Faces of Power: Alexander's Image and Hellenistic Politics (Hellenistic Culture and Society): 11 - Hardcover
Synopsis
Alexander the Great changed the face of the ancient world. During his life and after his death, his image in works of art exerted an unprecedented influence–on marbles, bronzes, ivories, frescoes, mosaics, coins, medals, even painted pottery and reliefware. Alexander's physiognomy became the most famous in history. But can we really know what meaning lies behind these images?
Andrew Stewart demonstrates that these portraits—wildly divergent in character, quality, type, provenance, date, and purpose—actually transmit not so much a likeness of Alexander as a set of carefully crafted clichés that mobilize the notion "Alexander" for diverse ends and diverse audiences. Stewart discusses the portraits as studies in power and his original interpretation of them gives unprecedented fullness and shape to the idea and image called "Alexander."
Andrew Stewart demonstrates that these portraits—wildly divergent in character, quality, type, provenance, date, and purpose—actually transmit not so much a likeness of Alexander as a set of carefully crafted clichés that mobilize the notion "Alexander" for diverse ends and diverse audiences. Stewart discusses the portraits as studies in power and his original interpretation of them gives unprecedented fullness and shape to the idea and image called "Alexander."
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
About the Author
Andrew Stewart is Professor of Greek and Roman Art at the University of California at Berkeley. His most recent book is Greek Sculpture: An Exploration (1990).
From the Back Cover
There is no more evocative Greek portrait type than that of Alexander the Great. By exploring its potency and development in antiquity . . . Stewart has made an impressive demonstration of the value of this broader approach to a traditional art-historical subject.--Sir John Boardman, Ashmolean Museum
From the Inside Flap
"There is no more evocative Greek portrait type than that of Alexander the Great. By exploring its potency and development in antiquity . . . Stewart has made an impressive demonstration of the value of this broader approach to a traditional art-historical subject."—Sir John Boardman, Ashmolean Museum
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Faces of Power: Alexander's Image and Hellenistic Politics
By Andrew F. StewartUniversity of California Press
Copyright © 1994 Andrew F. StewartAll right reserved.
ISBN: 0520068513
1
Texts
1. Histories
Ancient texts about Alexander are both few and many. Only five full-length narratives of his life and/or campaigns are extant, by Diodoros of Sicily, Pompeius Trogus (in the late epitome by Justin), Quintus Curtius Rufus, Plutarch, and Lucius Flavius Arrianus; to these one may add the Alexander Romance , derived from a Hellenistic novel and masquerading under the name of Alexander's court historian, Kallisthenes. Many others chronicled Alexander's deeds, but their work now survives only in fragments—numerous but often frustratingly brief.1 In addition, comments on and judgments about Alexander are to be found in a vast range of other authors, including poets, philosophers, orators, anecdotalists, geographers, and even Christian apologists. A number of inscriptions, both contemporary and later, completes the corpus.2
Generations of historians have wrestled with these sources, and a book about Alexander's portraits is no place to join them. Instead, I want to offer a few comments on the images of the king that the Greek and Latin authors tried to present, to consider their standing as representations. First, no "Portrait of the King" would be properly complete otherwise.3 Second, the texts so often mobilized to elucidate the sculptures, paintings, coins, and gems
These have generated a full-scale critical industry, especially in Germany: see Pearson 1960 and Pédech 1984 for comprehensive studies, with incisive comments in Bosworth 1980a and Bosworth 1988a: 295-300; Schachermeyr 1976: 35 prints a helpful family tree. Most of the fragments are collected in Jacoby 1923-30 (hereafter abbreviated to FGH ) and translated in Robinson 1953: 30-276.
Collected and studied by Heisserer 1980.
So, for example, Marin 1988.
cannot be properly understood—and may be grossly misunderstood—if their circumstances are not taken into account. And third, since authors, patrons, and audiences for both literature and art overlapped (Ptolemy, for example, wrote a history of Alexander's campaigns and commissioned portraits of him), the two media may well have something to tell each other on the way.
The task is not a simple one. Ptolemy is but one of those "lost historians" whose work is known only from quotations in later writers. For though Alexander had more books written about him than any other man in antiquity, the earliest narrative of his career that survives, by Diodoros, was written almost three centuries after his death. We shall find a similar lacuna when considering ancient accounts of his portraiture in the second half of this chapter.
To begin with Alexander's contemporaries. The old custom of simply dividing their writings into "favorable" and "unfavorable" has now been abandoned for a more skeptical, cautious, and nuanced approach. Some appear to have adopted a consistent stance, others not, and several are too poorly represented, or too selectively quoted, for us to be able to judge.
The first chronicler of Alexander's campaigns was Kallisthenes of Olynthos.4 Aristotle, his teacher, recommended him to the king, whom he accompanied deep into central Asia before falling victim to intrigue in 327. His function was to present Alexander to the Greeks in a way that would kindle their enthusiasm for him and his enterprise, and he has often been likened to a specially privileged war correspondent. His Deeds of Alexander was panegyrical in tone, representing the king as the true successor of Homer's heroes and promoting his claim to be son of Zeus, an aegis-bearing wielder of the thunderbolt before whom even the waves prostrated themselves.5 It thereby inaugurated both a court tradition of historiography that unabashedly eulogized Alexander, and the practice of spicing any writing about him—pro, con, or neutral—with a heady dash of rhetoric.
All this has earned Kallisthenes much abuse, and his ultimately fatal lack of tact at court seems to bear out Aristotle's remark that he was unusually intelligent but lacked common sense.6 Yet though his belief in Alexander's mission led him to propagate the "noble lie" of the king's divine paternity, his critics all too often confuse this with an acceptance of Alexander's divinity. In fact, when Alexander decided in 327 to enforce the Persian custom of prostration (proskynesis ) upon his Companions, Kallisthenes refused to comply
FGH 124; most recently, Prandi 1985.
Eust. ad Hom. Il . 13. 26-30; Polyb. 12. 1262-3 (FGH 124 F 31, 35). According to Strabo 13. 1. 27, Kallisthenes helped to edit the copy of the Iliad that Alexander kept under his pillow.
Plut. Alex . 54.
precisely because Greeks did this only before the gods.7 His stubborn refusal to blur the distinction between hero and god infuriated the king (who soon had him killed) and inaugurated an acrimonious debate that even outlasted the triumph of Christianity. Lysippos, too, heroized Alexander in his bronzes and criticized Apelles' picture of him with the thunderbolt of Zeus (T 120; P 1; cf. color pl. 8c and fig. 40), but he has never shared Kallisthenes' bad press. Fortunately for him, perhaps, he apparently did not accompany the king far (if at all) into Asia, so his convictions were never put to the test. This particular controversy will achieve some prominence in the chapters to come.
Kallisthenes' history stopped with Alexander's visit to Ammon at Siwah in 331; for information on the entire campaign, later writers had to go elsewhere. Their preferred sources were Ptolemy, Aristoboulos, and a writer now generally called the "Alexander Vulgate," who is probably to be identified with the Alexandrian historian Kleitarchos. Ptolemy, a boyhood friend of Alexander, rose to become one of his marshals and eventually the first Macedonian king of Egypt; Aristoboulos was formerly a royal engineer; and Kleitarchos joined the first wave of Greek intellectuals seeking their academic Elysium in Alexandria. Exactly when their books appeared is hotly disputed, but many now believe that both Ptolemy and Kleitarchos published quite soon after Alexander's death, while Aristoboulos waited until after the battle of Ipsos in 301.
Ptolemy and Aristoboulos are chiefly known from the pages of Arrian, who tells us in his preface that he will use them as his principal sources. Sober and careful chroniclers of the campaigns, they nevertheless tended to eulogize Alexander and his army.8 Aristoboulos was well known for this in antiquity, and Ptolemy had a political agenda to meet.
Ptolemy was awarded the satrapy of Egypt in the great share-out at Babylon after Alexander's death. Not only did he then proceed to hijack Alexander's hearse and entomb him in Alexandria (Chapter 7.4), but he also commissioned or prompted the creation of some of the most distinctive Alexander portraits of the Successor period (color pl. 8c; figs. 76-83). One would dearly like to know more about his history. How far did he craft it with the current power struggle in mind? What kind of portrait of Alexander did he offer? How did he represent his own relationship with the king?9 Certainly, if he was writing around or shortly after 320, then his selectivity in treating incidents unfavorable to Alexander—such as the proskynesis episode, which he apparently omitted entirely—is completely in tune with his appro-
Curt. 8. 5.5-24; Arr. Anab . 4. 10-12.
FGH 138-39; most recently, Roisman 1984.
See especially Errington 1976: 154-56 with references; Roisman 1984 sounds a more cautious note.
priation of the king's body and his enthusiastic promotion of Alexander's image and cult. His narrative of the battle of the Issos, where he was only a junior staff officer, was apparently quite schematic and slanderously portrayed Darius as a coward, while that of the Hydaspes was much fuller and clearer but muddled the Macedonian dispositions at the start.10
Kleitarchos was by far the most popular of the Alexander historians in later antiquity.11 Most of our information comes from Diodoros, Curtius, and Justin; not only does Curtius occasionally quote him directly, but his narrative was probably the source for the extensive portions of their books that run parallel to each other. The quotations are often rhetorical and sensational, but there is no telling how typical they are, for passages like this would naturally attract attention. Like Kallisthenes, Kleitarchos apparently also regarded Alexander as reliving the exploits of the heroes, and he was probably behind the story that in the winter of 325/324, after escaping the privations of the Gedrosian desert, the king deliberately organized a bacchanal in imitation of Dionysos' own return from India.12 Yet we know that he did not gloss over the horrors either, relating (for example) the massacre of eighty thousand Indians in the kingdom of Sambos.13 Furthermore, the "Vulgate" account of the battles of the Issos and Gaugamela is now judged the most reliable we have.14 This is important, since on it turns one's interpretation of no less a monument than the Alexander Mosaic (color pls. 4-5). Kleitarchos may have been a more balanced historian than many and was certainly no abject flatterer.
Other contemporaries also published their reminiscences of Alexander, but only those who can shed light on his portraiture merit attention here. Much of what we know about their work comes from a gossip writer of the third century A.D. , Athenaios, whose ten-volume compendium Table Talk is a mine of miscellaneous information.
Chares of Mytilene, Alexander's chamberlain, included a colorful account of the mass marriages at Susa in his Stories of Alexander . In this ceremony, celebrated in 324, ninety-two leading Macedonians took Persian wives; Alexander's two brides, Stateira and Parysatis, will occupy us further in Chapter 6.4.15 Ephippos, the author of a book on the deaths of Hephaistion and Al-
Arr. Anab . 2. 10-11, 5. 13-19; FGH 138 F 6, 20.
FGH 137; most recently, Hammond 1983.
Diod. 17. 106. 1; Curt. 9. 10. 22-28; Plut. Alex . 67; rejected by Arr. Anab . 6. 28. 1-2 after he could not find it in his two main sources, Ptolemy and Aristoboulos; cf. Bosworth 1988b: 67-72.
Curt. 9. 8. 15 (FGH 137 F 25).
Devine 1985, 1986; for the reassessment, see Hamilton 1973: 17; Bosworth 1988a: 297-98.
Ath. 12, 538b-39a (FGH 125 F 4).
exander, described this spectacle too and has also left us a very full record of the king's dress (T 48). Full, but problematic: though the king's concessions to Persian costume are well attested elsewhere (T 32-47), did he really dress up as Ammon, Hermes, Herakles, and even Artemis?16 And finally Nearchos of Lato in Crete, his admiral and the author of the official account of the voyage down the Indus and across the Arabian Sea, attributed the whole expedition to Alexander's pothos , which he defined as "a perpetual desire to do something new and extraordinary" (Arr. Indica 20. 1-3). A leitmotif of Arrian's history and (though this is less often recognized) of Curtius's too, this pothos to master the dangerous and unknown is often recognized in Alexander's portraits (see Chapter 2.3) and will reappear many times in the pages to come.
