Alexander the Great in the Roman Empire, 150 BC to AD 600 0429850549, 9780429850547

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Alexander the Great in the Roman Empire, 150 BC to AD 600

The life of Alexander the Great began to be retold from the moment of his death. Greco-Roman authors used these stories as exemplars in a variety of ways. This book is concerned with the various stories of Alexander and how they were used in antiquity to promote certain policies, religious views, and value systems. The book is an original contribution to the study of the history and reception of Alexander, analyzing the writings of over 70 classical and post-classical authors during a period of over 700 years. Drawing on this extensive range and quantity of material, the study plots the continuity and change of ideas from the early Roman Empire to the early Middle Ages. Jaakkojuhani Peltonen is a researcher at Tampere University. He defended his thesis in 2017. His specific interests include the use of history, Alexander the Great, and perceptions of the past in the classical world.

Alexander the Great in the Ro01an E01pire, 150 BC to AD600

Jaakkojuhani Peltonen

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Routledge

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Taylor & Francis Group

LONDON AND NEW YORK

First published 2019 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 Jaakkojuhani Peltonen

The right of Jaakkojuhani Peltonen to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Peltonen, Jaakkojuhani, author. Title: Alexander the Great in the Roman Empire, 150 BC to AD 600 / Jaakkojuhani Peltonen. Description: Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge, [2019] I "Reception of Alexander the Great." I Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018048106 I ISBN 9781138315860 (hardback) I ISBN 9780429456046(ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Alexander, the Great, 356 B.C.-323 B.C.-Influence. I Alexander, the Great, 356 B.C.-323 B.C.-In literature. I MacedoniaKings and rulers-Biography. I Macedonia-History-To 168 B.C. I Political oratory-Rome. I History, Ancient-Historiography. Classification: LCC DF234.2 .P45 2019 I DDC 938/.07092-dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018048106 ISBN: 978-1-138-31586-0 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-45604-6 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Apex Co Vantage, LLC

To my parents, Matti and Paivi

Contents

List of figures Acknowledgements

Vlll . IX

1

Introduction

1

2

Alexander in an empire of Romans, Greeks, and Jews

29

3

Alexander as a model of behavior

92

4

Alexander in relations of power and influence

133

5

Alexander in Christian apologia

164

6

Conclusion

215

Appendix 1: Primary sources Appendix 2: Chronological distribution of the data Bibliography Index

228

238 239

258

Figures

1.1

2.1

3 .1

5 .1

Apulian amphora, ea. 330-320 BC, red-figure pottery from Ruvo in Magna Graecia. It is a detail showing a battle scene between Alexander and Darius. With the permission of the Ministero dei Beni e delle Attivita Culturali e del Turismo - Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli. The Alexander mosaic was found in the House of the Faun in Pompeii. It shows the battle of Issus and underlines Alexander's martial virtue, widely admired in the Roman world. With the permission of the Ministero dei Beni e delle Attivita Culturali e del Turismo - Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli. Alexander the Great as an infant with a nymph. It shows how the idealized portraiture of the early years of the heroic and divine Alexander was known to the people of the Mediterranean and used as a tool for thought and imagination. Mosaic from Baalbek (modem Lebanon), 4th century AD. Source: Photo by Egisto Sani. Copyright by Ministry of Culture/ Directorate General of Antiquities of Lebanon/National Museum of Beirut. Coin minted by Lysimachus (305-281 BC) which portrays Alexander deified as Zeus Ammon. The Mac edonian worldconqueror is also depicted with the ram's horns of Zeus Ammon on the Egyptian coins of Ptolemy. It is impossible to say whether Clement of Alexandria had seen this portraiture of Alexander in coinage, but undoubtedly such coin types made an image of deified Alexander known to the people of the Mediterranean. Source: Classical Numismatic Group, Inc. (www.cngcoins.com).

20

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99

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173

Acknowledgements

This book is a revised and expanded version of my doctoral thesis submitted to Tampere University in the autumn of 2017. This project would have been impossible to carry out without the help of a number of scholars, colleagues, friends, and institutions. First of all, I want to express my gratitude to my supervisors and friends, Docent Ville Vuolanto, Docent Katariina Mustakallio, and Professor Christian Krotzl. Their help has been crucial for me in my research. Not only has their guidance been essential in solving the more technical challenges in completing the thesis, but their mature and well-thought ideas have also helped me enormously to develop my thinking as a scholar. My supervisors frequently encouraged me to persist when I faltered, and I am grateful to them for persisting with me, too. We have travelled a long journey to reach this point. I owe special thanks to Doctor Jussi Rantala, Docent Sari Katajala-Peltomaa, and Docent Christian Laes, who read the manuscript of the thesis and gave several good comments and suggestions. I would also like to give sincere thanks to Professor Hugh Bowden and Professor Arja Karivieri for their excellent comments, which enabled me to improve the study. I also wish to thank Pia Mustonen for checking the bibliography and Jouni Keskinen for helping me with the chart in appendix 2. My gratitude also goes to Docent Juhani Sarsila, who as a teacher of Latin and docent of the History of Ideas has revealed to me the value of our classical heritage. My brother and colleague Ollimatti Peltonen has guided me through difficult situations and provided his helping hand on several occasions during my studies. He has given me insightful comments not only on the dissertation but also on papers yet to be published. Other scholars and colleagues who have helped me and to whom I want to express my gratitude include the following: Docent Maijastiina Kahlos, Docent Jussi Hanska, Docent Markku Hyrkkanen, Docent Martti Leiwo, Doctor Kenneth Moore, Doctor Sanna Joska, Doctor Miikka Tamminen, Antti Oikarinen, Outi Sihvonen, Teijo Raty, and lastly Risto Kunnari. I also want to express my gratitude to the Finnish Cultural Foundation's Central Fund, the Finnish Cultural Foundation's Pirkanmaa Regional Fund, the Jalmari Finne Foundation, and the Tampere City Science Foundation. Without their financial support, this research would have been impossible. In addition, I am indebted to the School of Social Sciences and Humanities of Tampere University, which awarded a grant to cover the proofreading of my work and the traveling

x

Acknowledgements

costs for seminars that helped me to improve my argumentation. All translations are mine unless otherwise noted. Doctor Celine Murphy checked the language of the first version of the manuscript. Doctor Philip Line checked the language of the final version of the book, helped me to bring the translations into suitable English, and gave several good comments and suggestions, for which I am grateful. Finally, special thanks go to my late grandfather Orvo. Already as a five-yearold child I was greatly inspired by his scientific thinking. I am sure he would have been proud of my accomplishment in completing this research. Moreover, it is to him that I owe my lifelong interest in Alexander. When I was just a child, he used to read a fascinating comic book about Alexander to me (originally published in French Dans les pas d'Alexandre le Grand, A la recherche des sources du Nil in 1978, Societe des Periodiques Larousse). Therefore, I have to give him the credit for providing the impetus that led to this book, even though he is sadly no longer with us and my words do not reach him. Jaakkojuhani Peltonen Tampere, July 2018

1

Introduction

Alexander III of Macedon (356-323 BC), better known as Alexander the Great, is one of those rare historical figures who has fascinated a legion of writers in both the past and the present. Not only the ancient Greeks and Romans, but also Jews, Christians, and Muslims from antiquity to modem times have written (and will no doubt continue to write) about Alexander. Opinions about him have been as varied as those who have told his story, which has been told and retold in written and oral narratives, visual presentations, paintings, mosaics, sculptures, and, of course, in more recent times, movies. Over the centuries, his figure has inspired monarchs, politicians, soldiers, travelers, painters, poets, orators, philosophers, religious leaders, and commoners. Alexander's life has been idealized in various ways. He has been considered a military genius whose strategy and tactics have been analyzed in great detail and an exemplar for building an empire through military conquest. He has served as a romantic figure of heroic youth as well as an archetype of the philosopher - king. His life has inspired adventurers and explorers. In addition, his reign has been seen in the religious context of providential history, revealing the power of God. However, in contrast to the role model and idol, there is another Alexander, the bloody tyrant whose reign meant universal terror and destruction, who provides an example of the wrong kind of autocracy that harms its subjects, a model to be avoided rather than emulated. In this negative role as in his positive one, Alexander has stirred emotions and his story has reverberated through the ages. Alexander's popularity as an admired paragon with whom modem-day people can identify has not abated in the 20th and 21 th centuries. Comics, documentaries, films, novels, statues, and songs about him have inspired not only European peoples but also those of the Near East and South Asia. In the modem era, the heroic presentation of Alexander can be recognized in the equestrian statues erected in public places throughout modem Greece and the Republic of Macedonia (FYROM). The same heroic and idealizing portrait characterizes Andy Warhol's Alexander series of 1982, the English heavy metal band Iron Maiden's song Alexander the Great of 1986, and Oliver Stone's blockbuster film Alexander of 2004. 1 However, behind these modem portraits of Alexander there often lie modem ideological movements like nationalism. The first film about Alexander was the epic Bollywood film Sikandar of 1941, directed by Sohrab Modi. This film roused

2

Introduction

patriotic feelings by using the battle between Alexander's invading troops and the Indian king Porns as an analogy for the Indian struggle to win independence from Britain. 2 The film was censored for a while in some theatres. The potential for political and ideological use of Alexander has been manifested recently in the controversies between the governments of Greece and Macedonia. Both states have promoted the legacy of Alexander and ancient Macedonia in their politics and have constructed their national identity with the help of his figure. The dispute about who has the right to use the name 'Macedonia', thus claiming Alexander and his kingdom as a national symbol, has festered since the birth of the modem Republic of Macedonia in 1991 (officially recognized in 1993). 3 This modem-day obsession with Alexander reflects the long historical use of Alexander's legacy. Modem-day politicians, Greek and Macedonian nationalists, movie directors and artists are merely following a 2,300-year-old tradition, one embraced by British imperialists in the 19th century, Swedish monarchs in the 17th and 18th centuries, Portuguese colonialists, and medieval epic poets. 4 How did Alexander become such a prominent figure and a reference point? Of course, the use of historical figures' legacies to justify and promote one's goals has deep historical roots, and use of Alexander has historical roots, too. In Western historical thinking, because Rome extended it power and influence so far, it is normally the first port of call when attempting to trace the historical roots of a certain phenomenon. As so often when studying European cultural history, we encounter the legacy of ancient Rome and its heritage. As we know, Rome's cultural values, religious beliefs, technological advancements, engineering, and the Latin language have made an enormous impact on European societies. In line with this, before medieval Europe became obsessed with his story, the Romans had already created the Alexander phenomenon by making him a paragon and exemplary figure. This is theme of this book, in which I will explore the very roots of using Alexander as an historical exemplum. The long historical use of Alexander as a rhetorical tool began in the Greco-Roman world. In a way, they created the myth of Alexander as a superhero. My aim is to show the scope and magnitude of this phenomenon in the ancient world. This book will give a detailed analysis of the different ways the Greco-Romans used Alexander, providing a model for future centuries.

The exemplarity of the past Humans have a need to explore the past. People through the ages have used the past to understand themselves and others. The past is a series of events, which are arranged in a sequence and combined to form a story. People are inclined to respect these stories of the past because its events provide lessons and examples for posterity and explanations of their current status. Thus, these stories are used as a tool to justify a course of action, to strengthen a certain value system or social order, or to regulate behavior. However, stories, or as modem historians would like to say, interpretations, of the past change; those who claim to know and understand the past have the opportunity to retell its history. In retelling the story, people create the past anew. Different eras and cultures may produce a

Introduction

3

slightly different story of the past, re-emphasizing, rearranging, or reinterpreting its events. The stories reflect the value system of a given society. The power of historical examples has been particularly strong in cultures of the past. In the premodem world, the exemplarity of the past was considered self-evident; it was seen as a source of wisdom, for both individuals and society. The stories dealing with historical events and personae were considered a storehouse of moral codes and lessons in ethics for kings, religious officials and monks, soldiers, and peasants. The Ciceronian trope of historia magistra vitae ('history as a teacher of life') 5 dominated Western thinking until the tum of the 19th century. The paradigm shifted after 1850 with the increasing popularity of positivist theories. Famously, the historian Leopold von Ranke announced that the historian's task was primarily to recount, while not judging, the past for the benefit of future generations. The aim of like-minded 19th-century historians was to make history an objective and empirical field of science. Such professional historians were no longer simply moral instructors, but attempted to follow the path of the natural sciences: "One just learns history from history." 6 Even though modem historical theory does not prefer writing history in order to provide moral exempla, the idea itself has not been rejected altogether. To varying degrees, even modern historians argue that history can teach us lessons and provide exempla of life for modem communities. Since we live in a globalized world where mankind tries to find solutions to worldwide problems, historical knowledge and understanding has been recommended, by some historians, as a tool for solving these problems, since it enables man to learn from the mistakes of the past. 7 As Jared Diamond writes, "The past offers us a rich database from which we can learn, in order to keep on succeeding." 8 However, the question of using and abusing history is a difficult one. The idea rests on the belief that 'true' and 'false' presentations of the past can be detected and that wrong uses of history can be separated from right ones. In addition, the critique of 'history as a teacher of life' does not diminish the fact that, outside the academic world, history has been used continuously as a teacher ever since the foundation of the first civilizations. 9 If we appreciate that, at least to some extent, authors throughout history have embraced the idea of 'history as a teacher of life' and as a source of exempla, we may ask which historical figures were seen as admirable or exceptional enough to be used for these purposes? Obviously, contemporary values dictate which persons are admired or deplored and whose stories and lives will be retold and reinterpreted. Different eras see different things as exemplary, but a consistent and universal feature is that those who are believed to be exceptional are put up on a pedestal. People have been set up as paragons and icons to represent ideals and function as models for a certain stage of life, gender, or set of values. These individuals may be worshipped and venerated during their lifetime, but it is subsequent generations that decide the value of their legacy, whether they will be posthumously mystified, glorified, or vilified. Stories of their lives are retold, and their visual portraits become known to all. Not only has the posthumous mystification and heroicizing of well-known people continued into our own times, but mass media and popular culture have

4

Introduction

arguably assisted it. We need only list James Dean, Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, and Kurt Cobain. Their relatively short-lived but meteoric careers were ended by an early or tragic death, but only after their deaths did they become immortal, iconic figures. They were idealized by 20thcentury popular media journalists, biographers and documentarists, advertisers and promotors. Furthermore, there have also been political and military figures among the 'modem immortals'. One of the best examples is the Argentine communist leader Che Guevara, who also died young and became a symbol of youth, rebellion, and the fight for justice. His visual portrait (based on the picture taken by Alberto Korda in 1960) is not only known in popular culture, but is still used by those fighting for a political cause. The same mechanism seems to apply to 20th-century pop stars and politicians. Whatever the commercial or propagandistic motives of modem media, we are still witnessing a similar phenomenon to the heroicizing of historical figures. Historical consciousness - whether based on orally transmitted stories or written sources - is saturated by historical individuals. If we think about historical events, eras, wars, values, and dialogues, there is always an individual who comes to mind, a figure who gives a face to the story or phenomenon. Over the centuries, historical narratives have often been viewed from the perspective of major actors in politics, war, art, music, religion, and science. The fates of peoples, polities, and cultures are perceived to have been shaped by them. From the first cultures of which we have records of named individuals, in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, the deeds of mighty individuals have dominated their histories, mythical or otherwise. The actions of pharaohs and kings dominate the inscriptions and reliefs of Egypt and Assyria, reflecting the royal ideology at the core of their societies. Later, in Greco-Roman antiquity, the spotlight still fell on great men of the past. In the view of the Greeks and Romans, important and influential men exerted a major influence on the world and therefore their lives and deeds merited study. 1 From Herodotus and Thucydides historiographical narratives were formed around the lives of monarchs and political leaders whose actions allegedly changed the course of history. In the field of science, the illustrious lives of philosopher - scientists were celebrated and anecdotes of their lives used as guides for behavior. Famous sculptors and painters were regarded as emulated and venerated masters. Also, in Near Eastern cultures spiritual leaders like Moses, Zoroaster, Buddha, and Jesus were regarded as great men whose lives were studied and imitated. 11 The writing of Alexander the Great's history should be seen in the context of both the accepted exemplarity of the past and the recognized central role of illustrious men in history. Firstly, a person had to be appreciated as a legend and idealized to fit the idea of a great man, so he could be used as an exemplar supporting certain social mores and a value system. As we shall see, Alexander provided excellent material to function in this way in Greco-Roman culture, which in tum would have an enormous impact on later cultures. The various uses of Alexander the Great as a figure of interest began in the Hellenistic kingdoms soon after his death and continued from the end of the Roman Republic to the Imperial

°

Introduction

5

period, persisting even after the Christianization of the Empire. 12 The use of Alexander's character gives us a good insight into how one individual can offer many rhetorical possibilities to authors representing different groups, identities, 13 and ideologies in the ancient and modem world.

