In search of the Lost testament of Alexander the great

‘… the uncomfortable fact remains that the Alexander Romance provides us, on occasion, with apparently genuine materials found nowhere else, while our better-authenticated sources, per contra, are all too often riddled with bias, propaganda, rhetorical special pleading or patent falsification and suppression of evidence.’²

‘Historical, or natural, truth has been perverted into fable by ignorance, imagination, flattery or stupidity.’³

In 1896 the historian and orientalist, Sir Ernest Alfred Thompson Wallis Budge, proposed only one country could be the birthplace of Alexander’s story, and that country was Egypt.⁴ Its new city, ‘Alexandria-by-Egypt’, as the Greeks came to differentiate it from the conqueror’s many eponymous settlements, was to become a centre for syncretistic literature and the likely birthplace of the Corpus Hermeticum, the Sibylline Oracles, The Wisdom of Solomon, the Septuagint with its reputed seventy-plus translators, and its Alexandrian Canon too. Much of the detail that eventually filled the Suda most likely had its origins in the vibrant metropolis whose creative environment recycled apocrypha onto papyrus in the Hellenistic Age. And we have grounds to believe one of its earliest and most successful productions was to metamorphosise into the Greek Alexander Romance.⁵

As antiquities adviser to the British Museum, Budge was exploring the origins of the various Ethiopic Romance recensions, and he stumbled on something of a basic truth: the nations humbled by Alexander, he reasoned, would not so quickly record their own downfall.⁶ Only one place immediately prospered in the aftermath of the Macedonian campaigns, and that was Egypt. The propitious interpretation of Alexander’s seer, Aristander, which deflected embarrassment at Alexandria’s mapping-out when birds flocked to eat the barley-meal being used as the boundary marker, had provided a founding prophecy: the new city, which bears the inscription ktistes, founder, against Alexander’s name in the Romance, would feed the world.⁷

Cleomenes’ posthumous bank balance of some 8,000 talents, a legacy of over-zealous and quasi-autonomous tax collection, probably had the greater part to play, though its fate was now underpinned by the talisman that was Alexander’s body.8 Egypt’s new heart, Alexandria, established by the harbour settlement of Rhacotis, originally established to fend off Greek pirate attacks on the Nile Delta, was becoming something of a ‘new Heraclion’; it was fostered into maturity by the Bodyguard, Ptolemy I Soter, who, within two decades of taking up his post, would proclaim himself a king.⁹

Macaulay proposed history ‘is under the jurisdiction of two hostile powers: the Reason and the Imagination’, and, he added, never equally shared between them.¹⁰ This was particularly the case in ancient Attic Greek where the stories of the past were literally mythoi, and the segregation between myth, legend, and the factual past was a soft border blurred by Homeric epics and Hesiod’s Theogonia, which permitted a coeval interaction between men, heroes, and gods. Scholars have even pondered that ‘the absence of a clear distinction between factual and fictional discourse’ in the influential dialogues of Plato, ‘far from being idiosyncratic, may reflect a larger feature of Greek (or ancient) thinking’.¹¹ Even Thucydides, who claimed to have sacrificed ‘entertainment value’ (hedone) in order to dispense with to muthodes, the mythical elements in his work, nonetheless interlaced his texts with self-constructed speeches which reintroduced just that.¹² But the results were ‘immortal’ and the legends live on; as the habitually terse Sallust (ca. 86-35 BCE) reasoned, ‘these things never were, but are always’.¹³

We will illustrate how fraud entwined itself around the most momentous of historical episodes, but once a deliberate deceit is discovered, the truth is more often than not revealed. When an episode is adorned in the colourful robes of romance, however, we are on less firm ground, for truth and fiction may have been wedded in a ceremony that rendered them lifelong partners: ‘There are many occasions in the story of Alexander when it is hard to be sure just where history ends and romance begins.’¹⁴ To quote Michael Wood on the problem: ‘We are accustomed to believing that fiction can tell both truths and untruths… poets have a (highly visible) stake in the notion, but so do historians and philosophers and scientists.’ In which case it is ‘… misleading to contrast the so-called “historical biographies” with the legendary lives.’¹⁵ And this better equips us to appreciate how the Pamphlet and Alexander’s Will, along with many other genuine campaign episodes, came to be bedfellows with the Greek Alexander Romance.

The Alexander Romance stemma from recension ‘α’, which may itself be an embellished descendent of an earlier archetype. Provided with the kind permission of Oxford University Press and copied from PM Fraser Cities of Alexander the Great, Clarendon Press (1996).

The Hellenistic world saw exotic tales arriving from the fabled lands of Kush to the south of Egypt and from the distant East, carried down the Silk Road with the help of the settlements Alexander had founded or simply renamed along its route. According to Strabo, who studied in Egyptian Alexandria, the ‘city’ of Alexandria Eschate (‘the furthest’) in the Fergana Valley had brought the Greek settlers and the Graeco-Bactrian Kingdom into contact with the silk traders of the Han dynasty of the Seres (the Chinese, who lived to age 300, claimed Pseudo-Lucian) as early as the 3^rd century BCE.²⁰ Within 200 years the Romans would have a voracious appetite for silk and they obtained cloth through the Parthians who most likely encouraged the belief that silk grew on (or as) trees.²¹ Pliny dispelled that myth and described the role of the silkworm, and yet the Senate issued edicts in vain to prohibit the wearing of silk due to the trade imbalance it caused; one decree was based on accusations of immodesty for the way silk clung to the female form. In Pliny’s reckoning, India, China and the Arabian Peninsula extracted ‘from our empire 100 million sesterces per year – that is the sum which our luxuries and our women cost us…’²²

Ptolemaic Egypt had fostered trade eastward as far as India with the help of Arabs and Nabateans, and the resulting contact fertilised Hellenistic literature. But, paradoxically, much of the geographical knowledge of the former Persian East was lost in the period between Megasthenes’ eyewitness reports from India in the generation after Alexander (ca. 290s BCE) and the Parthian Staging Posts of Isidore of Charax in the 1^st century CE, principally due to the collapse of the Seleucid Empire and its dynasty established by Alexander’s former Bodyguard, Seleucus.²³

It was a millennium later that Marco Polo’s twenty-four-year adventure and travelogue opened up knowledge of the East once more. His account appeared under a number of titles including Livre des Merveilles du Monde, The Book of the Marvels of the World, first published in the descendant of Old French (langues d’oïl), and Il Milione written in Italian, which brought back stories of Cathay and Kublai Khan, lending further colour to developing European fables. The authorship of what we have come to name The Travels of Marco Polo is, in fact, contested, as is its original transcribed language; tradition holds that Polo dictated the book to a romance writer, Rustichello da Pisa, while in prison in Genoa between 1298 and 1299, and we would assume in Italian. Rustichello had already written a work in French, Roman de Roi Artus (Romance of King Arthur), and certainly much interpolated material was included, so we might speculate how much of Polo’s original detail remained unsullied in the hands of an established story-philanderer. The oldest manuscripts differ widely in content and length, and what we read today has been ‘standardised’ like other romances and the Iliad.

The Alexandreis had other siblings and more distant relatives too: the distinctive Li romans d’Alixandre, for example, fed by the ‘alexandrine’ verses of Lambert de Tort, and the Mort Alixandre credited to Alexandre de Bernay, alongside the Roman d’Alexandre by Albéric de Pisançon which was the possible source of the German Alexanderlied (ca. 1130) of Lamprecht ‘The Priest’.²⁸ These were hugely influential in the Middle Ages and they were amongst the earliest texts translated into the vernacular literature that emerged in the Renaissance. Like the oil paintings of the period, they were cultural palimpsests, absorbing textual supplements and stylistic elements from other classical works as well as the iconography of their day. The Alexandreis has the Macedonian king and his men fighting in chainmail with axes and broadswords against Arabs who fled in terror, scenes more representative of crusaders than ancient Greek hoplites; we additionally read of Spanish, Teutonic, Gallic and Flemish envoys arriving at Babylon to pay homage to the Macedonian king.²⁹ If Tarn’s criticism of ‘invented embassies’ is indeed correct, then every age wished to communicate with the Macedonian ruler of the Graeco-Persian world.³⁰

The Saracen threat from the Ottoman Empire loomed large in the minds of the romance writers, and it led to the emergence of vivid characters born out of fear or misplaced hope. In 1165 the Letters of Prester John entered circulation; this was an epistolary fantasy that convinced Pope Alexander III of the existence of a lost Nestorian Christian kingdom somewhere in central Asia.31 The character’s provenance might be found in the Historia Ecclesiastica of Eusebius (ca. 260-340 CE), the Bishop of Caesarea, and the fabled Prester John and his Christian outpost was an alluring enough idea for the Portuguese to venture to Ethiopia in search of his kingdom.³² He, and the appropriately named legendary Gates of Alexander, were supposedly constructed to hold back the pagan hordes, imagery with direct parallels in the Arabic Qur’an. The gated wall at the world’s end was in fact the narrow geographical feature that formed the Caspian Gates.

Josephus may have played a part in the legend, for in his Jewish Wars he claimed Alexander had indeed blocked the pass with huge iron gates.³³ That is somewhat ironic as Josephus had expounded: ‘It is often said that the Greeks were the first people to deal with the events of the past in anything like a scientific manner… but it is clear that history has been far better preserved by the so-called barbarians.’³⁴ He added: ‘Nevertheless, we must let those who have no regard for the truth write as they choose, for that is what they seem to delight in.’³⁵ But the fantasy was seductive and ‘breaking the bolts’ or the ‘gates’ of the earth had been a popular Roman locus (Greek, topos) when Alexander was under the knife.³⁶

A map titled A Description of The Empire of Prester John, Also Known as the Abyssinian Empire. Produced in Antwerp in the 1570s by Abraham Ortelius, it outlined Prester John’s fabled empire with both real and imagined names. Ortelius’ Theatrum Orbis Terrarum is regarded as the first atlas and was the most expensive book ever printed. Nevertheless, some 7,300 copies were printed in four editions from 1570 to 1612.

At the height of the Crusades it was alleged that John, the supposed Presbyter of Syria, had re-taken the city of Ecbatana.37 Yet much of Middle Age literature was about historical alchemy and Prester John was just one base metal alloyed with the superstitions and apprehensions of the age. But for an influential time he was as real as Alexander had been in the minds of his chroniclers and he became a regular feature in medieval texts. His legend was finally laid to rest when his mythical kingdom was removed from maps by the German Orientalist Hiob Ludolf (1624-1704) who exposed the seductive fancy for what it was.

Today in Greece the best-known Romance derivative is the He Phyllada tou Megalexantrou, first published in Venice in 1670 and never out of print through the three centuries that followed. The text represented the first attempt to ‘fix’ the fluid Romance recensions in circulation. Emerging ‘from the Byzantine preoccupation with the classical past’, the conflicts between the former Eastern Roman Empire and Ottoman Turks were inevitably dragged into the story.³⁸ The Phyllada portrayed Alexander as the protector of Greek Orthodox Christian culture, and ultimately as kosmokrator, the ruler of the world.

