of the Alexandrian-based Cleitarchus, who seems to have spawned the genre we refer to as ‘Vulgate’ due to its popularity in Rome (embodied in the accounts of Diodorus, Trogus via Justin and Curtius). Apart from surviving fragments, all of this earlier material has been lost. Indeed, without the infrequent references to these archetypal sources which are strewn sparingly across the classical library, the parental Alexander historians would otherwise be unknown, and many must still lie buried in unmarked graves.

Scholars can additionally call on an infamous collection of fragments (few of which provide useful campaign or biographical detail) from an assemblage of ancient writers who framed Alexander in the prevailing philosophical doctrine and state propaganda of their day, heavily garnished with rhetoric; these politicians, antiquarians and orators were above all promoting their own literary careers by using Alexander as a platform for their art.

Thanks to the ground-breaking forensic work undertaken through the 1800s and 1900s, today’s scholars can identify almost 400 fragments directly relating to Alexander from some thirty ‘lost’ writers, whose works ranged from serious biography to propaganda pamphlets, by the ‘good, sound and important’ and ‘the world’s greatest liars’; paradoxically, those traits often combine in the same source.4

But naming the narrator behind them is often problematic; after historians had sifted through the entries to divide the truly original reporting from regurgitated testimonia, many were deemed paraphrases while others have been labelled ‘spuriously assigned’.

It might seem logical to expect a linear deterioration in the accuracy and detail of this material through time, and it would be reasonable to suppose that the most lamentable losses will always be those compiled by Alexander’s senior staff. These eyewitnesses – including Ptolemy, Aristobulus, Nearchus, Onesicritus, Callisthenes, Eumenes and Chares – we define as the ‘primary’ or ‘court’ sources, who, as the title suggests, frequented the king’s palace or campaign headquarters, and even the king’s secretariat where the Royal Diaries were compiled. Yet to assume that a corruption of the truth was magnified by time would be a mistake, because evidence suggests that the magnet of political ambition and the realities of survival in a world torn apart by rivalries – along with the powerful hand of sponsorship that any publication would have required – perniciously drew fabrication, omission, exaggeration and agenda into the first-generation texts. Alexander’s successors were, after all, at war. Not too far behind them chronologically, there emerged the Greek Alexander Romance, one of the world’s most-widely read books of fables, which was inspired by and fed off the most embellished campaign accounts.

Today, we employ advanced historiographical methodologies to help us frisk the sources for weapons of deceit. Studies have become multi-disciplined processes in which papyrology, palaeography, linguistic palaeontology, osteoarchaeology, codicology, iconography, numismatics, epigraphy and even space-archaeology are being brought to bear on the evidence. Papyri and parchment palimpsests (reused scrolls or book pages) are undergoing multi-spectral imaging, and ancient bones and tomb materials are subject to DNA, stable isotope and radiocarbon dating tests. The surviving (or ‘extant’) written histories have always been just one part of a wider story, and their interpretation, unfortunately, has been open to modern bias – history is, after all, interpretation, not fact. Just as we need to tread carefully when listening to the ancient sources, care is also needed with the contemporary ear: ‘cherish those who seek the truth, but beware of those who find it’.5

This investigation into the sources who gave us Alexander follows my own journey into an ocean of anecdotes, testimony and propaganda in which the tides of scholarly opinion ebb and flow. Anyone delving into these murky waters soon realizes just how frail are the facts behind the life of the man dubbed ‘the Great’ sometime in the late Hellenistic era.6 Moreover, when sources are analyzed impartially, there appears evidence that those who did know him – the eyewitness historians who campaigned beside him – had much invested in keeping it that way.

The history of Alexander is a vexatious interweaving of history, personal politics, reinvention and fable, swinging like ship-wreckers’ lanterns beckoning historians to perilous harbours of deduction. Many a modern reader has been lost on the rocks this way.

‘History is a bag of tricks we play upon the dead,’

remarked the cynical Voltaire.

To which I propose:

‘On the contrary, history is a bag of tricks

the dead have played upon historians.’

The author

Chapter 2

Primary Sources: Eyewitnesses at War

So, we see that even the most trustworthy writers, men who were

actually with Alexander at the time have given conflicting accounts of

notorious events with which they must have been perfectly familiar.1

Arrian, The Campaigns of Alexander

To understand how it all began, we need to start at the beginning, with the eyewitnesses who accompanied Alexander on campaign across the Persian Empire from 334–323 BC and subsequently published their accounts.

These men were a select and privileged few, most of whom were not, in fact, trained historians or writers. There was also a band of fawning poets and courtiers who followed their king to lands few Europeans had ever seen, where they witnessed or partook in warfare on a scale history has rarely imagined. After that life-changing decade on the march, they were inspired to record what they saw and eventually fought among themselves, figuratively or literally. It is no surprise that their output acknowledged few literary restraints or rules of reputational engagement, and that they showed little hesitation in criticizing their literary counterparts for the sake of self-promotion or to hamstring a rival. Yet their recollections became the stock for every biographical stew served up in the 500 years that followed, when Rome co-opted Alexander’s story into its own imperial growing pains.

We start with an eyewitness whose deserving credentials put him at the head of the epitaphic list: he was both the first to write and the first to die as a result of what he saw.

Callisthenes of Olynthus

Callisthenes, the son of Demotimus of Olynthus, was the first to put pen to ink in Alexander’s name. He was appointed by Alexander as what amounted to ‘official’ campaign historian, most likely through the influence of his relative, Aristotle, who reputedly warned his protégé on his indiscreet tongue. There was reportedly a further motive for Callisthenes joining the Macedonian adventure: to convince Alexander to resettle his native city, Olynthus, destroyed by Philip II in 348 BC for its part in sheltering his half-brothers, who would have challenged him for the throne.2 Callisthenes was actually following Aristotle’s lead with this request, for he had likewise petitioned Philip to restore his birthplace, Stagira, destroyed in the same year when Macedonian forces annexed the Chalcidian Peninsula.3

Before the army set off, Callisthenes, along with another campaign philosopher Anaxarchus (ca. 380–320 BC), annotated Aristotle’s copy of Homer’s Iliad (known as the ‘Recension of the Casket’), an editing possibly spurred by Aristotle...

Índice

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Content
• Author’s Foreword
• Publisher’s Note
• Chapter 1: Introduction: ‘Study the Historian before you Study the History’
• Chapter 2: Primary Sources: Eyewitnesses at War
• Chapter 3: The Funeral Games Historian
• Chapter 4: The Alexandrian Monopoly
• Chapter 5: Secondary Sources: the Roman Alexander
• Chapter 6: The Greek Alexander Romance: Truth and Legend as One
• Chapter 7: Birth and Death: Nature’s Cracked Mirror
• Chapter 8: Illegitimate Sons, Rogue Wives, Forgotten Bastards and Courtesans
• Chapter 9: Forgery, Philology and Meddlesome Morphology: Battle on Papyrus
• Chapter 10: Mystery Historian, Mystery Agenda
• Chapter 11: Through the Cyclical Looking Glass
• Bibliography
• Notes