In search of the Lost testament of Alexander the great

‘A man, he shunned humanity; it seemed A trifle to stand highest among mortals.’²

‘… the gods and heroes begrudge that a single man in his godless pride should be king of Hellas and Asia, too.’³

Babylon, mid-June 323 BCE, the ‘gateway of the gods’; an ancient city already two millennia old and which, according to legend, was founded by the Mesopotamian deity, Marduk.⁴ This was now the Macedonian campaign capital and the staging point for the planned expeditions to Arabia and westward to the Pillars of Heracles. Inside the lofty baked-brick and bitumen-bound walls, the city had become a hive of activity with trepidatious envoys arriving from nations across the known world, those conquered and those expecting to be.⁵ Prostrated in the Summer Palace of Nebuchadnezzar II on the east bank of the Euphrates, wracked by fever and having barely survived another night, King Alexander III, the ruler of Macedonia for twelve years and seven months, had his senior officers congregate at his bedside.⁶ Abandoned by Tyche who governed fortune, and the healing god Asclepius, he finally acknowledged he was dying.⁷

Growing fear and uncertainty filled the portent-laden air. Priests interpreted omens, livers and entrails as whispered intrigues and newly divulged ambitions filled heavy sweat-soaked nights. Life signs were tenuous; the king’s breathing was almost imperceptible. Finally, Alexander, born under the watch of two eagles that signified two great empires, and birthed from a womb sealed with the image of a lion,⁸ was publicly pronounced dead and the prophecy of the Chaldean seers came to pass.⁹

The ancient city founded over 1,000 years before the legendary fall of Troy was a fitting stage for the death of the king who had conquered the empire of the Persian Great Kings and vanquished their progeny, for Alexander had married daughters of both Darius III (king 336-330 BCE) and Artaxerxes III Ochus (king 359/358-338 BCE). The backdrop was no mud-brick town in the eastern regions the Greeks loosely termed ‘India’, or windswept pass in the upper satrapy of Bactria, or, as the Greek historian Plutarch put it, ‘that nameless village in a foreign land must needs have become the tomb of Alexander’, but the greatest opulence the world had to offer.10 It was appropriately theatrical and it was uniquely ‘Alexander’ and yet the reporting is wholly unconvincing as a conclusion to his story. Alexander’s final days should have provided us with the rich and colourful imagery we read in the campaign accounts, for by mid-summer 323 BCE, warships, grain ships, pack animals, cavalry mounts and Indian elephants were being prepared for a new Arabian expedition, while the citadel guarding wealth the Greeks had never imagined was being mined for funds to pay what had become a multinational army.

Gossiping eunuchs, concubines and wives frequented the Summer Palace of Nebuchadnezzar II (Naboukhodonosor to the Greeks, reigned ca. 605-562 BCE). Bodyguards, physicians, slaves, scribes, cooks, tasters and royal pages filed through anterooms filled with waiting ambassadors who brought dispatches from distant lands at the borders of the known world. According to Plutarch, the palace was now full of ‘soothsayers (magoi), seers (manteis), sacrificers, purifiers (kathartai) and prognosticators’; by-products of the king’s late obsession with death-harbouring portents.¹¹ As events had already shown on more than one occasion, it was the seers and doctors, fearful of providing inaccurate divinations or ineffective prognoses, who had the most to lose: their lives.¹² So no doubt spells (epoidai) and incantations (epagogai) had been covertly cast as complex fears and political intrigues manifested themselves in dark corridors as Alexander’s health continued to deteriorate. Indeed, the surviving texts ought to have replicated the drama captured in the final chapter of the Cyropaedia of Xenophon (ca. 430-354 BCE), the vivid and laudatory portrayal of the former Persian Great King.¹³

Cyrus the Great (reigned 559-530 BCE) becomes significant to our case, for Alexander inherited the Achaemenid Empire he had founded and he appears to have become an admirer. The Cyropaedia, which can be broadly translated as ‘the education of Cyrus’, laid out the perfect death for a king of kings.¹⁴ Surrounded by the loved and faithful, Cyrus distributed his kingdom to his two sons, making sure no ambiguity or conflict would arise. According to Xenophon, both he and Darius I left enduring traditions that included oral testaments and farewell speeches of enlightened and benevolent words. They rounded off careers that had already become immortal, and Cyrus’ ended his with: ‘Now I must leave instructions about my kingdom, that there may be no dispute among you after my death.’¹⁵ Although Cyrus’ final hours were, in fact, the encomiastic overlay of a Greek historian, Alexander had about him all that was required to do the same, along with a prolonged illness that provided sufficient time. According to the surviving mainstream accounts, he failed in every respect, even when, as one tradition claims, he was being pressed by his generals to announce a successor. We are left wondering what truly took place at Babylon, and who Alexander had become, for it is not only accounts of his death that conflict, but opinions of his life.

One of the leitmotifs of Alexander’s story is his belief in his own divine and heroic origins. Yet he also had mortals to emulate and one of them was Cyrus the Great. Two centuries before him – tradition suggests October 29^th 539 BCE – Cyrus stood on the steps of the ziggurat of Etemenanki, the ‘Cornerstone of the Universe’, and dedicated to the god Marduk in his newly conquered Babylon.¹⁷ Rejecting the slavery and loot which was his by Victor’s Justice, he purportedly made an address which is widely regarded as the first charter of human rights. In 1879 a clay cylinder was unearthed at Babylon and it recorded the complete address previously known to us only from the biblical references in the Book of Ezra, chapter one. A copy of the so-called Cyrus Cylinder now sits in the halls of the United Nations Secretariat Building in New York.¹⁸

Portrayed as politically astute, in the first years of the campaign at least, Alexander III chose to emulate Cyrus when in 333 BCE he too entered Babylon for the first time via the ancient Processional Way having just defeated Darius III. He respected personal freedoms as well as local religious rights, and surviving cuneiform inscriptions found in the city’s astronomical diaries captured a part of the declaration: ‘Into your houses I shall not enter.’¹⁹ Alexander even sought to repair the Esagila Temple whose golden statue had been melted down by Xerxes upon his hasty return from Greece following defeat at Plataea in 479 BCE, a battle whose aftermath saw Greeks conducting annual sacrifices to their dead in Plutarch’s day, some 600 years on.²⁰ This, along with the adoption of Persian customs and his inheriting a still largely unified Persian Empire, had led some modern commentators to even refer to Alexander as ‘the last of the Achaemenids’.²¹

In his Prior Analytics Aristotle proposed that it is possible to deduce a person’s character from their physical appearance, though the contradictions found in the descriptions of Alexander render any conclusion suitably ambiguous.²³ We are told that though he was of average height, he was striking and menacing even, with a melting glance of the eyes. His breath and skin, according to the Memoirs of Aristoxenus of Tarentum (a pupil of Aristotle), exuded a sweet odour, but they were the by-products of his hot and fiery temperament, so his contemporary, Theophrastus (ca. 378-320 BCE), believed. His voice was described as harsh yet also femininely high-pitched; he sported a gold leonine-mane with anastole in the heroic style, but he chose to remain beardless; this became a new vogue for him and his men.²⁴ Alexander appears to have been heterochromatic, with one pupil black and the other grey, and his widely reported neck tilt suggests torticollis (wry neck). His teeth were asserted to be sharp and pointed like those of a snake, but this comes from the Greek Alexander Romance with its many serpent associations.

Clearly, many of the descriptions, like other detail relating to his life, come down to us from the Roman era and from anonymous, dubious and romanticised sources with little court authentication.25 Yet it is not Alexander’s physiognomy but his character and mindset that remain the more elusive, despite the best attempts of Quellenforschung to unmask the man behind the rhetorical veil. Modern historians soon discovered they lacked the vocabulary to cope with him, and word hybrids like verschmelzungspolitik appeared to describe what some have romantically believed was his ‘policy of racial fusion’.²⁶ So perhaps we should try and appreciate how Alexander III originally viewed himself in the light of his unique and privileged, though hazardous, Macedonian heritage and upbringing.

Some modern scholars accept that the origins of the ethnic, Makedones, approximated ‘men from the highlands’ or even ‘high-grown men’, though the ancient authors that shepherded Greece out of the Dark Ages proposed a more colourful, though conflicting, genesis.²⁷ Hesiod’s Theogonia (likely 7^th century BCE) and the Catalogue of Women, a supposed continuation that was attributed to him in antiquity, were cosmogonies that provided the archetype of mythical genealogical claims, though they made little of nationalist distinctions and some of this early material was even influenced by the religious doctrine of Babylonia and Mesopotamia, including the Epic of Gilgamesh.

In Hesiod’s legends (and those attached to him) the origins of tribal Greece and Macedonia started with Deucalion who bore a son, Hellen, from whom the ‘Hellenes’ were derived. He in turn bore three sons who became the founders of eponymous tribes: Aeolus, Dorus, and Xuthus who bore Ion and (according to other writers) Achaeus. By Zeus, Deucalion’s daughter, Thyla, produced two sons, Magnes, and Macedon who ‘rejoiced in horses’; Magnes journeyed south into Thessaly and Macedon remained in the region of Mount Olympus and Pieria, the heartland of what was once Emathia, the ‘prehistoric name for the cradle of the Macedonian kingdom’. A fragment of the Makedonika of Marsyas of Pella (broadly contemporary with Alexander) informs us that it was the two sons of Macedon, Amathus and Pieria, who became the eponymous founders of these two regions.²⁸

But whether Alexander considered himself ‘Macedonian’ in the tribal sense of the word is open to question; he was in any case half-Epirote through his mother, and he likely embraced a more Aristotelian definition of identity approaching ‘to Hellenikon’. To Herodotus (ca. 484-425 BCE) the ‘Hellenes’ were a people bound together by blood, speech, religion and a common mode of living. Of course if your tribe was lucky enough to appear on Homer’s Catalogue of Ships which listed the assailant fleet to Troy, then your ‘Greekness’ – or allegiance to Hellas at least – was beyond question, though the Iliad appears to have portrayed the Trojans as Greek-speaking as well.²⁹

As with all else he touched, Alexander’s teacher, Aristotle, attempted to bring some rationalisation to the ‘pre-history’ of Greece after the fall of Mycenaean civilisation; he described ‘ancient Hellas’ as being occupied by Selloi (Zeus’ priests, likely an alternative of Helloi) and Graikoi, who later became known as the homogenised to koinon ton Hellenon, which we might loosely term a ‘Hellenic commonwealth’.³³ The Periegetes Hellados of Pausanias (ca. 110-180 CE), his unique Guide to Greece (though a Greece whose northern boundary was the pass at Thermopylae) in the form of a straight-talking guide interwoven with the history, architecture and ancient Greek myths, mentioned that an inscription by Echembrotus dating to the 48^th Olympiad (584 BCE) employed the term ‘Hellenes’ in a dedication to Heracles at the Amphictionic Games.³⁴ A similar dedication at Delphi celebrating victory over Persia credited another Pausanias as the leading general of this ethnic group; it was a unity further endorsed at the fourth Panhellenic Games in which ‘non-Hellenes’ could not participate in any of the disciplines.

Plato (ca. 428-348 BCE) believed the most ‘Greek of the Greeks’ were the Athenians, and in the dialogue of the Menexenus (attributed to him), Aspasia, the mistress of the Athenian statesman Pericles, (ca. 495-429 BCE) proposed only Athenians were pure and free from barbarian blood.³⁵ According to Herodotus, Athenians (and other pre ‘pre-Hellenised’ tribes) were once Pelasgians, arriving through migration, or the autochthonic inhabitants.³⁶

A fragmented synoikismos (synoecism) – a population amalgam – existed through the Helladic period and Greek Dark Ages (ca. 1100-850 BCE) before the city-state culture of the Archaic period (ca. 800-480 BCE), and it resulted in a dioikismos of independent communities in which symbola, the rudimentary agreements between pairs of states, nevertheless, provided a basis for trade and law between the ethnic groups.³⁹ Tribal identity was then far more relevant than today’s homogenised terms, possibly because linguistic palaeontology does provide overwhelming evidence of a ‘pre-Greek’ population inhabiting the region: the names Corinth (Korinthos), Knossos, Larissa, Samos, Mycenae (Mykenai) and Olympus even, are thought to be of pre-Hellenic construction. The name Cadmus (Kadmos), the legendary Phoenician founder of Thebes who introduced the alphabet into Greece, is also considered pre-Greek.⁴⁰

The Latin term Graecus and the land of Graecia developed later, perhaps from the Graikoi who assisted the citizens of Euboea to migrate to Cumae in Italy through Epirus in the 8th century BCE; they were from the ancient city of Graia linked to Tanagraia, the daughter of Asopus (and so to the eponymous city of Tanagra and to Oropus), by Hesiod, Homer, Aristotle and Pausanias after them. According to Aristotle and the Parian Chronicle it was the Graikoi who were the renamed Hellenes, though early attachments still restricted them to Epirus and the Dodona region and its Homeric links to the age of Odysseus and Achilles. Hesiod referred to this region as Hellopia and Stephanus of Byzantium later named Graikos as the son of Thessalus the woodcutter who was first shown the shrine at Dodona dedicated to the cult of Zeus Naos.⁴¹

In time, the Romans, whose early continuous contact was likely with northwestern Greece, came to term Hellenes (now meaning all Greeks) Graeci.⁴² In return, the Greeks were partly responsible for the widening use of the appellation Italia; it stemmed from the Latin for ‘land of calves’ or ‘cattle’ (calf, vitulus), thus Vitalia. Lacking a ‘v’ in their alphabet, the Greeks in southern Italy settled on a name that spread north from Calabria and was eventually adopted by Rome itself. Some 600 years on from Alexander’s day, both the Greeks and the Italians of the Eastern Roman Empire were to become grouped together as the Rhomaioi, Romhellenes and the Graecoromans of a new Byzantine Empire.

The ‘closed world’ of some 750-1,000 introspective and independent mainland Greek poleis, city-states (originally ‘strongholds’), had acted as a natural buffer to the integration of barbarians and to the concept of national monarchy as well, unlike the development of Greece’s northern neighbours.⁴⁵ But the need for foreign commodities meant a polis could never remain totally isolated, thus the appearance of 300 or so Greek settlements overseas where they had to live side-by-side with the indigenous population and probably developed a less xenophobic attitude as a result.

The Greeks, and later the Romans, repeatedly referred to all northern barbarian tribes (including the Goths) as ‘Scythians’ or ‘Thracians’.⁴⁶ Thucydides considered the Acarnanians, Aetolians, Epirotes – the northern Greek tribes – and Upper Macedonians (more akin to the ethne of the Epirotes, thus Molossic) as barbarians, though he did distinguish ‘proper Macedonians’ (the ‘Lower Macedonians’) from the Balkan tribes to the north (as did Ephorus of Cyme ca. 405-330 BCE); it was these upper cantons (including Paeonia, Pelagonia, Lyncestis, Orestis, Eordaea, Elimea, Tymphaea and Almopia) that Alexander’s father, Philip II, effectively absorbed into a ‘greater Macedonia’.⁴⁷ Polybius (ca. 200-118 BCE), who once implied the Romans were a tribe of barbaroi as part of a (long) rebuttal to his forerunner, the historian Timaeus (ca. 345-250 BCE), provided a more nuanced distinction of ethnicity, and it appears that by his day (the 2^nd century BCE) the widespread use of Hellenistic koine (a dialect) had begun to break down the ancient divides.⁴⁸

Defying the older Homeric-era definitions, Alexander may indeed have been an original kosmopolites, a self-declared ‘citizen of the world’, a term that first became attached to Diogenes the Cynic who he famously met in Corinth. For political purposes Alexander might have presented himself as philhellenos, the cognomen taken by his Temenid predecessor, King Alexander I (ruled ca. 498-454 BCE), though the titles Proxenos and Euergetes (‘guest-friend’ and ‘benefactor’) granted by Athens to King Archelaus I (ruled Macedonia 413-399 BCE, his name broadly meaning ‘leader of men’), were hardly likely to have come Alexander’s way now that Greece was garrisoned.⁴⁹ Macedonia itself had been infused with foreign settlers through tribal and city state migrations and the displacement of war: when Mycenae was destroyed by Argos, over half the population relocated to Macedonia on the invitation of Alexander I.⁵⁰ Justin summed up Philip II’s own empire forging and repopulating in more recent times:

If, as a result, Alexander’s view on ethne was even something more eclectic that defied autochthonous norms, it was his ancestral Greek origins that would have rooted him in a distinct cultural upbringing with its vow to excellence and a particular honour code that backboned the Homeric sagas.

But there remains an ongoing philological contention over the original language of the Macedonians, and this stems in part from dialogues within the Alexander histories. As far as Thucydides was concerned, the region had previously been culturally backward (‘a majority of unwalled villages federated into ethne’) and probably linguistically distinct from the population to the south that spoke the more refined Attikoi (Attic) dialect of Greece.⁵² This is backed up by Curtius’ description of the trial of Philotas, the son of Alexander’s prominent general, Parmenio, for it suggested ‘legal’ procedures were conducted in a tongue (or dialect at least) distinct from the Greek that Alexander’s top echelons apparently spoke.53 Philotas replied that he wished to use the language Alexander had adopted (aedem lingua), rather than the patrius sermo that Curtius’ Latin text referred to, in order that the greatest number of soldiers could understand his defence; the ‘mother tongue’, Philotas stated, had become obsolete because of the wider dialogue with foreign nations. As Edward Anson concluded, Philotas’ practical retort indicates the Macedonians could understand Attic Greek more easily than Greeks could grasp Macedonian.⁵⁴ The common ‘adopted’ dialect being referred to (aedem lingua) was most likely akin to Hellenistic koine (which became known as ‘Macedonian’ Greek) rather than Attic Greek, for the Ionic dialect (with perhaps an admix of others) which was later infiltrated by Macedonian, was the basis of the lingua franca prevalent in much of the early Hellenistic world.⁵⁵

Plutarch believed that in cases of extreme emergency Alexander did beckon his Bodyguards in makedonisti, so ‘in the Macedonian tongue’.⁵⁶ The contention is backed up by a fragment found at Oxyrhynchus (Egypt) by archaeologist Annibale Evaristo Breccia in 1932; it described the clash between Eumenes of Cardia (the former royal secretary, now a governor and general in the post-Alexander world) and the Molossian noble, Neoptolemus, in the early Successor Wars during which Xennias, ‘a man of Macedonian speech’, was sent out to intimidate the opposing ranks.⁵⁷ Of course the claim may have been made by a historian emphasising Eumenes’ Greek disadvantage, and the historian Hieronymus, his client, cannot be discounted as the architect of that. We have a similar anomaly in Plutarch’s Life of Eumenes when the Macedones were portrayed as saluting their fever-ridden general: ‘… they hailed him at once in their Macedonian speech, caught up their shields, beat upon them with their spears, and raised their battle-cry…’⁵⁸

But noting statements from the Roman chronicler Livy (64/59 BCE-17 CE) and earlier from Herodotus that Greeks and Macedonians shared a common tongue, and with scant references in the texts to makedonizein, ‘to speak Macedonian’, scholars remain split on the case for a national language. A middle ground concludes that the Upper Macedonia cantons to the north and west, which Hatzopoulos terms ‘the cradle of the Macedonian ethnos’, were linguistically distinct from the Lower Macedonian heartlands, the flat fertile plain bordering the Thermaic Gulf, which included Bottiaea (possibly settled by Cretans in the Late Bronze Age ca. 1300 BCE) and Pieria.⁵⁹ The upper cantons had perhaps adopted the harsh Doric of northwest Greece as suggested by the Pellan Curse Tablet.⁶⁰

The graves unearthed at Vergina dating back to the 5^th century BCE indicate inhabitants had certainly adopted Hellenic names by then; of the 6,300 inscriptions found in the former state borders, ninety-nine per cent were written in Greek. In contrast, Hatzopoulos notes that ‘a relatively high percentage of the names attested in the neighbouring lands conquered after 479 BCE are of pre-Greek origin’; this suggests the vanquished were not immediately displaced and for a time retained their ethnicity.⁶² But there can be no doubt that Macedonia, though regionally discrete and perhaps tribally distinct, was by the 5th century BCE certainly a part of the Greek cultural milieu,⁶³ by which point it is likely that foreign policy and out-of-state business was conducted in Attic Greek, though Attic Greek, in turn, would be infiltrated by elements of Macedonian in time.⁶⁴

If we need any proof that the reform-minded Macedonian monarchs like Alexander I, Perdiccas II (reigned ca. 448-413 BCE) and Archelaus I were modelling their cultural sophistication on Greece, we only have to recall that the great tragedian Euripides, Hippocrates of Kos (ca. 460-370 BCE) the ‘father of western medicine’, the revered Pindar of Thebes (ca. 518-433 BCE), the dithyrambic poet Melanippides and Bacchylides the lyric poet, Choerilus the epic poet and Agathon the tragic poet along with his lover Pausanias, were all invited to stay at the royal court at Aegae or at the new capital at Pella. So was the musician Timotheus, alongside Zeuxis who captured life on canvas like none before him, and the historian Hellanicus of Mytilene who as colourfully captured lives on parchment.⁶⁵

Foreign hetairoi (high-ranking court friends) were given substantial tracts of land in Macedonia and many ended up drinking at symposia, the banquets (komoi or deipnoi) typical of the Macedonian court.⁶⁶ Guests typically relaxed on the Greek-styled couch, the kline, and famously downed their wine neat, akratos, and judging from the outcomes they consumed more than the Spartans’ daily ration of two kontylae per soldier which had helped to wash down their notorious melas zoomos, Sparta’s black bean soup (with boiled pork, blood and vinegar) that Leonidas, Alexander’s stricter teacher, might well have introduced him to as a youth.⁶⁷

Herodotus is thought to have ‘stayed with the king of the Macedonians in the time of Euripides and Sophocles’ (ca. 480 and 497-406 BCE respectively), whilst Aristotle’s own father, Nicomachus, had been a state doctor to Amyntas III (reigned 393/392-370 BCE), the father of Philip II.68 Although Socrates (ca. 470-399 BCE) is said to have declined an invitation to the state, Euphraus, the philosophising student of Plato, visited and taught at the court of Perdiccas III, Philip’s older brother; it was, in fact, Euphraus who advised Perdiccas to give the teenage Philip II a district to cut his teeth in governance.

The Greek comedy playwrights of the period made references to the lavish Macedonian court banquets and weddings that were the envy of the Athenians. Actors, such as the celebrated Neoptolemus and Philocrates were even sent as diplomats to Philip, so aware were they of his philanthropia to performers; in this particular case, as a precursor to what is now termed the ‘Peace of Philocrates’ of 346 BCE, the anti-Macedonian Athenian orator Demosthenes accused the hypocrites (actor) Neoptolemus of ‘acting’ in the best interest of Philip rather than Athens. Opposing Demosthenes to the end of his career, the Macedonia-friendly orator Aeschines, also present as part of the embassy, was a former actor himself.⁶⁹

The emerging power of Macedonia had hardly gone unnoticed; Plato certainly took an interest and Thucydides appears to have been an admirer of the growing state (he owned property in the Strymon basin); the historians Theopompus and Anaximenes of Lampsacus (ca. 380-320 BCE), possibly encouraged by Isocrates, spent time at the Pellan court of Philip II, as, of course, did Aristotle who would uniquely influence his son; Aristotle’s student Theophrastus (who became an expert on plants) was to later advise on land reclamation nearby.⁷⁰ The Argead kings, if not quite ready to adopt the ‘people power’ of demokratia, had ambitions on becoming civilised in all other ways, especially now that the ‘Aegean façade’ of Lower Macedonia had integrated itself into the ‘international, economic, diplomatic and cultural world of its times’.⁷¹

This newly ‘united’ and monarchic Macedonia was a ‘sub-Homeric enclave’ in which citizens started adding Makedon to their names as a sign of a national identity, suggesting there existed an extraordinary legal homogeneity under the late Argead kings. This was something of a paradox to a still-fragmented Greek mainland, a state of affairs epitomised by the almost simultaneous call from Isocrates for Philip II to lead a ‘Panhellenic’ expedition against ‘barbarian’ Persia, and a reply from Demosthenes which rallied Athens to oppose the ‘barbarian’ Macedonian king.⁷²

Something of that paradox resurfaced in Alexander who was mentally fused to the past through syngeneia (kinship) and lineage to the heroes of Hellas and the venerated kings of antiquity: ‘For what is the worth of human life, unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history?’⁷³ He was acutely aware of being porphyrogennetos with an illustrious crossbreeding, and just as mindful of how that imagery could be exploited. ‘Alexander’ broadly translates as ‘repeller’ or ‘defender’ of men, and it was a name fit for cause.74 He appears to have genuinely believed in his alleged descent from heroes, and his training had been far more illustrious than the encyclios paideia, the general classical Greek education. The poems of the Trojan Epic Cycle became his Omphalos, or as Alexander liked to term them, his ‘campaign equipment’ or viaticum.⁷⁵ But surely the keenest blade in his Homeric arsenal was Odysseus’ declaration: ‘Let there be one ruler and one king!’⁷⁶

Alexander’s birth was heralded as divine. Hegesias the Magnesian (fl. ca. 300 BCE), founder of the ‘Asiatic style’ of composition, proposed that the great fire at Ephesus in 356 BCE could be explained on the basis that the goddess was absent from her temple attending his delivery, for the events had apparently coincided; Plutarch wasn’t impressed with the connection, terming it ‘a joke flat enough to have put out the fire’.⁷⁷ Yet Parmenio’s defeat of the Illyrians and Philip’s recent capture of Potidaea, along with the victory of his racehorse at the Olympic Games, made the day Philip heard that a son had been born to him, indeed seem rather auspicious.

Alexander’s mother, Olympias, initiated into the Dionysiac mysteries of the Clodones and Mimallones (the Maenads, ‘raving ones’, of Greece linked to Orpheus whose grave was located in Macedonia), was from the Molossian tribe of Epirus.⁷⁸ Through her, Alexander managed to claim Aeacid descent from Achilles, whose son, Neoptolemus (also known as Pyrrhus of the Pyrrhidae), according to legend, had once ruled the region.⁷⁹ Through him, and as popularised in the Andromache of Euripides who spent his final years in Macedonia, Alexander was also a descendant of Hector’s widow, the Trojan princess Andromache, who became Neoptolemus’ concubine and gave birth to Molossus, the founder of the eponymous Epirote tribe; the ancestry linked Alexander to both the attackers and defenders of Troy.⁸⁰ As a result, as Bosworth points out, he did not view Trojans as barbarians but as ‘Hellenes on Asian soil’, which rather underpins Homer’s own linguistic treatment of Priam’s men and Dardanus’ mythological roots. In Alexander’s invasion of Asia, the united blood of Achilles and Priam would finally campaign together.⁸¹

Arrian associated Alexander with the hero Perseus, the son of Zeus, and the father of both the Persian race and the Greek Dorians through Heracles; this helps explain the similarities between the Greek Succession Myth and the Babylonian equivalent, the Enûma Elis.⁸² From his reading of Herodotus, Alexander would have been aware that King Midas, adopted by the childless Gordias, and the founder of the Phrygian dynasty, was said to have emerged from a region of Macedonia though the Roman geographer, Strabo (literally, ‘squint-eyed’, 64/63 BCE-24 CE), thought the Phrygians, originally Bryges or Brigians, were a Thracian tribe. Midas’ wealth came from mining iron ore until he was expelled by the semi-mythical Caranus (‘Billy-goat’), ‘the founding father of Macedonia’ who in legend reigned ca. 808-778 BCE. The Gardens of Midas at the foot of Mount Bermion still carried his name in Alexander’s day.83 This dominant Phrygian tribe, which migrated across to Asia Minor (ca. 800 BCE, though claims dating to as early as 1200 BCE suggest they broke Hittite power), inhabited the early tombs at Aegae found under some 300 of the tumuli, and it is worth noting that in Euripides’ Helen the Trojans are referred to as ‘Phrygians’.⁸⁴

The opening lines of Plutarch’s biography additionally managed to trace Alexander’s descent (through the Heraclid line of his father) back to the ‘founding father’, Caranus, who originally hailed from Argos and invaded Macedonia ‘with a great multitude of Greeks’.⁸⁵ This enabled Alexander to trace his lineage to the Argive Heracleidae and back to Danaus and the Danaans who shipped to Troy, the heritage Isocrates had assigned to Philip.⁸⁶ Other Heraclids included the kings of Sparta and the Aleuadae dynasty of Larissa in Thessaly (Heracles’ supposed birthplace), and so by definition their relatives, care of their common forefather, Heracles Patroos.⁸⁷

Euripides, once described as ‘the first psychologist’, had a different idea altogether: to please his reform-minded host, he proposed it had been an earlier Archelaus, a son of Temenus, who anticipated the Temenids, encapsulating the new proposition in a play aptly named Archelaus.⁸⁸ Adding to the thickening founding fog was a parallel belief that the etymological roots of the Argeads lay in ‘Argives’ who were Dorians in Greek tradition, as this challenged the claims that the stemma actually derived from ‘Argaeus’ the son of King Perdiccas I, or, according to later writers, a son of Macedon.⁸⁹ Appian (ca. 95-165 CE), writing later from the safe distance of Roman Alexandria, more controversially claimed that the true origins of the name of the Macedonian royal clan might have stemmed from a far more rural Argos in the Macedonian canton of Orestis; if so, it had been expediently hidden beneath layers of court-sponsored propaganda.⁹⁰

Hellanicus of Mytilene, who also spent time at the Macedonian court (probably in the reign of Archelaus), positioned a Macednus (not Macedon) as the son of Aeolus, so from the direct line of Hellen with ancestry to the Aeolians and Dorians, thus firmly ‘Hellenic’; Herodotus, who treated geography and ethnology as one, supported the Dorian links and claimed that Alexander I, the first Argead to mint coins, had convinced the adjudicating hellanodikai, the official judges from Elis, of his Peloponnesian Argive roots so that he might compete in the Olympic Games; his entry resulted in victory in the furlong foot race ca. 495 BCE. It has been more recently suggested that the increasingly pro-Hellenic stance of the Macedonian court resulted in the kings adopting the Greek names conspicuously found on the Vergina graves.⁹¹

The first of Alexander’s own silver coins; a tetradrachm struck sometime between ca. 335-29 BCE. Minted in Pella, it still displays the laureate head of his father, Philip II. On the obverse is a nude youth holding a palm frond and reins on horseback with a kantharos (a deep double-handed drinking vessel) below. Images provided with the kind permission of the Classical Numismatic Group. Inc. www.cngcoins.com.

A late Alexander tetradrachm minted at Sardis, the well-guarded treasury, under its governor Menander ca. 324 BCE. It bears a head of Heracles wearing a lion skin, and Zeus Aetophoros (‘Eagle-bearer’) with a club is seated on the obverse.

Philip and Alexander had commissioned portraits and bronzes by Lysippus and Euphranor before the planned Persian campaign. The family statues Philip commissioned from Leochares and erected in chryselephantine (or possibly marble) in the circular Philippeion in the precinct of Zeus at Olympia suggest the early birth of the Argead public relations machine, as well as an attempt of reconciliation with a then alienated son and wife.⁹⁴ Epic lineages were ever sought after by kings and their court poets, but here the Argeads were creating a new Succession Myth, and as history was to show, they became every bit as brutal as the Titans from whom they professedly descended.95

Backed by this useful polytheism, these heritages implied a telegony in which their combined traits and bloodlines would converge and meet in a new demigod: Alexander himself. They gave him his entelekheia, the vital force that completed him and then compelled him to Persia in his father’s stead. Although heritages were clearly often fused, confused and conveniently manipulated, the one ancestor that Alexander was never able to comfortably integrate into his developing persona was his own father, Philip, murdered at Aegae when Alexander was aged twenty, for he had provided the legitimacy that Alexander needed, but not the identity he ultimately sought. And as a recent study concluded, once the memory of Philip began to develop into nostalgic myth, Alexander lost control over its subordination to him.⁹⁶

A reconstruction of ancient Olympia from Pierers Universal-Lexicon, 1891. The circular building in the left corner is the Philippeion housing the statues of Philip’s family.

There were both immediate and lingering rumours that Alexander had played a part in his father’s death, and they, in turn, were fuelled by Philip’s accusations of Olympias’ infidelity (so claimed Justin, who also stated that Philip divorced her – Arrian claimed he ‘rejected’ her), and that would have been tantamount to Philip disowning his son.⁹⁸ Badian went as far as suggesting the previous rift between the prince and king had resulted in Philip favouring Amyntas Perdicca, the son of his older brother, Perdiccas III, in the line of succession; Philip had ostensibly ‘managed’ Amyntas’ kingship due to his nephew’s youth and more recently he had married him to his daughter, Cynnane, Alexander’s half-sister.

All Macedonia was festering with revolt and looking toward Amyntas and the children of Aeropus; the Illyrians were again rebelling, and trouble with the Scythians was impending for their Macedonian neighbours, who were in the throes of political change; Persian gold flowed freely through the hands of the popular leaders everywhere, and helped to rouse the Peloponnese; Philip’s treasuries were bare of money, and in addition there was owing a loan of two hundred talents…¹⁰⁰

Along with ‘the accomplices in the murder’ who were summarily executed on Alexander’s orders ‘at the tumulus of Philip’, those upon whom regicidal suspicion fell (genuine or contrived) would have suffered a similar fate, either publicly, or behind the scenes.

Several events which took place in close succession contributed to the patricidal finger pointing: Philip had recently married Cleopatra, the young niece (Diodorus and Justin said ‘sister’) of the influential Macedonian baron, Attalus, who had prayed for a ‘legitimate heir’ from the union; that was a barbed reminder to Alexander, who apparently threw his goblet at him during the court banquet where the toast was made, that he was half Epirote, or indeed a product of Olympias’ infidelity.¹⁰¹ Philip had his sword drawn as he lurched drunkenly towards his unapologetic son who then called into question his father’s ability to lead the invasion of Asia. The incident precipitated the flight of Olympias to her home in Epirus, while Alexander journeyed to Illyria, probably to his friend and ally, the Agrianian king, Langarus. That is exactly where you would go to raise a hostile force to oust a Pellan king, for the Illyrians had managed exactly that before.¹⁰²

The teenage Cleopatra was now pregnant with Philip’s heir; she gave birth to a daughter, Europa, just days before Philip’s death and there was possibly an earlier son named Caranus; they were murdered by Olympias, probably with the blessing of Alexander (despite claims otherwise), within the year.¹⁰³ Moreover, at the time of the wedding of Philip and Cleopatra, Alexander had reached throne age, eighteen.