Through the romance genre Alexander’s story finally infiltrated the East in a more permanent way than his own military conquest managed to. He entered the Qur’an texts, reemerging as Dhul-Qarnayn, the ‘two-horned’ who once again raised unbreachable gates to enclose the evil kingdoms of Yâgûg and Mâgûg (Gog and Magog) at the world’s end; the reincarnation, with roots in the Syriac version of the Romance, had its earlier origins in the silver tetradrachms issued by Alexander’s successors that depicted him with rams’ horns. A Persian Romance variant was the Iskandernameh and alongside it Armenian and Ethiopian translations circulated imbuing the tale with their own cultural identities. An interesting textual ‘rediscovery’ appeared in the 8^th century Syriac Secretum Secretorum; it included what was purported to be Aristotle’s lost doctrine on kingship dedicated to Alexander.³⁹

Many parallels to the Alexander romance corpus have appeared in literature: the rabbinic aggadah for example, with its folklore, historical anecdotes and moral exhortations dressed like biblical parables with attendant mythical creatures. We have the Norse Sagas which recapture a similar legendary past, and Beowulf, the Anglo-Saxon poem (ca. 1,000) of Scandinavian pagan legends and heroic exploits that emerged at the end of the Dark Ages when barbarism still triumphed over classical civilisation.⁴³ However, the enduring tale of King Arthur has the most significance for us, and somewhat predictably, Alexander and Arthur crossed paths in the 14^th century French romance, Perceforest. Stock to Greek playwrights was the storm at sea, a neat mechanism for a dramatic location shift and one reused, for example, effectively in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Perceforest upheld the tradition, and Alexander was swept off course to a mythical visit to Britain.⁴⁴

Transformed by Malory into Morte D’Arthur (ca. 1470), the Arthurian canon dominated British historiography for centuries. The ancient sources behind the legends of Brut, Arthur and his knights, have disappeared, leaving us in the dark on their identities, real or imagined.⁴⁵ Malory penned the Arthurian romance based on the earlier account of Geoffrey de Monmouth, whose Historia Regum Britanniae (ca. 1135) and Chrétien de Troyes’ French ‘grail’ romances, appeared in the mid-12th century. The debate on Monmouth’s work goes on regarding the extent to which it was purportedly derived from early Welsh or Breton manuscripts of an Archdeacon Walter. As early as 1190 the historian William of Newburgh declared of Monmouth’s work, which traced the lineage of English kings back to Troy, ‘… only a person ignorant of ancient history would have any doubt about how shamelessly and impudently he lies in almost everything…’ He followed with:

… it is quite clear that everything this man wrote about Arthur and his successors… was made up, partly by himself and partly by others, either from an inordinate love of lying, or for the sake of pleasing the Britons.⁴⁶

To some extent, Rome participated in the rise of both the romances of Arthur and Alexander: the fall of the Roman Empire, which saw the loss of the libraries that guarded primary historical testimony, allowed for a further metamorphosis in Alexander’s story, and Rome’s abandonment of Britain set the scene for Arthur’s legend to emerge. For when sheep began to graze in Rome’s Field of Mars, European history entered a millennium that put more stock in colourful fables than the accounts of, for example, the pedantic and stoic Arrian, whose Anabasis fell out of circulation until the Renaissance as a result. The change in biographical slant was not sudden and character portrayals were remodelled over time: compare the no-nonsense Sallust with Plutarch’s didactic profiling a century on, then place them beside the biographies of the Scriptores Historiae Augustae penned perhaps a further two centuries later.⁴⁹

These controversial texts, first termed Scriptores Historiae Augustae by Isaac Casaubon (1559-1614), are a remarkable collection of source-rich documents of ‘dying Paganism’. In this self-labelled mythistoricis, the biography of Alexander Severus (ruled 222-235 CE) is an ‘awkward imitation’ of the Cyropaedia, according to Edward Gibbon.⁵⁰ It is appropriate, then, that the Latin romanice scribere – to write in a ‘romance language’ – formed the origins of ‘romance’.⁵¹ These biographies were supposed to pick up where Suetonius’ Lives of The Twelve Caesars ended, a logical claim if ever the biographies of Nerva (emperor 96-98 CE) and Trajan (emperor 98-117) are found. The compendium, like the equally vexatious and still anonymous two sections (of three) of the Origo gentis Romanae, provides unique biographical details of late emperors (spanning 117-284 CE) presented as a corpus of texts by six historians written during the reigns of Diocletian (ca. 245-311 CE), the emperor who managed to push the barbarians back over Rome’s borders, and Constantine (272-337 CE).⁵²

I have always endeavoured to draw from the fountain-head; that my curiosity, as well as a sense of duty, has always urged me to study the originals; and that, if they have sometimes eluded my search, I have carefully marked the secondary evidence, on whose faith a passage or a fact were reduced to depend.⁵⁴

Momigliano was scathing of the impression Gibbon attempted to perpetuate about his methodology and his pedantic footnotes, summing up his use of the Scriptores with: ‘Theirs was an age of forgeries, interpolations, false attributions, tendentious interpretations. It would be surprising if the Historia Augusta should turn out to be more honest than the literary standards of the time required.’⁵⁵ Yet is it just another example of where ‘romance’ had clearly infiltrated ‘history’ with a dividing line we cannot readily see today.

In attempting to extract Alexander’s Will from his Romance we are in fact taking a euhemeristic stance: treating what has been deemed mythical as an echo of historical reality. This is an appropriate moment to introduce Sir Isaac Newton into our contemplations, for his tendentious views as a deeply religious euhemerist could not be easily revealed in his lifetime, and neither could the twenty years he dedicated to heretical alchemy in his search for the Philosopher’s Stone. Newton’s Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended was posthumously published in 1728; it was an exegesis in which he employed his mathematical erudition to recalibrate the events of antiquity to bring them ‘safely’ into the chronology proposed by Archbishop James Ussher. It may have inspired the publication of the multi-authored The Universal History from the Earliest Account of Time to the Present, which also ‘found’, or forged, ‘correlations between the Bible and classical worlds’.⁵⁶

The full title of Newton’s publication included the prefix, A Short Chronicle from the First Memory of Things in Europe, to the Conquest of Persia by Alexander the Great. It was presented with a covering letter to the Queen from John Conduitt who claimed ‘Antiquity’ had benefited from ‘… a sagacity and penetration peculiar to the great Author, dispelling that Mist, with which fable and error had darkened it.’ Newton’s treatise, consciously or otherwise, supported the methodology of the 1623 On the Plan and Method of Reading Histories by Digory Whear, and ironically so, for Newton is better remembered for the weighty gravitas of his Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, whose publication was delayed when poor sales of the History of Fishes almost bankrupted the Royal Society.⁵⁹

Newton’s gravitational masterpiece was based on Kepler’s astronomically unpopular law of planetary motion, and that too is ironic, for Kepler, who held the conviction that God had a geometric plan for the universe, fell foul of the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, as did the texts of Galileo with whom he collaborated. Although Kepler’s first publication, the Mysterium Cosmographicum, attempted to reconcile a heliocentric solar-system with biblical geocentrism, his refusal to convert to Catholicism (and dispense with elliptical orbits) ultimately sealed his fate, despite his imperial patronage in Prague. He was banished from Graz where his last astronomical calendar was publicly burned, and his mother was accused of witchcraft, an allegation backed up by spurious claims that his Somnium, the first attempt at ‘science fiction’, had referred to demonic themes. In 1626 the Catholic Counter-Reformation placed his library under lock and key.⁶⁰ In Newton’s case, as one author has commented in his study of his lesser-known euhemerist life, ‘the hunter turned prey’ when his scientific discipline produced more myths than it dispelled.⁶¹

While we are on the matter of euhemerism, it looks wholly suspicious that it was Cassander, the regent’s son accused of ferrying to Babylon the poison bound for Alexander, who employed Euhemerus, the founding ‘mythographer’, at his Macedonian court.⁶² One result was Euhemerus’ utopian land of Panchaea (surely Platonist in origin), though his employer, Cassander, displayed few of the qualities found on the idealised Indian Ocean island paradise.63 Could Euhemerus have been tasked with attempting an ironical role-reversal: that of explaining away a damaging ‘truth’ – Cassander’s part in the alleged plot – as nothing more than a myth propagated by a scurrilous pamphleteer? Euhemerus’ principal work was his Sacred History.⁶⁴ So was it perhaps he, without the reverence his title suggested, who tossed the Pamphlet Will and conspiracy into the final chapter of an early redaction of the Greek Alexander Romance?

Many euhemeristically inclined historians accept that romances may be built around a folklore that preserved elements of genuine historicity, a stance Ennius found useful when linking Rome’s foundations to Troy.⁶⁵ Others more cautiously see myths as ‘symbols of permanent philosophical truths’, and the Greek legends as natural cyclical processes forever recurring.⁶⁶ If an echo of reality has indeed been captured, these lodestones may still be camouflaged by the incredible. It’s worth re-quoting Peter Green’s conclusion on the issue, though he never linked his observation to Alexander’s Will:

… the uncomfortable fact remains that the Alexander Romance provides us, on occasion, with apparently genuine materials found nowhere else, while our better-authenticated sources, per contra, are all too often riddled with bias, propaganda, rhetorical special pleading or patent falsification and suppression of evidence.⁶⁷

Other ‘legends’ may have similarly been built around misplaced or forgotten events. Jason’s journey in the Argo and the legend of King Solomon’s Mines may all be aggregates of real journeys distilled from explorers’ travel logs along exotic trading routes; the latter inland to the metropolis of Manyikeni in the land of the city of ‘Great Zimbabwe’ through the port of Kilwa in modern Tanzania – termed the finest and most handsomely built towns by Ibn Battuta (1364-ca. 1369) – its name already changed to ‘Quiloa’ (as the Portuguese called it) by Milton in Paradise Lost. Solomon’s legendary mines were perhaps in the lost Land of Punt, ‘Ta netjer’ (‘God’s land’), believed by the people of Egypt to be their ancient homeland. According to biblical references, Phoenician ships traded down the African coast, visiting Ophir at the end of the Red Sea and bringing back ‘gold and silver, ivory, and apes and peacocks’ for Solomon; it was a famed trading city of ‘stones of gold’ that has been variously linked to Great Zimbabwe, Sofala in Mozambique (in Milton’s Paradise Lost) and Dhofar in Oman.⁶⁸

A curiosity with the source of the Nile and reason for its annual flooding was a common investigative and well established theme in Greek scholarship since the time of Herodotus, and it reappeared in Aristotle’s now lost treatise, De Inundatione Nili (as titled in a medieval Latin translation); he finally pinned the phenomenon on the Ethiopian summer rains, as Democritus, Thrasyalces and Eudoxus of Cnidus had proposed before him.⁷⁰ Aristobulus apparently touched on the problem too, and a tradition even existed in Roman times (through Seneca’s description and Diodorus’ polemic on the issue, for example) that Callisthenes claimed Alexander had commissioned an expedition to Ethiopia to ascertain the truth. If so, it could explain the reported presence of Ethiopian ambassadors in Babylon.⁷¹

State-employed elephant hunters would disappear into the African interior for months at a time once the Seleucids cut the Ptolemies off from their supply of Indian war elephants; they would return with animals never before seen and which became ‘objects of amazement’. There were reports of snakes 100 cubits long (approximately 150 feet) large enough to devour bulls and oxen and even bring elephants down.⁷² A live 30-cubit-long python was delivered to Ptolemy II Philadelphos, according to Diodorus, and once exhibited it became a court showpiece.⁷³ To quote Bevan’s 1927 summation of the second Ptolemy:

He was a parallel to Solomon in his wealth, surpassing that of any other king of his time… Perhaps it was less the real Solomon to whom Ptolemy II was a parallel than the ideal Solomon portrayed in the Book of Ecclesiastes – the book written by some world-weary Jew at a date not far off from Ptolemy’s time. Ptolemy, too, was a king who had ‘gathered silver and gold and the peculiar treasure of kings and of provinces’, who got him ‘men-singers and women-singers, and the delights of the sons of men, as musical instruments, and that of all sorts’, who had ‘proved his heart with mirth and enjoyed pleasure’, who had ‘made great works and builded him houses’…⁷⁴

Chimeral characters frequent the most influential of ‘historical’ episodes, and nowhere more vividly than when early classical Greece emerged from its Dark Age.⁷⁶ In the Iliad the 1,186 troop transporters comprising the Greek flotilla to Troy (the Catalogue of Ships; a number frowned upon by Thucydides) may in fact represent a hundred late Bronze Age and Mycenae-led invasions across the Aegean; it was the start of an ongoing saga continued in the Aethiopis, Ilias Mikra (Little Illiad), the lost Iliou Persis, The Sack of Ilium, Nostoi, Odyssey and the Telegony which completed the Epic Cycle.⁷⁷ Hittite texts suggest the invading Ahhiyawa (linguistic links to the Akhaioi, the Achaeans, are hard to dismiss) may have been Mycenaen Greeks based in coastal Asia Minor who were fighting for control of Wilusa, likely the Hittite name for Troy.⁷⁸

A photo of Wilhelm Dörpfeld and Heinrich Schliemann at the Lion Gate of Mycenae ca. 1884/5.

