Mulceber
06-27-2010, 20:07
As per popular demand, I'm posting the third of my essays on the Hellenistic World. This probably won't be of much use to the EB team, but who knows. In any case, enjoy.
In the year 323 BCE, Alexander III of Macedonia died at the young age of thirty-three years. In his short life he expanded Macedonia from a tiny kingdom with hegemony over most of Greece to the largest empire the world had yet seen. He conquered more land than many of his contemporaries had even known existed. He left no heir. Indeed, Diodoros tells us that on his deathbed, when he was asked to whom he wanted to give the Macedonian throne, he responded simply “τᾠ κράτιστᾠ,” “to the strongest” (Diodoros XVII.117.4). Other biographers, such as Plutarch, tell us that Alexander was incapable of speaking by this point, so the story from Diodoros may well be apocryphal. Regardless of whether or not these words were uttered by Alexander, however, they are an ominous commentary on what was to come. Over the ensuing decades, Alexander's empire was wracked with conflict, as his generals and family members fought for control over his domain. These years would see the death of his mother, his wife and his young son, as well as the man whom many believe Alexander desired to replace him, Perdikkas. Within three decades, the Empire was split between Antigonos in Greece, Alexander's close friend, Ptolemy, in Egypt, and a more obscure cavalry officer named Seleukos in Asia.
Even as the dynasty of Alexander ended and his kingdom was carved up into separate empires, Alexander himself retained a remarkable level of influence over his domain. The significant moments of his life quickly became legendary, helped in no small degree by his successors, who benefited from the glory of their dead king. In this paper, I intend to argue that Alexander was a significant ideological tool by which not only the successor kings, but also many leaders who came later, sought to gain influence and prestige in the Hellenistic era.
When Alexander died, his empire was stunned. The leading men continued to carry out their functions, putting down revolts, appointing officials, minting coins with Alexander's head on them (Erskine 168). Babylon continued to be treated as the administrative center of the empire, simply because Alexander was there (Erskine 169-170). Affairs carried on as if nobody knew the King was dead. When Alexander's friend and lover, Hephaestion, had died, there had been a prompt and lavish funeral. It was a week before Alexander's body was even embalmed. His generals would spend another two years having an opulent hearse constructed to carry Alexander to his intended final resting place (Erskine 168), most likely in Macedonia (Erskine 170).
The hearse never made it to Macedonia, however. It was intercepted in Syria by Ptolemy, who absconded with the body and laid it to rest in Memphis. Perdikkas, the regent for Alexander's as-yet unborn son, Alexander IV, invaded with an army to try to recapture the body. A battle was fought over a corpse. This action demands further examination of the significance ascribed to Alexander's body. To Perdikkas, and to the soldiers who served under him, the body of Alexander was central to the empire. He was their king, in life or in death, and whoever controlled Alexander controlled the empire. Alexander's body was part and parcel of the rule over his lands and the guardianship of his son. Thus, when Ptolemy defeated Perdikkas in battle, the latter was murdered by his own men, who then offered the regency and guardianship of Alexander's son to Ptolemy. He had Alexander, therefore he had rights to the rest (Erskine 171).
Yet Ptolemy declined their offer. He, before anyone else, recognized that the future of Alexander's empire lay in separate kingdoms. The dead king had been immensely talented at the art of conquest, but had shown little talent for consolidating his holdings. Ptolemy probably, at this point, already suspected the truth; that the prospect of a unified Macedonian Empire had died with Alexander. What then was the purpose of stealing Alexander's body, if he had no designs on succession? As we have already seen, Alexander was central to his Empire. In life his men had followed him all the way to India. Babylon had continued to be the de facto capital purely because his body was there. Many, if not most of his fellow Macedonians viewed control of Alexander's body as being tantamount to control of the entire kingdom. The location of his tomb would undoubtedly be a site of great reverence for Greeks in general and Macedonians in particular. The man whose kingdom held Alexander's tomb would be associated with the great conqueror. He would thus attract the loyalties both of the natives who had stood in awe of Alexander, and the Greeks who had loved Alexander. The dead king had the potential to be a stabilizing influence and a means of recruiting troops (Erskine 172). To Ptolemy, Alexander's body was not a crown, but a laurel wreath.
To that end, Ptolemy's monarchy in Egypt seems to have been built around Alexander. Shortly after the burial of Alexander at Memphis, he relocated the king's body to the new capital of Egypt, Alexandria. The choice to move the King's body to a city which he had founded and which was named after him is significant (Cartledge 149-150). Soon thereafter, Ptolemy began minting coins featuring Alexander, although these were done in a new style. The first run of coins were minted somewhere between 321 and 319 BCE, right around the time when Ptolemy stole the body. They feature Alexander wearing an elephant scalp, signifying his conquest of India (Mørkholm 63). Later issues would feature him wearing the ram's horns of the Egyptian god, Amun-Re, whom the Greeks associated with Zeus. This represented both Alexander's conquest of Egypt and his trip to Siwa where he was proclaimed the son of Amun-Re by the god's own priests. Such propaganda was a master-stroke for Ptolemy. Coinage in this era was used first and foremost to pay soldiers, and so by putting these stylized portraits of the dead conqueror on money, Ptolemy was associating his regime with Alexander in the minds of his soldiers (Erskine 173). Over time, the Ptolemaic Alexander coinage grew more and more different from the old coins, and so it seems likely that Ptolemy was using coinage to attempt, step-by-step, to separate his domain into his own kingdom (Mørkholm 66).