Justin painted a more hostile picture of court affairs: after the initial rift with Philip, Olympias urged her brother, Alexander Molossus, now the Epirote king, to declare war; it would have been an opportune moment with Philip’s most effective generals, Parmenio and Attalus (Cleopatra’s uncle), absent in Asia with a significant part of the royal army which was establishing a bridgehead for the invasion. At this point Alexander’s envoy, Thessalus, was to be found in Corinth potentially seeking military Greek support for the prince. Philip’s oikos (household) was clearly in trouble, and only the diplomacy of Demaratus of Corinth managed to reconcile father and a son who then became Master of the Royal Seal.¹⁰⁶

Astute as ever in a political crisis, Philip paired Alexander’s sister, Cleopatra, to Molossus to stave off any Epirote threat; he ‘disarmed him as a son-in-law’, as Justin put it.¹⁰⁷ Nevertheless, he sent Alexander’s philoi (closest court friends) including Ptolemy (the future Egyptian dynast), Nearchus, Laomedon and Harpalus (with his older brother Erygius) into exile. Those broadly coeval with Alexander were syntropoi (literally ‘those eating together’) who would later become the megistoi, the ‘great men’, who frequented his court. Staging the wedding would be the last performance of Philip’s twenty-three-year reign, for he was stabbed by Pausanias of Orestis upon entering the amphitheatre at Aegae.¹⁰⁸ The day signified Alexander’s arrival; it was perhaps even a day he orchestrated himself. Alexander took up the reins of power as keenly as he is said to have mounted his Thessalian warhorse, Bucephalus, and he and Olympias didn’t hesitate in executing the rivals for the throne, most likely along with their families and their political backers as well.¹⁰⁹

Pausanias was pursued by Alexander’s close court friends, Perdiccas and Leonnatus, and by the royal page Attalus, and was conveniently murdered before he could be questioned; the murderer and his pursuers were all from the canton of Orestis and both Perdiccas and Leonnatus became Alexander’s personal Bodyguards, Somatophylakes, on campaign.110 Pausanias had allegedly confronted Alexander with the same grievance he had previously taken to Philip – sexual assault – and he received, as Alexander’s reported reply, the line from Euripides’ Medea: ‘the giver of the bride, the bridegroom, and the bride’; it hinted of a triple murder in the making, and one that did come to pass (at Philip’s death, Alexander executed the ‘giver’, Attalus, and Olympias murdered the bride, Cleopatra). Justin claimed Olympias had arranged the getaway horses for the assassins.¹¹¹

Possibly to distance himself from any further implication of guilt, Alexander ‘took every possible care over the burial of his parent’ at a time when he needed all the support he could muster.¹¹² Within two years, and having ‘re-subdued’ Greece, Thrace and the Balkans, Alexander crossed the Hellespont (Hellespontos, ‘Sea of Helle’), today’s Dardanelles (named after Dardanus), in his father’s place, and he bolstered support for the invasion by claiming Philip’s assassins were backed by Persian gold. We will never know if Alexander fully dismantled the stigma of parricide, but an alleged oracular reply at Siwa some three years on, confirming all Philip’s killers had been punished, sounds suspiciously like a contrived vote on his own innocence, though it was peculiarly exonerating to the still-at-large Persian Great King as well.¹¹³

The two previous invasions of Greece by Persia under Darius I (ended 490 BCE) and his son Xerxes I (ended 480 BCE) had not been sudden appearances of Persian power and influence in Europe. Macedonia of the 6^th century BCE was, as Borza termed it, a ‘dependency of the Persian Empire’, after which the autonomous vassal kingdom was formally occupied as Darius’ forces under Mardonius spread west across the Hellespont in 492 BCE. The occupation and the tribute lasted until 479 BCE when Xerxes was forced to withdraw after three decades of Persian control which had nevertheless helped their client kings, Amyntas I, and then his son Alexander I, subjugate a hinterland that would become ‘Upper Macedonia’; also absorbed were lands to the west into an expanded Lower Macedonia.

Persian occupation left its mark on Macedonia and perhaps on Alexander III as well; the term ‘satrap’ we see in the campaign histories relating to Alexander’s regional governors, stemmed from the Achaemenid rule of an empire managed through client kings and officials who maintained the pax Persika. It has been proposed that the late Argead tradition of enrolling royal pages (paides basilikos, ‘informal hostage sons’ of the Upper Macedonian nobles), as well as the formal polygamy of the Argead (and Molossian) kings, who had their own military units of ‘friends’ (hetairoi), were also of Persian origin, and some commentators argue that the melophoroi, the golden apple-bearing Persian Immortals, were the inspiration behind the Macedonian agema of the hypaspists, the royal guard.¹¹⁷ Somatophylakes, the king’s personal Bodyguards, as well as chiliarchos, likened to post of the Achaemenid hazarapti (a second-in-command who also had administrative and diplomatic responsibilities like chief usher and the king’s intermediary with messengers) and reintroduced by Alexander (and occupied by his closest companion Hephaestion, and assumed by Perdiccas after him), were titles or roles adopted (or adapted) from the Persian courts, it is believed. Even the position of the king’s cupbearer had its origins with the Achaemenid kings.¹¹⁸

Compared to the ‘old guard’ command – the seasoned campaigners and infantry generals Alexander inherited from his father – the Bodyguards represented a class of relatively young equestrian aristocrats expected to adhere to the kalos kagathos of classical Greece, the Homeric-rooted code of virtue and honour.¹¹⁹ In fact the Homeric poems have been termed nothing less than the Bible of the Greeks containing ‘the germs of all Greek philosophy’.¹²⁰ Alexander’s Bodyguard corps emerged from the syntrophoi raised at the king’s court in Pella, the ‘city of stone’.¹²¹ If broadly coeval, they too would have been familiar with, or even educated with Alexander under the tutelage of Aristotle. Along with other trusted generals and leading landowners, they formed the noble ‘cavalry’ class of Macedonia, which attended the synedria, the gatherings of the king’s Privy Council and advisers. In the absence of what we might today term a ‘middle class’, Macedonian nobles commanded both the cavalry and the infantry battalions that were formed from tenant farmers and herders who responded to the king’s call, and who made up a professional standing army that first appeared under Philipp II.¹²²

It is no wonder, then, that the Greeks had tried to link the ancient East with their own mythology once they appreciated its greater antiquity; they accepted African and Asian origins for the ancestries established by Medea, Perseus and the Achaeans, which appears a paradoxical sociality considering their proud autochthonism.¹²⁴ Cadmus, Pelops, Danaos and Aegyptus all arrived in Greece from Asia and Egypt in the founding myths.¹²⁵ As Nietzsche put it, ‘… Their culture was for a long time a chaos of foreign forms and ideas – Semitic, Babylonian, Lydian and Egyptian – and their religion a battle of all the gods of the East…’ Xerxes had exploited just that when he too reminded Greece of the Persian-Perseus link when garnering Argive support for his pending invasion.¹²⁶

In Greek literature the term ‘Persian’ was employed loosely, as was its geographic and dynastic association. In the Alexander histories we see the Great King’s vassals referred to as Iranian, Asiatic and Oriental, as well as Median, beside Persian. Cyrus and Darius I were additionally termed kings of Assyria (often shortened to ‘Syria’ by Diodorus), the breadth of which might unite Assyrian Nineveh, Mesopotamia (Greek in origin, from mesos ‘middle’ and potamos ‘river’) and Babylonia. The ambiguity has caused much confusion for historians;¹²⁷ Herodotus and Xenophon used ‘Assyria’ when referring to regions as diverse as Anatolia to the Black Sea and the Aramaic Mesopotamian lands, where Curtius at times referred to the region of ‘Lydia’ in a manner that recalled the old kingdom of the expanded state, thus Asia Minor west of the Halys river.¹²⁸ Unable to untwine these knotted threads, we will defer to simply using ‘Persian’ when regional appellations and ethnographies remain less than well defined, and refer to their inhabitants as ‘Asiatic’ where their origins are mixed or contested.

Herodotus, faced with the task of combining ‘oriental dynasties with Greek genealogies in the first attempt at international chronology’,¹²⁹ and Ctesias, himself a physician to Great King Artaxerxes II (Artaxšaç^ā in Old Persian), argued over the conflicting traditions behind the Achaemenid dynasty founded by Cyrus I and which endured from 539 to 330 BCE, ending with Alexander’s defeat of Darius III. Originally named ‘Artashata’ in Persia and Kodommanos (Latinised, Codommanus) to the Greeks, ‘Darius’ originated as something approximating ‘Darayavaus of the haxamanisiya’ in Old Iranian. Yet the founder of the line, Achaemenes, was as mythical as Romulus, the legendary founder of Rome. Cyrus the Great was an Elamite described as half-Median – Xenophon confirmed his Median roots through Astyages and his Perseidae origins from Cambyses 130 – though ‘Cyrus’ is a Latinised-Greek derivative descended from Old Persian (Kūruš) with Elamite and Assyrian overtones, the meaning of which is still debated, though Plutarch claimed it was the Persian word for ‘sun’.¹³¹

The tombs at Naqsh-e Rustam (close to Persepolis), and that identified as Darius I’s, in particular, among other less-legible inscriptions at the necropolis, along with the relief at Behistun (Bastagana in Persian, ‘place of god’), are rich in multi-lingual engravings referring to the conquests of the Great Kings. Cuneiform syllabary often placed Elamite beside Akkadian as well as Old Persian – the languages that later transmuted into the more broadly used Parsi and written in Aramaic script.¹³² Like the bilingual and trilingual stone inscriptions of the Ptolemies, these provide us with ‘rosetta stones’ of rare linguistic clarity.¹³³

To the Persians the Hellenes were Yauna, Ionians, though it seems Yauna takabara specifically referred to Macedonians and possibly because of their distinctive felt hats, the traditional flat kausiai, that would now be seen across the empire as Alexander’s army marched east.¹³⁴

The 50 x 82 feet Behistun Inscription of Darius I carved sometime in his reign ca. 522-486 BCE. The multi-lingual texts in Old Persian, Elamite and Babylonian recorded Darius’ lineage and battles through the upheaval caused by the deaths of his predecessors, Cyrus the Great and his son, Cambyses.

‘Persuasion through words is not a characteristic of kings but of orators’,¹³⁷ and as early as 330 BCE, as Alexander ventured into the heart of the Persian Empire, Demosthenes’ On the Crown made a scathing declaration to Aeschines, the philomakedon, on the extent of Macedonian continued domination in Greece.¹³⁸ Having subdued Greece in the wake of his father’s death, Alexander was confirmed as hegemon (literally the ‘dominant one’), or in the military context, strategos autokrator, of the League of Corinth,¹³⁹ a federation which represented to koinon ton Hellenon, the community of Greeks and their Defenders of the Peace. He inherited two seats on the Amphictionic Council and life archonship of the Thessalian League, as Philip had before him, deftly holding measuring scales in one hand and a dagger in the other, like Themis and her divine justice.¹⁴⁰ For the Macedonian court at Pella was ‘freeing’ Greece from the Persian yoke and yet holding the sword of Damocles over the kyria ekklesia, the treasured assembly meeting that kept Athenian demokratia (literally ‘people power’) alive and vocal from the Pnyx.¹⁴¹

He left behind him a smouldering resentment despite the oath sworn by its members under the Treaty of the Common Peace, the Koine Eirene:

I swear by Zeus, Gaia, Helios, Poseidon and all the gods and goddesses. I will abide by the common peace, and I will neither break the agreement with Philip, nor take up arms on land or sea, harming any of those abiding by the oaths. Nor shall I take any city, or fortress, nor harbour by craft or contrivance, with intent of war against the participants of the war. Nor shall I depose the kingship of Philip or his descendants…¹⁴²

The oath went on to list all the member states and the ‘peace’ was watched over by a Macedonian garrison positioned on the heights of the Acrocorinth and Chalcis which were described by Polybius as two of the ‘Three Fetters of Greece’ (Demetrias in Thessaly became the third), as well as at the Cadmea, the citadel of Thebes.¹⁴³ More garrisons would soon appear under Alexander’s regent, Antipater. The real meaning of Greek loyalty, however, was epitomised by Athens’ contribution to the Macedonian-led war effort: the city-state supplied no more than 600 cavalrymen and twenty triremes from a fleet of over 300 in commission.144 So it is no surprise to read that of the fifty-two attested satraps Alexander appointed to govern the newly acquired Persian satrapies, only three were Greek and none of them came from the mainland, a clear sign of continued distrust. Of Alexander’s eighty-four identified hetairoi just nine were Greek, which illustrates the reality of the ‘Panhellenic’ crusade.¹⁴⁵ And only thirty-three Greeks were associated with any military command from a list of 834 officers (principally Macedonians) identified in the accounts of Alexander’s decade-long campaign.¹⁴⁶

The natural auditorium of the hill of the Pnyx in the foreground and the view across to the Acropolis.

In the first major pitched battle in Asia at the Granicus River in the summer of 334 BCE, the Macedonians slaughtered some 18,000 of perhaps 20,000 ‘warlike and desperate’ Greek mercenaries at the conclusion of the engagement, or so we are led to believe from cross-referencing Arrian’s claims with Plutarch’s. Four Persian satraps and three of Darius’ family also fell. Any Greeks rounded up (Athenians, Thessalians and Thebans) were sent back to hard labour camps in Macedonia. But we should once again be cautious with the numbers, for this has the distant feel of the propaganda of the on-campaign historian Callisthenes, in the form of a lesson to Hellas and the Corinthian League; modern interpretations suggest 5,000 mercenaries might have been killed.¹⁴⁷ But Alexander was to have a more effective stranglehold on Greek dissent: he soon controlled the corn supply routes from Egypt and trade through the Hellespont to the Kingdom of Bosphorus and its commercially favourable grain contracts. The Black Sea ports remained the largest grain producer and Greece required ‘more imported corn than any other nation’, a vulnerable state of affairs, as Demosthenes voiced.148

Nevertheless, obtaining the approbation of Athens, Plato’s ‘Hellas of Hellas’, seems to have weighed heavy on Alexander’s mind, or in the mind of those who crafted his public relations machine, for the ethnic divide that separated Macedonians and Greeks persisted through the campaigns.¹⁴⁹ When the Great King’s palace at Persepolis burned and ‘prosperity turned to misery’, it was for Athens that revenge was reportedly being extracted.¹⁵⁰ In Bactria, Callisthenes had apparently needed to remind his king that it was to the dominion of ‘Hellas’ that Asia was being added (though this may be posthumous Greek spin for it was woven into Callisthenes’ rejection of proskynesis, the prostration before the king that emulated Persian court protocol).¹⁵¹ And in India (‘lands east of the Persian Empire’, much took place in modern Pakistan), Onesicritus claimed Alexander commenced battle with King Porus (a derivative of his Hellenised name) of the Paurava region, broadly the Punjab, with the cry: ‘O Athenians can ye possibly believe what perils I am undergoing to win glory in your eyes.’¹⁵²

We do sense that Alexander, an honorary Athenian citizen (as Philip had become following the victory at Chaeronea in 338 BCE which brought Greece to its knees), wished to be acknowledged for allowing the city its democratic heart, but he knew in order to do so Athens would need to be hemmed in by pro-Macedonian oligarchs, a situation that left the Pella-salaried Aristotle in a precarious position. It is difficult to say whether Alexander genuinely admired Athens’ constitutional ideals, or whether he shared the jaundiced view of Xenophon and, in particular, the exiled Alcibiades (ca. 450-404 BCE), on its unique governmental system once they became exiles of the state: ‘As for democracy, the men of sense among us knew what it was, and I perhaps as well as any, as I have more cause to complain of it: but there is nothing new to be said of a patent absurdity.’¹⁵³ Thucydides credited Alcibiades with a speech that extolled the virtues of conquest, and that would have been easier for Alexander to comprehend: ‘We cannot fix the exact point at which our empire shall stop… and we must scheme to extend it’, for ‘if we cease to rule others, we are in danger of being ruled ourselves.’¹⁵⁴

Conceivably, with the dichotomies of Aristotle’s Politics fighting in his head, Alexander adopted an erratic policy that turned the cities in his path into an eclectic mix of ‘loyal’ democracies, oligarchies, tyrannies and indefinable in-betweens.¹⁵⁶ Philip’s advanced expeditionary force under Parmenio, Attalus and Amyntas had done much the same through 336/335 BCE and some of the alliances they formed were inherited by Alexander, though townsfolk had been sold into slavery by his predecessors too.¹⁵⁷ Although Philip’s foray into Asia Minor had found receptive ears in a few Greek cities, others living symbiotically with the Great King’s satraps under the King’s Peace of 387/6 BCE (otherwise known as the Peace of Antalcidas, which had once maintained Spartan supremacy in Greece) just saw trouble ahead.

Unlike Xenophon who had his Theban friend, Proxenus, to act as a proxenos and broker relations with Cyrus the Younger, Alexander had received no formal invite to Asia.¹⁵⁸ He did, nevertheless, have Isocrates’ famous ‘persuasion through words’. How influential was his early plea for koinonia, a commonality of purpose, remains conjecture, for it had failed to unite Greece against the Macedonian threat. As well as reaching out to Philip II, the Athenian rhetor had courted the fourteen-year-old Macedonian prince through correspondence; Isocrates’ letter praised Alexander’s philanthropos, his philosophos and his philathenaios, the love of Athens.¹⁵⁹ The Rhetoric to Alexander, possibly written around 340 BCE by Anaximenes, suggests the prince was indeed a political target in his malleable teens.¹⁶⁰ Isocrates had challenged Philip to Heraclean efforts, but his rousing words, more sycophantic than practical on the Pellan-strained budget, might have resonated deeper with the young self-assured Alexander:

Xenophon and his working colleague, King Agesilaus of Sparta, had shared Isocrates’ view, though the deep-rooted resentment of Sparta’s supremacy in the wake of the Peloponnesian War made her leadership of any Panhellenic force impossible. Moreover, Sparta had been aided by Cyrus the Younger in the last years of the conflict, a state of affairs that earned the pro-Spartan Xenophon his exile from Athens.¹⁶² Since then, military supremacy had passed to Thebes under the remarkable generals Epaminondas, Pelopidas and Pammenes (died 364, 362, 356 BCE respectively), whose military reforms had led victory at Leuctra in 371 BCE over Sparta which was either deliberately excluded by Philip from the League of Corinth, or was standing aloof in a display of xenalasia.¹⁶³ When Thebes was destroyed by Alexander in 335 BCE, Isocrates’ decades-old call for the invasion of Persia fell upon the new Macedonian hegemon.

When Alexander picked up the challenge, to obtain the funding for the expedition that would extend his rule beyond the bounds the gods and heroes approved of – so Themistocles had warned – he had been forced to borrow some 800 talents and at a loan rate that probably reflected the risk to the capital from (we assume) the Macedonian aristocracy.¹⁶⁴ He exempted Macedonians from tax to consolidate his position after Philip’s death and was now dishing out crown lands to secure further funds, though Perdiccas, the future Somatophylax, is famously said to have declined any such security, joining Alexander with a simpler trust in his ‘hopes for the future’.¹⁶⁵ Curtius and Arrian claimed the king still carried a debt of 500 talents from his father; this may have been derived from a court source who had wished to reinforce the non-pecuniary notion of loyalty of the state soldiers crossing to Asia, if it was not an allusion to the similar plight of the younger Cyrus in Xenophon’s Anabasis.¹⁶⁶

The alleged 60 or 70 talents remaining in the royal coffers at Philip’s death would have covered the wages of the 30,000 or so mixed infantry Alexander crossed to Asia with for only a few meagre weeks without additional plunder coming their way, discounting the far higher remuneration the cavalry would have expected; Duris of Samos (date of birth uncertain, possibly as late the 330s BCE), calculated Alexander had funds sufficient for thirty days and Onesicritus claimed he owed 200 talents besides.¹⁶⁷ The 800 newly borrowed talents would have maintained the expedition for no more than a further several months, and, as a result, Alexander was forced to disband his 160-ship navy (costing perhaps 250 talents a month) after the siege of Miletus due to financial constraints; his continued mistrust of his Greek naval officers in the face of 400 Phoenician ships still in Persian employ possibly played a part.¹⁶⁸ Although the treasury at Sardis would yield to him and Tarsus would be captured intact (giving him his first mint), and no doubt his adoptive mother, Queen Ada of Caria, made available funds from her stronghold of Alinda, the pressure was on for a confrontation that would prise the Persian treasury open.169

As Alexander pressed on down the coast of Asia Minor, cities and synoecisms that refused immediate obeisance were ransomed, garrisoned, destroyed and pillaged, or occasionally pardoned on the promise of good behaviour. For apart from a few Greek cities on the Aegean seaboard, these were not members of the League of Corinth, and thus they were fair game, despite any ancient Ionian League affiliations.¹⁷⁰ Non-Greek communities (those in Lycia, for example) could expect no terms at all; essentially their fate lay in the manner in which they treated the Macedonian advance.

Some cities failed to comply from the outset; others did, and then revolted. More than twenty cities came under siege, and Alexander (if not Philip II before him), and not Demetrius the son of Antigonus, should have earned the epithet Poliorketes, the Beseiger.¹⁷¹ When they did finally fall, Greek, Macedonian or local resident governors were installed (or reinstalled) with nomographoi to draft new laws and ‘correct’ those that had been already been drafted or imposed by the koine sympoliteia, the federal state body that oversaw their interests.¹⁷² In Miletus, Alexander was even nominally elected (or self-appointed) as stephanephoros, chief magistrate, for the year 334/333 BCE. There was no Thucydidean Melian Dialogue to weigh up arguments of alignment or neutrality; as Solon (ca. 638-558 BCE) had once been warned: ‘Written laws, are just like spiders’ webs; they hold the weak and delicate in their meshes, but get torn to pieces by the rich and powerful.’¹⁷³ In fact Solon had himself departed Greece for ten years to avoid being called to task for the decrees that backfired in the wake of his own reforms.¹⁷⁴

In the view of Tarn, Alexander’s behaviour was justifiable; he pointed out that the state of affairs in Asia Minor, specifically relating to these years, required extraordinary measures because the outcome of the war with the Great King was still far from certain.¹⁷⁵ We have an equally conspicuous apologia by Arrian: Alexander’s ‘… instructions were to overthrow the oligarchies and install democracies throughout, to restore their own local legislation in each city, and to remit the tribute they had been paying to the barbarians.’ This appears to overlook the key objective of the arrangement: the tribute (phoros) was now redirected to the Macedonian regime.¹⁷⁶

The cynical Diogenes, watching from occupied Corinth, is said to have summed up the campaigning king, his regent then in Athens, and his messenger (named Athlios) who had just arrived in the city, with, ‘athlios par’ athliou di’ athliou pros athlion’. This broadly (and here with poetic licence) translates as ‘wretched son of wretched sire to wretched wight by wretched squire’.¹⁷⁹ The mixed signals broadcast by this new order in the Eastern Mediterranean seaboard had to be weighed up against the certainty of annihilation if Alexander’s ambition was stifled.

The confrontation that would finally access significant funds from the Persian treasury came with the second major pitched battle with the Great King’s army beside the Pinarus River at Issus in Cilicia in November 333 BCE, near the strategic border ‘gates’ that separate Cilicia from Upper Syria. Demosthenes was hoping that Alexander, the meirakion (stripling) that held Greece under his thumb, would be ‘trampled under Persian hooves’.¹⁸⁰ The result was quite different: Darius fled in the face of Alexander’s penetrating charge in his direction despite the spirited defence of his nobles, forcing him to eventually abandon his chariot, shield and bow, along with his family and his harem of 329 concubines. Further hauls at nearby Damascus included hostile Spartan and Athenian envoys and some 2,600 talents of coined money, 500 pounds of wrought silver and 7,000 loaded pack animals.¹⁸¹

Some 100,000 infantry and 10,000 of Darius’ cavalry were reportedly slain, though Justin clarified that 40,000 were actually taken prisoner. Only 300 Macedonian infantry and 150 cavalry fell, claimed Diodorus who incongruously added, ‘… the cavalry on both sides was engaged and many were killed as the battle raged indecisively because of the evenly matched fighting qualities…’ The Persians had additionally ‘… launched at Alexander such a shower of missiles that they collided with one another in the air’; the source behind the figures (Arrian’s text suggests it might be Ptolemy) was obviously expecting readers to conclude that few arrows had found their mark. Curtius more plausibly added that that 4,500 of Alexander’s men were additionally wounded.182

The battle at Issus may have been the first instance in which the Macedonian infantrymen were provided reason to question Alexander’s motives as well as their own position in the scheme of things. In a pre-battle address to his troops, Alexander encouraged the Illyrians and Thracians to loot and pillage but there is no mention that any wealth filtered down to his Macedonian regulars. All this was, however, buried beneath the grander themes of post-battle chivalry that saw the captured Persian women embraced as Alexander’s own.¹⁸³

Keeping royal hostages alive on the pretext of bargaining for a larger prize was supportable. But Alexander assured Darius’ captive daughters that he would provide dowries for their marriages and find them suitable husbands – himself and Hephaestion as it turned out – for he married Stateira and Hephaestion married Drypetis at Susa in 324 BCE. Alexander further promised to bring up Darius’ young son as his own and to show him royal honour.¹⁸⁴ Had Alexander’s regular soldiers known of the outcome, it is doubtful they would have put their lives on the line at Issus, despite Diodorus’ claim that Alexander ‘…won universal recognition throughout his own army for his exceeding propriety of conduct’, behaviour that Diodorus hoped would echo through the future ages.¹⁸⁵

Some 8,000 Greek mercenaries had made good their escape in the cover of darkness.¹⁸⁶ Up to this point, more Greek mercenaries had fought for Darius III than in the invasion force; it was a state of affairs captured by an earlier Theban proclamation: ‘Anyone who wished to join the Great King and Thebes in freeing the Greeks and destroying the tyrant of Greece [Alexander] should come over to them.’¹⁸⁷ Those behind the Theban revolt were attempting to revive a Boeotian confederacy, one supposedly disbanded in 386 BCE (and again in 336 BCE).¹⁸⁸ Some 50,000 mercenaries might have eventually found their way into the Great King’s ranks, and if captured the punishment for their ‘treachery’ was bound to be harsh; many were exiles of their city-states care of Philip’s earlier campaigns.¹⁸⁹

Habitually settling on coastal islands into a loose Phoenician federation, here at Tyre, some 600 yards of maritime arrogance separated them from the shore; Alexander set about building a mole 200-feet wide so that ‘… they too would understand they belonged to the mainland.’¹⁹² He had already proven it could be done; Clazomenae had been joined to the coast with a permanent causeway a year or so before. The siege at Tyre requiring an estimated 28,000-plus tons of grain to feed the attackers, probably accounting for many of the support ships from Rhodes and the other ‘allies’ who watched on as a seaborne competitor was being battered into submission.¹⁹³ It is the silted-over remains of Alexander’s mole that joins the city to the mainland today.

Accounts of the military ingenuity employed against the Phoenician mother-city spanned many colourful pages. The artillery knowledge Philip’s engineers had gained from the innovations of Dionysius I of Syracuse, and which had been employed in the sieges Philip II brought to bear on Olynthus, Perinthus and Byzantium, was passed down to Alexander who had already used it well at Miletus and Halicarnassus (Bodrum in Turkey).¹⁹⁴ The taking of the city became a challenge that inspired the Thessalian, Diades (‘the man who took Tyre’, successor to Polyidus, a siege engineer for Philip) to invent and further develop movable towers (phoretoi pyrgoi), wheeled rams (arietes), drills (trypana), cranes (korakes), possibly ‘belly shooters’ (grastraphetes) and the new rock-hurling torsion catapults, the katapeltai Makedonikoi.

Arrian provided a description of the catapult-carrying warships, mechanophorai nees, which bombarded the walls. This in turn required the defenders to employ fire-throwers of bitumen, sulphur and other combustibles, as well as spoked spinning wheels to deflect the incoming projectiles, while red-hot sand was poured down into the armour of Alexander’s men.¹⁹⁵ The siege technology would pass down the generations through the lost writing of Diades himself and into the descriptions of Agesistratus and Athenaeus’ Mechanicus, through Ctesibius’ Construction of Artillery, Biton’s Construction of War-machines and Artillery, into the new catapult technology in Polyidus’ On Machines, Heron’s treatises Belopoeika and Cheiroballistra, and to the extant treatise of Aeneas Tacticus’ Defence of Fortified Positions (written soon after ca. 357 BCE) which survived along with Vitruvius’ three chapters on artillery for the Roman army to exploit.¹⁹⁶

This was a far cry from the honour code of the ‘spear-famed lords of Euboea’ who apparently banned missiles in the early Archaic ‘mythistorical’ Lelantine War ca. 700 BCE, and it renders the opening lines of Heron’s Belopoeika (On Arrow-Making) somewhat paradoxical: ‘Artillery-construction has surpassed argumentative training… and taught mankind how to live a tranquil life.’197 The Tyrian siege was a tense, bitter, drawn-out and expensive delay in Alexander’s progress. Yet the city’s eventual fall and the tribute to the dead is afforded a single line by Plutarch and Justin, less than a quarter-page by Arrian, and a meagre half-page by Curtius who provided the most detailed account (some thirty Loeb edition pages) of the siege.¹⁹⁸ Despite the Phoenician priests roping down and nailing Tyrian Apollo to his pedestal, with proposals to reinstate the Carthaginian tradition of sacrificing a freeborn son to Canaanite El (Cronus to the Greeks, Saturn to the Romans), the gods joined Alexander, and the Phoenician city that had survived a thirteen-year siege by Nebuchadnezzar II two and a half centuries before (585 through 572 BCE), was finally taken.¹⁹⁹

But what immediately became of the precious Tyrean murex purple dye trade that fetched its weight in silver, giving us the Byzantine honorific porphyrogennetos, ‘born in the purple’, is unreported.²⁰⁰ The murex divers reappeared some years later when transferred to fleet maintenance in the planned dockyards at Babylon, but neither recorded is the lingering hatred engendered by the sale of a reported 15,000 to 30,000 survivors (7,500 may be more plausible) into slavery with additional refugees flooding the Mediterranean.²⁰¹ The enigmatic Phoenician ships of Tarshish, a fleet that once defied the summer sailing season the Greeks adhered to, were never mentioned again and with them surely disappeared some of the closely guarded knowledge of safe anchorages, freshwater sources, trading outposts and the mineral deposits of Northern Europe and the tin islands of Britain, now accessed by sea since the Etruscans took control of the overland routes through France.²⁰² The Phoenician-exploited silver deposits at Tartessus (possibly Tarshish) had been known to the Greeks and coveted since Colaeus the Samian explorer and merchant was reportedly blown off course when voyaging to Egypt ca. 638 BCE.²⁰³

Alexander’s (alleged) simultaneous declaration of war on the 500-year-old Carthage merited a few words from Curtius and does not feature in any other extant account.²⁰⁴ Carthaginian envoys were present in Tyre (though Alexander gave them safe passage, according to Arrian) and Justin curiously recorded the presence of a Hamilcar Rhodanus in the campaign entourage; he had been sent by Carthage to gather information about Alexander’s intentions, probably before the Macedonian king entered Mesopotamia. This detail does not appear elsewhere either, and was perhaps scooped up by Trogus at Gallia Narbonensis.²⁰⁵ Carthage, by now more famous for its export of carpets and pillows to Greece according to the comedian Hermippus, was obviously expecting the worst after the Tyrian sun god was renamed Apollo Philalexander; the unfortunate Hamilcar was executed upon his return to Carthage for allegedly plotting against the city.206

‘THOU WILT NOT BE ZEUS MERELY BECAUSE THOU GRASPEST THE THUNDERBOLT.’²⁰⁷

Although Aristotle’s influential writings had cautioned that ‘a youth is an unsuitable student of civil philosophy’, his most famous pupil was setting out to change the world.²⁰⁸ Alexander did not wish to simply conquer, he wanted to seduce, and whether vainglorious, visceral, or carefully calculated propaganda, this is where the thaumaturge, Callisthenes, did come in, for a while. After the sieging and storming of Gaza, the route was now clear for the invasion of Egypt where Alexander’s legend could truly be developed.

Amongst the thaumata that must have proliferated Callisthenes’ account, we hear of sacred springs coming to life and the Pamphylian Sea parting to allow the Macedones to navigate a narrow rocky coastal track; presumably this report was compiled with Alexander’s blessing and it was later swept up by the poet Menander (ca. 342-290 BCE), an associate of Theophrastus and Demetrius of Phalerum, his once pupil:²⁰⁹

How Alexander-like, indeed, this is; and if I seek some one, Spontaneous he’ll present himself; and if I clearly must Pass through some place by sea, this will lie open to my steps.²¹⁰

Arrian explained the Pamphylian phenomenon in less divine terms; the coastal road could only be negotiated when a north wind blew, otherwise the route would be submerged. But aquatic feats were far from original, and miraculous water-crossings were a symbol of legitimacy when attached to campaigning kings. Xenophon’s Anabasis credited the Euphrates with yielding to Cyrus the Younger who waded across its span, and Cyrus the Great enjoyed a notable revenge when diverting the River Gyndes for the impiety of swallowing his warhorse. More pertinent to Alexander’s cause we have Xerxes’ triumphant bridge across the Hellespont and which briefly joined Europe and Asia in a hubristic defiance of prevailing doctrine, though combining the empires was Xerxes’ destiny claimed the banished Athenian, Onomacritus.²¹¹ Inevitably, the Romance gave Alexander power over dangerous water when he crossed the River Stranga when it froze every night, enabling him to meet, and then make good an escape from, Darius at Persepolis.²¹²

Alexander was establishing his own romance, even in his life. Callisthenes, along with Anaxarchus (ca. 380-320 BCE), had annotated Aristotle’s copy of Homer’s Iliad (the ‘Recension of the Casket’), an editing possibly spurred on by Aristotle’s (now-lost) Homeric Problems, which had highlighted the epic’s inconsistences; Alexander is said to have kept the edited scrolls close.213 Reliving the epic Iliad, in which the ‘temporal boundary between the ages of myth and history is in fact a fuzzier, less distinct line than appears at first glance’, was a role that suited Alexander, who took a firmly euhemeristic stance when tracking down his heroes.²¹⁴ He believed he was following in the footsteps of Heracles and Dionysus the conqueror of the Orient, and with a sense of the arete and aidos, the honour and duty, that the homage would have bestowed; ominously Aidos, the goddess of reverence and respect, was the companion goddess of Nemesis, who stood for indignation and retribution. Euripides’ description of Dionysus, with his juxtaposed qualities and polysemousness, was peculiarly relevant to Alexander: he was both the ‘most terrible’ and ‘most gentle’, crossing male and female as well as things Greek with foreign.

Euripides’ Bacchae, written at Pella ca. 407 BCE (posthumously premiered in Athens in 405 BCE) and possibly inspired by Macedonian court behaviour (or from the legacy of the Phrygian occupation of Macedonia), claimed Dionysus had travelled through Bactria, the likely home of Alexander’s wife, Roxane. When we consider that Alexander had named his first son Heracles, we might wonder if he would have named his second son Dionysus had he recovered at Babylon.²¹⁵ Euripides’ tragedy also portrayed the god of wine and ritual madness (whose divinity was here being rejected) as bringing destruction upon the ancient city of Thebes, and this could help explain why Euripides remained in the Macedonian king’s favour.

