Collected Papers on Alexander the Great

Ernst Badian

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136449345
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia antigua

Professor Ernst Badian (1925-2011) was one of the most influential Alexander historians of the twentieth century. His first articles on the subject appeared in 1958, and he continued for a full fifty years to reshape scholarly perception of the reign of Alexander the Great. A steady output of articles was reinforced by lectures and reviews in his own formidable style. Badian's earliest work transformed understanding of aspects of the Roman Republic, and he continued to work on that area throughout his career; but his series of studies of Alexander the Great (which he deliberately never summed up in a synoptic work) demolished the hero of his predecessors such as Droysen and Tarn, whom he regarded as starry-eyed hero-worshippers, and created an Alexander on the model of a twentieth-century tyrant. The Alexander who was a ruthless killer of his rivals and those who disagreed with him, a mass-murderer in his conquests, and perhaps even an incompetent imperialist, has superseded the Alexander whose mission it was to bring Greek civilization to the ends of the earth. These essays and articles provide a new layer in the interpretation of a figure who has not ceased to fascinate since his death in 323 BC.

Many of these articles were published in out-of-the-way journals and conference volumes, and are brought together here for the first time in a collection which will provide student and scholar with a view of the full range of Badian's work on Alexander. Certain ephemeral pieces and all reviews except one have been excluded, by the wish of the author. The twenty-seven articles included were all revised by the author before his death, but there has been no other editorial intervention. The volume also includes a portrait, and an introduction by Eugene Borza surveying Badian's career and contribution. No one who works on Alexander the Great can afford to be without this book.

1

Alexander the Great and the Unity of Mankind

Twenty-five years ago Sir William Tarn delivered a Raleigh Lecture on History to the British Academy,¹ to which he gave this challenging title and in which he created the figure we may call Alexander the Dreamer: an Alexander ‘dreaming’² of ‘one of the supreme revolutions in the world’s outlook’, namely ‘the brotherhood of man or the unity of mankind’. He did not claim to have given proof – only ‘a very strong presumption indeed’. Perhaps no one, in a subject of this nature, ought to ask for more. Yet six years later Tarn could write: ‘It is now, as I see it, certain.’³ Ten years ago, in his great work on Alexander, certainty was apparently a little abated.⁴ But if there was less pretension, there was no more ability to think himself mistaken, and no more civility in dealing with opposing views. And the conclusion reached was described by its author as ‘the most important thing about [Alexander].’⁵ The matter is indeed important. That the ‘revolution in the world’s [i.e. the Greek world’s] outlook’ did take place is a fact; and that it prepared that world for the spiritual climate of the Roman Empire and Christianity – helping to make first one and then the other possible and generally accepted – makes it one of the decisive revolutions in the history of Western thought. Ever since 1933, Tarn’s figure of Alexander the Dreamer has explicitly claimed the credit for this re-orientation: the phantom has haunted the pages of scholarship,⁶ and even source-books and general histories of philosophy and of ideas – at least in this country – have begun to succumb to the spell.⁷ Perhaps a quarter of a century is long enough for the life-span of a phantom: it is clearly threatening to pass into our tradition as a thing of flesh and blood. It is the aim of this article – an aim in which it can hardly hope to be immediately successful – to lay the ghost.⁸

‘The Fatherhood of God’

According to Tarn, Alexander developed ‘an idea which had three facets or aspects’; and, to avoid misrepresentation, it is best to quote his own exposition of them: ‘The first is that God is the common Father of mankind, which may be called the brotherhood of man. The second is Alexander’s dream of the various races of mankind, so far as known to him, becoming of one mind together and living in unity and concord, which may be called the unity of mankind. And the third … is that the various peoples of his Empire might be partners in the realm rather than subjects.’⁹ Let us examine these ‘facets’ in turn.