Some of the underlying imagery, if not its application, is sound. There is much evidence, for example, that the legend of the Wooden Horse of Troy started life as an Assyrian-style battering ram, for many were ornately horse-headed in design and fully enclosed to house and protect the men who inched them forward to the walls.⁷⁹ On the other hand, the now lost On Rhetoric According to Homer by Telephus of Pergamum exposed the narratives within the Trojan epics for what they really were: flights of epideictic fancy that reinforced the dominant value systems underlying the tale: the aidos and the nemesis that framed honour and revenge.

Whether there ever was a ‘Homer’ is doubtful, whether blind as one tradition claimed, or indeed far-sighted and as many as seven cities staked their claims as his home: Cyme, Smyrna, Chios, Colophon, Pylos, Argos, and Athens.80 In one view, ‘the works ascribed to Moses and Homer were libraries’, and ‘to deprive a library of an author would be to consign it to the realm of the anonymous’;⁸¹ ‘Homer was a sort of shorthand for the whole body of archaic hexameter poetry.’⁸² As with the thirty-three poems comprising the Homeric Hymns, a collection of different authors from many periods coalesced into something approximating a genre; the epics were collected into a ‘book’ sung by the Homeridai, the guild of the ‘sons of Homer’ that kept the ancient accounts alive orally at the Panathenaia.⁸³ Certainly the Life of Homer (one of many ‘lives’) by a Pseudo-Herodotus betrays the fictional traits of a later age.⁸⁴ The still anonymous Greek Anthology proposed more divine origins: ‘Whose pages recorded the Trojan War and of the long wanderings of the son of Laertes? I cannot be sure of his name or his city. Heavenly Zeus, is Homer getting the glory for your own poetry?’⁸⁵

The Roman poet Horace (65-68 BCE) coined the term ‘Homeric Nod’ in his Ars Poetica to describe the continuity errors Homer repeatedly made through the Iliad, and this perhaps supports the ‘multiple-author’ theory over a single compiler of the epic of prehistory.⁸⁶ Today the corpus of literature contained in the Homeric or Trojan Epic Cycle, or rather in its scholia, the critical and explanatory commentary in the margins, has spurred its own investigative science: Neoanalysis.⁸⁷

A gypsum wall panel relief from the palace of Tiglath-Pileser III (reigned ca. 744-727 BCE) at Nimrud dating to ca. 730 BCE, showing an Assyrian battering ram in front of the walls of a city under siege. The fully enclosed and wheeled battering ram may be the inspiration for the legend of the Trojan Horse. The panel is now in the British Museum. BM 118903.

Herodotus’ semi-mythical battle between the champions of Sparta and Argos in the mid-6^th century BCE at Thyrea described a single sun-baked blood-soaked day which might in fact have similarly recalled many campaigning seasons that witnessed similar hoplite clashes on the plains of Lacedaemonia in the heart of ‘the dancing floor of Ares.’88 Reminiscent of a gladiatorial arena, the format at Thyrea, designed to limit casualties, allocated victory to the last man standing, in this case a lone Spartan who committed suicide for fear that his valour would be questioned in the face of the deaths of all his comrades. But the outcome of the battle reads more like a tutorial on the prevailing warrior honour code. Some 300 in number from each city, the Thyrean champions are reminiscent of the elite Hieros lochos, the Theban Sacred Band, the shock troop corps of paired lovers that Alexander annihilated in 338 BCE, and whose remains were likely discovered in the 19^th century.⁸⁹

The battle at Chaeronea remains well attested, as does Philip’s harsh treatment of Boeotian soldiers who left their crack unit isolated: Boeotian corpses had to be purchased by their relatives, and captives were ransomed or sold into slavery. But was the Theban Sacred Band, a unit modelled on Spartan example, really annihilated to the last man as texts record, as a total of 254 skeletons were excavated from the tomb guarded by the Lion of Chaeronea? ‘Perish any man who suspects that these men either did or suffered anything that was base’, exclaimed Philip II upon seeing their corpses after the battle.⁹⁰ Perhaps the more poignant testament to their bravery is a tumulus 230 feet around and some 23 feet high that bears witness to the polyandreion, the mass grave, of their Macedonian attackers who were inhumed with their weapons.

The 20-foot tall Lion of Chaeronea as it appeared ca. 1907 in Outlines of European History, after earlier repairs and reconstruction of the fragments in 1902. According to Pausanias, the original statue was erected to guard the graves of the Theban Sacred Band who fell at the battle in Boeotia between Mt Helicon and Mt Parnassus. There is no surviving inscription. Excavation of the quadrangular enclosure revealed the remains of 254 corpses laid out in seven rows. Similar statues and a communal tomb (polyandreion) have been found at Thespiae and Amphipolis.91

But monuments to valour date further back. The battle at Marathon in 490 BCE clearly epitomised Greek arete and aidos, the classical codes of valour and duty. However it was likely Thersippus, or more popularly Eucles, and not the hemerodrome (day-runner) Pheidippides (famed by the 1879 Robert Browning poem of the same name) who delivered the news of victory at Marathon to the expectant Athenians; the proud motto of such messengers (in fact of their Persian counterparts) read, ‘… and neither snow nor rain nor heat nor night holds back from the accomplishment.’⁹² According to Plutarch, Eucles was a self-sent messenger who arrived in full armour from the battle he fought in himself. The Athenian Pheidippides (or Philippides, according to Lucian) apparently ran to Sparta to request help before the battle commenced, and he met the god Pan on the way, for legend had it that the god’s cave in the Parthenian ridge overhanging Tegea, was en route. In fact it was Euchidas, running the route to Delphi, who allegedly died on the spot.⁹³ An amalgam of truths with popular fiction is what we recite today, when ‘eager to adopt and adorn the fable’, writers embellished the subject ‘as if it were the soil of a fair estate unoccupied’.⁹⁴

Sparta’s own heroic holding of the pass against Xerxes’ Persian horde is itself shrouded in legendary misattribution, for the 4,200 reported defenders at Thermopylae are widely bypassed in eulogies that alone immortalise the alleged 300 Spartans who led them, though the numbers given by Herodotus (who claimed to know the 300 by name) are open to question (perhaps short by 700 or more in total), as is the Spartan-led night attack on Xerxes’ tent mentioned by Diodorus who was likely drawing from Ephorus, who in turn took this detail from an unknown source.⁹⁵

And this leads us to the exemplar of a laconic retort by Leonidas to the Great King’s demand that the Greeks hand over their arms: molon labe – ‘you come and take them’. It is a bold riposte, and yet one taken from the Apophthegmata Lakonika, Laconian Sayings, attributed to Plutarch (now grouped with his Moralia) and compiled over 500 years after the event. Moreover, the historical pragmatist would ask: if the defenders died to the last man, could a Greek have recorded Leonidas’ reply? The son of the seer, Megistias, sent home the penultimate day, is a possible contender, and the exiled Spartan king, Demaratus (ruled 515-491 BCE), who accompanied the Persians on the north side of the Hot Pillars (the literal translation of Thermo Pylai) is perhaps a stronger candidate, though we should recall, when dealing with Spartan legend, that Lycurgus (ca. 390-324 BCE), the forefather who supposedly gave Sparta its polity, has been termed nothing more than a ‘benevolent myth’.⁹⁶

What did Alexander himself conclude about his sources 2,300 years ago when carrying Herodotus and the philosopher-edited Iliad into an Asia he only knew from their scrolls or from Aristotle’s teachings at Mieza?⁹⁸ When Alexander finally joined battle with Darius III, where were Herodotus’ famed 10,000 ‘Immortals’ (a description unique to him), the Great King’s elite royal guard that the Macedonians expected to face? The answer is probably reincarnated in the melophoroi, so-called Apple Bearers, who were named after the fruit-like counter-weights on their spear butts, for Herodotus had most likely confused the Persian term ‘Anûšiya’ with ‘Anauša’, which simply meant ‘Companion’.⁹⁹ Herodotus himself is said to have quipped: ‘Very few things happen at the right time, and the rest do not happen at all. The conscientious historian will correct these defects.’ But who can find the comedic lines within the historian’s work? It was in fact Mark Twain who attributed the words to him in the preface to A Horse’s Tail.¹⁰⁰

Given time and propagated convincingly enough, this may well become a ‘genuine’ metaphrase that will further tarnish Herodotus’ reputation, for no historian has been more maligned (perhaps because he was a barbarophile) than the ‘father of history’ from Halicarnassus ‘who attempted to open up the gates to the past’. Plutarch penned a De Heroditi Malignitate (On the Malice of Herodotus), which has been termed literature’s ‘first slashing review’;¹⁰¹ the attack may have been in part due to Herodotus’ religious cynicism that offended the deeply pious Priest of Apollo, and the negative picture he painted of Plutarch’s fellow Boeotians.¹⁰² Valerius Pollio, Aelius Harpocration and Libanius followed suit with declamatory texts against the Histories, and Aristotle branded Herodotus a ‘teller of myths’ above anything else.¹⁰³ Perhaps the greatest disservice paid to him was a two-book epitome of the Histories by Theopompus.¹⁰⁴

Herodotus, ‘who blended the empirical attitude of the scientists with the rhapsode’s love of praising famous men’, nevertheless, offered in defence to the accusation, ‘that he sometimes wrote for children and at other times for philosophers’: ‘My business is to record what people say, but I am by no means bound to believe it, and let this statement hold for my entire account.’¹⁰⁵ The apologia was a popular prenuptial in the marriage of the historikon and mythistoria. He nevertheless remains unique; as Momigliano concluded simply: ‘There was no Herodotus before Herodotus’, moreover, ‘he was more easily criticised than replaced’.106

This, in turn, draws us by the bridle and halter to Alexander’s breaking of Bucephalus, the king’s Thessalian warhorse which was probably named after its ox-head branding (boos kephale). The rendering of the story fitted the overall encomiastic portrayal of the young prince: he was a Bellerophon mounting a wild Pegasus that could be only tamed by him before an incredulous Macedonian court and an elated horse-dealer, Philonicus. Yet the event, which ‘abounds in circumstantial detail and dramatic immediacy’, was preserved by Plutarch alone, as was Alexander’s quizzing of Persian envoys on military detail at an even younger age, for this anticipated, and set the tone for, his later invasion of Asia.¹⁰⁷ Did Onesicritus’ hagiographical The Education of Alexander (or Marsyas’ book of the same name) provide the models, or did Plutarch, in his ‘quiet naivety’, find this detail in the epistolary corpus he uniquely referred to on some thirty occasions?¹⁰⁸ Surely neither source was reliable. Was the Bucephalus episode an allusion to the metaphor in Plato’s Phaedra which likened the untamed horse to an unruly youth who must be broken by an education, paideia, itself steeped in Homeric values? In which case it is fully understandable why Bucephalus ‘was born to share Alexander’s fate’ in the Romance.¹⁰⁹

The careers of Plutarch, Callisthenes, Demosthenes and Aristotle, each influential to Alexander’s story, have also given birth to a spurious epistolary corpus in their name. Plutarch seems to have had unique access to a folio of correspondences to and from Alexander, so numerous that he commented: ‘In fact it is astonishing that he [Alexander] could find time to write so many letters to his friends.’¹¹⁰ Confirmation that a collection once existed, possibly collated as a book, came with the discovery of papyri in Hamburg, Florence and Oxyrhynchus in Egypt, though suspiciously ‘there is no trace of them earlier than Cicero’s De Officiis’ which referred to epistulae Philippi ad Alexandrum et Antipatri ad Cassandrum et Antigoni ad Philippum filium;¹¹¹ the title suggests there once existed a corpus of letters between Philip and Alexander, and correspondence between Antipater, Cassander and Antigonus Monophthalmos, the remarkable Macedonian ‘one-eyed’ general.