Alexander’s appointment of Antipater’s son, Iolaos, as his chief cupbearer (archioinochooi) perhaps recalled Euripides’ lines in the Herakleidai: ‘You have heard of me, I think. I am Iolaos, known as the right hand man of Heracles.’²¹⁶ Of course, on campaign Iolaos served as an informal hostage to ensure the regent’s loyalty back home. But this hypostatic union of the present and the past would have proven more politically useful than Aristotle’s Peripatetic penchant for rational classifications, or Thucydides’ subordination of the past to the present that had eliminated the fingers of the divine,²¹⁷ for where Herodotus’ scrolls gave Alexander the glories of Greece, Thucydides’ had captured only the misfortunes of the day.²¹⁸

Alexander observed the rites to Poseidon and the Nereids before sailing the narrows of the Hellespont and he made oblations to Priam and Athena when arriving at the ‘small cheap’ temple of Athena on the alleged ruins of Troy; the ceremonies reminded everyone why Philip had declared war on Persia – to exact retribution for her profanation of Greek temples.²²² Alexander had adopted the role of a new Protesilaus, the hero from the Iliad, and he was the first of the coalition army to set foot on Asian soil after hurling his spear to it to denote chora doryktetos, a spear-won prize. He was duly crowned by his sailing master and enthusiastic entourage.²²³ If, as it was claimed, he had learned the Iliad scrolls apo narthekos, by heart, it would have required the memorising of 15,693 standardised lines of dactylic hexameter. Alexander is said to have kept the epic under his pillow along with a dagger, and if this might have been Onesicritus’ own rendering of an ‘armed philosopher king’, it nevertheless appears symbolic of the mindset of the man.²²⁴

When seeking the blessing of Artemis in her sanctuary at Ephesus, propitious-looking entrails were even paraded around Alexander’s camp in hepatoscopic triumph; the superstitious troops were unlikely to complain at ceremonies of sphagia (signs derived from bloodletting, usually by cutting the throat), for all received a share of the sacrificial meat.²²⁵ Before battle at Issus, Alexander offered to Thetis and once again he followed Achilles’ own pre-battle ritual; in Egypt, Apis was honoured and in Babylon, Bel, as well as those deities suggested by the Chaldean priests.²²⁶ Alexander was clearly hedging his polytheistic bets and courting gods linked to both ancestral friend and enemy, besides those Ammon had chosen for him. He was now undermining both Aristotle and Euripides, for both had espoused the superiority of the Greeks and their gods over barbarians in no uncertain terms.

Hesiod had summed-up his Works and Days with: ‘Well with god and fortune is he who works knowledge of all this, giving the immortals no cause for offence, judging the bird-omens and avoiding transgressions.’²²⁷ And yet Alexander’s rant at his seer, Demophon, whether historic or allegorical, captured something of the contradiction within his piety: ‘when I have before my eyes such important matters and not the entrails of animals, what could be a greater hindrance to me than a superstitious seer?’ In this particular instance, in Mallia in India, his ignoring the signs was ill advised; Demophon cautioned him against battle and Alexander almost lost his life.²²⁸ Yet even the revered Chaldeans were not above reproach: ‘the best of prophets is the one who guesses right’, Alexander reminded them, alluding to another line from a now lost Euripides tragedy.229 Prediction was a dangerous business with the Macedonian king, and the seers would have recalled that Alexander ordered the crucifixion of the diviner who presided over the ‘favourable’ entrails on the day his father was stabbed to death at Aegae, though this would have been the perfect veneer of outrage from an only superficially grieving son.²³⁰

Philip had himself once sought oracular advice and he received a typically cryptic response: ‘Wreathed is the bull. All is done. There is also the one who will smite him.’²³¹ He and any reader of Herodotus should have been aware of the misadventure of Croesus (reigned ca. 560-546 BCE) when interpreting his favourable-looking answer: the Delphic Oracle had told the Lydian king that if he invaded Cappadocia a mighty empire would fall; the already-prosperous Croesus never considered that it might be his own.²³² Wealth, as Aristophanes portrayed it, is blind; an avowed acquaintance of Aesop, Croesus nevertheless failed to heed his Fable of the Mule: every truth has two sides.

The oracles of Delphi, Dodona and Didyma did not disappoint with their ambiguous predictions given, according to Theopompus, in verse.²³³ The priestess Pythia who Alexander himself dragged by force from the adyton, the inaccessible temple chamber, to extricate the reply he coveted on an ‘inauspicious day’, learned of his particular brand of piety the hard way.²³⁴ Alexander should have known that the god of Delphi neither revealed, nor concealed, but just ‘hinted’ the truth.²³⁵ The Pythia is said to have spoken only in a frenzied gibberish caused by the vapours arising from the Kerna below; in hindsight, it would have been more profitable to have assaulted the prophetai, the temple priests employed to interpret her responses.²³⁶

Less ambiguous was the result of the encounter with the Gordian Knot, ‘Fate’s silent riddle’ that vexed all-comers in Phrygia. A famed waggon stood on the acropolis of the palace of Gordius and Midas and had been dedicated to Sabazios, a god the Greeks associated with Zeus. Midas tied it to a post with an impossibly intricate knot; oracular prediction held that whoever unravelled it would become the king of Asia.²³⁷ Eyewitnesses variously reported that Alexander, driven by his pothos, yearning, either impetuously sliced through the ancient rope in frustration, or, as Aristobulus claimed, he cunningly unyoked the pin of the cart to which it was bound. This appears to be face-saving propaganda to hide an embarrassing performance – what Justin described as ‘a false interpretation of the oracle’– even though thunder is said to have followed signifying the approval of the gods.²³⁸

‘How is it to be decided whether the more dramatic or the more prosaic version of a story is the original one? The question of historical probability may be irrelevant: no one can really hope to know what actually happened at Gordium any more than one can say what song the Sirens sang.’²³⁹ But as Robert Graves noted, Alexander’s brutal cutting of the knot ultimately ‘… ended an ancient dispensation by placing the power of the sword above that of religious mystery.’240 Any priestesses attending the oracle obviously knew nothing of the dangers of toying with Alexander’s piety.

Alexander and the riddle of the Gordian Knot. A line engraving from 1899 after a drawing by André Castaigne.

If Alexander was an acolyte to divine and heroic doctrine, he was no hollow dreamer, and in him legend was bound up in practical military method; so Homer sat beside Xenophon in the campaign tent. Alexander sought bodily protection from what had been presented to him as the ‘shield of Achilles’ at Troy, and he would have absorbed lessons on cavalry command from Xenophon’s Hipparchicus.²⁴¹ To lead his men Alexander would have learned from Jason of Pherae whose exemplary behaviour Xenophon portrayed as unswerving self-restraint.²⁴² The lessons of fighting in Asia could already be learned from Xenophon’s Anabasis (in particular the need for a sizeable cavalry force, which Xenophon and Cyrus lacked), and in his father’s day stories and advice stemming from Spartan-led forays into Asia were surely absorbed by Philip as he planned his own campaign. So Alexander was no trailblazing ‘Columbus’, even if much geographical knowledge of the East remained shrouded in uncertainty; he was, as Bosworth proposed, more a ‘Hernán Cortéz’, the conquistador who brought down a civilisation and changed a newly opened old world forever.²⁴³

Neither was Alexander short on irony in victory, it seems. Following the battle at Issus, the Macedonians had received envoys from the freshly defeated Darius III, the ‘antagonist to Alexander’s genius’ who reportedly spoke some Greek; with them came, reportedly, the offer of a huge ransom for the return of the Great King’s captured family and possibly a concession to divide the Persian Empire at the Halys River (or Euphrates – sources conflict: there may have been as many as three separate offers).²⁴⁴ What appear monochrome correspondences between the kings in the campaign accounts were reborn with much colour in the Romance.²⁴⁵

According to Diodorus, Alexander hid the Great King’s olive branch and replaced it with a fabricated letter containing far less benign terms so his generals would reject them.246 Certainly, if left to his Companions and the veteran Parmenio, ‘the best tactician of his generals’, the Macedonian war machine would have settled for a truce, for under the terms of Darius III’s alleged peace offer, Alexander could have shared Asia with the Great King as his son-in-law.²⁴⁷ Here the fate of the world turned on a singular response dictated in a campaign tent in Cilicia (or northern Mesopotamia), proving the course of history can indeed turn on the toss of a tetradrachm.

This particular episode does not appear in the texts of Arrian or Plutarch; if it was genuine, perhaps their ‘court’ sources have felt the charade was best hushed-up. But according to Curtius, Alexander chose an envoy curiously named Thersippus to carry his terse rejection back to the Persian king.²⁴⁸ We know from Plutarch, who in turn took it from Heracleides, that it was a certain Thersippus who ran to Athens after the defeat of Darius I at Marathon some 160 years before.²⁴⁹ Having just defeated his namesake (Darius III), and now encamped at Marathus, Alexander appears to have chosen a high-ranking man of exactly the same name to deliver his reply.²⁵⁰

Anyone sceptical of the associations that Alexander or his press corps were attempting to make, should recall that the previous battle at the River Granicus in May 334 BCE had been fought (it was claimed) on the anniversary of the fall of Troy;²⁵¹ Duris reckoned that took place exactly 1,000 years (to the month, Thargelion) before in 1,334 BCE.²⁵² The Granicus bordered the Anatolian Troad: the messages being sent out were clear. Although the Macedonian kings never campaigned in the Macedonian May-moon month of Daisios (traditionally a month of harvest-gathering), Alexander inserted a second month of Artemisius in the calendar, corresponding to the moon of April, to pull it off.²⁵³ He was by then aged twenty-one and perhaps ten months.

Just a year earlier, the house of Pindar had remained untouched when Alexander flattened Thebes when it revolted upon receiving false reports of his death; the city’s downfall was apparently heralded in by portents including a fountain running with blood. He released the relatives of those who had once hosted his own father (as a hostage) but some 6,000 Thebans were reportedly executed and 30,000 prisoners were sold into slavery to fund the cost of the campaign.²⁵⁴ Although the andrapodismos (deportation and enslavement) ended 800 years of continuous occupation at Thebes, Alexander, nevertheless, paid homage to a fifty-two-year career that saw Pindar’s epinikia, his victory odes, honour winners at the Olympic, Isthmian, Nemean and Pythian Games.

Besides, it was Pindar who introduced Zeus-Ammon, the hybrid god who became attached to Alexander’s own divinity, to Greece in his Pythian Ode 4; Pindar dedicated a cult statue in 462 BCE to the sanctuary on the Cadmea, having seen the god being worshipped on his visit to Cyrene in Libya.255 A ‘mean spirited’ Thebes had fined her homebred celebrity 1,000 drachmas for his Pythian Ode 1 in which the enemy, Athens, was praised for her defence against Xerxes’ naval assault.²⁵⁶ The costly lines read:

I will earn
the praise of Athens by singing of Salamis
and of Sparta by making my theme
the battles beneath Cithaeron
where the curved-bow Medes strive and were crushed…²⁵⁷

Furthering any nostalgic attachment, Pindar had also written an encomium of the campaigner’s predecessor, the flamboyant Alexander I who was termed a traitor by Demosthenes for his part in assisting the Persian advance at a time when Themistocles was insightfully persuading Athens to spend its rich silver finds of 483 BCE (from the mines of Maronia in Laurium) on a new Athenian fleet of 200 triremes – the fleet that helped smash Persian naval power at Salamis in 480 BCE. Athens theatrically recompensed Pindar ten-fold for the Theban fine.²⁵⁸

With these past incursions in his mind, Alexander minted coins depicting the Persian defeat at Salamis before himself confronting the might of her empire; it was a message to the Great King and an announcement of intention. Spoils from the battle at Gaugamela, the ‘camel’s house’ (otherwise named Arbela),²⁵⁹ that saw Darius III finally toppled from power in 331 BCE, were even sent to Croton in Sicily as compensation for her naval expense in that earlier epic defence of Greece.²⁶⁰ Alexander’s declaration of war on Carthage at the siege of Tyre in 332 BCE, if indeed it ever took place, was possibly motivated by its part in Xerxes’ pincer movement generations before than its blood ties with the Phoenician mother-city then under siege.²⁶¹

If Athens was unlikely to have granted him an early apotheosis for facing the Achaemenid threat, Alexander received the divine response he surely sought at the Ammonium at the Libyan Desert oracle of Siwa after being welcomed into Egypt by the native population that had been under the Persian yoke. The very public divine ‘private reply’, which suggested he was the son of Zeus-Ammon, was most likely crafted with Callisthenes’ help, though if the priests of the sanctuary expected that Alexander would next proclaim himself pharaoh, then his immortality could hardly be denied.²⁶² The outcome was an avowed confirmation of his immortal blood and it readied him for the march ahead into the Asian interior.²⁶³ The divinity was later ridiculed by Marcus Terentius Varro (ca. 116-27 BCE) in a work titled Orestis or A Treatise on Insanity²⁶⁴ and satirised by Lucian (ca. 125-180 CE) who captured something of the dilemma and the real political agenda in his Dialogues of the Dead:

Alexander’s pothos (desire or yearning) to journey through the desert and consult the deity, a god now with ties with both the East and West, was less unique than Callisthenes’ account might have suggested.²⁶⁶ The oracle was well known to the Greeks through their intermediaries in Cyrene, the lush ‘spring’ city consecrated to Apollo in Libya that had left its mark on Pindar.²⁶⁷ Founded by famine-threatened settlers from Thera (Santorini) in 631 BCE and the birthplace of Eratosthenes (ca. 276-194 BCE) and Callimachus (ca. 310/305-240 BCE), Cyrene, along with its port, Apollonia, became a major centre of maritime trade and was minting its own coinage since the last quarter of the 6^th century BCE on the Athenian standard. It was also the home to Aristippus’ (ca. 435-356 BCE) hedonistic brand of philosophy, which produced a treatise titled On Ancient Luxury, which provided Diogenes Laertius with much doxographic scandaleuse.²⁶⁸

Plutarch explained that Cimon, who waged incessant war on Persia a century before, had also sent messengers to the Siwan oracle to obtain answers from Zeus-Ammon, and the Spartan commander Lysander, too, at the end of the 5^th century BCE. Each was following in the windblown footsteps of Cambyses II (ruled 529-522 BCE) who reportedly lost a 50,000-strong army in a sandstorm (their remains were possibly discovered in 2012), and those of Heracles and Perseus before him.²⁶⁹ Alas, Cimon did not live to receive his reply, but the emotional footprints were certainly there for Alexander to step into.

Cementing the foundations of Alexander’s own apotheosic myth, and one appropriately born in Egypt, was the priest’s allegorical slip of the tongue from ‘O, Paidion’ (‘O, my son’) to ‘O, pai Dios’ (‘O, son of God’, thus Zeus). We should recall that Alexander’s forefather, Danaus, who settled in Argos, was in myth the son of Belus, the legendary king of Egypt; Alexander was stepping into yet another ancestral homeland.²⁷⁰ We have no evidence of formalities to proclaim him pharaoh at this time except claims in the Romance, and, in any case, the more enduring epitaph was to be the founding of the city of Alexandria.²⁷¹ But to quote de Polignac’s study of the Macedonian ‘myth’: ‘Alexander stands at the crossroads of a Greek legend born out of the Libyan pilgrimage and the ancient Egyptian tradition of the pharaoh’s divine conception…’²⁷²

The Persians interpreted the eclipse differently: Herodotus claimed the Magi regarded the moon as the symbol of Persia; the Great King’s soldiers knew it and fear permeated their ranks. Babylonian astronomical diaries additionally recorded ‘deaths and plague occurred’; two days later a meteorite was seen ‘flashing to earth’ with two consecutive nights of ‘falls of fire’ along with an ominous reference to a dog being burned. Finally, there was ‘panic in the camp’; by the time the armies faced off, there was apparently little confidence left on the Persian side of the plain.²⁷⁷

The morning of the battle, Alexander rode at the head of his royal cavalry agema (the king’s own brigade) wearing a gleaming helmet fashioned by Theophilus, a sword of ‘astonishing temper’ from the king of the Citeans, an ornate Rhodian belt crafted by Helicon ‘the ancient’, and a thick linen thorax belonging to Darius himself, captured with booty at Issus two years before; the cuirass must have been far too large for Alexander (as was Darius’ throne) though the effrontery of its bearing must have humiliated the Persian king.²⁷⁸ Plutarch’s rundown of the panoply is once again steeped in the Iliad; Alexander was now adorned with not just an ancestry that combined the gods of friend and foes, but with their panoply and weapons too.²⁷⁹

Alexander’s return of the statues of the two tyrant slayers, Harmodius and Aristogeiton, from Susa to Athens soon after (where tyrannicides could find refuge, according to Callisthenes), and his burning of Persepolis, the Persian ceremonial capital modelled on Nineveh, echoed his continued retributions for those earlier Persian invasions of Greece.²⁸⁰ As a ‘political act’ the destruction of the palace, the ceremonial home of Persian power, was defensible and it signified a regime change from the Achaemenids to the Argeads.281 But Alexander had other reasons to be angry; mutilated Greeks had been encountered nearby (if reports are genuine and not designed to justify what came next) and despite his defeat at Gaugamela, Darius III was still on the loose.

Babylonian cuneiform tablet BM 36761 which formed part of the astronomical diaries recording the defeat of Darius at Gaugamela and Alexander’s entrance into Babylon. With permission and © of The Trustees of the British Museum.

Alexander would have additionally been aware of the rising tension within the Hellenic League in Greece which had recently resulted in a coalition led by Agis III of Sparta and an eventual battle with the Macedonian home army at Megalopolis in which the Greeks were funded by Persian gold. Alexander had himself sent funds to his regent, Antipater, to counter the accumulating threat (though probably too late to have had an effect). The message being sent from Persepolis was clear: if Alexander could now torch the Persian heartlands he could certainly burn Athens and the Peloponnese. On the other hand, Hellas was still supposed to rejoice in seeing the hegemon of the League of Corinth executing ‘Greek’ revenge. The result was, nevertheless, lamentable and Alexander is said to have regretted destroying the royal precinct, which was now, as Parmenio pointed out, his own property.²⁸²

The new conqueror of Asia was still pandering to the image Greece demanded, or rather the image he desired Greece demand of him: her long-awaited avenging hero with due cause and grievance. To cap it off he had Apelles paint him as Zeus wielding a thunderbolt to open a path to the gods.²⁸³

With the defeat of Darius, Alexander was effectively on the path to becoming the Great King of Persia, Shahansha, a title that came with connotations of divine approbation, even if it did not suggest the ruler was a god himself.²⁸⁵ Heracles achieved his divinity through nobility of soul alone, though it arrived posthumously and thanks to the oracle at Delphi.²⁸⁶ Being far less patient than his ancestral hero, Alexander knew true immortality lay in the lifetime recording of his deeds, ‘monuments more durable than bronze’, to quote Horace’s Odes.²⁸⁷ And so his campaign retinue included writers, philosophers, poets and classical antiquarians, and an unparalleled retinue of intellectuals: scientists, surveyors (bematistes), engineers and Aristotle-educated hetairoi recording the developing detail. And we should not forget the exiles that attached themselves to the mobile court. This was a proto ‘Scipionic Circle’, a group reminiscent of the scholars and philosophers Scipio Aemilianus (185-129 BCE) famously gathered about him two centuries later in Rome. Pondering the entourage in Asia, Cicero once questioned: ‘How many historians of his achievements are said to have been with Alexander?’²⁸⁸

Inevitably, the group housed the fawning camp followers whose traits Diogenes likened to the ‘worst biters’ in nature: ‘of wild beasts, the sycophant, and of tame animals, the flatterer’.²⁸⁹ ‘So great is the power of flattery, and nowhere greater, it seems, than among the greatest people.’²⁹⁰ The court poetasters, including Agis of Argos, Choerilus of Iasus and Cleon of Sicily, were noteworthy amongst the kolakeutikoi (sycophants) who proffered Homeric comparisons to Alexander and encouraged Achaemenid-style proskynesis, full body prostration in front of the king.²⁹¹ And there were more besides, those Curtius referred to as ‘the other dregs of their various cities’, for the mobile Macedonian court and its symposia, which followed the Homeric tradition of strengthening bonds through the ritualistic feasting of the commander with his men, were the perfect venues to practise he rhetorike techne.²⁹² And no doubt some of the noise was menoeikes to Alexander, soothing words for a searching soul.²⁹³ His early tutor, Lysimachus, had understood the prince in this respect; he took to referring to himself as ‘Phoenix’, to Alexander as ‘Achilles’ his pupil, and to Philip as ‘Peleus’ his father who had, in fact, befriended the hero Heracles.²⁹⁴

Alexander’s relationship with these writers reflected the paradox in him, and to quote a further fable attributed to Aesop: ‘We often despise what is most useful to us.’²⁹⁵ He recognised the utility of their artful prose for his pro-Greek press corps, and yet despised his own reliance upon them to produce a truly timeless history – ‘Some men are better served by their bitter-tongued enemies than by their sweet-smiling friends; because the former often tell the truth, the latter, never.’²⁹⁶

Curiously, when considering the possible origins of this episode, the Athenian demagogue, Demades, captured after the Athenian defeat at Chaeronea, had apparently accused the drunken Philip II of playing the ‘Thersites’ role when fate had, in fact, cast him as the Mycenaean King.²⁹⁹ Once described as ‘the wreckage of a shipwrecked state’, it was Demades who finally obliged Alexander with a proposal of divine honours, though his On the Twelve Years (ca. 326 BCE, and if truly attributable to him) had laid the groundwork for his later apologia to a hostile Athens for his proposing the same status for Philip II in 338 BCE.³⁰⁰

Alexander may even have been guilty of meddling in the affairs of his literary entourage; Anaximenes, the historian on campaign with the Macedonians and the likely author of the Rhetoric to Alexander, circulated a work in the literary style of Theopompus, the accomplished Chian chronicler who may have recently returned from exile. Copies of Anaximenes’ Trikaranus, a work deliberately hostile to Athens, Thebes and Sparta, were dispatched to each city with the result that Theopompus was unwelcome in much of Greece.³⁰¹ The mischief-making was obvious to those in the know yet the Trikaranus misled notable later historians; Josephus (Yosef Ben Matityahu 37-ca. 100 CE), Lucian and Aristides all referred to it as a genuine Theopompian work.³⁰²

Theopompus’ hostility, which suggests that he too, amongst many others, did not believe Alexander would return from his Eastern campaigns alive, was captured by a disapproving Polybius who was: ‘… indeed astonished at this writer’s extravagance.’³⁰⁵ He painted Philip’s hetairoi as a ‘band of debauchees assembled from across Hellas’; his Companions were ‘whores’, soldiers were ‘harlots’ and Philip’s men-slayers were ‘men-sodomisers by habit’. This reads as something of a paradox, for Theopompus simultaneously portrayed Philip as nothing less than the second founder of the Macedonian nation after Caranus. Theopompus is further alleged to have published a sophistical treatise on Alexander that balanced an encomium with polemic, so we may even posture that Alexander endorsed Anaximenes’ literary subterfuge.³⁰⁶

Alexander dismissed his Greek allies at Ecbatana in Media, the summer residence of the Archaemenid kings, soon after Darius’ defeat at Gaugamela, and this suggested that the League of Corinth was being excluded from his future campaigning; quite possibly the recent news of Peloponnesian support for the Spartan revolt of King Agis had a part to play. Alexander was sufficiently practical, however, to offer the units he discharged employment as mercenaries, but as they no longer represented a city-state in that capacity, formal Greek participation in the subjugation of Asia was over.³⁰⁷

The rhetorical war of revenge against the Achaemenid kings was over too and a personal crusade began; even Isocrates had only envisaged the conquest of Asia Minor. If Alexander no longer needed Greek political support, neither did he need a historian obsequious to her demands; raw conquest was something the sophist Callisthenes would have found difficult to tame on his pages and his arrest came soon after.³⁰⁸ ‘The cloven hoof’ had shown itself, but for a time Alexander’s troops were carried along on the adrenaline of battle and loot, and by the knowledge that their tight and disciplined formations resulted in comfortingly few casualties, if numbers are to be believed.³⁰⁹ But the ‘old guard’ generals who headed what was substantially his father’s army, still influentially commanded by Parmenio and his sons, would soon be supplanted by Alexander’s own generation of ‘friends’.³¹⁰

So what had now become of the Isocrates’ grand ideal, which latterly implored Philip to lead a Panhellenic army against Persia?³¹¹ Well, on one hand, Isocrates, then in his late nineties, took it with him when he starved himself to death shortly after defeat at Chaeronea while reportedly reciting lines from a Euripides play.312 And there is an added irony here too, for it was that battle in Boeotia that finally enabled Philip to take the leadership of the League at Corinth and so advance his invasion plans. Isocrates, it seems, didn’t foresee the true price of conquest or the cost of a unified Greece, for he had not lived to see the total destruction of Thebes.³¹³ The Sicilian historian Timaeus, who ‘turned his back’ on Alexander and his Diadokhoi when ‘steeping himself in a past age of civil liberties’, gave a usual scathing summation: he quipped that Alexander needed fewer years to conquer Persia than Isocrates had taken to write his Panegyric.³¹⁴

We may speculate whether Alexander, at that point, saw his own personal Bodyguards, traditionally seven in number, as the Epigonoi in the Thebaid, the ‘seven against Thebes’ who were sons of Argive heroes, when he oversaw the city’s destruction in 335 BCE; its Hieros lochos, the Theban Sacred Band, had been annihilated by him and his Companion Cavalry in the charge at Chaeronea three years before. But following the landscape-changing battle at Gaugamela, Alexander’s Somatophylakes would now be better considered as ‘seven against the False Smerdis’, for a final hurdle separated him from his own Great Kingship: the still-at-large pretender Bessus, the satrap of Bactria.³¹⁵ It took a further year to track down the renegade who proclaimed himself a new Great King, Artaxerxes V;³¹⁶ yet the eventual capture and execution of Bessus heralded in Alexander’s own troubled reign. He was twenty-seven when he effectively became the first European ‘Great King’ of the Persian Empire.

The Vulgate genre presented Alexander as a king ‘storm-tossed by changing fortune’ and the transformation is nowhere better exhibited than in Curtius’ polemical artistry.³¹⁷ Initially, ‘fortune was with him at every turn and so even his rashness had produced glorious results’; it was a rhetorical high point from which Alexander was to slide.³¹⁸ Even before victory at Issus Alexander reportedly ‘feared Fortuna’.³¹⁹ He murdered the innocent Sisines due to misguided suspicions, and he left infantry stragglers for the approaching enemy to mutilate; when the Persians found them they ‘succumbed to a frenzy of barbarian ruthlessness’.³²⁰

From the alleged crucifixions following the siege of Tyre, to a ‘foreign mode of behaviour’ that saw him drag the still-breathing Baetis, the phrourarchos (here, a garrison commander) of Gaza, behind his chariot in the fashion of Achilles, whilst putting all men to the sword, dark clouds had been gathering.³²¹ Gaza, the spice capital of Syria, fell, and 500-talents’ weight of frankincense and a hundred of myrrh headed back to Alexander’s austere tutor, Leonidas, so that he could stop ‘dealing parsimoniously with the gods’. Somewhat paradoxically, the incident involving the cruel treatment afforded to Baetis (possibly traceable back to Hegesias) is regularly challenged, whereas the crucifixions at Tyre are not.322

A ‘recklessness that could have spelled defeat’ preceded Curtius’ statement that: ‘The blood of thousands was paying for the grandiose plans of one man who despised his country, and who had deluded ideas about aspiring to heaven.’ Curtius’ fifth chapter highlighted Alexander’s liaisons with courtesans and an inexcusable fondness for drink, though, in his defence, Heracles had himself been a notoriously heavy imbiber and Dionysus was the god of wine (Liber or Bacchus to the Romans). These degenerative themes, repeated by Curtius throughout the next five books, are a far cry from the sexual abstinence and organisational brilliance that Plutarch and Arrian extended further into their coverage.³²³ Alexander had, as Timaeus would have phrased it, run aground into luxury.³²⁴

Callisthenes, who may have concluded the same, might have reported on one final post-Gaugamela episode before he was executed, and it occurred in Sogdia sometime in 329 BCE. Ptolemy and Aristobulus bypassed it, saving Arrian the trouble of justifying what was possibly the most troubling crime Alexander would commit: the massacre of the Branchidae. Eulogistic scholars such as Tarn have tried to dismiss the historicity of the event, though Callisthenes’ deliberately inaccurate rendering of its background argues that it actually took place.

Callisthenes claimed that the clan of the Branchidae, who were the keepers of the ancient shrine of Apollo at Didyma near Miletus, ‘gave over the treasuries of the gods to the Persians’ when Xerxes was planning his advance upon Greece (483 BCE onwards) some 150 years before.³²⁵ Herodotus, however, had made it clear that the Persian plundering of the temple was punishment for the earlier Ionian revolt against Darius I, which ended in 494 BCE; moreover, the oracle had not been rebuilt by Xerxes’ day.³²⁶ But following Callisthenes, Strabo claimed the Branchidae themselves sacked the temple before being granted a safe haven in Bactria beyond the Oxus River by Darius I to protect them from Greek retributions.

Alexander had symbolically reconsecrated the temple at Didyma in 334 BCE, and some five years later he located, by chance, the new settlement of the Branchidae (a site possibly rediscovered in 2014) when campaigning in the upper satrapies. The population, still Greek-speaking and retaining Hellenic customs, came out to greet him. Alexander had their city surrounded and reportedly massacred them to the last man to punish them for their ancestral betrayal, reportedly urged on by the Milesians in his entourage. As Curtius described it: ‘Everywhere there was butchery; neither their common language, nor prayers, nor olive branches held out to the attackers were able to prevent the cruelty.’

The campaign magic and its love of honour, philotimia, died in what have been termed Alexander’s ‘three catastrophes’: the trial and execution of Philotas in Drangiana (autumn 330 BCE); the murder of his general, Cleitus, at Maracanda in Bactria (Samarcand, winter 328/7 BCE); and the proskynesis debacle that preceded the arrest of the official campaign historian (possibly as late as 327 BCE). Callisthenes may have been required to write in eulogistic tones but he is also credited with: ‘For my part, I hold Alexander for any mark of honour that a man may earn; but do not forget that there is a difference between honouring a man and worshipping a god.’³²⁸

This was a distinction, a limitation, and an apotheosic rejection that Alexander could not tolerate, just as he could not accept a Cleitus who revered him and yet who maintained that Philip, his mortal father, was responsible for the foundation of his success – a father whose life Alexander was claiming he had once saved.³²⁹ The sword arm of ‘Black’ Cleitus, whose sister had been Alexander’s wet-nurse, saved Alexander’s life at the battle at the Granicus River, but it was now the unwelcome arm of his father’s old guard generals sabotaging his metamorphosis from a carousing Macedonian warlord to demigod.³³⁰

‘Alas what evil customs reign in Hellas’ was Black Cleitus’ accusation on the back of Alexander’s boasting; it was a line taken from Euripides’ Andromache, supposedly quoting Peleus the father of Achilles.³³¹ It was fatal; Alexander ran Cleitus through with a spear, though he blamed his murderous frenzy on the vengeful wrath of Dionysus that was brought to bear for his sacking of Thebes.³³² But Cleitus had been right; the ‘rudder’s guidance and the curb’s restraint’ that Sophocles propounded and Plutarch once saw in Alexander’s early education under Aristotle, were by now long abandoned in the dust of Asia.³³³ As Justin phrased it: ‘The father had laid the foundations of the empire of the world, the son consummated the glory of conquering the whole world’, and yet the son exceeding father ‘in both his virtues and his vices’.³³⁴ At Cleitus’ death in the upper satrapies, Alexander was probably aged twenty-eight, but the tragedy of the episode may have been instructive; after the customary withdrawal, fasting and weeping to the gods at Opis several years later, Alexander did place his father first when summing up royal achievements to appease his mutinous men, so the sources inferred.335

After the controversial execution of the popular veteran general, Parmenio, who, until he fell under the shadow of suspicion at Philotas’ trial, had been a demonstrably loyal strategos, Alexander censored letters home; when the couriers were a sufficient distance from the camp, he ordered them opened and read to fathom the army’s opinion of his actions and continued eastward campaigning. Damning reports were destroyed, the malcontents identified and then brigaded into the ataktoi, the ‘disciplinary unit’; his plan was, allegedly, to destroy them or settle them in distant colonies at the empire’s edge.³³⁶ This was not the first censorship; we are told Alexander had previously demanded that Antigone spy on Philotas, her lover already under suspicion.³³⁷ Although Curtius permitted the reader a vote on the outcome of Philotas’ trial, he condemned Alexander’s execution of Callisthenes as nothing short of ‘barbarous’.³³⁸

‘Alexander fixed his gaze on him [Philotas]. The Macedones are going to judge your case,’ he said. ‘Please state whether you will use your native language before them.’³³⁹ The unfortunate Philotas, now the most prominent commander of the Companion Cavalry, was being tried for treason. Alexander mocked Philotas for rejecting their native tongue, a harsh repost in the circumstances. In Curtius’ rendering of the trial, Bolon, a common soldier, also reprimanded Philotas for needing an interpreter to listen to men speaking his own language; this was perhaps a rhetorical device to highlight Philotas’ aloofness from the common infantryman and their rustic virtue, for he had grown, according to Curtius, vulgar in extravagant living.³⁴⁰ The treatment of Alexander in the extant Roman-era accounts is peppered with rhetorical devices.

The decapitation of Parmenio at Ecbatana in late 330 BCE, and Alexander’s use of Darius’ own signet ring and his harem, symbolised a metamorphosis complete, as Hermolaus’ defence speech at the trial of the ‘conspiring’ pages had neatly articulated.³⁴¹ Parmenio may have never been forgiven for his ‘sluggish’ performance at Gaugamela which ultimately led to Darius’ escape, depriving Alexander of the long-dreamt of opportunity of seeing the Great King prostrated before him, unless this was once again Callisthenes’ handiwork at the general’s expense.³⁴²

The trial of Parmenio’s son, Philotas, nevertheless acts as a litmus test for the political pH of each narrator and their underlying sources, in this case through the reporting of a plot on Alexander’s life led by a court hetairos, Dymnus.³⁴³ As far as Curtius was concerned, Philotas’ torture after a sham trial in front of a hastily convened Common Assembly of Macedones, and his subsequent sentencing and execution, formed an integral part of Alexander’s moral decline that was painted in tragic biographical tones that typified the Vulgate genre.344 Although Plutarch also saw a conspiracy against an innocent Philotas too, at this point the dispassionate Diodorus still saw Alexander ‘stumbling into a base action quite foreign to his goodness of nature’; Arrian almost bypassed the affair altogether, as no doubt had his principal source, Ptolemy. After all, the removal of the prominent Bodyguard, Demetrius, on the suspicion of collusion with the plotters, provided the opportunity for Ptolemy to occupy the resulting vacant post of Somatophylax.³⁴⁵ Indeed, at Alexander’s death, the Somatophylakes were transformed from Bodyguards to successors, the Diadokhoi, who governed regions of the newly expanded empire; by then they would include Perdiccas, Leonnatus, Ptolemy, Aristonus, Lysimachus, Seleucus, Peucestas, and possibly Eumenes.

