Did Alexander drag Batis behind his own chariot, or did he just order it done? How do you think everyone else felt about it? It seems brutal, even for the time?
How one answers this depends a bit on how one already sees Alexander (positive or negative). Those who, following Badian and Schachermeyer, have a negative view, take it as proof of Alexander’s cruelty. Those who see him more positively want to dismiss it, or at least justify it.
The fact this particular titbit comes only from Curtius Rufus (4.6.25-29) makes it easier to dismiss.
But we must approach it logically. First, if he did do it, what might have been his motivating factors? And if he didn’t do it, what motivating factors led Curtius to invent it?
Curtius notes that Alexander claims to imitate Achilles in the Iliad. Yet Achilles’s dragging of Hektor’s corpse was not portrayed in any way, shape, or form as an admirable action (Hom. Il. 22.395). The Iliad is about Achilles’s descent and redemption, and dragging the corpse was his absolute nadir. He desecrates the body of an honorable enemy. If his extreme grief and guilt are the cause, it’s not held up as a good thing. His admirable act, when he recalls his humanity, is in returning the body to Hektor’s father, adding gifts.
So it’s a rather strange thing for Alexander to emulate on purpose. Furthermore, Batis wasn’t guilty of killing Alexander’s best friend to justify that level of inhuman rage. What was Batis guilty of?
Obstinacy. I want to point out here that Romans hated obstinacy in the enemy. THEY could show pertinacia or obstinatio: constancy, perseverance, steadfastness, determination. But in the enemy, it was contumacia: disobediency, stubbornness—obstinacy. Unlike the other two, it doesn’t really have a positive translation. In fact, when Pliny the Younger explains his method of trying Christians, “obstinacy” (contumacia) is one of the things of which they’re found guilty (along with contempt of court and atheism).
That said, Curtius doesn’t portray Alexander as just in his reaction to Batis’s stubbornness. It’s more subtle, and more interesting.
Let’s underscore a couple things: Batis and the Persian garrison with Arabic mercenaries had refused to surrender, despite what Alexander had just done at Tyre. This enraged the king. These points, the sources agree on. He was just SO done, plus he’d suffered two somewhat serious wounds there. But curiously, Curtius gives Batis a little “aristeia” in the midst of his city’s final defeat. It’s a nice Homeric touch. What’s an aristeia? A description of individual heroic fighting. Batis’s is only a couple lines (4.6.25-26a), but note it’s given to the enemy.
Right after Batis’s aristeia, Curtius reminds the reader that Alexander usually respected bravery in the enemy (4.6.26). What appears to have sealed Batis’s fate here was his refusal to yield or speak when brought to Alexander, he “obstinately” stares at the king, straight-backed, and won’t yield, bow, or speak. And YES, “contumacia” is the word used: sed contumaci quoque vultu intuens regem nullam…
Yet, with that aristeia, the reader should sense a certain respect for Batis. What’s up with that?
Part of Curtius’s larger theme is Alexander’s corruption by Eastern orientalism, as well as the overall corruption brought by power. Curtius even says, after Batis’s contumacia…“Then his wrath changed to ‘madness’ (rabiem…from rabiēs, yes the root of the disease rabies), for even then his new fortune suggested foreign customs (perigrinos ritus).” (4.6.29)
In short, his “new fortune” will lead to his moral decline, and this is an early hint of his madness to come. Remember, just above, Curtius had noted that Alexander usually respected bravery but was now acting out of character, treating Batis with “insolent joy” (4.6.26). And here, just a few lines later, he slips in, as the reason, “foreign customs” as a result of great success.
I see what you did there, Curtius!
It gets even better. Back to the Homeric imitatio. Curtius says Alexander clamed imitation of Achilles, from whom his line came (via his mother, the Molossian royal house). But this implies Alexander has lost his moral compass (or is in the process of losing it) because he doesn’t see he’s emulating the wrong act. Yet Curtius’s readers would recognize as much.
So there’s some pretty complicated signaling going on. It’s elegant, really.
But could the bare bones of the event be true, even if Curtius dressed it up?
Sure. Consistently in the histories, Alexander has two chief faults: an excessive love of honor (philotimia) and desire for fame (kleos), as well as his terrible temper, made worse when in his cups or when he felt himself to be slighted (which circles back around to his philotimia). Batis insulted him by refusing to kow-tow…and Alexander blew his top, deciding to make an example of Batis, not unlike Thebes and Tyre, although aimed very specifically here.
So I think it’s quite possible he did do it, but not as an Homeric allusion. Alexander may have had a completely different reference in mind, assuming it wasn’t just “execution by dragging,” which was also a thing. (No, I’m not sharing as it’s the seed of a future article.) Btw, Curtius says only that Batis was tied by his ankles to the back of Alexander’s chariot, then the horses dragged him. Alexander wasn’t driving the chariot. (Another difference from Homer.)
There’s an unfortunate tendency to over-Homerize Alexander. He read widely. It wasn’t Kleitos quoting Homer that let Alexander to run him through; Kleitos quoted just a snippet of Euripides, who both Plutarch and Strabo tell us was his favorite playwright. Likewise, Alexander surely read Herodotos, Thucycides, Xenophon, Plato, Isokrates and probably a passel of other things we no longer know about.
So we shouldn’t just dismiss Curtius’s stories as automatically wrong because they’re hostile. As with the Branchidai incident (which is also horrible and which I also think happened, although it’s attested in more places than just Curtius), we must separate, insofar as we can, what Alexander thought he was doing from what Curtius says Alexander thought he was doing.