The task and the sources used In this study, I approach the use of history and the supposed exemplarity of the past through the numerous Classical and post-Classical texts concerning Alexander the Great. The stories about Alexander here serve as a tool to explore the role of history in the literary culture of the Roman and late ancient world. I discuss the different functions of history by distinguishing how and why the figure of Alexander was used in the literary culture of the Greco-Roman upper classes. The key research questions addressed in this study are the following: What kind of rhetorical and ideological functions did the literary presentations of the king support? Why was Alexander such a popular figure in texts of different genres? By answering these questions, I shed light on the use of history and on the understanding of the role of history as magistra vitae in the ancient world. In this study 'using history' means a rhetorical action, a means to promote a certain ideology and self-presentation by referring to historical figures of the remote past. 14 The aim of this book is to explore the differences between the various representations of Alexander and their mutual impact. My study offers a pragmatic view of the past as a rhetorical practice, with the purpose of achieving certain ideological goals. I shall examine how authors were defending, warning, accusing, praising, persuading, accepting certain opinions, crafting their self-presentation, acclaiming, or giving advice and instruction with the help of the past. In my analysis, I examine the potential for certain philosophical, political, religious, and personal messages behind these ancient accounts of the Macedonian king. This research is important not only because it illustrates the position of the past in the Classical world, but also because it provides us with material with which to compare the ways we presently see and use history today. Little attention has been paid to the ideological uses of history in any period ( especially in the Classical period) from the contemporary perspective. One of the fundamental starting points of this research is that the importance of the past and history in the ancient world was tied to its ideological and rhetorical usage. This is true not only where ancient historiography or oratory are concerned but also in the case of private letters and philosophical treatises. The present research explores what ancient writers 'did with Alexander' when they wrote about the world conqueror whose status as an icon and fame were selfevident facts. Scholars have long searched for the 'historical' or 'real' Alexander and disputed his true character. The quest for the historical Alexander has been popular among European intellectuals and historians since the Enlightenment, even though the source material presents a significant challenge to anyone who wants to write

6

Introduction

about what 'actually' happened during Alexander's reign. 15 However, instead of analyzing all possible textual sources dealing with Alexander, most have concentrated mainly on the five Classical accounts of Alexander's reign (Diodorus, Curtius, Plutarch, Arrian, and Justin/Trogus), leaving the shorter Classical and post-Classical passages aside. 16 Moreover, if scholars have not studied the historical Alexander, their interest has centered on the form, style, and literary themes of the separate texts. Sometimes passages concerning Alexander have been considered different images and views of Alexander, or reflecting Roman perceptions of the king. 17 Here, I argue that it is these minor passages especially that can offer us valuable information on the ideological and rhetorical uses of history and historical figures in the ancient world. My purpose is to identify the values and messages these authors were promoting when they wrote about Alexander. The period under consideration here starts with the last centuries of the Roman Republic and extends to the Christianized Empire of the sixth century AD. The sources of this study cover various works from Polybius to Procopius and represent several different genres: historiography, oratory, epistles, and philosophical treatises. The approach of this study is qualitative. Since I am examining a long period, extending from 150 BC to AD 600, and since my sources represent several literary genres, some attempt can be made to identify overall changes in the use of history in texts as the period progressed. I have systematically collected and analyzed the surviving passages about Alexander the Great (see Appendix 1: Primary Sources) dating from 150 BC to AD 600. The sources for the present study include several works from various writers, amounting to about 70. These sources represent several genres, thus enabling a fuller understanding of the uses of the past in different forms of literature. 18 Many of the sources, especially texts from Late Antiquity, have not been previously examined in the context of Alexander studies. The chronological distribution of my source material is indeed wide: a great part of it dates to the first, second, and fourth centuries AD. There are a few texts originating from the fifth or sixth century AD (see Appendix 2: Chronological Distribution of the Data). This distribution might lead one to the conclusion that Alexander's legacy faded in Late Antiquity. However, it must be remembered that the number of surviving works from this period is relatively small and may represent only a small proportion of what was written. I have analyzed all the literary sources in which I could find depictions of Alexander, his image, his reign, or stories/myths about him. However, I do not attempt to offer an overall analysis of any individual Alexander history. The works of Diodorus, Curtius, Plutarch, Arrian, and Justin/Trogus are considered where relevant to my subject, but an analysis of their corpora as a whole is not made. For example, I will not attempt a comprehensive interpretation of the way the image of Alexander is used in Arrian's work as a whole, even though I use some passages of his work as my source material. Neither do I concentrate on the Alexander Romance tradition, which has no identifiable authorship and can never be said to have a fixed form. It would also require analysis of other medieval texts, and only a few of the known versions belong to the period, which is my primary

Introduction

7

reason for discussing it only to a limited extent. 19 My aim is to examine passages that, rather than giving a coherent story of the Macedonian king, express moral ideas by redeploying the image of Alexander. As a common factor in my approach he plays an instrumental role in the narrative. According to Horace, literature has two principal goals: to instruct (docere) and to delight (delectare). 20 In this study, I concentrate on the past's 'instructive' or teaching aspect and do not pay much attention to the ways in which stories of past events served as entertainment for contemporary audiences. Under scrutiny is the period during which the Roman Empire ruled many parts of Europe and the whole of the Mediterranean world. This is when Greco-Roman cultural hegemony indisputably enabled the rise of Christianity. Since a temporal gap exists between the lost early Hellenistic works and the surviving Roman ones, I see it as reasonable to extend my time frame from the second century BC to the sixth century AD. 21 My study ends with the rise of Islam because it marked a dramatic change in the Roman East and caused a reorientation in its remaining territories, the Byzantine Empire, which in and of itself was a separate continuator of the Classical tradition. My sources include the works of both Latin and Greek writers. Some of the writers were simultaneously what we would call philosophers, historians, poets, satirists, and professional orators, and wrote several works. Cicero, Seneca the Elder, Horace, Seneca the Younger, Lucan, Pliny the Elder, Valerius Maximus, Vitruvius, Silius Italicus, and Juvenal are among the Latin writers of the Late Republic and the early Principate. These authors give us a picture of the literary culture of the Early Empire. The works of these writers were mainly philosophical treatises, epistles, epic poetry, and oratory. Also important are the Roman Latinlanguage historians Livy, Velleius Paterculus, Curtius, and Tacitus. Many of these Latin works were composed in Italy and reflect the mentalities and culture of the senatorial elites. These authors and their works will be introduced in the main chapters of the study. Another group of sources for the period encompassing the reigns of Augustus (27 BC-AD 14) and Marcus Aurelius (161-180) consists of the works of Greek writers. Diodorus, Strabo, Plutarch, Dio Chrysostom, Arrian, Appian, Polyaenus, Lucian, and Maximus of Tyre all came from the Eastern Greek provinces of the Roman Empire. In many cases, they directed their works towards both Greek and Roman audiences. In addition, they represented the Greek upper classes that strived to achieve a prominent social position in the Romanized Hellenistic world. There are also Jewish-Greek writers - Philo of Alexandria and Josephus - whose works I analyze in this study. I also exploit the rich source material of the Christian writers whose works were composed in the Later Roman Empire. Tatian of Syria, Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, and Origen represent Christian writers of apologetics in the second and third centuries. Their works were written in the period when the Christian communities formed a minority in the Roman world. From the fourth to sixth centuries, a vast group of Christian authors and ecclesiastical notables lived at the time when the Christian Church gained a dominant position in the

8

Introduction

Empire. Amo bi us, Eusebius, Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nyssa, John Chrysostom, Jerome, Augustine, Orosius, Palladius, Sozomen, Fulgentius, Procopius, and Ennodius belong to this group. Many of the Christian writers lived and acted in the Eastern part of the Roman Empire. These writers' works include theological treaties, sermons, epistles, and histories. My source material also contains many non-Christian writers of Late Antiquity. Libanius, Himerius, and Themistius were professional orators and philosophers who pursued a career at the imperial court as imperial advisers and officials. Amongst court poets and panegyrists are Claudian,. Ausonius, and several anonymous writers. In addition, valuable information can be extracted from the writings of Emperor Julian. All these writers were members of the Greco-Roman upper classes and directed their works to the members of their contemporary elite circles. The authors themselves, as well as their audience, were educated and well acquainted with the theory and practice of rhetoric. Various definitions for 'rhetoric' have been offered by both Classical and modem writers. One modem definition is George Kennedy's: for him, rhetoric is the 'art of persuasion by words'. At the same time, rhetoric is a phenomenon of human life, language, and history. Kennedy describes the origin of rhetoric as follows: Ultimately what we call 'rhetoric' can be traced back to the natural instinct to survive and control our environment and influence the actions of others in what seems the best interest of ourselves, our families, our social and political groups and our descendants. This can be done by direct action - force, threats, bribes, for example - or it can be done by the use of 'signs' of which the most important are words in speech or writing. 22 From the standpoint of the present study, the different passages about Alexander are regarded as rhetorical actions in which an individual tried to control his environment and to influence the actions of others. I approach my literary sources as different Alexander presentations, or 'uses', constructed more or less deliberately by the authors themselves. In all cases, the given presentation relates to the author's line of reasoning and to the political and cultural context in which the texts were produced. Thus, I consider the literary sources as rhetorical actions and approach them as 'uses of the past'. The authors themselves are to be considered 'users of the past'. The theoretical approach I apply during my close reading of the texts relates to the concept of narrative. Historical narration is not a neutral genre but is deeply impacted by ideological construction. 'Uses of history/Alexander' are often presented in the form of narratives, in which the narrator controls the rhetorical pattern of argumentation. In the works of ancient writers, the form of the narrative and the narrative techniques are in the present. I explore how forms of narrative are connected to the argumentation of the writer. One of the main hypotheses of my study is that each writer's prime concern was to achieve his rhetorical goals through his narrative, which could include the transmission of the desired didactic, moral, apologetic, and ideologically colored messages. 23

Introduction

9

A growing field in Classical scholarship is reception studies. 24 These investigations center on the reader or the receiver. 25 Nevertheless, if we approach specific ancient writers as more or less passive 'receivers' of certain preexisting texts or past historical figures, as is sometimes the case in reception studies, it is easy to forget that these authors often chose certain traditions for ideological purposes. Here, I explore whether the 'users' of the Alexander tradition should be regarded more as active producers of the past than as passive 'receivers' of the previous tradition. My interest is in exploring the extent to which the authors picked up or themselves created the traditions concerning single anecdotes or longer narratives for their rhetorical purposes. These writers were not working like modem historians who are supposed to be faithful to their original sources. We must remember that more often than not, when it comes to literature concerning Alexander we do not know what particular texts the authors read or were influenced by, or how faithfully they followed the previous tradition, but we can distinguish the uses and the functions of their presentations; that is, the themes or arguments they constructed around the material found in the Alexander tradition. When analyzing my sources, I exploit the concepts of intention and context. Quentin Skinner, a historian of the Early Modem and modem periods, stressed the importance of context in determining the meaning of the texts and claimed that the authors' intentions can be extracted from their texts. 26 These intentions can be inferred from 'inside' the text. Skinner applied the speech- act theory, and described his approach as "the idea of treating a text as a form of social action, and seeking to understand it by way of recovering what the writer saw himself as doing in writing it." 27 Later, J. G. A. Pocock, a historian of the laws and institutions of Early Modem and modem England, expounded upon Skinner's thesis. 28 Critics of contextualism questioned the possibility for a historian, or a reader, to get to the texts' 'real' contexts through textual evidence. Instead of intentions, some historians of the premodem periods have therefore encouraged examination of 'the context of the text's production', or approaching the texts as 'sites of articulation' .29 In this study, my aim is to identify these layers while keeping in mind that the modem researcher can never be sure of all the original contexts and intentions behind individual ancient texts. Nonetheless, I would argue that instead of searching for 'definite' intentions behind each passage, it is possible to distinguish some of the different layers of argumentation from the texts and their functions. To bring together intention, context, narrative, and audience, I have developed a specific method or theoretical framework. I have named this theoretical framework a 'process of using the past' and I apply it when approaching ancient texts and their rhetorical production. The first stage of this process consists of an analysis of an author's - a user of the past - rhetorical intentions towards his audience. 30 The second phase of the process examines how the ancient author creates his narrative by choosing and adapting material from the previous literary tradition. Consequently, it is possible to observe how this author collects and arranges his data in a way that supports his arguments. I also take into account the fact that the ancient author could add new material and nuances to the presentation of the past when producing his presentation of it.

10 Introduction The line of argumentation can be read either explicitly or implicitly in the text. Explicit reading concerns texts like letters, where the author reveals why he writes or what his aims and wishes are. However, caution is necessary because the given motives are not always to be trusted, or seen as the only possible motives behind the passage. Implicitly covered private aims and rhetorical goals can be detected to some extent by thinking over what the author picks up, or omits, from the tradition, or how he arranges his presentation and what his argumentative strategy is. The researcher can contextualize a passage by connecting the information he or she has about the writer and his writings, and about the sociopolitical background of the work. It is important, however, to remember that access to the context of the text's production is always incomplete. 31 Information about ancient writers and their works is often meagre. Sometimes we do not even know the author's name or his identity and the date of the literary composition is often disputed. Nevertheless, even in these cases, it is possible to identify - while using the method proposed above - many things about the rhetorical argumentation and the values the anonymous writer defended, justified, or attacked. In the final stage of the 'process of using the past' the text meets its audience. Undoubtedly, ancient writers tried to prepare compositions appealing to their audiences. The community had its values and preconceptions that affected the ways the past was viewed, and thus how certain stories had previously been told. Therefore, the nature of the audience to whom the text was directed exerted an impact on the way the work was constructed. In some cases, although we do not know about the exact contemporary audience to whom a work was addressed, we can, nevertheless, assert certain things about how the author wrote and what issues he considered his listeners and readers to be familiar with. By using the aforementioned comparative method, I will interpret how ancient authors, as 'users of the past', exploited available traditions and how they simultaneously produced new representations of Alexander. 'History/past being used' refers here both to the previous Alexander tradition and to the past which ancient writers created in their texts. The Alexander tradition/ corpus was already rich in the early Hellenistic period. We know that Alexander material of various kinds existed: not just histories but also epic poems and tracts composed by many early Hellenistic writers. 32 These early works formed vast collections of stories, anecdotes, and images of Alexander which provided the foundation for later images of the Macedonian world conqueror or tyrant. I have divided my study according to the different uses of the Alexander tradition and the functions of the literary images Alexander inspired. The different themes concern pedagogy, philosophy, and social life in both the political and religious contexts. In what follows, I shall not proceed to treat each author individually, nor shall I divide the texts into separate sections according to their genres, since these texts contain similar rhetorical elements and uses of Alexander. Therefore, different texts representing different genres are dealt with together alongside the themes and issues of the main chapters. In the second chapter, "Alexander in an empire of Romans, Greeks, and Jews", I examine the role of Alexander in the political discourse of the Empire. The chapter first focuses on Roman

Introduction

11

Latin, Roman Greek, and Jewish patriotic uses of Alexander. Then, I analyze the political milieu of the texts of Late Antiquity. The third chapter, "Alexander as a model of behavior" is devoted to philosophical and pedagogical passages concerning Alexander. This chapter deals with passages written especially by the philosophers and pedagogues of Greco-Roman antiquity. In the fourth chapter, "Alexander in relations of power and influence", I tum to examine the passages where the Roman writers of the Early and Later Empire flattered and persuaded men of higher rank by drawing comparisons and analogies with Alexander. The fifth chapter, entitled "Alexander in Christian apologia", deals mainly with the material written by Christian authors of the early third to sixth century. Although I examine some passages written by Jewish and Christian authors in chapters 2 and 4, the fifth chapter concentrates on the passages directly constructing Christian and Jewish religious and cultural identity. The themes of my work deal with the different values and practices of the Roman elite: proper upbringing and education, social relations (patronage, friendship), participation in public life, and political and religious obligations.