Such coins were accompanied by a biography of Alexander which featured Ptolemy prominently (Erskine 173). Later on in Ptolemy's reign, myths formed stating that Ptolemy's mother, Arsinoe, had been a lover of King Philip II, Alexander's father, and that when she was impregnated with Ptolemy by him, he married her off to Lagos. Thus according to the legend, which was encouraged by the Ptolemaic regime, Ptolemy was the half-brother of Alexander. The legend goes even further, however. It states that when Ptolemy was born, he was exposed, but was rescued and raised by an eagle (Bulloch 44). This is markedly similar to the snakes which Plutarch reports were found near Olympias around the time of Alexander's conception (Vita Alexandri II) and suggests an attempt to even further connect Ptolemy with the dead king through the association of natural or even divine forces with his birth. The message was clear. As a half-brother of Alexander who was similarly-divine, Ptolemy had a god-given right to be King of Egypt (Bulloch 45).
Beyond coins and reinterpretations of history, Ptolemy also founded a cult of Alexander with a priesthood. Time in Ptolemaic Egypt was measured not only by regnal years, but by who the current priest of Alexander was. Thus the Ptolemies sought to keep Alexander firmly in the minds of their subjects. Ptolemy I did not, however, associate himself too directly with the cult of Alexander. He had his own cults on Rhodes and in the Egyptian city of Ptolemais. The step of directly associating the cult of Alexander with the monarchy would be taken by Ptolemy II Philadelphos and his wife Arsinoe II, who made a cult for themselves and associated it with that of Alexander, thus creating the priesthood of Alexander and the divine monarchs (Bulloch 50-51). This trend would be repeated by Ptolemy III Euergetes, who associated himself and his wife, Berenike II, with the cult of Alexander as well (Bulloch 52-53).
The cult can also be seen in the pomp of celebration. After the death of Ptolemy I, his son, Philadelphos, staged a massive festival in honor of his divine father. An immense amount of money was spent, as virtually all of the Ptolemaic army and many other Hellenistic monarchs were invited to see and partake in the parades, games and festivities. There were tremendous, proto-animatronic statues, and the route of the parade went through all the main points of Alexander's city, highlighting the fact that these games were in honor of the successors of Alexander (Thompson 372). There were statues of Corinth, which was likely meant to be a divine personification of Greece, as well as Ptolemy I, Nike and Alexander. Diadems were to be seen everywhere. There were state-of-the-art water pumps being used to spray wine.
Images of Dionysus, Alexander's supposed ancestor, were especially prevalent at this festival. Dionysus would have been presented as a Macedonian, Greek and especially an Eastern deity. Highlighting his Eastern side would remind people of his mythical expedition to India, which was to prefigure that of Alexander. Since Ptolemy was rumored to be an illegitimate son of Philip II, however, this made Dionysus an ancestor of his as well. Thus the prominence of Dionysus in this festival served to underline both Ptolemy's and Alexander's relationship to the divine, and their relationship to each other. Taken as a whole, the procession is a celebration of kingship, of which Alexander is the keystone (Thompson 377-378).
The image we take away from this examination is one of a monarchy built around Alexander. As the author of nigh-inhuman accomplishments, he was understandably the object of great admiration, worship even, by his contemporaries as well as successive generations of men. The Ptolemies skillfully capitalized on the aura around him and went to every length possible to present their regime as the natural heirs of Alexander's conquests. It would seem that they were successful, for in 30 BCE, when Octavian visited the tomb of Alexander after defeating Antony and Cleopatra, it seemed natural for his guides to ask if he wanted to visit the remains of the Ptolemies as well (Erskine 164).
Other Hellenistic kingdoms did not base their ideology around Alexander as boldly as the Ptolemies, however. Unlike the Ptolemies, they did not have the body of Alexander. Thus they were not so easily able to tie the dead King into their lineage as the Ptolemies had. It was certainly possible for them to identify their regimes with Alexander, however. Most, if not all, of the successor states worshiped him as a god, just like the Ptolemies. Engravings on funerary monuments from Macedonia mention him in the same breath as Heracles, and there was a priest of his cult in Ephesus as late as the second century (Erskine 435). Yet to engage in bold propaganda campaigns, seeking to portray him as the founder of their dynasty, would only draw attention to the fact that their alleged founder's final resting place lay in Egypt, on the palatial grounds of the Ptolemies. As a result, the opportunities to capitalize on the aura of Alexander were not quite as lucrative for the other successors, although they nevertheless made extensive, albeit more subtle, use of him as well.