Cleitarchus, writing later in Ptolemaic Alexandria, sensibly appears to have kept Ptolemy off the list of commanders summoned to coordinate a covert action against the accused.³⁴⁶ And soon after the trial, the acquitted Amyntas, a prominent (though arrogant) son of Andromenes, a syntrophos of the Pellan court and one of the king’s hetairoi, died conveniently (some might say ‘mysteriously’, for he had too much support for an open conviction).³⁴⁷ Yet both trials – that of Callisthenes with the pages, and Dymnus with Philotas – along with the death of Alexander Lyncestis (Antipater’s son-in-law) who had been held in captivity for years after falling under suspicion of offering his services to Darius, would have caused widespread panic in the ranks, for Macedonian law seems to have demanded the death of all who were related to those deemed guilty of treason.³⁴⁸

This series of episodes represented a dark period for Alexander, though blacker was still to come. Holt calculates that the Macedonian campaigns in Bactria and Sogdia through 328/9 BCE (much of it absent from Arrian’s account and dealt with more fully by Curtius) had already left 100,000 dead, including women and children, whilst 7,000 Macedonians are estimated to have perished there. Deaths from wounds, illnesses and disease had surely taken more allied troops than any eyewitness source would have been prepared to admit. When Alexander departed the region he had to leave behind a defence force with garrisons that might have totalled 20,000 ‘peacekeepers’.³⁴⁹ Curtius claimed he actually tried to conceal the disastrous outcome, ‘… threatening with death those who came back from the battle, if they revealed what had happened.’³⁵⁰

The ‘Vulgate Alexander’ was now more Ahriman than Ahura Mazda, and more the stuff of the Spartan Crypteia than king portrayed in Xenophon’s Cyropaedia.³⁵¹ The wolf that the priestess Pythia predicted would guide the Macedonian conqueror to the Persians (Apollo-Lyceus that appeared on Macedonian coinage?), had finally crept out of Alexander himself;352 as far as Demosthenes was concerned, this was the monolykos, the rapacious ‘arch wolf of Macedonia’, he had warned of years before.³⁵³

It was at this point that Alexander lost control of his passions that his self-restraint and continence, supreme virtues at the height of good fortune, degenerated into arrogance and wantonness… he began to rival the loftiness of the Persian court, equal to the power of the gods.³⁵⁴

Alexander was criticised for slapping Asiatics on the back and marrying into the Persian royal line the Macedonians had fought to topple in battle, and he slept with the ‘prostitute’ eunuch, Bagoas, who had convinced him to execute Orsines, ‘the noblest of Persians’.³⁵⁵ Even the apologist Arrian, in an unconscious attempt at physiognomy, commented in his so-called ‘great digression’ on moral turpitude that it was ‘regrettable that a descendent of Heracles’ traded Macedonian garb for ‘the median dress and the Persian mitre… when he was victor and they the vanquished.’³⁵⁶

But objection on campaign had become dangerous, and the relationship between the Macedonian commander-in-chief and his men-at-arms, which traditionally permitted isegoria – freedom of speech – was dissolving. Alexander began to see his kingship as a personal sovereignty more than an organ of state and any word against it was deemed mutinous. Finally, Curtius claimed his ‘friends regarded him as the enemy’.³⁵⁷ Alexander’s own brand of court politics had been a one-way diplomacy: unstoppable, inflexible, unflankable and unforgiving as his phalanx; there was no neutral and Alexander recognised no reverse gear at all.

If Alexander had ‘systematically exploited the tensions of his court’, he had finally become part of them himself;³⁵⁸ the passage in Aelian’s Varia Historia is likely apocryphal but may, nonetheless, preserve a core of truth:

Alexander son of Philip is said to have been very jealous of his friends and suspicious of them all, though not for the same reasons. He disliked Perdiccas for being a natural solder, Lysimachus because he was renowned as a general and Seleucus for his bravery. Antigonus’ ambition troubled him, and he disliked Antipater’s ability in leadership, and he was suspicious of Ptolemy’s cleverness and feared Atarrhias’ insubordination, not to mention Peithon’s revolutionary character.³⁵⁹

But would Ephorus, Herodotus or Diodorus have embarked on ‘universal’ history unless they believed its boundaries could be encompassed in their pages? One cannot help but imagine that Aristotle felt, given a long life, he could wrap his arms around the sum total of the physical and metaphysical world and house it in a treatise. Indeed he tried; Cicero reported Aristotle ‘… could see that, since great advances had been made in so few years, philosophy would be completely finished in a short time.’³⁶¹ If ever completed, it would have anticipated the so-called speculum literature of the Middle Ages, the single compendia encompassing the supposed sum of all knowledge.

So it was with Alexander, whose geography, or the geography he chose to believe in, was finite; for him the Oikoumene, the whole inhabited world, was engulfed by an endless Stream of Ocean mentioned by Hesiod, Homer and Herodotus.³⁶² Psychologically, it magnified his ambitions, for this perspective made even the aim of becoming kosmokrator possible despite Herodotus’ warning of the things he had heard: ‘I know of no river of Oceanus existing, but I think that Homer or one of the poets who were before him invented the name and introduced it into his verse.’³⁶³

A map of the known world drafted according to Herodotus’ geographical descriptions ca. 450 BCE. When the Macedonians arrived in India they started to appreciate the boundless East with the Ganges clearly referenced in extant texts. Whether the land of the Seres (China) was mentioned to them we can only speculate.

There were additional reports arriving of the River Ganges, some four months to the east, and probably tales of lands beyond from the traders they encountered or from remnants of the reports of Scylax of Carianda who (debatably) explored the Indian river systems for Darius I ca. 515 BCE.³⁶⁵ This gave rise to a spurious tradition that Alexander even reached the Ganges’ banks.³⁶⁶ The Roman Empire was to learn the true scale of things with the arrival of silk from the Seres and through Egyptian commerce to the south and Parthian trade routes to the north.³⁶⁷ But when Alexander departed Europe he enjoyed a cartographic naivety stemming from maps and notions dating back to Ephorus and Hecataeus’ Periodos Ges (or Periegesis, broadly World Survey) based on Anaximander’s design, an Iliad and Odyssey that looked to the East no further than Colchis on the Black Sea (today’s southern Georgia), Xenophon’s Anabasis which had turned back at the Tigris, a Pseudo-Periplous which advanced nowhere east of Phoenicia, and a Persika from Ctesias which contradicted the claims of both Herodotus and Xenophon.³⁶⁸

As Alexander ventured ever eastward, Aristotle’s declaration that Greeks were born to rule through a superior Hellenic civilisation was being severely undermined by epigraphy and by Alexander himself. The stele listing the Laws of Hammurabi, dating back 1,500 years, proclaimed the sophistication of Babylonian civil codes at a time when Greece was learning to smelt iron, presumably from the Ideaen Dactyls of Mount Ida.³⁷⁰ In India the Macedonians encountered Brahmin sages whose material simplicity made Diogenes’ Corinthian barrel and loincloth appear an extravagance, and whose truth-twisting sophistry matched any Athenian prosecutor.³⁷¹ Pythagoras, who had been captured at the school of Egyptian mysteries by Cambyses II and ferried as a prisoner to Babylon to the presence of Chaldean prophets, already knew it, of course, some two centuries before, and yet the hellenocentric Aristotle must have been disturbed at the reports arriving in Athens. The campaigning ‘student’ may have dumped his former teacher when he caged Callisthenes in favour of a far more eclectic philosophy born of a much wider Peripatus.³⁷²

It follows that Alexander’s belief codes, rooted in Greek propaganda, must have perished at some point in the odyssey that took him beyond the Indus, and this may well have contributed to his gradual orientalisation, or as his men thought, ‘barbarisation’, his poignant retort to the Hellenic lie. What the Macedonians encountered next left Pyrrho of Elis demonstrably sceptical, despite (or possibly because of) the 10,000 gold pieces Alexander is said to have offered him at their first meeting.³⁷⁴ For if any illusion of campaigning glory still carried any currency, India crashed the exchange rate. Victory was tarnished as the highly choreographed battles on open plains were replaced by poisoned arrowheads, snakebites, dysentery and monsoon mud. Rain rusted what shining metal was left in panoplies, and pike heads, swords blades and spear tips were of weatherable iron, and tougher steel (though still weatherable) was almost unheard of in Europe at that time.³⁷⁵ Cavalry officers were now climbing scaling-ladders, and the orderly phalanx formation turned into street-to-street fighting with religious fanatics; when the walls were finally scaled, honourable surrender became nothing less than mass slaughter.³⁷⁶

Alexander had finally marched a river too far and his army refused to follow him further east; as Bosworth pointed out, the court propaganda that saw him as ‘… superhuman, had long ago worn thin amongst the men upon whose efforts his godhead rested.’³⁷⁷ By now, Alexander had been faced with ‘… storms, droughts, deep rivers, the heights of the Birdless Rock [Aornus], the monstrous shapes of savage beasts, an uncivilised manner of life, the constant succession of petty kings and their repeated treachery.’³⁷⁸ Alexander’s near-death wound in the city of the Mallians in today’s southern Punjab would only reinforce their doubts; Alexander was not aniketos (invincible) after all.

The beginning of the Mallian episode has the ring of Philip’s siege of Methone (354 BCE) when he withdrew the scaling ladders once his men had climbed the wall ‘leaving the assailants no hope of safety but in their courage’, though here played in reverse. Two ladders had collapsed leaving Alexander himself exposed upon the citadel wall; furious with the hesitation of his men (who had recently threatened to mutiny), he jumped down the enemy side whereupon he was attacked and almost killed.³⁷⁹ Lucian satirically captured the state of affairs again: (father to son) ‘You were passing for a God; and your being wounded, and carried off the field on a litter, bleeding and groaning, could only excite the ridicule of the spectators…’ Nevertheless, Alexander’s ‘miraculous’ healing, as Brian Bosworth has pointed out, rivalled that of Ares in the Iliad when ‘divine ichor flowed’ and yet it healed as ‘swiftly as fig-juice thickens milk that curdles when stirred’.³⁸⁰

He remained haunted, perhaps for the very first time, by an ambition unaccomplished, and neither was he able to give the superficial impression to the world that had he had fulfilled it. If his two-day sulk on the banks of the Hyphasis (now the Beas River in Northern India) was reminiscent of Achilles’ own tented isolation, it was again a well-worn picture; the Spartan general Clearchus had done the same to avert mutiny under Cyrus. The Hyphasis may have been the boundary of the empire of Darius I; if the troops knew it, they would have considered their job completed.³⁸⁴

Alexander’s next instructions were similarly theatrical, if they are to be believed. Sensing that he may never return, he ensured his men paid for their dissent; he commanded that twelve stone altars some 50 cubits high (approximately 75 feet) be built to Olympian gods, and he set about exaggerating the stature of the ‘giants’ who erected them: oversized weaponry, equipment, couches, and beds were left behind. The altars were apparently still standing in Plutarch’s day before the Hyphasis changed its course. Curtius concluded of the whole affair: ‘He was preparing to leave posterity a fraudulent wonder.’³⁸⁵ Alexander had already, and somewhat symbolically, destroyed Cyra, the city that marked the furthest foundation of Cyrus’ earlier empire, and these altars were to be the new eastern boundary marks.³⁸⁶ Arrian, thus we assume his favoured source, Ptolemy (and perhaps Aristobulus too), was predictably silent on any suggestion of ‘fraud’, focusing their texts on memorials to ‘victorious progress’ instead.

But this time victory came at a price. The ‘commoner’ Coenus, whose family had received significant land in Macedonia, had spoken out on the dissatisfaction of the regular infantryman in what became an immortal speech.³⁸⁷ He was a brother-in-law of the executed Philotas as he had married one of Parmenio’s daughters, whose previous husband was most likely the also executed Attalus.³⁸⁸ The incompliant Coenus was precariously placed; now a distinguished infantry hyparchos who had sarcastically congratulated Alexander for giving 1,000 talents to the Indian rajah of Taxila, he next pointed out the poor condition of his men and their weapons in India. He too, suspiciously, died a few days later on the banks of the Acesines (today’s Chenab); Alexander is said to have adorned his ‘grief’ with, ‘It was for the sake of a few days that Coenus had made his long harangue, as if he alone were the one who would see Macedonia again.’389

The retracing of steps westwards ceased at the River Hydaspes when Alexander ordered the famous 1,800-vessel flotilla to be built on which they would head south to the sea; he, like Achilles, would do battle with a river, or at least emulate Scylax’s voyage of discovery. In the rapids at the confluence of the Hydaspes and Acesines, he certainly fought for survival, and once more at the delta of the Indus when tides never imagined nearly scuttled the whole fleet. On the voyage, Alexander’s men would embark upon the most bloody campaigning to date, while a young Chandragupta (Sandrokottos to the Greeks), who reportedly once approached Alexander for help, watched on as he planned his own Indian dominion.³⁹⁰ But aware that Darius I had conquered the Indus Valley, Alexander could do no less, and he attempted to extract the veneer of fealty from the river-bordering tribes.

We may doubt that he knew that some 2,000 years earlier a great Indus Valley civilisation had existed; it was once twice the size of that of Egypt and Mesopotamia and it was only discovered in the 1920s along with the dry beds of the once great Saraswati River. A thousand settlements, the largest at Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa, extending over 500,000 square miles, once proliferated the fertile basin with some one million inhabitants with an elaborate and unrivalled system of drainage and sanitation, and a still-undeciphered script.³⁹¹

Blind to that ancient past, Arrian, we imagine drawing principally from Ptolemy (though with a weather-eye on Cleitarchus when information was scant) littered his fifth and sixth chapters with terms associated with the carnage that followed no fewer than sixteen times from the aftermath of the Hydaspes battle with Porus, through the slaughter in Mallia, to Alexander’s flotilla finally arriving at the Indus Delta: translations give us ‘crushed’, ‘cut down’, ‘put to death’, ‘subdued’, ‘attacked unarmed men’, ‘onslaught’, ‘massacred’, ‘enslaved’, ‘trapped’, ‘stormed’, ‘plundered’ and ‘hanged’.³⁹² Campaigning in Gedrosia added to the death toll and Diodorus recorded that: ‘Every spot was filled with fire and devastation and great slaughter.’³⁹³

Remarkably, Arrian recounted this period in an easy and matter-of-fact way despite the enemy casualties (reportedly) falling in the tens of thousands. But this was typical of Arrian’s stoic principles: ‘never say an action is bad’, and so the death count was simply labelled ‘high’. Tarn, in a similarly characteristic stance, claimed Cleitarchus ‘had a taste for inventing, or adopting inventions of, massacres’, though did agree that the period was ‘unique in its dreadful record of mere slaughter’.³⁹⁴ Then again, we must recall that ‘India’ had become a byword for thauma and the exaggeration of scale; living dragons, 300-year-old elephants and 200-foot-long serpents epitomised the inflation of misunderstood fact.³⁹⁵ The twelve oversized temples and numbers attached to the massacres may simply be its by-product, and after all, chronic policy failure was rarely reported as simply that.

It was not that Alexander chose this route unaware of its difficulty (only Nearchus claims this), but because he had heard that no one had yet succeeded in getting an army through the region safely. Semiramis had travelled this route on her forced retreat from India, but locals reported that even she made it through with twenty survivors from the entire army, and Cyrus the son of Cambyses suffered the same with only seven to tell the tale.³⁹⁷

Alexander was evidently lost to the West and he was being consumed by the East; it was Cyrus and the Assyrian queen who occupied his nostalgia. Babylon had seduced, India had scarred, and finally Gedrosia attempted to swallow the Macedonian-led army. The desert did not step aside in obeisance as the sea had in Pamphylia, and the ‘yearning’ (pothos) Nearchus attributed to the choice of route looks like the cover-up of another huge blunder that ‘proved fatal to a large proportion of the army’; ‘most were lost in the sand, like sailors lost overboard at sea’.³⁹⁸ Notably many must have been Greek mercenaries.³⁹⁹ Of the 125,000 infantry and 15,000 cavalry Alexander once commanded in India, Plutarch believed one-quarter survived (though he didn’t directly attribute the loss to this disaster alone). These overall numbers appear grossly exaggerated (even accounting for a ‘moving state’ of non-combatants) but it was, nevertheless, a devastating outcome.⁴⁰⁰

The despondent king soon began executing misbehaving officials who must have doubted he would return; ‘In short, the whole empire was in turmoil, and an atmosphere of instability prevailed everywhere’, claimed Plutarch.⁴⁰¹ Curtius reported that over 600 transgressors were executed in Carmania for malversation, including the scapegoat administrators Alexander pinned blame on for the poor Gedrosian logistics; the death list included Persian satraps and common soldiers alike, as well as the four men Alexander had earlier enlisted to murder Parmenio, one of them Coenus’ brother.⁴⁰² The ever-trustworthy general, Craterus, brought two Persian nobles who had planned to revolt to Alexander in chains, whilst Leonnatus had suffered heavy losses when attacked by local tribes. At this point there was still no news of whether Nearchus’ fleet had survived its journey; the disaster could be greater still.

At Opis (or Susa, there is some chronological uncertainty) Alexander received a long-overdue reality check in the form of a second (or third) troop mutiny.⁴⁰⁶ Having infiltrated the Companion Cavalry with Persians as early as 329 BCE, Alexander had nevertheless refrained from arming and equipping them in Macedonian style. But the arrival at Susa of 30,000 epigonoi, the cadets representing the next generation of Asiatic soldiers, was a step too far for the veteran infantrymen whose unique status with their king was being undermined. According to Diodorus, the epigonoi were to ‘serve as a counterbalance to the Macedonian phalanx’, which implied Alexander’s lack of trust in his domestic ranks; perhaps it also pointed at their dispensability now the Achaemenid threat was gone.⁴⁰⁷

‘Foreigners’ now carried Macedonian lances in place of the thonged javelins of their native lands, a Persian battalion of Silver Shields was formed (previously an elite hypaspist unit), and Arrian suggested that even the melophoroi, the golden apple-bearing Immortals, had been assimilated, though he predictably saw this as Alexander prudently distancing himself from chauvinism.⁴⁰⁸ Persian cavalry, in small numbers, had been serving with the army since 330 BCE, but here we have the first signs of dissent from the king’s own mounted units which were being diluted by ‘barbarian’ regiments from Bactria, Sogdia, Arachosia, Zarangiana (Drangiana), Areia, Parythaea (Parthia) and the elite Euacae from Persia; as a result a fifth hipparchy (cavalry squadron) emerged.⁴⁰⁹

Young Persian nobles had also augmented the Royal Guard, the agema, which was now, tellingly, under Alexander’s personal command; the king was, it must have appeared, handing back the empire to the Persians.⁴¹⁰ As Briant notes: ‘Of the twelve satrapies conquered and reorganised between 331 and 327 BCE, only one, Arachosia was given to a Macedonian (Menon); all others, at least initially, had been bestowed on Iranians’; even former Persian plotters (Nabarzanes) were pardoned, though they relinquished their military power and then saw their sons enrolled in Macedonian ranks as hostages for good behaviour.411 In Alexander’s wedding of Roxane he effectively gained a ‘detainee’, for this helped ensure the troubled regions of Bactria and, or, Sogdia, remained ‘loyal’.

The face of the original expeditionary force had changed beyond recognition; the core of the royal army ‘became increasingly less Macedonian – perhaps only a sixth of the entire force – and behaved more mercenary itself.’⁴¹² When Alexander announced his intention to demobilise up to 10,000 veteran soldiers and return them to Macedonia, including those unfit for future campaigning, the assembled men (probably those due to leave and those scheduled to remain) expressed their discord, shouting back something along the lines of ‘go to war yourself then, together with your father Zeus-Ammon’; Alexander’s public rejection of his ‘terrestrial father’, Philip II, had clearly offended those who had once fought under him. The disquiet was suppressed by the drowning of thirteen ringleaders, by Persians no less, a traditional Babylonian retribution though also a Macedonian punishment for those committing sacrilege.⁴¹³

The mutiny at Opis (or Susa), when veterans were discharged, was the second, or arguably the third, revolt in three years.⁴¹⁴ So where did the loyalty, the esprit de corps and eunoia (goodwill) to the king now come from except within Alexander’s own personal guard? Where was the implicit pistis, trust, in their commander-in-chief? The answer looks increasingly pecuniary; the new homonoia came in the form of a talent of silver per discharged man; this equated to approximately 57 lb (26 kg) of silver, the equivalent of 6,000 drachmas which would have amounted to something like sixteen years of an infantryman’s generous pay.⁴¹⁵

On top of that, Alexander pledged the repayment of years of accumulated debt, a settlement that ‘… was received not more thankfully by the debtors than by the creditors.’ Rather than be burdened with hauling waggons of silver into India, Alexander had kept the captured wealth in the Persian treasuries at Susa and Ecbatana; unable to pay his men in coin, a huge backlog of payments must have accumulated, and that in turn would have filtered down to camp provisioners and service providers.⁴¹⁶ But what was once monetary munificence was now little short of a bribe; according to Cicero, this was not the first time Alexander had imprudently used wealth to garner support:

Philip takes his son Alexander sharply to task for trying by gifts of money to secure the goodwill of the Macedonians: ‘What in the mischief induced you to entertain such a hope,’ he says, ‘as that those men would be loyal subjects to you whom you had corrupted with money?’⁴¹⁷

The arrival of the Macedonian army at Susa in early 324 BCE saw the en masse marriages of Macedonian soldiers to Asian brides in a great celebratory pavilion, a venue that itself paralleled the apadana, the marquee-style audience hall of Achaemenid tradition.⁴²² Arrian summed up Alexander’s intentions: he was offering his megistoi to ‘the noblest of Persian and Median blood’.⁴²³ Performing at the weddings, and possibly capturing the truer sentiment of the betrothed Macedonians officers, were the tragic actors Aristocritus, Athenodorus and Thessalus, though none of the neogamoi, the newlyweds, dared voice their dissent.⁴²⁴ The event evidenced a practical reality rather than the more fanciful stoic notions that were later attached to it: Alexander was initiating plans for a hybrid aristocracy. His Somatophylakes and other distinguished officers, some ninety-two in total, were to produce a future generation of half-Asiatic governors that would maintain his legacy across the vast empire.⁴²⁵ And it is here that we may insert Badian’s final assessment: Alexander was ‘essentially not interested in a future without himself’, a presence that was to be extended through his own half-caste sons who would be accepted as overlords of this new environment.⁴²⁶

Had Darius been captured alive, we might even conjecture that Alexander would have followed the example he later set with Porus in India: reinstating him as a ‘client king’ to manage an eastern Argead realm, and in the process reuniting him with a family Alexander had all but adopted himself; he did bring Darius’ brother, Oxyathres, into the fold of court hetairoi and even into his Bodyguard corps.⁴²⁷ And we sense that Alexander would have relished the moment of this grand and poignant gesture, which may explain why he levied such a cruel sentence on Darius’ murderer, Bessus, who was delivered to him naked in a collar, with nose and ears then cut off, and summarily crucified.⁴²⁸ Pure altruism would not have been behind his partial reinstatement, for practically speaking it would have saved him a huge administrative burden, and where possible and when suitably compliant, we know Asian satraps were reconfirmed. Moreover, Alexander ‘will certainly have understood that his work could not last unless he made use of the Achaemenid model’.⁴²⁹ Alexander had made sure that Darius was buried in the royal sepulchre of the Achaemenids close to Persepolis.430

The Macedonian rank and file was bewildered by Alexander’s adoption, admiration, and preservation of so much he had conquered, just as the Spartan hoplites under Lysander had questioned why Pausanias voted against destroying Athens at the end of the Peloponnesian War (which nevertheless marked the end of the creativity of the Greek city-state). Pausanias was tried and finally exiled for his pacifist policy, though Plutarch credited the lines of Euripides’ Electra with saving the day, for upon hearing them, ‘… all were moved to compassion, and felt it to be a cruel deed to abolish and destroy a city which was so famous, and produced such poets.’ But Athens’ Long Walls were pulled down and its fleet was burned to the melancholy sound of the flute.⁴³¹ But in Alexander’s case, the simple truth is that he did not so much defeat the Persian Empire as become subsumed by it.

The army finally returned to Babylon in late 324 BCE, by which time troops were cynical, friends had been executed and close Companions were dead. How did this affect the ever-campaigning king? Lane Fox insightfully stated ‘nothing is harder, than to appreciate Alexander after Hephaestion’s death’, for the former chiliarchos – Alexander’s alter ego – had died in Ecbatana earlier in the year.⁴³² A decade before, and in more hopeful times, Darius’ mother, Sisygambis, had unwittingly mistaken Hephaestion for the king due to his height.⁴³³ The king’s immortalised reply – ‘he too is Alexander’– implied a true homoousios in which they shared the same essence. If Aristotle’s definition of ‘a single soul dwelling in two bodies’ held true here, Alexander had lost his more temperate half, and any remaining sophrosyne, moderation, was lost along with him.⁴³⁴

‘To lighten his sorrow’, after reportedly destroying the temple to Asclepius at Ecbatana and shearing the manes of his horses and mules in a Homeric mourning, Alexander embarked on a ‘blood-soaked hunt’ of the Cossean tribes from the youths upwards; Plutarch termed it a ‘sacrifice to the shades of his dead friend.’⁴³⁵

In contrast to the earlier Asiatic appointments, by the time Alexander returned to Babylon, tellingly, only three Persians still held office.⁴³⁶ The new administration was never the Graeco-Oriental homonoia many believe he attempted to bring about. Within this new administrative model Alexander relied on resettled mercenaries, principally Greeks, to keep peace across the empire. Curtius proposed that: ‘Alexander… was thinking that Asia could be held by an army of modest size because he had distributed garrisons in many places and filled his new cities with settlers eager to preserve the status quo.’⁴³⁷ But Isocrates had long before alerted Philip to the prospect of these wandering and destitute fighters searching for new employment, advising him to plant them in colonies on the empire borders to thwart any dangerous build-up.⁴³⁸ Even Calanus, the resident Indian gymnosophist, had demonstrated to Alexander, with a stiffened hide laid on the floor, that unless you controlled the centre, the edges of the empire would always rise up in opposition.439

Polybius ominously concluded that tyrant-employed mercenaries are superior to those recruited by democracies.⁴⁴⁰ But Iphicrates’ advice to hire a ‘mercenary soldier fond of money and of pleasures, for thus he will fight the more boldly to procure the means to gratify his desires’, did not contemplate a life on the far banks of the Indus, or the wolf-packed forests of Hyrcania (‘wolf-land’), despite the raising of the mysterious so-called Wall of Alexander erected in the region.⁴⁴¹ These garrisoneers were supposed to become what the Romans broadly termed limitanei, frontier soldiers. They were farmers of kleroi, land grants in the Athenian-style kleroukhia that established a new colony with political dependence on the mother city.

Those in settlements furthest from home inevitably degenerated into local militia when regular ‘state’ contact became infrequent. The policy was a huge overestimate of their enthusiasm and stability; some 3,000 of these settlers in katoikiai, military settlements or colonies, had already revolted upon rumour of Alexander’s death in Mallia. Others murdered Philip, the satrap of the expanded Indian provinces east of the Indus.⁴⁴² Demaratus of Corinth had been wasting his tears on the fallen Hellenes who, he lamented, had been deprived of the ‘great pleasure’ of seeing Alexander finally sit on Darius’ throne; he, like Isocrates, appears to have held a far too utopian view of the ‘Panhellenic’ invasion of Persia.⁴⁴³

Alexander had issued an edict to his Asian satraps in 326 BCE ordering them to disband their own hired armies in anticipation of trouble, just as the Persian King Artaxerxes III Ochus had soon after his accession in 358 BCE, for by now over 100,000 mercenaries (if cited numbers can be believed) had seen service with the Macedonians and were stationed across the empire; many of them had once been in the pay of Darius III.⁴⁴⁴ ‘Partly for the sake of gaining fame, and partly wishing to secure many devoted personal followers in each city to counter the revolutionary movements and seditions of the Greeks’, Alexander followed up with the Exiles Decree that was read aloud at the 324 BCE Olympic Games (July 31^st-August 4^th), and which must have broadly coincided with the trouble at Opis or Susa.⁴⁴⁵

The edict, unconstitutional as it turned out, was partly motivated by the need to repatriate these itinerant soldiers and to gain a core of support in the Greek cities. The decree was particularly onerous for Athens which had turfed out the native residents of Samos and made the island a cleruchy in 366/365 BCE, following which the Samian exiles may have journeyed to Sicily (amongst other locations, Iasus, for example) where the historian Duris may have been born.⁴⁴⁶ We even have the lengthy diagramma (legislation) drafted by the city of Tegea in Arcadia to deal with the complicated property and civil laws surrounding the returnees.447 The re-emergence of up to 20,000 political outcasts in Greece was to cause huge property conflict, though Antipater was instructed to act against any city resisting. In this Antipater was precariously placed, for the decree undermined his own political architecture and perhaps Alexander was aiming to achieve just that, for Craterus was already journeying home through Asia with orders to take over the regency.⁴⁴⁸

The Athenian commander Leosthenes, ironically the son of an exile once given sanctuary by Philip II, and singled out for the sacred duty of leading the Greek forces by a newly vocal and ever-hostile Hyperides, another of the so-called ‘Ten Attic Orators’, was offering wandering mercenaries an alternative: a home at Taenarum in southern Laconia. Here the seeds of the Lamian (originally ‘Hellenic’) War against Macedonia were being irrigated by covert Athenian sponsorship, along with an alliance with Locris, Phocis and Aetolia using 50 of the talents from the Athenian treasury that now housed, thanks to the earlier arrival of Alexander’s defecting treasurer, Harpalus, a further 700 talents guarded on the Acropolis.⁴⁴⁹ The 22,000 or so gathering soldiers of fortune (some 8,000 of them formerly employed in Asia by Alexander) should, however, have thought twice about the chthonic implication, for it was here at Taenarum that Heracles discovered the entrance to Hades; a nekyomanteion, a ‘drawing place of ghosts’, was located nearby as well as the Death Oracle of Poseidon and its temple of sanctuary.⁴⁵⁰

Hyperides, who was quite accustomed to representing for a fee, argued to keep the balance of Harpalus’ stolen gold to fund ‘his’ war, fermenting an already explosive brew. Demosthenes, who had been positively mute for the previous six years, and who had been appointed Athens’ representative, archetheoros, for the 324 BCE Olympic Games, was now planning to meet, or had just returned from meeting, Alexander’s general, Nicanor of Stagira (possibly Aristotle’s nephew and soon-to-be son-in-law) at Olympia. Demosthenes now voted against the move. We can only speculate on the repercussions Nicanor threatened both him and Athens with if Harpalus and his funds were not handed over.

Demosthenes was nonetheless accused (by Hyperides, Stratocles and Deinarchus) of taking a commission; 350 talents went missing and so did Harpalus himself to a death in Crete at the hand of one of his Spartan associates, Thibron, while being chased across the Aegean by Alexander’s agent, Philoxenus. After the Areopagus concluded its investigation and made its accusations (the result possibly guided by accusations from Harpalus’ captured steward), Demosthenes, the recipient of a gold crown in 340 BCE and again in 338 BCE at the Great Dionysia for his services to the state, was eventually forced to seek sanctuary on the island of Calauria.⁴⁵¹

With the backdrop of turmoil in both Greece and the Asian empire, the final months of Alexander’s life are difficult to decipher, as we are left with the image of a man painted in sfumato, and the court sources appear to have been remarkably light on coherent detail through this period, when the rapidly concluding biographies degenerated into local reports of portents, prophecies and funeral pyres. So it is difficult to establish who or what Alexander had become. Eugene Borza proposed that every historian needs to deal with three incarnations of the Macedonian king: the ‘mythological-romanticised’, Alexander the ‘historical’, and ‘Alexander the man’.⁴⁵⁶ They are of course inseparable despite Quellenforschung’s best efforts. Besides, ‘the original author of the myth was often Alexander himself’.⁴⁵⁷

There can be no doubt that he was, on the whole, incomprehensible to the average man of his age; simply put, Alexander was a maverick. Can we reconcile the king who paired eighty officers with Asiatic brides at the Susa mass weddings with the campaigner who forbade them and soldiers to take their half-caste offspring back to Macedonia?⁴⁵⁸ Can we explain why Persepolis was burned when Cyrus’ tomb and the Esagila Temple were repaired? And can the Alexander who ran Cleitus through be the same tyrant who let the ever-hostile Demosthenes outlive him? The latter may have been down to the influence of his agent, Aristion, who had enjoyed a friendship with Hephaestion,⁴⁵⁹ and yet the long arm of Antipater and his oligarchs could have easily silenced the anti-Macedonian logographos years before.⁴⁶⁰

Plutarch claimed that in a letter sent to his regent, Antipater, Alexander threatened to bring Aristotle to account for his role in Callisthenes’ treason, but how far their relationship had truly deteriorated remains conjecture.⁴⁶² Nevertheless, we doubt Aristotle would have performed proskynesis at the campaign court despite knowing what had befallen his relative. Alas, he left us no opinion of the great Macedonian conquest; Aristotle’s essay titled Alexander, or On the Colonists, which was associated with his On Kinship and similarly dedicated to Alexander, is lost, and here he might have critiqued what he heard of the new overseas poleis.⁴⁶³

Precariously based in Athens as a philomakedon (or rather an employee of its king), Aristotle had to condone the presence of Macedonian-installed oligarchs in Greece while managing a philosophical school founded under a demokratia in which, according to Aristotle’s Athenian Constitution, ‘the poor, with their wives and children, were “enslaved” to the rich’. The limits of Aristotle’s own creativity must have been tested when he attempted to pair the conqueror of Asia with the pepaideumenos (learned) prince he had taught in the Temple of Nymphs at Mieza. The recurring dichotomies in his writings, and what Diogenes Laertius described as a ‘double criterion of truth’, along with the ‘dual structure of politics, morality and ethics’, were probably a result of his uncomfortable position.⁴⁶⁴ In his Politics Aristotle appreciated that some monarchies can neither be described as absolute nor constitutional, and this is no doubt how he avoided passing judgment on Makedonon Politeia.⁴⁶⁵ If genuinely attributable to him, his disquisition on monarchy hinted that he and Alexander may have philosophically shadow-boxed on which of his five subcategories of kingship Alexander had actually established, encroaching as it did on ‘absolute rule’ as far as it fitted into the ‘heroic’.⁴⁶⁶

If these complexities defied easy explanation, the Platonist and Peripatetic classifications did not advance the case. Plato determined there are four species of justice, two divisions of law, four of nobility and four of perfect virtue.⁴⁶⁷ They seek absolute definitions for Alexander’s mercurial character when there was clearly an evolution. The abstemious prince who fought at Chaeronea could hardly be the king who enjoyed nightly komoi (Macedonian-styled court banquets which often descended into drinking binges) at Babylon dressing variously as Ammon, Artemis and Hermes, a point even the admiring Tarn reluctantly conceded.⁴⁶⁸ Nietzsche apparently took delight in discovering that at his death the solemn Plato was found to be reading the light-hearted Aristophanes. He concluded the philosopher has a sphinx-like nature; isn’t it just possible Alexander did too?469

But just as ‘great natures exhibit great vices also, as well as great virtues’, mythology provided us with both a Theban winged Sphinx with malevolent riddles, and an Egyptian Sphinx endowed with benevolent strength.⁴⁷⁰ Opinion on which inhabited the conqueror depends entirely on the position of the onlooker.

While guessing like Oedipus on the changing nature of man, we recall that the corpus of fragments collected by Jacoby and Müller is exclusively of Graeco-Roman descent and opinion.⁴⁷¹ What of the opposing view expounded by the Persian, Phoenician, Egyptian and Babylonian accounts? We have no idea what Berossus, the Chaldean priest of Bel-Marduk, actually wrote about Alexander in Babylon; writing just a generation later, the twenty-two quotations or paraphrases of his work and the eleven statements about him in classical sources suggest he was prolific in astronomical and philosophical references to Chaldeans, though to what extent is represented a history of events remains unknown.⁴⁷² The ‘barbarian’ accounts that are extant remember history quite distinctly. Controversial Zoroastrian claims in the Book of Arda Viraf, the religious texts written in ‘Middle Persian’ or Pahlavi, paint Alexander as that thoroughly evil spirit:

But afterward, the accursed evil spirit, the wicked one, in order to make men doubtful of this religion, instigated the accursed Alexander, the Roman, who was dwelling in Egypt, so that he came to the country of Iran with severe cruelty and war and devastation; he also slew the ruler of Iran, and destroyed the metropolis and empire, and made them desolate.⁴⁷³

This may be later Sassanid-era spin (with specious ethnic attachments) but it surely captures the ancient tones of the regions Alexander had once devastated, and were they not just as entitled to their reflections in order to balance the total tradition?

