Faces of Power: Alexander's Image and Hellenistic Politics (Hellenistic Culture & Society, Band 11) - Hardcover

Stewart, Andrew

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0520068513 ISBN 13: 9780520068513

Verlag: University of California Press, 1993

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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).

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"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

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"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

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Faces of Power: Alexander's Image and Hellenistic Politics

By Andrew F. Stewart

University of California Press

Copyright © 1994 Andrew F. Stewart
All 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...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of California Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 1993
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0520068513
• ISBN 13: 9780520068513
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 550
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