Arrian also referred to the collection and it is likely a common source was behind the tradition.¹¹² Plutarch’s folio was even more specific; those letters written to Alexander’s mother, Olympias, were ‘private’, and only Alexander’s closest friend, Hephaestion, was permitted to read them. Nevertheless, the detail we garner from them appears, in hindsight, to be fictitious. The authenticity of one of Plutarch’s own works remains just as vexatious; a Greek manuscript attributed to him and titled Pro Nobilitate, In Favour of Noble Birth, resurfaced as recently as 1722 and was not convincingly discredited until the late 1900s. Yet separating deliberate imposters from well-meaning ‘impostures’ is not always achievable.113 And so the authenticity of similar correspondence by the philosophers Plato, Speusippus (Plato’s nephew, ca. 408-338 BCE), Archytas (428-347 BCE) and the influential rhetorician Isocrates, whose pleas for an invasion of Persia arguably motivated Philip II (and then Alexander) to launch his Asian campaign, is still debated.¹¹⁴ But the composition of such letters, in emulation of the great minds of the past, was a part of Greek classroom preparatory exercises, progymnasmata.

Some thirty-plus letters concerning Alexander made their way into the Greek Alexander Romance, a publication unique in ancient fiction in the breadth of its epistolary ‘pseudo-documentarism’. Examples range from what Merkelbach termed wunder-briefe to the almost credible, a state of affairs that epitomises the whole Romance.¹¹⁵ Plutarch may have been unwittingly incorporating letters that had no historical foundation into his own biographies, perhaps fooled by the freehand-form of their intimacy when no stylistic baseline for comparison existed. They may have even originated, convincingly, with a court scandalmonger such as Chares, the king’s chamberlain. So the argument about the ‘truth’ revolves around the degree of trust we place in the instincts of our secondary sources and their immunity to seduction.

The association of the authorship of Romance with the campaign historian Callisthenes (besides other historians) reminds us that we commonly place credit where none is due, when the real architects of events may disappear without a trace. With a superficial knowledge of characters and the events attached to them, we risk, once again, creating our own modern ‘romances’ when regurgitating the tale. We habitually lay down Mercator-like projections on history’s prosopographic terroir; but this is a one-dimensional mapping that distorts both the shape and the scale of contributions, for the truth lies hidden in contours and grottos time has flattened out.

Examples proliferate the classical accounts: Pythagoras’ theorem still bears his name, yet the triplets had already been in use in Babylon and Egypt for over 1,500 years before his day, since the Middle Bronze Age in fact.¹¹⁶ If Porphyry is correct, Pythagoras took his knowledge of geometry from Egypt, arithmetic from Phoenicia, astronomy from Chaldeans, and principles of religion from the Magi too,¹¹⁷ which is no doubt why Plato is said to have paid the exorbitant sum of 100 minas to purchase three books of Pythagorean doctrine by Philolaus of Croton.¹¹⁸ Plutarch’s Symposiacs provided further detail of his teachings but these were penned some 500 years later using notes left behind by the polymath’s inner circle, the mathematikoi and akousmatikoi, the ‘learners’ and ‘listeners’.¹¹⁹

If the inscriptions found at Nineveh have been deciphered correctly, the so-called Archimedes Screw was also in use centuries before Archimedes ‘stumbled’ upon the idea.¹²³ And on the subject of water management, De Lesseps’ canal at Suez remains a wonder of the industrial revolution, but Aristotle, Diodorus, Strabo and Pliny each placed an original channel linking the two oceans (though indirectly and via a different route) in the time of the Egyptian pharaohs. The first excavations possibly commenced with Merenre I of the Sixth Dynasty in the late third millennium BCE, though sources better corroborate the early efforts of Sesostris (ca. 1878-1839 BCE, probably identifiable with Senusret III).¹²⁴ Re-excavation of the watercourse had commenced around 600 BCE, centuries before Alexander crossed the Nile, which was named the Aegyptus River in antiquity, though in Greek mythology Aegyptus was a descendent of the river-god Neilus.¹²⁵

Pharaoh Necho II (ruled ca. 610-595 BCE) stopped construction of the waterway when an oracle warned him he was ‘working for the advantage of a barbarian’, though by then, according to Herodotus, some 120,000 Egyptians had died in the construction efforts. Another tradition picked up by Aristotle more practically suggested that engineers had advised against contaminating the freshwater Nile with salt, for the channel linked the Red Sea (thought to be at a higher level than Lower Egypt) to the river and not directly to the Mediterranean.¹²⁶ The canal was finally completed by Darius I whose inscription commemorating the project survives to this day; according to Herodotus the waterway was sufficiently wide for two triremes to pass and Ptolemy II Philadelphos had it re-excavated to the Bitter Lakes using navigable locks and sluices to prevent the in-flow of seawater; it was known as the ‘Ptolemy River’.

Excavated papyri do reveal a remarkable irrigation system in the Fayyum basin south of Memphis, which drained marshland that was otherwise uninhabitable and reclaimed valuable settlement areas for Egyptians and Hellenic mercenaries alike through to the mid-3^rd century BCE.127 Rome would later benefit from the engineering feat and Trajan extended the canal system with a branch known as the Amnis Trajanus, which joined the Nile somewhere close to Memphis (which was some 12 miles south of modern Cairo). Remnants of an ancient East-West canal were indeed found by Napoleon’s cartographers in 1799 along with an emaciated Alexandria with barely 6,000 inhabitants; Napoleon reincarnated the idea of putting it back into service, though the canons of the British navy did not allow him the opportunity.¹²⁸

Rome’s own enigmatic past is not beyond question. The ‘legend’ of Coriolanus (5^th century BCE), a vivid narrative of a hero turned enemy, was scooped up by Livy, Plutarch and Dionysius, amongst others. Although Plutarch confidently afforded him a lineage (and a nickname) and a fifty-page biography, the consular fasti (official records) never mentioned Coriolanus at all, yet they record the siege of Corioli and the Volscian uprising that supposedly made him.¹²⁹ Was he a figure invented to warn the Senate of the unbridled power of popular generals and kings, or a representation of aristocratic tyranny over the city’s plebeian interests? For these themes were prominent in the early days of Rome; Livy recorded the fall of the Etruscan city of Veii, which was alienated by the remaining tribes for its abhorrent adherence to monarchy.¹³⁰

It is worth noting that new linguistic investigation suggests the Etruscans, to whom Rome ‘owed much of its civilisation’, may well have been refugees from fallen Troy (Herodotus reported they emigrated from Lydia in Asia ca. 1,000 BCE), though Augustus, Naevius, Ennius (ca. 239-169 BCE) and Virgil (70-19 BCE) would be mortified to hear it. Certainly, some of the paintings on the walls of Etruscan tombs (6^th century BCE), somewhat Greek in style, have Phrygian and Lycian points of comparison. Etruscan offerings (7^th century BCE) have been found at Olympia, suggesting continuous early contact with Greece.¹³¹ Trosia, the Greek name (alongside Ilium) for the city of Priam, resonates with similarity to the frequent Hittite and Egyptian references to Turush and Trusya that appeared in 14^th and 15^th century BCE documents, and thus, it is suggested, to later Tros or Trus, the supposed roots of the names ‘Etruria’ and ‘Etruscans’. What was once a fanciful notion is now backed up by the identification of genetic similarities,¹³² though as one historian noted of the Etruscan civilisation and its supposedly indecipherable texts: ‘I don’t think there is any field of human knowledge in which there is such a daft cleavage between what has been scientifically ascertained and the unshakable belief of the public…’¹³³ But the same could perhaps be stated, of course, of Alexander himself.

Alexander’s own Homeric shield-coveting might have been inspired by tales of Pythagoras, who, through eternal transmigration, claimed to be a reincarnation of a Trojan hero. He was, he believed, Euphorbus, who had been cut down by Menelaus in the fight over Patroclus’ body, a story put to verse in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a ‘compendium of myth’ written in the dactylic hexameter of the Epic Cyle. Unlike the Socratic belief that all knowledge of a previous life was washed away with each rebirth, Pythagoras had been, he claimed, granted eternal memory as part of the gift from Mercury. As ‘proof’ of his past when inhabiting the reincarnated body of Hermotimus, he apparently went to the (original) territory of the Branchidae and tracked down the beaten shield (by now worn down to the ivory) that Menelaus had retrieved from the battlefield and dedicated to the temple of Apollo.¹³⁶ Whether Pythagoras or Alexander truly believed they had the genuine defensive armour of the Trojans is a matter of conjecture, but in Alexander’s case that would have meant that the hoplon he actually used in battle was more than 800 years old; what he had retrieved from the Athena’s temple was surely a symbolic talisman rather than a functional shield.¹³⁷

A 17^th century sculpture of Nero at the Musei Capitolino, Hall of Emperors, Rome. A part of it is original giving form to the reconstruction. Suetonius provided a vivid description of the emperor: ‘He was about the average height, his body marked with spots and malodorous, his hair light blond, his features regular rather than attractive, his eyes blue and somewhat weak, his neck over thick, his belly prominent, and his legs very slender… he was utterly shameless in the care of his person and in his dress, always having his hair arranged in tiers of curls.’¹⁴⁵

Chrysostom’s final line brings us to the most significant parallel with Alexander: the ‘false’ Neros that appeared. For many did believe he never committed suicide but rather lived on in obscurity; at least three imposters presented themselves as the living emperor over the next twenty years and with subjects ready to accept them.¹⁴² Cassius Dio (ca. 155-235 CE) reported that in 221 CE, a century and a half on, a mysterious person appeared at the Danube with an entourage and claimed to be Alexander the Great. Entranced by the apparition (an eidolon to the Greeks), none dared to oppose his progress; on the contrary, they provided him with food and lodging. After performing nocturnal rituals and burying a wooden horse, he disappeared once more.¹⁴³ As for Nero, it was the developing Sibylline Oracles that took the thespian emperor to the realms of apocalyptic legend through to the City of God of Augustine of Hippo (354-430 CE, also known as ‘Saint Augustine’), which criticised the portrayal of him as the Antichrist, and like Alexander, Nero entered the folklore of the Middle Ages.¹⁴⁴

Nero had forced his teacher, Seneca (‘the Younger’, ca. 4 BCE-65 CE), and his teacher’s nephew, the celebrated poet Lucan, to commit suicide, claiming they both had a part in the Pisonian plot to remove him.146 In fact Nero simply wished to put an end to Seneca’s criticism of his increasingly bizarre behaviour following his alleged murder of his own mother, Agrippina; Nero claimed that Seneca had amassed the remarkable (and highly suspicious) sum of some 300,000,000 sestertii in just four years under his patronage.¹⁴⁷ The Apocolocyntosis (loosely translated as the ‘pumpkinification’) of the Divine Claudius, flattering to Nero and possibly written by Seneca shortly after Claudius’ death (in 54 CE), suggested this Stoic teacher once held high hopes for his new ‘radiant-faced’ Nero. Alas, after some promising years, the trappings of imperium saw the ‘new star’ begin to fade. The demise of Lucan, once an imperial friend and holding a questorship and augurate at a remarkably early age, stemmed ultimately from the republican sympathy embedded within the later books of his De Bello Civili.¹⁴⁸ This led to the banning of his poetry, including the De Incendiis Urbis, On the Burning of the City, in which Lucan termed Nero a tyrant, and that paralleled his critique of the conquering Alexander. Lucan was forced to open his veins at the age of twenty-five.¹⁴⁹

The parallel here is Callisthenes, Alexander’s own outspoken historian. He had opened promisingly for Alexander too; seas parted and the gods took due notice of their favourite new son. However, his distaste for Alexander’s oriental adoptions, divine pretensions and perhaps, finally, the wholesale slaughter of the defenceless Branchidae, saw him forget Aristotle’s warnings and he let loose his indiscreet tongue. He too was executed on the king’s orders; according to one tradition, quite possibly again stemming from Greek polemic emanating from the Peripatetic school, Callisthenes was first caged for some years and dragged around in chains before being tortured. Perhaps he saw it coming: once offered undiluted wine at a court komos, he reportedly declined with, ‘I do not wish to drink Alexander’s cup and then need the cup of Asclepius’, the healing god.¹⁵⁰ The comparison with Nero is rarely made but the crime was ultimately the same.