The most all-encompassing example of the Alexander ideology elsewhere lies in the Hellenistic model of kingship. For the Ptolemies, the Seleukids and the Antigonids, the king was a Macedonian born of great ancestry, ideally divine. The Seleukids, for example, cited an anchor-shaped birthmark as evidence of their descent from Apollo, just as Alexander had claimed relation to Zeus-Amun, Heracles and Dionysus. Hellenistic kings, with the possible exception of the Antigonids, had to be able to bridge the cultural gap with the natives, and to that end went to some lengths to associate themselves with native culture, just as Alexander had done by acquiring a Persian bride and borrowing several elements of Persian dress. At the same time, however, they sought to portray themselves as the guardians of Greek culture. Alexander had arguably done so by spreading Greek culture all the way to India. Philip V of Macedonia portrayed his alliance with the Achaean League against the Aetolian League as a defense of Greek culture as well (Ma 5/2/2010). As a means of spreading Hellenism, the king was a founder of cities as well, just as Alexander had been. This similarity is driven home by the tendency of the kings to name the cities after themselves; cities with such names as Seleukeia, Antiochea and Ptolemais occur frequently, though not as much so as the ubiquitous cities of Alexandria (Ma 12/2/2010).
The court of the Hellenistic king also shows the strong influences of Alexander. The court tended to be populated with friends of the king, courtiers who often seem to have performed administrative functions as well as simply offering advice to the king. It was a very flexible system, although it did have a hierarchy; friends of the king were on the lower levels, whereas higher up on the social ladder were the first friend and the commander of the bodyguards. Many of them had known him since childhood. One of Antiochos III's closest friends was a certain Nikanor, with whom he had grown up. Seleukos IV had a certain Olympiodoros as a foster brother (Ma 12/2/2010). One is reminded strongly of the relationship of Alexander to both Hephaestion and Ptolemy. Within the court, the king was a great benefactor, of gifts as well as freedom to those with whom he came into contact (Ma 12/2/2010). Seleukos I returned lost religious works to Babylon and repaired temples throughout Mesopotamia (Bullock 120). Alexander had been a generous man as well. In India Plutarch has him capturing ten of the local wise men known as gymnosophists who had agitated the people against him. Alexander posed difficult questions to them, and when they answered wisely and cleverly, he gave them not only their freedom but gifts as well (Vita Alexandri LXV). Earlier in the biography, when Alexander had seen a Macedonian porter who was struggling to drive a mule that was laden with royal gold, he had promptly informed the driver that the gold he was transporting was to be his own (XXXIX.3). One or both of these stories may be apocryphal, but regardless, they provide us with a valuable insight into the model of monarchy to which the Hellenistic kings saw themselves as heirs.
Royal images provided a valuable link to the great conqueror as well. Alexander's imagery had been distinctive. With his youth, his clean-shaven face and his mane of shoulder-length hair, the king's images had been at variance with those of previous leaders, such as his father, whose image was more mature and featured a beard. Royal images of the Hellenistic Era tended to be based on a combination of Alexander's image and the images of young gods and heroes. Youth in particular was important, and it was considered essential that the Hellenistic king be portrayed as smooth and youthful like Dionysus. The image should be reminiscent of Alexander, but recognizably different, as they typically did not favor shoulder-length hair. The king was portrayed as either young or ageless, typically between 20 and 35, ages which line up almost perfectly to the the years of Alexander's ascension and death, respectively. Some of the older kings might occasionally choose to have images made that were mature, but wrinkles never showed, and the king was never portrayed as anything less than divine (Bulloch 208-209). There was one king in particular who made especially good use of references to Alexander on coins, a fact that is particularly interesting when one considers that his kingdom was not one of the successor states of Alexander's empire.
Mithridates VI Eupator of Pontos is one of the more fascinating figures to grace the Late Hellenistic Era. A charismatic and yet ruthless ruler, he was a perennial enemy of Rome, and his wars with Sulla, Lucullus and Pompeius were marked by his ability to come back with a fresh army after horrendous defeats. He also made use of Alexander ideology more than any Hellenistic ruler apart from perhaps some of the Ptolemies. His coins were noteworthy for his youthful appearance, his clean-shaven face and his flamboyant, shoulder-length hair, making no effort to conceal his self-identification with the legendary king of kings. Statues of Mithridates, meanwhile, often seem to have their head tilted slightly to the left, a posture Alexander had been noted for in his lifetime (Mayor 65). His manner of dress was similarly reminiscent. After his conquest of the Persian Empire, Alexander had angered his troops by taking up elements of Persian clothing. While he had rejected the eastern fashion of wearing pants as outlandish, he had taken up the practice of wearing a pure white tunic with a Persian sash that held his dagger. Mithridates did not reject wearing pants, but also wore a pure white tunic and sash for his dagger (Mayor 67).