Surely Porus, the 7-foot tall ruler of Paurava, had scribes in India recording the Macedonian onslaught. What did Alexander’s ‘most loyal vassal’, as Arrian termed him, really think of the short godless invader who killed two of his sons at the Hydaspes River?⁴⁷⁴ What did Manetho’s Aegyptiaca (ca. 285 BCE) make of the Macedonian rule of the Ptolemies written from the perspective of a subjugated priest of Ra based at Heliopolis?⁴⁷⁵ Manetho’s Criticism of Herodotus gives us a hint of his views on Greeks coveting the oriental past for themselves. Nevertheless it was Herodotus’ account, and not Manetho’s pages and neither those of Berossus, that remained ‘the standard authority’ on the prehistory of Egypt and Babylonia, from a Western perspective at least.⁴⁷⁶

But the popes, Alexander VI in particular and the Borgia line especially, had inclined to the opposite view, decorating the Vatican with his likeness and charging their contemporaries to ‘behave like Alexander, in dealing with the kings of the East’.⁴⁸¹ Louis XIV, the ‘Sun King’ (1683-1715), fashioned himself on the conqueror, commissioning paintings and a set of prints from Charles Le Brun named Battles of Alexander; even Mehmet II, who ended the Byzantine Empire when conquering Constantinople, adopted the iconography of the Macedonian.⁴⁸² The political philosopher Montesquieu in his 1748 De l’Esprit de Lois (On the Spirit of the Laws) saw an enlightened policy of infrastructure improvement and racial integration in Alexander’s maritime plans and his Graeco-Persian intermarriages.

It has been proposed that ‘murderers are allowed to kill if to the sound of a trumpet’, and so Machiavelli’s Why the Kingdom of Darius, conquered by Alexander, did not rebel against his successors after his death was tolerant of Macedonian brute force too.⁴⁸³ He also forgave and even lauded the Borgias’ cruel reign when discussing ‘whether it is better to be loved or feared’, and he found Hannibal’s ‘inhuman cruelty wholly responsible’.⁴⁸⁴ Machiavelli (1469-1527) had in fact borrowed much from Polybius’ anacyclosis and theories of mixed constitutions along with stoic credits to Fortuna, when outlining his own city state models.⁴⁸⁵ The Florentine is remembered as ‘Machiavellian’ when he was in many ways a model Renaissance man: a humanist trained in grammar, Latin and rhetoric, a musician, playwright, diplomat and a political scientist who published an Art of War.

Where Gustav Droysen saw a ‘Bismarck’ in Alexander in the 1870s,⁴⁸⁸ Tarn, born into privelege in 1869 and writing on the subject through to 1948 in the heyday of the League of Nations, represented Alexander’s campaign somewhat differently: he saw in him that ‘utopian’ mission to bring unity or ‘brotherhood to mankind’.⁴⁸⁹ Schachermeyr published in 1949 and as a result saw the ‘mixing of cultures’ as a dangerous ‘chaos of blood’, rejecting Tarn’s ideals completely.⁴⁹⁰ Ernst Badian, writing in 1958 in the aftermath of Jewish persecution, considered Alexander a ruthless totalitarian tyrant where Peter Green, who published his brilliant but cynical account in the liberal 1970s, was simply disillusioned and failed to see any higher ideals at all. He nevertheless conceded that Alexander was, ‘… perhaps, taken all in all, the most incomparable general the world has ever seen.’⁴⁹¹

In contrast, Lane Fox’s charismatic 1973 biography has been labelled a ‘last great gasp’ of the Alexander ‘romance’. But a historiophotic romantic genre does still persist when summing up his military achievements;⁴⁹² even Polybius allowed Alexander some divinity when recognising his soul had, ‘as all admit, something of the superhuman in it’.⁴⁹³ Hammond’s influential source studies have been branded as: ‘A misguided attempt to turn back the clock of Alexander studies to the time when WW Tarn dismissively rejected the fruitful work of German Quellenforschung, in an attempt to lay the foundations for his Alexander, the Nice.’⁴⁹⁴ As one commentator proposed, Tarn’s thematic approach ‘… has tended to cow originality into silence, because of the mass of erudition underlying that study.’ And it has been said that the studies of ‘Droysen, Berve, Tarn, Schachermeyr and Badian have both added to our understanding and multiplied uncertainties’ attached to the Macedonian king.⁴⁹⁵

These many ‘vintages’ have been readily captured in oils and tapestries – enduring propaganda that pitted the brush and weave against the pen. An ekphrasis in late-medieval art was reasserted throughout the Renaissance merging contemporary and classical themes as effectively as an auctor supplementorum filled manuscript gaps.⁴⁹⁸ Paying due attention to the intolerances of the Holy Roman Empire, the tale of Alexander was already something of an iconograph that was sufficiently alluring to divert the attention of great painters from the safe career of biblical depictions. The result was colourful tapestries depicting the Tales of Alexander and canvasses named Les Reines de Perse aux pieds d’Alexandre (1660-61, better known as The Tent of Darius), Alexander at the Tomb of Cyrus, Alexander and Porus (1673) and Alexander the Great and the Fates (ca. 1667), whilst the 17^th and 18^th centuries saw a still wider artistic proliferation of the theme.⁴⁹⁹

Albrecht Altdorfer’s The Battle of Alexander at Issus painted in 1529 and commissioned by Duke Wilhelm of Bavaria, was influenced by both the recently published World Chronicle of Hartmann Schedel (1440-1514) and Curtius’ account of the engagement.⁵⁰⁰ A civic officer of some repute with connections at the imperial court, Altdorfer had announced the expulsion of Jews from the city and sketched the synagogue before its destruction. He interrogated Anabaptists, appointed Protestant ministers and he shunned ‘spiritual accessories’. The fermenting Turkish push towards Vienna threatened apocalyptic events, and it is against this background that Altdorfer’s canvas depicted a dark turning point in history, thus his rendering of Issus has been described as a ‘cosmic Armageddon’.

A tablet within the picture emphasised the Persian death toll while soldiers wear turbans in Turkish style and women wear feathered toques in the fashion of the German court. Their presence is a likely allusion to Curtius’ description of the capture of Darius III’s royal family, a scene depicted in Paolo Veronese’s equally anachronistic The Family of Darius before Alexander (1565-70). What Duke Wilhelm IV finally received from Altdorfer was a depiction of a world ‘dominated in equal parts by new ideas and medieval tradition’. The conquering Napoleon, a clear admirer of Alexander’s military genius, had the painting relocated to Paris and hung in his bathroom.

In all these ideological hybrids, however, one episode has remained literarily and artistically stable: the rendering of Alexander’s death. In no portrayal of his passing, from the illuminated manuscripts of the 1330s to the unfinished The Death of Alexander the Great by Karl Theodor von Piloty (he died in 1886), do we see sight of a testament or the reading of a Will, not even in those depictions taken straight from the Romance.

If Athenaeus’ testimony is accurate, Alexander was launching himself into an animated recital from Euripides’ Andromeda at Medius’ komos in Babylon just days before he died, as Perseus the saviour we would imagine. Medius of Larissa, whose close relationship with Alexander might stem from the assistance the Thessalian royal Aleuadae line had provided to his grandfather, Amyntas III, allegedly called the impromptu party with the specific intent of facilitating the poisoning of the king. Alexander was toasting his guests in unmixed wine; Ephippus claimed his usual cup held 2 choes (12 pints which verged on a krater, so mixing-bowl-sized) and so it was redolent of the cup of Nestor, so large it was a challenge to lift. We do not know how much Alexander had imbibed that night but the tenth krater signified madness and unconsciousness, according to a fragment of a play from Eubolus (floruit 370/60s BCE).⁵⁰² Euripides seems to have been the choice verse for fevered men; Lucian claimed that when an epidemic hit the population of Abdera, the pale ghost-like citizens recited Perseus’ lines over, mimicking Archelaus’ performance seen earlier that summer. Apparently it was only stopped by the onset of frost.⁵⁰³

Aside from his professed silence in the Journal and his succession failure in the Vulgate accounts, what did Alexander truly contemplate in the fevered days before he died? He must have recalled the Chaldean warning not to enter the city, the advice that diverted him past the now barely inhabited Borsippa, if this is historical and not part of later thauma that attached itself to his death (T21, T22, T23, T24). Or, perhaps he regretted heeding Anaxarchus who advised him to ignore it, though the philosopher’s belief in innumerable worlds might at last have seemed appealing.⁵⁰⁶ Reflecting that most of the Aeacid line had died before the age of thirty, did the first Macedonian ‘Great King’, now with one young son (two, if Justin’s unlikely episode with Cleophis is true), a pregnant wife, an illustrious family and the wealth of Croesus, complain that Tyche and Asclepius had treated him unkindly?⁵⁰⁷ Asclepius had no explaining to do for he was termed ‘the blameless physician’, but surely the Homeric and Iliadic comparisons finally came back to haunt Alexander.⁵⁰⁸ The Iliad, which (it has been proposed), like Statius’ epic poem, was perhaps once named the Achilleid due to its focus on the hero,⁵⁰⁹ opened with:

Sing Goddess, the wrath of Peleus’ son, Achilles and its devastation, that caused the Achaeans loss on bitter loss and hurled many warrior souls down into the house of Hades.⁵¹⁰

Through Alexander’s final hours, as he ‘exchanged life for an eternal battle line’ (as Hyperides phrased it), and when fever-wracked and sweat-soaked in Nebuchadnezzar’s bedchamber, did he think of the warriors he, like Achilles (whose name stems from ‘grief’) had cast into the underworld, or had he conveniently become a believer in the Pythagorean immortal soul?⁵¹¹ Did Alexander expect to meet Cronus breathing the upper air of Aether in the Elysian Fields, or on Hesiod’s Makaron Nesoi, the Isles of the Blessed?⁵¹² And we wonder whether he requested Zeus to consider himself and Hephaestion as new Dioscouri and immortalise them both.⁵¹³

The Persian Great Kings buried clay cylinders inscribed with a record of their deeds in the corners of significant city buildings. Where were Alexander’s, and where was his golden commemorative statue on the Babylonian plain?⁵¹⁴ If he had truly inherited the pharaonic titles ‘Horus the Strong’, ‘the beloved of Ammon’, and ‘Son of Ra’, as a Luxor inscription suggests, he would have also been introduced to the Egyptian Book of the Dead.515 Alexander would have known that he would fail many of the thirty-six denials and that would have hindered his journey to the Egyptian gods, demigods and spirits of the dead.⁵¹⁶ In which case, he might have simply considered little more than the words of Themistocles, ‘the subtle serpent of Hellas’, after the Persian defeat: ‘… the gods and heroes begrudge that a single man in his godless pride should be king of Hellas and Asia, too.’⁵¹⁷

Perhaps Alexander was contemplating Themistocles’ own fate: a hero at Marathon and the real (if not official) commander of the Greek forces at the naval battles at Artemisium and Salamis, and in Plutarch’s opinion ‘the man most instrumental in achieving the salvation of Hellas’, his arrogance saw him ostracised to Argos (as the 190 inscriptions on excavated ostraka testify). Themistocles then ventured to the sanctuary of Alexander I of Macedonia, before, ironically, gaining Persian employ, for Athens had a habit of exiling and poisoning her best.⁵¹⁸

The eyewitness authors would have us believe that none of these introspections, regrets, the blood guilt (alastoria) and the pleas to the gods of Olympus, Egypt and Esagila, made their way to Alexander’s fever-cracked lips as his men gathered around him. Was the king who had been quoting ‘the most tragic of the poets’ about to acquiesce to another silent tragedy, leaving the last lines of his own play unwritten, or to be penned by those about him?⁵¹⁹ We propose not, for Alexander was a manipulator of men, Pythia, diviners and their gods; he exploited imagery of the past and he attempted to change the present; he was more likely to have been disdainfully churning over Themistocles’ challenge on impiety the moment he left Pella. And whether truly verschmelzungspolitik or a purely practical initiative, the mass weddings at Susa made it clear that Alexander was setting out to manipulate the future as well.

As it has been pointed out, the very existence of Alexander’s lavish funeral hearse and its unchallenged construction at Babylon over two full years is evidence enough that he requested burial somewhere else.⁵²⁰ The 12 by 15-foot bier that departed Babylon, vividly described by Diodorus, was so heavy that special shock-absorbing axles had to be designed and a team of road menders and mechanics employed to accompany its slow but loud advance.⁵²¹ Mysteriously, a spectacular sarcophagus was found in Sidon in 1887 and now has pride of place in the Istanbul Archaeology Museum. One scholar commented: ‘It is tempting to see its scaled roof, running vine garlands, guardian lions, and long narrative friezes, as an homage to Alexander’s hearse, which must have passed close by the city in 321 BCE but nothing can be proved’,⁵²² though the frieze clearly depicts the Macedonian king and Hephaestion.

The sarcophagus is now popularly accredited to Abdalonymus, the ‘rags to riches’ King of Sidon, but that has been recently challenged; Laomedon, the displaced satrap of Coele-Syria, has been proposed as its alternative inhabitant.523 Forensics now reveal that the Pentelic Marble sarcophagus was brightly painted in polychromatic style with evidence of gold plating; this is not inconsistent with the ‘hammered gold’ in Diodorus’ description of Alexander’s hearse.⁵²⁴ And so we might be forgiven for wondering whether Ptolemy left the ponderously heavy cask in Syria in his hurried flight back to Egypt after kidnapping Alexander’s body, if it weren’t for a panel which appears to depict the murder of Perdiccas which took place a year or so later.⁵²⁵

If Alexander had genuinely envied Achilles in having Homer to preserve him, he might have equally taken solace in the speech Thucydides provided to Pericles:

Rather, the admiration of the present and the succeeding ages will be ours, since we have not left our power without witness, but have shown it by mighty proofs; and far from needing a Homer for our panegyrist, or other of his craft whose verses might charm, for the moment, only for the impression, which they gave to melt at the touch of fact we have forced every sea and land to be the highway of our daring, and everywhere, whether for evil or for good, have left imperishable monuments behind us.⁵²⁶

But in Alexander’s case the monuments had not been built; no new Acropolis with a Propylaia or Erektheion adorned Asia’s rocky outcrops. The new eponymous cities listed in the epitome of Stephanus of Byzantium’s Ethnica (6^th century) and in the Romance, were, more often than not, simply Asiatic settlements refounded.⁵²⁷ They appear little more than mud brick forts (‘and a market’), or a forced synoecism of smaller settlements into a larger hastily walled town, and, moreover, through the campaign decade much had been destroyed. One of the many new Alexandrias (of perhaps fourteen, and with the exception of the new city in Egypt, all of them east of the Tigris) had been founded on the River Jaxartes (today’s Syr Darya flowing through Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan); the population of three existing ‘cities’ was resettled here at Alexandria Eschate (the ‘Furthest’) and yet a wall 6 miles in circuit was completed in just seventeen days.⁵²⁸

Twelve altars to the Olympian gods at Alexander’s ‘world’s end’ now existed, sculptures by Lysippus of the twenty-five Companions who fell at the Granicus River had been erected at Dion, and ‘Alexander’s Steps’ had been cut into Mount Ossa in Thessaly (they are still visible); we must include the mole at Tyre and the causeway at Clazomenae as ‘construction projects’, though both were simply necessities of aggressive siege warfare. But there was little else to show; no lofty gardens or new palaces with stone carvings that graced Assyrian reliefs.⁵³¹ Even his treasurer, Harpalus, seems to have outdone him in Babylon for an ‘expensive’ monument (perhaps a temple) to Pythionice had already been erected for his dead courtesan.⁵³²

There were no new aqueducts, permanent bridges or a new road network that we know of, just the flotsam and jetsam of campaign necessity and a mercurial nostalgia for a Great King’s tomb; even the harbour construction at Babylon and removal of weirs on the Tigris and Euphrates appear more motivated by military requirements (for the fleet heading to Arabia) than for agricultural purposes.⁵³³ Although Alexander retained Achaemenid administration structures, whether they could be maintained under garrison conditions and thinly spread Macedonian authority is questionable. So was this the skilled and pragmatic adaptation to circumstances that Briant, for one, credits to him, or the tired and insufficiently imaginative solution from a warrior who simply coveted the Persian throne? Perhaps Alexander realised, like Hannibal would later do in Italy, that you cannot truly ‘own’ or keep a whole begrudging country or empire suppressed – when it had been gained by military conquest – when you are ethnically foreign.

‘Positive Hellenism’, which was to see safe trading routes, real cities constructed and Greek amphitheatres nestling in the foothills of the upper and eastern Persian provinces, came later with the Successor kingdoms, when Greeks settled by choice and not coercion in the newly opened up Asiatic world. Aramaic would then give way to koine, the patois of the Western conquerors, and even the Babylonian calendar was synchronised to that of Macedonia.⁵³⁴ But with the exception of Silk Road commodities and dwindling Persian gold, and camels exported to Macedonia and Egypt with hydraulics and irrigation expertise – as well as the appearance of leprosy that was probably imported from India with Alexander’s returning veterans – this was predominantly one-way traffic and not a permanent cultural exchange. It was something of a reversal of the old world order in which the Persian Empire saw little need of Greek goods in the interior. Yet even in this more stable environment, the Greeks themselves continued to show a great apathy for learning foreign tongues or homogenising their existence. The one significant exception, however, was in the growing entrepôt of Alexandria in Egypt.

In the opinion of the Roman emperor Augustus (ruled 27 BCE-14 CE), ‘for Alexander conquest and arete were all, the dull but essential business of administration held no charms for him.’⁵³⁷ Is the appraisal unfair? We could argue that had he lived a decade longer we might have evidence of a grand infrastructure emerging across Asia, and yet his desire to head west from Babylon when the East was still so fragile and recently won, clearly suggests otherwise. It is perhaps understandable then that Alexander’s original Will might have sought to address this: demanding construction of grand mausoleums, temples and chryselephantine statues in his name, a dying man’s compensation for the lack of stone mortared during his life. The Wills detailed in the Romance and at the end of the Metz Epitome (Epitoma Metensis, possibly 4^th or 5^th century CE), a later Latin précis which recounted campaign events through 330 to 325 BCE, request just that (T1, T2).

We opened the chapter with an extract from the words carved into the Cyrus Cylinder, but this timeless and benevolent imagery has its flip side too. It was the Shah of Iran in 1971 who referred to its declaration as ‘the first bill of human rights’ when dedicating a copy to the United Nations; the Pahlavi regime was exploiting the relic as a symbol of 2,500 years of continued Persian monarchy. But Cyrus’ true mindset must be considered in a more sober context, for he had just defeated the much-hated Babylonian king, Nabonidus, at Opis, slaughtering the retreating army and capturing a great haul of loot; Babylon was his for the taking.

The inscription on the cylinder, hardly original in Mesopotamia, was standard conqueror’s rhetoric. Along with the Nabonidus Chronicle, it positioned Cyrus’ capture of the city as an invitation from the local god, Marduk, in the same way that Nabopolassar (Nebû-apal-usur, ca. 658-605 BCE) had recorded and justified his actions at Nineveh seventy years before.⁵³⁸ Cyrus’ ‘restraint’ was a political necessity if he was to unify his new empire, and there is no archaeological evidence suggesting the reconstruction of any building, or the repairing of Mesopotamian temples during his reign.539 Even Xenophon’s encomiastic Cyropaedia contradicted the claims on the cylinder, providing an altogether darker version of events:

Cyrus sent squadrons of cavalry down the different roads with orders to kill all they found in the street, while those who knew Assyrian were to warn the inhabitants to stay indoors under pain of death…When all was done he summoned the Persian priests and told them the city was the captive of his spear and bade them set aside the first fruits of the booty as an offering to the gods and mark out land for sacred demesnes…⁵⁴⁰

The legends that Alexander fed off were clearly open to question. Arrian doubted that either Heracles or the ivy-wreathed Dionysus, the ‘Lord of the Triumph’, had really visited India; he was after all in Hades bringing Euripides back to life.⁵⁴¹ And according to the Cypria, a book of the early Homeric Cycle, the invading Greek fleet heading for Troy made a navigational error and landed at Theuthrania some miles south, fighting an inconclusive battle before noting their mistake.⁵⁴² After nine years besieging the city, a disheartened Agamemnon proposed sailing home with: ‘Cut and run! Sail home to the fatherland we love! We’ll never take the broad street of Troy.’ Helen was, in any case, not in the city; she was stranded for a decade in Egypt while the Greeks battered the Ilion walls.⁵⁴³ Herodotus’ verdict on it all:

It seems to me that Homer was acquainted with this story, and while discarding it, because he thought it less adapted for epic poetry than the version which he followed… If Helen had been at Troy, the inhabitants would, I think, have given her up to the Greeks, whether Alexander [Paris] consented to it or not.⁵⁴⁴

We may be equally dubious about the much-debated concept of verschmelzungspolitik that was so fulsomely anticipated in Plutarch’s Moralia with its ‘philosophic commonwealth’ and ‘one great loving cup’.⁵⁴⁵ Arrian’s account of ‘the international love-feast’ at Susa, which espoused a ‘union of purpose between Macedonians and Persians and partnership in empire’, along with Curtius’ rendering of Alexander’s indignant harangue to his troops that preceded it with further calls for homonoia and koinonia (‘harmony’ and ‘fellowship’) – must have played their part in the notion. The phraseology Curtius used implied the Macedonian king sought to erase the national distinctions of his soldiers: ‘It is neither unbecoming for the Persians to copy Macedonian customs nor for the Macedonians to imitate the Persians’; this was an equalising sentiment that was perhaps perpetuated by the frequent references in Roman rhetoric to Alexander’s breaking the bolts of the doors of the earth. Yet this admirable notion has been described as nothing more than a ‘… romantic comfort blanket thrown by later Hellenistic writers over a by now wobbling Isocratic crusade.’546

Curtius did, however, have his reasons for rebroadcasting such a theme: he was espousing the benefits of a Roman imperialism (we suggest in Nero’s rule, 54-68 CE) which was by then rapidly swallowing up a good portion of the known world.⁵⁴⁷ Some historians such as Droysen argued that a breakdown of cultural barriers was part of Alexander’s grand design, and it is hard to refute the man who first coined the term ‘Hellenistic’, though, ironically, he saw the outcome of the cultural movement as positive to the spread of Christianity but to little else.⁵⁴⁸ Tarn more cautiously stated: ‘The germs of certain phenomena of Hellenism begin to appear before Alexander.’⁵⁴⁹ Mausolus and his Hecatomnid predecessors had, for example, already established a Greek-orientated cultural foothold at Halicarnassus in Caria in the previous century, and Hermias’ philosophical experiment in government at Assus (in the Troad) ought to be mentioned too, though perhaps it was too perfect a concept to escape Persian curiosity;⁵⁵⁰ he was tortured to death in Susa giving his son-in-law, Aristotle, something to ponder on after his prudent return to Macedonia from a too-close-by Lesbos.⁵⁵¹

But it remains highly unlikely that Alexander had such elevated pretensions, and the speech re-rendered by Curtius surely attempted nothing more than to deliver something of a morale-boosting epipolesis (akin to a pre-battle speech) in the face of a military mutiny.⁵⁵² The Greek allusion to a common purpose, homonoia, is, as one scholar put it, a phantom that should be laid to rest.⁵⁵³

As even the harshest critics have, we must acknowledge Alexander’s military prowess and credit him with a coercive campaign genius, for with the exception of Procles of Carthage who rated Pyrrhus of Epirus (died 272 BCE) the better tactician, Alexander is hailed as history’s most successful general. According to Appian, even Hannibal agreed and Scipio too, reluctantly; Livy, Appian and Plutarch repeated the story of Scipio and Hannibal meeting at Ephesus some years after the formative battle at Zama in 202 BCE, and it was here that they questioned each other on their respective military rankings. Polybius rated leaders by the plots and mutinies they attracted or steered clear of, but where Hannibal had remained conspiracy-free, Scipio, whose deeds were later immortalised by Petrarch (who took a dim view of Alexander) in his poem Africa, had not been free from controversy himself. Scipio’s near death illness led to a mutiny of his troops at Sucro in Spain, though the grievances were familiar: soldiers demanding back pay and a larger share of the plunder.⁵⁵⁴

The close temporal proximity of the deaths of Alexander and Demosthenes, with the equally influential Aristotle, each within the successive years 323-322 BCE, has been termed ‘one of the most marvellously significant synchronisms in the history of civilisation’, for it emphatically marked the end of a productive period of Greek genius. It is indeed a wonder that three of history’s most brilliant individuals breathed the same air and with fates that were intertwined. The list becomes even more remarkable if we include Diogenes the Cynic who was said to have died on the same day as the Macedonian king.⁵⁵⁷

To these we may add the Somatophylax Leonnatus (322 BCE), Alexander’s acting chiliarch Perdiccas (321 BCE), the regent-in-waiting Craterus (321 BCE), the court philosopher Anaxarchus (320 BCE) alongside the Macedonian regent Antipater (319 BCE) and Alexander’s vocal opponent Hyperides who died in 322 BCE on Antipater’s orders. Both Theopompus and his opponent, Anaximenes, died within these years taking their Hellenika and Philippika with them, and there followed ‘… a period when anecdote and fable gradually came to usurp the place of truth’.⁵⁵⁸ And this sums up well the environment in which the tales of Alexander’s life, and his death, were first put to papyrus, as it becomes apparent when reviewing the historians who gave us the ‘universal comparandum’.

1.An adaption of the transcription from H Schaudig Die Inschriften Nabonids von Babylon und Cyrus’ des Großen, Münster, 2001, The Prince of Peace 24, 25 and 26. The translation is a modified version of M Cogan’s published in WH Hallo and KL Younger The Context of Scripture. Vol. II: Monumental Inscriptions from the Biblical World, 2003, Leiden and Boston.

3.Herodotus 8.109-110 for Themistocles’ warning that no king should rule Asia and Hellas too.

4.Curtius 5.1.24 reported that ‘most have believed’ Babylon was founded by Belus (alternatively, Marduk), and he added that they were wrong and it was Semiramis; see chapter titled Babylon Cipher and Rosetta Stone for more on its founding.

5.Curtius 5.1.16 described the Babylonian walls as bitumen cemented, using the bitumen stream that poured from a cavern at nearby Mennis.

6.Diodorus 17.117.5 stated twelve years and seven months, Arrian 7.28.1 stated twelve years and eight months; a discussion of the calculation of the length of reign can be found in the Loeb Classical Library 1963 edition, p 467 footnote 5.

7.The Summer Palace might better be termed the ‘Outer Palace’ for its defensive nature; see discussion in Reade (2000) p 20.

8.Justin 12.16.5 for the eagles and Plutarch 2 for Philip’s dream that he sealed Olympias’ womb with the image of a lion before his son’s birth.

9.Arrian 7.16-17 and 7.22.1 for the Chaldean warning to Alexander not to enter Babylon.

10.Quoting Plutarch Moralia 327b, translation from the Loeb Classical Library edition, 1936.

11.Plutarch 75.1. ‘Magi’ comes from the Old Persian name for ‘priest’; Collins (2008) p 54.

12.The doctor treating Alexander’s closest companion, Hephaestion, had been executed for failing to cure him the previous year: Arrian 7.14.4, Plutarch 72.3. Alexander executed the seer who predicted a propitious day when his father was murdered; Hammond (1994) p 176 for discussion; a fragment of the report of the trial following Philip’s death is preserved.

13.Xenophon Cyropaedia 8.7.6 provided a vivid account of Cyrus’ deathbed speech attended by his sons and generals.

14.As an example of the admiration, Alexander had Cyrus’ tomb repaired and punished those he suspected of tomb-raiding. Discussed in detail in chapter titled Lifting the Shroud of Parrhasius.

15.Xenophon Cyropaedia 7.6.9 translated by HG Sakyns 2009, Gutenberg e-book project.

16.Aristotle Magikos fragment 6 cited in Diogenes Laertius book 1 Prologue, section 8-9 On Philosophy. Aristotle’s lost work, On the Pythagoreans, is also said to have discussed the Magi and, or, magic. See discussion in Chroust (1964) p 572 and Momigliano (1977) pp 18-19.

17.With calendar changes and recalibrations it is not possible to support the exact dating of this event to the modern calendar with any certainty, despite the accuracy of astronomical observations.

18.Scholars disagree on whether the text on the Cyrus Cylinder really portrays a tolerant regime; see discussion in Kuhrt (1983) pp 83-97 and below.

19.The tablets are labelled BM 36761 and 36390. For full discussion see Polcaro-Valsecchi-Verderame (2008) pp 55-64. Sprague de Camp (1972) p 141 for a description of the Processional Way.

20.Arrian 3.16.4,7.17.2, Diodorus 2.9.9, Strabo 16.1.5 for the destruction; Xerxes melted down the gold statue of Marduk for his depleted treasury. Plutarch Aristides 21.2 reported on the sacrifices taking place by the Plataeans in his day.

21.Following P Briant, Rois, tributs et paysans: études sur les formations tributaires du Moyen-Orient ancient, Pu Franc-Comtoises, 1989, p 330; discussed in Briant (1974) pp 183-184; the contention was also re-asked as a question by R Lane Fox in 2007.

24.Alexander’s beardless tradition discussed by VA Troncoso in Carney-Ogden (2010) pp 13-24; Plutarch Moralia 180a-b claimed Alexander ordered his men to shave before battle. See Athenaeus 6.260d-261a and 13.565a-b for references to the beardless fashion. Plutarch 4.1-4 for his sweet odour, neck tilt, melting eyes and fair complexion. Aelian 12.14 for his menacing or alarming appearance.

25.Stewart (1993) pp 341-350 and Carney-Ogden (2010) p 13 for other citations on Alexander’s appearance. Plutarch 4.1-7, Plutarch Moralia 53D and Pyrrhus 8.1 for Alexander’s hair, smell, harsh voice. For his teeth Romance 1.13.3. Plutarch 4 for the Memoirs of Aristoxenus.

26.The word literally means ‘policy of fusion’ and was first used by Droysen in his Geschichte Alexanders des Grossen (1833) to describe Alexander’s supposed plan.

27.Roisman-Worthington (2010) p 89 ff for origins of Makedones, and following Anson (1984).

29.The Catalogue of Ships is found in Homer’s Iliad 2.494-759. Herodotus 2.154.2, Thucydides 2.68.5, Xenophon Cyropaedia 2.3 all stress the commonality of the Greek language; discussed in Anson (2004) p 205 ff.

30.Both Herodotus and Pausanias were more specific in the identification. For example Pausanias 7.1.5 links Achaeans to the inhabitants of Argolis and Laconia being displaced by the Dorian invasion.

32.The collective Akhaioi was used almost 600 times in the Iliad, the Danaoi almost 140 times and Argives some 182 times to denote the Greek where Hellenes appeared only once.

34.Pausanias 10.7.6. The Amphictionic League represented an ancient association of tribes with obscure origins.

36.Herodotus 1.57.3, 1.58.1; quoting E Anson from Roisman-Worthington (2010) p 15 for ‘Greek of Greeks’. Anson (2004) p 193 for Pelasgians. In myth Pelasgos the son of Zeus and Niobe was an Arcadian.

37.Herodotus 1.56.3 suggested the Dorians inhabited northern Greece before migrating south.

39.Snodgrass (1967) p 48 for discussion of the end of the Greek Dark Age. Finlay (1973) p 161 for the emergence of the symbola. As examples, Polybius 5.104.1, 7.9.3, 7.9.5, 7.9.7, 9.37.7, 38.3.8 Also Polybius 18.18.1 suggested the ‘Greeks’ used the sarissa and not specifically or exclusively Macedonians. It is highly unlikely all Greece used the sarissa.

40.Discussion of the pre-Greek population and the non Indo-European vocabulary that survived into Greek in Mallory (1989) pp 66-72. Herodotus 5.58-5.59.1 for the Cadmus and founding of Thebes. RSP Beekes Etymological Dictionary of Greek, Brill, 2009, p 614 for the pre-Greek etymology of Kadmos.

41.Pausanias: Boeotia 20-24. Aristotle Meteorologika 1.14. Parian Chronicle entry 6: ‘From when Hellen (Ἕλλην) [son of] Deuk[alion] became king of [Phthi]otis and those previously called Graikoi were named Hellenes.’ Strabo 7.328 for the Hellopia of Hesiod. Stephanus of Byzantium Ethnika for Graikos’ origins. Homer Odyssey 14.327 for Odysseus’ visit to Dodona; Iliad 16.233 for Achilles praying to Zeus of Dodona; Malkin (1998) pp 149-150 for discussion. Carney (2006) p 91 for the cults of Dodona.

42.Aristotle originated from Euboea which perhaps explains his earlier reference. For the various clues to the etymology of Graecus see Homer 2.498, Pausanias 5, Aristotle Meteoroligica 1.352a.

44.Loosely attributed to Aristotle Politics 3.14, 1285a.20, but more likely emanating from his ‘school’. Politics 7.1324b for the Macedonian reference as ‘barbarians’ and 1333b38-34a1 for the barbarians deserving their fate; Finlay (1973) pp 156-157 for discussion. Aristotle Politics 1327b 23-28 for the climate discussion. Isocrates Panathenaicus 12.163. Also see the earlier view at Plato Republic 470c-471a; see Tarn 1 (1948) p 9 for discussion.

45.Hansen (1999) p 55 for the estimated 750 poleis and Roisman-Worthington (2010) p 93 for 1,000 poleis.

47.Thucydides referring to tribes as barbarian at 1.5.3, 1.6.6, 1.47.3, 1.50.3, 2.68.9, 2.80.5, 2.81-82, 3.112.7, 4.124.1, 4.126.3, 4.127.2. He did occasionally distinguish Macedonians from barbarians, as did Ephorus at 16.4.2, 5.71-2. Thucydides 2.99.2 for the distinction of tribes. Hammond argued ‘barbarian’ was used in a cultural not linguistic sense, considering they all spoke dialects of Greek; HGL Hammond, Ancient Macedonia-Deductions and explanation of the term ‘Barbaroi’, published in Ancient Macedonian Ethnicity, Language, Linguistics, Modern Historians, February 2010. Hatzopoulos (1996) p 479 for Upper Macedonians being more ethnically akin to Epirotes.

49.Herodotus 8.144.2 defined what it was to be Hellenic. Diogenes Laertius Diogenes 6.63 for Diogenes’ use of kosmopolites. Roisman-Worthington (2010) p 93 for philhellenus. The epithets were granted after Archelaus provided much-needed timber for the Athenian fleet after disaster at Syracuse in 413 BCE.

52.Thucydides referring to tribes as barbarian at 1.5.3, 1.6.6, 1.47.3, 1.50.3, 2.68.9, 2.80.5, 2.81-82, 3.112.7, 4.124.1, 4.126.3, 4.127.2. He did occasionally distinguish Macedonians from barbarians, as did Ephorus at 16.4.2, 5.71-2. Thucydides 2.99.2 for the distinction of tribes. Hammond argued ‘barbarian’ was used in a cultural not linguistic sense, considering they all spoke dialects of Greek; HGL Hammond, Ancient Macedonia-Deductions and explanation of the term ‘Barbaroi’, published in Ancient Macedonian Ethnicity, Language, Linguistics, Modern Historians, February 2010. Hatzopoulos (1996) p 479 for Upper Macedonians being more ethnically akin to Epirotes. Quoting Hatzopoulos (1996) p 101 following Thucydides 1.5.1 for ‘villages federated into ethne’.