A former slave captured by pirates, and one charged with debasing (or defacing) the local currency at his native Sinope (a charge carrying severe penalty),¹⁵⁴ Diogenes had found the clay barrel (or urn) in which he slept in the Temple of Cybele. He might have been the first true ‘citizen of the world’, kosmopolites, a concept the Stoikoi later took up when Rome was indeed assimilating much of the known world.¹⁵⁵ But there were, in fact, a number of traditions floating around involving Alexander and the ‘dog’ he so admired. Plutarch’s Moralia claimed Diogenes expired on the same day as Alexander, whilst another writer has him brought before Philip II after the Athenian defeat at Chaeronea; when questioned on his identity Diogenes replied he was ‘a spy, to spy upon your insatiability’ following which his amused captor set him free.¹⁵⁶ A further story, which proliferated in later works, claimed Alexander found the philosopher rummaging through a pile of bones; when asked why, Diogenes replied: ‘I am looking for the bones of your father, but cannot distinguish them from those of a slave.’ No doubt allegorical too, it bears the hallmarks of Lucian’s Menippus, a dialogue featuring the 3^rd century Cynic-satirist whose style he often imitated,¹⁵⁷ and it remains highly unlikely that the ‘mad Socrates’, as Plato called Diogenes, would have been worthy of Alexander’s continued esteem.¹⁵⁸

Plutarch was always creative when dealing with a scandal. In a campaign episode that featured the legendary Amazons he named fourteen different sources that either confirmed, or repudiated, Alexander’s affair with their tribal queen, Thalestris. Superficially, the incident is quaint and much developed in the Romance, however, for our study, it is a tutorial on the grey matter between the black and white.¹⁵⁹ Of those sources cited, five declared for the meeting, and nine, according to Plutarch, maintained it was a fiction. Notably, one of the five was Onesicritus, supposedly an eyewitness to the event. Another was Cleitarchus who likely followed Onesicritus’ lead. Surprisingly, one of the nine doubters was Chares the royal usher who had an interest in court scandaleuse; Ptolemy and Aristobulus also came down on the side of invention.¹⁶⁰

Arrian recorded the presence of embassies from various Scythian tribes as Alexander progressed through Asia; when reporting that Atropates, the satrap of Media, sent one hundred women dressed as Amazons to the Macedonian king, he reminded us of their frequent appearances in the Histories of Herodotus, which recounted Heracles’ task of bringing the girdle of their queen, Hippolyte, back to Greece. Arrian concluded with: ‘I cannot believe that this race of women never existed at all, when so many authorities have celebrated them.’¹⁶² But regardless of their historicity, if Alexander was presenting himself as a new Achilles, as sources appears to confirm, then the hero needed an encounter with his own Penthesilea, the legendary Amazon queen who turned up to defend Troy and take on the famed warrior.¹⁶³ That Alexander seduced an Amazon where Achilles stabbed her instead, did not lessen the romantic parallel. The spectacular shield found in Tomb II at Vergina may in fact bear the imagery of that legendary Trojan encounter as its centrepiece in ivory and gold.¹⁶⁴

So can we blame Onesicritus for what may amount to a modest embellishment of truth inspired by the Median episode? Upon hearing Onesicritus recount the episode, Lysimachus’ cynical quip – ‘Where was I then?’ – may have been targeted at the thirteen-day tryst Alexander allegedly enjoyed with the queen (assuming Onesicritus covered that too) and not at the meeting itself.¹⁶⁵ Furthermore, Lysimachus’ criticism appears singular, which might suggest that on the whole Onesicritus narrated events that were supportable. That itself appears misleading, for we have examples of far more fabulous claims from him concerning the wonders of India: living dragons, three-hundred-year-old elephants and 200-feet-long serpents among them.¹⁶⁶ So we in turn may ask: ‘Where were all the Macedonians then?’

Clearly, this genre of ‘romantic’ material, based on the seductions of, and by, the Macedonian king, has endured in the ‘mainstream’ accounts. Should ‘romances’ then be so easily dismissed and relegated behind their ‘serious’ counterparts? Our point, illustrated from various angles, is that the dividing line between fiction and fact is subtle, like the ‘all-too-narrow isthmus’ Lucian proposed marked off ‘history from panegyric’.¹⁶⁸ And it was often muddied over by the debris of romance, leaving us guessing if we are dealing with plausible impossibilities, or rather, implausible possibilities.

What made Alexander’s story so ripe for ‘romancing’ when, as an example, the life of Julius Caesar – paralleled with Alexander’s in Plutarch’s Lives – was not? Certainly without the thauma, the marvels developed by the fabulously inclined biographers, Ptolemy’s sober military treatise would not have provided sufficient flammable tinder either. It required hagiographies and panegyrics to blow on the fire, and a death in distant Babylon, not on the steps of the Theatre of Pompey in a no-nonsense and fractious Rome. Strabo sensed it when he wrote of Alexander historians: ‘These toy with facts, both because of the glory of Alexander and because his expedition reached the ends of Asia, far away from us.’¹⁶⁹ Caesar had in fact stood before the statue of the Macedonian with its outstretched arm in the Temple of Heracles (now Roman Hercules) at Gades, modern Cadiz, when he was quaestor of Hispania Ulterior; vexed at his comparatively slow progress to greatness, he is said to have sighed impatiently. The statue remained standing until the 12^th century by which time Arab authors proposed Alexander had himself excavated the Straits of Gibraltar.¹⁷⁰

Both Caesar and Alexander had understood the need to lay their achievements down in writing when fresh, pliable, and untarnished by partiality and the reasoned balance of hindsight. Alexander had Callisthenes and Onesicritus on the spot to do the job, whereas Caesar himself penned his own Gallic War diaries, ‘… incomparable models for military dispatches. But histories they are not…’ There are ten surviving manuscripts of Caesar’s commentaries on the war in Gaul and none of them mentioned the estimated one million slaves taken between 58-51 BCE.171 But Quellenforschung would rule both approaches unfair, a partiality uniquely manifested when the recorder of the episodes was either employed by their architect, or the architect himself; as far as Caesar’s Commentarii, as Wilkes points out, they ‘acquired authority in later years, not because they were invariably more reliable’ but because his followers ‘could allow no other version to prevail’.¹⁷² Nevertheless, Cicero praised them for their simplicity, straightforwardness and grace, and he found them ‘stripped of all rhetorical adornment’, so much so that it ‘kept men of any sense from touching the subject’.¹⁷³ Had Caesar wanted an enduring romance, it seems he ought to have outsourced to an author in Egypt.

Highly readable romances were more easily assimilated than the more challenging and often lengthy classical histories, in much the same way that Cleitarchus’ Alexander eclipsed the primary sources it subsumed. This was something of a literary Oedipus complex, when the parental work is rejected by the collusion of later sibling texts that were drawn to the story. But it remains impossible to pinpoint Alexander’s Romance equivalent of ‘Chrétien de Troyes’, the first writer to mention the Arthurian Holy Grail.¹⁷⁴ Yet, as with the jongleurs, the Middle Age troubadours who kept Arthur in circulation, and the authors of the Four Continuations who diversified and accessorised the tale, there was probably no single influence that gave the Romance its birth, and there would have been a number of ‘pre-texts’, as Fraser termed them, behind the first edition.¹⁷⁵

Pearson aptly noted that: ‘The distinction between different streams of the tradition is an artificial one… nor is there any fixed rule that a story acquires new miracles or discards them as it grows older: the methods of mythological criticism are not applicable to anecdotes about historical personages.’¹⁷⁶ He was referring to what he termed ‘the historical, the rhetorical, the philosophical, the political and the purely romantic publications’.¹⁷⁷ But if the kaleidoscope of colourful protomatter behind the Greek Alexander Romance coalesced into focus for a moment, we would likely see Callisthenes’ Praxeis Alexandrou with its apotheotic spice, Onesicritus’ encomium on education replete with the quasi-utopian land of Musicanus (likely a tribe, not a king) and Brahmin sophistry, with Chares and Polycleitus of Larissa, and even Ctesias, in the melting-pot beside them.¹⁷⁸

If all this gave us the cast and the plot, the unique cultural diversity of Alexandria, where Alexander’s body now resided, tuned up a script which claimed the corpse’s final resting place was apparently prompted by an oracle of Babylonian Bel-Marduk; the god demanded his interment in Memphis, though the local priests thought otherwise.¹⁸¹ The most influential element was Egypt, as Wallis Budge, an expert in this genre, sensed; The Demotic Chronicle, The Dream of Nectanebo and Romance of Sesonchosis (Alexander is supposed to have declared himself the ‘new Sesonchosis’), and many more of the themes that were regurgitated in the Romance originated here.¹⁸² Budge’s famous acquisition of the Egyptian Book of the Dead for the British Museum was a fitting triumph for his career, for he himself was a believer in the paranormal and the occult; perhaps it was a result of his friendship with H Ryder Haggard, whose gothic fantasies recalled genealogies that traced lineages back to the generals of Alexander the Great.¹⁸³

In Hellenistic Alexandria, where Eratosthenes was to place the Prime Meridian when carving up the Earth in longitudinal lines, ‘magic’ was the watchword; the compressed air water pumps and musical instruments of Ctesibius (floruit ca. 270 BCE) and later the mechanical devices of Heron (ca. 10-70 BCE) mysteriously opened temple doors and turned visitors into cult believers, anticipating the ‘golden age of automata’ by almost two millennia.¹⁸⁴ The Book of Thoth (a god paralleled to Greek Hermes) inspired the Corpus Hermeticum, the book of knowledge in which wisdom was fermented with alchemy, prophesy and prayer-spells. The new arts in thaumaturgy, along with the influential local Jewish predilection for narrating tales, provided a suitably atmospheric set. Josephus, the Jewish scholar, claimed that Alexander had visited Jerusalem, linking him to the Persian Empire-destroying prophecy of the Book of Daniel; Ptolemy I, when taking Judea in his Syrian campaigns, ferried captives (many of them willing) back to Egypt to bolster its creative population, and the Jewish Quarter in the eastern section of Alexandria, governed by an ethnarch, became almost as large as the Greek.¹⁸⁵ Scholars estimate that the Jewish population may have comprised ten per cent of the population of Egypt (which was perhaps five million in total) and possibly twenty-five per cent of the population of Alexandria estimated by Diodorus to be 300,000 in his day, excluding slaves.186

‘For a time, Alexander is lost to the practical, political and military world of the West, having been subsumed into an oriental idyll. His eventual return to the “Western” world is only accomplished with the growth of humanistic studies.’¹⁸⁷ That reality check arrived with Quellensforschung when the irreconcilability of East and West was finally put under the microscope, and when any mystique that survived through the Renaissance was finally extinguished. As TB Macaulay neatly put it: ‘History commenced among the modern nations of Europe, as it had commenced among the Greeks, in romance.’¹⁸⁸ Macaulay’s rather prejudiced methodological treatise, History, was published in the Edinburgh Review in May 1828 to great critical acclaim, although his History of England was described as ‘a sad testimonial to the cultural regression of our times’;¹⁸⁹ so much then for one of history’s own methodological guards. An elitist Europhile, as firmly as Aristotle had been a bigoted xenophobe, Macaulay, nevertheless, provided a relevant historiographical summation that is particularly apt:

A history in which every particular incident may be true may on the whole be false… the changes of manners and morals, the transition of communities from poverty to wealth, from knowledge to ignorance, from ferocity to humanity – these are, for the most part, noiseless revolutions. Their progress is rarely indicated by what historians are pleased to call important events. They are not achieved by armies, or enacted by senates. They are sanctioned by no treaties, and recorded in no archives…

Of course those ‘noiseless revolutions’ include the ‘important events’ that have so far evaded detection: the deceptions, manipulations, interpolations and recreations that remain in history’s pockets. For in the ‘headlong, dramatic, breathless rush of its narrative’, as Braudel termed it, history often fools us into rushing past subtler detail too.¹⁹⁰ In this context it is paradoxical that historians have not further questioned why Alexander has been credited with three conflicting deaths.