Beyond his imagery, the great king-of-kings was personally important to Mithridates as well. Early in his life when he was in the process of regaining his kingdom from his mother, the Poison King is known to have visited many of the places significant to Alexander in Asia Minor. For example, he enlarged the sanctuary of Ephesus like Alexander did by shooting an arrow. Once king, he would follow Alexander's example by keeping a menagerie of exotic animals such as lions, bears, ostriches and mongooses (Mayor 253). To the King of Pontos, Alexander must have had tremendous appeal, especially because he was supposed to have been an ancestor of Mithridates. Alexander's role as a bringer of civilization would have seemed especially attractive to a young Mithridates; in all probability, he was already opposed ideologically to what he perceived to be the uncultured barbarity of the Romans (Mayor 65). He sought a Greco-Persian Empire not all that different from the goal of his hero, who had embraced both Persian and Greek culture and had compelled many of his leading generals to take Persian wives (Mayor 66). Mithridates saw himself as the great king, the preserver of Greek culture who would liberate the east from the predations of the rapacious Romans. It was an ideology that was unmistakably influenced by the great conqueror. Indeed, after his death, Cicero would call him the greatest king since Alexander, a remark which Mithridates would have considered the highest compliment.
As the remark by Cicero shows, however, even the Romans were not immune to Alexander-worship. Pompeius' chosen cognomen of “Magnus” is a thinly veiled imitation of the great conqueror, and Lucan tells us in his Pharsalia that when Caesar arrived in Alexandria in pursuit of Pompeius, he cared for none of the wonders of the city but proceeded directly to see the remains of Alexander. Lucan portrays it as one power-crazed megalomaniac meeting another (Pharsalia 10.14-52).
Through his conquests and the strength of his personality, Alexander had provided the archetypical model of kingship for the Hellenistic World. The Ptolemies associated themselves directly with him as a means of legitimizing their regime, while other Kings modeled themselves on him, with varying degrees of subtlety, for their own purposes. Some sought comparisons to him as a means of aggrandizing themselves, while others used him to promote a particular ideology, but regardless, Alexander was a significant tool by which the monarchs of the Hellenistic Era could accomplish their goals. As the period came to a close, the cycle was to repeat itself. On 15 March, 44 BCE, Julius Caesar was stabbed to death before a meeting of the Senate. Within a year he was considered a god. His successors would shamelessly identify themselves with him, even going so far as to take up his cognomen. They would model the roles they took and their power after him. At least one of them would portray himself in images as a young man well into his seventies. In this way the ideology of Alexander was carried well into the Roman period and would survive for hundreds of years.
Annotated Bibliography
1.A. W. Bulloch et al. (eds.), Images and ideologies: self-definition in the Hellenistic world (Berkeley 1993).
2.Paul Cartledge, Alexander the Great: the hunt for a new past (London 2004).
3.Andrew Erskine, 'Life after death: Alexandria and the body of Alexander', Greece and Rome 49 (2002), 163-179.
4.Andrew Erskine, A companion to the Hellenistic world (Oxford 2003).
5.Adrienne Mayor, The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithridates, Rome's Deadliest Enemy (Princeton 2009)
6.O. Mørkholm, Early Hellenistic coinage from the accession of Alexander to the peace of Apamea (336 BC-188 BC) (Cambridge 1991).
7.D. J. Thompson, Philadelphus' procession: dynastic power in a Mediterranean context', in Leon Mooren (ed.), Politics, administration and society in the Hellenistic and Roman world. Studia Hellenistica 36 (2000), 365-388.
Additionally, I have made use of notes taken while listening to Dr. John Ma of Corpus Christi College, Oxford in his lecture series “Themes in Hellenistic History.”
This paper was also received very well, although my teacher did have some notes to make on it:
1. Part of the reason why the non-Ptolemaic Hellenistic Kings might not have sought to identify their regime as strongly with Alexander is that in many eastern cultures, especially Greece, the person who buries a man is considered his son/heir/successor. Thus, by burying Alexander, Ptolemy was establishing himself as the heir to Alexander in Egypt, while the other successors couldn't make similar claims for their dominions over their respective lands.
2. I was slightly mistaken in my second to last paragraph: the article I read references Lucan's Pharsalia and mentioned "Caesar," but unfortunately it meant not Julius but Augustus (starts muttering curses against academics who don't think to speak more clearly). So Augustus was the "power-crazed megalomaniac" who was ignoring all the wonders of Alexandria in favor of Alexander. However, while this particular anecdote was incorrect, I was correct to identify Julius Caesar as another great Alexander admirer - there is a story, which many people here probably know, that states that when he was in Spain in his 30's, Caesar came across a statue of Alexander and burst into tears. When he was asked why he was crying, Caesar said it was because by the time Alexander was his age, he had conquered the world, but he, Caesar, had not yet accomplished anything of merit.