53.A thorough study on the issue of a distinct Macedonian language or dialect in Anson (2004) pp 191-231.

55.Athenaeus 3.122a for Attic adopting elements of Macedonian; discussed in Anson (2004) p 209.

56.Plutarch 51-52 for the Black Cleitus episode in which Alexander demanded his Bodyguard turn out ‘in the Macedonian tongue’. See Borza (1999) pp 42-43 who saw this as a strong case that Macedonians did have a distinct language.

57.Papyrus PSI 12: 1284. See Goralski (1989) pp 95-96 for full transcription of the fragment and Bosworth (1978) for full discussion.

59.See Bosworth (1978) p 236 for Macedonian being considered a wholly separate language in Alexander’s day and Anson (2004) pp 191-231. Livy 31.29.15 and Herodotus 5.22 each claimed Greeks and Macedonians spoke the same language. Livy could have followed Herodotus who might have simply meant the educating or leading Macedonians were able to understand Greek. Andronikos concluded in 1984 that the names on the gravestones at Vergina unequivocally confirm the Macedonians were a Greek tribe. Hammond Philip (1994) for fuller discussion on dialects of Macedonia. Quoting Hatzopoulos (1996) p 77 and p 209. Hammond (1991) p 12 for Cretan immigrants in Bottiaea.

60.Roisman-Worthington (2010) p 95 for discussion of the Pellan Curse Tablet and its Doric linguistic style; Hammond suggested Aeolic; Anson (2004) p 210 for discussion.

61.Roisman-Worthington (2010) p 93 for the influences in Macedonian and p 94 for Hesychios.

62.Andronikos concluded in 1984 that the names on the gravestones at Vergina unequivocally confirm the Macedonians were a Greek tribe. Anson (2013) p 19 for the Greek inscriptions. Quoting Hatzopoulos (1996) p 173 for the pre-Greek names.

64.Athenaeus 3.122a for Attic adopting elements of Macedonian; discussed in Anson (2004) p 209.

65.See Billows (1990) p 21 for discussion on the development of the Macedonian court. Hammond (1994) p 43 for discussion of the notable artists invited to the Macedonian court.

66.Aelian 13.4 for Euripides and Agathon; how late in the reign of Archelaus Pella was founded in disputed. Athenaeus 6.261a for the land grants to foreign hetairoi.

67.Borza (1995) for the Spartan troop ration of wine; 2 kontylae was approximately 1 pint.

68.Discussion of Herodotus visiting Macedonia in Hammond (1996) p 67 citing the Suda FGrH 4T 1, ca. 455 BCE.

70.Discussed in Wilkins-Hill (2006) p 45 citing Aristophanes Frogs 85, Anaxandrides Protesilaus frag. 41 and Mnesimachus The Horsebreeder where Macedonian luxury is referred to. WS Greenwalt in Carney-Ogden (2010) p 155 for Euphraus at Pella. Flower (1994) p 22 for the presence of Theopompus and Anaximenes. Photius claimed Isocrates influenced the content and style of their works: Flower (1994) pp 42-43 though rejected by him. Hammond (1991) p97 for Theophrastus’ role.

72.As examples of nationalistic calls, Demosthenes 3.24, 9.31-32, Isocrates To Philip 5.154. Green (1974) p 6 for ‘sub-Homeric’ enclave.

73.Quoting Cicero Orator XXXIV, translation from Routledge Dictionary of Latin Quotations 2005 p 284.

74.Alexander is derived from alexein, to defend against or repel, and andros the genitive of the noun for ‘man’.

75.Omphalos is literally ‘navel’ though also a sacred stone such as at the oracle at Delphi. Lenden (2005) p 36. For Alexander’s reference to the poems of Homer as ‘campaign equipment’ see Plutarch Moralia 327f or Fortune 4.

76.Homer Iliad 2.204 for the wording of Odysseus to quell an uprising in the Greek camp.

77.Plutarch 3.6. Strabo 14.648 credited Hegesias with founding the Asian style of composition. Cicero Letter XXXV: ad Atticum 6.1 branded him a ‘silly writer’.

78.For Olympias’ association with the Dionysiac mysteries see Plutarch, 2.5-6, Athenaeus 13.560 ff, Polyaenus 4.1. Pausanias 9.30.7 for Orpheus’ grave.

79.Plutarch 1 gives us Alexander’s Aeacid descent on his mother’s side from Neoptolemus, and Justin 17.3. Neoptolemus was also known as Pyrrhus; Plutarch Pyrrhus 1-1-4 for his origins and Pausanias 1.11.1, 2.23.6 for Neoptolemus rule of the Molossians; Anson (2004) p 211 for detail, also Carney (2006) p 5. The mythical association is confirmed by Pindar in his Nemean Odes 4.51-53 and 7.38-38. See Arrian 1.11-12 for Alexander’s sacrifice to Priam to avert anger against the family of Neoptolemus.

82.For Perseus see Arrian 3.3.2. Also discussed in Thomas (2007) p 200. At Herodotus 7.150 Xerxes claimed the Persians were descended from Perseus whose father was Danae’s son, Perseus. The full text is ‘Men of Argos, this is the message to you from King Xerxes. Perseus our forefather had, as we believe, Perseus son of Danae for his father, and Andromeda daughter of Cepheus for his mother; if that is so, then we are descended from your nation.’ Thus Xerxes claimed to be of the same blood as the Greeks. Heracles was a Perseid four generations after Perseus, so claimed Isocrates in the Busiris 8.36.

83.Justin 7.1.6 for Midas’ expulsion. Herodotus 1.14 for the son of Gordias, and at 8.138.3 he mentioned the Gardens of Midas in Macedonia. It is certain Alexander would have read Herodotus, for Aristotle had and it would have surely been an educational study topic; see Aristotle Rhetoric 1409a 27 where Aristotle opened with ‘Herodotus of Thurii hereby publishes the results of his enquiries.’ Callisthenes FGrH 124 F 24 for Midas’ wealth coming from iron ore, cited in Hammond (1994) p 5. Hammond (1996) for discussion of early Macedonia and Midas’ dynasty and (1991) p 31 for early genealogies. Strabo 7.3 for origins of the Phrygians; Herodotus 7.73 for Bryges and 8.138 for their coexistence with Macedonians.

84.Euripides Helen lines 39, 109 as clear examples. Graves (1955) p 283 for the earlier date and Hittite power.

85.Lineage discussions in Hammond (1996) and in Roisman-Worthington (2010) pp 1-39, Green (1970) pp 20-21, Hammond (1993) pp 5-6, Hammond (1991) pp 12-13, Plutarch 1 and in Greenwalt (1985). Plutarch 2.1 for Caranus founding the Argead line (with similar claims in Satyrus FGrH 631 F1, Theopompus FGrH 115 F 383 and Marysas FGrH 135-6 F14; Roisman-Worthington (2010) p 128. Herodotus 5.22.1, 7.73 and 8.137.8-9 for the link from Temenus to King Perdiccas of Macedonia; Justin 7.1.6 for Caranus’ invasion and the re-founding of Aegae. Diodorus 7.17 for Caranus’ Argive origins. There is in fact uncertainty of the lineage of the early kings of Macedonia; discussed in Greenwalt (1985) pp 43-49. Thucydides 2.99.3 and Herodotus 8.137-9 reported on the Temenid origins from Argos.

86.Arrian 2.5.9 confirmed Alexander’s descent from the Argive Heracleidae. Isocrates To Philip 32: ‘Argos is the land of your fathers.’ Also Isocrates To Philip 115 for his descent from Heracles.

88.Quoting Jaeger (1939) p 347 for Euripides exploiting rhetorical device and for ‘the first psychologist’. See Green (1996) pp 69-71 for the Temenid line and its ascendancy over the Argead line. Athenaeus 12.537d recorded that Nicobule said: ‘In his last dinner, Alexander in person acted from memory a scene from the Andromeda; perhaps he favoured the poet for his Macedonian links.’ Greenwalt (1999) p 164 ff, quoting Hammond for Euripides’ play and the development of the Caranus myth. Temenus was the alleged ancestor of King Perdiccas I; Herodotean tradition has it he ruled Macedonia in the early or mid-7^th century BCE.

89.Justin 7.2.2-4 for Perdiccas’ son Argaeus and St Stephanus of Byzantium for the son of Macedon; Polyaenus 4.1 for Argaeus’ deeds and Herodotus 8.137-139 for the Macedonian line. Anson (2013) p 14 for additional detail. See Borza (1995) pp 114-115 for the etymology of Argead and history of the Argives.

90.Appian Syrian Wars 63. Also see discussion of links to Argos and Orestis in Jarde (1997) p 324 ff. Orestis had formerly been part of the Molossian tribal region of Epirus. The other tribal coalitions were Thesprotians and Chaonians; Hammond (1994) p 120.

91.Herodotus 5.22 for the story that Alexander 1 of Macedonia was allowed to compete after proving his Argive roots; Justin 7.2.13-14. Macedonians were at that time not permitted to enter the games and only allowed Greeks to compete. Herodotus’ treatment of geography and ethnology following discussion in Jaeger (1939) p 382. FGrH 4 F-74 for Hellanicus’ claim see Roisman-Worthington (2010) p 16 for discussion and Anson (2004) p 200 and p 90 (Engels). Apollodorus Chronica 3.8.1 also followed the contention of Hellanicus of Mytilene.

92.Stewart (1993) p 277 for the Greek proverb and its use. Hammond (1994) p 158 for Philip’s coinage. Roisman-Wilkinson (2010) pp 50-51 for the bimetallic minting in the Attic and Chalcidian standards.

94.The statues were to be of himself, his parents Amyntas and Eurydice, Olympias and Alexander; Pausanias 5.17.4 (states, probably incorrectly, that Eurydice was the wife of Arrhidaeus), 5.20.9-10. Scholars debate whether the Eurydice being referred to was his mother or last wife, niece of Attalus, otherwise named Cleopatra (Arrian 3.6.5 for the rename of Cleopatra to Eurydice); discussed by O Palagia Carney-Ogden (2010) pp 33-41; p 38 for the marble argument identity of Eurydice. Alexander and Olympias had fled Macedonia to Epirus and Illyria following Philip’s wedding to Attalus’ niece, Cleopatra; O Palagia therefore suggests including them in the family statues was an act of reconciliation; Carney-Ogden (2010) p 37; however if Eurydice was his new young wife Philip was walking a dangerous path. The Philippeion description comes from Pausanias 5.20.9-10 and is discussed in Carney (1995) p 380.

95.The Succession Myth related the cruel lineage of the Titans from the primordial Uranus and Gaia. Cronus, the youngest son, killed his father Uranus, who prophesized a similar fate for the line of Cronus who swallowed his own children whole to evade that fate. Only the youngest son, Zeus, survived. Refusing to free his sibling from Tartarus, the fiery abyss, his wife, Rhea and mother, Gaia, conspired against Cronus; Cronus coughed up the three children whereupon Zeus freed them from Tartarus, and so started a war between he and Cronus lasting ten years which eventually saw Zeus take his place amongst the gods. Whilst Ouranus is generally considered the first god of the sky with Gaia as his wife, Hesiod’s Theogonia 126 ff cited him as the son of Gaia, Mother Earth. For its link to the Babylonian creation myth, Enûma Elis, see discussion in West (2008) Introduction xii.

98.Justin 9.5.9 for claims of adultery and mention of divorce (also 9.7.1), Arrian 3.6.5 for ‘rejection’; Carney (2006) p 11 believed Justin may have sourced that from the Romance. Justin 9.7.1 for the divorce and Plutarch 10.6 for suspicions falling on Alexander.

99.Badian (1963) pp 245-6 for the suggestion of Philip favouring his nephew over Alexander. Plutarch Moralia 327c-d for the preference of Amyntas and the sons of Aeropus. Curtius 6.9.17, Justin 12.6.4. Arrian 1.25.2, Justin 11.2.2 for Lyncestis’ show of support for Alexander. Arrian 1.25.1 for the murder of two of the three sons of Aeropus.

102.Diodorus 16.93.7 for Attalus’ prominence at court and Curtius 8.8.7 for Alexander’s distrust and lack of forgiveness for Attalus’ comment that Cleopatra may produce a ‘legitimate’ heir to the throne; Plutarch 9.7-9, Satyrus fr.5, Romance 1.21.1, Justin 9.7.3 for the banquet at which Attalus insulted Alexander. Plutarch 9.4-11 for events that led to the flight of Alexander and Olympias. Also Justin 9.7.5 for Alexander in Illyria. Athenaeus 13.557e, Diodorus 17.2.3 for Cleopatra’s daughter; Justin 9.7.2 for Cleopatra giving birth to a daughter and a son; see Lane Fox (2011) p 385 for discussion. Some consider that Alexander had Illyrian blood himself: Carney (2006) p 90 for Philip’s Illyrian blood through his mother Eurydice, though contested. Plutarch Moralia 14b-c and Libanius through the Suda stated Eurydice was Illyrian of the Taulanti tribe but Eurydice’s father, Sirrhas, was probably of Lyncestian (so Upper Macedonian) origin, which makes sense when considering his recent defeat at Illyrian hands.

103.Justin 11.2.3 alone claimed Alexander killed a brother (Caranus, should read ‘half-brother’) by his ‘mother-in-law’ thus we assume Cleopatra, which suggests a second child. Justin 9.7 and Satyrus via Athenaeus 13.557e claimed Cleopatra had a daughter, Europa. Heckel (2006) p 78 argues, Justin’s claim this should be ignored. Diodorus 17.2-5, Curtius 7.1.3,8.4.2, Justin 12.6.14 for the murder of Attalus. Justin 9.7.12, Pausanias 8.7.7, Plutarch 10.8 for the murder or mistreatment of Cleopatra.

104.Plutarch 10.1-2 for the Pixodarus episode. Plutarch 10.3 for the implication that Philotas revealed the plot; detailed below.

105.Plutarch 9.1-4 for Alexander’s campaign in Thrace, the founding of the city and events that followed.

106.Following the proposals of S Ruzicka in Carney-Ogden (2010) pp 4-11 for the importance, timing and implications of the Pixodarus affair. Justin 9.7.7 for Alexander’s plans to overthrow his father and Plutarch 10.4 for Thessalus’ presence on Corinth; Philip demanded he be returned in chains. Demaratus’ role at Plutarch 9.12-14, Moralia 197c.

108.Diodorus 16.1.3 stated a twenty-four-year reign; the additional year depends upon whether he initially acted as regent for his nephew, Amyntas, or immediately proclaimed himself king.

109.Curtius 6.11.20 and 8.6.28 clearly (though uniquely) stated Macedonian law demanded the death of all those related by blood to the guilty party, though here no trial or Assembly meeting was held; see chapter titled The Reborn Wrath of Peleus’ Son for more on the purge. Justin 9.7.7 claimed Alexander was aware of the plot to kill Philip.

110.Plutarch 10.5, Arrian 3.6.5 for the exile of Alexander’s friends. For Philip’s death see Diodorus 16.91.2-.94.4, Justin 9.7, Plutarch 10.6-7; Heckel (2006) p 194 for other sources, Heckel (2006) p 197 and Heckel Somatophylakes (1978) for their inter-relationships. Diodorus 16.94.4 and Justin 9.7.9-12 for the death of Pausanias, the slayer of Philip. Justin claims he was caught alive and hung on a cross. He had been pursued by Attalus, Perdiccas and Leonnatus who killed him even though he was reportedly helpless after tripping and falling to the ground. This suggests they may have been covering up a plot to kill Philip. Both Perdiccas and Pausanias were from Orestis. Attalus (much) later became Perdiccas’ brother-in-law. Justin 9.7.10-13 alleged that Olympias put a gold crown on the crucified Pausanias after she returned from Epirus, scattering his ashes on Philip’s grave and providing him with a tomb of his own. See Hammond (1978) pp 339-349 for discussion of the veracity of events.

111.Euripides Medea 288; mentioned at Plutarch 10.6. Justin 9.7 for the mounts.

113.Diodorus 17.51.2-3, Curtius 4.7.28 for the oracle’s answer on Philip’s assassins. For the journey to Siwa see Diodorus 17.49.2-52.7, Arrian 3.4-5, Curtius 4.7.8-4.89, Plutarch 26.3-27.11, Justin 11.11.1-13, Strabo 17.1.43, Itinerarium Alexandri 48-50.

114.Herodotus 5.17-21 for Macedonia first accepting Persian dominance. For more on Xerxes’ invasion, and Macedonian complicity, see Hammond (1991) pp 14-19 and quoting Hammond p 17 for ‘double game’. Herodotus 9.31.5 for support for Persian at Plataea.

115.Meiggs (1982) pp 43 and 47 for timber types. Perdiccas II would also construct a treaty with Athens on the promise of timber.

116.Justin 7.4.1-3 for Xerxes placing Alexander I in command of an expanded Lower Macedonia, stemming from the marriage of Bubares, a Persian ambassador, to his sister. Demosthenes 4.48 reported Philip II sending envoys to Artaxerxes III in 351/350 BCE; this may have reconciled Artabazus, taking refuge in Macedonia, with the Great King. Hammond (1994) p 57 for discussion. Demosthenes 6.11 termed Alexander I a traitor. Herodotus 7.173, 8.34, 8.136-144, 9.44-45 for Alexander I’s participation in the Persian invasion. In the wake of the Persian Wars lower Paeonia with Pella, Ichnai, Mygdonia beyond the Axius (Thracian) and territories to the Strymon river were added to the kingdom: Hatzopoulos (1996) p 106. Hammond (1991) pp 16-19 for the politics of the Persian occupation.

117.Anson (2013) p 55 for Persian origins of the hypaspist corps; discussion in chapter titled Sarissa Diplomacy: Macedonian Statecraft. Pausanias 10.19.9 ff suggests one explanation of why the Persian guardsmen named ‘Immortals’ as casualties were immediately replaced to keep the number static. Borza (1980) cited in Anson (2013) p 52 and pp 53-55 for polygamy discussion of Persian origins including the agema of the hypaspists, Somatophylakes and paides basilikos; pp 58-59. Heckel-Jones (2006) p 11 for the observation that the pages were from Upper Macedonia and Roisman-Worthington (201) pp 447-448 for the origins of ‘Friends’ units. The Persian chiliarch who commanded the 10,000 Immortals and was second only to the Great King. The term traditionally meant ‘commander of a thousand men’, but the Persian usage was adopted; Heckel (2006) pp 32-48 for discussion.

118.Atkinson (2009) p 178 and Collins (2001) pp 260-261 proposed chiliarchos was the equivalent post of the Achaemenid hazarapati, the king’s second in command; Collins (2001) p 266 for cupbearer. Diodorus 11.69.1, 18.48.4-5 (‘…the post and rank of chiliarch had been brought to fame and glory under the Persian kings.’) and Nepos Conon 3 for the Persian chiliarchy, also Diodorus 18.48.4-5 gives an explanation as ‘second in command’. Arrian Events After Alexander 1.3 and 1.38 for Perdiccas and Cassander holding the post.

119.The aristocratic code of conduct in classical Greece was termed the kalos kagathos; discussion in Jaeger (1939) p 4.

120.Quoting Jaeger (1939) p 53 for the Homeric epics containing the germs of all Greek philosophy. The importance of the Homeric epics in the mindset of the Greeks discussion in Lendon (2005) p 36.

121.‘Pella’ translated as ‘stone’ in ancient Macedonian, or perhaps ‘stone enclosure’ from the Doric apella. Livy 44.46 for the description of Pella. Strabo 7 fragment 20 did mention its position on the River Axius.

122.Discussion of hetairoi and the synedrion in Billows (1990) pp 19-21 and p 246 for discussion of the synedrion and its function. Quoting Anson (2014) p 4 for the make-up of the common infantry.

124.Cook (1983) pp 1-2 and pp 25-28. Medea was the daughter of the king of Colchis in the Southern Caucasus, present Georgia. Perseus’ wife was Andromeda, of Ethiopian origin, and through their nine children they established the line of Mycenae. The Achaeans have been linked to both the Hittites (through the similarity of Akhaioi and Ahhiyawa of Hittite texts) as neighbours in the region of Troy and thus to the Trojans.

125.Plato’s Menexenus termed Cadmus, Pelops, Danaus and Aegyptus ‘by nature barbarians’…who nevertheless ‘pass as Hellenes’.

126.Quoting Nietzsche On the Use and Abuse of History for Life, translation by A Collins, 1909. Herodotus 7.150. Xerxes claimed the Persians were descended from Perseus to gather support from the Argives for their invasion of Greece.

127.Discussed in Dalley (1994) p 47. Herodotus 1.179 and Strabo 16.1.16 included Babylon in Assyria.

128.Curtius 3.4.1, 4.5.7-8, 11.5, 7.8.18 for the broader use of ‘Lydia’; discussed in Anson (1988) p 474.

130.Dalley (2013) p 190 for Cyrus’ Elamite origins. Xenophon Cyropaedia1.2.1-2 for his median and Perseidae roots.

132.Dalley (2013) for the Assyrian architecture of Persepolis modelled on Nineveh. Full discussion in RG Kent The Oldest Old Persian Inscriptions, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1946, pp 1-10.

133.Examples of Ptolemaic inscriptions include the Canopus Stone of 238 BCE of Ptolemy III Euergetes, the Memphis Stele ca. 218 BCE by Ptolemy IV, and the Rosetta Stone itself, erected by Ptolemy V Epiphanes in 196 BCE.

134.Roisman-Worthington (2010) pp 87 and 343-344 for Yauna. Takabara means ‘wearing shields on their heads’. The epithet possibly refers to the shield-shaped flat hat, the kausia.

138.Demosthenes On the Crown 270; the excerpt heads chapter titled Sarissa Diplomacy: Macedonian Statecraft.

139.For discussion on the League of Corinth see Hammond-Griffith (1979) p 639. Also Heckel (2006) p 349 for the significance of the role of hegemon. See Bosworth-Baynham (2000) pp 98-99 for the significance and origination of the league, a successor to the Hellenic League of 480 BCE.

140.Diodorus 16.89.3 for the Common Peace. Justin 11.3 uniquely mentioned the same inherited position in the Thessalian League. Other citations to the Common Peace at Diodorus 17.4, Arrian 1.1.1, Justin 11.2.5, Plutarch 14.1. Anson (2013) p 102 for the Amphictionic Council seats; he controlled the seats in the name of Thessaly too; p 132 for the life archonship of the Thessalian League.

141.The kyria ekklesia was an assembly meeting in Athens held ten times each year to vote on city and state issues on the rocky hill known as the Pnyx which acted as a natural auditorium.

143.Polybius 18.11.3-7 stated ‘fetters’ was a term first used by Philip V of Macedonia. Following Anson (2014) p 142 and the observations in Worthington (2000) p 97 for the strategic value of these cities.

144.Diodorus 17.22.5 for the twenty triremes Athens provided from a navy of 400; Blackwell (1999) p 50 and Green (1970) p 89 for discussion of the total Greek contribution of men.

146.See Anson (2004) pp 244-245 for discussion of the Greeks who held satrapal governorships under Alexander during the campaign and military commands.

147.Arrian 1.16.2-3 and Plutarch 16.12-15; Arrian 1.14.4 suggested there was a similar number (‘little less’) of mercenaries to the Persian cavalry stated at 20,000, and that all died bar 2,000 prisoners; 1.16.2. The Macedonians allegedly lost only eighty-five cavalry and thirty infantry (less according to Aristobulus, so claimed Plutarch). Modern interpretations suggest more like 5,000 mercenaries were present; discussion in Parke (1933) p 180, Green (1974) p 179 and in detail pp 499-500.

148.Finlay (1973) p 162 for the trade with the Kingdom of Bosphorus. Demosthenes against Leptines 31-3 for Greek corn imports.

149.As examples where Macedonians are distinguished from the allied Greek forces under Alexander see Arrian 4.11.8, 7.4.5, Plutarch 47.9, Diodorus 18.56.1-3.

152.As reported by Plutarch 60.6, translation from the Loeb Classical Library edition, 1919.

153.The speech of Alcibiades at Thucydides 6.89.6 translated by Richard Crawley, Project Gutenberg, 2009. Xenophon’s attitude to democracy discussed in R Warner (1949) p 8 and in Warner (1966) p 9 ff.

155.See discussion of Aristotle’s linking the phalanx with the Greek polis in Lenden (2005) p 44. Aristotle Athenian Constitution 24.3 for the breakdown of city employees and discussed in Finlay (1973) p 173. For Athenian income in the time of Socrates and the Peloponnesian War see Xenophon Anabasis 7.1.27. This had not significantly changed by Alexander’s day. See discussion in Roberts (1984) p 74. For confirmation of Athens’ annual income in the time of the Diadokhoi see Athenaeus 12.542g, where he alleged Demetrius of Phalerum spent most of Athens’ 1,200 talents income on parties rather than the army or city administration; confirmed by Aelian 9.9 but this was some years later. Athenaeus 6.20 for the census of Demetrius of Phalerum (313 BCE) recording slave numbers at 400,000; Hyperides estimated 150,000 including mining district slaves; both seem excessive. The population was given at 84,000 (313 BCE) and 172,000 estimated in 431 BCE; 100,000 is an extrapolated number for Aristotle’s day; numbers discussed in Kamen (2013) p 9. Finlay (1973) p 151 for the liturgy system.

156.See chapter titled The Wrath of Peleus’ Son for more on the dichotomies within Aristotle’s Politics.

157.Parmenio sold the population of Grynium into slavery in 335 BCE; Diodorus 17.7.8.

158.Coincidentally, a proxenos was a public guest-friend, a type of ambassadorial relationship where ‘a person who, in his own city, assisted citizens from another city that had appointed him proxenos of its citizens’, quoting the explanation of Hansen (1999) p 403. A proxenos might formally introduce his guest-friend to the assembly or magistrates of the host city. Here Xenophon would in return have been a widioxenos, an invited guest-friend. Xenophon Anabasis 1.1.2. Proxenus was a friend of Xenophon and already with Cyrus. He invited Xenophon to Sardis with a promise to introduce him to the Persian prince.

159.Isocrates Letter 5 (of nine extant letters), discussed in Worthington (2007) p 73.

160.Originally credited to Aristotle but more recently to Anaximenes of Lampsacus; discussed in Worthington (2007) pp 104-120. Quintilian refers to Anaximenes in his Institutio Oratio 3.4.9 and the reference may be to the Rhetoric to Alexander.

162.Diogenes Laertius 2.58, Xenophon Anabasis 7.7.57 for Xenophon’s own exile; discussed in Warner (1966) p 12.

163.Justin 9.5 for the Spartan’s position: ‘stood aloof’. The Lacedaemonian xenalasia laws were designed to preserve Spartan ‘purity’ of customs and bloodlines by banning its citizens from travelling outside the state and foreigners from entering, except in religious festivals and on state business.

164.Herodotus 8.109-110 for Themistocles’ warning that no king should rule Asia and Hellas too; the text heads the chapter.

165.Justin 11.5.5, Plutarch 15.3-5, Moralia 342d-e for the handing out of land grants. For Alexander’s financial position pre-loan see Plutarch 15.1-3, Curtius 10.2.24 and Arrian 7.9.6 for his borrowing 800 talents. For interest rates see Bellinger (1979) p 37. Athenian interest rates were typically anywhere between twelve per cent and eighteen per cent depending upon the venture; risky maritime loans were higher still; see Tarn (1927) p 115. Also see Archibald-Davies-Gabrielson (2005) p 145 and Tarn’s comments in Bury-Barber-Bevan-Tarn (1923) p 115.

166.For Philip’s debt see Plutarch Moralia 327d and Plutarch 15. Duris suggested the Macedonians had sufficient money for thirty days campaigning where Aristobulus claimed Alexander had 70 talents in total, whilst Curtius 10.2.24 and Arrian 7.9.6 claimed 60 talents. Pearson (1960) pp 90-92 for discussion and the allusion to Cyrus the Younger and his plight detailed in Xenophon’s Anabasis.

167.See Hammond-Atkinson (2013) footnote to 7.9.6; 1 talent was sufficient to pay 6,000 Athenian hoplites for one day; whether a formal wage was being paid to Macedonian soldiers is uncertain but as Greek mercenaries arrived in the ranks, remuneration must have been broadly equalised. Plutarch 15.1-3 and Moralia 327d-e for the various statements of the campaign funds; Aristobulus stated 200 talents debt with only 70 talents with Alexander on campaign.

168.Rodgers (1937) p 21 for the estimate of 250 talents a month. Tarn 1 (1948) p 14 reckoned the army would have cost 200 talents per month with another 100 for the Graeco-Macedonian fleet.

169.Arrian 1.20.1 for the disbanding of the Macedonian navy. Heckel-Jones (2006) pp 20-21 for soldiers’ pay rates. Plutarch 17.1 Diodorus 17.21.7, Arrian 1.17.3-8 for the treasury at Sardis. Green (1974) pp 192-193 for discussion of the fleet disbandment; they were costing 100 talents per month. For Tarsus see Arrian 2.4.2-6, Curtius 3.4.14-15, Justin 11.8.1-2.

171.Full discussion of Alexander’s siegecraft in Kern (1999) pp 201-335. Poliorketes translated as ‘the besieger of cities’. Philip besieged six cities between 357 and 354 BCE (Amphipolis, Pydna, Potidaea, Pagasai, Methone, Olynthus) and more after; Gabriel (2010) p 91.

172.For discussion on nomographoi see O’Neil (2000) pp 424-431. They were specially qualified men entrusted to draft new laws for the polis as well as to record existing legal codes.

173.Thucydides 2.34-2.46 inserted a fictional dialogue that pitched Melos’ claim for neutrality with Athenian aggression, forcing them to side against Sparta or be destroyed. Plutarch Solon 5; state of affairs recalling a warning the Scythian Anacharsis once gave to Solon in Athens.

174.Herodotus 1.29, Plutarch Solon 25.1 for Solon’s departure; as an example of the backfiring decrees, learning that he was about to cancel all debt, his friends took out loans to purchase land; suspected of complicity, Solon was forced to cancel all debts to himself. His friends never paid up: Plutarch Solon 15.

175.Tarn (1948) p 200 ff for discussion of the state of affairs with the Greek cities of Asia Minor; Mytilene is an example of a harbour city that did enter the League of Corinth, as well as Tenedos; Tarn 1 (1948) p 31.

176.Arrian 1.18.2 for the tribute due to the Persians now redirected to Alexander; here referring to Aeolian and Ionian cities in Hellespontine Phrygia under his new strategos, Calas.

177.Tarn 1 (1948) p 34 and Tarn (1949) p 213 for his arguments on intervention in Chios. For a full translation of the letter see Heckel-Yardley (2004) pp 87-88. For dating discussion see Heisserer (1973). Blackwell (1999) p 38 footnote 18 for Chios being a member of the Common Peace and p 39 for the quote from Badian. Anson (2013) p 133 quoting Badian on the ‘will of one man’.

178.Following the comments in Heckel-Yardley (2004) p 87; Briant (1974) pp 78-79 for Chios’ position in the League.

179.Diogenes Laertius 6.44 Diogenes. The messenger’s name was Athlios, which in Greek meant ‘wretched’ or ‘miserable’, so this is a play on names, implicating Philip, Alexander and Antipater to whom the message was being sent. Translation from CD Yonge 1853, Bohn’s Classical Library.

181.See chapter titled Lifting the Shroud of Parrhasius for money on the captive lists at Issus and Damascus. Curtius 13.13.16 for the sums secured.

182.Diodorus 18.36.6 and 17.33.3 for the missiles; Diodorus did add that the collisions made the missile impact weaker, but clearly the numbers are questionable. Arrian 2.11.8 suggested Ptolemy was the source of the numbers. Curtius 3.11.27 corroborates the numbers but added that 4,500 of Alexander’s men were wounded. Curtius stated 504 wounded, 32 infantrymen killed and 150 cavalrymen. Justin 11.9 for casualty and prisoner numbers.

183.Curtius 3.10.9 for Alexander’s encouragement to the Thracians and Illyrians; 3.12.1-13 for his treatment of the Persian women.

184.Diodorus 17.38.1-3 for the promised dowries and also Justin 11.9.10-11.10.4. Hephaestion married Drypetis at Susa, Alexander ‘wanting to be uncle to his children’; see Arrian 7.4.5.

187.It is reckoned Darius had 20,000 Greek mercenary infantry at the Granicus and Alexander 10,000 according to Arrian 1.12.8 and 1.14.4. Also at Issus Darius had 30,000 Greek mercenaries facing 10,000 according to Arrian 2.8.6 and a fragment of Callisthenes from Polybius 12.17-18 has 30,000 mercenaries facing the Macedonians. Diodorus 17.9.5 for the Theban proclamation.

188.Arrian 1.7.10-11 stated that the Theban exiles who incited Thebes to revolt against Alexander in 335 BCE were members of the Boeotian Confederation that had supposedly been disbanded with the King’s Peace (or Peace of Antalcidas) in 386 BCE.

190.Arrian 2.24.4 stated 8,000 dead civilians. Curtius 4.2.15 for the treatment of the envoys. Curtius 4.4.10-21 stated 6,000 civilians were killed and 2,000 crucified. Diodorus 17.46.4 stated 7,000 with 2,000 crucified. Legend had it that Cadmus, son of King Agenor of Tyre, founded Thebes; Herodotus 5.58-5.591.

191.Herm (1975) p 25 for the self-identification as Canaanites and pp 52-63 for the Amorite-Canaanite migrations that saw the cities settled. Herodotus recorded that Phoenicians carried off Io, daughter of the king of Argos. In retaliation the Greeks abducted Europa from Tyre and so Paris stole Helen from Sparta.

192.Curtius 4.2.5 for Alexander’s threat to make Tyre ‘a part of the mainland’. Diodorus 17.41.5 for the width of the mole.

195.Tarn (1948) p 39 for ‘the man who took Tyre’. For the siege engines see Plutarch 25.5; Justin 12.2.14; Arrian 2.21-22. Vitruvius 10.13.3. See summary of sources in Heckel (2006) p 111. Full discussion on the siege engines of Diades in Whitehead-Blyth (2004) pp 85-90. Hammond (1994) p 133 for Polyidus’ ingenuity and his On Machines. Diodorus 16.74.2 for machines used at Perinthus; Gabriel (2010) pp 91-92 for discussion on the ‘belly shooters’ and katapeltai Makedonikoi. Diodorus 17.43.1-2 and 17.45.3 for the spinning spoked wheels used in defence and Diodorus 17.44.4 for fire-throwers. Arrian 2.22.6 and 2.23.2 for the machine-carrying ships; discussed in Murray (2012) p 177. Philip’s use of artillery discussed in Keyser (1994). Examples at Diodorus 16.53 and 16.54.3-4 (Olynthus), 17.74.2-76.4 (Perinthus), 16.77.2-3 (Byzantium). For Alexander’s siege of Miletus, Arrian 1.18.3-19, Diodorus 17.22.1-3, Plutarch 17.2; Diodorus 17.24.1 for the transfer of siege equipment from Miletus to Halicarnassus, and Arrian 1.20.8-1.22.2, Diodorus 17.24.6-17.26.6 for the siege and use of catapults. For catapults at Tyre see Arrian 4.21.1-2, 4.22.6-23.1, Curtius 4.3.24-26, Diodorus 17.41.3-4, 17.43.1-2,17.43.7-17.44.5, 17.45.3-4.