A sharp, coherent, and confidently structured Last Will and Testament sits at the conclusion to the Metz Epitome and the Romance (T1, T2), in contrast to unlikely Vulgate deathbed noises (T6, T7, T8) and the silence of the Journal (T3,T4). Have the wrong historical bodies been attached to the wrong biographical heads? If so, how could such a wholesale misinterpretation occur? In part, the question has already been answered: because Alexander’s story had its provenance in Alexandria. ‘Legends and lies about Alexander were given currency by authors who had actually seen him or accompanied his expedition: there had been no Thucydides to strangle such monsters at birth.’¹⁹³ The conqueror of Persia may have bemoaned that he had no Homer to immortalise him, but equally his politics never would have permitted a Thucydides, a Polybius, or even a Tacitus, to set the record straight.

No attempt has been made to reincarnate Alexander’s original Will, principally because few historians have given credence to the idea that it ever existed, and yet Alexander’s intestacy is the mytheme in his mythology, for the testament was too tenacious a tradition to disappear completely. The Pamphlet resurrected it, Curtius claimed other historians had mentioned it, Diodorus clearly linked the testament to Rhodian guardianship, and the preservers of the Metz Epitome, along with the compiler of the Kronika Alexandrina, preferred it over Alexander’s alleged silence and his incendiary last words.¹⁹⁴ Nevertheless, Curtius branded the Will nothing more than an imposter, and on the whole the Roman-era historians wrapped their cloaks against the uneasy breeze it arrived upon, deeming it nothing more than romantic driftwood floating past. So it was boat-hooked aboard and into the safe haven of the Greek Alexander Romance in whose final chapter still lay a welcoming and empty bed. Truth and romance make unlikely bedfellows, and yet in Alexander’s story they never slept apart.

1.Herodian 1.1-3, translation by CR Whitaker, London, 1969-70 and quoted in Pitcher (2009) p 40.

3.Sir William Jones On the Gods of Hellas, Italy and India 3.320-322, 1784. Discussion of Jones’ work in Lincoln (2002) pp 1-18.

4.Wallis Budge (1896) p VI. Also see Stoneman (1991) pp 14-16 on early Alexandrian literature.

5.Stoneman (1991) pp 8-10 for Egyptian origins of the Romance. The Septuagint derived its name from the seventy-plus translators who, ancient tradition tells us, worked on the manuscripts; see Casson (2001) p 35. For discussions of the various origins of the Septuagint see Jobes-Silva (2001), for the Corpus Hermeticum see Copenhaver (1992), Sundberg (1958) pp 205-226 for the Alexandrian Canon.

6.A sentiment more recently restated by Momigliano (1966) p 116. Budge’s work was published as the Life and Exploits of Alexander the Great. Ethiopic Histories of Alexander by Pseudo-Callisthenes and other Writers.

7.Aristander’s prophecy is detailed at Arrian 3.1.2, Aelian 12.64 (though here after Alexander’s death). Other ‘seer’ prophecies regarding the city appear at Curtius 4.8.6, Plutarch 26.5-6 and Strabo 17.1.6.

8.Diodorus 18.14.1. Ptolemy apparently found 8,000 talents in the treasury amassed by Cleomenes’ tax collections. Cleomenes was eventually executed by Ptolemy, possibly for his Perdiccan sympathies. Heckel (2006) pp 88-89 for ‘over-zealous tax collection’.

9.Formerly Heraclion (also known as Thonis) was the dominant seaport positioned on the Nile Delta. Heracles, Paris and Helen are all associated with the city. The city was lost until recent excavations confirmed its legendary status. In ancient texts Heraclion was mentioned by Diodorus 1.9.4, Strabo 17.1.16 and Herodotus 2.113 amongst others.

12.Herodian 1.1.3 for a further example. Herodian’s History of the Empire from the time of Marcus claimed that the portraits of previous imperial biographers were romanced ‘because they wanted to give flattering praise to an emperor or a city of a private individual’ and yet he, like Thucydides reconstructed their speeches.

13.Sallust Of Gods and the World IV. Quintilian 4.44-45 termed Sallust ‘terse’.

15.Quoting Wood from Gill-Wiseman (1993) Prologue xiii and de Polignac (1999) p 3 quoting Goukowsky.

17.Müller combined recensions A and B to create a continuous text; see Fraser (1996) pp 205-227 for a useful summary of the Romance recensions. Heckel (1988) pp 2-3 for ‘peculiarities’ and a useful summary of Ausfeld’s work.

18.Quoting Stoneman (1991) p 28. Fraser (1996) pp 205-207 for discussion of the origins of the recension A manuscript, p 206 for ‘ill-written, lacunose, and interpolated’, and p 210 for ‘flimsy continuum’.

20.Strabo 11.11.1 reported the expansion of the Hellenistic kingdoms and expeditions that might have travelled as far as the Seres (China) and the Phryni. Pseudo-Lucian Makrobioi 5 for living to 300. 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.

21.Seneca Phaedra and Virgil Georgics both referred to silk as a ‘tree’. Pliny 11.76 corrected them.

22.Seneca Declamations volume 1 for the Senate’s edict. Pliny 12.84 for the trade imbalance figure.

23.The loss of geographical knowledge discussed in Fraser (1996) p 86 ff. Pliny named Isidore as ‘Dionysius’ of Charax.

24.The dactylic hexameter was the poetic meter of the majority of Latin verse of the medieval period, as well as of Homer, Virgil and the Silver Age of Latin; discussion in Townsend (1996) Introduction xxiii. Discussion of the manuscripts and print history of the Alexandreis in Townsend (1996) Introduction xi.

25.Discussed in Townsend (1996) p 15 quoting Henry of Ghent’s statement on the popularity of the Alexandreis.

26.Gautier de Chatillon Alexandreis book 3, verses 400-407 and quoting Townsend (1996) Introduction xviii and xxiii.

27.Details of the interpolation authors from discussion in Townsend (1996) p 18.

28.The tradition behind the Li romans d’Alixandre discussed in Highet (1949) pp 56-57.

29.The medieval imagery pervades the whole Alexandreis poem but good examples of the military adornments can be found in the Alexandreis at 4.600-620 and for the envoys 10.265-280.

30.See chapter titled Hierarchic Historians and Alexandrian Alchemy for Tarn’s criticism of the Roman authors that invented contemporary embassies at Babylon.

31.Full discussion in R Silverberg The Realm of Prester John, Ohio University Press, 1996.

36.As ‘gate’ examples Seneca Epistle 119.7 ‘mundi claustra perrumpit’, Lucretius De Rerum Natura 1.70 ff ‘effringere portarum claustra’.

37.As related by Otto of Freising in his Chronicon, edited by GH Pertz, MGH SSRG, Hanover: Hahn, 1867, VII, 33, pp 334-35; translated by James Brundage in The Crusades: A Documentary History, Marquette University Press, Milwaukee 1962.

38.Quoting Stoneman (2012) Introduction p ix, and full discussion through pp xii-xxix. He Phyllada tou Megalexantrou is closest to the Middle Greek Romance recension.

40.Cited in Fortenbaugh-Schütrumpf (2000) p 315 drawing from I During Aristotle in the Ancient Biographical Tradition, Studia Graeca et Latina Gothoburgensia, Goteborg, 1957, p 215 and pp 233-234.

41.Quoting Harris (1999) p 78 and Chroust (1970) p 630 for Aristotle’s Will in Arabic.

42.R Kipling Barrack Room Ballads, 1892. Herodotus’ accounts of the Persian invasions illustrated the constant mistrust and friction between East and West. In Greek legend Helle drowned in the strait when fleeing her stepmother, Ino, to Colchis with her brother Phryxus on a golden-fleeced ram; referred to by Pindar, Herodotus, Aeschylus, amongst others.

43.Beowulf survives in a single anonymous manuscript residing in the British Library, known as the Nowell Codex; following Highet (1949) p 81 for the definition of the Dark Ages.

44.The Perceforest link following Roussineau (2001) and the parallels with Arthurian tales discussed in Spencer (2002) pp 207-208.

47.Polybius 34.5-7 (and confirmed by Strabo 2.4.1-2) ridiculed Pytheas’ journey having himself sailed out of the Pillars of Hercules and questioning sailors on their opinion; Scipio had likely given Polybius a ship to explore beyond the Pillars of Hercules (straits of Gibraltar) after the fall of Carthage; McGing (2010) p 144. Timaeus nevertheless believed Pytheas’ account according to Pliny 37.36. His hostility appears unfounded; discussed further in chapter titled Lifting the Shroud of Parrhasius. Plutarch Solon 31.3-32.1 recorded that Solon was embarking on a work about Atlantis using information he heard from the men of Sais, but this may be Plato’s own imagination at work, ‘eager to adopt and adorn the fable’… ‘as if it were the soil of a fair estate unoccupied’. Diodorus 3.54-55, 56.1 and 60-61 for one example of the legend of the Atlantians.

49.In a passage of the Quadriga tyrannorum the Historia Augusta accuses Marius Maximus of being a producer of a ‘mythical history’ or mythistoricis. See Syme (1971) p 76 for discussion.

50.See Momigliano (1966) p 40 for discussion of Gibbon and the Historia Augusta.

51.Following Syme (1971) p 279. The connection is that the tales in the vernacular languages derived from Latin were usually about chivalric adventure, hence ‘romance’.

52.Following the dates in Momigliano (1966) p 145 and Momigliano (1977) p 121 for the Origo gentis Romanae.

53.See Pitcher (2009) p 29 for discussion on the spurious sources used by the Historia Augusta; also Syme (1971) and Baynes (1926). Momigliano (1966) p 147 for the 130 documents cited and their breakdown and groupings. Quoting Momigliano (1966) p 145 and pp 143-166 for the authenticity of the Historia Augusta. His full dissection of the Historia Augusta can be read in Momigliano (1954) pp 22-46.

54.Gibbon (1776 to 1789) Volume 1 p xvii. Gibbon’s work was the first to give the reader detailed subtext, the precursor to the modern use of footnotes; for his use of the Historia Augusta see introduction by Leckie (1906). For Gibbon and source analysis see Momigliano (1966).

55.Gibbon’s own testimony in Preface to Volume 4, in Womersley (1994) p 520. The implausibilities within the Historia Augusta are also discussed in Pitcher (2009) p 153. The quote is from Momigliano (1954) p 23.

56.Quoting from Mallory (1989) p 9. The work was published broadly between 1736 and 1765. It was a multi-authored compendium of contributions.

59.Whear’s methodology discussed in chapter titled Classicus Scriptor, Rhetoric and Rome.

60.Caspar (1993) pp 308-328 and for the sentencing of Kepler’s mother, pp 300-301.

63.Discussed in Thomas (1968) p 259. Euhemerus wrote his Sacred History and expounded his ‘rationalising method of interpretation’, known as Euhemerism, at the court of Cassander. He treated mythology as a reflection of real historical events, reshaped over time and according to the social mores of the day. See discussion in Brown (1946) pp 259-274 and chapter titled Mythoi, Muthodes and the Birth of Romance.

64.Most of what we know about Euhemerus’ work is preserved in references in Diodorus 5.41-46 and 6.1.

68.Milton Paradise Lost 11.399-401. See Kings 1.9:28, 1.10.11, 1.22.48, Chronicles 1.29: Chronicles 2. 8:18; 9:10 for expeditions to Ophir and the recurring mention of gold. CEV Crawford Treasure of Ophir, Skeffington and Son Ltd, 1929 for the link to Dhofar.

69.Herodotus 2.29.1-2; following Burstein (1976) p 142; Job 28.19 as example of biblical references.

71.Burstein (1976) pp 135-136 for Aristotle’s lost work on the Nile floods. Aristotle’s Meteorologika touched on Ethiopian rains and p 137 ff for the expedition. Strabo 15.1.17-19 for Aristoboulos’ text on Nile floods. Arrian 7.15.4 for Ethiopian ambassadors. Seneca Naturales Quaestiones 4a, De Nilo 2.11. Diodorus 1.37 covered previous opinions which he attacked as inventions.

72.Diodorus 1.37 and 3.36 for Ptolemy II Philadelphos journeying to the Upper Nile and into Ethiopia. Bagnall-Derow (2004) p 250 for a papyrus detailing the elephant hunters. The length of the Attic cubit is not established for certain.