Anyway, hopefully you all enjoyed this essay - I wish I had others to share, but the teacher only wanted 3 essays. Thanks for reading and being supportive/constructively critical. -M
In the year 323 BCE, Alexander III of Macedonia died at the young age of thirty-three years. In his short life he expanded Macedonia from a tiny kingdom with hegemony over most of Greece to the largest empire the world had yet seen. He conquered more land than many of his contemporaries had even known existed. He left no heir. Indeed, Diodoros tells us that on his deathbed, when he was asked to whom he wanted to give the Macedonian throne, he responded simply “τᾠ κράτιστᾠ,” “to the strongest” (Diodoros XVII.117.4). Other biographers, such as Plutarch, tell us that Alexander was incapable of speaking by this point, so the story from Diodoros may well be apocryphal. Regardless of whether or not these words were uttered by Alexander, however, they are an ominous commentary on what was to come. Over the ensuing decades, Alexander's empire was wracked with conflict, as his generals and family members fought for control over his domain. These years would see the death of his mother, his wife and his young son, as well as the man whom many believe Alexander desired to replace him, Perdikkas. Within three decades, the Empire was split between Antigonos in Greece, Alexander's close friend, Ptolemy, in Egypt, and a more obscure cavalry officer named Seleukos in Asia.
Even as the dynasty of Alexander ended and his kingdom was carved up into separate empires, Alexander himself retained a remarkable level of influence over his domain. The significant moments of his life quickly became legendary, helped in no small degree by his successors, who benefited from the glory of their dead king. In this paper, I intend to argue that Alexander was a significant ideological tool by which not only the successor kings, but also many leaders who came later, sought to gain influence and prestige in the Hellenistic era.
When Alexander died, his empire was stunned. The leading men continued to carry out their functions, putting down revolts, appointing officials, minting coins with Alexander's head on them (Erskine 168). Babylon continued to be treated as the administrative center of the empire, simply because Alexander was there (Erskine 169-170). Affairs carried on as if nobody knew the King was dead. When Alexander's friend and lover, Hephaestion, had died, there had been a prompt and lavish funeral. It was a week before Alexander's body was even embalmed. His generals would spend another two years having an opulent hearse constructed to carry Alexander to his intended final resting place (Erskine 168), most likely in Macedonia (Erskine 170).
The hearse never made it to Macedonia, however. It was intercepted in Syria by Ptolemy, who absconded with the body and laid it to rest in Memphis. Perdikkas, the regent for Alexander's as-yet unborn son, Alexander IV, invaded with an army to try to recapture the body. A battle was fought over a corpse. This action demands further examination of the significance ascribed to Alexander's body. To Perdikkas, and to the soldiers who served under him, the body of Alexander was central to the empire. He was their king, in life or in death, and whoever controlled Alexander controlled the empire. Alexander's body was part and parcel of the rule over his lands and the guardianship of his son. Thus, when Ptolemy defeated Perdikkas in battle, the latter was murdered by his own men, who then offered the regency and guardianship of Alexander's son to Ptolemy. He had Alexander, therefore he had rights to the rest (Erskine 171).
Yet Ptolemy declined their offer. He, before anyone else, recognized that the future of Alexander's empire lay in separate kingdoms. The dead king had been immensely talented at the art of conquest, but had shown little talent for consolidating his holdings. Ptolemy probably, at this point, already suspected the truth; that the prospect of a unified Macedonian Empire had died with Alexander. What then was the purpose of stealing Alexander's body, if he had no designs on succession? As we have already seen, Alexander was central to his Empire. In life his men had followed him all the way to India. Babylon had continued to be the de facto capital purely because his body was there. Many, if not most of his fellow Macedonians viewed control of Alexander's body as being tantamount to control of the entire kingdom. The location of his tomb would undoubtedly be a site of great reverence for Greeks in general and Macedonians in particular. The man whose kingdom held Alexander's tomb would be associated with the great conqueror. He would thus attract the loyalties both of the natives who had stood in awe of Alexander, and the Greeks who had loved Alexander. The dead king had the potential to be a stabilizing influence and a means of recruiting troops (Erskine 172). To Ptolemy, Alexander's body was not a crown, but a laurel wreath.
To that end, Ptolemy's monarchy in Egypt seems to have been built around Alexander. Shortly after the burial of Alexander at Memphis, he relocated the king's body to the new capital of Egypt, Alexandria. The choice to move the King's body to a city which he had founded and which was named after him is significant (Cartledge 149-150). Soon thereafter, Ptolemy began minting coins featuring Alexander, although these were done in a new style. The first run of coins were minted somewhere between 321 and 319 BCE, right around the time when Ptolemy stole the body. They feature Alexander wearing an elephant scalp, signifying his conquest of India (Mørkholm 63). Later issues would feature him wearing the ram's horns of the Egyptian god, Amun-Re, whom the Greeks associated with Zeus. This represented both Alexander's conquest of Egypt and his trip to Siwa where he was proclaimed the son of Amun-Re by the god's own priests. Such propaganda was a master-stroke for Ptolemy. Coinage in this era was used first and foremost to pay soldiers, and so by putting these stylized portraits of the dead conqueror on money, Ptolemy was associating his regime with Alexander in the minds of his soldiers (Erskine 173). Over time, the Ptolemaic Alexander coinage grew more and more different from the old coins, and so it seems likely that Ptolemy was using coinage to attempt, step-by-step, to separate his domain into his own kingdom (Mørkholm 66).
