- This paper explores the historiographical background of the representation of Alexander III of Macedon. By setting alongside each other examples taken from the narratives of Herodotus and from the Alexander-historians, it will examine the extent to which early representations of the Persian King have informed accounts of Alexander the Great. Among the areas covered will be: geographical explorations, the status of ‘King of Asia’, the dress of the Persian King, and the ideological setting of the royal banquets. In all these areas, the image of Alexander III will be shown to be in a complex dialogue with earlier traditions, both taking on and reversing typical characteristics of the ‘Herodotean Persian King’.
- https://www.researchgate.net/publication/320427587_Taietti_GDM_2016_’Alexander_the_Great_as_a_Herodotean_Persian_King’_159-177_with_bibliography_added?channel=doi&linkId=59e4e0edaca272390ed637dd&showFulltext=true
- Alexander left Macedonia in the early Spring of 334 BC, less than two years in his rule, to cross to Asia in May 334 BC, never to return to Europe. In fact we do not know whether he ever intended to come back. Indeed, classical and oriental evidence alike show Alexander’s efforts to assume trappings of the Achaemenid monarchy both in political practice of taxation, appointments of satraps, usage of oriental troops and image-building. This, traditionally called, Orientalizing policy of Alexander manifested itself in his proclamation as King of Asia at the battlefield of Gaugamela, to culminate in the so-called proskynesis affair and to be sealed by mass wedding of Susa and Alexander’s decision to select Babylon as his primary residence, just as late Achaemenids did.
Alexandria in or near Egypt proved the most successful of all real or attributed foundations of Alexander, both as the capital city of the Ptolemies and a centre of arts and commerce. Starting from her research on the Hellenistic vitreous ware in the Sandwich GoldGlass technique, Giulia Cesarin investigates the motive of hunting iconography in Hellenistic art. She notices a strong, if circumstantial Alexandrian connection of the scene of a young horseman dressed in kausia and hunting big game with a spear. Its origin is related to the Macedonian art, best represented by the hunting scene (of Alexander?) on the façade of the Tomb II in Vergina. Cesarin shows its transformation in the Greco-Egyptian milieu of Alexandria. The dearth of contemporary Greek sources on Alexander necessitates study of any evidence, no matter how incomplete and ambiguous. A broken stele containing the Athenian honorific decree (IG II² 356) of 327/6 BC for a descendant of Pharnabazus and Artabazus is the case in point. The name of the honorand is usually restored as Memnon, with an almost universal agreement that it a member of family of the famous mercenary general Memnon of Rhodes. But, following upon a new restoration of S. Lambert, Eduard Rung, shows new possibility of historical interpretation of the decree and its geopolitical context. To him no Memnon was ever mentioned as honorand and the Athenians passed this decree for Thymondas son of Mentor. In Rung’s tentative interpretation Thymondas earned the praises having successfully negotiated release of Athenian mercenary soldiers and envoys from Alexander’s captivity.
- Alexander’s expedition to Asia was first of all a military endeavor although few contributors to this volume would be inclined to reduce its history to strictly military matters, least of all not in the modern, seemingly rational understanding of war making. But even now, for all logistical and intelligence sophistication the very outcome of many military operations is largely unforeseeable. In ancient warfare a universal answer to the powerful factor of unpredictability was ascertaining future through divination. Krzysztof Ulanowski looks from this point of view at campaigns of conquest of rulers of Neo-Assyrian Kingdom and of Alexander. His aim is not to prove direct influence of the Assyrian divination on that of the Greeks and Macedonians of the fourth c. BC, but to show basic, universal approach to warfare from the Assyrian empire to that of Alexander, despite all differences, the greatest being perhaps the very nature of Assyrian divination: with a highly structured hierarchy of experts drawing on extensive specialized literature devoted to discreet disciplines. Even if nothing betrays a similar structure of Greek seers serving Alexander, the divinatory techniques and questions were similar to those applied in Neo-Assyrian armies.
- One episode in Alexander’s campaigns in Baktria or Sogdiana, whose geography is as imprecise as any other’s and whose meaning has baffled scholars is the massacre of Branchidai. Olga Kubica attempts to find out who they were and to gauge their guilt in a mock trial. Kubica reminds the reader that Alexander’s deed, an act of genocide by our standards, was almost universally construed in ancient sources as just punishment, even if this explanation was no more than a cover up absolving Alexander from the charge of inadequate control of his troops, guilty of massacre. But, Kubica shows, Branchidai did not disappear completely: there are epigraphic traces of their survival in Central Asia a few hundred years after Alexander, while in Asia Minor divinatory practices harking back to their tradition are attested as late as the fourth c. AD. Although Alexander’s conquests ended at the Hyphasis and in modern geographical terminology he barely made an inroad into India, serious scholars and history enthusiasts have long been asking questions about his real and possible relations with the great nation east of India, China of the Warring States period. Gościwit Malinowski notices that in many eastern versions of the Alexander Romance Alexander conducts a peaceful conquest of China. But this is certainly a literary fiction, introduced much later than the age of Alexander, long after diplomatic contacts between China and the Roman empire had been established under Marcus Aurelius.
Even if contacts, certainly not limited to trade in goods, between India and China existed in the age of Alexander, no evidence proves the knowledge of China at the court of Alexander, nor did his conquest found any reflection in Chinese sources. To many Alexander is also and to some mostly a literary figure. Guendalina Taietti investigates parallel handling of motives in Herodotus and among Alexander historians, treated as a notionary unity. She finds some remarkable parallels between the Herodotean image of the Persian king and the representation of Alexander in later authors, e.g. in terms of conquests or in bold engineering feats, but also in negative traits. On poignant example is the topical representations of tyrants, with their excessive longing on which the famed pothos of Alexander certainly bordered. In Taietti’s analysis some other principal characters in Alexander’s historians were re-modeled to fit the Herodotean patterns; the most convincing case to be made for Parmenion, a tragic-warner, not unlike Croesus or Artabanaus. Alexander historians, Taietti shows, freely borrowed story patterns from Herodotus which only helped them to promote their agenda in presenting the portrait of Alexander, both modelled on the Herodotean Persian King and being its reversal.