Dividing the Spoils: The War for Alexander the Great's Empire (11 page)

The theft of the body was more or less an act of war. On top of Ptolemy’s appropriation of the Egyptian treasury (the contents of which, strictly speaking, belonged to the kings, and were therefore Perdiccas’s by right of regency) and annexation of Cyrene, it was extremely provocative. Of course, Perdiccas (still in Pisidia at the time) sent an army to try to recover the body, but it was too late. The theft of the corpse made Ptolemy Perdiccas’s prime target; when war broke out, he would attack Egypt first.

Ptolemy probably never intended the corpse to rest in remote Siwah. He wanted it by his side. Alexandria, the projected capital of Egypt, was still a vast building site, and so Ptolemy kept the body first in the old capital of Memphis and moved it some years later, when the palace compound at Alexandria was ready. He celebrated the arrival of the body in Memphis with games, and instigated a cult of Alexander as founder of Alexandria. He also began at much the same time to issue coins with Alexander’s head, the first of the Successors to do so.

When the body eventually moved to Alexandria, a new national cult was initiated of the deified Alexander. Close to the palace he constructed a kind of tomb-cum-shrine—a most un-Macedonian miscegenation, an invention of Ptolemy’s to emphasize the divine blessing his rule was receiving. Henceforth Alexandria, not Memphis, would be not only Ptolemy’s capital, but also implicitly the center of the empire Alexander had created.

In due course of time, Alexandria became famous for four prominent statues of Alexander, as well as a number of paintings: the cult statue; an equestrian statue of Alexander as founder; a nude (the most common form of statue for Hellenistic kings); and an ensemble, housed in the
sanctuary of Fortune, showing Alexander being crowned by Earth, who was in turn being crowned by Fortune, who was flanked by two statues of Victory.
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The Greek and Macedonian communities of Alexandria were not to forget that the Ptolemies were Alexander’s heirs. Fortune had blessed Alexander, and now Alexander’s Fortune blessed the Ptolemies. Their possession of the body let the world know that they and Alexander were inseparable.

Each of the Successors exploited the image and memory of Alexander to legitimate his bid for power. Ptolemy’s hijacking of the corpse and subsequent adornment of Alexander’s city with statues of its dead founder were simply the most blatant and outrageous.
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Perdiccas, as we have seen, preferred not to manage the Babylon conferences in his own name, but in the presence of Alexander’s throne. Before long, we will find Eumenes doing much the same, in response, he said, to instructions received from Alexander himself in a dream. Seleucus too claimed that Alexander had appeared to him in a dream and predicted future greatness. Just as it was well known that Olympias claimed to have conceived Alexander by Zeus, so Seleucus let it be known that his true father was Apollo.
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All the Successors did their best to ally themselves as closely as possible with members of the Argead house; all of them, if they could, made sure that everyone knew how important a role they had played in the eastern campaigns. Ptolemy even wrote an account of the campaigns, which emphasized his own role, of course,
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and he or someone in his court later spread the story that he was actually an illegitimate child of Philip II, and so Alexander’s half brother. Craterus marked the end of the Lamian War with a large monument at Delphi, sculpted by the best artists of the day, that showed him saving Alexander’s life during a hunt, and he dressed in Alexander’s style. Leonnatus too dressed and wore his hair like Alexander. Cassander commissioned a huge picture showing Alexander and Darius in battle, which may have been the original of the famous Alexander Mosaic in the Naples Archaeological Museum. Alcetas’s tomb was adorned with Alexander motifs.
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All those who came to establish kingdoms founded cities bearing Alexander’s name and minted coins with Alexander’s head in the place of divinity (the obverse, or “heads” side), to announce to their subjects and to the world at large their allegiance to his memory
and protection by his ghost. When they portrayed themselves on their coins, there were still significant echoes of Alexander—his distinctive clean-shaven face, the tilt of his head, the longer hair that helped to mark him out as superhuman.

It is easy to see the motive behind these moves: to win the support of actual or potential subjects. In much the same way, American presidential candidates from time to time subtly model themselves on the talismanic John F. Kennedy or Ronald Reagan. Alexander was talismanic in the first instance simply because of the enormous pride that everyone involved felt at having been associated with a man who had achieved so much. The particular magic of his name and image was due to the fact that, for his achievements, he was recognized after his death as a god. The Successors did not invent the use of propaganda, but they made more extensive use of it than anyone in western history had before. The evocation of Alexander’s spirit was an important element.
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Another aspect of Alexander’s postmortem influence was less subtle. It did not stem so much from what one might call his “ghost”—all the ways in which he was evoked as an archetype (a practice that continued for centuries among holders of power in Rome and Byzantium)—but was a consequence of the changes he brought about in the world. One of the most striking aspects of the Hellenistic period, by comparison with what came earlier, is its focus on the human individual. Social historians agree with historians of philosophy, art, and literature that this phenomenon is characteristic of the age. Quite why it happened, however, is less commonly observed. It was a consequence of the era of absolute rulership that was ushered in by Philip II’s conquest of Greece and confirmed by Alexander’s conquest of the east and incorporation of all the Greek poleis (cities) of Asia Minor into his empire.

