#second sophistic

[jeannereames]

Hiii, I hope you're well.

As far as I understand, the idea/debate of whether Alexander and Hephaistion were lovers goes back centuries. As far as I know, it was the roman writer Klaudios Ailianos in 'Miscellaneous History' who first called them lovers.

But how did it come about? Did it come out of nowhere? Why exactly did some Roman writers consider this possibility, that they were lovers?

Alexander and Hephaistion in Roman-era Authors

We’re not actually sure who first (unambiguously) called them lovers. Aelian’s comment postdates one in Arrian’s writings on Epiktatos, which also claims it, not to mention the not-so-subtle hints in Arrian’s biography, where Hephaistion is compared to Patroklos (the only Alexander historian who makes that comparison, btw). Arrian was probably dead before Aelian was born. Similarly, Curtius implies it in his history, as well, although it may not be meant in a good way, there. Curtius is (probably) even earlier than Arrian.

We must remember that Alexander was an object lesson by the Roman era—mostly as a cautionary tale, but sometimes for good, too. That lent itself to oversimplifications. Seneca uses him to talk about uncontrollable rage with the murder of Kleitos, and excessive mourning with his reaction to Hephaistion’s death. He was also used to warn against overweening ambition and Too Much Drink. In short, all examples of “excess,” which was a big Roman no-no, and a Greek no-no, too. Sophrosunē (self-control) was much lauded; so also Latin disciplina. Plutarch presents the young Alexander as a shining example of sophrosunē, thanks to his Good Greek Paideia (education). But success spoilt him. While not a Roman, Plutarch lived under Roman rule and was part of the Second Sophistic—as was Lucian, who’s even more harsh towards Alexander. His “Dialogues of the Dead” includes one between Philip and Alexander where Alexander is presented as a pompous ass. There’s another dialogue just below, between him and Diogenes, which is more of the same. ATG comes out better in the dialogue with Hannibal and Scipio (and Minos).

But all that gives you some idea of how Alexander was used as (negative) exempla. Plutarch in his “On the Fortune or Virtue of Alexander” goes the other way and presents Alexander as Ubermensch. It was a standard piece of rhetoric from Plutarch’s youth, so shouldn’t be taken as his opinion on Alexander. He was showing off his speech-writing chops.

This is how Alexander was used by the imperial period and why certain anecdotes about him were repeated over and over. Hephaistion wasn’t remembered as Alexander’s chiliarch and right-hand guy, but as Alexander’s beloved friend and alter-ego: Alexander too. The story of Hephaistion and Alexander before the Persian women was quite popular, popping up again and again, sometimes to show Alexander’s generosity but sometimes to show the vicissitudes of fate (Oh, how the mighty have fallen). The nature of such anecdotes is their very malleableness. They can be used and reused to make several different points.

Hephaistion wasn’t unique. All the bit-players around Alexander came to symbolize something for stock usage. And the move from dear friend to lover isn’t a big one, in the game of ancient rhetorical telephone. 😉

It may also reflect reality. But that entails determining whether it’s the removal of prior coy language, or exaggeration for rhetorical purposes. That’s not at all straightforward.

Greeks were somewhat reticent on certain matters, and “Friend” could have romantic overtones in the right context. It’s the problem of “When is a cigar just a cigar?” Ha. In this case, when they met would have a lot to do with it. Were they indeed friends from their youth (as Curtius claims)—or only later, once Alexander was already in Asia (as Hephaistion is never mentioned in our sources about Alexander’s youth)? That’s why Sabine Müller thinks they didn’t meet until Alexander was an adult, and Hephaistion came from Athens, wasn’t just of Athenian descent. They would have met too late to be lovers, although Hephaistion was still very dear to Alexander and a perfectly capable commander (on that, we agree). By contrast, I do think they met as boys, and were lovers, and that attachment persisted into their adulthood (although perhaps not the physical affair). And that comes down to which sources we trust, and why: the historiography.

[lionofchaeronea]

Portrait bust (Pentelic marble) of the sophist and orator M. Antonius Polemon from Laodicea in Syria, teacher of Herodes Atticus. At the behest of the Emperor Hadrian, Polemon gave the dedicatory speech at the opening of Athens' Olympieion (Temple of Olympian Zeus) in 131 CE; this sculpture, by an unknown artist, dates to ca. 140 CE and was found at the Olympieion. Now in the National Archaeological Museum, Athens. Photo credit: Zde/Wikimedia Commons.

[jeannereames]

Do you think we lost useful / important information along with the account / biography Ptolemy Soter wrote of Alexander? Could you talk a bit about this book?

If I recall correctly (and I can be very wrong in this) Arrian used Ptolemy’s book as one of his main primary sources. Did any bits of it survive that are useful to modern historians?

Ptolemy Soter's History of Alexander

@akriticsongs, first, yes, Arrian used Ptolemy, along with Arisobulos, as his two chief sources for his own history. These weren’t all he used, and he certainly editorialized on them, giving his own opinions throughout. We shouldn’t take his history as a “cut-and-paste” version of theirs. That makes getting back to theirs a bit of a struggle.