73.Diodorus 3.36.1 for 100-cubit-long snakes, 3.36 for the length of the live python at Alexandria, 3.39.9 for the ability of the pythons to devour bulls, oxen and bring down elephants. For Ptolemy’s hunting expeditions 3.36-39. The Attic cubit at 18.25 inches was longer than the Macedonian cubit of 14 inches. Arrian 3.2.7 for the deportation of pro-Persian tyrants from the Aegean islands to Elephantine.

74.See full discussion of the comparison between Solomon and Ptolemy II Philadelphos in Bevan (1927) pp 76-78.

75.This appeared as an epitaph by Theodore Roosevelt in the American Museum Journal, volume 18, no. 5, 1918, pp 321-330, some months after Selous had been killed in January 1917.

76.The Greek Dark Age is deemed to have ended ca. 750 BCE when the first alphabetic inscriptions appeared.

77.See discussion of the Epic Cycle in Shelmerdine (1995) p 2. For the catalogue of ships that set sail for Troy see Homer Iliad 2.494-759. Thucydides 1.10.4 for his suspicions of Herodotus’ numbers and fidelity.

78.Discussion in Wood (1985) p 147 and fuller discussion of the Ahhiyawa in Bryce (1977) who links them to the Trojans but with Greek affiliations.

79.The Siege of Lachish wall relief in Sennacherib’s palace at Nineveh clearly shows different types of siege engines.

80.From the Planudean Appendix to the Greek Anthology 16.298; discussion in J Martinez (2011) p 15.

83.By the 6th century BCE the Homeric epics and Homeric Hymns were recited at the festival of Panathenaia in Athens; Shelmerdine (1995) p 8.

84.Full discussion on the authenticity of the lives of Homer in Allen (1912) pp 250-260.

86.Horace Ars Poetica lines 358-359. Mistakes can be reviewed in Homer’s Iliad at book 5 lines 576-579 and book 13 lines 643-665. Fitzgerald (1998) p xii for the multiple-author theory behind the Odyssey.

88.So-called due to the innumerable battles fought in the Peloponnese, thus the ‘dancing floor of Ares’, the god of war.

89.Herodotus 1.82 for the battle of champions and 1.82.8 for the last survivor. The factual basis of myths is discussed in Wood (2005). Jason’s journey it is suggested is a tale of Greek colonisation of the Black Sea coast. For the battles at Thyrea see discussion in Lenden (2005) p 11. The remains of the Sacred Band are said to lie beneath the Lion of Chaeronea; excavation revealed 254 skeletons laid out in seven rows; Pausanias 9.40.10 reported that there was no inscription on the lion monument which represented a common grave for the Thebans. Strabo 9.2.37 also reported a ‘public tomb’ was erected near the battlefield; Hanson (1991) p 43 for discussion.

90.Hammond (1989) p 217 and (1994) p 217 for discussion of the tumulus excavations at Chaeronea and weapons found in the tumulus. A ‘trophy’ to the dead was confirmed at Diodorus 16.86.6. Plutarch Life of Pelopidas 18.5 for Philip’s words. Lenden (2005) p 109 for Theban emulation of Spartan lovers standing side by side.

92.Herodotus 8.98 for the motto though here relating to the Persian messaging system.

93.A hemerodrome was literally a ‘day runner’, a messenger employed to bear news from one city to another. Pheidippides is mentioned in Herodotus 6.105-107 as the messenger sent to Sparta; in Lucian’s A Slip of the Tongue in Greeting 3 and Pliny 7.20.84 he is named Philippides. The poem of the same name by Robert Browning in 1879 suggested Pheidippides died upon delivering a victory speech at Athens. There is no historical basis for that. The tradition goes back through Lucian to Plutarch and before him to Heracleides of Pontus. Plutarch On the Fame of the Athenians 347c named him Thersippus or Eucles who expired on the spot in full armour. Euchidas is said to have died after running to Delphi; see Frost (1979) pp 159-163.

94.Quoting Plutarch Solon 32.1; he was actually referring to Plato’s (and Solon’s) Atlantis.

95.For a discussion of numbers see Flower (1998). Herodotus 7.202-203 mentioned 3,100 varied Peloponnesians and 1,100 from Thebes (400) and Thespiae (700), the largest contingent from a single Greek city. Herodotus 7.205.2 only mentions the 300 Spartans chosen by Leonidas but later quotes an epitaph at 7.228.1 suggesting 4,000 Peloponnesians fought in the battle, including 3,000 other Greeks, thus 1,000 Lacedaemonians were present but as 700 departed before the battle only 300 were ever mentioned; Diodorus 11.4.5 suggested 1,000 Lacedaemonians as did Isocrates Panegyrikos 90, Archidamas 99, so Herodotus may well have been at least 700 short on numbers (900 if his epitaph is accurate). Herodotus 7.224 for the battlefield inscription which may have provided names; Pausanias 3.14.1 claimed a pillar at Sparta listed the names. In addition 1,000 Phocians and the entire fighting force of the Opuntian Locrians were summoned; we do not know whether they arrived, though the five epitaphic stelae mentioned by Strabo included them. Diodorus 11.8.5-11.10.3 for the Spartan night attack that almost killed Xerxes; discussed in Flower (1998).

96.See Herodotus 7.56-137 for a summary of the Persian troops and Xerxes’ discussion with the exiled Spartan king, Demaratus. Plutarch Laconian Sayings 51.11 for molon labe. Herodotus 7.219.1-7.221 for Megistias and his son. Quoting Russell (1946) p 471 on Sparta.

97.The Suda stated that Tyrtaeus wrote a constitution for the Spartans (though probably not the Eunomia referred to in Aristotle Politics 5.6.1306b36) and encouraged them in war against the Messenians through his war songs. Jaeger (1939) pp 85-95 for discussion of Tyrtaeus and his influence. Plato The Law 629a for the hostile rumour that Tyrtaeus was a lame Athenian schoolmaster, likely Attic propaganda.

98.In contrast to the view we propose, Tarn (1939) p 128 was adamant that neither Alexander nor Aristotle were aware of the work of Herodotus.

99.For reference to Apple Bearers see Polyaenus 4.3.24. Scholars believe Alexander’s historians used this term for the crack regiment, due to the counter-weights on their spear butts. An explanation of ‘Apple Bearers’ also appeared in Athenaeus 12.514b-c drawing from Heracleides of Cyme’s Persika. Pausanias 10.19.9 ff gives one explanation of why they may have been known as ‘Immortals’ as casualty numbers were immediately replaced to keep the total number static.

101.Quote from Kimball (2000) p 4 for ‘first slashing review’. Gibbon branded Herodotus a liar in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire suggesting he never visited Babylon. For Gibbon’s quote see Grant (1995) p 61.

102.Grant (1995) p 57. Plutarch became a Priest of Apollo. Herodotus showed bias against the Boeotians, Corinthians and other Greek states.

104.Flower (1994) p 28 for the possible motives behind Theopompus’ epitome of Herodotus.

105.Quoting Jaeger (1939) p 383 for Herodotus blending the scientist with the rhapsode. Herodotus 7.152 and echoed again at 2.123 and 4.5; compare to Curtius 9.1.34; see discussion in Baynham (1998) p 86.

107.Plutarch 6-7. Chares, as recorded by Aulus Gellius 5.2.1, did record the sum paid for the horse (13 talents) and the derivation of the name (ox-head), due to the shape of its head, but nothing of its taming. Arrian 5.19.5 attributed the name to a brand mark or white mark on its head; the Romance 1.15 suggested its haunch. See full fragment in Robinson (1953) p 85. The Romance 3.33 made the comparisons of Alexander and Bucephalus to Bellerophon and Pegasus. See discussion of the taming of Bucephalus in Baynham Romance (1995). Plutarch 5.1-4 for Alexander’s quizzing of Persian envoys. Quoting Green (1974) p 43.

108.Quoting Powell (1939) p 230; Samuel (1986) pp 433-435 for discussion of the letters in Plutarch’s biography of Alexander.

109.Alexander spoke to Bucephalus at the point of his death and recognised that the horse had shared his fate, except in death, Romance 3.33. Whitmarsh (2002) p 180 draws the comparison to Plato’s Phaedra.

110.Quoting Plutarch 42.1, translation by I Scott-Kilvert, Penguin Classics edition, 1973. Plutarch cited many letters unique to accounts of Alexander. He may have been quoting from other historians rather than the letters themselves but an intimacy with them is suggested that points to the latter. In Plutarch Life of Alexander the historian referred to personal letters of Alexander he had read or knew the contents of at 7.6, 8.1, 17.8, 19.5-8, 20.9, 22.2, 22.5, 27.8, 39.4, 39.7, 39.13, 42.1, 46.3, 47.3, 55.6, 55.7, 60.1, 60.11, 68.4. No other historian seems to have had access to them, and how genuine they were remains open to speculation. Arrian 7.12.5, Justin 12.14.3 mentioned slanders from Olympias in letter form.

111.The Hamburg and Florence papyri discussed in Pearson (1960) p 258 and Pearson (1955) p 448 for the Oxyrhynchus papyri. Quoting Powell (1939) p 230 for the earliest sign of the epistolary corpus. Cicero De Officiis 2.14.48 for the epistolary corpus; Marasco (2011) p 45 for other references.

112.Cicero De Officiis, Book 2, Expediency. Arrian 6.1.4 and 7.12.4-7 for examples of a letter from Alexander to Olympias and Antipater that Arrian believed to be genuine.

113.‘Impostures’ is a term suggested by Rosenmayer in Ancient Epistolary Fictions, Cambridge University Press, 2001, and discussed in Ehrman (2014) p 44.

114.The epistolary collections are discussed in Gudeman Greeks (1894) pp 64-65.

115.Following the comments of Arthur-Montagne (2014) p 1 on the breadth of epistolary forms in the Romance; and p 3 for the reference to Pseudo-documentarism, a term emanating with William Hansen. For discussion of Mereklbach’s 1954 work p 20. For full discussion of the epistolary corpus in the Romance see Arthur-Montagne (2014) pp 1-31.

116.Riedweg (2002) p 27. Also Teresi (2002) and Dalley (2013) p 58 for attributions to Pythagoras and the sources of his knowledge.

119.Plutarch Symposiacs Book VIII and Cicero On the Nature of the Gods 3.88 for the Pythagorean notes.

120.Petrarch found a corpus of unknown correspondence by Cicero in Verona in 1345; Highet (1949) p 83. Nepos Atticus 16.3 for the widespread publication of Cicero’s work.

121.Gudeman Romans (1894) p 148 for a discussion on the Ciceronian forgeries, the Epistola Ciceronis ad Octavianum, for example.

122.Plutarch Caesar 2.3. Plutarch confirmed both men were pupils of the rhetorician. Highet (1949) p 84 for discussion of Petrarch’s letter to Cicero. Momigliano (1977) p 80 for Petrarch’s letter to Livy.

123.Discussed in Dalley-Oleson (2003). See Dalley (1994) pp 52-53 for references to the Alammitu palm that was used to depict a spiral screw device. Diodorus was ambiguous in his connecting the Egyptian screw with Archimedes; see Dalley (2013) pp 56-57 quoting Diodorus 1.34.2. Neither Strabo, Vitruvius nor Philo of Byzantium linked Archimedes to the screw device.

124.Aristotle Meteorology 1.14.25, Strabo 17.1.25, Pliny 6.33.165 for origins with Sesotris. Herodotus 2.158, Aristotle Meteorology 1.14 P 352b, Strabo 17.1.25, Pliny 6.33.166 ff for Darius I. Diodorus 1.33, Herodotus 2.158-159 for Necho II. The same authors (except Pliny) claim it was only completed by Ptolemy II Philadelphos.

125.Arrian 5.6.5 and Homer Odyssey 4.477 and 4.581 for the original name of the Nile and origins of Egypt.

127.For details of Ptolemaic irrigation in the region see DJ Thompson, Irrigation and Drainage in the Early Ptolemaic Fayum, in A Bowman and E Rogan (editors), Agriculture in Egypt from Pharaonic to Modern Times, Oxford University Press, (1999), pp 107-122.