Previous research The objective of identifying the so-called facts in Alexander's story has had a great impact on the way in which scholars have approached the ancient sources. In the traditional approach, scholars have mainly analyzed surviving literary sources written by Diodorus, Curtius, Plutarch, Arrian, and Justin/Trogus. These ancient authors wrote their works 300 or 400 years after Alexander's reign, but allegedly based their works on - now lost - Hellenistic works. 33 By using Quellenforschung, modem historians of Alexander have attempted to track borrowings from the Hellenistic texts. 34 Correspondingly, the scientific approach in commentaries on histories of Alexander has mainly treated the historical reconstruction of his reign, and has approached these works by asking how much these surviving pieces follow the supposed literary sources of the early Hellenistic world. 35 A primary scholarly debate concerns the reliability of different ancient authors who wrote about Alexander. The basic question was (and still is for the scholar studying the historical Alexander) which of the authors should be considered the most trustworthy. Scholarship offers a basic classification of two groups of sources based on the sources they themselves used: first, that of Arrian following mainly Ptolemy and Aristobulus, and second, the so-called 'vulgate' authors, consisting of Diodorus, Curtius, and Justin/Trogus, who mostly followed Cleitarchus. 36 Scholars such as William Tam and N. G. L. Hammond ranked Arrian's Anabasis as the most reliable source on Alexander. According to this view, Arrian was the most trustworthy because he employed the best methods and the most reliable main sources. Arrian's special position was first questioned in the debate concerning the authenticity of the royal ephemerides used by Ptolemy. 37 This critique raised doubts about Arrian's method and his sources. Ernst Badian and A. B. Bosworth, for example, pointed out some contradictions and inaccuracies in Arrian's text and regarded the information found in 'vulgate' authors, such as

12 Introduction Diodorus and Curtius, as often more reliable. 38 Most recent scholarship tends not to recognize Arrian or the so-called 'vulgate' authors as unquestionable authorities, but treats the available sources with caution and episode by episode. 39 In recent years, historians of Alexander have paid more attention to the general political and cultural milieu of the fourth century BC, rather than simply writing straightforward biographies of the king. Instead of concentrating only on Alexander himself, scholars have stressed the role of his father, Philip II, and his mother, Olympias, and have considered the historical development of ancient Macedonia before and after Alexander's reign. 40 Krzysztof Nawotka, Robert Rollinger, and Sabine Muller draw attention to the evidence found in ancient Near Eastern texts and to new archeological findings. 41 Moreover, Hugh Bowden, for example, stresses the importance of giving greater weight to contemporary documents - such as epigraphy - than has been customary. He also believes that studies on Alexander should pay more attention to the Near Eastern context rather than to the Greek or Macedonian context alone. 42 Scholarship dealing with the historical Alexander has met with criticism in two scholarly reviews written by James Davidson (2001) and Mary Beard (2011). Davidson proposed a concept called the Alexanderland which refers to a lack of any fresh approach to old sources. He accused scholars of carrying out uninteresting and unfruitful source-speculation. In the final lines of his review, he remarked: The texts are finally running out and Alexander historians are finally running out of excuses for not doing something more interesting with their subject. 43 In her review, Beard remarked that most modem historians of Alexander are still trying to answer the same traditional range of questions, based on the same approach to the same evidence. At the end of her article she suggested that the Roman context should be further stressed, since ancient writers were bound to have perceived the king's story through a Roman filter, and consequently interpreted and adjusted it in a way characteristic of their own political age. 44 Unfortunately, studies developing these ideas have not yet appeared. I am not stating that attempting to determine what is likely to have happened in the fourth century BC is not a legitimate research topic, but rather that interesting new research directions can be found by asking new questions and by expanding the literary source-material. New questions could, for example, encompass asking why ancient authors wrote about Alexander, and what their interests were in referring to and reinterpreting the story of an individual living several hundred years earlier. Previous research has recognized the contemporary rhetorical layers, but the focus of these studies has primarily revolved around the question of what is fact and what is fiction. 45 Recently, some scholars have given attention to this feature, but it has been relegated to a secondary position - studying the contemporary rhetorical layers does not typically direct research in the way it does in my study. 46 Accordingly, a great proportion of Roman sources, including those written by Christian writers, or texts of Late Antiquity, has not received much attention. 47

Introduction

13

Different literary portraits of Alexander were traditionally considered as particular perspectives on the king. Early 20th-century scholarship distinguished two doctrinal portraits of him: the Peripatetic and the Stoic views. 48 According to this theory, Peripatetic philosophers perceived the Macedonian king as Aristotle's first good student. However, since Alexander killed Callisthenes (who was Aristotle's nephew), the king was perceived in a negative light. On the other hand, the Stoic view promoted Alexander as the root of all evil. The Peripatetic theory was first challenged by Ernst Badian. 49 The thinking behind hostile Stoic views on Alexander was then questioned by J. Rufus Fear (1974). More recently, scholars simply reject the dichotomy between Peripatetic and Stoic views, and divide different images of the king into 'positive' or 'negative' impressions of him. 50 In certain analyses the portraits of Alexander in ancient texts have not been considered views but images. For example, Petre Ceau~escu (1974), Jacob Isager (1993), and Claude Mosse (2001) have argued that the different portraits of Alexander in art and literature are constructed images. 51 These images have been regarded by scholars as positive/favorable or negative/hostile images of the king. Although these studies dealt with images of Alexander and their uses, their general approach was descriptive. 52 Andrew Stewart's Faces of power -Alexanders image and Hellenistic politics (1993) employed visual sources, frescoes, sculptures, and coins as primary source material. Stewart perceived the sources as several representations of Alexander made in a cultural context, rather than as works depicting the historical Alexander. In his opinion, moreover, literary sources should be approached as various representations of Alexander, although he did not actually examine literature himself. 53 More recently, Diana Spencer and Sulochana Asirvatham have studied the reception of Alexander in Roman Latin and Greek literature. Their point of view is above all literary. The most important of these, I would argue, is Diana Spencer's Roman Alexander (2002). According to Spencer, detecting the 'real' Alexander is not essential. Instead she approaches the Alexander narratives as 'stories'. The significance of Spencer's research lies in the fact that she is not exploring the historical Alexander, but is more concerned with how the Macedonian king lived on in Roman cultural memory. Spencer investigates the key elements in the story of Alexander that were seen, for the first time, as a Roman story which was constructed and developed during the Roman domination of the Mediterranean world. 54 Another important aspect of her study is that, for the first time, she considers the 'shorter' and minor Latin passages ref erring to Alexander alongside longer accounts. Spencer concentrates on literary themes and tries to distinguish cultural readings of the text. In contrast to my research, however, she is not interested in analyzing the different thematic 'uses' of Alexander or their philosophical, social, political, and religious functions. Instead, Spencer examines the sources on either 'thinking about or with Alexander' or the 'Roman fascination with Alexander' - how Romans constructed an image of themselves more or less collectively and subconsciously. 55 For my study, Spencer's Roman Alexander is a work of fundamental importance, since it does not explore the historical

14 Introduction Alexander but the role of his image in Roman literature and culture. 56 Spencer's other studies concerning the Roman reception of Alexander follow the main lines of her monograph concentrating on certain authors or literary themes or the popularity of Alexander in Roman culture. 57 Sulochana Asirvatham studies the reception of Alexander and the ancient Macedonians in the Second Sophistic and in the various versions of the Alexander Romance. 58 Her approach, however, also concentrates on the writers' literary themes and matters of language, and thus not mainly on the ideological uses of Alexander in the Greco-Roman world. As in the case of Spencer, my present study differs from Asirvatham's studies as it concentrates on the rhetoric behind different portrayals of Alexander, and not only on the Greco-Roman writers of the Early Empire but also on other periods of antiquity. 59 There is growing interest in studies on medieval literature concerned with Alexander's Nachleben. George Cary's survey, The medieval Alexander (1956), was the first investigation into the large number of different writings dating from Late Antiquity to the late Middle Ages. It took decades for interested scholars to further examine the vast amount of literature concerning Alexander in medieval and Early Modem Europe summarized in Cary's monograph. 60 Richard Stoneman (1994, 2008) has been a pioneer in studying various versions of the Alexander Romance. He has examined how the many Alexander legends were born and transported to the Mediterranean and to the Near Eastern worlds. His viewpoint is that the many legends, based on the Alexander Romance, were told and retold because of the fascinating depiction of Alexander as a Christ-like 'everyman' .61 A major contribution to research on the Nachleben and reception of Alexander in the age of Enlightenment is Pierre Briant's The first European - A history of Alexander in the age of empire (2017). In this work, Briant examines images of Alexander created in 18th- and 19th-century literature. While Briant explores European intellectuals' perceptions of Alexander or their attempts at finding the original Hellenistic sources, he also gives attention to the uses of Alexander in debates on European imperialism, nationalism, and contemporary views of the Ottoman Empire as 'the Other'. Briant's approach here is of considerable interest since it places works in their contemporary context, and explores the functions that Alexander the Great had for writers of the Enlightenment period. This is an approach that I also use here in the context of antiquity. Research on Alexander's Nachleben, and Briant's study, in particular, concentrate on a period after the figure of Alexander had been used in different ideological contexts for more than 1000 years. 62 As noted above, the purpose of my research is to study the function of the literary tradition surrounding his persona in the texts of Classical and post-Classical writers: in other words, I concentrate on the texts which made a serious impact on the way in which the figure of Alexander was reused in the Middle Ages and in the age of Enlightenment. By the time Machiavelli or Montesquieu wrote about Alexander, stories about the Macedonian world conqueror had already been widely used by ancient writers. For this study, research into Alexander's Nachleben in medieval and Early Modem Europe is a useful reference point since it does not search for the historical

Introduction

l5

Alexander but rather focuses on his role in later literature. However, scholars (except Briant) have been more interested in how Alexander was remembered, or in how his legacy lived on through the Middle Ages as a literary theme, than in investigating the actual uses of his image. Scholarship on the use of history has mainly concentrated on the political history of the 20th century. It treats matters such as how certain politicians or regimes utilized history in their official policy and propaganda, and not so much ancient history. 63 However, this scholarship is a useful tool for the ancient historian approaching the uses of history in the Roman world since it offers ways to understand the role of history in human culture and societies. 64 Margaret MacMillan's Dangerous games - the uses and abuses of history (2009) approaches the uses and abuses of history from the general perspective of the past and its place in human lives. 65 Here, MacMillan deals with the general passion for the past and with how history responds to a variety of human needs. She takes her examples from various events in 20th-century history, from the First World War to the 2003 Iraq War. Most significantly, she explores uses of the past within the context of identity, nationalism, and political rhetoric. The uses of the past in premodem societies have received some attention in previous scholarship, and especially in The uses of the past in the early Middle Ages (2000), edited by Yitzhak Hen and Matthew Innes, and in The uses of history in Early Modern England (2006), edited by Paulina Kewes. Both these works claim both to be the first volumes devoted to the theme and to make a significant contribution to our understanding of the role of the past within early medieval and Early Modem England. These volumes treat the matter across a vast range of sources. Hen and Innes' volume employs canon law, hagiography, and Carolingian historiography as its sources, whereas the Kewes collection draws from historical dramas, poems, novels, and Church and national histories of 16th-and 17th-century literature. Although they exploit a large amount of evidence, many of the articles reveal important aspects of the ways in which Protestants and Catholics composed different histories of the Reformation and their attitudes towards the contemporary political actors. However, neither of these studies provided an overall picture, or any categorization of the uses of the past and its functions. Instead they concentrate on themes such as the origins of myths, public memory in the early Middle Ages, or the nature of history-writing and other literary categories in Early Modem England. In the field of Classical scholarship, some volumes explore the complex roles the past played in antiquity. Reading the past in Late Antiquity (1990), edited by Graeme Clarke, deals not only with the uses of history in different genres but also with views and models of the past in the writings of Ammianus Marcellinus, John Malalas, and Philostorgius in Late Antiquity. Among the 14 articles, Nixon's "The use of the past by the Gallic panegyrists" comes closest to my own approach, since it concentrates on how historical exempla were used in the panegyrics of Late Antiquity, which also forms a topic of discussion in this study. Attitudes towards the past in antiquity: Creating identities (2014), edited by Brita Alroth and Charlotte Scheffer, examines texts such as funerary inscriptions

16 Introduction and literature, but also archaeological remains such as pottery, ranging from prehistory to Late Antiquity. The focus of the articles on the archeological and epigraphic evidence differentiates them from research carried out in this present study. Another recent volume, Valuing the past in the Greco-Roman world (2014), edited by James Ker and Christoph Pieper, examines how the ancient past was valued (or devalued) from 400 BC to AD 100. The volume is based on the analysis of literary evidence. In the introductory chapter, the authors examine the ways in which interest in the past was manifest in the works of authors such as Aulus Gellius and Varro. Amongst these articles, it is Maaike Leemreize's "The Egyptian past in the Roman past" which comes closest to my research approach. It examines what functions the Egyptian past has in Roman Imperial literature. She distinguishes three functions for the Egyptian past - admiration, emulation, and incorporation - and argues that Roman appropriations of Egyptian monuments were undertaken to confirm Rome's achievements. In a similar way, I propose to examine the functions and ideological role of the remote past personified by the stories of Alexander. The similarities between my study and the aforementioned collections of essays lie in the fact that all literary genres are studied together in this analysis of the different uses of history and of the role of the past in shaping the present. But, unlike those works, my study offers a systematic analysis of a certain set of sources, while more strictly exploring the ideological uses and functions of the past. 66 Even though the concept of the use of history has not been much explored by scholars of Classical literature, some studies on political propaganda, reception, and classical rhetoric and historiography - themes that touch upon using the past generally - do nevertheless exist. 67 Classical rhetoric had an effect on the ways in which the past was exploited in Classical and post-Classical literature. Previous scholarship has often approached rhetoric and the theory of rhetoric as two separate phenomena, with research centered on ancient views of the theory of rhetoric. The influence of rhetoric on other literary genres and its cultural significance in Greco-Roman society was long left aside. 68 Recently, however, scholars of Classical rhetoric have become increasingly interested in the rhetorical aspects of ancient literature, including historiography, epistolography, philosophical prose, drama, biography, and poetry. 69 In these studies, researchers have concentrated on the rhetorical style or the influence of rhetorical theory in a particular genre or on a particular author. However, it is arguable that scholars who often concentrate on the formal or aesthetic parts of Classical literature have not given much attention to the authors' rhetorical strivings or to the sociopolitical context of the work, although those aims and purposes naturally controlled the ways ancient historians, philosophers, poets, and orators exploited their rhetorical education. Accordingly, my study examines the rhetorical aspects of the texts as a means of persuasion and a strategy for convincing, blaming, and defending. I concentrate on aspects that are often left aside in the study of Classical rhetoric. In other words, I explore how the authors' goals/intentions (not the theory of rhetoric or their rhetorical techniques) impacted on the ways in which the past was used as an argumentative strategy.

Introduction

l7

Another important topic of research related to my study is exemplarity and the exemplum-tradition. According to Classical rhetorical theory, exempla (exemplum, napa8c:tyµa, Tono~) were recognized as argumentative proofs in oral and literary presentations. 70 An exemplum could refer to a mythological or historical figure and his/her famous deeds. In earlier research, interest in studying historical exempla in Roman culture and society focused on its relation to the concept of mos maiorum. 71 Accordingly, exempla studies in Classical scholarship have tended to focus on a particular writer or his works, and its exempla are often condensed into catalogue form, so that the question is rarely approached from a wider perspective. 72 The historical examples which have been studied are thus treated in a simplified way, by examining the forms of exempla in relation to the theory of rhetoric or by dividing different exempla into positive and negative categories. Nevertheless, some progress on the topic was made in Matthew B. Roller's article "Exemplarity in Roman culture: The cases of Horatius Cocles and Cloelia" (2004). Roller analyzes Horatius and Cloelia in a discourse of exemplarity. 73 Even though he still adheres to divisions, such as whether Horatius' and Cloelia's examples were 'illustrative' or 'injunctive' types of exempla, Roller discusses aspects of Roman historical consciousness and their relation to the production of exemplary discourse. 74 In this study, my premise is that exempla should be connected to the wider concept of the use of the past in Classical literary culture and rhetorical argumentation. Accordingly, this study offers a fresh approach to the study of historical exempla, since it does not examine forms or theories of exempla but instead explores how and why ancient writers referred to stories of the past. A number of studies also deal with the role and legacy of Hannibal and Elagabalus in Roman literature. Even though half of Martijn Icks' monograph, The crimes of Elagabalus - the life and legacy of Rome s decadent boy emperor (2011 ), concentrates on 'what happened' under Elagabalus, the second half of the book deals with the emperor's fictional afterlife. Icks' volume addresses the question of what Elagabalus symbolized and what ideas his figure supported in the literature and art of the 18th and 19th centuries. Claire Stocks' The Roman Hannibal - Remembering the Enemy in Silius Italicus 'Punica (2014) explores Hannibal's afterlife in Roman literature, including not only epic but also historiography, biography, oratory, and poetry. Stocks analyzes the different epithets and portraits attributed to the Carthaginian and discusses the emergence of a Roman Hannibal, which she sees as 'a product of Rome's continual process of re-evaluation and re-engagement' .75 Stocks admits that the Roman Hannibal is a product of each individual author, but she is more interested in tracing aspects of the Roman Hannibal evident in literature dating after Polybius' time. 76 In her study, Stocks approaches the sources as repetitions and refashionings of Hannibal's mythical status in the literature of Rome. Both Icks and Stocks offer a welcome approach to the scholarship that often concentrates on seeking to differentiate fact from fiction. The present study shares the same interest in analyzing the status of a historical figure and his use in textual imagery.