Then there were the poets. Describing Alexander's attempt to introduce prostration at court, Curtius names three court poets whose insidious flattery supposedly speeded the king's corruption: the appalling Agis of Argos, the even more abysmal Choirilos of Iasos, and Kleon of Sicily. "These at that time were opening heaven to him," he noted, "boasting that Hercules, Father Liber [Dionysos], and Castor and Pollux would give place to the new deity" (8. 5. 7-8).17 As W. W. Tam noted long ago, this remark proves that these individuals did not identify Alexander with Herakles and the rest but compared his exploits with theirs, particularly the Indian "campaigns" of Herakles and Dionysos, concluding that he handsomely surpassed them.18 If he thereby deserved deification, it was in his own right.
Understandably, the works of the court poets swiftly vanished into oblivion, and only their names survived to exemplify the archetypal chorus of flatterers.19 Choirilos also wrote up the obvious comparison between Alexander and his maternal ancestor Achilles: we know both this fact and the New Achilles' opinion of the whole enterprise from his devastating remark that he would sooner be Homer's Thersites than Choirilos's Achilles.20 Of course, this is not to say that he repudiated the connection (far from it), only the industry that had evolved to promote it; likewise the comparison with Herakles and Dionysos.
Ath. 12, 537e-38b (FGH 126 F 5); rejected by Pearson 1960: 63-65, but accepted by Neuffer 1929: 11-17, 39-56, among others, and, more surprisingly, by Bosworth 1988a: 287; yet why does not Curtius, always eager for evidence of Alexander's moral corruption, mention these antics? On his concessions to Persian dress see Chapter 3.4.
FGH 153 F 10-12; commentary, Tarn 1948: vol. 2: 54-62.
Tarn 1948: vol. 2: 56. Clement of Alexandria got it right: he was the thirteenth god (Protr . 10. 77).
Thus, for example, Plut. Mot . 60B-C, 61C, 65C.
Porphyrion ad Hor. Ars P. 357 (FGH 153 F 10a); cf. Lloyd-Jones and Parsons 1983: no. 333.
In judging poetry "more philosophical" than history, Aristotle had not reckoned with verse of this kind, but neither had he reckoned with the appearance of a phenomenon like Alexander. The praise poetry of Pindar and Bacchylides had also sung the glory (Greek kleos : Latin clamor , English acclaim ) of victors, using the same technique of comparing them with the heroes, and drawing stern moral lessons from the comparison.21 Yet Agis, Choirilos, and Kleon had to deal not only with victory on an unprecedented scale, but also with its unforeseen consequence: the sudden collapse of the very world that had brought forth and sustained their own poetic enterprise. Using the poetic resources of the polls system, they had to praise the very man who had first marginalized it, then reduced it to a mere appendage of his empire. Poets of average talent at best, they were faced with a task to daunt a genius.
Sitting safely at home, the philosophers could afford the luxury of criticism. Yet surprisingly, their judgments tended to be no less crude than those of the poets. As usual, little survives, but to judge from the Romans who quoted and paraphrased them, there is no evidence that any of them seriously attempted to come to grips with Alexander and with the new world that he was creating. Instead, they wrote him off as the prototypical tyrant, "haughty, cruel, and unrestrained," as Cicero put it.22 In their view, success had turned Aristotle's well-taught prince into a monster of depravity.
These ad hoc comments were crafted by early twentieth-century scholarship into two doctrinaire "portraits" of Alexander. The Stoics supposedly saw him as the epitome of the ruler corrupted by delusions of grandeur, and the Peripatetics (enraged by his elimination of Kallisthenes) wrote him off as a man ruined by his own Fortune (Tyche). The reconstructed Stoic version seems to hold up, to judge from the consistent appearance of Alexander in this guise in the works of two eclectic Stoics of the early empire, Lucan and Seneca.23 They particularly censure him for his capitulation to anger and alcohol. The Peripatetic, on the other hand, does not—at least not in the monolithic form that has been proposed.24
The main evidence concerning the Peripatetics and Alexander comes once more from Cicero. He records that in Theophrastos's book Kallisthenes, or On Grief (presumably written in response to Kallisthenes' death in 327) he noted that his friend had had the misfortune to fall in with a man who was most
On the centrality of kleos to Greek culture see Nagy 1979; King 1987: 28-49; and especially Svenbro 1988.
Att . 13. 28. 3.
Luc. 10. 20-45; Sen. Ep . 83. 19, 23; 113. 29, etc.; cf. Tarn 1948: vol. 2: 69 n. 1; Hamilton 1969: lx-lxii; Bosworth 1980a: 13.
First demolished by Badian 1958: 154-57; cf. Hamilton 1969: lx-lxi.
fortunate and most powerful but who did not know how to bear his good fortune, and that not wisdom but fortune rules human life.25 Another of Aristotle's pupils, Demetrios of Phaleron, developed the theme further in a book On Fortune , announcing that though Fortune (Tyche) had given the Macedonians the whole wealth of Persia, she could always withdraw the gift, for "she has but lent them these blessings until she decides to deal differently with them."26 As will appear, the Alexander Mosaic (color pls. 4-5) may register some of these ideas, indeed may even have something to contribute to the debate.
The Peripatetics may have initiated discussion about Alexander's Fortune, but their views about his personality are quite opaque. Plutarch mobilizes Theophrastos in support of his contention that Alexander's temperament was "spirited" (T 10); his bodily mixture was hot and fiery, which expelled moisture and accounted for his red chest, fragrant body odor, proneness to drink, and choleric disposition. Plutarch first cites the Memoirs of Aristoxenos, another Peripatetic, as his immediate source for the ruddiness and body odor, but his wording makes it clear that the appeal to Theophrastos is his own idea.27 Other Peripatetic references to Alexander are either neutral or (on one occasion) favorable: there was no consistent Peripatetic "portrait" of the king.
These ideas have taken us deep into the Roman period, bridging the gap between Alexander's contemporaries and the extant historians. The latter divide into three groups: Diodoros and Trogus (as epitomized by Justin), who both wrote universal histories; Plutarch, who has left us our only surviving biography; and Curtius and Arrian, who confined themselves to Alexander's campaigns alone. Diodoros, Plutarch, and Arrian hold him in high esteem, while Trogus/Justin and Curtius paint a darker picture of a gradually deteriorating character, particularly after the death of Darius.
Diodoros's universal history in forty books began with the Creation and ended in the year 60 B.C. Most of the first twenty survive complete; fortunately, they include his narratives of Alexander and the Successors, which fill Books 17 and 18-20, respectively.28 Aiming to make world history accessible to the ordinary reader by judicious selection from the major authorities, he weaves his patchwork around a program for moral living. He is interested in the progress of civilization and judges the great men of the past by their con-
Tusc . 3. 21; 5. 25; Diog. Laert. 5. 44. Theophrastos also believed that Alexander was all but impotent: Ath. 10, 435a.
Polyb. 29. 21. 3-6.
Alex . 4; see Hamilton 1969: lx-lxi, 11-12; Leimbach 1979: 218-19; misunderstood by Pédech 1984: 350. For these characteristics and Peripatetic physiognomics see ps.-Arist. Phgn . 808a22-24.
There is no modern critical edition of Diodoros: for comments see most recently Billows 1990: 341-47; Sacks 1990.
tribution to advancing it. He idolizes Caesar and sees Alexander as his forerunner (1.4. 6-7; 17. 1. 3-4). He notes the king's descent from the heroes, "which endowed him with the physical and moral qualities of greatness" (17. 1.5), including several of the cardinal virtues of the Hellenistic king: valor, magnanimity, kindness, and love for his subjects.29 He also makes much of Fortune's caprices and Alexander's ability to transcend them.
Diodoros describes, but does not censure, Alexander's tendency to capitulate to anger, and his adoption of Persian customs (T 35), including concubines for every day of the year. He believes that his murder of Philotas and Parmenion, though reprehensible, was "actually quite foreign to his good nature" (17. 79. 1), and that the retreat from India was a democratic decision taken in assembly. Finally, he accepts that Alexander was visited by the queen of the Amazons, who was eager to have a child by such an outstanding sire.30 Yet Alexander's empire had its limitations: Caesar had gone farther, surpassing Herakles and Dionysos (1. 55. 3; 2. 37. 3; 5. 21. 2). Both were supreme achievers, even demigods, but both were to be followed by lesser men, who plunged the world into chaos.
Though Diodoros has often been called naive, evenhanded might be a better description. Precisely because of his reluctance to wrestle his sources into predetermined paths, of his refusal to allow his mission to dominate his material, he is no negligible resource. Fortunately, he chose well, singling out the "Vulgate"/Kleitarchos and the great historian of the Successors, Hieronymos of Kardia. As remarked above, the "Vulgate"/Kleitarchos also furnished material for large parts of Trogus/Justin and Curtius, while Arrian used Hieronymos in his history of the Successors, which once again survives only in fragments.31
Pompeius Trogus was a Romanized Gaul who wrote his Philippic Histories under Augustus. Alexander's deeds occupied Books 11 and 12 of his narrative, but these, like the rest of his work, survive only in the third-century epitome by M. Iunianus Iustinus, whose name is normally Anglicized to Justin.32 Unfortunately, his précis is full of exaggeration and error: for example, the Ar-
17. 4, 24, 37-38, 69, etc.; cf. 32. 4. 1-3; on these virtues see most recently Smith 1988: 49-53.
Fortune: 17. 37, 47, etc.; anger: 17. 9, 76, etc.; concubines: 17. 77; retreat: 17. 94; Amazons: 17. 77. Curt. 6. 5. 24-32 and Just. Epit . 12. 3. 5-7 also accept the Amazon story, which all three presumably got from the "Vulgate"/Kleitarchos (see below); Plut. Alex . 46 is skeptical; discussion: Bosworth 1988b: 65-67.
On Hieronymos see especially Billows 1990: 329-33 and passim; Sacks 1990: 21 and 41.
The standard text is Seel's Teubner of (1935) 1972; there is no critical edition, but Tarn 1948: vol. 2: 122-26 offers a brief synopsis and critique.
rhidaios who was told to convey Alexander's body to Ammon is confused with his namesake, the king (T 79). So when others contradict him, he is usually disbelieved. Trogus/Justin's Alexander is as subtle as a stickman. Power-crazed and intending from the start to conquer the world, he begins to degenerate morally with the visit to Ammon at Siwah in 331, who endorses his ambition and orders his Companions to worship him as a god. Subduing nations that he never even saw, he ends up at Babylon by cowing everyone into worshipping him as their predestined king, then falls victim to a poison plot hatched by the disaffected Antipatros.33
Like Trogus/Justin, Curtius also chronicles a marked deterioration in Alexander's character after 331; maybe Kleitarchos had made a theme of this decline. In Curtius, particularly, the frustrations, the drinking bouts, the orgies, the rages, the massacres, the murders, and the superstitions eventually combine to paint a picture of unfettered megalomania and rampant paranoia.
Curtius is in some ways the most interesting of the Alexander historians.34 Although often careless about details and prone to heavy-handed rhetoric, he wrote with true feeling and intended to offer a stern lesson for his time.35 Unfortunately, his first two books are lost, depriving us of any statement of purpose and any direct indication of his date, which has to be inferred from internal evidence. All in all, the reigns of Caligula and Claudius look the most likely, and it is exceedingly tempting to identify him with the Quintus Curtius Rufus who was consul in A.D. 43. Perhaps his Alexander, the raging monster who had nevertheless achieved more than any other man, was intended as a double indictment of Caligula's grandiose dreams of conquest, but depraved and sedentary rule.