One reason Arrian gives for using Ptolemy is that he was a king, and it wouldn’t do for a king to lie.

That assessment may make modern historians crack up laughing—as it should. But we must also recognize that Arrian isn’t simply being obtuse; his history was written to flatter his patron—the Emperor Hadrian. A king. Not just a king, but a king with a noted fondness for Greek culture and Greek philosophy—the first emperor to wear a beard after Greek fashion.

Was Arrian being serious about his claim? Well…probably not, although he also wasn’t playing the same sort of inside-out “I’m going to compliment you in order to insult you” games Virgil played with Augustus in his The Aeneid. Nonetheless, and whatever he says, I doubt he took Ptolemy’s history entirely uncritically.

I am not an expert on Arrian. There have been a couple of really good assessments of Arrian as an historian published recently: V. Liotsakis’s Alexander the Great in Arrian’s Anabasis (2019) and D. W. Leon’s Arrian the Historian: Writing the Greek Past in the Roman Empire (2021). The links go to their Bryn Mawr reviews. The former is more inclined to analysis of passages while the latter casta a wider net to place Arrian in context as a historian. I like both, as they do different things.

Getting back to Ptolemy’s original, Tim Howe speculated that Ptolemy was influenced by Egyptian and Ancient Near Eastern tradition in the book we coedited, Macedonian Legacies (2009), “Alexander in India: Ptolemy as Near Eastern Historiographer.” And more recently, he edited an entire collection, Ptolemy I Soter: a Self-Made Man (ed., Tim Howe, 2018).

It’s too bad we don’t still have Ptolemy’s original history, for two reasons. It would be the only surviving contemporary account, and it could illustrate how later Roman-era historians parsed and refitted earlier histories to their own takes.

My personal first choice of Hellenistic-era writings I’d like to see recovered would be Marsyas’s works on ancient Macedonia (and Alexander). But after that would be Ptolemy’s history. Both would provide us with pre-Roman views of Macedon and Alexander. We don’t have that. The first Macedonian writing about Alexander (et al.) that survives (Strategemata) is late imperial military historian Polyaenus, who wrote a little after Arrian (during the reign of Marcus Aurelius, not Hadrian). There are recent debates as to whether he’s really Macedonian, but even if he was, c. 500 years separated him from his country’s most famous son. And if he calls himself a Macedonian, he was born and raised in Bithynia, and later lived in Rome, so how “Macedonian” he was would be a good question to ask. Like a lot of writers of or influenced by the Second Sophistic, he engaged in a fair bit of Hellenic beautification.

So the upshot is: yes, having Ptolemy’s history would be extremely useful, but even if we did, it would bring a different freight to problems to navigate. It might, however, help us to better assess the later Roman-era historians we do have.

[jeannereames]

Dr. Reames, hello! It's great to be able to ask you things here, and thank you very much for taking the time to answer them. I was reading Ian Worthington's By the Spear, which inspires this ask.

Alexander the Great is one of those historical figures who have cemented themselves in general culture. Almost everyone knows who he was. My question, however, is about his father, king Philip II. I understand that historiography has privileged Alexander for a long time. But it seems like another current is re-evaluating the reign of Philip II in comparison to his son's, to reach the conclusion that Philip II was in fact the greatest ruler among them.

The argument goes (or implies, or presuposes) that it was Philip II's military prowess and accomplishments that built the Kingdom of Macedonia to a position where the conquest of the Persian Empire was made possible. If not for Philip II's work on the hegemony of Greece, and creating a strong, centralized Macedonian State, Alexander wouldn't have had the necessary conditions for the invasion of Asia.

And the argument goes on to say that while Philip II left a stronger than ever Macedonia, Alexander's reign brought just as much chaos as it brought glory: the Argead Dynasty would soon be extinct, and the realm divided between the diadochi.

First, would you say Philip II's history was overshadowed by Alexander's, and did that affect the historiography of his reign? Second, do you think this view of Philip II's reign (if it new new at all) is warranted, and Alexander's conquests depended on his father's previous success?

“The Greatest of the Kings of Europe”: Philip of Macedon

I open with that assessment from Diodoros (16.95.1). I should note that he named Philip that because Alexander, of course, called himself “King of Asia.”

The debate as to whether father or son was greater isn’t new. It raged in antiquity, too. As part of the philhellenic project of the Second Sophistic, Plutarch styled Alexander as a great conqueror and bringer of (Greek) civilization, due to his superior (Greek) culture and paideia. Philip (and later Darius) function as Alexander’s barbarian foils. Plutarch resurrects standard 4th-century rhetoric that posited Philip’s success as due to luck, not skill, strategy, or virtue. Arrian, who also wrote during the Second Sophistic but is not counted specifically among those rhetoricians, is not so blunt-knuckled about it, but he certainly highlights Alexander’s Greek virtues.