Such coins were accompanied by a biography of Alexander which featured Ptolemy prominently (Erskine 173). Later on in Ptolemy's reign, myths formed stating that Ptolemy's mother, Arsinoe, had been a lover of King Philip II, Alexander's father, and that when she was impregnated with Ptolemy by him, he married her off to Lagos. Thus according to the legend, which was encouraged by the Ptolemaic regime, Ptolemy was the half-brother of Alexander. The legend goes even further, however. It states that when Ptolemy was born, he was exposed, but was rescued and raised by an eagle (Bulloch 44). This is markedly similar to the snakes which Plutarch reports were found near Olympias around the time of Alexander's conception (Vita Alexandri II) and suggests an attempt to even further connect Ptolemy with the dead king through the association of natural or even divine forces with his birth. The message was clear. As a half-brother of Alexander who was similarly-divine, Ptolemy had a god-given right to be King of Egypt (Bulloch 45).
Beyond coins and reinterpretations of history, Ptolemy also founded a cult of Alexander with a priesthood. Time in Ptolemaic Egypt was measured not only by regnal years, but by who the current priest of Alexander was. Thus the Ptolemies sought to keep Alexander firmly in the minds of their subjects. Ptolemy I did not, however, associate himself too directly with the cult of Alexander. He had his own cults on Rhodes and in the Egyptian city of Ptolemais. The step of directly associating the cult of Alexander with the monarchy would be taken by Ptolemy II Philadelphos and his wife Arsinoe II, who made a cult for themselves and associated it with that of Alexander, thus creating the priesthood of Alexander and the divine monarchs (Bulloch 50-51). This trend would be repeated by Ptolemy III Euergetes, who associated himself and his wife, Berenike II, with the cult of Alexander as well (Bulloch 52-53).
The cult can also be seen in the pomp of celebration. After the death of Ptolemy I, his son, Philadelphos, staged a massive festival in honor of his divine father. An immense amount of money was spent, as virtually all of the Ptolemaic army and many other Hellenistic monarchs were invited to see and partake in the parades, games and festivities. There were tremendous, proto-animatronic statues, and the route of the parade went through all the main points of Alexander's city, highlighting the fact that these games were in honor of the successors of Alexander (Thompson 372). There were statues of Corinth, which was likely meant to be a divine personification of Greece, as well as Ptolemy I, Nike and Alexander. Diadems were to be seen everywhere. There were state-of-the-art water pumps being used to spray wine.
Images of Dionysus, Alexander's supposed ancestor, were especially prevalent at this festival. Dionysus would have been presented as a Macedonian, Greek and especially an Eastern deity. Highlighting his Eastern side would remind people of his mythical expedition to India, which was to prefigure that of Alexander. Since Ptolemy was rumored to be an illegitimate son of Philip II, however, this made Dionysus an ancestor of his as well. Thus the prominence of Dionysus in this festival served to underline both Ptolemy's and Alexander's relationship to the divine, and their relationship to each other. Taken as a whole, the procession is a celebration of kingship, of which Alexander is the keystone (Thompson 377-378).
The image we take away from this examination is one of a monarchy built around Alexander. As the author of nigh-inhuman accomplishments, he was understandably the object of great admiration, worship even, by his contemporaries as well as successive generations of men. The Ptolemies skillfully capitalized on the aura around him and went to every length possible to present their regime as the natural heirs of Alexander's conquests. It would seem that they were successful, for in 30 BCE, when Octavian visited the tomb of Alexander after defeating Antony and Cleopatra, it seemed natural for his guides to ask if he wanted to visit the remains of the Ptolemies as well (Erskine 164).
Other Hellenistic kingdoms did not base their ideology around Alexander as boldly as the Ptolemies, however. Unlike the Ptolemies, they did not have the body of Alexander. Thus they were not so easily able to tie the dead King into their lineage as the Ptolemies had. It was certainly possible for them to identify their regimes with Alexander, however. Most, if not all, of the successor states worshiped him as a god, just like the Ptolemies. Engravings on funerary monuments from Macedonia mention him in the same breath as Heracles, and there was a priest of his cult in Ephesus as late as the second century (Erskine 435). Yet to engage in bold propaganda campaigns, seeking to portray him as the founder of their dynasty, would only draw attention to the fact that their alleged founder's final resting place lay in Egypt, on the palatial grounds of the Ptolemies. As a result, the opportunities to capitalize on the aura of Alexander were not quite as lucrative for the other successors, although they nevertheless made extensive, albeit more subtle, use of him as well.