Unlike Trogus/Justin, Curtius sets up Alexander as a noble character at root, who begins by besting Fortune's tide through his temperance and moderation. Yet eventually his Alexander too is all but overwhelmed by the flood, sinking in a sea of death, destruction, wine, and sex.36 Once again, it was Ammon at Siwah who sowed the seed of corruption, "since Fortune makes her bonded believers generally more eager for glory than qualified for it. Accordingly, Alexander not only allowed himself to be called son of Jupiter but even ordered it; avid to increase the fame of his deeds by such a title, he besmirched it" (4. 7. 29-30). As in Trogus/Justin, Ammon promises Alex-
Ambition: 11. 6. 3; Ammon: 11. 11. 6-12; fictitious conquests: 12. 6. 18, 8. 9; Babylon: 12. 13. 1-3; poison: 12. 13. 6-10; Antipatros: 12. 14. 1-9; death: 12. 15. 1.
But the sole recent critical edition, of Books 3-4 only, is Atkinson 1980.
Aims and methods: 9. 1. 3-4; 10. 9. 1-7.
3. 12. 18-21, and see below. Tarn 1948: vol. 2: 97-99 gives a complete list of vices, but Curtius is not reproducing a "Peripatetic portrait" of Alexander: Badian 1958: 154-57.
ander the world, "adding that he would be invincible till he went to join the gods" (4. 7. 27),37 and commands his Companions to pay him divine honors. The blandishments of the East and the death of Darius then persuaded him to attempt to introduce prostration, and all the other vices followed in train.38
Plutarch, who was born around the time that Quintus Curtius Rufus became consul, also came to believe that Alexander had not lived up to the high standards of his early years, but he apparently took longer to arrive at this conclusion and was far less censorious about it. His Life is the best-known of his writings on Alexander but was not his only contribution to the debate. Two juvenile essays are preserved in the collection known today as the Moralia , under the title On the Fortune or Virtue of Alexander : for brevity, I will refer to them hereafter as the Essays . Cast in the form of speeches and taking up the Peripatetic theme of his Fortune (Tyche), they are highly polemical examples of epideixis —the prose successor to praise poetry.39 In them, Plutarch defends Alexander from the attacks of the philosophers, depicting him as a philosopher-king who out-philosophered his detractors by actually accomplishing what they either only sketched in theory or botched in practice. Thus, for example, Sokrates tried to introduce new gods to one city but was executed for it; Alexander introduced the Greek pantheon to the whole of Asia (328D).
More interesting, perhaps, is the Essays ' titular theme, which is cast in the form of a question: Was Tyche (Fortune; Providence) or Arete (Excellence; Virtue) primarily responsible for Alexander's success? In general, the first speech hands the palm to Fortune but stresses how his philosophical qualities enabled him to rise above it, while the second gives a greater role to his Virtue. Thus in the first speech we read that Fortune presented Alexander with Roxane, but he married her instead of merely taking her by force: "like a philosopher!" (332E). In the second, though, the common notion that Alexander had the good Fortune to live in an age of artistic efflorescence is turned on its head. The artists were the lucky ones, living under a patron whose surpassing Virtue enabled them to use their gifts to the full (333E). This antithesis, artificial as it may seem, evidently appealed greatly to the Greeks; the Alexander Mosaic (color pls. 4-5) may offer another instance of it.
Plutarch's scheme was generated in a wider context and has to be read along with the preceding essay, On the Fortune of the Romans .40 Here the Tyche-Arete antithesis is resolved decisively in favor of the Romans. They,
On Alexander's "invincibility," see Chapter 3.5.
The East: 6. 2. 1-5; prostration: 8. 5. 5-8; total corruption: 10. 5. 33-36.
On the genre as a whole see especially Russell and Wilson 1969: xi-xxxiv; analysis and discussion of the speeches: Hamilton 1969: xxiii-xxxiii.
Mor . 316C-26C; cf. Wardman 1955.
not Alexander, achieved world unity precisely because Fortune put fewer obstacles in their path. If she had not hampered and finally killed Alexander, he would have invaded Italy (326A), and the two invincible peoples would have met like the proverbial irresistible force and immovable object (326C)—but this was fated not to happen. "What if Alexander had lived to attack Rome?" was a well-worn cliché of Hellenistic and Roman literature, whose most famous appearance is in Livy's extraordinary polemic against Alexander in Book 9 (17-19). It combines both Greek chauvinism and the Romans' deep ambivalence toward the king and his image: both will reappear in connection with the later Hellenistic Alexanders (figs. 120-45) discussed in the Epilogue.
Plutarch wrote his Life of Alexander around A.D. 110-15, under Trajan, and balanced it with a Life of Caesar , unfortunately, his formal coda comparing the two men is no longer extant. Like Xenophon half a millennium earlier, he saw his task as essentially didactic, as providing examples of virtue and vice for the discerning and receptive reader. His ultimate aim, he tells us in a short preface, is to reveal character, ethos , and to do this he must select his material like a portrait painter. So though he draws on a wide range of sources, including Kallisthenes, Ptolemy, Aristoboulos, Kleitarchos, and Chares, he eschews exhaustive description for the telling incident and the revealing anecdote.
His selection begins with Alexander's predestination to greatness (his descent from Herakles on his father's side and from the Aiakids, chief among whom was Achilles, on his mother's) and consistently brings out his moderation and self-control in the face of increasing temptation. He thereby tacitly counters the prevailing image of the king as a man corrupted by power into a monster of excess. The fact that he was writing for a public whose emperor was personally interested in Alexander, reconquered part of his empire, and paid him signal honors may not be irrelevant here.41 Yet his account is by no means entirely one-sided. He recognizes that his subject was prone to anger and superstition and indeed changed increasingly for the worse in the last years of his reign.
This tension is particularly evident in the famous chapter in which he tries to reconstruct the king's appearance, conflating firsthand observation, the bronzes of Lysippos, and the scientific theories of Aristotle's pupil and successor, Theophrastos (T 10). All are conflicted in one way or another. Alexander's appearance hardly matched expectations; Lysippos sought both to capture it and to do justice to his "virile and leonine character"; and in Theophrastan terms he was a "spirited" man (thumoeides ), a "hot" personality prone on the one hand to great ambition, but on the other to rage, excessive
Cf. Wirth 1976: 197-200.
drinking, and similar vices (2. 5).42 As will appear in Chapter 3, the less-than-perfect fit among these traits illuminates at least one notorious art-historical puzzle, Alexander's "melting" gaze. Plutarch's strategy is to argue that his "spirited" temperament and the ambition (philotimia —normally a pejorative word) it generated were usually mobilized for the good of the Greeks and the bane of the barbarians; only occasionally does his thumos lead him to disaster.
Plutarch also offers insights into Alexander's attitudes to sex and to his own deification. The king's sexual continence, which the biographer correctly saw as an important component of his power (5, 22), was both celebrated in Aetion's painting of his marriage to Roxane (P 6) and perhaps also critiqued in a second, much more problematic picture (color pl. 6). (These pictures will be discussed in Chapter 6.4). His attempt to exculpate Alexander from hybris in his pretensions to divinity is equally revealing: the king believed in his divine parentage but was properly circumspect about it, using it only to secure his power (28). Elsewhere, though, Plutarch was less forgiving, commending Lysippos's stem disapproval of Apelles' picture of the king wielding a thunderbolt (T 120; P 1).
This latent tension between encomium and criticism becomes overt in the work of Arrian. A Bithynian, Roman senator, and sometime governor of Cappadocia, he is the subtlest and traditionally the most appealing of the extant historians.43 An admirer of Xenophon, Arrian too called his history Anabasis , and the fluent, understated Atticism of his style has had much to do with his appeal. Living in the high summer of the Roman Empire, the second century A.D. , he had fewer problems with autocracy than did Curtius; a Stoic, he managed nevertheless to avoid their doctrinaire condemnation of Alexander; a member of the Roman power elite, he tended to overlook or explain away the king's darker side. Thus, though the murder of Kleitos revealed Alexander as "a slave to two vices . . . anger and drunkenness, for the sequel" Arrian commends him, "in that he immediately recognized the savagery of his action" and repented in style (4. 9. 1-2; cf. 7. 29. 1). Similarly, his claim to be the son of Zeus is excused as perhaps "a mere device to make him more impressive to his subjects" (7. 29. 3). This Alexander is cast in the mold of Arrian's contemporaries, the emperors Trajan, Hadrian, and Antoninus Pius: a man at the apex of human good fortune, distinguished by his generally moderate use of power, able to admit when he is wrong, peerless among humankind, and probably divinely conceived (7. 30).
Yet on occasion the mask slips. Alexander's excessive ambition, his long-
Wardman 1955: 102-7 sees this classification as the key to Plutarch's entire portrait of him, but as Hamilton 1969: lxiv points out, this is too reductive.
On Arrian see Brunt 1976, 1983; Bosworth 1976, 1980a, 1988b. On Arrian's Romanitas see also Vidal-Naquet 1984.
ing (pothos ) for conquest and things unknown "in competition with himself in default of any other rival" (7. 1. 4), overstepped mortal bounds. Since moral criticism is fundamentally incompatible with encomium, these last chapters of Arrian's narrative not surprisingly begin to exhibit a decided unease—like the last chapters of Plutarch's Life . Indeed, to the unprejudiced reader, his final summation of Alexander's achievements reads more like a speech for the defense than a eulogy of the greatest man of action ever to emerge among either Greeks or barbarians (1. 12. 4; 7. 30. 1).
The last surviving Alexander narrative of antiquity is not history but historical fiction: the aptly named Alexander Romance . It is preserved in several overlapping versions, seems to have been compiled around A.D. 300, and is falsely attributed in the manuscripts to Kallisthenes.44 Furnished with illustrations as early as the fourth century A.D. , it completely eclipsed the Alexander historians in the Middle Ages, swiftly becoming the mainstream tradition about the king in both the medieval West and the Islamic world.
The plot seems to have grown by a process of accretion that began in late Hellenistic Alexandria, though one or two elements, such as the account of the king's education and the highly sensationalized chronicle of his death, probably date back to the Age of the Successors.45 It confuses Alexander with his uncle and namesake, Alexander the Molossian, whose campaigns in Italy are conflated with his: the Romans, of course, duly surrender. It is also full of fantastic incidents—battles with monsters and excursions to the Isles of the Blest, the bottom of the sea, and even the stratosphere—and its portrait of the king is mixed indeed. The invincible hero, world conqueror, and intrepid explorer all rolled into one, he is also a driven man, unable to rest, prone to cruelty and deceit, and always tempted to overstep the bounds of mortality. This Alexander, the last we shall encounter before moving to the portraits in stone, bronze, and the like, is a conqueror fallen victim to his own insatiable desires, a conflicted personality who is both half-barbarian himself and Greece's crusader against a strange and frightening world.
2. The Portraits: Testimonia
Ancient testimonia about Alexander's portraiture are of two kinds: literary and epigraphical. Texts and translations of all literary references to Alexan-
The basic edition is Kroll's of 1926; Haight 1955 translates the Latin version, Wolohojian 1969 the Armenian.
Later history: Cary 1956; Ross 1971. "Early" sections: Samuel 1986; Heckel 1988.
der's personal appearance that are known to me are assembled in Appendix 1 (T 1-48), and those to his pre-Augustan portraits in Appendix 2 (T 49-157), where the images they describe are assembled by medium (paintings: P 1-16; statues: S 1-35; various media: V 1-3).46 The inscriptions are scanty until the Roman period, when a number of statue bases appear in connection with renewals of his cult. The Hellenistic inscriptions directly connected with his portraits are gathered in Appendix 2, the cults in Appendix 3.
