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The reception of Alexander is a theme in which the conqueror is uncharacteristically passive. The point has been well made that the Alexander we receive in Diodorus, Rufus, Arrian, Plutarch and Justin is primarily a construct of these authors writing centuries after Alexander’s death, reflecting not just their contemporary concerns, but also their reliance upon equally partisan historiographic traditions of representing Alexander. Even the passages identified as eyewitness accounts must reflect the agenda of those writing and come to us through filters of fragments and testimonia in writers of the Roman period.

1. On the historians of Alexander: L. Pearson, The Lost Histories of Alexander the Great (Chico, Cal.: Scholars Press, 1983); A.B. Bosworth, A Historical Commentary on Arrian’s History of Alexander i (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 1–41; From Arrian to Alexander: Studies in Historical Interpretation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988); Alexander and the East: The Tragedy of Triumph (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 31–65; N.G.L. Hammond, Sources for Alexander the Great: an Analysis of Plutarch’s Life and Arrian’s Anabasis Alexandrou (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); D. Lenfant, “On Persian tryphe in Athenaeus” in Persian Responses: Political and CulturalInteractions with(in)the Achaemenid Empire ed. C. Tuplin (Swansea: The Classical Press of Wales, 2007), 51–57 raises the same issues in respect of Athenaeus, whose Deipnosophists provides a number of fragments relating to Alexander. A.J.S. Spawforth, “The Court of Alexander the Great Between Europe and Asia” in The Court and Court Society in Ancient Monarchies ed. A.J.S. Spawforth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007): 88– 89 on the issue of the Roman Alexander; and “The Pamphleteer Ephippus, King Alexander and the Persian Royal Hunt”, Histos 6 (2012):177–180 has discussed not only the acknowledged invective in one of Athenaeus’ sources, Ephippus, but the further difficulty inherent in contemporary accounts of Alexander which is the issue of proximity to the king and knowledge of his intentions within the royal court.
2. The surviving sources agree that Alexander adopted certain eastern customs including costume and court protocol (Arr. Anab. 4.7.3–7, 8.2, 10.5–12.5, 14.1–2; Plut. Alex. 45; De Alex. fort. 329f–330a; Diod. Sic. 17.77.4–6; Curt. 6.6.1–7; Just. Epit. 12.3.8–12). Although they do not agree on the details of Alexander’s new court style, the dominant features they record are: the adoption of clothing that was recognizably that of the Persian kings. Including the adoption of Achaemenid royal headgear. Plutarch says nothing specifically about headgear; Diodorus, Curtius Rufus and Justin all concur that Alexander adopted the diadem, to which we may add Ephippus FGrH 126 f5 = Ath. 12.537e; Arr. Anab. 4.7.4 states that Alexander “exchanged the tiara (τὴν κίταριν) of the Persians … for the head-dress he had long worn”, but it is generally accepted that this is an error and he only ever used the diadem, A.B. Bosworth, A Historical Commentary on Arrian’s History of Alexander ii (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 50. The introduction of certain rituals from the court of the Persian kings, especially the practice of doing obeisance before the king, and distributing cloaks of purple and gold to his closest companions. We can be confident these are genuine features of Fourth Century Persian royal dress as they appear in Xenophon’s account of the costume and ceremony adopted by Cyrus the Great (Xen. Cyr. 8.3.1–3, 13–16, 21–23; cf. Curt. 3.3.17–20).

1. Orientalizing
2. The issues with using terms such as “oriental” and “orientalizing” in the 7th Century bc to describe the interactions between Greeks and their Near Eastern neighbours, evidenced in art, have been thoroughly argued by Ann Gunter and those concerns remain valid for the 6–4th centuries bc (A. Gunter,“Models of the Orient in the Art of the Orientalizing Period” in Achaemenid History v: the Roots of the European Tradition, Proceedings of the 1987 Groningen Achaemenid HistoryWorkshop eds. H. Sancisi-Weerdenburg andJ.W. Drijvers (Leiden: NederlandsInstituut voor het Nabije Oosten, 1990), 132–137; Greek Art and the Orient (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 1–13; “Orientalism and Orientalization in the Iron Age Mediterranean” in Critical Approaches to Ancient Near Eastern Art eds. B.A. Brown and M.H. Feldman (Boston/Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014), 82–96). Oriental has in the past been applied pejoratively, creating two fundamentally opposed monoliths: East and West, Europe and Asia, Us and Them ( See C. von Rüden, “Beyond the East-West Dichotomy in Syrian and Levantine Wall Paintings” in Critical Approaches to Ancient Near Eastern Art eds. B.A. Brown and M.H. Feldman (Boston/Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014), 61–63 for an excellent summary of early twentieth century positions regarding the sharp contrasts between East and West). Said’s Orientalism has been the subject of sharp criticism since its publication in 1978 from various disciplines on numerous grounds, including highly selective use of sources and his own reduction of the Orient and Orientalism to the Islamic Arab experience of an equally monolithically conceived 18th Century Europe. For a highly detailed critical analysis of Said’s Orientalism with substantial bibliography see the recent new edition of D.M. Varrisco, Reading Orientalism: Said and the Unsaid (Seattle Wash.; London: University of Washington Press, 2017), Kindle Edition.