In contrast, Lucian—who, interestingly, is also a member of the Second Sophistic—preferences Philip, which he makes abundantly clear in Dialogues of the Dead: Philip vs. Alexander (12), then Demosthenes vs. Alexander (13). In both, he mocks Alexander’s claim of divinity, even though his dead-Alexander admits it was all a political ruse. Curtius Rufus also has issues with Alexander, and Justin didn’t like either Alexander or his father. For his detractors, Alexander’s success is also attributed to luck (Tychē/Fortuna), not skill or virtue—a theme that resurrects itself in a number of modern assessments.

I think the tendency to pit father and son against each other in modern scholarship merely reflects the ancient tendency, as well as, perhaps, the human desire for zero-sum competition.

Instead, we should look at how later Macedonian monarchs built on the successes of previous kings, or sometimes failed to live up to them. This is the approach I take when teaching either my undergrad ATG and the Macedonian Origin class, or my Argead grad seminar. Was there never any interfamilial competition? Well, looking at how Argeads tended to murder each other, of course there was. But that was between living relatives. If we consider Alexander’s own career, he seemed to be in competition with Herakles or Dionysos, as much as with Philip. That suggests “competition” was (like copycatting) a form of flattery.

So yes, Alexander wouldn’t have been half as great if his father hadn’t handed him a trained and seasoned army with unique and highly effective tactics—plus a (mostly) unified Greece in his rear. But Philip wouldn’t have had space to experiment with those new tactics had his brother Perdikkas III not made him archon of a Macedonian canton. Nor would he have had a place to start updating the army if both Archelaos and earlier, Alexandros I, had not begun to implement Greek hoplite divisions, the use of cavalry, as well as improved military infrastructure such as new roads, forts, etc. Not to mention Alexandros I used the Persian invasion to expand Macedon’s borders and absorb what would come to constitute “Lower Macedonia.”

Even Amyntas, Philip and Perdikkas’ father, while arguably a weak king, had managed to right the ship and stay in power for an extended period after the chaos following the murder of Archelaos. He (and Eurydike) raised three boys who didn’t try to murder each other when their father died (although Philip, at least, had to eliminate half-brothers).

Each king’s successes from at least Alexandros I forward (c. 497?-450? BCE)* led to the improvement of the Macedonian kingdom, with the exception of turmoil between Archelaos and Amyntas III.

If nobody (except perhaps Alexandros I) could be placed on a par with either Philip II or Alexander III, those two wouldn’t have amounted to much if not for earlier Argead kings. And whatever Philip handed to Alexander, Alexander had to know how to use it—and improve on it. Many a talented father has left everything to a son who failed to secure his father’s legacy.

Did Alexander’s extraordinary success suppress his father’s memory? Yes, undoubtably. See the little infographic below to get a sense of just what Philip managed:

But again, I think we must resist arguing that Philip was really the greater of the two, as a form of reactionism.** A reminder of what Alexander managed:

Although his conquests are ALSO overblown, so a reminder in a larger, more global context:

What I see here is a RARE case where a wildly successful father managed to raise an even more wildly successful son, at least by ancient criteria. I think it's fair to ask whether conquest should be regarded as "success," but that's a discussion for another post. In ancient terms, yes, Alexander was extraordinary.

In history, that sort of back-to-back success just doesn’t happen much. I’d like to give them both due credit, as well as recognize that both built on the work of kings before them. Neither Alexander nor Philip sprang, fully armed, from the head of Zeus. Sitting back there in the shadows are Alexandros I, Perdikkas II, and Archelaos.

And, by the way, I dare say the shade of Philip was very proud of his son.

——————-

*Whatever you may read on the Internets, we have neither a secure accession nor death date for Alexandros I. He was king by 497 BCE, before the first Greco-Persian War, and dead by 450. It’s really the best we can say.

** Richard Gabriel, Philip II of Macedonia: Greater than Alexander (Washington DC, 2010). Which is actually a rather good book in terms of showcasing Philip’s accomplishments, but feels overly strident at times in an attempt to elevate Philip over Alexander.

[brainrotarchive]

it’s my last day of working on this long ass essay that has been testing my nerves for weeks and my brain has somehow babygirlified a man that died almost 2 thousand years ago. like he couldn’t stay in his hometown because there was so much more out there in the world for him and he went to greece and worked his whole life to become a greek philosopher and everything he ever wanted was to be seen and accepted. he sacrificed every part of himself to be greek just for that conservative ass fucker polemon to call him a disgusting and too feminine and pure evil just because he was born without testicles. And then he’s exiled and realises that there is no fatherland and that they are all immigrants somehow and all this trouble would’ve never happened if they just were kind to each other.I know he’s a government sell out and only cares about himself but I’m sure inside the icon there’s still a small boy from Arles.

[peach-blossom-spring]

Someone write me a Second Sophistic parody of taylorswift‘s “New Romantics”, this is as far as I got:

Baby, it's the Second Sophistic Come on, come along with me Feeling philhellenistic Declaim it proudly We're all so busy penning Bombastic lines to speak Baby, it's the Second Sophistic The whole frickin’ empire's gone Greek

[rdsathene]

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