Of these inscriptions, two (T 91 and 142) can be dated to Alexander's lifetime, another (T 108) to the period immediately after the king's death. The first (T 142) is carved on a base recently discovered at the Letoon of Xanthos (S 25), which he reached in the fall of 334. Since he is named as dedicator and no other subject is indicated, the base probably carried his portrait; unfortunately, its capping block is lost. The second (T 91) accompanies the reliefs of the so-called Shrine of the Bark of Ammon in the temple at Luxor (figs. 53-54) and was apparently cut in the early 320s. Too extensive to treat here, it will reappear in Chapter 6.3. The third, an epigram appended to Krateros's great lion-hunt group at Delphi (T 108; S 13), reveals that his son finished the group after he died in 320. Evoking the ancient image of the bull-devouring lion, a symbol of divinely inspired heroic triumph,47 it relates how the valiant Krateros grappled with the king of beasts and killed it "in farthest Syria"—but tactfully fails to note that he thereby saved the king's life.
These and other monuments had a most varied reception. Though many ancient writers refer to Alexander's portraits, few do so without an ulterior motive, and fewer still indulge in extensive description or comment. The earliest references relate directly to the two major crises of Alexander's last eighteen months: the Harpalos affair of the summer of 324 and the so-called deification debate of the following winter.
The first of these is a fragment of an open letter by Theopompos to the king denouncing his treasurer Harpalos for treason. In it he mentions Harpalos's proposal to erect statues of himself and Alexander beside that of his mistress, Glykera, at Tarsos (T 140-41; S 24). Since Harpalos had already installed Glykera in the royal palace there as queen, this plan smacked unmistakably of hybris . Unsettled by Theopompos's accusations, then terrified by the reports of Alexander's ruthless purge of disloyal and inefficient officials on his return from India, Harpalos soon fled with five thousand talents to Athens, bribing his way in and touching off a diplomatic crisis that nearly led
Though I cannot claim to have searched the Byzantine authors as thoroughly as their predecessors.
Discussion and literature: Stewart 1990: 46-47.
to war. It subsided only with his escape and death in Crete, and with the trials and condemnation of the politicians he had corrupted.
One of the condemned was Demosthenes, and the speech for the prosecution is the first of two by the orator Hypereides (delivered in the spring of 323 and the summer of 322) that take up the issue of Alexander's supposed divinity (T 92-93; S 2). In the first speech, Hypereides attacks a proposal made in late 324 to erect a statue (eikon ) to Alexander as "God Invincible"—the text is, inevitably, mutilated at this point. In the second, with Alexander now dead and the war of liberation against the Macedonians now fought and lost, he lists cult images (agalmata ) of them among the outrages that the Athenians now have to "witness." The implications of these passages will be explored in Chapter 7.2.
Two early Hellenistic poets also addressed the same issue, though in a different context. An epigram by Poseidippos praises Lysippos for representing Alexander as a lion among cattle (T 115; cf. figs. 41 and 44), and another, by Asklepiades of Samos (T 116), confirms the bronze's heroic character, stressing that for all its evocation of colossal power, it recognized the divide between gods and men. It bestrode the earth but left Olympos to Zeus. With these four texts we stand at the threshold of a debate about the propriety of representing a man with the attributes of the gods. This debate finds some echo in the historical sources for the last year of Alexander's life, is a continuing theme of later writing about him, and is critical to any evaluation of Alexander's portraiture. The richest source of information on its relevance to the images is Plutarch, who quotes the Asklepiades epigram twice (T 9 and 119).
Meanwhile, other aspects of Alexander's image had begun to interest the historians. Aristoboulos recorded Lysippos's group of bronzes commemorating those Companions who fell in the first assault at the battle of the Granikos in 334 (T 103); Hieronymos of Kardia described Alexander's hearse (T 71); and the anonymous author of the Book on the Death and Testament of Alexander , a partisan forger who may have published as early as 320 and whose work was later incorporated into the Alexander Romance , has the king ordering gilded bronze statues of himself to be set up at Delphi, Olympia, and elsewhere along with Ammon, Athena, Herakles, Olympias, and Philip (T 150-52). Oddly enough, these are the only Alexander portraits to catch the attention of the historians. Though the forged Testament soon vanished from the mainstream historical tradition, the Granikos group resurfaces in the early imperial historian Velleius Paterculus, in Trogus/Justin, and in Arrian (T 104-7), and the hearse reappears in Diodoros (T 74). Why should this be so?
What unites these monuments is their relevance to the historian's task of
perpetuating the memory of men and their deeds—in this case the memory of Macedonian valor in battle, of the king's last journey, and (in the case of Velleius) of Macedon's final subjection to Rome.48 Sculptures and paintings bear upon this enterprise only so far as they can become part of the narrative the historian constructs. Very few of them can meet this criterion, and even when they can, the tendency is for the work itself to yield place to the event it recalls. Thus, although no fewer than five ancient authors mention the Granikos group, not one actually describes it. What interests them is the heroic charge itself, the number of the casualties, and (in the case of Velleius) the group's utility as a symbol of Rome's assumption of Alexander's legacy.49 The hearse, too, swiftly became a mere adjunct to the dramatic struggle between Perdikkas and Ptolemy over the body it housed; thus Curtius, Arrian, Pausanias, and the author of the Heidelberg Epitome all recount Ptolemy's success but completely ignore the vehicle itself (T 76-81; see text fig. 9 and fig. 75).
The early Hellenistic historians survive only in pitiful fragments, and the loss of almost all subsequent Hellenistic prose has left a gaping lacuna in our evidence. Into this black hole have fallen the third-century "professional critics" of art, Xenokrates of Athens and Antigonos of Karystos, whose treatises culminated with the work of Apelles and Lysippos, and whose opinions can be glimpsed only by careful sleuthing in the pages of Pliny.50 What little else survives does so only in fragments: Kallixeinos of Rhodes' account of the Alexanders in the Great Procession of Ptolemy II, Nikandros's note about another on Kos, Herillos of Carthage's mention of them to illustrate a philosophical argument, and a single vague reference in Polybios (T 49, 96, 128, 144). The inscriptions are scarcely more helpful: a statue base in Kandahar (uncertain), the third-century progonoi (ancestor) monument of the Antigonid kings on Delos (also uncertain), and the progonoi monument erected in the late first century by Antiochos I of Kommagene (T 131, 143, 145).
Kallixeinos, who probably lived around 200, transmits an eyewitness account of the Great Procession, which was held in Alexandria in the winter of 275/274 (T 96).51 One wishes that his entire book had survived intact, for it clearly contained much about Alexandrian works of art and could probably have clarified many of our problems with Alexander's hearse, his tomb (Sema), and the numerous statues of him in the city. Concerning the proces-
On art, history, and the preservation of memory see Nora 1984-86; de Caso 1988; and especially Young 1989: 83.
Arrian, relying on Aristoboulos, even thinks that it is still at Dion: T 106.
See Stewart 1990: 21, 82, 291.
Comprehensive study by Rice 1983; date: Foertenmeyer 1988.
sion, though, Kallixeinos was clearly interested in more colorful things than statues. He notes that two Alexanders were included in the festivities (S 5, 6), one surrounded by interesting company (see Chapter 8.4), and the other in its own mini-procession within the big one, but his attention is not focused on them but on the living, breathing spectacle. He dwells at length on the automata , the extravagant floats with their mythological tableaux, the lavish display of gold and gems, and the exotic animals, such as the "four real elephants" that drew the chariot carrying Alexander's golden image. His unalloyed delight at Alexander's fabulous legacy, the wealth of Egypt delivered into Macedonian hands, helps us to understand the ambivalence that permeates the Alexander Romance .
Herillos, a minor third-century thinker, is interested in Alexander's portraits only to illustrate a favorite theory (T 49). Has remarks are transmitted secondhand, Nikandros's on the Koan statue (T 128) at thirdhand. Athenaios records the latter in a list of exotic flowers, quoting a Pergamene antiquarian who is himself quoting Nikandros: the point is that the flower of immortality, ambrosia (a species of lily), was growing out of its head. Polybios (T 144) does not even give us a name, merely the bland statement that in their sack of Dion in 220 Skopas and the Aitolians destroyed all the votive offerings and plundered "all the statues of the [Macedonian] kings"—Alexander included? Once again, the historian is not interested in objects but events, in this case the systematic erasure of memory, the deliberate destruction of Macedonian historical consciousness by their most bitter enemies.
With the late republic this bleak situation brightens up a little.52 Varro must have included Alexander in his book of biographies of seven hundred great men, each introduced by a likeness (T 88). The debt-ridden and politically frustrated Julius Caesar encountered an Alexander portrait in far-off Spain, which caused him to lament the fact that even though he had now outlived the king, his achievements were nothing by comparison (T 129-30). And Cicero used Apelles' Alexander at Ephesos (P1) as a stick to beat the rapacious Verres, referring to it in an offhand way that shows that it was completely familiar to his audience (T 59). He also illustrated a philosophical argument about resemblance by Lysippos's ability to mass-produce Alexander bronzes, and has the honor of being the first to report that the king preferred these two artists above all others (T 51). Soon, under Augustus, the poet Horace was to allege an edict, that Alexander positively forbade anyone else to make his portraits (T 52), and two generations later, Pliny added the
On the Latin writers cited below see especially Becatti 1950, though he rates their interest in art qua art substantially higher than I do.
gem cutter Pyrgoteles, completing the privileged triumvirate (T 54). Though Pyrgoteles was soon forgotten again, the core of the legend was to endure into the Byzantine period (T 123).
Cicero's other references to Alexander show an easy familiarity with Hellenistic writing on the king and his achievements. His remark about Alexander's "preference" for Apelles and Lysippos (what one might call the "soft" form of the tradition) must have come from some Greek source, which was later also tapped by Valerius Maximus, Plutarch, Himerios, and Chorikios (T 53, 58, 121, and 123).53 There is no reason to doubt its historicity. Alexander certainly gave major commissions to both men and had no reason to keep his opinions about them and their rivals to himself. The "edict," however—the "hard" or Horatian form of the tradition—reappears only in Pliny, Apuleius, and Arrian (T 54-56, 106, and 154). Could it have been invented, either by Horace or by one of his contemporaries, to provide a precedent for Augustus's control of his own portraiture?54
Horace's purpose is not so simple. He is indeed addressing Augustus but is using Alexander's example to excuse himself from joining Vergil and others in singing the praises of the new regime (245-47). He introduces Alexander in order to point a double contrast: between the king's uneven judgment—bad as regards poetry (Choirilos), good as regards portraiture (Apelles and Lysippos)—and Augustus's consistent good taste; and between poetry's ability to capture the soul and portraiture's interest only in externals (245-50). Alexander, then, invested in the wrong stock (241-44), Augustus in the right one (245-50), but if he, Horace, were to heed his master's voice, he would only be another Choirilos (257-70).55
For Horace, then, Cicero's simple statement of Alexander's "preference" for Apelles and Lysippos (T 51) would not do. He wanted to emphasize, first, that rulers must choose their publicists well and, second, that poets should know their limitations. Like most ancient critics, he was interested in art only as an ancilla to literature. He displays no concern for the quality of Augustus's
Perhaps Douris of Samos or Kleitarchos, whom Pliny cites among his sources for T 54 (HN 1. 125; cf. 34. 65, where he paraphrases Douris on Lysippos); on Cicero and Alexander see especially Green 1990: 199 and 204-6.