The first is not logically relevant to the other two: it is only by playing with imagery that we arrive from the idea of God as ‘the common Father of mankind’ at that of the ‘brotherhood of man’ in any ethically important sense. In fact, for reasons that nowadays need hardly be set out at length, the idea of God as ‘the common Father of mankind’ is ethically neutral. On it, or on similar foundations, equalitarian and universalist ethics have in fact been founded – but also systems of chosen peoples, of lawful slavery, and all the class and race distinctions with which we are so familiar. To keep within the bounds of the image: God may still have all manner of favourite children, including the exponent of the theory advanced. This seems so elementary as to be hardly worth stressing. Yet it seems to have escaped Tarn’s notice, as is clear from his exposition. Citing from Plutarch the report that Alexander ‘said that God was the common father of all mankind, but that he made the best ones peculiarly his own,’ he comments: ‘This, on the face of it, is a plain statement that all men are brothers.’ (And he goes on to say that it is the first.)¹⁰ On the face of it, it is hard not to see in it something quite different. Nor does scrutiny belie the first impression. Plutarch¹¹ has been talking about Alexander’s visit to Ammon and telling some of the stories that collected round the oracle’s replies to him; in particular, he has stressed the revelation to Alexander that he was to regard Zeus-Ammon as his father. It is after this that the story of ‘Psammon’ – in which the quotation occurs – is introduced as a further λεγóμενoν: there can be no doubt that its point, precisely like that of the preceding ones, is Alexander’s close relationship to the god. The implication of the context is confirmed by the wording of the Greek: Psammon says that all men are ruled by God; but Alexander, speaking ‘more philosophically’, says ώς пάντων μέν öντα κöιν άνϑρώпων пατέρα τòν ϑεóν,

δίυς δέ пoιoύμενoν έαυτoῦ τoύς άρíστoυς. It is here that Tarn persuades himself that the μἐν clause is what really matters, while the δἐ clause ‘seems … not to affect the matter in the least’:¹² the structure of the sentence, like that of the context, must be distorted or ignored in order to fit it into a preconceived theory. In fact, as has often been noticed, the first clause is simply an adaptation of the Homeric tag пατὴρ ἀνδρῶν τε ϑεῶν τε (in which, as the Greeks knew and Tarn recognises, пατήρ means ‘father’ in a social-hierarchic and not in a physical sense): far from being important in itself, it is merely a way of picking up ‘Psammon’s’ statement – in a manner that would come natural to a man educated in the Greek tradition – in order to qualify it with the addition (μὲν … δὲ ) that Plutarch calls ‘more philosophic’.¹³ Alexander, as we saw, had just been told that he was a son of Zeus-Ammon.

So much for the story as Plutarch tells it: it is not intended to, and it does not in the least, portray Alexander as believing in the brotherhood of man in any sense in which Greeks, ever since Homer, had not. Moreover, even Tarn is doubtful about the person of Psammon – a name not found again – and the anecdote follows a particularly silly one that no one has ever thought genuine, and it is the culmination of a chapter in which practically nothing can be accepted as undoubted fact. Meetings between Alexander and philosophers – treated, according to what one wanted to prove, to his credit or to theirs – are one of the stock subjects of legend: we need only mention Diogenes and (though here a meeting did at least take place, and we can almost watch its elaboration) the Gymnosophists.^13a It is indeed surprising that such an elaborate house of cards should be built on a distortion of a reported saying – but even more so that anyone should try to build anything at all upon the shifting sands of the appropriately named Psammon.

The banquet at Opis

The other two ‘facets’ – far more important – are fashioned out of the Opis banquet, which we must now investigate.¹⁴ The scene is reported only by Arrian (anab. vii 11, 8–9: all our references to Arrian are to this work), and, considering the importance it has in Tarn’s elaborate structure, we must give Arrian’s account in full:

(8) ’Aλέξανδρoς δὲ ἐпὶ τoύτoις ϑυσíαν τε ϑύει τoῖς ϑεoĩς oí῀ς αὐτῷ νόμoς καì ϑoíνην δημoτελῆ ἐпoíηεσε, καϑήμεόνς τε αὐτὸς καì пάντων καϑημένων, ἀμφ αὐτὸν μέν Μακεδόνων, έν δὲ τῷ ὲφε

ῆς τoύτων Пερσῶν, ὲпì δὲ τoύτoις τῶν ἃλλων έϑνῶν ὅσoι κατ’ ἀ

íωσιν ἤ τινα ἃλλην ἀρστὴ ν пρεσβενόμενoι καì ἀпὸ τoῦ αὐτoῦ κρατῆρoς αὐτὸς τε καì oἱ ἀμφ αὐτὸν ἀρενόμενoι ἔσпενδον τὰς αὐτὰς σпονδάς, καταρχομένων τών τε ‘Ελλήνων μάντεων καὶ τών Μάγων

(9) εὔχετο δὲ τά τε ἃλλα άγαϑὰ καì όμόνοιάν τε καì κοινωνίαν τῆς άρχῆς [τοις τε ?] Μακεδόσι καὶ Пέρσαις… .