18 Introduction

Setting the scene: the anatomy of Alexander's greatness In 335 BC, when Alexander III was 21 and preparing for his Persian campaign, there were reports of a divine omen. A statue of the poet Orpheus in Pieria was reported as sweating continuously. 77 The seer Aristander of Telmessus, formerly the chief seer of Philip II and soon to become Alexander's favorite interpreter of omens, construed it as a sign of epic victories in the near future: singers of epic tales would have plenty of work composing verses celebrating Alexander's deeds. The gods had already foreseen the future and now sent a sign that the young king would be renowned among later generations. Regardless of whether this incident actually occurred, Alexander's campaign undoubtedly aroused anticipation and excitement. However, as Alexander crossed into Asia with his army in spring 334 BC, it is unlikely that anyone was able to predict that the Macedonian army would reach the edge of the known world and that Alexander would become one of the greatest legends and icons in world history. It was to be a stunning achievement, in which Alexander would win unprecedented glory. One could argue that the appeal of Alexander for his contemporaries and subsequent generations was quite simply his unparalleled success, especially when achieved by one so young. 78 However, his sudden demise added a vital ingredient to the myth. Few, if anyone, could predict that the young world conqueror, who had already achieved the status of a semidivine figure, would suddenly die at the peak of his success, and that his great empire would fragment into several smaller kingdoms. However, the king's fame evidently increased as a result of his sudden and tragic death at the age of only 32 years and 8 months. This storyline of a young hero dying at the peak of his success has continued to fascinate storytellers throughout history. Modern popular culture has made no exception: we tend to heroize athletes, actors, and singers whose lives follow the same pattern - success at a young age, death at the peak of their success, and the subsequent achievement of legendary status. In a way the myth of the Macedonian Alexander was a predecessor to the Western archetype of a heroic youth. Even though some Classical authors portray Alexander as an exceptional and talented individual, his success depended mostly on factors he was unable to influence. First, the historical Alexander was born into a family that had prepared the way for success. He was born in 356 BC in the city of Pella as the son of the most successful Argead monarch up to that point, Philip II. Philip had already made the major Greek city-states subject to him. As we know, Alexander inherited from his father both the idea to conquer Achaemenid Persia and the administration and army to run a successful campaign. Philip had created the most efficient army up to that point in the ancient world, with first-class battle-hardened troops and officers of high caliber, which stood Alexander in good stead in his war against Persia. 79 In addition, there were no rivals for the throne when Philip died by assassination, since Alexander's half-brother Arrhidaeus, two years his senior, was mentally ill. So, it was Alexander who, after dealing firmly with revolts in the Balkans and Greece, led his Greco-Macedonian troops in person on a war of conquest in which he repeatedly defeated his enemies. Despite several battlefield

Introduction

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wounds and conspiracies against his life, he survived to the point where his army refused to go further into the unknown and returned to Persia, only to die there. Alexander's whole life became a myth. It was not just one battle, not just one heroic deed. From cradle to grave, his life is full of heroic, not to say controversial, events. How did it happen? Besides being successful in war and taking full advantage of the favorable circumstances he was born into, Alexander was presumably aware that his accomplishments needed to be widely celebrated if he was to take full advantage of them. He created his own myth by ensuring that his accomplishments were recorded for posterity. He employed Aristotle's nephew Callisthenes as his court historian to write down the events of the Persian expedition in a way that cast a favorable light on his actions. 80 He also had artists portray him as a semidivine hero equal to Heracles and the heroes of Homeric epic. 81 According to one anecdote, which will be discussed in chapter 4, Alexander desired eternal fame, yearning for poets like Homer to write about his deeds. Several anecdotes portray him as a person who really wanted to be remembered and praised by later generations. After his death, Alexander's contemporaries, like the general and future king, Ptolemy, the architect Aristobulus, the admiral Nearchus, and the philosopher Onesicritus, who knew him personally, immediately idealized the Macedonian conqueror and his persona. 82 Evidently, these authors stressed their own part in the grand story when describing the events and the king's persona. They used history to justify the present they were creating. Sadly, these works are lost and we have no direct access to them. However, they were copied and widely read in the Hellenistic world, thus proclaiming Alexander's deeds throughout the Mediterranean. In addition, under the Hellenistic monarchies the Ptolemaic, Seleucid, and Antigonid rulers identified themselves with Alexander. 83 This is emphasized in the several coins minted by Hellenistic monarchs that have heroic portraits of Alexander as Zeus Ammon bearing the horns of a ram, or wearing a helmet covered by a panther skin, Dionysius' sacred animal, as well as an elephant's hide, referring to the king's legendary Indian campaign. These portraits were spread through commerce and made Alexander known as a superhuman figure and idol throughout the Hellenistic world and beyond. Most important for Alexander's legacy was its adoption by a new Mediterranean imperial power, Rome. The Romans used and were inspired by Alexander's story. When Alexander won his battles against Darius in 333 and 331 BC the news undoubtedly spread to Italy. The various peoples dwelling in Italy, including Greeks, Etruscans, Latins (including the Romans), Volsci, Oscans, Samnites, Celts, and Ligures heard tidings that the vast land of Persia had a new Macedonian master. Apulian vases that portray Alexander charging on horseback on the left and Darius standing in his chariot have been dated to c. 330 BC. These are the earliest visual portraits of Alexander's campaign to survive and it is interesting that they were found on Italian soil. 84 As we know, Alexander never went to Italy, but according to one tradition, he was planning to conquer it and other western lands. This tradition may have arisen because his uncle, Alexander I of Epirus, also known as Alexander of Molossus / the Molossian (370-331 BC), was

20

Introduction

campaigning in Italy while the Persian conquest was occurring. Alexander of Molossus went to help the Greek colony of Taras (mod. Tarentum) in their war against the Lucanians and Bruttii. He made a treaty with the Romans but after victorious battles against the Lucanians he died at the battle of Pandosia in 331 BC. Some 50 years later, Alexander's cousin Pyrrhus of Epirus fought against the Romans themselves. In the aftermath of this war Pyrrhus was forced to leave Italy. In a sense, when the Romans met Pyrrhus on the battlefield, they encountered Alexander's legacy. Alexander's imperialism offered the Romans, who promoted martial values, something to identify with. The lesson of Alexander's successful imperialism for Republican Rome was that empires could be created by great men and glory could be won by great victories over 'barbarians'. When the Romans conquered Greek city-states and Hellenistic monarchies, they encountered lands where the memory of Alexander was stronger than in Italy, where he never ventured. During the second and first centuries BC, Rome conquered cities like Athens, Corinth, Ilium, Tyre, Sidon, Jerusalem, and Alexandria in Egypt. Alexander had personally visited or even founded these cities, which undoubtedly added to his legacy in the collective memory of them. For example, the inhabitants of Ilium could have told their versions of how the king visited the tomb of Achilles and paid homage to Homeric heroes. 85 Also, priests serving in the temple of Athena might have shown the weapons and armor that Alexander left as a votive offering. 86 The people of Ilium could say to visitors "Alexander was once here". When the Romans conquered Egypt, they found a place where Alexander was worshipped both as the founder of the city of Alexandria and the first king of the Ptolemaic dynasty. Inhabitants of Alexandria could even have boasted that "Alexander is here" since his embalmed body was kept in a mausoleum in a sarcophagus that was one the most visited sites in the city. After Octavian's victory over Antony and Cleopatra's troops in the naval battle

Figure 1.1 Apulian amphora, ea. 330-320 BC, red-figure pottery from Ruvo in Magna Graecia. It is a detail showing a battle scene between Alexander and Darius. With the permission of the Ministero dei Beni e delle Attivita Culturali e del Turismo - Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli.

Introduction

21

of Actium in 31 BC, there was no longer a Ptolemaic dynasty to venerate Alexander as a god of a state cult, but veneration of Alexander's divine figure did not end. The new rulers of Egypt maintained the positive view of Alexander even though they had removed the Ptolemies. For example, in his speech delivered in Greek after conquering the city of Alexandria, Octavian said that the Romans had decided to spare the city because Alexander was its founder. 87 Once Alexander's memory had become Roman 'property', they continued to cherish it. The concept of imitatio Alexandri (imitation of Alexander) loomed large in Roman thinking (and retained its importance even in medieval and Early Modem Europe). 88 Just as imitatio Christi became a dominant model for an apostolic way of life after the conversion of the Roman Empire and then Europe, so imitatio Alexandri became a model for Western imperialists. The Roman elite are said to have worshipped Alexander's persona. This theme of great men venerating, emulating, and measuring themselves against Alexander is recurrent in Greco-Roman literature and reflected genuine historical admiration and the self-image of the rulers and warlords. An important factor in the growing popularity of Alexander imitation in Rome was the political and ideological change when the Republic gave way to one-man rule. 89 In contrast to the Republican regime under which the senate and magistrates governed the state, in the last century BC Rome increasingly came under the control of powerful military leaders like Sulla, Pompey, Julius Caesar, Mark Antony, and, ultimately, Octavian, the first emperor. These military leaders saw Alexander as their role model. According to one famous anecdote, after reading the exploits of Alexander (or after seeing the statue of the Macedonian king according to a second version), Julius Caesar burst into tears, overcome by the realization that by his age Alexander had already conquered the Persian Empire, whereas he himself had yet to accomplish anything. 90 The anecdote may be unhistorical, but it emphasizes the admiration the Romans had for Alexander. 91 Even after he achieved his conquest of Gaul and defeated Pompey, the great Julius Caesar was presented as the successor to a 'greater' predecessor, Alexander. Several Roman emperors, including Octavian/Augustus, Caligula, Nero, Trajan, Caracalla, Constantius, and Julian were mentioned in connection with Alexander. Noble Romans, not only emperors but the elite of both the Republican and Imperial eras, are said to have had costumes and objects that belonged to Alexander, or even wore costumes with Alexander's image. Perhaps these objects were considered talismans. 92 In some contexts, this admiration approached 'Alexander mania', which existed in various forms throughout the history of the Empire. Pompey used the epithet 'Great' and when appearing in public attempted to appear as Alexander did in his images: he is also said to have worn Alexander's cloak. 93 Octavian/ Augustus is said to have used a signet ring that had Alexander's image on it, 94 so that both official and private documents had an image associating him with Alexander. Caligula is said to have taken Alexander's breastplate from his tomb. 95 Emperor Caracalla (198-217), sometimes depicted as the greatest 'fan' of the Macedonian king, is said to have drunk his wine from goblets (supposedly) used by Alexander and ordered statues and paintings of his hero. 96 There are gold

22

Introduction

medallions from Aboukir that have busts of Caracalla carrying a shield depicting Alexander. 97 About 150 years after Caracalla's reign, Emperor Julian (361-363) was also labelled by some authors as obsessed with Alexander. 98 Famous Romans are said to have visited Alexander's monumental tomb (the Serna or Soma) and sarcophagus in Alexandria. There Julius Caesar, Octavian, and Caracalla became emotional in the presence of the corpse of their hero and venerated Alexander's memory with religious piety. 99 Invented or not, such anecdotes related by Roman authors still demonstrate Alexander's significance in the Roman cultural milieu. In Rome itself, Roman emperors initiated the construction of massive public buildings that showed imitation of Alexander. Augustus' Mausoleum shares similarities physically, politically, and symbolically with Alexander's tomb in Alexandria, which presumably inspired him to build his monumental tomb. 100 Portraits like the massive Alexander mosaic underline the popularity of Alexander's heroic exploits and his role as an example for the Roman upper classes. 101 It was not only those who saw themselves as conquerors who identified themselves with Alexander. Marcus Tullius Cicero, more of whose works have survived than of any other Classical author, was fascinated by Alexander. In one of his earliest letters to Atticus, Cicero relates his experiences on the frontier near Parthia: "For a few days we were encamped on the very spot which Alexander had occupied against Darius at Issus, a commander not a little superior to either you or me!" 102 The site where Alexander had won the battle against Darius made a deep impression on Cicero, even if there is a hint of self-mockery in his comparison with himself and his friend. Some 400 years after Cicero's visit to the battle site of Issus, the Latin historian Ammianus Marcellinus, probably without a second thought, turned to a comparison with Alexander's battle against Darius in his account of the battle at Issus in 194, between Pescennius Niger and Septimus Severns' general Anullinus, after which Pescennius fled from the battlefield only to be killed later. 103 It seems that in the Roman world Alexander was 'known by all'. Even today, Alexander is the first person with the epithet 'Great' who comes to mind. The Roman playwright Plautus ( c. 254-184 BC), whose works are among the earliest Latin literature to have survived in their entirety, is the first extant author to give Alexander the cognomen 'Great'. Since almost all Hellenistic literature - which must have made multiple references to Alexander - is lost, we cannot be sure whether the Greeks used this epithet for Alexander. In Plautus' Mastel/aria (The haunted house), the epithet relates to Alexander's mighty deeds: "They say the great Alexander and Agathocles were a pair that did mighty big things. How about myself, for a third, with the immortal deeds I'm doing, singlehanded?" 104 Afterwards, Roman authors of the Empire used this epithet widely, thus accentuating the extraordinary status of Alexander, a status which other monarchs have been unable to attain since. 105 In Classical and post-Classical literature, Alexander is sometimes referred to anonymously, called simply 'great king', 'great man', 'the bold leader of the Macedonians', or 'the Pellean leader'. 106 All these terms illustrate the great respect the king enjoyed generally in the Mediterranean world. When a ruler was 'great' but

Introduction

23

unnamed, it was taken for granted that the reference was to Alexander. In critical contexts, authors could refer to Alexander as 'a young man' (adulescens, iuvenis), or 'fortunate freebooter' (felix praedo). 107 In all these instances, authors assume that the various epithets and 'nicknames' of Alexander were widely known to their audience. Since everybody already knows the name 'Alexander', the authors choose to use well-known epithets and nicknames for Alexander as rhetorical tools to underline his characteristics. Because Roman writers turned to Alexander's persona and deeds repeatedly, his name and deeds became so familiar that his story and fame survived even the collapse of their empire.

Notes 1 For studies of Stone's film and its reception, see Baynham 2009b; Cartledge 2010. For a study of Alexander in heavy metal, see Djurslev 2015. 2 Jaikumar 2006, 206,215. The recent Indian TV series Porus (2017) uses the Macedonian conqueror to represent a foreign invader who fights heroic Indians (represented by Porns), a theme that suits contemporary Indian nationalism. 3 For a good introduction to recent controversies, see Danforth 2010, 572-598. See also Danforth 1995. In June 2018, Macedonia and Greece signed an agreement to change the country name to "Republic of North Macedonia" if a national referendum and legislation there were to be successful: if the name is changed in this way, it amounts to an agreement to share the legacy. 4 For a detailed survey of Alexander's significance in British imperialism in Afghanistan and India, see Hagerman 2009. For a discussion of Alexander's reception in 15th- and 16th-century Portugal and Spain, see Barleta 2010. 5 The Latin dictum comes from Cic. De Or. 2.36. The idea itself already existed in Greek historiography, as in the work of the Greek historian Polybius. 6 For this change as a part of modernization, see Koselleck 2004. 7 An example of this kind of approach is Schafer 2007, which concentrates on extracting useful knowledge from history through 'real-world experiments' and 'natural experiments'. 8 Diamond 2005, 3. 9 For a discussion of public and popular histories, see Kalela 2011, 63-70; De Groot 2012. 10 Cf. Tac. Ag. 1. Ferrario 2014 offers a survey of the development of the individual in Greek thought, which she traces back to fifth-century Athens. The significance of Miltiades, Callimachus, and Themistocles was already stressed in the Athenian past, but the culmination of the "great man" concept was the idealization of Alexander the Great. 11 For studies of the importance of such religious figures, see, for example, Ziolkowski 2016 on the uses of Moses. 12 Alexander's contemporaries wrote many works on his career which have not survived (Plut. Alex. 46. l ). After Alexander, people were already seeing his conquests as a watershed, the world as pre- and post-Alexander. For a detailed discussion on Alexander's fame, see esp. Braudy 1986, 32-51. 13 In this study, the concept of identity refers to the fashioning of a collective sense of self, especially by creating divisions between us and the other, and writing about the past in a way that forms groups and constructs identities. This identity formation is to be seen as an ongoing process which uses multiple expressions and ways to construct cultural, national, or group identities. Cf. Gruen 2011, 1-2. For the construction of cultural identities in the ancient world, see Gruen 2011 and Huskinson

24

14

15

16 17 18

19

20 21

22 23

24

Introduction 2000. Cartledge 2002 discusses identity-making among the Greeks, and Dench 2005 concentrates on Roman identity construction. In previous scholarship, the concept of 'using history/the past' appears in the context of the "Why history?" question: why history as a discipline should be studied and taught in modern academia. For an illustration of this approach, see Stricker 1992. In the area of environmental history, some studies focus on how environmental histories should be used for understanding and managing ecosystems, see esp. Jameson 1959; Swetnam and Allen 1999. Stone 2014 proposes that from the 14th century onwards, attempts to establish the true history of Alexander became more prevalent, and that writers therefore attempted to follow more reliable sources than the traditions of the Alexander Romance when writing about him. Briant 2017 shows that the search for the historical Alexander was a preoccupation in 18th-century Europe. Briant's massive analysis questions the view that the German historian Johann Gustav Droysen's (1808-1884) Geschichte Alexanders des Grossen (1833) was the first serious attempt to trace the historical Alexander, pointing out that before Droysen there were several attempts by Enlightenment intellectuals to write 'truthful' accounts of Alexander's reign. As an example, Briant mentions Baron de Saint Croix's (1746-1809) work Examen critique des anciens historiens d'Alexandre le Grand (1775). Except Diana Spencer's Roman Alexander and the articles written by Sulochana Asirvatham. See below on pages 13-14. See my discussion of the earlier research on Alexander below. For studies of a particular genre, see Stowers 1986; Mossman 2006; Foles 2005. It should be remembered that classifying ancient works according to our definitions of literary genres is problematic, since ancient writers would have used different classifications. For example, the ancient genre of historiography differs significantly from modem history-writing. Fox 2007, 378-379. The earliest datable Greek version of the Romance comes from the third or fourth century AD. The Jewish gamma recension version of the Greek Alexander Romance differs most radically from other versions. In addition, there is a Latin translation of the Greek version (fourth century AD) and an Armenian version (fifth century AD). For different versions of the Alexander Romance, see Stoneman 1991, 28-32; 2008, 231-245. On pages 219-220, I briefly discuss the circulation of the stories of Alexander appearing in the Romance. Hor. Ars P. 1.333-334. The famous Athenian orator Demosthenes (384-322 BC) and Isocrates belong to the group of rare contemporary writers whose short Alexander references have survived. Among later Hellenistic writers, Polybius has a couple of short passages concerning Alexander, but, as we know, the vast majority of the Hellenistic material did not survive to our modern era. For Polybius' passages concerning Alexander histories, see esp. Billows 2000. Kennedy 1994, 3. Arthur Danto's idea that 'History tells stories' is important. This anti-Annalistes' (like Paul Ricouer) approach was examined later by Hayden White 1973; 1987, who argued that history-writing is largely about writing narratives and therefore belongs more to a genre of literature and rhetoric than science. The debate about history itself, whether history-writing is to be considered as fiction or as rhetoric, would probably seem odd to the ancients, since they would not have recognized our distinctions. Cf. Cic. Leg. 1.5. Cicero, for instance, defines writing history as opus oratorium (rhetorical work). Cf. Bowersock 1994, 12. For the theory of reception in the context of the Classical world, see esp. Martindale & Thomas 2006; Hardwick & Stray 2011; Kallendorf2011. A major contribution to Classical reception studies is The Classical Tradition encyclopedia, Grafton, Most, and Settis 2010. Sometimes reception is replaced by concepts of 'tradition' or 'heritage', cf. Goldhill 2002, 297 and Hall 2004, 51-89.