E.g., Schwarzenberg 1976: 248-49; on Alexander and Augustus see the synopsis by Wirth 1976: 190-94.
But as ever in Horace, irony reigns. Nec magis expressi voltus per aenea signa (247), coming directly after he mentions Vergil, slyly recalls the latter's famous paean to Roman rule:
excudent alii spirantia mollius aera,
(credo equidem), vivos ducent de marmore voltus;
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. .
tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento
(hae tibi erunt artes).
(Aen . 6. 847-52)
imperial portraiture and gives no reason to think that it ever crossed his mind. Suggestively, though, the omnivorous Pliny adopts his phraseology almost verbatim (T 54). Even though he does not acknowledge him in his extensive list of sources, and must have read of Alexander's preferences in the sources he does cite, he would have learned Horace's works by heart at school, and his prodigious memory perhaps did the rest.56 So did Horace invent the "edict" to boost his own arguments for quietism?
Probably not. The fact that Arrian knows of it (T 106) all but proves that it is a Hellenistic invention, for he used no Latin sources for his Anabasis . Greek authors of the empire habitually ignored the literature of their masters. In addition, Pliny would not have included Pyrgoteles in such an authoritative way—and twice over at that (T 54 and 154)—on his own initiative. So when and why did this "hard" form of the tradition appear? Hellenistic kings were much concerned with their portraiture, and some of them may have longed to control it in this way.57 Alexander's preference for Apelles, Lysippos, and Pyrgoteles could well have been turned into an edict by some enterprising courtier at Pergamon, Alexandria, Antioch, or Pella.58
Horace explicitly contrasts Augustus and Alexander, and the emperor himself seems to have cultivated the comparison, at least in the early years of his rule. He visited Alexander's body in the Sema at Alexandria, he used a signet ring with his portrait to stamp official documents (V 2), and he dedicated at least two paintings by Apelles in his Forum, showing Alexander with the Dioskouroi, Nike, Triumph, and the trussed-up figures of War and Fury (P 4-5). Like his other dedications there, these were most probably spoils from Alexandria and were no doubt intended to stimulate comparison between the new ruler of the Mediterranean and his Macedonian predecessor.59
Fifty years later, Claudius rammed the point home by substituting Augustus's face for Alexander's in both pictures (T 66), and subsequent exponents of the "edict" took the hint, dutifully affirming that a monarch's dignity is demeaned by anything less than the best in sculpture or painting (T 56). In addition, the fact that later writers depict the three geniuses as eagerly submitting to Alexander's will, even competing for his favor (T 58), while con-
Hor. 2. 1. 229-30: edicto vetuit, ne quis se praeter Apellen / pingeret, aut alius Lysippo duceret aera . Pliny HN 7. 125: idem hic imperator edixit, ne quis ipsum alius quam Apelles pingeret, quam Pyrgoteles scalperet, quam Lysippus ex aere duceret . On Pyrgoteles, see below.
Cf. Smith 1988: 26-31. Ath. 11,497b-c, for example, notes that Ptolemy II Philadelphos invented the double cornucopia specifically for Arsinoe II's statues.
The evidence may point to Kleitarchos, Alexandria, and the court of Ptolemy I: Pliny consulted him for Book 7 (HN 1. 7: cf. T 54), and Arrian certainly used the "Vulgate" extensively alongside his two main sources, Ptolemy and Aristoboulos: see especially Bosworth 1976.
See, for example, Wirth 1976: 190-96; Hafner 1977; Simon 1986: index, s.v. "Alexander."
sistently denigrating the work of contemporary artists,60 signaled unmistakably that these lesser men should be glad to follow their lead. Apuleius (T 56), writing in the middle of the second century A.D. , presents the "edict" in its most developed form, explaining how it standardized the king's features in all media, so that his virtues could at last be adequately conveyed to his subjects and to posterity. This was a utopian situation that had nothing to do with Alexander, but very much to do with the making and distribution of Roman imperial portraiture. It was in the high summer of empire, then, not under Augustus, that Alexander's "edict" finally became the paradigm of autocratic control for imperial Rome.
Meanwhile, Alexander's portraits had provoked another tradition of response that was to prove extremely long-lived. At what point does an artist's desire to do justice to a mighty ruler become flattery, and at what point does commemoration appropriate to his achievements become bombast? This time the artist concerned is not one of the privileged three but an "outsider." His name is variously reported as Deinokrates, Cheirokrates, and Stasikrates, and his home as Macedonia, Bithynia, and Rhodes (T 132-39). His outrageous proposal to rework Athos into a kind of Macedonian Mount Rushmore (S 23) was a heaven-sent gift to the moralizer. The proposed statue, with its feet in the Aegean, its head in the clouds, a city in its left hand, and a libation bowl eternally emptying the rivers of Athos into the sea in its right, is faithfully described by both Vitruvius and Strabo, though in very different ways. A splendid eighteenth-century reconstruction of it is illustrated in figure 1.
Vitruvius (T 132) uses the proposal both to flatter Augustus and to entreat him for favors. His Alexander turns it down not because it is hybristic—quite the contrary, he approves of it in principle (formationem puto probandam )—but because no city could flourish on such a site. Yet attracted by the intelligent and handsome "Dinocrates"—a fellow Macedonian—he takes him on and eventually commissions him to design Alexandria. "But as for me, my Emperor," writes Vitruvius, "nature has stunted my height, age has deformed my looks, and illness has sapped my strength. Since I am deprived of these advantages, I hope for preferment through my expertise and my writing" (2 praef . 4).
Strabo, on the other hand, having no personal axe to grind, reports the project almost as an aside (T 133). He calls its proposer Cheirokrates (Hand-master), a far less tendentious name than Deinokrates (Marvelmaster). Yet since both are overtly programmatic, one wonders whether the man's given name might not have been the more conventional Stasikrates (Strifemaster). This is the form in which it is transmitted by both Plutarch and Tzetzes, who
E.g., Pliny HN 34. 5, 46-47, 52; 35. 5, 28, 51.
independently adds that he was a Bithynian (T 134-35, 139). So either Cheirokrates and Deinokrates were nicknames, prompted by the Athos proposal itself, or the sources have conflated two or more individuals with similar names.61
Though Alexander's portraits appear in a variety of contexts in the literature of the empire, real continuity is to be found only in Pliny and Plutarch, who together account for the vast majority of all post-Augustan references to the subject. Without them, the number of attested portraits would be cut by half, and our knowledge of the rest would be impoverished beyond recognition.
Pliny's Natural History has earned him a good deal of contempt from scholars, who often seem to think that ancient authors can seldom do anything right. Extensive reliance on a single major source is condemned as slavish and unoriginal, while a synthesis of many is written off as a pastiche. Yet Pliny's vast palimpsest of information not only is crafted with some care but among other things has given us our only surviving large-scale history of Greek sculpture and painting. He includes many Alexanders that others ignore entirely, preserves the names of hitherto undocumented portraitists, presents interesting new traditions about Alexander and his court artists, offers valuable hard information on several key monuments, summarizes the opinions of Hellenistic critics about their style and the aims and interests of their authors, and, last but not least, always tries to find a "Roman angle" in the form of connections with the giants of the republic or the emperors.
Pliny introduces Alexander's "edict" and the three superstars in Book 7 of his work, in the context of the history of human evolution (T 54). His purpose is to catalogue the most eminent men and women in all spheres of life, so Alexander's recognition of Lysippos, Apelles, and Pyrgoteles (this is his
On the problem see RE, s.v. "Deinokrates" (6), cols. 2392-93 (Fabricius). Four separate projects are involved, as follows: (1) Ephesos, temple of Artemis: Strabo (T 133), quoting Artemidoros of Ephesos, has Cheirokrates; Solinus 40. 5 has Dinocrates. Vitruvius 7 praef . 16 ascribes the building to Paionios of Ephesos and the temple slave Demetrios. (2) Athos: see the main text. Diokles of Rhegion, who is mentioned only by Eustathios (T 138) and is otherwise unknown, must be a mistake. (3) Alexandria: the communis opinio of antiquity was that the city's architect was called Deinokrates (so Val. Max. 1. 4. 7; Solin. 32. 41—transcribing and correcting Pliny HN 5. 62, whose MSS read "Dinochares"; thus also H.N . 7. 25; and Atom. Marc. 22. 16. 7). Julius Valerius 1. 25 and ps.-Kallisthenes 1. 31 call him a Rhodian, though they give his name as Hermokrates and Hippokrates, respectively. Deinochares was certainly a separate personality, who worked for the early Ptolemies (RE , s.v., cols. 2390-91). Modem historians, when they discuss the matter, opt for Deinokrates of Rhodes: so, for example, Fraser 1972: 4; Hamilton 1973: 74; Bosworth 1988a: 246. (4) Hephaistion's tomb: Plutarch (T 135) makes Alexander "long" for Stasikrates, but this could suggest that by then he was otherwise employed, or dead; Diodoros 17. 115 describes the tomb but omits to name its designer. It was never completed.
debut) make the three obvious candidates for inclusion. His phraseology, as remarked above, strongly suggests that he was taking his cue from Horace (T 52), though as we have seen, the "edict" itself is probably a pre-Horatian, Hellenistic invention. He presumably found Pyrgoteles himself, among has primary sources, but this discovery was not to take root. Once Pliny had succumbed to the ash of Vesuvius, the gem cutter was forgotten again, and the abbreviated, mainstream tradition—"hard" and "soft" versions to— gether—continued undisturbed.
In Books 34-36 Pliny adds four more painters and three sculptors to the roster of Alexander portraitists. The painters are Protogenes, who got around to painting Alexander (with Pan) only at the end of his life, shortly after 305, despite Aristotle's constant urging (P 3); Philoxenos of Eretria, who painted the battle of either the Issos or Gaugamela for "King Kassandros" (P 9); An-tiphilos, who painted Alexander as a youth, and in company with Philip and Athena (P 2, 11); and Nikias, whose "extremely fine" Alexander then hung in Pompey's Porticoes (P 13). The sculptors are Euphranor and one "Chaereas" (perhaps Lysippos's pupil Chares of Lindos, the author of the Colossus of Rhodes),62 both of whom made bronzes of Alexander and Philip (S 9, 10); and Euthykrates, who produced an Alexander Hunting (S 14).
Yet Pliny has not forgotten the "edict": he even repeats it when speaking of Apelles and Pyrgoteles (T 55, 154). So what are Euphranor and the others doing here? Surprisingly, none of them constitutes a prima facie violation of it. He has it both ways with Antiphilos: he first specifies that Antiphilos painted Alexander "as a youth" and alongside Philip (i.e., before 336), and then makes it clear that Antiphilos was born in Egypt and worked at the court of Ptolemy (35. 138)! He then dearly locates the pictures of Protogenes, Philoxenos, and Nikias in the period of the Successors. As for the sculptors, he introduces Euthykrates as Lysippos's son and pupil and in 34. 51 explicitly dates him to the 121st Olympiad (296-293); in 34. 50 he puts Euphranor in the generation before Lysippos and Alexander (Olympiad 104 = 364-361); and in 34. 41 he also places Chares among Lysippos's pupils. So Pliny is actually being quite consistent, at least by his own standards.
To ask whether his scrupulous observance of the "edict" is conscious is to miss the point. Most likely, once it became gospel, conflicting information simply dropped out of the tradition or was instinctively adjusted to fit it. Support for this thesis may be had from Pliny's own text. He mentions a Battle with the Persians by Aristeides of Thebes, containing one hundred figures and sold to Mnason of Elateia at the astronomical price of ten minae per figure (T 87); and he notes Aetion's picture of "a newly married bride,
Following Schreiber 1903: 268-72.
remarkable for her air of modesty" (T 68). Since Mnason was tyrant of Elateia around 330, the first picture could well have been one of Alexander's battles, and the second one has long been connected with Lucian's ekphrasis on Aetion's Wedding of Alexander and Roxane (T 69), which indeed put great stress on the modesty of the bride. So why are Pliny's references to them so vague?