It is clear that to Arrian (i.e. to his source) the whole affair is not of outstanding importance. It is a tailpiece( ὲпὶ τoύτoις ) of merely two sections to the Opis mutiny, which is an important event and has taken up chapters 8 to ii, 7; and it is immediately followed (12, 1) by the dismissal of the Macedonian veterans. This had been planned and announced before the mutiny and had been immediately responsible for its outbreak; and after its settlement it could at last be executed. The banquet, as we can see, just like the sacrifice that precedes it, marks the formal settlement of the dispute that had led to the mutiny; and it follows upon the account of the details of that settlement. The mutiny, as we are repeatedly and unanimously told, was due to the Macedonians’ jealousy of the favour Alexander was showing to the ‘Persians’.¹⁵ The reconciliation, therefore, might be expected to be between (a) Alexander and the Macedonians, whose quarrel was the mutiny; (b) the Macedonians and the ‘Persians’, whose differences h...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Foreword
• Introduction
• 1. ‘Alexander the Great and the Unity of Mankind’. Historia 7 (1958), 287–306
• 2. ‘The Eunuch Bagoas’. Classical Quarterly n.s. 8 (1958), 144–52
• 3. ‘The Death of Parmenio’. Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 91 (1960), 324–338
• 4. Review of L. Pearson, The Lost Histories of Alexander the Great. Gnomon 33 (1961), 660–67
• 5. ‘Harpalus’. Journal of Hellenic Studies 81 (1961), 16–43
• 6. ‘Alexander the Great and the Loneliness of Power’.Australasian Universities Modern Languages Association (1962), 80–91
• 7. ‘The Death of Philip II’. Phoenix 17 (1963), 244–250
• 8. ‘The Date of Clitarchus’. Proceedings of the African Classical Association 8 (1965), 5–11
• 9. ‘Orientals in Alexander’s Army’. Journal of Hellenic Studies 85(1965), 160-161
• 10. ‘Alexander the Great and the Greeks of Asia’. Studies in Honour of V. Ehrenberg (Blackwell 1966), 37–69
• 11. ‘Agis III’. Hermes 95 (1967), 170–192
• 12. ‘A King’s Notebooks’. Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 72 (1968), 183–204
• 13. ‘Nearchus the Cretan’. Yale Classical Studies 24 (1975),147–170
• 14. Review of K. Kraft, Der ‘rationale’ Alexander. Gnomon 47 (1975), 48–58
• 15. ‘The Battle of the Granicus’. Ancient Macedonia 2 (1977), 271–293
• 16. ‘The Deification of Alexander the Great’. Studies in Honour of Charles Edson, Institute of Balkan Studies (1981), 27–71
• 17. ‘Greeks and Macedonians’. Studies in the History of Art 10 (Symposium series 1) (1982), 33–51
• 18. ‘Alexander at Peucelaotis’. Classical Quarterly 37 (1987), 117–128
• 19. ‘The Ring and the Book’. Festschrift G. Wirth, ed. W. Will (1988), 605–625
• 20. ‘Agis III: Revisions and Reflections’ in I. Worthington (ed) Ventures into Greek History (Oxford University Press 1994), 258–292
• 21. ‘Alexander the Great between Two Thrones and Heaven’ in A. Small (ed) Subject and Ruler; Journal of Roman Archaeology Supplement 17 (1996), 11–26
• 22. ‘The King’s Indians’. Antiquitas 46 (1998), 205–224
• 23. ‘A Note on the “Alexander Mosaic”’ in F. B. Titchener and R. F. Morton Jr (eds), The Eye Expanded (University of California Press 1999), 75–92
• 24. ‘Conspiracies’ in A. B. Bosworth and E. J. Baynham (eds), Alexander the Great in Fact and Fiction (Oxford University Press 2000), 50–95
• 25. ‘Darius III’. Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 100 (2000), 241–67
• 26. ‘Plutarch’s Unconfessed Skill’ in Th. Hantos (ed) Laurea Internationalis, Festschrift. J. Bleicken (Franz Steiner Verlag 2003), 26–44
• 27. ‘Once More the Death of Philip II’ in Ancient Macedonia VII, Institute of Balkan Studies (2007), 389–406
• Index