The most all-encompassing example of the Alexander ideology elsewhere lies in the Hellenistic model of kingship. For the Ptolemies, the Seleukids and the Antigonids, the king was a Macedonian born of great ancestry, ideally divine. The Seleukids, for example, cited an anchor-shaped birthmark as evidence of their descent from Apollo, just as Alexander had claimed relation to Zeus-Amun, Heracles and Dionysus. Hellenistic kings, with the possible exception of the Antigonids, had to be able to bridge the cultural gap with the natives, and to that end went to some lengths to associate themselves with native culture, just as Alexander had done by acquiring a Persian bride and borrowing several elements of Persian dress. At the same time, however, they sought to portray themselves as the guardians of Greek culture. Alexander had arguably done so by spreading Greek culture all the way to India. Philip V of Macedonia portrayed his alliance with the Achaean League against the Aetolian League as a defense of Greek culture as well (Ma 5/2/2010). As a means of spreading Hellenism, the king was a founder of cities as well, just as Alexander had been. This similarity is driven home by the tendency of the kings to name the cities after themselves; cities with such names as Seleukeia, Antiochea and Ptolemais occur frequently, though not as much so as the ubiquitous cities of Alexandria (Ma 12/2/2010).
The court of the Hellenistic king also shows the strong influences of Alexander. The court tended to be populated with friends of the king, courtiers who often seem to have performed administrative functions as well as simply offering advice to the king. It was a very flexible system, although it did have a hierarchy; friends of the king were on the lower levels, whereas higher up on the social ladder were the first friend and the commander of the bodyguards. Many of them had known him since childhood. One of Antiochos III's closest friends was a certain Nikanor, with whom he had grown up. Seleukos IV had a certain Olympiodoros as a foster brother (Ma 12/2/2010). One is reminded strongly of the relationship of Alexander to both Hephaestion and Ptolemy. Within the court, the king was a great benefactor, of gifts as well as freedom to those with whom he came into contact (Ma 12/2/2010). Seleukos I returned lost religious works to Babylon and repaired temples throughout Mesopotamia (Bullock 120). Alexander had been a generous man as well. In India Plutarch has him capturing ten of the local wise men known as gymnosophists who had agitated the people against him. Alexander posed difficult questions to them, and when they answered wisely and cleverly, he gave them not only their freedom but gifts as well (Vita Alexandri LXV). Earlier in the biography, when Alexander had seen a Macedonian porter who was struggling to drive a mule that was laden with royal gold, he had promptly informed the driver that the gold he was transporting was to be his own (XXXIX.3). One or both of these stories may be apocryphal, but regardless, they provide us with a valuable insight into the model of monarchy to which the Hellenistic kings saw themselves as heirs.
Royal images provided a valuable link to the great conqueror as well. Alexander's imagery had been distinctive. With his youth, his clean-shaven face and his mane of shoulder-length hair, the king's images had been at variance with those of previous leaders, such as his father, whose image was more mature and featured a beard. Royal images of the Hellenistic Era tended to be based on a combination of Alexander's image and the images of young gods and heroes. Youth in particular was important, and it was considered essential that the Hellenistic king be portrayed as smooth and youthful like Dionysus. The image should be reminiscent of Alexander, but recognizably different, as they typically did not favor shoulder-length hair. The king was portrayed as either young or ageless, typically between 20 and 35, ages which line up almost perfectly to the the years of Alexander's ascension and death, respectively. Some of the older kings might occasionally choose to have images made that were mature, but wrinkles never showed, and the king was never portrayed as anything less than divine (Bulloch 208-209). There was one king in particular who made especially good use of references to Alexander on coins, a fact that is particularly interesting when one considers that his kingdom was not one of the successor states of Alexander's empire.
Mithridates VI Eupator of Pontos is one of the more fascinating figures to grace the Late Hellenistic Era. A charismatic and yet ruthless ruler, he was a perennial enemy of Rome, and his wars with Sulla, Lucullus and Pompeius were marked by his ability to come back with a fresh army after horrendous defeats. He also made use of Alexander ideology more than any Hellenistic ruler apart from perhaps some of the Ptolemies. His coins were noteworthy for his youthful appearance, his clean-shaven face and his flamboyant, shoulder-length hair, making no effort to conceal his self-identification with the legendary king of kings. Statues of Mithridates, meanwhile, often seem to have their head tilted slightly to the left, a posture Alexander had been noted for in his lifetime (Mayor 65). His manner of dress was similarly reminiscent. After his conquest of the Persian Empire, Alexander had angered his troops by taking up elements of Persian clothing. While he had rejected the eastern fashion of wearing pants as outlandish, he had taken up the practice of wearing a pure white tunic with a Persian sash that held his dagger. Mithridates did not reject wearing pants, but also wore a pure white tunic and sash for his dagger (Mayor 67).