It therefore should come as no surprise that the general consensus among Alexander histories is to present the introduction of Near Eastern customs as the corruption and degeneration of Alexander. Unacceptable subversion of clearly superior Hellenic practices: S. Swain, Hellenism and Empire: language, Classicism and Power in the Greek World ad50–250 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 17. For them, our term orientalizing would be synonymous with barbarization. Plutarch describes the costume as “barbarian dress”, Arrian remarks that he does not approve of it, and Curtius Rufus sees the adopted practices as “corrupted by luxury and foreign customs (Plut. Alex. 45.1–3; Arr. Anab. 4.7.4; Curt. 6.6.1–10). Interestingly, Curt. 10.3.6–10 repeats the motif of the Oriental luxury and excess, but places it in an address by Alexander to his foreign troops at Opis.

1. Persianization
2. That Alexander had genuine objectives in mind for the adoption of certain elements of costume and ceremonial is suggested by Plutarch and Arrian ( Plut. Alex. 45.1; Arr. Anab. 7.29.3–4). Each indicates that the introduction of new practices was a deliberate policy of Alexander’s intended to align himself more closely with the political and cultural traditions of his native subjects in an ancient campaign to win hearts and minds and so reduce the risk of rebellion. Harmony and unity most fully developed in (Plut. Alex. 45.1; 47.3–7; de. Alex. fort. 329b– 330e). An overly simplified summary of the key developments are: promotion of “brotherhood and unity” by W.W. Tarn, Alexander the Great ii (Cambridge: University Press, 1948), 400–403, 409–449; this view was then persuasively challenged by E. Badian,“Alexander the Great and the Unity of Mankind”Historia 7 (1958): 425–444; and Bosworth, “Alexander and the Iranians” put the nails into the coffin of unity of mankind. Arrian and Plutarch do not state that this policy was directed at the Persians, using the phrases “barbarians” and “Asians” respectively, but it is implied that Persians were the target group.In the case of Plutarch, the discussion is situated in Hyrcania, and in the case of Arrian, this “device designed for the barbarians” is surrounded by direct references to “Persian dress,” “Persian apple-bearers” and “Persian peers”. Having concluded that orientalizing carries too many implications of moralizing distinctions between East andWest to appropriately be used as a term for Alexander’s actions, and that the Alexander historians considered those actions to be directed towards the Persians, we must examine the suitability of the term Persianization. The first potential problem with Persianization is how easily this term can be used synonymously with orientalizing, where Persia comes to stand not only for the entire empire, but for the entire Near East.

The inscription on the tomb of Darius i at Naqši Rustam lists the achievements of Darius (DNa §16–18 … 22–30). A more recent translation is produced by A. Kuhrt, The Persian Empire: A Corpus of Sources from the Achaemenid Period (London; New York: Routledge, 2010), 11, no. 16 which includes only minor variations. The petasos wearing Ionians (op Yauna takabarā) of DNa and DSm §10–11 cf. DSe §27–29 are identified by J.M. Balcer, “Persian Occupied Thrace (Skudra)”Historia 37 (1988), 7 as Macedonians. N.G.L. Hammond, The Macedonian State: The Origins, Institutions and History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 13 follows Balcer in identifying this group as Macedonian, but prefers to identify them as Ionians wearing the kausia. On the kausia in Macedon see E.A. Fredricksmeyer, “Alexander the Great and the Macedonian kausia”, Transactions of the American Philological Association 116 (1986), 215–227 contra B.M. Kingsley “The Cap that Survived Alexander” American Journal of Archaeology 85 (1981), 39–46. The inscription states:

There are two minor issues which must be borne in mind when proceeding on the basis that Persia was a distinct and reasonably homogeneous entity within the empire: one is the identification by Darius and Xerxes in inscriptions not just as Persians, but also as Aryans db iv §70 Aryan appears as a language; DNa §8–15 (also reminds that Darius is “king of countries containing all kinds of men”); DSe §12–14; XPh §11–14 (Daiva Inscription). Aryan (Iranian) incorporates various groups across the imperial heartland speaking dialects of Old Iranian and sharing a broad culture. For definitions of Iranians and their distribution across modern Iran see: Kent,Old Persian, 6; R.N. Frye, “Iranian Identity in Ancient Times” Iranian Studies 26 (1993): 143–146; and J. Wiesehöfer, “The Achaemenid Empire” in The Dynamics of Ancient Empires: State Power from Assyria to Byzantium eds. I. Morris and W. Scheidel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 70.

1. Persians, though distinct, also existed as part of a broader ethnic group with which they shared certain customs. The second is the identification of Cyrus in his own inscription on the Cyrus Cylinder as king of Anšan rather than of Persia (Cyrus Cylinder §12). After this introduction Cyrus uses the traditional Babylonian royal titles “king of the universe, great king, powerful king, king of Babylon, king of Sumer and Akkad, king of the four quarters” but identifies his paternal line back three generations as kings of Anšan (§20–21). Fortunately, this issue does not present a serious problem when assessing the actions of Alexander as no Persian king after Cyrus seems to have used this title. The title drops out of royal usage, but Cyrus of Anšan, son of Teispes continued to feature in Achaemenid royal circles, used on pfs 93*: Kuhrt, The Persian Empire, 3, no. 3. See M.B. Garrison, “Seals and the Elite at Persepolis: Some Observations on Early Achaemenid Persian Art” Ars Orientalis 21 (1991), 3–7. However, it would not do to just ignore the fact that Cyrus would use this as a title since Anšan was one of the capitals of the ancient Elamite kingdom and, most significantly, was neither Persian nor Iranian.
2. Although this anecdote highlights a problem with the term Persianization, it is not in itself direct evidence for Alexander adopting practices from peoples of his empire other than Persians. Alexander seems to have been unaware that this ritual existed and was being undertaken after he entered Babylon. He was concerned that the man’s action may have been part of a plot against him (Arr. Anab. 7.24.3). What this incident does highlight is that local traditions relating to royalty persisted throughout the period of Persian rule in the Near East and that Alexander was being received in these traditional terms ( A. Kuhrt, “Alexander and Babylon” in Achaemenid History v: the Roots of the European Tradition, Proceedings of the 1987 Groningen Achaemenid History Workshop). As seen above, the key elements of costume and court ceremonial the historians record Alexander adopting are likely to be genuinely Persian elements. Those sources who place the court developments chronologically agree that Alexander introduced them at the Parthia-Hyrcania border around the time he received news that Bessus had declared himself the new Achaemenid king ( Curt. 6.5.22–6.1; Plut. Alex. 45; Diod. Sic. 17.77; Just. Epit. 12.3. Bosworth, “Alexander and the Iranians”, 5–6). As a result, it is generally agreed that, regardless of whether or not it was successful, these developments were calculated to appeal to the Persian nobility, in their own terms, that Alexander was the new Great King (A.B. Bosworth, Conquest and Empire: The Reign of Alexander the Great (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 98–100).

The latter point out that the title he is recorded as employing, “king of Asia”, has no Near Eastern precedent; Persian kings preferring “king”, “great king”, “king of kings”, “king of countries”, and alternative traditions providing for “king of Akkad” or “king of the universe”; they highlight the apparent lack of interest in Iranian gods, especially Auramazda, and the burning of Persepolis as actions which severed the bonds between the king and the Persian nobility whoformed the main pool of satraps and other imperial staff ( King of Asia: Plut. Alex. 34; Arr. Anab. 2.14.9). Darius uses the titles “great king, king of kings, king in Persia, king of countries” at Behistun dbi §1; The titles used by Cyrus in the Cyrus Cylinder are observed above at 3n. 5; titles of Esarhaddon include “the great king, the mighty [king, king] of the universe, king of Assyria”, D.D. Luckenbill, Ancient Records of Assyria and Babylonia ii (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1927) no. 648. On traditional Macedonian royal titles see R.M. Errington, “Macedonian ‘Royal Style’ and Its Historical Significance” Journal of Hellenic Studies 94 (1974), 20–37. Holding the rulership of Asia does however have a long tradition in Greek historiography, for example it is used by Herodotus of Cyrus and the Persians (Hdt. 1.95).