Introduction 25 26 27 28 29 30

31 32 33 34

35

36

37

38

39

40 41 42 43 44 45 46

25

Martindale 2006, 19. Skinner 1975, 212. Cf. Clark 2004, 138. Skinner 1975, 212. Ibid. 140. Pocock 1987, 24-25. Eley 1990, 77-78; Spiegel 1990, 77-78. See also Clark 2004, 162-163. In the Classical world, oral culture was strong. Works of literature like historiography were meant for public reading, in which a heterogeneous public could participate. A small percentage of the population, those who had received regular grammatical and rhetorical education, could also read historiography. Historical works were never school books in the modern sense. Nicolai 2007, 23. Innes 2000, 4. Cf. Plut. Alex. 46. l. For the lost histories of Alexander the Great, see Pearson 1960; Zambrini 2007. The fragments of the early Alexander historians, collected from the texts of later Roman authors, are included in Die Fragmente der Griechischen Historiker edited by F. Jacoby. Many of the fragments are translated in Robinson 1953. The tendency to search out the words of contemporary writers is attested by the way in which Alexander scholars sometimes refer directly to these Hellenistic writers and their signs in Jacoby. There are a great number of studies dealing with certain episodes of the king's life, the literary sources, and their reliability. Here, I give only a few of the most important studies. Tam 1948; Briant 1974; Lauffer 1978; Hammond 1981; Bosworth 1988a; 1988b; Heckel 2008; Badian 2013. For the commentaries, see esp. Hamilton 1969 (commentary on Plutarch's Alexander); Bosworth 1980; 1995 (commentary on Arrian's Anabasis in two volumes); Atkinson 1980; 1994; 2009 (commentary on Curtius in three volumes); Yardley & Heckel 1997 (commentary on Justin's Epitome of Pompeius Trogus). The theory concerning the 'vulgate' authors was first made developed by E. Schwartz and F. Jacoby. It was famously criticized by Tarn 1948, who considered it as oversimplifying and not paying attention to the existing differences in the three authors' works. Later, Goukowsky and Atkinson showed that Cleitarchus was not the 'only' source for Diodoms and Curtius, but that these two writers composed their narratives based on several previous works. It was thought that Ptolemy had access to Alexander's royal archives kept in Alexandria, and that therefore his contemporary work contained the most reliable material. Pearson 1954 first rejected this idea, arguing that even if the ephemerides were accepted as authentic, their information would have contained only the last events of Alexander's career, and that there never were any diary-like notes concerning the whole expedition that were used by Ptolemy. Hamilton 1983, 1-3. For the critique of Arrian by Bosworth, see esp. Bosworth 1976. Interestingly, Bosworth admits in a later article that he might have underestimated Arrian as an uncritical enthusiast for Alexander. See Bosworth 2007, 452. Cf. Mosse 2004, 200; Heckel 2008, 10-12; Nawotka 2010, x. Recently Bowden 2014a, 5, writes that despite decades of research, we still have no reliable method for determining which accounts can be trusted. For Philip II, see Worthington 2008, 2014. For Olympias and Macedonian women at the court, see Camey 2000, 2006. For the Macedonian background, see Thomas 2006. See esp. Thomas 2007; Nawotka 2010; Rollinger 2013; Muller 2014. Bowden 2014a, 5-9. For the lack of the Near Eastern context in recent books about Alexander, see Bowden 2014b, 136-148. Davidson 2001, 7. Beard 2011, 37. For example, in the studies mentioned in note 35. Cf. Bowden's 2013 article onproskynesis and Alexander, in which the contemporary concerns are briefly referred to but dealt with only cursorily (Bowden 2013, 76). In

26

47

48 49 50

51

52

53 54 55 56 57

58 59

60

61 62 63

Introduction his biography, N awotka 2010 at times refers to the different anecdotes, but his interest is in offering a reliable picture of the historical Alexander. For a rare treatment of Alexander in the literature of Late Antiquity, see Dopp 1999. However, this descriptive article is a short survey on the topic and does not contain all the relevant passages. See also Stoneman 2004, who introduces some texts concerning Alexander (like the Jtinerarium Alexandri) written in Late Antiquity. Hamilton 1969, lx - lxi; Stewart 1993, 14-15. Badian 1958, 144-147. In Spencer 2006, 90, it is expressed directly: "There was no consistent tradition of Stoic hostility to Alexander." Cf. Stoneman 2003, 328-329, 336; Burliga 2013, 58-62 convincingly argues against the common hostile Peripatetic or Stoic view of Alexander, and suggests that instead we should mostly see the passages of Alexander as a mechanically assembled collection of exempla. For the approach of naming the different literary presentations of Alexander 'views' see, for example, Bosworth 1996, 2-5. Cf. Ceau~escu 1974, 168; Isager 1992, 75; Mosse 2004, 167-177. Mosse's work was first published 2001(translated into English as Alexander: Destiny and myth in 2004). Briant 2015 likewise focuses as much on images of Alexander as on those of Darius III, even though Briant explores what we can know about the historical Darius, too. Ceau~escu 1974, 155 distinguished between Alexander's admirers/imitators and the hostile tradition of the senatorial circles. Isager 1992, 82-83 refers to Seneca's use of Alexander as a literary paragon. Stewart 1993, 9. Spencer 2002, xiv - xv. Cf. Spencer 2006, 96. Spencer 2002, xvi - xvii. See esp. Spencer 2006; 2009; 2010. For the Roman reception of Alexander, see also Baynham 2009, which is more like a catalogue of some of the Roman Latin historians who wrote about Alexander. See esp. Asirvatham 2008; 2010a; 2010b; 2013; 2014. A few articles also either deal with exempla of Alexander presented by individual Roman authors or with episodes connected with Alexander and their afterlife in Classical literature. For this kind of research, see Wardle 2005; Bosman 2007; Bellemare 2015. Unfortunately, I have not been able to include in my analysis research published after early 2018. Thus, even though I am aware of the publication of Brills Companion to the Reception of Alexander the Great (2018, edited by Kenneth Moore) and Christian Djurslev's Alexander the Great in the Early Christian Tradition (2018), their insights are not considered here. Brill s Companion to Alexander Literature in the Middle Ages (2011) and Brepols' Alexander redivivus series are recently published volumes on Alexander the Great in the field of medieval and Early Modem European literature. Brill's Companion treats Alexander's legacy in world literature, including articles on medieval texts in Syriac, Persian, Coptic, Arabic, Ethiopic, and Hebrew, alongside the European languages. Noteworthy is these articles' treatment of Alexander literature: they undertake text criticism, and study literary themes, style, and language, and do not exclusively concentrate on the ideological and rhetorical uses of the king's personae. Brepols' Alexander redivivus series contains several volumes investigating the history and legend of Alexander's reception. The volumes, edited mainly by Gaullier-Bougassas, are written chiefly by French scholars. For another study of Alexander in the medieval world, see also Stock 2016. For Alexander in French literature, see also Maddox & SturmMaddox 2002. For Alexander in medieval and Early Modern England, see Stone 2014. Stoneman 2008, 227-229. For other surveys of Alexander's Nachleben, see also Hageman 2009; Barletta 2010. Sometimes the concept of "use of history/past" appears in the context of the "Why history?" question. Cf. n. 12 above.

Introduction

27

64 Black 2005; MacMillan 2009; Blafield 2016. Ferro 1981 explored how nation states and different sociopolitical groups have controlled the official image of their common past to legitimize power and authority, and to pursue their nationalistic goals and ideologies. Niggemann & Ruffing 2011 deals with the way in which the Classical past was exploited as a model and reference point in the context of the 18th and 19th centuries. 65 MacMillan 2009, xi. 66 For the perception of the past in medieval literature, see also McKitterick 2000; Goetz 2007. 67 Clarke 1990 and Ker 2014 above being rare exceptions. 68 John Dugan, in his article "Modern critical approaches to Roman rhetoric", called the famous works of Kennedy and Lausberg old-fashioned and stated that the tendency to downplay the impact of rhetoric on all literature has long dominated Classical scholarship. Dugan 2007, 11, 16. 69 See Porter 1997, in which different genres are handled in separate articles. 70 Ancient rhetoricians in their textbooks defined examples and prescribed many rules for their use, see Arist. Rhet. 356b. l-35, 2. l 393a. l - b.30; Rhet. ad Her. 2.29 .46, 4.49.62; Cic. Inv. 1.30.49, De or. 2.169; Quint. Inst. 5.11. 71 Cf. Blom 2010, 15-16. 72 There are several articles on the use of exempla in the writings of some Classical or post-Classical writers, or in a single Classical work. For research on exempla, see Carlson 1948; Lawall 1958; Stem 2007; Mayer 2008. For monographs on the topic, see Bloomer 1992; Chaplin 2000; Roller 2018. For studies of exempla concerning Alexander, see n. 5 9. 73 Roller 2004, 9-10. Most recently, see Roller 2018. 74 Cf. Ibid. 52. 75 Stocks 2014, 9. 76 Cf. Ibid. 22. 77 Arr. an. 1.11.2. The anecdote appears also in the Alexander Romance, see Alex. Rom. 1.42. 78 Cf. Polyb. 8.1 O; Liv. 8.3. 79 For Philip's military reforms, see Worthington 2008, 11-12, 26-32; Anson 2013, 44-52. In recent years scholars have paid more attention to Philip's accomplishments and how he made it possible for Alexander to conquer Persia. Cf. Worthington 2008, 1-5; Carney & Ogden 2010. For a comparison between the accomplishments of Alexander and Philip, see Worthington 2008, 204-208; Gabriel 2010. 80 For the work of Callisthenes, see Pearson 1960, 22-49; Cartledge 2004, 247-249. 81 Mihalopoulos 2009, 27 5-293 discusses Alexander as the first ruler in the Greek world to understand and exploit the propaganda value of official portraits. For a detailed discussion on Alexander's medallions, see Holt 2003. 82 Pearson 1960 is still the most detailed monograph on Alexander writers in the early Hellenistic period. For a more recent and shorter survey, see Zambrini 2007. 83 For the myth of Alexander and its evolution in the policy of the Hellenistic kings especially, see Goukowsky 1978/1981. For a study of the representations of Alexander in Hellenistic coinage, see Dahmen 2007. 84 Stewart 1993, 47-48, 150-157. 85 For the literary tradition of the visit, see Plut. Alex. 15.7-9; Arr. an. 1.12.1; Diod. Sic. I 7. I 7. 5 ; Just. Epit. I I .5 . 12. 86 Arr. an. 1.11.7-8. Cf. Arr. an. 6.9.3. 87 Cass. Dio. 51.16.4. 88 The role of Alexander in Roman politics and political imitatio Alexandri in the Late Republic and Early Empire has been studied by Weippert 1972; Hannestad 1992; Isager 1992; Spencer 2002, 15-31; Kuhne 2008. 89 This is already stated by Spencer 2002, 29.

28

Introduction

90 Suet. Jui. 7 .1; Plut. Caes. 11.5-6. 91 Weippert 1972, 108; Green 1978, 195 sees the anecdote as unhistorical. 92 The Roman Macriani family is said always to have had images of Alexander on their rings and bracelets. Hist. Aug. Tyr. Trig. 14.2-6. John Chrysostom criticized the way people used images of Alexander on coins as talismans, which he saw as an expression of idolatry. Cf. John Chrys. Cat. ad Ilium 2.5. 93 Plin. HN 7.26, 95; Plut. Pomp. 2.1, 13.3-6. For Pompey wearing a cloak believed to have belonged to Alexander, see App. Mith. 117. For a discussion of Pompey's Alexander-imitation, see Michel 1967, 35-66; Spencer 2009, 253-256. 94 Plin. HN37.l0; Suet. Aug. 50. 95 Suet. Aug. 52. Cf. Cass. Dio. 59 .17 .3. Malloch argues that Caligula imitated Alexander when he started to plan to build a bridge at Baiae. Malloch 2001, 215-216. 96 Cass. Dio. 78.7.4-8.4; Hdn. 4.8.1. Cf. HA 2.l. For a discussion of Caracalla's imitation of Alexander, see Baharal 1994, 524-567; Carlsen 2016, 316, 324-328. 97 Dahmen 2007, 34-35. 98 For Julian's imitation of Alexander, see Barnes 1912; Athanassiadi 1992, 192-193, 224-225; Tougher 2007, 65. For a moderate opinion of Julian's 'limited admiration of Alexander', see Lane Fox, 1997, 252 and Smith 2011, 101-102. 99 For Julius Caesar's visit to the tomb, see Luc. 10.10-45. For Octavian's visit, see Suet. Aug. 18.1; Cass. Dio. 51.16.5. For Caracalla's visit, see Hdn. 4.8.9. 100 Rehak 2006, 50-51. 101 For a detailed study of the mosaic, see Cohen 2000. 102 Trans. Evelyn Shuckburgh. Cic. Att. 5.20: Castra paucos dies habuimus ea ipsa quae contra Darium habuerat apud Jssum Alexander, imperator haud paulo melior quam aut tu aut ego. 103 Ammian. Marc. 26.8.15. 104 Trans. Paul Nixon. Plaut. Mastel!. 77 5: Alexandrum magnum atque Agathoclem aiunt maximas duo res gessisse: quid mihi fiet tertio, qui solus facio facinora immortalia? 105 Alexander is called Alexander the Great (Alexander magnus) in Roman literature: see, for example, Plin. HN 14.7; !tin. Alex. 4.9; Pan. Lat. 10.10.2-6. 106 For Alexander referred to as 'great king', 'great man', 'great Macedonian king', or 'the Pellean leader', see Philo Op. 4.17; Tert. De pall. 4.6.3; Symm. Ep. 1.20; Pan. Lat. 6.17.1; Ennod. Pan. Theod. 17.79. 107 For Alexander referred to as 'a young man' (adulescens, iuvenis), see Sen. Ben. 1.13.3; Juv. 10.169-170; Arn. Adv. nat. 1.5.5. For Alexander as the 'the mad son of Macedonian Philip' (proles vesana) and a 'fortunate freebooter' (felix praedo), see Luc. 10.25.

2

Alexander in an empire of Romans, Greeks, and Jews

In this chapter we consider the use of Alexander in the political rhetoric of ancient historians and orators from the Early Empire to Late Antiquity. The Roman Empire was a multicultural entity where people adopted different identities depending on their ethnic and cultural backgrounds. The Latin-speaking population and the Romanized upper classes of the Western empire had a different background from the Greeks who lived under the Roman regime. The Jewish minority had its own culture and traditions. During the centuries of Imperial rule, a common Roman identity also developed and became stronger, uniting the population, especially the elite, under the Imperial regime. In this chapter I scrutinize how and why writers representing different ethnic and cultural backgrounds praised, defended, attacked, or explained the contemporaneous state of affairs and promoted certain political agendas in their portrayals of Alexander. I pay special attention to the ways in which the historical context influenced their representations of the famed Macedonian king. By dividing authors into the categories of Roman Latin, Greek, or Jewish and belonging to the Early or Later Empire, we can observe how Alexander's portrayal varied. Can we in fact speak of 'Roman Latin', 'Roman Greek', or 'Jewish' Alexanders, or the creation of self-definitions of 'us' and 'others' in the Alexander texts of different ethnic and cultural groups and identities? The chapter concludes with an analysis of the political functions and messages that were conveyed through the use of the Macedonian king and the ways in which his image remained similar or was redefined in Late Antiquity. The first and the second subchapters deal with texts written by the Roman Latin writers of the Early Empire. These two subchapters focus on a Roman patriotic self-fashioning that both defended and promoted power structures in the early Principate and the values of the Roman senatorial class. The task of the third subchapter is to study the representations of Alexander that the Roman Greek writers of the Early Empire constructed. By doing this, I reveal the different functions that the portraits of the king had. The fourth subchapter concentrates on Jewish writers and their political argumentation. In what ways did their presentations of Alexander change according to the different sociopolitical conditions under which they lived and wrote? The last subchapter deals with the writers of the Later Empire and examines prose panegyrics and the functions of Alexander in the political rhetoric of the fourth century. In this subchapter, I show the popularity of

30 Alexander in an empire of Romans, Greeks, and Jews Alexander as a historical exemplum and a legendary figure during the Dominate, and the ways that current sociopolitical realities and Imperial propaganda had an impact on the uses of his image. Questions of historical exempla as providers of philosophical and ethical lessons, their use as a strategy of self-promotion among the Roman upper classes and the role of Alexander in constructing cultural and religious identities, including in Christian rhetoric, are handled in subsequent chapters.

