Hi Dr. Reames, thanks so much for relaying all these fascinating analyses (I have to say, I find myself back on your blog multiple times a week just to check out more cool bits of information). I actually have two questions, but please feel free to only look at one! My first is, what was Alexander’s relationship with Parmenion initially? We know he was loyal to Philip, he served somewhat as an advisor to Alexander too, and then Alexander killed him because of the Philotas plot. I mean, he was a senior officer and had served the Macedonian court for so long—might Alexander and Parmenion have had a decent relationship at some point? And my second question is, how come absolutely nothing survives from the time of Alexander? Did his “successors” try to destroy things related to him (they did kill his son and his mother) so they could protect their own ambitions? I really appreciate your time, thanks for checking out my questions! Again, please feel free to just look at one and not the other :D
First, I’m glad people are actually reading these. LOL.
The biggest problem with discerning Alexander’s true relationship with Parmenion prior to the downfall of Philotas are the inserted “Alexander vs. Parmenion” conversations. You’ve heard them, if you think about it. “If I were Alexander,” Parmenion says, “I would …” “So would I,” Alexander replies, “if I were Parmenion.” Meant as a put down. Parmenion is repeatedly shown as overly cautious and a bit of a fuddy-duddy. It’s a deliberate motif, and most modern scholars recognize these as later insertions.
They seem to have several purposes: first, they showcase Alexander’s dashing bravery and brilliance as opposed to Parmenion’s plodding traditional approaches. Second, they backset conflict between the two. Third, they suggest Alexander didn’t really need Parmenion’s advice; he could have won all those battles by himself.
We suspect this is the work of Kallisthenes (the official court historian) before his own fall from grace. The Page’s Conspiracy happened after the Philotas Affair. Ergo, it appears in a number of the later histories. Some (esp. Badian) have suggested that Alexander was just looking for a way to get rid of Parmenion, and either seized on Philotas’s culpability, or even set up Philotas in order to get rid of Parmenion (Badian’s article on the Philotas Affair suggest Alexander was keeping some sort of FBI-style file on Parmenion and his family.) They’ve pointed out that he left him behind in Ekbatana when taking off to Baktria, but that was a damn important position! And Parmenion was c.70, by then. I suspect he was moving him towards administrative positions, out of active combat. Phiilotas’s stupidly forced his hand. Philotas was his last living son (Hektor had died in Egypt, Nikanor after Gaugamela). He couldn’t trust that Parmenion wouldn’t feel honor-bound to retaliate for his death (it was a matter of timē). And Parmenion was sitting on Alexander’s all-important supply lines; he could cut off the entire army and leave them to starve. (This, btw, doesn’t justify murder, but does explain it.)
After that, he almost had to inflict a hatchet-job on Parmenion’s reputation. Murdering Parmenion would look even worse if everyone could read how much he owed him.
If one takes those A vs. P conversations with a grain of salt and looks more widely, it’s clear that Alexander owed his kingship to Parmenion—and Parmenion was compensated (so to speak) by the high appointments of his sons, at least the elder two, and his other family members. Although Philotas was older than Alexander, he wasn’t a senior general, yet he got the plumb assignment of commander of the Companion Cavalry. His younger brother commanded the Hypaspists—the whole thing, not just the royal unit. Parmenion’s brother, Asander held high positions, as did another relative (another Nikanor) in the navy. The boys, at least, leapfrogged over older men who may have been more deserving. And Philotas seems to have flaunted his position and relations. We’re told in a couple places that, while his father was beloved, he was not. Certainly Krateros couldn’t stand him, although being an enemy of Krateros may not have required more than being in Krateros’s way. Ha. Krateros was kinda-sorta Parmenion’s understudy.
Alexander often took a good deal of Parmenion’s advice. For instance, there are actually TWO verions of the Battle of Granikos, and they’re almost mutually exclusive. One appears to be a rewrite for drama…and to get in a dig at Parmenion. It’s the better-known version, where the battle takes place in the afternoon, at the end of a long march, and is a cavalry-heavy battle because not all the infantry had arrived. It’s one of the first A vs. P exchanges, where Parmenion advises Alexander to wait for the rest of the army, then attack at night or at least in the morning. Alexander tells him he “won’t steal a march” and brashly attacks the Persians before they’re ready. And wins (after a significant loss of Companions).
The other version is more or less exactly what Parmenion advised: he waited till morning. It was still mostly a cavalry battle and much of what happened is similar…but he did what Parmenion suggested. Yet in that version, he looks less heroic…but more level-headed.