The clue lies only a sentence or two away. Pliny is careful to note at the beginning of his disquisition on Aristeides that he was a contemporary of Apelles, and prefaces his list of Aetion's "noble works" with the information that he "attained outstanding distinction in the 107th Olympiad" (352-349). He therefore knew very well that Aristeides would have been subject to the "edict," and in Aetion's case he would certainly have realized that any picture celebrating the wedding of Alexander and Roxane and painted by a man who had "flourished" twenty-five years before would probably have been produced before Alexander's death and so would violate it too. Yet Aristeides' picture came complete with an anecdote about its size and consequently astronomical price, and Aetion's was part of the established canon of "noble works," and so could not easily be discarded either.63 Was this why the true titles of these pictures quietly fell by the wayside, leaving only these sorry wraiths behind?
Pliny describes none of these works in detail: after all, most were made by "the rest of the throng" (34. 53), lesser masters "famous in minor genres" (35. 112). Nor does he notice any Alexanders east of Ephesos, for his sources appear to have covered only Greece and the Aegean.64 Finally, among the sculptures he focuses exclusively on bronzes. This accords with his view that although the metal was first generally reserved for statues of gods, after the Athenians honored the Tyrannicides with portrait bronzes in 510, its utilization for statues of mortals "was taken up by the whole world" (34. 17). He repeats this view in 35. 9 and confirms it, in much the same way as with the "edict," by including almost no portrait marbles in Book 36.65 Predictably, he devotes his real attention to the work of the three superstars: Lysippos, Apelles, and Pyrgoteles.
Alexander dominates his account of Lysippos. In 34. 51 the Sikyonian is
Pliny's description of these five select pictures by Action as "noble" points to Pasiteles' Nobilia opera , though Varro may be an intermediary here: cf. HN 36. 39-40 for Pliny's admiration of Pasiteles, and on his sources in general, HN 1. 34-36; cf. Stewart 1990: 21. Either could have been responsible for "losing" their titles.
Thus he omits Antioch's two masterpieces, the Tyche by Eutychides (fig. 80) and the Apollo by Bryaxis, though he discusses Eutychides at 34. 51 and 78 and Bryaxis at 34. 42, 73 and 36. 22, 30-31; on the omission see Stewart 1990: 300.
Exceptions: Cupid said to be Alkibiades (36. 28) and a Kallisthenes by Amphistratos (36. 36); indeed, the pattern repeats itself, for Skopas's kanephoroi (36. 25) are now anonymous, and the quadriga atop the Mausoleum at Halikarnassos has lost its occupant (36. 31).
said to have flourished "together with Alexander the Great in the 113th Olympiad" (328-325), and, after an initial anecdote describing his humble origins, Alexanders take up fully half the space Pliny devotes to cataloguing his works in 34. 62-64 (T 105, 109, and 113). As so often, it is the Roman angle that interests him: Tiberius's immoderate love for the Apoxyomenos excites his contempt; Nero's crass attempt to gild his Young Alexander (S 15) enables him to moralize about the transcendent value of great art; and finally, after praising the Companions of the Granikos group for their consummate realism (S 12), he is careful to remark that they were removed to Rome by Metellus after the conquest of Macedonia. As in Velleius (T 104), these icons of Macedonian martial arete had now become symbols of the triumph of republican virtus .
Conspicuously absent from this otherwise quite informative account is any mention of the portrait that Plutarch represents as Lysippos's tour de force : the Alexander with the Lance (T 120, 134). Since the normally scrupulous Pausanias does not mention it either, the natural inference is that it stood somewhere in the East and so failed to get into the Hellenistic art-historical canon. Were it not for Plutarch and his Byzantine admirer Tzetzes (cf. T 26-27), we would not even know of its existence. A similar situation obtains with regard to the king's portraits displayed in Alexandria: here, Nikolaos's ekphraseis are our sole guides (T 95, 126). As will soon appear, this is not the only large-scale disjunction between the testimonia and the surviving monuments.
The three sentences that end Pliny's account of Lysippos have caused more needless controversy among historians of Greek sculpture than almost any others. Probably taken from a book by Lysippos's third-century follower Xenokrates of Athens, they list his contributions to realism (akribeia ) and the science of proportion (symmetria ); the third category of analysis, composition (rhythmos ), is unfortunately omitted.66 Rejecting the "foursquare" physique favored by his predecessors (Polykleitos and his school: 34. 56), Lysippos is said to have cultivated a rendering that sought to increase apparent height by reducing the size of the head and slimming down the body, a system of proportion that codified the change, and an unparalleled mastery of detail. Pliny then concludes by quoting Lysippos's oft-repeated dictum that in contrast to his predecessors he pursued appearance rather than reality.
Contrary to common belief, none of this contradicts Pliny's opening anecdote, taken from Douris of Samos (active ca. 300), where the painter Eupompos advises the young Lysippos to start from nature, not from received wisdom (34. 61). Nor should one assert, as some do, that Pliny did not un-
For more detailed comments see Stewart 1990: 35, 80, 82, 186, 291-93.
derstand what he was writing. The entire section is perfectly lucid and not only self-consistent but in agreement with the report in 35. 153 of Lysippos's brother Lysistratos's novel practice of making "corrections" upon molds taken from life as a preliminary to casting portraits in bronze. In both cases the end result would have been the same: a "phenomenal" idealism that substituted doctored proportions and modeling for the real thing, in order to capture subjective appearance. Lysippos and his brother, Pliny is telling us, aimed not merely to reproduce reality but where necessary to improve on it, to chart a third course between the categorical idealism of Polykleitos and others and the crass realism of sculptors like Demetrios of Alopeke.67 This is precisely the strategy envisaged by Aristotle in the Poetics , where he lists three kinds of poetic, pictorial, and sculptural mimesis: "of things as they were or are, of things as they are said or seem to be, and of things as they ought to be" (25, 146068-11): Demetrios, Lysippos, Polykleitos. As will appear, in the contest for Alexander's favor this novel approach indeed gave Lysippos a decided advantage over his rivals, though detailed discussion must be reserved till Chapter 6.
Pliny was evidently unable to connect Lysippos directly with Augustus; somewhat surprisingly, the emperor may not have brought any Alexanders of his back from the East. Apelles, however, was another matter. He receives about four times more attention than Lysippos (35. 79-97), with Augustus now much in evidence. Whereas Lysippos apparently wrote nothing, Pliny was able to use Apelles' own textbook, and it also seems that he was the more colorful character of the two, better geared than Lysippos to the kind of moralizing the ancient critics favored. His relationship with Alexander is described in detail, tapping into a complex discourse about class, gender, desire, self-control, and power.
The narrative, perhaps again taken from Douris, is prefaced by a discussion of Apelles' good sense, illustrated by the inevitable anecdote. Genial as ever, the painter happily redrew a pair of sandals when a cobbler pointed out a mistake, but sternly rejected the same man's criticism of his drawing of the leg, "saying that cobblers should stick to sandals, a remark that has passed into a proverb" (35. 85). The cobbler is thus put where he belongs: as a mere menial (Greek banausos ), a maker of purely utilitarian objects, he cannot compete with the master of illusion.68 Pliny then passes to one of Alexander's visits to Apelles' workshop, and the "edict" is invoked to explain the occasion. Like the cobbler, the king is also out of his depth in an environment where the expert rules, displays an embarrassing ignorance of the art of paint-
Stewart 1990: 186, 274-75.
Parallels: Kris and Kurz (1934)1979: 102-3.
ing, and is tactfully reproved by Apelles.69 Here, Pliny begins to endow his proverb with more universal significance, as the genial painter, at home in his own territory, dominates the usually irascible king (regem alioqui iracundum ), now very much out of his.
Surprisingly, though, Alexander bears Apelles no grudge. The lesson in humility has not infringed his authority where it counts, out in the world at large, and so does not provoke his usual anger. Instead, he meekly reciprocates by presenting his favorite mistress, Pankaspe,70 to the painter after Apelles falls in love with her when she models for him in the nude. Here, the theme of Alexander's self-control in the workshop is developed to the extent that his action is explicitly recognized as increasing his power over himself, and thus his capacity to wield power over others (magnus animo, major imperio sui ).71 This capacity is now seen as dependent upon the redirection of his desire into its proper channels, and accordingly his affection for the woman is now displaced upon a male subject, Apelles himself (adfectum donavit artifici ). Here, one moral of the story, the gendering of desire, complements that of the Aetion painting described by Lucian (T 69); all will reappear in Chapter 6.4.
Meanwhile, Apelles is simultaneously elevated for displaying courtesy beyond his station in life and put down again by Pliny's characterization of Pankaspe's side of the deal: Alexander is deaf to her feelings at having exchanged a king for a (mere) painter. The eventual outcome of this chain of stories, then, is to restore the proper order of things, with the king at the top, his power substantially enhanced by the two incidents; the painter in the middle, handsomely rewarded for his good-mannered lesson and timely passion for Pankaspe; the cobbler below him, put sternly in his place as a menial craftsman; and the hapless woman at the bottom, a mere commodity defined solely by her sex. Yet even as it strives to exalt Alexander, the text betrays its anxiety: the rhetoric of praise and victory (magnus animo, maior imperio sui, nec minor hoc facto quam victoria alia, quia ipse se vicit ) reaches fever pitch just before the king's callous indifference to Pankaspe's feelings is revealed.
Pliny begins his catalogue of Apelles' paintings by describing his relationship with Ptolemy Sorer and his portrait of Antigonos One-Eye. Uncertain as to "which of his pictures are noblest" (35. 90), he then turns this into a compliment to Augustus for choosing his Aphrodite Anadyomene for Cae-
The incident resurfaces in Plut. Mor . 58D and 472A (Apelles and Megabyzos) and in Ael. VH 2. 2 (Zeuxis and Megabyzos). Kris and Kurz (1934)1979: 40-44 correctly link the story with the problem of the artist's status but fail to appreciate the complexities of its resolution.
Pankaste according to Ael. VII 12. 34; Pakate in Lucian Imag . 7.
See especially Halperin 1990: 35.
sar's temple. The Roman reader would of course have known of the Julian claim to be descended from Venus. The theme of artist and king is then further developed with an account of his portrait masterpiece, the Alexander Thunderbolt-bearer—Alexander Keraunophoros—at Ephesos (T 60; P1). Pliny defines it in two characteristic ways: by its enormous cost and by its realism. Both establish its status in a very concrete way, since its immense monetary value clearly mirrored its extraordinary virtuosity. Neither would have been lost on his Roman audience. Then, as an aside, he tells us that it was painted in only four colors. This parsimony is the key to the entire description, deflating Alexander's extravagance and locating the pictorial genius at the hub of the narrative, as he brilliantly achieves results and reaps rewards out of all proportion to his own investment.
Portraits of others then follow, with the information that Apelles painted Alexander and Philip more times than Pliny cares to count (T 82). Two of his Alexanders at Rome are then introduced, one grouped with the Dioskouroi and Nike, and the other triumphing in a chariot over a trussed-up figure of War (T 66; P4, 5). Augustus is complimented once more on his restraint in dedicating them publicly in his Forum rather than keeping them for himself, and Claudius is mocked for (literally) defacing them by substituting Augustus's visage for Alexander's. Pliny has, in fact, already mentioned these two pictures long before, in his account of the development of painting at Rome (T 65). They culminate his history of Roman collecting, for Augustus "surpassed all others in placing them in the most frequented part of his Forum."