Proclaiming Roman supremacy In this section, I study Latin texts of the Early Imperial period in which the writer compares Alexander to his Roman counterparts to analyze how each comparison created patriotic and cultural definitions of 'us' and 'others'. I suggest that the images of the Macedonian king, Roman warlords, and the Roman Republican past can be explained by the rhetorical aims of the writers and the sociopolitical context in which they wrote. Scholars have investigated historical comparison (comparatio ), imitation (imitatio ), and emulation (aemulatio) of Alexander in the cases of famous Roman statesmen and emperors, whether there has been actual imitation and emulation or not. 1 Diana Spencer claims that attempting to isolate comparatio and imitatio as separate strands is a thankless and uninteresting task. 2 However, one can, and should, separate passages that contain comparisons between Alexander and his counterpart from those passages that describe certain Romans as imitating Alexander, since the former seem to be created by the writers themselves while the latter belong more to the common tradition, or even reflect real historical imitation. 3 By studying different comparationes, we can attempt to identify a particular rhetorical strategy and political messages. My hypothesis, given what we know of the methods of writers in the Roman era, is that with the help of the comparatio, writers did not primarily intend to argue why certain Roman statesmen were greater than Alexander, but constructed patriotic presentations of the Romans and their superiority. If this is the case, these texts should not be regarded primarily as Roman 'views of Alexander' but as rhetorical proclamations of the Roman constitutional, military, moral, and social supremacy. In the theory of rhetoric, comparison was one way to persuade or motivate the listener to undertake a desired action. The writer or speaker developed his argumentation with the help of comparatio. Two subjects were compared and a judgment was made as to which one was superior to the other. 4 The purpose of the comparison was therefore to further the orator's rhetorical aims: in other words, comparisons served to transmit the message of the oral or literary rhetorical presentation. In the passages under scrutiny here, the presentations of Alexander and his Roman counterpart should always be regarded as the writers' own composition. The comparison itself and any 'historical' detail included in it is subordinated to the author's rhetorical themes and is made to support his line of argumentation. In the Classical and Hellenistic periods, Greek teachers of rhetoric and biographers compared Greek leaders to Persian kings. When Greece and Rome came

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into contact, the need to make more comparisons became acute for writers in both Greek and Latin. 5 Naturally, Alexander, as the great king and conqueror of the Eastern Mediterranean world, inspired writers to compare him to leading Roman figures. Nevertheless, of primary importance was Alexander's use as a point of reference that their audience was familiar with. For this study, it is essential to understand why and how authors used Alexander in each case. I look at these aspects by analyzing three texts of the Early Empire, in which Latin historians compare Alexander to Roman political figures. As far as we know, the first Roman writer to compare Alexander to the Romans was Livy. Livy's so-called 'Alexander digression' takes place in the ninth book of The History of Rome, in which he deals with the events of the Second Samnite War.6 First, Livy praises the Roman general and hero Papirius Cursor's qualities and his efforts for the Roman state (res Romana), and remarks that many people regard him as a man who might have matched Alexander in generalship. 7 After this comment, Livy asks: What would have happened if Alexander had invaded Rome at that time? In the previous lines, Livy has tried to convince his audience that he had often silently pondered the result of that war. 8 Livy answers: Even as against other princes and nations, so also against this one the might of Rome would have proved invincible. 9 In scholarship, this text has sometimes been considered a reaction to the claims raised by some anti-Roman Greeks. 10 On the other hand, Mahe-Simon has argued that Livy found Alexander-comparisons in his sources, which stimulated him to construct his own comparison, included in The History of Rome. 11 However, of greatest importance are not the possible accusations made by some Greeks, or previous comparisons between Alexander and Rome, or Livy's long held private interest in the issue, but the message he intends to convey through the comparison. In the passage, Livy intentionally picks up on and presents the historical tradition in a way that suits his rhetorical aims. At the beginning of the comparison, he admits that Alexander was a great warlord (egregius dux) and gives a list of the consuls who might have fought against the king at that time. According to Livy, all those consuls would have shown courage and skill even though Alexander might have been more skillful in choosing the right battle site and in military training generally. 12 The comparison deliberately uses information we know from other writers. In addition, we recognize the old Greek stereotypes ofMedes and Persians as effeminate and physically weak soldiers corrupted by luxury. 13 As proof of the statement that the Persians were not a great threat to the Macedonians, Livy describes Darius' army as a group of women, eunuchs, gold and purple, but not of real soldiers. 14 Livy probably used existing accounts stating that Darius had his family, mother, and daughters with him at the battle of Issus. 15 This allows him to belittle Darius' army and to describe it as 'booty' for the Greeks, rather than present it as a dangerous enemy. 16 Livy notes that Alexander would have faced harsher conditions in Italy than India, where he was able to travel in a drunken parade with an

32 Alexander in an empire of Romans, Greeks, and Jews intoxicated army. Here, Livy seems to be referring to the story that Alexander and his troops took part in Dionysian banquets in Nysia. He uses the tradition to indicate that the Indian resistance could not have been strong. 17 He intentionally omits to mention the fierce fighters of Porns, or the resistance Alexander faced from the Indian tribe of the Malli, or the difficulties Alexander faced in the Gedrosian desert. In the same context, Livy reminds his readers of what happened to Alexander's uncle, the king of Epirus - Alexander Molossus. The king died on Italian soil. 18 Livy notes that Alexander traversed the passes of Apulia and the mountains of Lucania - in other words, roadless places - where he was defeated. Again, Livy is picking examples from history to make clear how tough a resistance Rome would have offered Alexander's invading armies and how difficult Italy would have been to campaign in. In addition, we are told that if Alexander had invaded Rome after his campaign in the East, by then he would have been influenced by oriental ways. Alexander would then have been like Darius - in other words, an Eastern despot fond of drink and susceptible to sudden anger. 19 Alexander's reputation as a general and his military achievements are belittled in the Livy passage. This is part of Livy's rhetoric of Roman constitutional and military grandeur. This becomes evident when Livy extends his historical treatment and starts to compare the totality of the accomplishments of Alexander and Rome. An idealized Republican past answers the requirements of the present and future in Livy's patriotic analysis. Livy reminds his audience that Alexander's accomplishments lasted only ten years but that Rome had so far achieved military success for 400 years. 20 Even if Rome lost some battles (proelium), it never lost a war (bellum). 21 The Macedonians had only one Alexander, while the Romans had produced several Alexanders who were capable of the same magnificent achievements as the Macedonian conqueror and proved it by their successes. If the Macedonians had lost their king - which was a possibility since the king deliberately exposed himself to all sorts of dangers - the state's existence would have been at risk. In contrast, the 'Roman Alexanders' fulfilled their destiny without endangering the state. 22 Rome's governmental system is superior to the Macedonians', as shown by its continuity: in other words, the Roman political order is constitutionally superiority to the traditional monarchies of the surrounding peoples. In addition to the governmental system, Livy tries to convince his audience of the superiority and efficiency of the Roman army. In the comparison, Livy enumerates the number and the qualities of the Roman troops. 23 Whatever reasons Livy presents, the basis of his 'reasoning' is patriotic fervor - Roman armies were superior to Macedonian ones and Roman weapons were much better than the ones Alexander's men carried. Livy uses the tradition that Alexander recruited foreign Persian and Indian troops for his army. 24 According to Livy, these poor troops would likely have been a burden to Alexander rather than a help in Italy. When it comes to weaponry, Macedonian round shields and long spears are not comparable to the Roman large shields and swords. The passage ends with a eulogy of the Roman soldier and his endurance. Livy asks who can withstand fatigue and perform hard work better than the Roman soldier.

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Livy's treatment of the Roman army was not just about comparing the army and its leader's qualities to Alexander's army, but it was implicitly referring to Rome's enemies in the Augustan era. Can the Roman army respond to any threat to its superior position by its frontier enemies? In the passage Livy mentions that 'the silliest of the Greeks' (levissimi ex Graecis) had exalted the reputation of the Parthians. 25 Implicitly, Livy is saying that the Roman army will beat its Eastern enemy, the Parthian Empire, which did not pose a serious threat in his time. Depicting Alexander, the famous subjugator of the Persian Empire (the native dynastic predecessor of the Parthian Empire) as inferior to the Romans in military terms guarantees Roman military superiority in the present. Alexander and his Macedonians' inferiority to the Roman army becomes obvious if related to the contemporary Roman - Parthian rivalry. Livy's counterfactual history supports the identity-building image of the Romans as a military race superior to other nations in both the past and the present. It is about offering an idealized picture of the Romans' previous achievements and depicting their success as a long and continuous process. Livy returns to the original setting and notes that only one single battle would have destroyed Alexander but that Romans could achieve victory even when they lost a battle. He then refers to the heavy Roman defeats at the Caudine Forks and Cannae, and notes that these losses did not change the final result of the wars during which those battles were fought. The Punic Wars alone lasted longer than Alexander's lifetime. Since Alexander never met the Romans on the battlefield in the fourth century BC, Livy's purpose in making his comparison was probably not to 'prove' that Roman arms were superior to Alexander's, which he could never do definitively, but primarily to use this and the Republican past in general to praise the Rome of his day, the Roman Empire of Augustus. 26 Livy's treatment of Alexander is one way of illuminating Roman superiority in both governmental and military matters and of reminding his audience of the elements that maintain Roman supremacy. Why was this patriotic presentation important? According to Jane Chaplin, the purpose of exempla in The History of Rome can be described in a way that helps our understanding ofLivy's Alexander digression: They were not only a sophisticated vehicle for creating political stability and for ordering a complicated history, but also a reassuring reminder that all was not lost and that the interpretation of that complex past could lead to a more secure future. 27 The lessons of the past were applied to the present and they could serve as models for the future. Livy's work was about making an idealized presentation of the past that would strengthen Roman cultural identity. Livy's patriotic intent appears evident in his choice of words. In the last passage of the digression, Livy writes from the perspective of 'we'. In the narrative, he uses expressions such as 'we remember' (recordamur), or 'we live' (vivimus). 28 Such expressions built a sense of collective Roman identity, healing the wounds of a long civil war and

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unifying the Empire. The patriotic message was clear: we Romans were, and still are, better than Alexander the Great. Therefore, in the future, we will crush all our Alexander-like opponents. In the aftermath of a long and destructive civil war, Livy perhaps felt it fitting to remind and convince his readers of the greatness of the Roman Empire. This also suited Augustus' official message that he was the restorer of Republican glory. In the last lines of the passage, Livy reassures the reader that there is no danger of any enemy shaking the superiority of the Roman Empire. The relationship between Livy and Emperor Augustus has been debated among scholars. Was Livy working independently or did Augustus direct his literary program, just as he directed his public building projects in the Forum, which promoted images of the Roman distant and recent past? 29At any rate, when Livy wrote his digression he may have been aware of Augustus' official policy. Livy offered a positive depiction of the Augustan Empire and the Republic, and his digression on them could be regarded as intentionally idealized, with a didactic aim. Here I disagree with Morello, who claimed that the digression was a manifestation of Livy's disapproval of Augustus' governmental system. 30At the same time, we should remember that it would be simplistic to consider Livy a mere propagandist for Augustus. An important political message in Livy is that Rome will defeat all its enemies even if they are stronger than Alexander and his troops. The most important thing, and the only prerequisite, is that the peace that Augustus restored continues. Livy speaks of the consensus (concordia) and of "our present love for domestic peace" and its necessity. 31In Augustus' propaganda, Concordia played an important role, that of pardoning and showing mercy. 32Livy's statements were probably in support of this policy. Cicero, who belonged to the previous generation, stated that if Rome stayed faithful to its institutions and customs, the empire would assuredly be eternal. 33Livy was therefore repeating ideas that the Roman upper classes of the period shared, even if many must have been aware that Augustus' form of government was not quite the old Republic. Previous scholarship has recognized some of the ideological elements that are attested in the comparison between Rome and Alexander's Macedon, although interest has also been given to the literary structure and themes of the digression. Ruth Morello describes the passage as "a eulogizing survey of republican tradition."34 Tim Whitmarsh states, "The shrill tone of Livy's denunciation bespeaks his anxiety to protect Rome's status as the ultimate world empire." 35I agree with these characterizations. However, we have to remember that Livy was not just declaring to his audience that Alexander would have lost an imagined war against Rome but also offering a patriotic interpretation about the supremacy of the Roman Empire. While Livy'sAlexander comparison served to promote Roman military and governmental superiority, Velleius Paterculus' and Tacitus' works served to enhance the superiority of Roman morals and traditions. Velleius Paterculus' prose work History of Rome 36 was written a couple of decades after Livy's work, probably in 25-30. 37Velleius deals with the transition from the Republic to the Principate,

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and he depicts this as a time of continuity rather than radical or negative change. All positive things in the res publica were perfected during the supremacy of the Caesars. Velleius Paterculus' History of Rome can be considered a work supporting the principate of Tiberius. In contrast to writers like Tacitus, who offers a very pessimistic view of Tiberius, Velleius provides a very idealized and propagandistic picture of him as the best ruler (optimus princeps). 38 Tiberius is portrayed as the culmination of all the great leaders and generals of the Republic. It is not misleading to state that Velleius' work was written to strengthen the idea that the organization of the Roman Empire was to be handed to a suitable and virtuous dominating individual. In the work of Velleius, Alexander is not compared with Tiberius, but with the emperor's famous 'grandfather' and adoptive father of Augustus, Julius Caesar. 39 Velleius was not the only author to see similarities between Alexander and Caesar and accordingly to compare them. 40 Velleius often draws comparisons between father and son, brothers, or men in similar positions. 41 An important question for this study is how and why Velleius compared Alexander with Caesar. In Velleius' work, Augustus and Tiberius are raised above all other individuals as the creators of the Principate. Caesar's main contribution is his adoption of Octavian. 42 Caesar's career precedes the greater regimes of Augustus and Tiberius. Even though the role of Caesar in the Velleian narrative is not as important as his successors, we can still see his role as facilitating the move towards one-man rule, and thus positive. In the comparison of Caesar and Alexander, Velleius sees similarities in the grandeur of their plans, in the cunning of their military campaigns, and in their ability to endure dangers. 43 However, Caesar was better than Alexander in many ways. Caesar was sobrius and not iracundus. The first word can be translated "free from drinking", or "sober in one's habits and judgment", and the second refers to a person who is "prone to anger, hot-tempered, irascible", in other words, someone whose actions are marked by anger and unpredictability. In the passage, Velleius refers to the known negative attributes of Alexander that were also utilized in the philosophical treaties written by the Roman Latin intellectuals. 44 Contrary to Alexander, Caesar ate and drank when it was necessary and not for voluptas. 45 Generally, that word means "pleasure" but it can also refer to organized pleasures and entertainments. Velleius stresses that Caesar did not enjoy banquets in which eating and drinking sometimes went beyond what was considered proper. By means of negation, he builds a picture of Caesar as a man of virtue. In the ideology of the Principate, opposition to extravagance (luxuria) and of the promotion of modesty and moderation (moderatio) were part of the Imperial pro gram. 46 Using Alexander's faults, Velleius draws a picture of the ideal Roman autocracy. Julius Caesar is, in Velleius' presentation, a man who was in harmony with Republican virtues. In other words, Romans can reconcile monarchy with Roman Republican ideal values. 47 At the same time, Velleius depicts the history of Rome as a story of great individuals who have led the Romans with desirable results;