Beyond his imagery, the great king-of-kings was personally important to Mithridates as well. Early in his life when he was in the process of regaining his kingdom from his mother, the Poison King is known to have visited many of the places significant to Alexander in Asia Minor. For example, he enlarged the sanctuary of Ephesus like Alexander did by shooting an arrow. Once king, he would follow Alexander's example by keeping a menagerie of exotic animals such as lions, bears, ostriches and mongooses (Mayor 253). To the King of Pontos, Alexander must have had tremendous appeal, especially because he was supposed to have been an ancestor of Mithridates. Alexander's role as a bringer of civilization would have seemed especially attractive to a young Mithridates; in all probability, he was already opposed ideologically to what he perceived to be the uncultured barbarity of the Romans (Mayor 65). He sought a Greco-Persian Empire not all that different from the goal of his hero, who had embraced both Persian and Greek culture and had compelled many of his leading generals to take Persian wives (Mayor 66). Mithridates saw himself as the great king, the preserver of Greek culture who would liberate the east from the predations of the rapacious Romans. It was an ideology that was unmistakably influenced by the great conqueror. Indeed, after his death, Cicero would call him the greatest king since Alexander, a remark which Mithridates would have considered the highest compliment.
As the remark by Cicero shows, however, even the Romans were not immune to Alexander-worship. Pompeius' chosen cognomen of “Magnus” is a thinly veiled imitation of the great conqueror, and Lucan tells us in his Pharsalia that when Caesar arrived in Alexandria in pursuit of Pompeius, he cared for none of the wonders of the city but proceeded directly to see the remains of Alexander. Lucan portrays it as one power-crazed megalomaniac meeting another (Pharsalia 10.14-52).
Through his conquests and the strength of his personality, Alexander had provided the archetypical model of kingship for the Hellenistic World. The Ptolemies associated themselves directly with him as a means of legitimizing their regime, while other Kings modeled themselves on him, with varying degrees of subtlety, for their own purposes. Some sought comparisons to him as a means of aggrandizing themselves, while others used him to promote a particular ideology, but regardless, Alexander was a significant tool by which the monarchs of the Hellenistic Era could accomplish their goals. As the period came to a close, the cycle was to repeat itself. On 15 March, 44 BCE, Julius Caesar was stabbed to death before a meeting of the Senate. Within a year he was considered a god. His successors would shamelessly identify themselves with him, even going so far as to take up his cognomen. They would model the roles they took and their power after him. At least one of them would portray himself in images as a young man well into his seventies. In this way the ideology of Alexander was carried well into the Roman period and would survive for hundreds of years.
Annotated Bibliography
1.A. W. Bulloch et al. (eds.), Images and ideologies: self-definition in the Hellenistic world (Berkeley 1993).
2.Paul Cartledge, Alexander the Great: the hunt for a new past (London 2004).
3.Andrew Erskine, 'Life after death: Alexandria and the body of Alexander', Greece and Rome 49 (2002), 163-179.
4.Andrew Erskine, A companion to the Hellenistic world (Oxford 2003).
5.Adrienne Mayor, The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithridates, Rome's Deadliest Enemy (Princeton 2009)
6.O. Mørkholm, Early Hellenistic coinage from the accession of Alexander to the peace of Apamea (336 BC-188 BC) (Cambridge 1991).
7.D. J. Thompson, Philadelphus' procession: dynastic power in a Mediterranean context', in Leon Mooren (ed.), Politics, administration and society in the Hellenistic and Roman world. Studia Hellenistica 36 (2000), 365-388.
Additionally, I have made use of notes taken while listening to Dr. John Ma of Corpus Christi College, Oxford in his lecture series “Themes in Hellenistic History.”
This paper was also received very well, although my teacher did have some notes to make on it:
1. Part of the reason why the non-Ptolemaic Hellenistic Kings might not have sought to identify their regime as strongly with Alexander is that in many eastern cultures, especially Greece, the person who buries a man is considered his son/heir/successor. Thus, by burying Alexander, Ptolemy was establishing himself as the heir to Alexander in Egypt, while the other successors couldn't make similar claims for their dominions over their respective lands.
2. I was slightly mistaken in my second to last paragraph: the article I read references Lucan's Pharsalia and mentioned "Caesar," but unfortunately it meant not Julius but Augustus (starts muttering curses against academics who don't think to speak more clearly). So Augustus was the "power-crazed megalomaniac" who was ignoring all the wonders of Alexandria in favor of Alexander. However, while this particular anecdote was incorrect, I was correct to identify Julius Caesar as another great Alexander admirer - there is a story, which many people here probably know, that states that when he was in Spain in his 30's, Caesar came across a statue of Alexander and burst into tears. When he was asked why he was crying, Caesar said it was because by the time Alexander was his age, he had conquered the world, but he, Caesar, had not yet accomplished anything of merit.
Anyway, hopefully you all enjoyed this essay - I wish I had others to share, but the teacher only wanted 3 essays. Thanks for reading and being supportive/constructively critical. -M