What is surprising about this earlier notice is its omissions. Pliny fails to mention either Apelles or Alexander, does not tell us where the pictures came from, and lists only the secondary figures—and not all of these. He does confirm that Triumph was actually represented in the picture that featured War, but leaves out another figure whose existence happens to be recorded by Servius (T 67): a defeated Furor (Lyssa?) seated on a pile of weapons.72 Outright carelessness is one possibility, but since Pliny's whole point is to praise Augustus, so is a desire (conscious or unconscious) that the emperor should have the limelight entirely to himself. As to the provenance of the pictures, what mattered to him was not pedigrees, but the fact that they were now an ornament to Rome. They probably hung at the entrance to the Forum, which has yet to be excavated.73
Finally, Pyrgoteles, whom Pliny apparently resurrected from oblivion and who immediately returned to it thereafter. The encyclopedist knew only
Daut 1984 thoroughly explores the possible meanings of "Belli facies" but overlooks the reference in Servius.
Servius notes that they were exhibited "introeuntibus ad sinistram"; cf. Pape 1975: 164 n. 2, against Zanker 1968: 23-24.
that he was Alexander's court engraver (T 54 and 154). Pliny mentions no specific works by him and can describe him only as "undoubtedly the most brilliant artist in his field." The reason for this is simple: apart from the rings of Polykrates and Pyrrhos, "the authorities can produce no gems famous enough to be specially recorded" (37. 6). So much for the brilliant history of Greek gem carving revealed by archaeology! Clearly, there was no independent Hellenistic tradition of writing about engravers (as opposed to their materials) that he could consult, and he knew of no work signed by Pyrgoteles in Rome or connected with the emperors.
So why did Pliny decide to include him? The answer must lie, once again, in the circumstances of imperial Rome. During the republic and especially under Augustus, portrait gems had become a fetish of the Roman elite. At the beginning of Book 37, Pliny admits that pre-Roman gems interest him only as a prologue to the present, only insofar as they can illuminate "this enthusiasm that has blazed into so violent a passion" (37. 2). He resurrects Pyrgoteles for the sole purpose of prefacing his account of the art of gem carving at Rome and introducing his encomium of Augustus's own favorite engraver, Dioskourides (37. 8). He then proceeds to list the gems that the emperor used to stamp state papers: first, a signet engraved with a sphinx, then, when this provoked some ribaldry during the civil wars, one with Alexander's portrait (T 155; V 2). This gem, however, must have been unsigned, since a signed image so widely disseminated would surely have attracted attention and found its way into Pliny's text. Unsung before imperial times, and an enigma even then, Pyrgoteles only entered the canon on Dioskourides' coattails. Unless a signed work of his appears, he will always remain a shadow.74
In the teleological scheme that Pliny inherited from the Hellenistic critics, Lysippos and Apelles had brought their respective arts to perfection. For him, the shadowy Pyrgoteles was undoubtedly to be ranked with them. Alexander, it is implied, was lucky to be alive at that moment, when a watershed in Greek history coincided with the climax of her representational arts.
In his second essay under the title On the Fortune or Virtue of Alexander , Plutarch turns all this on its head. Introducing the king's court artists, Plutarch observes that the conjunction was their good fortune, not his, and that they "became the foremost not simply under Alexander, but because of Alexander" (2. 1, 333D-E). After listing the performing artists at court, Plu-
Bibliography and comments: Zazoff 1983: 208, 269-70, 315-16. Occasional attempts to resurrect him, such as Guépin 1964, have not found general favor: cf. Schwarzenberg 1976: 264-66; for a quite different, and certainly more plausible, try see Hafner 1977. Boardman 1970: 371 (notes to pl. 997) reports a suggestion by Vollenwieder that Pyrgoteles made the gem in the Ionides collection signed IIY, but this is incompatible with his own observation that it recalls the coins of Antigonos Doson (reigned, 229-221).
tarch turns to the painters and sculptors. First comes Apelles, whose Alexander Keraunophoros receives due praise for its realism, provoking a neatly turned epigram: "Philip's Alexander is invincible, but Apelles' is inimitable" (T 61). For obvious reasons, he omits Lysippos's caustic remark that not the thunderbolt but the spear was Alexander's true and proper attribute, one that Time could never take away from him (T 120). This comment appears elsewhere in the Moralia , as part of an attack on men who would usurp the heavens,75 but was quite out of place in an encomium.
Next comes Lysippos himself (T 119). Plutarch praises his unique success in catching Alexander's personal quirks, such as the inclination of his neck, the upward tilt of his head, and his melting, limpid eyes, without compromising his virile and leonine character: his matchless arete . The Lift further specifies that the inclination of the neck was to the left and that many of his friends and Successors tried to imitate these quirks (T 10). Similar remarks elsewhere in Plutarch's oeuvre (T 8 and 11) more or less guarantee that the physical characteristics so described are taken from eyewitnesses and reflect firsthand knowledge of Alexander's appearance.76 Lysippos's procedure here is exactly that ascribed to him by Pliny (34. 65). Plutarch is only being more specific. He implies that normally these peculiarities would be decidedly unheroic and unleonine (melting eyes, for example, were a characteristic of Praxiteles' Aphrodite of Knidos)77 and that no one but Lysippos could turn them to advantage. This gained him Alexander's approval and provoked the famous "edict." Yet, as Plutarch emphasizes elsewhere, his successors in the genre were less scrupulous, corrupting it beyond all redemption.78
So while Apelles exalted Alexander with the attribute of Zeus but caught his real features perfectly, Lysippos represented him as a mortal but idealized his appearance in order to reveal the unique character underneath. The structure of the argument is broadly chiastic, though this time Lysippos takes the palm. Then comes Stasikrates (T 134).
One would have expected that his Macedonian Mount Rushmore (fig. 1) would have excited Plutarch's contempt and abuse, but it did nothing of the kind. Like Vitruvius, Plutarch had other things in mind. His Alexander also admires the plan and rejects it only because Xerxes' attempt to cut a canal through Athos had already become a byword for hybris and because the whole
See also Mot . 780F: the good ruler does not need the thunderbolts or tridents of the sculptors and painters.
Leimbach 1979, who shows that the current orthodoxy that Plutarch got his information solely from the statues cannot be right: see further Chapter 3.2 below.
Lucian Imag . 6; Dio Chrys. 4. 112. Marshall 1909: 92-98 is still the fullest discussion of the meaning of , though Polemon in Anecdota Graeca 4. 255 (Cramer), plus the citations in LSJ, 9th ed., show that it must mean "moist" or "melting."
Mor . 779F-80A.
of Asia was to be his memorial: his eyes are fixed on bigger things still. Plutarch then finishes up with a highly contrived comparison. Though Fortune supplies the materials, it is Art, not Fortune, that creates great painting and sculpture like Apelles' Keraunophoros or "the statue named after the spear" (presumably the Lysippic bronze he discussed earlier). So how can we believe that the greatest man of all time was created by Fortune's supply of arms and men alone, without Virtue's help?
By the time Plutarch wrote the Life , he had read more, reflected more, and matured somewhat. As already mentioned, his comments on the Lysippic Alexander are a little more specific, but instead of praising Apelles' Keraunophoros for its accuracy, he now censures it for making the king's complexion too dark (T 10). Citing a pupil of Aristotle on Alexander's pleasant smell, he then moves into an analysis of how this came to be, basing his argument on the characterological theories of Aristotle's successor as head of the Peripatetic school, Theophrastos (see above, Section 1).
Here too, then, Plutarch uses Alexander's portraits as a form of control, weighing them against other sources (firsthand accounts and theoretical speculation) to obtain a rounded view of Alexander's appearance and character. His other remarks on them in the Life are more ad hoc . He rounds off his account of the battle of the Granikos with the by now obligatory mention of Lysippos's group at Dion (T 103), cites the Krateros group at Delphi as concrete testimony to Alexander's valor in hunting the king of beasts (T 110), and reintroduces Stasikrates to emphasize the extraordinary nature of his project for Hephaistion's tomb (72. 5). Finally, he returns to Delphi again (he was a priest there) with an anecdote about Kassandros's holy terror of Alexander being reawakened many years after the king's death by seeing a statue of him in the sanctuary (T 111; S 137). This anecdote is part of a strong tradition about Kassandros's hatred for Alexander and his descendants, which surfaces elsewhere in Plutarch as well as in Diodoros and Curtius.79 Thus, here too, the sculpture serves to certify a historical fact, clinching the argument like a silent witness to its veracity.
After Pliny and Plutarch, the discourse surrounding Alexander's portraiture fragments again. Latin writers add but little, largely confining themselves to translating, epitomizing, or glossing earlier sources (T 57, 67, 79, 107, 151-52). The only notable exceptions are Apuleius, Statius, and Suetonius. Apuleius gives us the definitive, high imperial form of the "edict" but erroneously substitutes Polykleitos for Lysippos (T 56). Statius, writing a clever but nauseatingly sycophantic encomium of Domitian's new equestrian portrait, sees the advantages of a pejorative comparison with Lysippos's
Plut. Mot . 180F; Diod. 17. 118. 2; 19. 51; Curt. 10. 10. 17-19.
bronze of Alexander on Boukephalas, turning his conceit on the replacement of the Macedonians head with Caesar's (T 125). And Suetonius gives us both a fuller account of Augustus's signet rings (T 156) and the first description of Caesar's encounter with Alexander's statue in Cadiz (T 129).
Greek literature of the middle and late empire offers a richer pasture. Pausanias dutifully notes several Alexander portraits in his Description of Greece (T 94, 97-98, 102). Unfortunately, since his sympathies lay with the free Greece of the years before Philip and Alexander, he reveals little but the mere fact of their existence and at Delphi even omits the Krateros group (S 13), so keen is he to get to the Knidian Lesche. Proud of the traditions of his native Ionia, he also tells us about Alexander's dream in Smyrna, the founding myth of the city, making a bridge to Roman coins illustrating the scene (7. 5. 1; fig. 109). Philostratos, too, includes a number of Alexander portraits in his account of the Indian journey of his hero, the sage Apollonios of Tyana (T 127, 146, 157). Unfortunately, since his "source," the diary of the shadowy Damis of Nineveh, is probably his own creation, and his "biography" of Apollonios is more fiction than fact, this casts doubt upon the very existence of the works of art he so colorfully reports.80 Though excavation has done much to verify his description of Taxila, it has not turned up any of the works of art he describes. Each of his Alexanders therefore has to be taken on its own merits, which will be explored in Chapters 6.3 and 10.1.
These doubts introduce us to a new tradition that apparently began in the middle empire: the creation of completely fictitious Hellenistic Alexanders. Ptolemaios Chennos (The Quail), an early exponent of historical fiction, had included a Helen of Alexandria and her picture of the Issos in his catalogue of famous Helens (T 84), but since he says that the painting was on public display in Vespasian's Temple of Peace, it is probably authentic. Lucian and Philostratos, writing around A.D. 170 and 200, are the first extant authors where one suspects such mendacity (T 146, 148); they certainly invented other works of art when it suited them. Soon after, we find Aelian concocting a dummy of Alexander in order to sensationalize the story of the hearse and to contrast Ptolemy's cleverness with Perdikkas's stupidity (T 153). Lastly, and most spectacularly, the author of the Alexander Romance makes a painted Alexander central to his complicated dealings with Queen Candace of Meroe—a fiction at the heart of a fiction—invents a group of him, Seleukos, and others at Alexandria; and finally picks up the spurious tradition of his will
See, for instance, Meyer 1917, esp. 376-79 (extreme skepticism); Charpentier 1934 (uncritical acceptance); Anderson 1986: 121-239, esp. 128 and 208-9 (cautious optimism). Apollonios and Damis turn up in Sanskrit and medieval Persian sources: see G. W. Bowersock in the Cambridge History of Greek Literature , ed. P. E. Easterling and B. M. W. Knox (Cambridge, 1965), 657; Anderson 1986: 166-69 and 173 n. 106.
and the portraits mandated therein (T 89-90, 149, and 150-51). It cannot be coincidence that these developments took place exactly when Alexander had regained favor as an exemplum for the Severans and the barrack-room emperors of the third century (T 21).81
For obvious reasons, Alexander portraits also made excellent material for extended literary description, or ekphrasis . Around A.D. 170, Lucian dedicated a long ekphrasis to Aetion's painting of Alexander's marriage to Roxane (T 69), and in the fifth century, Nikolaos Rhetor of Myra composed two more, both on monuments in Alexandria. One describes the Tychaion and its contents, the other the king's statue as founder of the city (ktistes : T 95, 126).