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by extension such men will continue to ensure that the Roman Empire will be prosperous in the future. In this sense, Velleius' comparison shares the same eulogizing message that we find in Livy's presentation. According to Velleius, Roman leaders are not only equal to Alexander in military virtues, but superior in moral qualities. His passage gives the Roman self-definition as a nation with an innate propensity towards all desirable virtues. The third Roman patriotic Alexander comparison comes from the historian Cornelius Tacitus (c. 55-120). In his Annals, Tacitus compares Alexander to the Roman general Germanicus (15 BC - AD 19). The comparison is made after Tacitus' description of Germanicus' funeral. The narrative allows Tacitus to shift from a critical presentation of the Tiberian principate to praise of Roman virtues and customs. Tacitus mentions that Germanicus' contemporaries already saw similarities with Alexander in their appearance, young age, manner of death, and the place where they died. 48 After enumerating the similarities between Germanicus and Alexander, Tacitus points out the things that made Germanicus better than Alexander: But the Roman had borne himself as one gentle to his friends, moderate in his pleasures, content with a single wife and the children of lawful wedlock. Nor was he less a man of the sword; though he lacked the other's temerity, and, when his numerous victories had beaten down the Germanies, was prohibited from making fast their bondage [servitium]. But had he been the sole arbiter of affairs, of kingly authority and title, he would have overtaken the Greek in military fame with an ease proportioned to his superiority in clemency, selfcommand, and all other good qualities. 49 While describing the character of Germanicus, Tacitus refers to well-known aspects of Alexander's behavior. Germanicus' attributes are the antithesis of Alexander's failings. In Tacitus' comparison, it is noted that Germanicus only married once and that his offspring were from a decent marriage. In tum, Alexander is reported to have kept the Rhodian Barsine as his concubine and to have married first the Bactrian princess Roxanne and then Stateira, the daughter of Darius and Parysatis, daughter of Ochus. 50 The implicit allusion to the personal life of Alexander stresses the Roman concepts of culturally proper matrimony and the importance of having children from one marriage. Tacitus reminds his audience of the Roman way to marry, which contrasts with the uncivilized ways of the surrounding peoples. In Roman thinking, its traditional ways and practices (mos maiorum) make Romans better than other nations. It is according to Roman standards that 'others' (non-Romans), like Macedonians, are assessed. 51 Tacitus also notes that Germanicus was mild (mitis), or at least not harsh, toward his friends and that he was moderate in respect to entertainments (voluptas). The statement above refers to the negative attributes of Alexander which Livy and Velleius had already mentioned in their comparisons. Alexander's faults enable the patriotic praise of Rome's ability to produce greater heroes than he. According

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to Tacitus, Germanicus, as a general, was as good as Alexander, but he was not prone to foolhardiness (temeritas). Here, Alexander's military virtue, his reckless courage - which is often proffered as his most remarkable feature - is presented as potentially detrimental. 52 In Tacitus' work, reckless courage could threaten the rest of the army and therefore should not be considered a positive feature. In Tacitus' Annals and Histories, slavery (servitium) is opposite to the concept of liberty (libertas). In liberty, the imperial subjects can express their feelings openly. Accordingly, Tacitus' concept of libertas is based on the subjects' own mental attitude. If the imperial subjects are forced to flatter the emperor, they are being subjected to slavery. In contrast, a good emperor supports a system in which one can display his freedom by speaking his mind freely without being influenced by what the emperor wants to hear. 53 After his victories over the Germans, Germanicus' actions did not support the slavery of the habitants of Germania. In other words, Germanicus did not encourage the Germanic people to abandon their freedom by using flattery, but rather to freely express their opinions. By contrast, Persians and barbarians previously under the Persian monarchy were not 'liberated' from this state of affairs by Macedonian conquest, but during Alexander's reign they were still 'encouraged' to live in slavery. Tacitus' presentation of Alexander's reign resembles that in Curtius' work, which states that Alexander's power promoted slavery among his Persian and Macedonian subjects. 54 Alexander permitted and even demanded flattery from his subjects. Evidently, Tacitus had Tiberius' reign in mind, in which liberty was, according to his view, minimized. In contrast to Alexander and Tiberius, Germanicus, representing a true Roman leader, did not support a regime which reduced his subjects to slavery. In the last lines of the comparison, Tacitus adds that had Germanicus been the sole ruler with the confirmation of law and title, he would have surpassed Alexander in fame or military renown in clementia and temperantia. 55 This final statement of the passage was meant to illuminate the inconsistency in the government of the Roman Empire. After Augustus, the state of the empire was regrettable. In the Annales, Tiberius is represented as the greatest opponent of libertas and a promoter of servitude. Germanicus, on the other hand, is a true good old Roman man with all the (Roman) virtues. According to Tacitus, he should have been the ruler of Rome, not Tiberius. The Alexander comparison highlights the importance of a good emperor and Republican virtues that the right-minded rightful leader should apply. When the wrong men lead the Empire, as in the case of Tiberius, the whole Empire suffers. When Tacitus wrote the Annales, the Principate, a monarchy, had been established in the Roman world for 100 years. The Republic represented both a distant and often idealized golden age of the past. Tacitus himself had been successful in terms of his public career (cursus ho no rum), although he had experienced the reign of terror during the last years ofDomitian's rule. 56 In this context, the political message of Tacitus' comparison appears two-sided. A monarchy/principate can succeed if the ruler, as a 'first among equals' (primus inter pares), sticks to Roman virtues, that is, supporting libertas, and correspondingly enabling the

38 Alexander in an empire of Romans, Greeks, and Jews people to avoid servitium. Accordingly, Rome and its excellent men have suffered and will suffer if its Empire is ruled by inadequate emperors. On the other hand, his comparison was about praising the military and governmental order and the customs and moral abilities of the Roman Empire and its true leaders. The idealized Roman, like Germanicus, is incomparable simply because he acts like a true Roman and therefore has qualities that no non-Roman can possess, including Alexander. All his virtues and good qualities, which surpass those of the Macedonian king, indicate the correctness of the Roman senatorial ideal. In Tacitus' political rhetoric, Roman supremacy is an undisputed fact, necessary for a prosperous future. The passages analyzed in this subchapter closely resemble the Roman texts describing the imitatio Alexandri of notable Romans in that the Macedonian world-conqueror functions as their ultimate paragon (see pages 21-22). Comparison of figures like Papirius Cursor, Julius Caesar, and Germanicus to Alexander reflects the admiration the king enjoyed among the Roman upper classes. Although at first glance these passages of Roman historiography might seem no more than attempts to show Rome and its illustrious men in an even better light than the great king of Macedon, they are actually a strategy of patriotic selffashioning. In the Alexander comparisons, he was depicted as great, but not as great as the Romans. Accordingly, the supposed faults of Alexander illuminated the degree of Roman greatness on all levels. The passages pronounced Roman constitutional and military superiority, which extended to Roman traditional customs and moral practices. Livy, Velleius, and Tacitus glorify the greatness of the best Roman individuals and leaders who act as real Romans should. In Velleius' work, the lives of Julius Caesar, Augustus, and especially Tiberius show how the Roman system has raised individuals capable of ruling in a Roman way. On the other hand, Tacitus uses Alexander as a tool to separate the true Romans from the unsuitable rulers, who are acting in a non-Roman way. All the patriotic Alexander comparisons above were intended to shape Roman cultural identity. The idea of Roman superiority over the surrounding nations which they had subdued is, for these authors, an undisputed fact. At the same time, comparisons served to reinforce the unity of the traditional Roman ruling class, whose ability to produce new great individuals had not vanished. These comparisons were not primarily opinions or views on Alexander, but rather propagandistic views on the Roman Empire. For the Latin historians, the Roman Empire was the greatest empire of all time. The greatness of Rome is far above that of any possible rivals. Motivated by this 'fact', leading families, leading officials, generals, and emperors should continue to act according to the examples of the glorious past, which will guarantee continuing collective glory and prosperity for the Empire in the future.

The dangers of denying patria and mos maiorum This subchapter focuses on negative presentations of Alexander's oriental policy and divinity. These themes appear in Roman Latin texts written during the period when the Principate was relatively new. After examining some passages of Livy

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and Valerius Maximus, I analyze the evidence found in Quintus Curtius' History of Alexander. I argue that the critique of Alexander's actions was an attempt to define how the Roman emperors should exercise their ultimate power and to remind them of the expectations of the Roman senatorial class. The aristocratic ideology of the Republican ruling class saw the very idea of a king (rex) and kingship (regnum) as suspect. 57 However, with the rise of Octavian (Augustus), the political realities changed and henceforth the Roman Empire was ruled by one man. Augustus did not present himself as rex or dictator, but as the restorer of the Republic. 58 In the new Augustan order, the one-man ruler was expected to show respect and reverence towards the previous Republican past and the mos maiorum. Augustus' good relationship with the Roman senatorial class became the yardstick by which the later emperors were measured. It can be argued that, for the Romans, Alexander was an ambivalent figure who represented the other as well as a model for Romans. Although the figure of Alexander was widely admired in the Roman world, he represented monarchy, a form of government that was anathema to the Republican tradition. 59 In the Latin texts of the Early Empire he is often called a king (rex), which naturally had its negative connotations. As we shall see, the critique of the king's adoption of Eastern ways and manifestations of ruler-cult was exploited to define the way Roman autocracy should function in a world where one-man rule was an unfamiliar phenomenon. 60 As stated above, Livy's characterization of Alexander included deliberate sociopolitical messages. In the previous subchapter, I showed that one message of the passage was that Romans living under the reign of Augustus would continue to be victorious if they were faithful to its institutions. Accordingly, in the same passage, Livy gives a critical presentation of Alexander and his adoption of Eastern ways: He [Alexander] would evidently have come to Italy more like Darius than like Alexander, at the head of an army that had forgotten Macedonia and was already adopting the degenerate customs of the Persians. I am loath, in writing of so great prince, to remind the reader of the ostentatious alteration in his dress, and of his desire that men should prostrate themselves in adulation, a thing which even conquered Macedonians would have found oppressive, much more then [sic] those who had been victorious; of his cruel punishments and the murder of his friends as they drank and feasted; of the boastful lie about his origin. 61 In Livy's work, one of the worst things was that Alexander and his army had forgotten Macedon and had degenerated by adopting the customs (mores) of the Persians. The familiar concept in degenero refers to the idea of falling away from an earlier, ancestral, standard of behavior. The remark contains the idea that the Macedonian army had achieved its great success by following the Macedonian ways without the corruptive effect of the Eastern ways. Livy qualifies "the ostentatious alteration of Alexander's dress", "the desire that men should prostrate themselves in adulation", and "the boastful lie about

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his origin" as imitations of Eastern monarchy and its practices. 62 One implicit message in Livy's passage was to warn his readers about the dangers of rejecting Roman ways: the ruling class of the Roman Empire should not be seduced by the ways of the conquered barbarian nations and be true to their own traditions and practices. In other words, Rome as the ruler of the Mediterranean world should hold on to the elements that lay behind her success. Livy wrote his text on Alexander immediately after the civil war between Octavian and Mark Antony. During that civil war Octavian launched a propaganda war against Mark Antony in Rome. The propaganda labeled Antony a slave of Eastern luxury and vices, and especially Cleopatra's spells. 63 Antony was presented as acting in a non-Roman way by accepting Eastern religions and ways. Livy's contemporaries could use Alexander's faults to illustrate the alleged origins of the harmful civil war in the abandonment of Roman ways and values. Valerius Maximus lists Alexander's actions as the first foreign example of haughtiness (superbia) and outrageous (inpotentia) behavior. A couple of decades after Livy and some decades before Curtius, in the reign of Tiberius, Valerius wrote that it was Alexander's courage and fortune that made him grow arrogant, in three stages: He looked down on Philip, and claimed that Jupiter Hammon was his father, he grew tired of Macedonian customs and society, so he took Persian ways of dressing and behaving; he rejected his status as a human being and strove to become a god. He had no qualms about denying his father, his country, and his humanity. 64 Here, abandoning Macedonian ways and adopting Persian dress was regarded as similar to denying one's fatherland. Throwing away the Roman mos maiorum was condemnable, haughty and outrageous behavior. Alexander's action in adopting Persian ways, costumes, and divinity served to indicate to the Roman audience what was proper and what was not. Implicitly, Valerius is saying that the members of the Roman elite should not grow tired of faithfully following the basic forms of Roman customs and society, as Alexander did of his Macedonian roots. In other words, they should avoid any activity that would challenge the existing political order. The fidelity towards Roman institutions and customs, including clothing and worshipping gods in a proper manner, is to be expected of the Roman elite. Valerius' reference to clothing may have been a reminder to his audience of the toga, the principal garment of the free-born Roman male. 65 Condemnable in Alexander's supposed divinity was that he looked down on Philip's paternity and took Jupiter Amon as his father. 66 Alexander's alleged disrespect for the memory of his father could be considered a means of eulogizing the ruler-cult in Augustan and Tiberian Rome, since divine respect toward the memory of the previous emperors as adoptive fathers was an essential part of Julio-Claudian ideology. 67 Valerius' passage contained the message that reigning emperors should pay respect to their predecessors, live according to the Roman

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ways and should not act like Alexander, who did not pay homage to his father or to Macedonian customs. The theme of Alexander's negatively presented orientalism and ruler-cult in Livy and Valerius Maximus is emphasized more distinctly in Quintus Curtius Rufus' History of Alexander. The author himself represented the Roman senatorial class and composed his work during the reign of Claudius. 68 In scholarship, Curtius' work has been treated mostly in the context of reconstructing the historical period of Alexander's reign, but this was not necessarily Curtius' main concern when he composed his work. 69 In contrast, J. E. Atkinson stated in his commentary on Curtius that, for the author, Alexander was a vehicle by which he could communicate his own concerns about the Principate, and that his target audience was the senatorial class and those who shared its values. At the same time, Curtius was careful not to allow the emperor of the day to take his work as a thinly veiled criticism of his rule. 70 Accordingly, Atkinson remarked that it must be a working assumption that Curtius' History of Alexander may have made significant points at a metatextual level of meaning while he was writing in an unfree society. 71 However, this kind of reading and exploration of Curtius' own concerns about the Principate has not received much interest in Curtian scholarship, not even in Atkinson's own research. 72 Unlike the Curtian scholars who search for the historical Alexander or distinguish certain literary themes, I approach the work from the perspective of how Curtius used the story of Alexander in the social and political context of the Claudian regime. Curtius' choice to write a 'monograph' about Alexander's life for his Roman audience may have been motivated to a degree by the great Roman leaders', and especially Claudius' predecessor Caligula's, admiration for Alexander or at least use of his reputation in the promulgation of official policy. In this cultural milieu, Curtius' treatment of Alexander not only received interest as a 'new' version of the king's well-known story, but also constructed new meanings and values about the proper and improper ways of governing for its contemporary audience. An important concept in Curtius' work is the way he classifies the Macedonians and Persians as "nations living under kings (reges )" and sometimes refers to the Macedonians as "a people accustomed to live with monarchy." 73 Curtius presents himself as writing from the perspective of an outsider. When he wrote it is arguable that the Romans were not accustomed to living under the rule of kings. In the Claudian era, the Principate had existed for only fifty years, and in the Roman Republican tradition, monarchy was regarded as a threat. Curtius concentrates on the negative change in the king's relation with his subjects; in other words, how "a people accustomed to live with monarchy" started to reject their beloved king. If the Macedonians who had lived for a long time under monarchy did not tolerate the wrong kind of autocracy, how much more should this be true of the Romans. Even though the first two books of Curtius' work have not survived, we can still identify the radical change in the king's relationship with his Macedonian staff through the evidence found in the narrative of the third and fourth books. In the

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third book, there is a picture of a young Macedonian king showing many virtues and maintaining a unique relationship with his fellow men. One reason for this respect and good relationship was because Alexander dressed in a way that did not vary from the dress of the "ordinary citizen" and because he "had the energy of a soldier." 74 At this stage, Alexander is depicted as a 'beloved' (carus) and deeply 'respected' (venerandus) king, who enjoys ideal trust and the loyalty of his men. 75 The negative change in the way that Alexander exercises his power towards his Macedonian subjects is an important theme in the work of Curtius. In the narrative, the king's ideal relationship with his men is destroyed when he starts to act like a barbarian autocrat. In Curtius' work, Alexander's quick military success (provided by fortuna) encouraged him to adopt certain vices and motivated him to introduce the wrong kind of ruler-cult. Curtius writ es: "Alexander was goaded by an overwhelming desire to visit the temple of Jupiter - dissatisfied with elevation on the mortal level, he either considered, or wanted others to believe, that Jupiter was his ancestor. " 76 In Curtius' text, the visit and the king's yearning for divinity underline the negative progress towards the wrong kind of autocracy. 77 Curtius' critical treatment is stressed when Alexander meets the priests in Siwah. First, Alexander, forgetting his mortal state (humanae sortis), welcomes the fact that the eldest priest calls him 'son' ,filium, the name that Jupiter had given him. 78 According to Curtius, Alexander should have taken a critical attitude towards these vague (vana) responses of the oracle through sound and honest argument. 79 Curtius' narrative follows the same tradition as Livy and Valerius Maximus, discussed above. Alexander, not satisfied with his role as the king of Macedon, shows contempt for the expectations of his own people with his outrageous actions. The episode underlining the moral degeneration of the king is manifested further in the subsequent part of Curtius' work. Later in the narrative, the negative change in the king's behavior is linked with orientalism, as Alexander starts to imitate Persian court practices. A crucial turning point is described at the beginning of the sixth book, where Curtius depicts the aftermath of the victory of Gaugamela. After the battle, Alexander misuses his spare time (otium) and turns to copying foreign practices (externi mores). This is presented in the narrative as a contrast to the behavior of the Spartan king Agis. In Curtius' rhetoric, Alexander acted in a way that betrayed his infatuation with the evil practices of alien nations in preference to the ways of his own country. 80 In Curtius' construction, the Macedonian mos maiorum had enabled Alexander's success and it was the very element connected with his virtues and the ideal relationship to his men. Curtius adopts the Greco-Roman bias against the Persians and the East, by presenting them as degenerative powers inferior to the civilized Greeks and Romans. 81 According to Benjamin Isaac, the negative connotations Persia received as a corrupting oriental threat were created during the Persian Wars through the literary culture of Greek city-states, mainly in Athens. 82 Many prejudices, like the idea of the Persian Empire as a hotbed of various vices, a place of slavery, and the epitome of despotic government, were linked to national stereotypes. During 1