197.Thucydides 1.15.3, Herodotus 5.99 for what we now name the Lelantine War; Strabo 10.1.12 for the banning of missiles; discussed in Lenden (2005) p 17 and quoting Archilochus 3. Quoting Heron’s Belopoeika introduction 72 in Marsden (1971) p 19.

199.The previous siege was mentioned in the Old Testament books of Jeremiah 27:3–11 and Ezekiel 26:7–14. Curtius 4.3 23 for the child sacrifice tradition; it was well known in Greece, see Fears (1976) p 218 footnote 26 for other sources.

201.Arrian 7.19.4 for the murex divers. Arrian 2.24.5 stated 30,000 were sold into slavery at the fall of Tyre, whereas Diodorus 17.46.4 stated 13,000 with 2,000 crucified and Curtius added that 15,000 were smuggled to safety. So 30,000 seems an aggregate total. Tarn 1 (1948) p 7 and footnote 2 calculates 7,500 slaves from the resulting 440 talents; Tarn terms Diodorus’ 30,000 a stereotyped figure and Tarn 1 (1948) p 40 suggests the result had no effect on the world slave market; p 40.

202.There are many references to Tarshish in the Old Testament as well as other trading posts and sources of silver. Boardman (1964) pp 210-217 for the mineral trading.

203.Boardman (1964) p 213 for Colaeus’ journey and return with a horde of silver. Kings 1.10.22 and Ezekiel for references to the ships of Tarshish; discussed in Herm (1975) p 95. Tarshish was possibly Tartessus near Cadiz.

204.Curtius 4.18. Various conflicting sources place the founding of Carthage around 825 BCE; Josephus Against Apion 1.18 placed Dido’s departure in the seventh year of Pygmalion, her brother, quoting Menander the Phoenician historian.

205.Arrian 2.24.5 for the Carthaginian envoy with Darius. Justin 21.6.1-7, Orosius 4.6.21, Frontinus Stratagemata 1.2.3. Trogus did record the founding of Carthage and its links to the early Tyrian kings.

206.Diodorus 17.46.6 for the renaming of Tyrean Apollo. Hermippus fr 63 K-A for the fragment mentioning Carthage’s exports.

207.Quoting Plutarch Themistocles 29.5; the lines credited to Artaxerxes II’s cousin Mithropaustes in the time of Themistocles’ exile in Persia.

209.See Robinson (1953) p 69 for the fragment. It is recorded as a miracle in the Romance 1.28. Strabo 17.1.43 (following Callisthenes) for the sacred spring at Branchidae, dry for some 160 years, flowing again once Alexander arrived.

211.Xenophon Anabasis 1.4.17-18 and Herodotus 1.189-190 for the feat of Cyrus the Great and 7.33-36 and 7.54-57 for Xerxes’ bridging the Hellespont. Onomacritus the oracle monger had been banished from Athens by editing the prophecies of Musaeus; discussed in chapter titled The Precarious Path of Pergamena and Papyrus. As for prevailing doctrine, see Herodotus 8.109-110 for Themistocles’ warning that no king should rule Asia and Hellas too.

212.Arrian 1.26.1-2; Plutarch 17.6-8. Romance 2.14-16 for the River Stranga episode.

213.Strabo 13.1.27 and Plutarch 8.2, Plutarch Moralia 327f and Pliny 7.29.108 for the casket Iliad.

215.Following the observation and discussion in Wilkins-Hill (2006) p 168 for Dionysus’ traits. Stewart (1993) p 79 for discussion of Dionysus and his origins. Euripides Bacchae 13-22 for Dionysus hailing from Bactria. Whilst Ephippus did not include Dionysus in the list of gods Alexander impersonated, it does not mean he was excluded from the king’s psyche; Athenaeus 12.537e. Moreover the Ptolemies visibly associated Alexander with Dionysus; discussion in Stewart (1993) p 238. Following Carney (2006) p 99 for the inspiration for the Bacchae. Hammond (1991) p 12 for the suggestion that Phrygians introduced the worship of Dionysus.

216.Euripides Herakleidai lines 88-89, based on the translation by R Gladstone from Euripides I, The Complete Greek Tragedies, edited by D Grene and R Lattimore, The University of Chicago Press, 1955.

219.Quoting Jaeger (1939) p 10 for ‘an immortal aristocracy’. Heracles and the Waggoner, a fable attributed to Aesop for the ‘gods help those who help themselves’.

220.For example Iliad 22.273; Athena stepping in to recover Achilles’ spear in his battle with Hector at Troy.

221.Protesilaus’ grave was plundered by Artacytes, a satrap under Xerxes during the invasion of Greece; Herodotus 9.116-120, 7.23. Xenophon Hellenika 3.4.2-5, Plutarch Agesilaus 6.6-11 for the abortive attempt to sacrifice at Aulis.

222.Diodorus 17.17.3, Justin 11.5.12 for the sacrifices at Troy. Diodorus 16.89.2 for Philip’s declaration of war and the causes. Strabo 13.1.25-26 described the temple as ‘small and cheap’.

223.When Alexander disembarked from the first ship to land on Asian shores, he cast his spear into the soil to claim it by spear; Diodorus 17.17.2, Justin 11.5.10. Robbins (2001) p 67 and Arrian 1.11 for Alexander’s sacrifice to Protesilaus before crossing the Hellespont and for his disembarkation as the first to set foot of the invading force again on Asian soil, and subsequent crowning.

224.Plutarch 8.2 quoting Onesicritus’ claim that Alexander kept a dagger and the Iliad under his pillow.

225.Following Heckel’s footnote to Curtius 3.8.22, footnote 55, p 274, Penguin Classics 2001 edition. Arrian 1.11.1-2, Diodorus 17.16.3-4, Plutarch Moralia 1096b, Athenaeus 12.538c, 539d for the sharing of sacrificial meat. The noun, sphagia, is cognate with the verb sphazein, ‘to pierce the throat’; Hanson (1991) p 197 ff.

226.Polyaenus 4.3.14 for Alexander having the sacrificial bodies carried through the camp if the omens were positive. Iliad 18 for Achilles’ sacrifice before fighting Hector. Arrian 3.1.4 for Apis and Egyptian gods and 3.16.5 for Bel.

229.Arrian 7.16.6 for Alexander’s reply to the Chaldeans warning him not to enter Babylon. This appears to come from a Euripides fragment 963 in Nuake’s edition of collected fragments; see Hammond-Atkinson (2013) footnote 22 for Arrian 7.16.6 p 3.

230.Hammond (1994) p 176 for discussion; a fragment of the report of the trial following Philip’s death is preserved.

232.Herodotus 1.53. The reply from the Delphic Oracle warned Croesus that if he invaded Cappadocia, a mighty empire would fall. He did not consider that it might mean his own. Cicero De Divinatione 2.116 believed Herodotus made up the story.

233.According to Plutarch, Aesop journeyed to Delphi on a diplomatic mission for Croesus; a fatal one, as it turned out, for he insulted the Delphians who threw him off a cliff; Plutarch’s references to Aesop appeared in On the Delays of Divine Vengeance. Flower (1994) p 162; Theopompus claimed oracular replies were still given in verse not prose in his day.

234.Plutarch 14.4. Apparently Alexander visited on an ‘inauspicious’ day when replies were forbidden.

237.Arrian 2.3.1 for the acropolis location and Justin 11.7.3-4 for the dedication. ‘Fate’s silent riddle’ as it was described in the Alexandreis of Gautier de Chatillon 2.99. The waggon or chariot was fastened to its yoke by the bark of the cornel tree. See Plutarch 18, Arrian 2.3, Curtius 3.1.14, Justin 11.7.3 for biographical sources narrating the episode.

241.For Achilles’ shield Arrian 6.8.3, and Arrian 2.7.8 for Alexander’s confirmed familiarity with Xenophon; full discussion in McGroaty 2006 who concludes Arrian’s statement is not proof that Alexander actually read Xenophon. Xenophon’s Hipparchicus advised the pointing forward of the lance between the horses’ ears to make the approaching cavalry appear more fearsome; discussed in Hornblower (1981) p 198.

242.Xenophon’s Hellenika 6.1.14-16 eulogised Jason’s character. Using the date and title in Hammond (1994) p 11 for Aeneas’ book. Hammond (1994) pp 133-134 for Polyeidos and siegecraft.

244.Quoting Diodorus 17.6.3 on Darius’ genius. According to Curtius 5.11.5 Darius III had some knowledge of Greek. Three distinct offers from Darius were recorded in the extant accounts and confusion between dates exists. Justin 11.12.1-2, Arrian 2.14-15 and Curtius 4.1.7-14 stated Darius demanded Alexander withdraw from Asia after Issus. Arrian mentions no financial offer for the return of the royal family. Arrian 2.25.1 cited the Euphrates, not Halys. The offer of marriage to Barsine and the division of empire is positioned in Curtius after the capture of Tyre. See Curtius 4.5.1-8 and Justin 11.12.3-3. The third offer comes after Alexander departed Egypt and sometime before Gaugamela. See Diodorus 17.39.1-3, 17.54.1-6, Curtius 4.11-12, Arrian 2.25-26, Justin 11.12.7-16, Plutarch 29.4. Some scholars such as Briant (1974) p 52 doubt Darius ever made such an offer.

245.Romance 2.14-15 and 2.22 for examples of the embellished correspondence between Alexander and Darius.

247.Curtius 4.13.4 for Parmenio and his tactical ability. Chapter titled The Rebirth of the Wrath of Peleus’ Son for more on the truce being offered by Darius III to divide the Persian Empire. For Darius’ peace offering(s) and Alexander’s rejection, see Curtius 4.11.1-14, Arrian 2.25.1, Plutarch 29.7-9 and Diodorus 17.54.

248.Thersippus is mentioned as the envoy in Curtius 4.1.14 and he confirmed the camp was at Marathus at 4.1.6.

249.Lucian Pro Lapsu 3 has ‘Philippides’. Plutarch Moralia: De Gloria Atheniensium 3 stated it was either Thersippus of Erchea, or Eucles, who ran to Athens with news of the victory at Marathon. Lucian’s name appears to have been taken up by Robert Browning into Pheidippides.

250.See Heckel (2006) p 264 for discussion. Thersippus seems to have survived the incident, no doubt because Alexander had Darius’ family as hostages and was later honoured by the Nesiotic League for services to Philip and Alexander.

252.Callisthenes, Ephorus, Damastes, Phylarchus and Duris agreed Ilium fell on the 24^th of Thargelion (May-June); confirmed in Plutarch Camillus 19.7; others claimed 12^th or 22^nd; see Pearson (1960) pp 60-61 and full discussion in Lincoln (2002) pp 1-18. Fragments from ancient historians suggest the following dates BCE: Duris 1334, Life of Homer 1270, Herodotus ca. 1240, Cleitarchus 1234, Dicearchus 1212, Parian Chronicle 1209, Thrasyllus 1193, Timaeus 1193. Apollodorus and the so-called Canon of Ptolemy also dated the fall of Troy; Eratosthenes and his disciples (Apollodorus, Castor, Diodorus, Apollonius, Eusebius) 1184/3; Sosibius 1171, Phanias ca. 1129, Ephorus ca. 1135; detail taken from Mylonas (1964) p 353.

253.Plutarch 16 for Alexander changing the name of the month of Daesius (May-June) to a second or ‘long’ Artemisius (April).

254.Plutarch 13 for the Theban link to Dionysus. Aelian 12.57 for the portents heralding on the destruction of Thebes, though the Thebans assumed they signaled the end of the Macedonians. Aelian 13.7 for the exemption from slavery of the families of Philip’s former hosts and the numbers of dead and captured.

255.Pausanias 9.16.1 for the description of the sanctuary and its roots. Pausanias 3.18.2, 8.32.1, 10.13.3 for the worship of the god in other parts of Greece. Pindar Pythian 4.29 for the reference to Zeus Ammon. Herodotus 1.46, 2.32,52.6 for references to Ammon being equated to Zeus; discussion in Anson (2013) p 97. Early links to Zeus refuted by Tarn (1948) pp 348-351 who nevertheless confirms the presence of a cult to Ammon in Athens before 371/370; Tarn 1 (1948) p 42.

256.Thebes was termed ‘mean spirited and greedy’ in the Suda A518.1. The preservation of Pindar’s house was mentioned at Arrian 1.9.10. See discussion in Nisetich (1980) pp 10-11. Whilst Eustathius claimed the fine was 1,000 drachmas, Isocrates claimed 10,000.

257.Pindar Pythian 1, lines 75-80, translation from Nisetich (1980) p 9 though replacing Persians with Medes.

258.Pindar Pythian 1 lines 62-72. Finlay (1973) p 172 for the importance of the naval industry at Athens. Quoting Borza (1995) p 115 on the ‘flamboyant’ Alexander I.

259.Plutarch 31.7 related the story of the naming of Gaugamela, the ‘camel’s house’. Dalley (2013) p 97; the name may derive from the Gomela River. Arrian 6.11.5-6 for the actual location of Gaugamela and its relation to Arbela some 500 or 600 stades away (the Attic stade was equivalent to 185 metres or 610.5 feet, whereas the Olympic stade to 176 metres or 580.8 feet). Herodotus 2.6 has a stade at 600 Greek feet (a parasang was equal to 30 stades); discussed in Gershevitch-Fisher-Boyle (1968) p 628.

260.For the Salamis coins see Stewart (1993) pp 159-160. See Plutarch 34 for his gifts to Croton.

261.Curtius 4.4.18; for additional siege detail Curtius 4.4.13-17, Arrian 2.24.3-6.

262.For the journey to Siwa see Diodorus 17.49.2-52.7, Arrian 3.4-5, Curtius 4.7.8-4.89, Plutarch 26.3-27.11, Justin 11.11.1-13, Strabo 17.1.43, Itinerarium Alexandri 48-50.

263.See Bevan (1927) p 13 for discussion. Recognition of the pharaoh or kings as the son of Ammon-Ra had been common practice since the second millennium.

265.Lucian Dialogues of the Dead 12, translation from Lucian, Complete Works, Delphi Classics, 2016, p XIV.

266.According to Strabo 17.1.43 Callisthenes stated Alexander received, uniquely, spoken words from the priests confirming that he was the son of Zeus, whereas nods and signs were used elsewhere. See full discussion of the various versions from Plutarch, Arrian, Diodorus and Justin in Hammond (1993) pp 58-60. Anson (2013) p 97 for the origins of Zeus Ammon.

267.De Polignac (1999) p 4 for notoriety of the city. Herodotus 4.171 for details of its founding.

268.Diogenes Laertius Aristippos 1.96; 2.23 and 48-49; 3.29-32; 4.19; 5.3-4 and 39; 8.60 for its hedonistic references. Boardman (1964) p 137 for Cyrenian coinage.

269.Herodotus 3.25.3, 26.1-3, Plutarch Cimon 12.5 and Plutarch 26.12 mentioned Cambyses’ earlier journey; Arrian 3.3.1 and Strabo 17.1.43 mentioned that Alexander knew Perseus and Callisthenes stated Heracles had visited the oracle before him. See also Robinson (1953) pp 62-63.4. For discussion on Heracles and Perseus see Bosworth (1988) p 281. The remains of the 50,000-strong army that vanished in 525 BCE were reportedly discovered in 2012 by Angel and Alfredo Castiglioni after thirteen years of research and desert expeditions; report at http://news.discovery.com/history/archaeology/cambyses-army-remains-sahara.htm

270.The slip of the tongue was recorded in Plutarch 27, though this is hardly likely. Hypostaseis is a substance in which a god could exist in different forms. Strabo 17.1.43 indicated Callisthenes stated the oracle’s reply confirmed Alexander as the son of Zeus. Diodorus 1.28.1-4 for the journeying of Belos and Danaos from Egypt.

271.Romance 1.32 for the inscription of founder being associated with Alexandria; discussion of its significance in Carney-Ogden (2010) p 127. Only the Romance 1.34.2 claimed Alexander was given the title of pharaoh. Discussed in Anson (2013) p 104 and Tarn (1948) p 347 accepts this as proof Alexander became pharaoh.

274.Curtius 4.10.1-8 for the eclipse and interpretations. Discussion in Hammond (1993) pp 269-270 and Pearson (1960) p 162 with footnote 70. The time between the eclipse and the battle (eleven days) Plutarch 31.8, Pliny 2.180 though ‘some days’ before battle in Arrian 3.7.6. Polcaro-Valsecchi-Verderame (2008) pp 55-64 for discussion of the dating of the eclipse. The Babylonian cuneiform tablet recording the eclipse is referred to as BM 36761 along with 36390. Modern calculations place the eclipse after sunset on the 20^th September 331 BCE whereas the battle commenced on 1^st October 331 BCE.

275.The Goddess Selene represented the Moon in Greek mythology and was termed ‘the far shining’ in the Homeric Hymns.

277.Herodotus 7.37. A translation of the relevant cuneiform table in the British Museum, using extracts from Sachs-Hunger (1988). It somewhat backs up Diodorus’ account at 17.60.2-4 that Darius himself did not order a retreat, but that the ranks around him collapsed, perhaps due to the earlier drop in morale following the celestial portents. The panic in the camp is strangely dated to the 11^th of the month (in the sixth month of Darius) when the battle took place on the 24^th, with the eclipse reportedly preceding it on the 13^th. Yet the same entry recorded or suggested the armies were encamped opposite one another. This actually suggests Curtius’ source might have been correct and the battle actually took place eleven days earlier.

278.Plutarch 32.5-6 for the run down of Alexander’s panoply. Borza Tombs (1978) pp 112-113 for the Tomb II helmet, which in turn matches the image on the so-called Porus Medallion.

280.Arrian 4.10.3-4 for the alleged dialogue between Philotas and Callisthenes on tyranny. For the return of the statues see Arrian 3.16.7-8. Valerius Maximum claimed Seleucus returned the statues.

281.Anson (2013) pp 153-156 for the discussion of the themes behind the burning of Persepolis. Curtius 5.5.5-24, Diodorus 17.69.2-9, Justin 11.14.11-12 for the mutilated Greeks.

282.Arrian 6.30.1 for Alexander’s later regret. See Borza (1995) pp 220-229 for discussion of possible motives for burning Persepolis.

284.‘Of wild beasts the sycophant, and of tame animals the flatterer’ attributed to Diogenes of Sinope, according to Diogenes Laertius, Diogenes 6.

285.For examples of divine approbation of being chosen by the gods at Ezra 1.2 for Cyrus declaration, and the wording on the Nabonidus Chronicle, discussed below.

286.Discussed in Bosworth-Baynham (2000) p 101. Xenophon had proposed Heracles had achieved a divinity due to the nature of his soul. For Heracles’ posthumous elevation to hero see Arrian 4.10.5-7, Diodorus 4.29.1, 5.15.3.

287.Horace Odes 3.301 claimed of his own poetry ‘I have built monuments more durable than bronze.’

290.Plutarch Moralia: How to tell a Flatterer from a Friend translation by AR Shilleto, digireads publishing 2011.

291.Herodotus 1.134 gave a detailed description of proskynesis. See discussion in Stewart (1993) p 13 quoting Curtius 8.5.7-8. Plutarch 45.1 and Curtius 6.6.3 did suggest Alexander initially restricted mandatory proskynesis to Asians. Also Arrian 4.9.9, 10.5.12, 6, Curtius 8.5.5-24, Plutarch 54.2-6 for the introduction of proskynesis and the repercussions.

293.Plutarch Phocion 2.2 described the use of menoeikes as something soothing and yielding to the soul.

297.Homer Iliad 2.212 translated into English blank verse by William Cowper, published by Project Gutenberg, edition 1860. For Penthesileia see chapter titled Mythoi, Muthodes and the Birth of Romance.

298.Curtius 8.5.8 for Choerilus’ presence with Alexander and Romance 1.42. For Alexander’s payment to the poet see Pomponius Porphyrio’s commentary on Horace’ Epistles ii. 1.232-4. Also Horace Ars Poetica 357 for the derision of Choerilus as poeta pessimus.

299.Diodorus 16.87.1-2 for Demades chiding Philip. Hammond (1994) p 156 rejects it ever happened.

300.Plutarch Phocion 1.1. Demades discussed Pearson (1960) p 206; for the proposal of divine honours see Athenaeus 6.251b, Aelian 5.12. He was fined by Athens for the proposal. For the authenticity of Demades’ On the Twelve Years see discussion by VJ Gray in Marasco (2011) p 19 ff.

301.Pausanias 6.18.2. Also Josephus Against Apion 1.24, Lucan Pseudologos 29, Aelius Aristides To Rome 51; Flower (1994) p 22 footnote 36 for other traditions concerning the Trikaranus. Dionysius of Halicarnassus On Composition 4 thought Anaximenes of Lampsacus ‘weak, unconvincing’ and ‘four-sided’.

303.Discussion of Theopompus’ (and Ephorus’) treatment of Athens vs. Philip in Carney-Ogden (2010) pp 72-73. Theopompus wrote a scathing letter about Harpalus’ behaviour (and Alexander’s hetairoi); recorded at Athenaeus 595a-c.

304.‘Prosecutor’ from Lucian How to Write History 59. Flower (1994) p 161 on Theopompus’ digressions. Further Cicero thought Theopompus ‘bitter’ and Nepos thought him (and Timeus) ‘most malicious’ (maledicentissimi).

305.Polybius 8.9.1-3 translation by ES Shuckburg, Macmillan 1889. Polybius’ own astonishment actually superseded the above extract from Theopompus.

307.Arrian 3.19.5-6 Diodorus 17.76.3, Curtius 6.2.17 for the dismissal of allies. Blackwell (1999) p 55 for discussion of the Peloponnesian contingent; some were members of the league. For more on the revolt of Agis and battle at Megalopolis see chapter titled Sarissa Diplomacy: Macedonian Statecraft.

309.For ‘cloven hoof’ see Robinson (1953) p 7 referring to Tarn’s (1948) p 98 commentary. All the extant accounts confirm otherwise unheard of battle death and casualty ratios in favour of the Macedones. While this is certainly an exaggeration, light casualties are a recurring message against heavy enemy losses. As examples for Issus see Arrian 1.16.2 for Persian cavalry losses and 1.16.4 for Macedonian cavalry losses and 2.11.8 for Persian losses; where only mounted troop numbers were mentioned, Plutarch 20.11-13, Curtius 3.11.27. For Gaugamela see Arrian 3.15.6 for losses on both sides, Diodorus 17.61.3, Curtius 4.16.26. See Pearson (1969) p 156 and footnote 41 for discussion of Arrian’s statement on casualty numbers, relating them to Companions only where Aristobulus and Justin claimed these were the total killed.

310.Nicanor had commanded the Guards Brigade of hypaspists until he died in Areia, Philotas the Companion Cavalry until executed, Hector drowned in the Nile; Parmenio’s brother Asander had governed Lydia.

312.Pseudo-Plutarch Isocrates, Pseudo-Lucian Makrobioi 23 with a similar tradition in Dionysius of Halicarnassus Attic Orators, Life of Isocrates 3.2, Pausanias 1.18.1, Flavius Philostratus Lives of the Sophists 17. Other corroborating claims in anonymous ‘lives’ remain.

313.See Bosworth-Baynham (2000) p 97. Michael Flower suggested the destruction of Thebes and the restoration of Plataea were symbolic of Panhellenic policy.

314.Timaeus fragment 139 cited by Shipley (2000) p 263 and quoting Momigliano (1977) p 46 on Timaeus’ attitude.

315.According to the Behistun Inscription (as well as Herodotus, Justin and Ctesias), in 522 BCE Gaumata, allegedly a Magus from Media, impersonated Bardiya the brother of Cambyses II (son of Cyrus the Great) who was campaigning in Egypt. Bardiya had been secretly murdered by Cambyses before he departed and Gautama seized the throne for some seven months. Greek tradition called him Smerdis and then the ‘False Smerdis’ once the background to his usurpation was revealed. The various reports of the episode conflict, as do names and his legitimacy. The imposter was stabbed to death in September 522 BCE by seven Persian nobles who had discovered his true identity.

316.For the capture and execution of Darius by Bessus and Nabarzanes see Curtius 5.9-12 and 5.13.15-25, Arrian 3.21.1-10, Diodorus 17.73.2 and for Bessus’ final capture see Curtius 7.15.19-26 and 36-38, Arrian 3.29.6-3.30.5 Also Arrian 3.25.3 for his proclaiming himself king.

317.Curtius 4.14.21 for Alexander describing the Macedonian army as ‘storm-tossed by changing fortune’.

318.Curtius 3.6.18 for attributions to fortune. For the episode with Sisines, Curtius 3.7.11-15.

319.Curtius 3.8.20 for Alexander fearing Fortuna on the eve of the battle at Issus.

321.Curtius 4.6.29 for Baetis’ treatment. ‘Batis’ amended to ‘Baetis’ following Pearson (1960) pp 247-248. The treatment of Baetis is reminiscent of Virgil’s Aeneid 4.6.29. Arrian 4.2.4 for the treatment of captured men at Gaza.

322.Quoting Plutarch 25.8; also Pliny 12.62, Plutarch Moralia 179e-f. Discussion of Hegesias as a source of the Baetis episode in Pearson (1960) p 247; see chapter titled Sarissa Diplomacy: Macedonian Statecraft for more on the siege of Tyre. The crucifixions were reported by Curtius 4.410-21 so this may be a rhetorical device but his total casualty numbers, 6,000 killed and 2,000 crucified, tie in with 8,000 total at Arrian 2.24.4.

323.For the ‘blood of thousands’ 4.10.3-4; the descriptions of the burning and plundering of Persepolis, 5.6.1-8 and 5.7.1 for Curtius’ claims on drink and courtesans. For Alexander coping with war better than peace, 6.2.1.

327.The sources of the Branchidae episode are Curtius 7.5.28-35, Diodorus 17, table of contents (a lacuna swallowed the text), Strabo 11.11.4, 14.1.5, Plutarch Moralia 557b. Discussion of its historicity in Tarn (1949) pp 272-275, also Tarn Classical Review 36, 1922, p 63 and Parke (1964).

330.Arrian 1.15.8, Plutarch 16.11, Diodorus 17.20.7 for Cleitus’ part at the Granicus battle. For the role of Lanice, Cleitus’ sister, see Curtius 8.1.21,8.2-9, Arrian 4.9.3, Aelian 26, Athenaeus 4.129a, Romance 1.13, Julius Valerius 1.17.

331.Euripides’ Andromache line 683 is referred to by Plutarch 51.8. See Bosworth-Baynham (2000) p 101 for further discussion.

332.Plutarch 13.4 for Alexander attributing Cleitus’ death to Dionysus’ wrath. For Cleitus’ death see Curtius 8.1.49 ff, Plutarch 50-51, Arrian 4.8.6-9, Justin 12.6-7, Lucian Dialogues of the Dead 12.

334.This comes from Justin’s lengthy digression that compared father to son from 9.7.13-21.

335.Arrian 7.9.2, Curtius 10.2.12, Diodorus 17.109 for Alexander praising the virtues of his father.

336.Diodorus 17.80.4 and Polyaenus 4.3.19 for the censoring of letters; Curtius 7.2.35; Justin 12.5.8 also for the ataktoi unit and (Justin) for its fate. Strabo claimed Alexander told his men he planned three years of further campaigning and wanted to know the true feelings of his men. Curtius 7.2.35 suggested they were openly unhappy at the death of Parmenio.

340.Curtius 6.8.3 and 6.11.3-4; Anson (2004) p 208 for discussion and following Anson for ‘aloofness’.

341.Curtius 7.2.32 for Parmenio’s decapitation; the head was sent to Alexander. Diodorus 17.77.7 and Justin 12.3.11-12 for Alexander’s adding concubines to his retinue. Justin 12.3.9-10 for Alexander wearing Darius’ diadem. For Hermolaus’ speech and the themes it captured see Arrian 4.14.2, Curtius 8.7.1 ff.

342.Plutarch 33 described the reports of Parmenio as ‘sluggish’ and ‘dispirited’.

343.Plutarch Caesar 66. For full details of the Philotas affair see Curtius 6-7.1-6.8.21, Diodorus 17.79, Plutarch 49.3-12, Arrian 3.26.1-2, Justin 12.5.1-3.

344.Baynham (1989) pp 171-180 for a good discussion on the themes underlying the Philotas affair.

345.Arrian 3.27.5 for the arrest of Demetrius whose post Ptolemy subsequently filled. Curtius 6.7.15 and 6.11.35-38 claimed he was named guilty by a witness. Curtius 6.11.10 and 6.11.38 for the custom of stoning.

346.Curtius 6.8.17 named Hephaestion, Craterus, Coenus, Erygius, Leonnatus and Perdiccas as those summoned to coordinate the plans against Philotas.

347.Arrian 3.27.3 for Amyntas’ death during an insignificant siege. Curtius 7.1.18 for Amyntas’ own argument that he was innocent of colluding with Philotas. For Amyntas’ arrogance see Curtius 7.1.15.

348.Curtius 6.11.20 and 8.6.28 clearly (though uniquely) stated Macedonian law demanded the death of all those related by blood to the guilty party. For the execution of Alexander Lyncestis see Curtius 7.1.5-9, Diodorus 17.80.2, Justin 12.14.1; the captured Persian Sisines allegedly carried correspondence from Lyncestis to Darius.

351.Plutarch 48-49. Plutarch Lycurgus 28.3-7 for Crypteia references. The Crypteia has been credited with anything from a secret role of the Ephebia to spy on helots, to a secret police force.

352.Plutarch 37.1-2. Apollo Lyceus, the wolf-like deity gave its name to the Lyceum in Athens. The wolf had appeared on the coins of King Amyntas II; Hammond (1991) p 51.

353.Plutarch Demosthenes 23.5. Also Plutarch 37 for the story that the priestess Pythia had predicted a wolf would guide Alexander on his march against the Persians. Whether the stories were connected remains unclear. Demosthenes was referring to one of Aesop’s fables; sheep stood up to wolves when allied with dogs until the dogs promised peace in return for abandoning the alliance.

355.At Susa in 325 BCE Alexander married Stateira or Barsine, daughter of Darius III as well as Parysatis, daughter of Artaxerxes Ochus. The troop mutiny at Opis followed. See Arrian 7.4-5. Curtius 10.1.25-37 for the behaviour of Bagoas.

356.Arrian 4.7.4 based on the translation by M Hammond, Oxford World Classics, 2013 edition. The so-called ‘great digression’ takes place between 4.7.4 and 4.15 and includes digressions on Alexander’s orientalism, his murder of Cleitus, Callisthenes and the conspiracy of the pages.

359.Aelian 14.47a. Atarrhias was a prominent hypaspist commander who may have served Cassander after Alexander’s death; Heckel (2006) p 60 for details of his career.

361.Cicero Tusculan Disputations 3.28.69, translated by CD Younge, published by Project Gutenberg, 2005.

362.Arrian 5.26.1 gave a description of Alexander’s geographical belief in this encircling Stream of Ocean.

364.Strabo 15.1.25 quoting Nearchus’ Indike, translation from Pearson (1960) p 123. Green (1974) p 405.

365.Arrian 5.26.1 included a reference to the Ganges in Alexander’s speech to the mutinous men at the Hyphasis River, claiming it was a comparatively small distance away. Strabo 15.1.42 however claimed Nearchus reported it was a four-month march to the Ganges through India. It remains unclear if Scylax sailed down the Indus or Ganges; Herodotus 4.44; Aristotle Politics 7.14.2 for early references to him; Strabo 12.4.8, 13.1.4, 14.2.20 for later references.

366.Plutarch 62.2, Diodorus 2.37 Strabo 15.1.35 (c702) quoting a letter of Craterus to his mother for the Ganges tradition; see Fears (1976) p 217 for discussion.

367.The Seres were inhabitants of Serica, the land of silk, so China. Strabo 11.11.1 first referred to them though their whereabouts and cultivation method remained unknown, as evidenced by Pliny 20 The Seres, when he referred to the woollen substance as forest-derived.

368.Ephorus espoused a simplified view that the known world was bordered by Scythians to the North, Ethiopians to the South, Celts to the West and Indians to the East; discussion in Pearson (1960) Introduction p 13. Hecataeus’ description of the Earth was the first geographical treatise to include a map and corrected the earlier map of Anaximander who produced the first world map around 550 BC in his treatise On Nature. Xenophon’s Anabasis turned back northwest at Cunaxa, close to Babylon, following the Tigris to the Black Sea. Ctesias’ Persika contradicted both Herodotus and Xenophon and is preserved in fragments in Diodorus, Athenaeus, Photius and Plutarch. The Periplous that survives is attributed to Pseudo-Scylax of Carianda. Scylax is mentioned by Herodotus at 4.44 and may itself have been influenced by Phileas of Athens, the Greek navigator; see discussion in Shipley (2011). How close the extant Periplous is to the original is conjecture. Green (1974) p 404 and footnote 108 for Aristotelian geography; Meteorologica 362b 19-23 for relative distances.

370.The stele of Hammurabi is a black diorite stone discovered by J De Morgan and V Scheil during their excavations at Susa in 1901-1902. The fifty-one columns of cuneiform text were written in Akkadian. It is now in the Louvre. It dates to around 1790 BCE and already continues a royal tradition of laying down legal codes, with similarities to earlier stelae, for example the Code of Urukagina, as early as 2350 BCE. The text comprises a long list of civil codes, sophisticated in their social applications. See M Van de Mieroop (2005) pp 99-111. In contrast, almost all Greek legal code developed after 600 BCE; I. Arnaoutoglou, Ancient Greek Laws, A Sourcebook, Routledge Press, London, 1998. Diodorus 17.7.3-4 explained that the Ideaen Dactyls of Mount Ida were the first to work iron.

371.Arrian 7.1-2 references to Dandamis the Wise Man and Plutarch 64 for Brahmin sophistry.

372.Plutarch 8 recorded a gradual estrangement between Alexander and Aristotle; the Peripatus was part of the Lyceum. The building had colonnades, peripatoi, though which Aristotle would walk whilst teaching, earning him the title peripatetikos, hence peripatetic. Whilst the link is attractive, the term peripatetikos, of walking, was likely already in use; Diogenes Laertius Aristotle 4 for the origins of the name.

374.Pyrrho of Elis founded the Skeptikoi movement. According to Plutarch Moralia 331e, Sextus Empiricus recorded in his Adversus Mathematicus that Alexander gave the philosopher 10,000 gold pieces on the first meeting.

375.Steel blades have been found elsewhere that pre-date Alexander, most notably in India (Seric steel), produced by the hands-on crucible technique. There is little or no evidence of steel being manufactured for weapons or armour in Europe at this time. The Periplous of the Erythrean Sea 6 describing the trading route from the Red Sea to India, and broadly dated to the 1^st century, made reference to the Greeks importing steel and iron from India. And Pliny 34.145 referred to the Seres of China making ‘true steel’, though this has been challenged, as it is the only known reference linking the Seres to steel manufacture. India was the most likely origination point. See full discussion in Schoff (1915). See the argument for India in Srinivasan-Sinopoli-Morrison-Gopal-Ranganathan (2009). A form of mild steel was however found on the helmet and cuirass in the so-called tomb of Philip II at Vergina; Hammond (1994) p 180.

376.Curtius 9.8.15 records that 80,000 Indians were slaughtered in the area of King Sambus, according to Cleitarchus. Arrian 5.24.7-8 recorded that 17,000 men were slaughtered and 70,000 more at Sangala. As an example of crucifixion, Arrian 6.17.1-2 and Curtius 9.8.16 for the punishment of Musicanus.