Lucian uses Aetion's picture to make a humorous appeal to a Macedonian audience. He presents it as one among several instances of how displaying one's wares at festivals pays off, for it supposedly won Aetion the daughter of an Olympic judge, no less. The protagonists are actually the Erotes, playfully overcoming the modesty of Roxane and Alexander's reluctance. Nikolaos, on the other hand, is deadly serious. In each case he strives to situate his subjects in a wider context. Concerning the Tychaion, he first lauds the universal power of Tyche and then proceeds to treat the Tychaion and its allegorical Alexander group from this standpoint, taking advantage of telling details to emphasize Tyche's commanding role in the affairs of mortals. In the description of the Founder, his aim and technique are somewhat similar: to exalt both city and king, first in general terms, then by demonstrating (sometimes erroneously) how the statue's iconography was chosen to evoke his aims and ideals. His intent throughout is to bring Alexander and Boukephalas to life, to move us with his pen sketch of what Cavafy was later to call "a man worthy of such a city." En route, these ekphraseis let slip much valuable information. Without them, we would not even suspect that these four works ever existed, much less be able to trace replicas like that illustrated in figure 52.
The older traditions of response continue too. Arrian and Himerios perpetuate the "hard" and "soft" forms of the "edict," respectively (T 58, 106), and the latter adopts the same stance as Plutarch when discussing Alexander's debt to Lysippos and vice versa (T 122). Dio repeats the story of Caesar at Cadiz (T 130). And the poets of the Anthology produce elegant variations on the Alexander epigrams of their Hellenistic forebears (T 114, 117). As usual, opinions vary according to whatever axe the author is grinding at the time. The Athos project receives a double dose of moral disapproval from Lucian,
Cf. S. H. A., Thirty Tyrants 14. 4-6 on the popularity of Alexander talismans during the troubled years of the third century; on Caracalla's obsession with him see Bieber 1964: 76-77; Wirth 1976: 200-203; Castritius 1988.
who, however, has either forgotten Stasikrates' name or does not care to mention it (T 136-37). The Christian apologist Clement of Alexandria mocks Alexander's images for their defilement of human beauty with—of all things—ram's horns (T 147). And Athenaios is simply interested in their entertainment value (T 96, 128, 140-41).
The Byzantine writers, though increasingly prone to factual error, deviate only marginally from the canon. Nikolaos of Myra's ekphraseis have already been discussed, together with their tendency to overinterpretation. The sixth-century rhetor Chorikios of Gaza repeats the story of the "edict" and comments that the Lysippic bronzes had to be over life-size to please a king who thought himself bigger than everyone else (T 123-24). Eustathios notes the Athos project in his commentary on the Iliad but ascribes it to an otherwise unknown Diokles of Rhegion (T 138). Tzetzes, on the other hand, knows that it was proposed by Stasikrates, and contrasts his overblown bombast and what he sees as Lysippos's sober realism (T 25-27, 139). This would have astounded Plutarch and Apuleius, who knew full well that Lysippos idealized the king (T 56, 119); it has also been responsible for much recent confusion regarding the Sikyonian's aims and methods.82
These differing perspectives on Alexander and his image are illuminating, but the merest fragments of far more extensive traditions of response now forever lost. With Tzetzes, the ongoing discourse about Alexander's portraiture comes full circle. To him, as to his predecessors, it is keeping hybris in check that counts. Stasikrates' Athos project (S 23) and Apelles' Keraunophoros (P1) overstepped the bounds, Lysippos's spear-bearer (S 16) did not. Other issues overlap: the proper representation of Alexander's character, the evaluation of his personal appearance, and the role of Tyche or Arete in life and image. For the reception of Alexander's portraiture was a complex affair, provoking discourses of quite diverse kinds, generating opinions and arousing passions that are sometimes easy, but often difficult, for us to understand. Few are congruent with the interests of twentieth-century art historians, but that is not to say that they are either irrelevant or, worse, "naive." To paraphrase a recent study of Caravaggio and his interpreters, rather than dismiss the ancient critics as simpleminded, we might do well to treat them as sophisticated men who express themselves in terms that are often alien to us.83 Understand their preoccupations, and one comes closer to understanding the preoccupations of those who ordered and paid for the images they discuss. With this in mind, it is time to move on to those images themselves.
Correctly recognized by Schwarzenberg 1967 and 1976.
Carrier 1987: 73; my thanks to Hayden White for this reference.
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Hardcover. Condition: Near Fine. Dust Jacket Condition: Fine. Hardcover in dust jacket. Third printing of first edition. Fine condition in fine, unclipped dust jacket. Pristine inside and out, with no mars, marks, dings, tears, or writing. Bottom and side fore-edges each have a very small stain. Illustrated. 8vo. 507 pp. including seven appendices, bibliography, and index, and an unpaginated section at the end of busts of Alexander reproduced in black and white. Seller Inventory # 96973
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FACES OF POWER Alexander's Image and Hellenistic Politics
Published by
University of California Press, 1994
ISBN 10: 0520068513
ISBN 13: 9780520068513
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Seller: Ancient World Books, Toronto, ON, Canada
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Hardcover. Condition: Near Fine. Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good. Light edgewear and faint creasing to DJ. ; Hellenistic Culture and Society; 545 pages; Alexander the Great changed the face of the ancient world. During his life and after his death, his image in works of art exerted an unprecedented influence on marbles, bronzes, ivories, frescoes, mosaics, coins, medals, even painted pottery and relief ware. Alexander's physiognomy became the most famous in history. But can we really know what meaning lies behind these images? Andrew Stewart demonstrates that these portraits wildly divergent in character, quality, type, provenance, date, and purpose actually transmit not so much a likeness of Alexander as a set of carefully crafted cliches that mobilize the notion "Alexander" for diverse ends and diverse audiences. Stewart discusses the portraits as studies in power and his original interpretation of them gives unprecedented fullness and shape to the idea and image called "Alexander.". Seller Inventory # 33294
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Faces of Power: Alexander's Image and Hellenistic Politics (Hellenistic Culture and Society)
Published by
University of California Press, 1994
ISBN 10: 0520068513
ISBN 13: 9780520068513
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Hardcover
First Edition
Seller: Bookworks, Chicago, IL, U.S.A.
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Hardcover. Condition: Fine. Dust Jacket Condition: Near Fine. 1st Edition. Fine contents, binding and dust jacket; appears unread. International shipping may require added postage charges. Seller Inventory # 144006
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Faces of Power
Published by
University of California Press, 1994
ISBN 10: 0520068513
ISBN 13: 9780520068513
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Hardcover
Seller: PBShop.store UK, Fairford, GLOS, United Kingdom
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HRD. Condition: New. New Book. Shipped from UK. Established seller since 2000. Seller Inventory # WF-9780520068513
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Faces of Power
Published by
University of California Press, 1994
ISBN 10: 0520068513
ISBN 13: 9780520068513
New
Hardcover
Seller: Kennys Bookshop and Art Galleries Ltd., Galway, GY, Ireland
Seller rating 5 out of 5 stars
Condition: New. During his reign and following his death, the physiognomy of Alexander the Great was one of the most famous in history, adorning numerous works of art. This study demonstrates how the various portraits transmit not so much a likeness of Alexander as a set of cliches that symbolized the ruler. Series: Hellenistic Culture and Society. Num Pages: 545 pages, 8 color illustrations, 191 b/w photographs, 5 line illustrations. BIC Classification: 1QDAG; ACG; AGH. Category: (P) Professional & Vocational; (UP) Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly; (UU) Undergraduate. Dimension: 254 x 178 x 44. Weight in Grams: 1375. . 1994. Illustrated. Hardcover. . . . . Seller Inventory # V9780520068513
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Faces of Power: Alexander's Image and Hellenistic Politics (eng)
Published by
University of California Press, 1994
ISBN 10: 0520068513
ISBN 13: 9780520068513
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Hardcover
Seller: Brook Bookstore On Demand, Napoli, NA, Italy
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Condition: new. Seller Inventory # c2185dbb7578fc9e9f007191d325f441
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Faces of Power: Alexander's Image and Hellenistic Politics (Hellenistic Culture and Society)
Published by
University of California Press, Berkley, CA, 1994
ISBN 10: 0520068513
ISBN 13: 9780520068513
Used
Hardcover
First Edition
Seller: M & M Books, ATHENS, GA, U.S.A.
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Hardcover. Condition: Fine. Dust Jacket Condition: Fine. 1st Edition. Small signature from previous owner on FEP. Seller Inventory # 140270
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Faces of Power
Published by
University of California Press, 1994
ISBN 10: 0520068513
ISBN 13: 9780520068513
New
Hardcover
Seller: Kennys Bookstore, Olney, MD, U.S.A.
Seller rating 5 out of 5 stars
Condition: New. During his reign and following his death, the physiognomy of Alexander the Great was one of the most famous in history, adorning numerous works of art. This study demonstrates how the various portraits transmit not so much a likeness of Alexander as a set of cliches that symbolized the ruler. Series: Hellenistic Culture and Society. Num Pages: 545 pages, 8 color illustrations, 191 b/w photographs, 5 line illustrations. BIC Classification: 1QDAG; ACG; AGH. Category: (P) Professional & Vocational; (UP) Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly; (UU) Undergraduate. Dimension: 254 x 178 x 44. Weight in Grams: 1375. . 1994. Illustrated. Hardcover. . . . . Books ship from the US and Ireland. Seller Inventory # V9780520068513
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Faces of Power
Published by
University of California Press, 1994
ISBN 10: 0520068513
ISBN 13: 9780520068513
New
Hardcover
Seller: PBShop.store US, Wood Dale, IL, U.S.A.
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HRD. Condition: New. New Book. Shipped from UK. Established seller since 2000. Seller Inventory # WF-9780520068513
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Faces of Power
Published by
University of California Press, US, 1994
ISBN 10: 0520068513
ISBN 13: 9780520068513
New
Hardcover
Seller: Rarewaves USA, OSWEGO, IL, U.S.A.
Seller rating 5 out of 5 stars
Hardback. Condition: New. Alexander the Great changed the face of the ancient world. During his life and after his death, his image in works of art exerted an unprecedented influence-on marbles, bronzes, ivories, frescoes, mosaics, coins, medals, even painted pottery and reliefware. Alexander's physiognomy became the most famous in history. But can we really know what meaning lies behind these images? Andrew Stewart demonstrates that these portraits--wildly divergent in character, quality, type, provenance, date, and purpose--actually transmit not so much a likeness of Alexander as a set of carefully crafted cliches that mobilize the notion "Alexander" for diverse ends and diverse audiences. Stewart discusses the portraits as studies in power and his original interpretation of them gives unprecedented fullness and shape to the idea and image called "Alexander.". Seller Inventory # LU-9780520068513