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the Roman Imperial period, most of the former Persian Empire was ruled by the Parthians, to whom the Romans attached the many stereotypes previously linked with the Persian Achaemenid Empire. 83 The theme of the corrupting East, with its vices and luxury, was connected to the story of Alexander presented by Livy, Valerius, and Curtius. In these texts, that the Eastern ways of the Persians were barbaric and damaging was regarded as self-evident. Curtius also constructs an image of the Macedonian ways and values as morally superior to the Persian ones. Macedonian soldiers are depicted as virtuous men opposing the banquets, expressing reserve towards heavy drinking and harlots. Curtius writes: For men who held fast to their native discipline, and were accustomed with frugal and easily obtained food to satisfy the demands of nature, he had driven to the evil habits of foreign and conquered nations. 84 Curtius' construction of Macedonians soldiers as previously sober and nonbanqueting men does not conform to the more common view of the Macedonians in ancient and modem times. In the Classical world, the Macedonians were famous for their banquets and heavy drinking. 85 Avoiding this national stereotype, Curtius constructs his image of the Macedonians with the purpose of discussing the importance of Republican virtues, of defining the position of the ruler towards his subjects, and of highlighting the priority of resisting harmful alien practices. The idealized characterization of the Macedonians can be viewed as a Curtian presentation of the Romans with Republican virtue. 86 In Curtius' work, Alexander's failures are linked to his decision to set aside his own national values and to adopt alien practices. 87 In other words, Curtius is saying that if Alexander had remained Macedonian, he would not have destroyed his relationship with his Macedonian subjects. In the narrative, Curtius continues the theme of negative change and summarizes the king's development after his meeting with Darius' former eunuch Bagoas, and with the Amazon queen Thalestris, as follows: 88 It was in fact at this time that Alexander gave loose rein to his passion, and changed continence and self-control, eminent virtues in every exalted fortune, to haughtiness and wantonness. Regarding his native customs and the discipline of the Macedonian kings, wholesomely restrained and democratic, as too low for his grandeur, he strove to rival the loftiness of the Persian court, equal to the power of gods. 89 Curtius lists certain virtues of the king's early career, which he contrasts with his vices. As in Valerius Maximus' text, the vices are superbia and lascivia. The former referred to 'pride' and 'lofty self-esteem', and the latter to 'unruly' or 'licentious' behavior. Curtius deliberately idealizes the reigns of the previous Macedonian kings and the Macedonian monarchy, which is linked with his rhetorical aims. The presentation of the passage can be read as an allusion to

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emperors like Augustus and Tiberius (the predecessors of Caligula) who respected the Republican tradition, or at least did so 'officially'. In Curtius' work, foreign costumes and symbols of power were proofs that one-man rule conflicted with Macedonian expectations. Alexander compelled his friends, his cavalry, and the leaders of the soldiers to wear Persian dress; this was repugnant to the Macedonians, but they did not dare to refuse it.90 In addition, Alexander filled his palace with 365 concubines and hordes of eunuchs who were also accustomed to prostitution. 91 By the "loftiness of the Persian court, equal to the gods", Curtius was referring to proskynesis, the Persian greeting, and wearing the symbols of power once worn by the king Darius. Proskynesis was a famous Persian protocol, a greeting without any religious connotations, and Curtius approached the matter from a Roman perspective, a culture that traditionally did not contain such a protocol. 92 Among the royal symbols of power were the purple diadem, Persian garb, and the ring of Darius. 93 In the passage, Curtius stresses the bad effects of this emulation of Persian monarchs: "He used to say that he was wearing the spoils of the Persians; but with them he had assumed also their customs and insolence of spirit accompanied by the magnificence of his attire." 94 In the Roman context, these practices embodied a principate that differed from the 'accepted' Augustan model. As stated above, Curtius was most likely a contemporary of Caligula. The official image of Caligula and his infamous crimes against Roman mores remind us of Curtius' Alexander. According to Philo, Suetonius, and Cassius Dio, Caligula made a good start, but the alteration in his character was due to the illness he suffered in 38. 95 Young Caligula was reported to be especially respected by the Roman army, just as Alexander was respected by the Macedonians at the start of his career as ruler. After his recovery from illness, Caligula's personality changed dramatically for the worse and the "universal good ended." 96 The image of Caligula as a good emperor, 'one of us', begins to change to the bad and dangerous despotic 'other'. Numerous executions, exiles, and the forced suicides of leading senators, in other words, crimes against the Roman upper classes, were reported. 97 In addition to a series of murders, mistrust and suspicion began to arise within the Imperial administration and the court. Caligula is reported to have clothed himself unusually and ruled according to Eastern tastes, just like the degenerate Alexander presented in Livy, Valerius Maximus, and Curtius. 98 According to the ancient texts of the Early Empire, Caligula did not take the traditional sentiments of the many members of the senatorial class into consideration. The members of the Roman senatorial class expected their emperor to do his job, as the top man of a hierarchical system, in a way that would represent core Roman values. In contrast to his predecessors, Caligula did not care about his obligations, but acted in the manner of the Eastern autocrats. In Classical literature, Caligula's unconventional behavior was represented as a sharp contrast to the regimes of Augustus and Tiberius. Caligula's enforced ruler-cult and his demands to be recognized as a god resemble Curtius' narrative of Alexander's visit to Siwah and its notorious

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aftermath. Especially important in the Classical sources was Caligula's public attitude towards his own divinity. 99 The emperor, who considered himself a god, abandoned actions suitable for mortals. The imperial cult had been introduced into the Eastern provinces before Caligula's reign, but a living emperor had never been worshipped in Rome. 10 For the contemporary Roman elites, these demands must have felt repugnant, especially as Caligula probably demanded worship in his own right with no divine associations linked to Rome or the Senate. 101 Like Alexander in Curtius' works, Caligula is also reported to have introduced the ritual of obeisance known as proskynesis. 102 As with Curtius' Alexander, who alienated himself from his own Macedonian people, Caligula's divine aspirations and provocative policy seemed very distant, condemnable, and regrettable in the eyes of the Roman upper classes. The Romanized story of Alexander and his radically changing relationship with his Macedonian countrymen served as a warning about the terrible reign of Gaius Caligula. In Curtius' rhetoric, Alexander did not respect the natural expectations the Macedonians had of their king. The king was not satisfied with his role as the king of Macedon, whose monarchic power was based on the Macedonian mos maiorum, but yearned for more power that in fact did not belong to him. Similarly, Caligula, in the Classical tradition, was not content with his duties as princeps but broke his relationship with the senatorial upper class. The historical Caligula has been said to have emulated Alexander, which may have been one of the reasons why Curtius chose the latter as a subject. 103 Ideas concerning the way monarchy should be arranged in Rome were of immediate concern during Caligula's notorious autocracy. It can be argued that Curtius' History of Alexander was a way of handling the shocking recent memory of Caligula' s reign and perhaps, he hoped, a way of ensuring that such a terrible autocracy would not recur in the near future. 104 In Curtius' paradigm, Alexander's irresponsible autocracy had to be separated from the Claudian regime. There is a reference that Claudius was officially estranged from the memory of Alexander in the Roman Principate. Augustus had had two friezes created, one depicting Victory and Alexander with Castor and Pollux, and the other with Alexander riding triumphant in his chariot alongside the image of war in the ForumAugustum. Claudius is reported to have ordered the faces of Alexander to be cut out and replaced with images of the deified Augustus. 105 Pliny had lived during the reign of Claudius. In the passage, Pliny depicted Claudius as an emperor who wanted to distance himself publicly from the reign of Caligula, to show that he was leaning on the Augustan principate. In the world after Caligula, Curtius' moralizing concerns and the general debate over the right way of governing can be seen in his work. In an autocratic society such as the Roman Empire, this feature of the narrative containing a sociopolitical message was evident. Curtius' story-writing defined the ways of a good princeps, who ruled his countrymen in accordance with the expectations of the senatorial upper class. Alexander spoiled his good relationship with his men, and this example was used by Curtius to remind his audience that a proper relationship between the emperor and his subjects was essential. For the Roman elites, it was not only

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important to see how the princeps acted in relation to defeated people, but to see how the emperor exercised his power towards themselves - mainly the senatorial class. Perhaps in the future Curtius' work will be examined systematically for its sociopolitical messages and as a commentary on contemporary Roman concerns. The much imitated and admired Alexander also offered a negative model for the Latin Roman authors: an example of what not to do. The critical portrait of Alexander as a degenerate oriental despot underlined certain political lessons. The foreign practices, values, and the system of government in non-Roman states are not only inferior to the Roman ones, but also harmful if they are imitated. In barbarian states under one-man rule (rex), the king can use his power without concern for his obligations. Since foreign practices and despotic one-man rule are interpreted as objectional, dishonorable, and shameful, imitating these practices and their conduct can only lead to disaster. A corollary of the above message was that when a ruler starts to imitate the foreign practices, he is replacing superior Roman ways with inferior practices. This potentially frightening picture was a severe threat to traditional Roman identity. Even though Rome had conquered the inhabited world, it had to be careful not to adopt the ways of the conquered nations. Although geographically expanded, the Empire should still be Roman. The Latin writers of the Early Empire saw Alexander as a means to discuss the problems that autocracy would bring the empire. These Roman writers were not setting out to assess the historical Alexander but to comment on and evaluate how and why the princeps should exercise his power for the benefit of his fellow countrymen. Roman intellectuals repeated the demand that Rome should remain faithful to her institutions and the customs that had made her great. 106 According to this way of thinking, Rome's success lay in her fidelity to her virtues and lifestyle. The message transmitted in their presentations of Alexander denying his patria and mos maiorum was that it was important to remain faithful to the Roman ruling system and its sociopolitical customs. The princeps should always use his power in a way respectful of the demands of the Roman senatorial class.

Alexander as a Greek cultural hero While Latin Romans used a critical portrait of Alexander in their patriotic texts, Roman Greeks exploited the figure of Alexander in political rhetoric and identity construction. Here, I focus on the idealized portraits of Alexander by the Roman Greeks: why did the Greek Roman writers of the Early Empire give a positive image of Alexander's career and his oriental policy? I explore the patriotic message behind these heroic presentations of Alexander. My hypothesis is that contemporary political realities and the needs of the Roman Greek upper classes impacted on the way these authors wrote about Alexander. The popular trend among the Roman ruling class was a phenomenon now called philhellenism. 107 This was both a cultural and a political matter. Greek language, literature, and philosophy were favored by the Romans from the second century BC onwards. After Rome conquered the Greek city-states during the wars of the second and first centuries BC, Greek culture made a deep impact on the Roman

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Empire. The blend of Greek and Roman values and the admiration for Greek culture lived on for a long time during the Principate and was to continue throughout the history of the empire. Many Roman emperors, including Augustus, Nero, and Hadrian, are famously described as philhellenes because of their support for Greek art and culture. 108 In the Hellenistic East, the memory of Alexander had lived on during the centuries since his death. When Rome conquered the Greek East, it encountered absolute monarchies ruled by Hellenistic kings or successors in Asia Minor who imitated them. Even though it might be an exaggeration to consider Alexander the inaugurator of a new age who created a new world of kingdoms informed by Greek culture, his legacy in the Hellenistic East was indisputable. 109In the Hellenistic East, Alexander was treated as 'the first king' and as a national hero, a god, or in some cases as the founder of Alexandria. 110It can be argued that for Greek Roman writers, Alexander did not belong to the 'other' but to the 'us'. The writers I consider here came from Greek-speaking areas, such as the province of Bithynia (Arrian, Dio Chrysostom, Cassius Dio ), the city of Alexandria (Diodorus, Appian), or the cities of mainland Greece (Plutarch, Aelius Aristides, Polyaenus). They were Roman citizens and had created a career within the Roman Empire. 111Yet they were more 'insiders about Greek culture' than they were about Roman culture. 112In addition, their position as the representatives of the Greekspeaking elite and the Greek past was something they wanted to promote. 113 The idealized Greek Alexander of the Early Empire has been recognized in earlier research. 114However, scholarly interest has often been directed towards particular writers and particular works such as Plutarch's Alexander biography and his essay On the fortune or the virtue of Alexander the Great. Many other Greek passages dealing with Alexander have received v ery little attention. 115Accordingly, passages concerning Alexander have been examined as literary themes appearing in works written by the representatives of the Second Sophistic movement.116 Questions of language and genre have received scholarly interest, while the idealized image of Alexander has not been considered in its own right as a use of history for specific purposes. I suggest that the portrait of Alexander in the Greek Roman texts should not be considered mainly the writer's personal opinion about the king, or as a reflection of the Second Sophistic movement, but rather as a conscious attempt to convey a sociopolitical message and promote specific values. Correspondingly, these writers' presentations of Alexander were closely related to contemporary cultural and political concerns. Diodorus, a Greek writer from Alexandria, wrote his Library of History during the reign of Augustus. The portrait of Alexander in Diodorus is quite typical of the Greek Roman treatments of the king in the Imperial Era: 1

He accomplished greater deeds than any, not only of the kings who had lived before him but also of those who were to come later down to our time. 117 In this passage, the Macedonian king is depicted as the greatest leader of all time. Diodorus refers to his own time, which had witnessed leaders such as Pompey,

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Caesar, and Augustus. For Greek writers, Alexander's topmost position is indisputable. We find several other Greek writers eulogizing Alexander's career. In his so-called second preface to the Anabasis, Arrian stated that "no other man performed such remarkable deeds, whether in number or magnitude, among either Greeks or barbarians." 118 Plutarch went even further in his essay: not satisfied with simply calling Alexander a "great man", he described the Macedonian king as the "greatest man who ever lived." 119 Alongside these laudatory comments, many Greek writers made comparisons between Alexander and famous Roman statesmen. As distinct from the Roman Latin texts examined earlier in this book, Alexander is at least as good as, if not clearly better than, both his Greek and Macedonian predecessors and the many illustrious Roman generals and statesmen. This becomes evident in Plutarch's biography of Pompey. Plutarch draws a comparison between Pompey and Alexander. He was not the first to do this. Pliny the Elder, in his Natural History, referred to Pompey the Great, whose victories and many triumphs had "equaled the brilliance" not only of Alexander but of Hercules and Liber Father. 120 In his life of Pompey, Plutarch goes against the trend with a critical statement. He mentions how Pompey celebrated his third triumph over the third continent. Plutarch states, "So it seemed in a way to have included the whole world." In the next passage, Plutarch has the career of Alexander on his mind when he describes Pompey's age: His age at this time, as those insist, who compare him in all points to Alexander and force the parallel, was less than thirty-four years, though in fact he was nearly forty. How happy would it have been for him if he had ended his life at this point, up to which he enjoyed the good fortune of Alexander. 121 Plutarch refers to those who insist on comparing Pompey in all aspects to Alexander. It is, in Plutarch's view, 'forcing the parallel'. By this statement, Plutarch wants to make clear to his audience the exaggerated nature of the claims made for Pompey in this 'trend'. He insistently reminds his readership that Pompey was the same age as Alexander when he celebrated his three triumphs, but was at the peak of his career. The Roman warlord was in fact nearly 40. The critical statement implies that Pompey was not equal to Alexander. The reference to the peak of Pompey's career reminds the reader that he was ultimately defeated in the civil war against Caesar. Plutarch insists that Pompey's accomplishments were not particularly remarkable or astonishing - certainly not in the light of Alexander's. It would have been better if Pompey had died at this age. In that case, he could have enjoyed the 'good fortune of Alexander'. Other similar comparisons between Alexander and his Roman counterparts are found in Appian's (95-165) Civil Wars and Dio Cassius' (ea. 155-235) Roman History. In his work, probably written during the reign of Antoninus Pius, Appian places Caesar alongside Alexander, but in a slightly differently way than Velleius does (cf. previous subchapter). When it comes to Caesar's attributes, Appian describes him as a man "fittingly compared with Alexander." 122 The passage

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shows a different approach to those adopted by the writers of patriotic Roman Latin comparisons. To be compared to Alexander is the greatest honor one could receive, and thus comparison in itself was a great mark of respect. On the other hand, it is notable that when Greek writers like Appian wrote on Roman heroes, they almost invariably reminded their audience of the greatness of Alexander. In a passage that follows the death of Caesar, Appian outlines what Alexander and Caesar had in common. 123 The digression serves as praise of both Alexander and Caesar. According to Appian both men had the greatest ambitions, were skilled in warfare, quick in their decisions, and relied equally on audacity, luck, and military skill. Furthermore, they both mourned their dead commanders and paid them divine honors. Additionally, they were both students of the sciences and arts. Alexander's troops were unbeaten (arrrT11To