129.Plutarch Coriolanus 1.1. Most vividly described in Livy 2.33-35, Dionysius of Halicarnassus Roman Antiquities book 7, and Plutarch Coriolanus.

130.Livy 5.1.3 recorded that the Etruscan city of Veii fell to the Romans when the Etruscans abandoned her due to her continued kingships. Whether factual of a reflection of Roman opinion of monarchy is debatable. See Barker-Rasmussen (2000) for full discussion.

131.Virgil’s Aeneid developed the story in Naevius’ Bellum Punicum in which Aeneas journeyed from Troy to found Rome. Ennius’ Annales followed (Fabius Pictor used the theme). Aeneas was supposedly the maternal grandfather of Romulus. Boardman (1964) p 207 for the tomb paintings. Herodotus 1.94 for Etruscan origins.

132.Herm (1975) p 191 for discussion of the Etruscan link. Recent gene tests suggest racial similarities between likely Etruscan descendants and Western Anatolian stock. This was originally thought a link to Lydia but linguistic evidence argues against it and against the claim at Herodotus 1.94 that Etruscans were migrated Lydians. Boardman (1964) p 199 for Greek opinion of Etruscan origins.

133.Quoting M Pallottino in his review of DH Lawrence’s 1986 reprint of the 1927 Etruscan Places, Olive Press, London, pp 13-14.

134.Suetonius Caligula 52, Cassius Dio 59.17.3; there is however no evidence Caligula visited Egypt as an adult.

135.Strabo 13.1.27: ‘This is not the site of ancient Ilium, if one considers the matter in accordance with Homer’s account’; translated by HC Hamilton and W Falconer, published by Henry G Bohn, London, 1854.

136.Quoting D Feeney from Raeburn-Feeney (2004) Introduction xxix for ‘compendium of myth’. Diogenes Laertius Pythagoras 4. It was Heracleides of Pontus who made the claim of reincarnation. Ovid Metamorphoses book 15 lines 160-175 for references to Pythagoras’ reincarnation and recollections of the Trojan War.

137.Arrian 1.11.8, 6.9.3, 6.10.2 for Alexander taking the shield from the Trojan War from the temple of Trojan Athena. Homer 16.786-16.85. Hoplon is the route of Hoplite, and was the shield carried by Greek infantry. Otherwise called an aspis, a more generic term for a shield. The fall of Troy dated back past 1,100 BCE.

140.Nero’s career discussed in detail in chapter titled Comets, Colophons and Curtius Rufus.

141.Dio Crysostom Discourses 21: On Beauty, translation from the Loeb Classical Library edition, 1939.

144.See Champlin (2003) 12-16 for relevant extracts from the Sibylline Oracles. St Augustine City of God 20.19.

145.Suetonius Nero 51, translation from the Loeb Classical Library edition, 1914.

146.Suetonius Nero 35 and the fragmentary Lucan in his partly extant Illustrious Writers, and from Statius’ Silvae 2.7. Nero claimed they were both implicated in the conspiracy plot of Piso. Tacitus 15.60-64 for Seneca cutting his veins.

147.For the various accusations of matricide and reporting of Agrippina’s death see see Tacitus 14.1-8, Suetonius Nero 34 and Cassius Dio 63.11-14. Seneca allegedly amassed a fortune according to Tacitus 13.42.4 and Cassius Dio 61.10.3 and 61.14.3 has 400,000,000; discussed in Finlay (1973) p 56. As a broad guide, one million sestertii at current gold prices (it was linked in value to the gold aureus) translates to over three million US dollars.

148.The Pharsalia was actually labelled De Bello Civile, On the Civil War in the manuscripts.

149.Tacitus 15.49 claimed Nero became jealous and banned Lucan’s poems; according to Suetonius’ Lucan, Nero lost interest in his poet friend who responded by insulting the emperor. Both Vacca’s Life of Lucan and Statius’ Silvae 2.7 refer to the contents of Lucan’s De Incendiis Urbis. Lucan’s treatment of Alexander discussed in chapter titled Classicus Scriptor, Rhetoric and Rome and his death in chapter titled Comets, Colophons and Curtius Rufus.

150.Plutarch 55-56 for the various reports of Callisthenes’ death. The caging seems extreme but Curtius 7.1.5 did report that Alexander Lyncestis was caged for three years after his sentencing for treason; possibly also Vulgate fabrication. Justin 15.3 and Arrian 4.14.1-4 for other reports of chaining and torture. Athenaeus 434d, Plutarch Moralia 454e (On Control of Anger) for Callisthenes’ refusal to drink; its authenticity is questionable; see discussion in Brunt (1974) p 67. The Loeb Classical Library edition, 1939, footnote on another interpretation reads: ‘A jibe at Alexander’s assumed divinity’, Alexander taking the place of Dionysus, the wine god, until the physician god, Asclepius, would have to be called in; on the authenticity of the story see Macurdy, Jour. Hell. Stud. (1930), pp 294‑297.

151.Preserved by Plutarch 14.1-6 and Moralia 331f or Fortune 10 and Diogenes Laertius 6.38 Diogenes, Cicero Tusculan Disputations 5.32.

152.See Brown (1949) pp 27-28 for the background to the dialogue between Alexander and Diogenes.

153.Diogenes Laertius Diogenes 40 and 60 for examples of publicly being called a ‘dog’.

154.It remains unclear exactly what he was charged with. Diogenes Laertius Diogenes 74 for his life in slavery. Diogenes 6.20 suggested his father was a banker or moneychanger (trapezites) and he became involved in a scandal concerning the defacing of currency; possibly a political statement. A number of defaced currencies from Sinope and dating to the middle of the 4^th century BCE had been discovered; discussion in Seltman 1938. Finlay (1973) pp 166-167 for the treatment of those charged with debasing currency.

155.Diogenes Laertius Diogenes 63 for kosmopolites. Various traditions given by Diogenes Laertius Diogenes 1.1 involved Diogenes with tampering with the currency of Sinope, which caused both him and his father to flee. Alternative versions blame his father and others still have Diogenes claiming he was persuaded to the act by artisans, when he was one of the curators. He apparently consulted Apollo at Delphi or Delos on whether he should undertake the scam.

156.Diogenes Laertius Diogenes 6 and 79 and Plutarch Moralia 717c for Diogenes’ death.

157.Lucian Menippus 15 contained a scene depicting the piles of bones found in the underworld, where heroes and villains lay indistinguishable. Menippus appears to have provided much detail on Diogenes’ life to later doxographers.

158.Diogenes Laertius Diogenes 6.54; Aelian 14.33 for the comparison to a ‘mad’ Socrates.

159.Plutarch 46.1-3 for Thalestris’ meeting with Alexander; also Curtius 6.5.24-32, Justin 12.4.5-7, Diodorus 17.77.1-3. Justin provided an alternative name, Minithyha.

161.The Women Warriors – the Sarmatians, The Circle of Ancient Iranian Studies and Archaeological and Cultural News: ‘Amazon graves found in what is today known as Kazakhstan’, 2001. More detail from the archeologist, Jeannine Kimball-Davis can be found at CSEN.org. Also Bosworth A in the East (1996) p 81 for the female warriors amongst Sacan nomads. Arrian 4.15.2-5 suggested this was close to Colchis on the Black Sea, where Curtius 6.5.24-26 for example suggested Hyrcania in the plains of the River Thermodon. Fully detailed in Mayor (2014) pp 34-52. It is also worth noting that over 112 weaponry-filled graves of Scythian women aged sixteen to thirty, previously identified as men, have been discovered at tombs between the Danube and River Don; see Antikas-Wynn Antikas (2014) p 7. Tarbell (1920) for the Amazonomachy in Greece. Hanson (1991) p 25 for Amazon light battle-axes.

162.Arrian 7.13.2-6 for the Amazon affair. Arrian 4.15.2-5 for the earlier encounter with the Scythians and offers of marriage with the daughter of the Scythian king or the regional chiefs. Following the observation in Heckel (2006) p 61 concerning Atropates. Arrian 7.13.1-4; 4.1-3,7.15.4 for further embassies from Scythians.

163.See chapter titled The Reborn Wrath of Peleus’ Son for Alexander’s emulation of Achilles. Quintus of Smyrna Posthomerika 18 ff for Penthesilea’s arrival at Troy and Diodorus 2.46 for her legend; Pseudo-Apollodorus Epitome of the Bibliotheke 5.1 for her death at Achilles’ hand. Pausanias 10.31.1 and 5.11.2 for the art that suggested Achilles repented the death of a woman he had fallen for.

164.Borza-Palagia (2007) p 114 for the decoration on the shield found in Tomb II.

165.Plutarch 46.4-5 for the episode involving Onesicritus and Lysimachus; more in chapter titled Hierarchic Historians and Alexandrian Alchemy. For Alexander’s thirteen-day tryst with Thalestris, Justin 12.3.7, Curtius 6.5.32, Diodorus 17.77.3.

166.Aelian 16.39 for dragons; Strabo 15.1.43 for 300 and 500-year-old elephants; Strabo 15.1.28 for 180 cubit long snakes.

167.Curtius 8.10.32-36 for the whole Cleophis affair and siege of Massaga; Metz Epitome 45 for Cleophis’ beauty, and Justin 12.7.9-11 for the further scandal. See Heckel (2006) pp 90-91 and the Curtius, Penguin Classics edition, 1984, p 294 footnote 68 for discussion of its authenticity. Romance 3.18-24 for the Candace episode. For the massacre of the mercenaries at Massaga see Diodorus 17.84.1-6 for the most damning version though it was captured by Plutarch 59.6-7; Arrian 4.28.7-4.30.4 claimed Alexander killed them as they planned to desert. Quoting Plutarch 59.6.

170.Suetonius Julius Caesar 7. De Polignac (1999) p 1 for the Arab tradition and the Straits of Gibraltar.

171.Quoting Macaulay (1828) Plutarch Caesar 15.5, Appian Celtica 1.2 for the one million slaves.

172.See Pitcher (2009) p 81 for discussion, taking Asinius Pollio’s criticism cited in Suetonius Julius Caesar 56.4; and quoting Wilkes (1972) p 186.

173.Suetonius Julius Caesar 56.2-3; Suetonius was quoting from Cicero’s Brutus 262.

179.The influences are well discussed in Stoneman (1994), Introduction. For Ctesias’ tales from India see discussion in Pitcher (2009) p 155. Pearson (1955) p 446 for the letters suggesting Callisthenes had no accomplices in the conspiracy of the pages. Plutarch 55.6 for the letters to Craterus, Attalus and Alcetas in which the pages named no accomplices; thus suggesting Callisthenes’ innocence.

180.Quoting K Dowden Pseudo Callisthenes. The Alexander Romance (2008) cited in and following the argument of Arthur-Montagne (2014) p 11.

183.In Ayesha, The Return of She Haggard developed the characters Khan Rassen and his wife, the Khania Atene, who claimed to be descendants of the generals of Alexander the Great.

184.The so-called ‘golden age of automata’ refers to the period broadly spanning 1860 to 1910 which itself followed the earlier 19^th century automata exported in great quantities to China.

185.See Stoneman (1991) pp 14-17 for discussion. Recensions ‘e’ and ‘g’ of the Romance include this detail. For Alexander’s visit to Jerusalem see Josephus 11.329-335 and 12.3-10 for Ptolemy’s captives. The Jewish Quarter of Alexandria discussed in Vrettos (2001) pp 6-7.

186.Discussion of the numbers in Philo of Alexandria, Philo’s Flaccus, The first Pogrom, PW van der Horst, Brill, 2003, p 136.

191.See discussion on the works of Parsons and Jones in Mallory (1989) pp 13-14. Parsons’ credibility was also undermined by his claim that the languages of the North American Indians were Japhetic too, in other words related to Japheth, one of the sons of Noah. Parsons additionally concluded the route language was Irish Magogian.

194.The Metz Epitome is essentially Vulgate in style and hence probably Cleitarchus-derived though the source of the unique information it provides is problematic. See Heckel-Yardley (1997) XXII-XXIII for discussion.