Strange though it may seem, a citizen of a Greek polis of the Classical period—the period that Alexander’s conquests brought to an end—would have struggled to understand the value of individualism. We use the term to describe part of a spectrum of political possibility, ranging from absolute individualism (or anarchy) at one end to absolute collectivism (communism, perhaps) at the other. We think of ourselves as individuals by contrast with the soulless, faceless apparatus of
state control. But the Classical Greek polis was not soulless and faceless; it was animated by and wore the faces of each generation of its citizens.

The most accurate, but somewhat awkward, translation of the ancient Greek word
polis
is “citizen-state,” because the citizens of a polis were, by direct participation, responsible for the running of the state. And this was true whatever the state’s constitution; in a democracy such as Athens more men were involved in the running of the state than in an oligarchy like Sparta, but in both cases, and in all intermediate cases, citizens were by definition those who ran the state. It was just that there were more enfranchised citizens in Athens than there were in Sparta. There was no power set over the citizens that one could call “the state”; the citizens were the state. By directing citizens’ energies toward the good of the state, the system allowed poleis to flourish, but the price was a higher degree of collectivism than most of us would find acceptable today.
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By contrast, we consider ourselves free the more we are able to avoid or ignore the state apparatus and remain within our private lives. A citizen of a Classical Greek polis had a far more restricted sense of privacy. Almost everything he did, even fathering sons and worshipping gods, was done for the good of the state—that is, for the good of his fellow citizens.

The Macedonian empire, however, changed the rules. Although poleis retained a great deal of their vitality, the inescapable fact was that they had become greater or lesser cogs in a larger system. Cities were still ruled by democracies or oligarchies made up of their own citizens—to that extent nothing had changed—but these local administrations had relatively little power. All major foreign-policy decisions were out of their hands, for instance. And a great deal of the apparently political maneuverings of the cities were merely “ceremonial and repetitive.”
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They still clung to the ideal of autonomy, and some cities tried to regain their freedom by armed rebellion, but as the years passed and successive rebellions were crushed, the ideal came to be seen as no longer feasible. A pancake model, in which all citizens of a polis were theoretically equal, was inevitably replaced by a pyramidal model, with kings at the top and local magnates ruling the civic roosts.

The relative disempowerment of citizens as political agents made it possible for them to see themselves, to a greater extent, as individuals, rather than just as contributors to the greater good. Of course, people had chosen not to play a part in the public life of their cities before—they were known as
idi
tai
, the remote origin of our word “idiot”—but as the Hellenistic period progressed, fewer citizens played a significant part in the political life of the city and larger numbers gained more of
a private life, and hence the context within which the value of the individual might be recognized.

It is not surprising, then, that the ultimate
idi
tai
, Cynic philosophers, flourished in the period. Believing that human happiness lay in shedding conventions and possessions, they lived as tramps and preached asceticism as the road to moral integrity. As wandering beggar preachers, they could be found all over the empire, an integral part of the mobility of the period. There was a long tradition of Greek praise of poverty, but the first true Cynics began to appear in the middle of the fourth century; the most famous of them, Diogenes of Sinope (who was said to live in a large jar), was admired by Alexander the Great.
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Crates of Thebes, contemporary with the Successors, wrote of a Cynic utopia, where there was no need for work or politics because the soil itself produced all that was necessary for a simple life.
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The first Epicureans were scarcely less “idiotic,” since they lived apart from society in a commune, and Epicurus recommended avoiding the hurly-burly of public life as detrimental to the goal of inner tranquility.
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The most popular philosophers of the period were precisely those who appealed to the new sense of individual worth. The same goes for religion, too: there was a surge of interest in the mystery cults. These were not new; they had been around for centuries. But larger numbers than ever before turned to them, because initiation into these cults, a profoundly emotional experience, was supposed to bring individual salvation. By the same token, small-scale, more personal forms of worship flourished in increasing numbers alongside the great civic cults.

In terms of factual history, scholars are justified in looking back and finding a pretty clean break between the Classical and Hellenistic periods, marked by Alexander’s conquest of the east and the Successors’ struggles. But it would be a distortion to try to find the same kind of break in literature or art or religion or philosophy. There was no sudden revolution; we are talking about a trend that became markedly more prominent in the Hellenistic period.

The trend is as apparent in art as in philosophy and religion. Sculptors earlier in the fourth century had already begun to lose interest in representing only famous men or in portraying them merely as bearers of civic virtues, but this trend rapidly accelerated. Its most striking fruit lay in portraiture, where artists—catering now for the private market that developed quite early in the Hellenistic period—soon excelled at expressing their subjects’ characters and feelings, and found ordinary people of interest for their individuality. Every such portrait
is a minibiography, and it is not surprising that the literary genre of biography also gained momentum in this period. This focus on the accurate depiction of individuals is modern enough to invite the thought that the hundred years from the middle of the fourth century to the middle of the third was the period when art as we understand it was born.