Guess which one is probably the true version. 😉
Philotas, btw, got himself in trouble for asserting that Alexander’s big wins weren’t really his, but Parmenion’s (and Philotas’s). Philotas may have been a blowhard, but at least part of that was true. Alexander consistently gave Parmenion the difficult but absolutely crucial positions at Issos and Gaugamela. He knew damn well that if Parmenion fell on the left, it didn’t matter what he did. That’s WHY he didn’t chase Darius either time, but especially at Gaugamela.
However difficult Philotas was, we’re told that Alexander was close to Hektor, the youngest of Parmenion’s sons. When Hektor died accidentally in Egypt, Alexander was heartbroken and threw him a huge funeral. Hektor is among the boys I had with Alexander at Mieza in the novels.
As for what Parmenion thought of Alexander, I expect he saw him as his best friend’s son, and therefore felt some responsibility for him, after Philip’s untimely death. Parmenion and Philip appear to have been real friends. Philip and Antipatros, not so much. Antipatros had been a friend to Philip’s older brother, Perdikkas, who apparently had a more philosophic turn of mind. And indeed, Antipatros and Aristotle later were fast friends. There’s a funny story of Philip and Parmenion playing draughts (and drinking), when Antipatros entered the room. Immediately Philip shoved the game board under his chair, like some naughty boy caught skivving off. It’s hysterical (the anecdote comes from either Plutarch’s Moralia or, more likely, Athenaeus’s Supper Party). Parmenion was older than Philip, but closer to him in age than Antipatros. Also, Antipatros and Parmenion didn’t really like each other. And there’s Philip’s famous quip that the Athenians should count themselves lucky if they could find 10 good generals every year (their custom of electing generals is what he’s referring to). In his time as king, he’d found only one. Parmenion. (It’s obviously a dig at Athens for poor generals; in Philip’s day they had only a couple decent ones, Phokion being the best.)
Anyway, given Parmenion’s closeness to Philip, I’ve always assumed that he would have backed the candidate Philip wanted on the throne, and that was Alexander. As I noted elsewhere, Philip’s last child was a girl, not a boy. So Attalos had no skin the game anymore. Ergo, even if Parmenion had married his own daughter to Attalos, when push came to shove, he shoved him under the bus (had him executed) when Alexander asked him to. I expect he didn’t do it for “free.” That’s why Philotas and Nikanor had their positions. He could always marry his daughter to someone else, and did: Koinos/Coenus, which is why Koinos was so eager to help “question” Philotas, his brother-in-law: to prove his loyalty to Alexander.
As for why we don’t still have the original histories of Alexader, written by contemporaries? Simple loss over time. I seem to recall reading stats somewhere that only a quarter to a third of (known) texts from antiquity have survived. No, I don’t remember where, but the percentage doesn’t surprise me. How do we know about missing texts? From “testamonia” in surviving ones, especially collections, or books like Diogenes Laertus which contains the lives of famous philosophers and their bibliography. D.L. is how we know Aristotle wrote 4 books of letters to ATG, 1 each to Hephaistion and Olympias, as well as letters to Antipatros.
Some quick terminology: “extant” means “still existing.” So an “extant” text is one we still have. A “testamonium” is mention of a text or author in another text. And a “fragmentum” is a quoted section from another text, or a paraphrasing. Keep in mind that while ancient memories were generally better than ours, fragmenta (when we can compare) often contain slight errors and rephrasings. The major collection of these in Greek was compiled by Felix Jacoby, Fragmente der griechischen Historiker, often referred to as FGrH or just “Jacoby.” The original 1923 version was just in Greek, but New Jacoby is translated, and now available as Jacoby Online!
Another super important source of information on ancient texts, people, and places unavailable elsewhere now is the Suda [Suidae Lexicon], a mid-Byzantine “encyclopedia” of the ancient Mediterranean world. It has LOADS of info otherwise unattested in our extant sources. Visit the Suda Online.
Anyway, back to our texts. Popularity is one reason certain texts make it. The fact we have FIVE different histories of Alexander (however varying in quality) is actually extraordinary, the most we have for any single individual from antiquity. And it’s not only popularity in antiquity, but popularity later. Plutarch was very popular in the medieval and Renaissance, so we have a lot of Plutarch surviving. More copies…more likely something will make it.
So no, what we lack isn’t from any concerted effort to erase a text. The Successors penned their own histories (buffing their own reputations and skewering their rivals), but they didn’t try to systematically get rid of other’s writings. To do so would have been very difficult, if not impossible. Most of the contemporary histories were still available down into the early Byzantine era and probably beyond. We just don’t have them now.