377.Following Bosworth A in the East (1996) p 108; past tense used as Bosworth related his comment to the Bactrian campaign of 328/7 BCE and soon after the imposition of proskynesis.

379.For Alexander’s entry into the Mallian city and subsequent wounds see Arrian 6.8.4-6.13.5, 6.28.4, Curtius 9.4.26-9.5.30, Diodorus 17.98.1-17.100.1, Plutarch 63.5-13. Curtius 9.4.15 for the mutinous behaviour before entering Mallia.

380.Polyaenus 4.2.15 for Philip’s siege of Methone. Bosworth A in the East (1996) pp 60-65 for discussion of Alexander’s wound in Mallia. Iliad 5.900-904 for Ares’ wound and recovery. Arrian 6.9.1-2 for Perdiccas’ surgery.

381.For Xandrames’ army see Diodorus 17.93.2, Curtius 9.2.3; Plutarch 63 has 200,000 infantry, 80,000 cavalry, 8,000 chariots and 6,000 elephants. For Phegeus’ report of the army facing them Diodorus 17.93-12, Curtius 9.1.36-9.2, Metz Epitome 68.

382.Diodorus 17.87.5 described Porus’ army with its elephants resembled the towers of a city.

383.Zeus sent a gadfly to sting Pegasus and dismount Bellerophon for attempting to fly on Pegasus up Mount Olympus, presumably to become a god. Bellerophon was crippled and died a hermit. For his fate see Pindar Olympian Odes 13.87–90 and Isthmian Odes 7.44, Apollodorus Bibliotheke 2.3.2; Homer’s Iliad 6.155–203 and 16.328, Ovid Metamorphoses 9.646. Plutarch 61.1 for Bucephalus’ age.

384.Arrian 5.28.1-3, Curtius 9.3.16-19, Plutarch 62.5-8. Roisman (2012) noted where Achilles refused to fight and abandoned the Greek army, Alexander wanted to fight and had been abandoned by his army. Tarn 1 (1948) p 98 for the suggestion that the Hyphasis was Darius’ boundary with India.

385.For the differing descriptions of the altars and ‘oversized’ artefacts see Justin 12.8.16-18, Plutarch 62; Arrian 5.29.1; Diodorus 17.95.1-3. Plutarch claimed the ‘present day’ kings of the Praesii still sacrificed on the altars when crossing the river. Arrian never mentioned any oversized construction. Xenophon Anabasis 1.3 for Clearchus’ handling of the Greek mercenaries. Quoting Curtius 9.3.18-19.

386.Strabo 11.11.14 for Alexander’s destruction of Cyra; discussion in Pearson (1960) pp 94-95.

387.Hatzopoulos (1996) p 336 for the tracts given to Coenus family over two generations. Coenus (Koinos) loosely translates as ‘common’. Curtius 9.3.3-15, Arrian 5.27.2-9 for Coenus’ speech.

388.Heckel (2006) p 91 and p 62 for the family history of Coenus, Attalus and Parmenio. Justin 1.5.1 for the death of Attalus’ family.

389.Curtius 9.3.20, translation based on the Loeb Classical Library edition, 1946. Curtius 8.12.10-18 for Coenus’ comment in Taxila.

390.Arrian 5.29.2. Diodorus 17.97.3 stated that after navigating the dangers of the Indus-Acesines, Alexander reflected that he had emulated Achilles in doing battle with a river, referring to the Iliad 21.228-282. Alexander would have believed from Herodotus 4.44 that Scylax journeyed down the Indus and then west to the Persian Gulf. Plutarch 62.9 for Sandrokottos meeting Alexander.

391.The Indus Valley civilisation unearthed in the 1920s appears to have matured through 2,600-1,900 BCE.

392.Arrian 5.21.6, 5.23.5, 5.24.3 (500 dead when retreating), 5.24.4 (17,000 deaths, 70,000 prisoners), 5.24.7-8, 6.6.3, 6.6.6, 6.7.1-4,6.7.6,6.8.3, 6.8.8,6.11.1,6.16.1-2,6.16.5,6.17.1-2,6.18.1,6.21.4-5. Specific numbers of dead were not recorded for most operations but the numbers we do have make it clear than tens of thousands died.

394.Arrian’s Epictetou Encheiridion 45 (Manual of Epictetus), Do Not say it is Bad, preserved the Stoic doctrine of Epictetus. Tarn (1948) p 127 and Tarn Alexander the Great Volume I, Narrative, 1948, p 103.

395.Aelian 16.39 for dragons; Strabo 15.1.43 for 300 and 500-year-old elephants; Strabo 15.1.28 for the impossibly long snakes.

396.Plutarch 66 for the length of the seven-month voyage down the Hyphasis-Indus.

399.Diodorus 17.95.4-5 recorded the arrival of 30,000 Greek allied and mercenary infantry and 6,000 Greek cavalry just prior to the journey down the Indus. Alexander sent around 10,000 mercenaries home with Craterus and Polyperchon (Arrian 7.12.4) before crossing the desert, so these new recruits must have comprised a large percentage of the remaining numbers that made the desert journey.

401.Quoting Plutarch 68, translation by I Scott-Kilvert, Penguin Classical Library, 1973.

402.Curtius 10.1.1-9, Arrian 6.27, Plutarch 68.2-3, Justin 12.10.8. Those arrested included Sitacles, Cleander, Heracon and Agathon who had been charged with murdering Parmenio. Whilst non-confirmed, they were presumably executed. Cleander was likely Coenus’ brother; Heckel (2006) p 85.

403.Harpalus was Alexander’s boyhood friend and treasurer in Babylon. Diodorus 17.108.6, Curtius 10.2.1, Arrian Events After Alexander 1.16, Plutarch Demosthenes 1-2 for Harpalus’ flight. For his friendship with Alexander Arrian 3.6.5, Plutarch 10.4.

404.Quoting Plutarch Demosthenes 25. Bosworth (1971) p 124 for Cleander and Harpalus and following Heckel (2006) p 130 for Harpalus’ involvement with Cleander, Sitacles, Heracon and Agathon.

406.The actual chronology of the Pasargadae, Opis and Susa chain of events, including the mutiny, debt repayment and weddings is uncertain; see discussion in Robinson (1953) p 5 footnote 8 and Olbrycht (2008) pp 237-239; what amounted to the start of a mutiny when the flotilla approached Mallia is mentioned. At Curtius 9.4.15 ff.

407.For the dissent caused by the arrival of the Asian epigonoi, Diodorus 17.108.1-3, Arrian 7.6.1, Plutarch 71.1, Justin 12.11.4.

408.Diodorus 18.108.3 and Arrian 7.6.5 for the reissued weaponry. For the Persian Silver Shields see Arrian 7.11.3 and 7.29.4 for the Golden Apple-Bearers. Arrian 7.29.4 for the supportive statement on chauvinism.

409.Curtius 7.3.4 for the 200 Persian horsemen present since 300 BCE. Also Arrian 3.24.1 for the first use of hippakontistai, mounted skirmishers, who appear to be locally recruited. Arrian 7.6.3-4 for the resentment from the Companion Cavalry and its dilution and 7.6.4 for the reference to barbarians in the ranks. For the various positions they held and regiments they were divided into see Arrian 7.11.1-3, Diodorus 17.109.3, 17.110.1; fuller discussion in Olbrycht (2008) p 246.

410.Justin 12.12.3 ff for the 1,000 Persian bodyguards and sentiment that he trusted them as much as Macedonians at Diodorus 17.110.1 Plutarch 71.4.

411.Quoting and following Briant (1974) pp 113-112. Curtius 8.5.1 regarded the Asiatic epigonoi as ‘hostages’.

413.For the demobilisation of veterans to be escorted home under Craterus, Justin 12.11.4, 12.7, Arrian 7.12.1, Diodorus 17.109.1, 18.4.1, 18.16.4, Curtius 10.10.5. Full discussion in Hammond (1991) p 146. For the insult thrown at Alexander see Plutarch 71.1, Diodorus 17.109.2. Following the observation in Olbrycht (2008) p 240 for the rejection of Alexander’s ‘terrestrial father’. For Alexander’s resulting fury, Diodorus 17.108.3, Arrian 7.8.3, Justin 12.11.6. Curtius 10.2.3 for the executions. Drowning as a means of execution was documented in Babylonia; see Olbrycht (2008) p 243 for discussion and p 245 for the alleged request by those sentenced to be killed by Macedonians and not foreigners; Curtius 10.4.1-3. Hammond (1994) p 48 for the punishment for sacrilege, here referring to the aftermath of the Battle of the Crocus Field when 3,000 prisoners were supposedly drowned.

414.Curtius 9.4.15 for the beginnings of a mutiny before entering Mallia; an Assembly gathering had to be called.

415.This assumes the Attic talent was being referred to. See chapter titled The Tragic Triumvirate of Treachery and Oaths for pay rates. 1 talent = 6,000 drachmas = 36,000 obols, equivalent to 6 obols per day for sixteen years; most infantrymen received 4 per day. Top pay would equate to 1/10 of a talent per man per year.

416.The hypaspists remained loyal at Susa/Opis enabling Alexander to round up the ringleaders; Arrian 7.8.3. For the repayment of debt see Curtius 10.2.8, Diodorus 17.109.2 and quoting Justin 12.11.2-4. For the talent per man see Arrian 7.12.2. More details follow in this chapter. Where the debt repayment took place remains debatable, possibly Susa and before Opis to soften the blow of the planned dismissal of veterans. Following the observation of Roisman (2012) pp 41-44. Diodorus 17.71.2, Strabo 15.3.9 for leaving the treasury behind (except a basic float); cf Curtius 5.6.9.

418.Curtius 10.2.12 for his new Asian capital, and for the mutiny Arrian 7.8.1-7.12.4, Diodorus 17.108.3, 17.109.103, Plutarch 71.1-5, Justin 12.11.5-12.12.10, Curtius 10.2.8-10.4.2.

419.Aristobulus’ account of the sophists at Taxila captured by Arrian 6.22.4-8 included reference to Phoenicians ‘who had been following the expedition in search of trade’ collecting spikenard, myrrh, gum and other roots.

420.Ada was reinstated as satrap of Caria and she adopted Alexander; see Arrian 1.23.8. Alexander addressed Sisygambis, Darius’ mother, in terms that suggest he adopted her as his second mother; see Curtius 5.2.22. Curtius 8.4.26 for the comparison to Briseis and Achilles; see Homer Iliad 2.688-694 for the capture of Briseis. Plutarch 21.7-9. Roxane was Bactrian or Sogdian; the campaign and siege of the so-called Rock of Sogdia, the Rock of Sisimithres (Chorienes) and the Rock of Ariamazes are confused; see Heckel (2006) pp 241-242 and 187 for identifications and Heckel (1987) p 114 for discussion. Barsine and Parysatis were from Persian royal lines, see Arrian 7.4.4-7 The prominent non-Macedonian drinking partners mentioned at Alexander’s final komos were Medius from Thessaly, Heracleides the Thracian, Ariston of Pharsalus, Nearchus the Cretan and Stasanor, a Cypriot; Heckel (1988) p 10 for a further list of those present. Holcias may have been Illyrian (see chapter titled The Silent Siegecraft of the Pamphleteers) and Lysimachus was originally Thessalian but became a naturalised Macedonian; Heckel (2006) p 153.

421.Greenwalt (1999) for the strategic position of Pella and its silting problems.

422.For discussion of the Achaemenid tradition of the great royal tent see Albrycht (2008) p 234 and Briant (1974) p 128.

424.Aristocritus had supposedly acted for Pixodarus and Thessalus for Alexander in his own failed bid to marry the daughter of the Carian dynast. Plutarch 10.1-4 for Thessalus’ mission to Pixodarus and Athenaeus 12.538f for his performance at Susa, along with Athenodorus and Aristocritus.

425.Arrian 7.4.6 stated eighty marriages in total, whereas Chares cited ninety-two; see Athenaeus 12.538b-539a. Arrian’s statement came after his naming key personnel and could have been designed to exclude them.

426.Badian (1964) p 203. Arrian Events After Alexander 1.2; see Arrian 6.28.4 for the previous seven, who became eight with Peucestas. Hephaestion had died in 324 BCE. Eumenes may have been elevated after that; see chapter titled The Tragic Triumvirate of Treachery and Oaths.

427.Plutarch 43.7, Curtius 6.2.11 for Oxyathres’ hetairos status; Diodorus 17.77.4, Curtius 7.5.40, Metz Epitome 2 for his enrolment into the Bodyguards.

428.Arrian 3.30.5 for Bessus’ capture and arrival naked in a collar. For the cruel end administered to Bessus see Diodorus 17.83.9, Curtius 7.5.40-42 and 7.5.43, Arrian 30.30.5 and 4.7.3. Curtius stated he was crucified though other traditions have him beheaded and torn apart by recoiling trees.

430.Diodorus 17.73.3; Arrian 3.22.1, Justin 11.15.15, Plutarch Moralia 343b, Pliny 36.132 for Darius’ royal burial.

431.Pausanias was pro dual hegemony and peaceful co-existence with Athens, whereas Lysander was for harsher treatment; see discussion in Cartledge (2003) pp 200-201. The lines come from Plutarch Lysander 15.3-4.

433.Arrian 2.12.6-8, Curtius 3.12, 15-17, Justin 11.9.12, Diodorus 17.11.4.2 (implied at 17.114-34 also) for Alexander’s reply. The Persian Queen Mother Sisygambis, mistook Hephaestion for Alexander on account of his height. Plutarch 21.6 for Darius’ height: ‘the tallest man in the Persian Empire’ thus kings were supposed to be so.

435.Quoting Plutarch 72 for Alexander’s sacrifice to the shades of Hephaestion and ‘blood-soaked hunt’. Plutarch Pelopidas 34.2 for the shearing of horses and mules, Arrian 7.14.5 for the references to the temple of Asclepius in Ecbatana.

436.Following the observation in Briant (1974) p 126 for the three remaining Persian governors.

439.Plutarch 65 related how Calanus threw hide on the ground and stepped around its edges observing how the opposite edge rose up. The demonstration was supposed to show Alexander that he needed to concentrate his weight on the centre if he was to keep the empire under control.

442.For Philip’s governorship and rapidly expanding provinces, Arrian 5.8.3, 5.20.7, 6.2.3,6.4.1, 6.14.3, Plutarch 60.16. For his death Arrian 6.27.2 and Curtius 10.1.20. For the revolt of 3,000 mercenaries, Curtius 9.7.1-11.

443.Plutarch 37.4 and 56.1 alleged Demaratus burst into tears for the Hellenes who fell in battle before seeing Alexander throned.

444.Plutarch 68.3 stated the empire was in chaos. See Diodorus 17.106.2 and 17.111.1 for his decree that all satraps disband their mercenary forces as a result. Griffiths (1935) p 39 for the 100,000 mercenary numbers. Parke (1933) p 196 for Artaxerxes Ochus’ ordering provincial governors to dismiss their mercenary recruits.

445.For the timing of the drafting of the Exiles Decree see Bosworth (1988) p 221 and Blackwell (1999) pp 14-15.

446.Unconstitutional as votes of the League were needed to change its laws and as the return of exiles was banned under the terms of the League of Corinth; following the observation in Worthington (2000) p 102. A useful discussion in Bosworth (1988) pp 220-228. Diodorus 18.8.7 for the Athenian occupation of Samos. See Kebric (1977) p 3 for discussion of Samos’ loss of freedom and p 4 for possible Sicilian exile and p 19 for Iasus.

449.Diodorus 17.111.3 for Athens authorising Leosthenes to recruit mercenaries and 18.9.1 for the sum of 50 talents he was provided with. Pausanias 1.25.5 for his appointment as commander-in-chief of Greek forces following Alexander’s death. Diodorus 18.9.12 for the alliance with Locris, Phocis and Aetolia. Anson (2014) p 29 for the amassed 18,000 talents at Athens. See chapter titled The Wrath of Peleus’ Son for discussion of Harpalus’ flight; Harpalus left Asia with 5,000 talents and when turned away by Athens he reentered the city a second time with 700 talents; Blackwell (1999) pp 11-31 for sources and discussion.

450.Pausanias 8.52.5 gave 50,000 soldiers but Diodorus 18.9.1 for 8,000 dismissed satrapal mercenaries, 18.9.5 for 7,000 Aetolians, 5,000 Athenian foot, 500 horse and 2,000 mercenaries. Heracles is said to have found the entrance to the underworld at Cape Taenarum (also known as Cape Matapan) in his final labour to capture Cerberus. Four locations were associated with the oracles of the dead, Taenarum, Heraclea Pontica, Acheron in Threspotia and Avernus in Campania; discussion in Ogden (2001). For reference to the Temple of Poseidon, Diodorus 11.45.4, Pausanias 3.25.4; discussed in Anson (2014) p 30.

451.For Demosthenes’ lack of political activity between 330 and 324 BCE see discussion in Worthington (2000) pp 93-94. The accusations against Demosthenes embodied in Plutarch Demosthenes 25-26, Hyperides Against Demosthenes; also Pseudo-Plutarch Hyperides, also Plutarch Phocion 21, Athenaeus 8.342f. Demosthenes was probably not guilty of stealing the gold but perhaps guilty of freeing Harpalus; see discussion in Worthington (2000) p 105 and he was in fact attempting to appease Alexander so he could argue for a repeal of the Exiles Decree. For Harpalus’ death see Diodorus 17.108.8, 18.19.2, Curtius 10.2.3, Arrian Events After Alexander 1.16, Strabo 17.3.21, Pausanias 2.33.4-5. For Nicanor’s possible ties to Aristotle see Diodorus 18.8.3 (Stagira), Aristotle by G Grote, John Murray, 1880, footnotes 23-24 and Heckel (2007). Blackwell (1999) pp 14-31 for a good summary of events and pp 18-19 for Philoxenus’ identity; he captured Harpalus’ steward and extracted a list of bribed Athenians; Pausanias 2.33.4-5.

452.The request for divine honours from Athens is most colourfully recorded in Aelian 2.19 and 5.12, Plutarch Moralia 804b and 842d, Polybius 12.12b.3, and Pausanias 8.32.1 mentions what is considered to be a shrine at Megalopolis dedicated to Alexander, housing a statue of Ammon. Discussed in full in Blackwell (2006). Hyperides Against Demosthenes 31 and Deinarchus Against Demosthenes 94 for Demosthenes proposing divine honours. Yet Timaeus (see Polybius 12.12b.3) suggested Domosthenes had voted against divine honours though the timing is uncertain; see Blackwell (1999) p 151 ff for discussion.

453.Tarn 1 (1948) p 42 for discussion of the presence of a cult to Ammon in Athens before 371/370.

454.Discussed in Worthington (2000) p 105. Demades’ quip is preserved in Valerius Maximus 7.2.13.

455.Athenaeus 6.251b, Aelian 5.12 for Demades’ fine, Plutarch Phocion 26.2. Diodorus 18.18.1-2 for his losing citizenship. Plutarch Phocion 23.2 reported that Phocion likened Lesothenes’ inciting speeches to a cypress tree, large and towering but bearing no fruit. See chapter titled Babylon: the Cipher and Rosetta Stone for Leosthenes’ statement on Macedonian disarray following Alexander’s death from Plutarch Moralia 336e-f. Hyperides Funeral Oration 6 or Hyperides over Leosthenes and his Comrades in the Lamian War for the eulogy to Leosthenes.

458.For Alexander’s refusal at Opis to let veterans return to Macedonia with their Asiatic children, Arrian 7.12.2 and for the eighty marriages at Susa, Arrian 7.4.6, and 7.4.8 for the 10,000 total Macedonians who had married Asian wives, a suspiciously high number.

459.According to Aeschines Against Ctesiphon 162 and Marsyas FGrH 135/6 F2, Demosthenes sent Aristion to Hephaestion to secure ‘immunity and reconciliation’ from Alexander. See Heckel (2006) p 110 for further discussion.

460.See Worthington (2000) p 101 for a summary of Demosthenes’ activity in 323/4.

461.Plutarch 7.7; translation from the Loeb Classical Library edition, 1919. Acroamatic: those to be disseminated orally only, implying only the elite initiates were worthy of hearing them.

462.Plutarch 55. The letter had allegedly been sent to Antipater, the regent in Macedonia.

463.Aristotle discussed in Thomas (2007) p 197. These lost works, supposedly dedicated to Alexander, discussed in Ober (1998) p 348.

464.Aristotle Athenian Constitution 2.2. Quoting the introductory note prepared by Ian Johnston for students in Liberal Studies and Classics classes at Malaspina University-College, Nanaimo, BC, Canada, released May 1999. Diogenes Laertius Aristotle 13 for the ‘double criterion of truth’. Athenaeus 9.398e for Aristotle’s grant from Alexander, though when this was made is uncertain.

465.Aristotle Politics 3.1285a-b, translated by Benjamin Jowett 1885. WS Greenwalt in Carney-Ogden (2010) pp 115-163 for discussion on Aristotle’s position on Macedonian politics.

466.Aristotle On Monarchy only permitted absolute monarchy if the ruler was intelligent and enlightened beyond his subjects to the extent that a man exceeds an animal’s intelligence. For the five subcategories see Aristotle Politics 3.1284b35-1285b33; discussed in Roisman-Worthington (2010) p 380.

468.Athenaeus 12.537e cited Ephippus as claiming Alexander dressed as Ammon, Artemis and Hermes. Tarn (1948) p 97.

471.Oedipus answered the ‘many footed’ riddle of the sphinx and thereby avoided strangulation. His answer was that man was born on all fours, walked with two feet in life and ended with three, when a walking stick was required. Recorded by Apollodorus Library 3.5.8. This was a standardisation of an extremely old legend and probably represents just one possible version of the riddle.

472.Berossus’ Babylonaika was written around 290-278 BCE for King Antiochus Soter, son of Seleucus. It is not extant, but a number of classical writers referenced it in their works. See discussion of the dating of Berossus in Pearson (1960) p 231; he dated Berossus’ writing to between 293 and 281 BCE. Drews (1975) p 50 ff for Berossus’ contribution to ‘history’.

473.Excerpt from the Book of Arda Viraf (alternately Arda Wiraf or Wiraz) 3-7, a Zaroastrian religious text from the Sassanid era, written in Middle Persian; translation from CF Horne The Sacred Books and Early Literature of the East, Volume VII: Ancient Persia, 1917.

474.Seven feet if the Attic cubit was being referred to; at 18.25 inches it was longer than the Macedonian cubit of 14 inches. Diodorus 17.88.4, Arrian 5.19.1, Plutarch 60.12 agreed King Porus was over seven feet tall, i.e. 5 cubits. Tarn (1948) p 170 suggests the Macedonian cubit was being referred to. Arrian 5.18-19. Diodorus 17.89.1 reported that two of Porus’ sons were amongst the 12,000 Indian dead.

475.Verbrugghe-Wickersham (2000) for discussion of the writings of Berossus and Manetho and their influence.

477.Following the details in Hadjnicolaou (1997) for the printed editions in France.

479.Quotation from N Beauzée Histoire d’ Alexandre Ie Grand par Quinte Curce, 1781.

481.Rodrigo Borgia took the title Alexander VI in admiration. He, and later Alessandro Farnese, pope from 1534 to 1549 under the name Paul III, decorated the Vatican apartments with scenes from Alexander’s life. See discussion in Hadjinicolaou (1997).

482.Avcioğlu (2011) p 126 for emulation of Alexander by Louis XIV and Mehmet II.

485.See discussion of Machiavelli’s use of Polybius’ political theories in McGing (2010) pp 215-216 and Brouwer (2011) pp 111-132.

486.Nicolo Machiavelli Discorsi (Discourses on first ten years of Titus Livy), translated by Ninian Hill Thompson, 1883, 13.19.

488.Droysen (1877); detailed discussion of biographer opinions in Green (1974) p 481 ff.

492.Green (1974) p 487. Lane Fox’s view appears to have influenced Oliver Stone’s 2004 movie to which he consulted; discussed by G Nisbet in Carney-Ogden (2010) pp 217-231; ‘historiophotic’ was a term coined by Hayden White in 1988 in his Historiography and Historiophoty, American Historic Review 93, to describe the ‘representation of history’ and our thoughts about it in visual images and filmic discourse.

496.Diodorus 13.68.5 and Plutarch The Comparison of Alcibiades with Corolianus 6.

497.A good summary of the relative views of these modern historians is given in Baynham (1998) pp 63-66.

498.Ekphrasis derives from the Greek ‘out’ (ek) ‘to speak’ from ekphrazein, and a term often used to capture the rhetorical devices in artistic expression. See chapter titled The Precarious Path of Pergamena and Papyrus for discussion of medieval text supplements.

499.Alexander at the Tomb of Cyrus by Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione, ca. 1650, Alexander and Porus by Charles Le Brun (1619-1690), Alexander the Great and the Fates by Bernadino Mei (ca. 1612-1676) The Tent of Darius by Charles Le Brun was originally titled Les Reines de Perse aux pieds d’Alexandre.

502.Alexander recited from the Andromache at Medius’ komos; see Athenaeus 12.537b, fragment on Robinson (1953) p 89. Athenaeus 10.44p for the size of Alexander’s drinking cup and Iliad 11.632-637 for Nestor’s cup; Diodorus 17.117.1 also term the cup ‘huge’. Discussed by F Pownall in Carney-Ogden (2010) p 64. The fragment is from Eubolos’ Semele of Dionysus.

504.Fragment 141, for full discussion of the Euripides’ fragments, see translation and discussion in Collard-Cropp-Gilbert (2004) p 153.

505.Discussed at length in the chapter titled Babylon: the Cipher and Rosetta Stone.

506.Justin 12.13.3-7 for the Magi warning and Alexander’s diversion past the ‘uninhabited’ Borsippa; the Babylonian surviving documents however suggest Borsippa was still a trade centre, see Bosworth (200) p 220 for detail. Also Arrian 7.16.5-7, Plutarch 73.1 and Diodorus 112.2-5 who terms them Chaldeans as opposed to Magi. Plutarch Moralia 466d or On Tranquility of Mind for Anaxarchus’ belief in innumerable worlds following Democritus’ school.

507.Justin 12.15.1-3 for his reflection that most of his line died before reaching thirty. See chapter titled Mythoi, Muthodes and the Birth of Romance for detail of Cleophis. Arrian 7.14.5; Alexander is said to have destroyed the shrine of Asclepius at Ecbatana at Hephaestion’s death, complaining to envoys from Epidaurus that Asclepius had ‘not treated me kindly, for he did not save my friend I valued as my own life’; translation by A de Selincourt, Penguin edition, 1958.

508.Homer Iliad 11.518 for Asclepius ‘the blameless physician’; better 'faultless' or 'capable'.

509.Jaeger (1939) p 47 for the Achilleid discussion; some scholars believe the original title. Statius wrote an unfinished Achilleid as a life story of the hero in the 1^st century.

511.Quoting from Hyperides over Leosthenes and his Comrades in the Lamian War.

512.For references to the Elysian Fields see Homer Odyssey 24.5-9 and Virgil Aeneid, 6.54. For Pythagorean belief in immortality see Riedweg (2002) p 37. Hesiod termed the Elysian Fields the Fortunate or Blessed Isles, which were, like the Elysian Fields, supposedly located at the western edge of the Earth.

513.Castor and Pollux, or Polydeuces, were the Dioscouri, twin brothers yet of different fathers; Castor was immortalised by his father, Zeus, and begged him to let Pollux (son of the mortal Tyndareus of Sparta) share his immortality with him. Alexander did sacrifice to them; see Plutarch 50 describing the death of Cleitus.

514.The Book of Daniel 3.1 described a golden statue erected by Nebuchadrezzar II on the plain of Dura near Babylon. It was purportedly 90 feet tall.

515.The Egyptian titles are discussed in de Mauriac (1949) p 112 quoting FA Wright Alexander the Great, 1934, pp160-161. Also Anson (2013) p 105 for the inscriptions.

516.For details of the Book of the Dead see Casson (2001) Egypt pp 116-117. For the progression of gods see Manetho’s Dynasties of Gods, Demigods, and Spirits of the Dead as preserved in Eusebius’ Kronographia.

517.Herodotus 8.109-110. Plutarch Themistocles 29.3; Artaxerxes II’s reference to Themistocles as a ‘subtle serpent’.

519.Aristotle Poetics 13.1453a 27-30 termed Euripides ‘the most tragic of the poets’.

521.Diodorus 18.27.3-4 for the axle design and 18.28.1 for the team of road menders. The funeral carriage was such a spectacle that spectators from nearby cities flocked to witness its passing; loud due to the bells attached to the sixty-four mules. Stewart (1993) p 216 for its dimensions.

523.See Heckel (2006) p 315 and text note 383 for Judeich’s view that Laomedon was the original occupant. K Schefeld convincingly made a case that the coffin was constructed before Abdalonymus’ reign; see his review of Brunilde Sismondo Ridgway in the American Journal of Archaeology 73.4, October 1969, p 482. Anson suggested Alexander’s original sarcophagus would have been shipped up the Euphrates to Thapsacus and overland from there to Alexandria; see Anson (1986) p 213. Anson (2013) p 150 for the background to Abdalonymus; Curtius 4.1.16-26, Diodorus 17.47.1, Justin 11.10.7-9 for the Vulgate story.

525.Chapter titled Lifting the Shroud of Parrhasius for Perdiccas’ role in Syria and his possible links to the sarcophagus. As Heckel-Jones (2006) p 91 points out, there is no proof, only supposition, that this depicts the murder of Perdiccas.

526.Thucydides 2.41 from Pericles’ panegyric to the Athenian dead, translated by Richard Crawley, 1910, based on the earlier translation by Cannop Thirwall and published by JM Dent and Sons.

527.Fraser (1996) pp 1-46 for discussion of the Alexandrian lists of the cities of Alexander. Modern excavations suggest the new ‘Alexandrias’ were little more than renamed Asiatic cities.

528.Justin 12.5.13 for Alexandria on the Tanais, also Strabo 11.7.4 and Plutarch Moralia 2.352e, 341c; discussion in Pearson (1960) Introduction p 14. The Jaxartes was later misidentified as the Tanais, the modern Don in Russia and then considered the boundary of Europe and Asia. Anson (2013) p 183 for 14 Alexandreias. Plutarch Moralia 438e claimed Alexander established seventy settlements and a minimum of six named after himself. Justin 12.5.12-13 claimed 13 cities (unnamed) were founded in Bactria and Sogdia alone. Green (1974) p 412 for ‘and a market’.

529.Arrian 4.1.3-4 for the intentions for Alexandria Eschate and 5.29.5 for the damage by monsoon rains. Quoting Tarn 1 (1948) p 100.

531.For the twelve monuments see Arrian 5.29.1-3, Diodorus 17.95; Curtius 9.3.19. Diodorus stated 75 feet high, i.e. 50 cubits. Arrian 1.16.4 for the twenty-five Companion statues later taken to Rome in 146 BCE. For the bronze statues at Dion, Arrian 1.16.4, Plutarch 16.8, Velleius Paterculus Roman History 1.11.3-4. Polyaenus 4.23 for the steps in Mt. Ossa.

532.Theopompus wrote a scathing letter about Harpalus’ behaviour (and Alexander’s hetairoi); recorded in Athenaeus 595a-c. Diodorus 17.108.5 referred to it as an expensive tomb of the Attic type’; Flower (1994) pp 260-261 for discussion.

533.Arrian 7.7.7 for the removal of weirs; also Strabo 15.3.4, 16.1.9 ff; here the restrictive nature of the cataracts on trade is mentioned though it was clear Alexander’s navy could not sail downriver either. The sentiment reiterates Bosworth (1988) p 159.

534.See Hannah (2005) pp 91-94 for discussion on the recalibration of the Babylonian calendar.

536.Plutarch Apophthegms or Sayings of Kings and Commanders 207D8, based on the translation by E Hinton, William W Goodwin, Little Brown and Co., Boston, 1878.

541.Arrian 4.28.2 and 5.1-3 for his doubt surrounding the legends of Heracles and Dionysius and India, and Arrian 6.28.2 for the epithet Lord of the Triumph. According to Aristophanes’ Frogs Dionysus visited Hades to bring Euripides back to the living, so disenchanted was he with the state of Athenian tragedians. ‘Ivy-wreathed’ following the Homeric Hymn to Dionysus.

543.Herodotus 2.120 gave the alternative version of Helen’s Egyptian captivity.

544.Herodotus excerpted from Book 2.116 and 2.120, translation by George Rawlinson, Everyman’s Library 1910. Iliad 9.26 and 14.74-81 for Agamemnon’s plea.

545.See discussion in Tarn (1923) pp 26-27 citing Plutarch Moralia 329c or Fortune 6. See Tarn (1948) pp 399-449 for his full treatise on ‘brotherhood’. Bosworth-Baynham (2000) pp 97-135 for a detailed discussion of Panhellenism. ‘Loving cup’ came from Eratosthenes and referred to the drinking cup used at the Opis reconciliation ceremony and formerly belonging to Darius; see Tarn 1 (1948) p 116.

546.Arrian 7.11.8-9, Oxford World Classics edition, 2013, translation by M Hammond. Curtius 103.10-14 which likely echoed Roman themes and Curtius’ vocabulary; see discussion in Atkinson (2000) pp 134-139, Bosworth A in the East (1996) pp 2-4 for Plutarch’s influence on later interpretations of Alexander’s racial intentions. As examples of the use of breaking barriers or doors, Seneca Epistle 119.7 ‘mundi claustra perrumpit’, Lucretius De Rerum Natura 1.70 ff ‘effringere portarum claustra’. For discussion of the literal meaning of the Greek homonoia see de Mauriac (1949) pp 104-114.

547.See chapter titled Comets, Colophons and Curtius Rufus for discussion of Curtius’ identity and publication period.

551.Diogenes Laertius Aristotle. Also Athenaeus 15.696a. Hermias of Atarneus ruled Assus and was a student of Plato. He invited philosophers to study there. Aristotle had been there for three years and had married Hermeias’ niece, Pythias.

552.An epipolesis was a troop review, typically pre-battle, in which a rousing speech was given to boost morale.

554.Pausanias 4.35.4 for identification of Procles and his dating see Hernandez (2009). Livy 35.14, Appian Syrian Wars 10-11, Plutarch Flaminius 21 for the meeting at Ephesus; Livy and Plutarch recorded different opinions on rankings. According to Appian, Hannibal and Scipio met at the court of Antiochus III. He preserved their discussion on who was considered the greatest of generals. However the meeting, as Baynham (1999) pp 19-20 explains, is historically unlikely. Plutarch Pyrrhus 8.2 confirmed Hannibal’s opinion, rating Scipio second and himself third. McGing (2010) pp 96-97 for discussion of Polybius’ attitude to treason and plots. Lucian Dialogues of the Dead 25 embellishes the conversation through third parties. The relation of the Alexandreis to the Africa discussed in Townsend (1996) Introduction p 17.

555.The first recorded use of the epithet ‘great’ came from the Roman playwright Plautus Mostelleria 775 in ca. 200 BCE. It may of course have been in use before but Greek literature did not employ it and was somewhat more hostile to his memory.

556.Plutarch Moralia 840c-d for the founding of a school of rhetoric, and Plutarch Aeschines for his fate. Aeschines may have been at Ephesus until Alexander’s death.

557.This is unlikely to be true and yet is suggests a death sufficiently close to the date to have made the claim that appeared in Plutarch Moralia 717c, Diogenes Laertius Diogenes 11. The Suda claimed the same.