In the opinion of Cassius Dio, Septimius Severus' capture of Nisibis and annexation of the province of Mesopotamia were not among the emperor's more worthwhile ventures.Footnote 1 The costs were great and the yields slight. Our knowledge of the campaign is sketchy, although we do have a narrative outline supplied by Dio's eleventh-century epitomator, John Xiphilinus.Footnote 2 Xiphilinus preserves the following anecdote, which takes place after Severus and his army had crossed the Euphrates and were starting to feel the effects of thirst and heat. The epitomator says:
κεκμηκόσι γὰρ αὐτοῖς ἐκ τῆς πορείας καὶ τοῦ ἡλίου καὶ κονιορτὸς ἐμπίπτων ἰσχυρῶς ἐλύπησεν, ὥστε μήτε βαδίζειν μήτε λαλεῖν ἔτι δύνασθαι, τοῦτο δὲ μόνον ϕθέγγεσθαι, ‘ὕδωρ ὕδωρ’. ἐπεὶ δὲ ἀνεϕάνη μὲν ἰκμάς, ἐξ ἴσου δὲ τῷ μὴ εὑρεθέντι ἀρχὴν ὑπὸ ἀτοπίας ἦν, ὁ Σεουῆρος κύλικά τε ᾔτησε καὶ τοῦ ὕδατος πληρώσας ἁπάντων ὁρώντων ἐξέπιε.
(Dio Cass. 75[75].2.2 [Xiph.])For when they were already wearied by their march and the hot sun, they encountered a dust-storm that caused them great distress, so that they could no longer march or even talk, but only cry, ‘Water, Water’. And when some little vapour did appear, on account of its strangeness it meant no more to them than if it had not been found at all, until Severus called for a cup, and filling it with the water, drank it in full view of all.
The story, with perhaps one significant difference (which we shall discuss below), is a riff on an anecdote told by Arrian, Curtius Rufus, and other authors about Alexander the Great.Footnote 3 As with other episodes in the Alexander tradition, it was something of a ‘floating’ anecdote and appeared in different contexts in different accounts of Alexander's campaigns.Footnote 4 But, for the purposes of this article, the story of Severus and his thirsty soldiers is illustrative of Dio's allusive employment of what may be termed the ‘Alexander-motif’.
As we shall explore in this article, the figure of Alexander looms large in Dio's imperial narrative. There are twenty-five direct references to Alexander the Great in the surviving portions of Dio's history.Footnote 5 The number is surprisingly high, especially for a historian not writing about Alexander. For comparison, Tacitus has four, Ammianus fifteen, and the pseudonymous author of the Historia Augusta nineteen references, of which fourteen are in the Life of Severus Alexander. Only Appian has more, yet the bulk of these fall in his Syrian Wars. If we exclude the Syrian Wars and the Caesar–Alexander comparison in the second book of the Civil Wars, there are fifteen.Footnote 6
The question of how should we approach these references and allusions is one worth asking. The recent studies of Brian Bosworth, Cynthia Damon, David Levene, and Chris Pelling (among others) have suggested nuanced ways in which such historical as well as literary allusions functioned within historical narratives.Footnote 7 Rather than seeing the identification of the parallel or allusion as an end in itself, we should perhaps regard these as points of departure from which the reader is invited to perform further acts of interpretation. Using these ideas as a starting point, I shall address the possible ways in which the Alexander-motif functions in Dio's Roman History. As such, my focus is primarily historiographical rather than historical. In other words, I shall not be exploring whether or not certain Late Republican generals or Roman emperors actually attempted to fashion themselves after Alexander.Footnote 8 Instead, my focus is on instances where Dio places historical figures in situations which function so as to recall the life or history of Alexander, how these fit into Dio's authorial agenda, and, furthermore, what these tell us about Dio's own compositional techniques and his historical vision. As we shall see, Dio's use of the Alexander-motif across the imperial narrative represents a distinct and sophisticated narrative strategy, which reveals something not only about Dio as an author but also about the reception of Alexander in the early third century ad.
I. Contemporary contexts and pseudo-Alexanders
Dio's contemporary narrative provides an appropriate starting point for this inquiry. It is in his treatment of Caracalla that we get the clearest and most sustained treatment of the Alexander-motif in his history. To appreciate the extent of what Dio is doing, it is worth noting how this aspect of Caracalla is treated in the other historical accounts. The Latin tradition is relatively threadbare; the Life of Antoninus in the Historia Augusta has only one significant passage.Footnote 9 In Herodian's History, Caracalla's enthusiasm for Alexander is mentioned, and may derive in part from Herodian's familiarity with Dio's narrative, but it is not developed to the same extent as it is in Dio.Footnote 10 Why was this so?
There was certainly a historical basis to Dio's decision. It was presumably the image of Alexander as a military victor that the historical Caracalla had sought to emulate and mimic. The formation of the Macedonian phalanx and the emperor's collection of relics, such as Alexander's sword, were all ostentatious displays of his imitation and idolization of Alexander.Footnote 11 Even Caracalla's actions were self-consciously framed in the context of the Alexander tradition: as noted by Millar and others, his crossing of the Hellespont and decision to visit Ilium at the outset of his eastern peregrinations are described in terms that recall the visit of Alexander at the start of his great campaign.Footnote 12
Our three main authorities provide differing but complementary accounts of this moment. If we look at Dio's narrative alone, we get the following description:
καὶ τὸν Ἑλλήσποντον οὐκ ἀκινδύνως διαβαλὼν τόν τε Ἀχιλλέα καὶ ἐναγίσμασι καὶ περιδρομαῖς ἐνοπλίοις καὶ ἑαυτοῦ καὶ τῶν στρατιωτῶν ἐτίμησε, καὶ ἐπὶ τούτῳ ἐκείνοις τε, ὡς καὶ μέγα τι κατωρθωκόσι καὶ τὸ Ἴλιον ὡς ἀληθῶς αὐτὸ τὸ ἀρχαῖον ᾑρηκόσι, χρήματα ἔδωκε, καὶ αὐτὸν τὸν Ἀχιλλέα χαλκοῦν ἔστησεν.
(Dio Cass. 78[77]16.7 [EVV])Footnote 13After crossing the Hellespont, not without danger, he honoured Achilles with sacrifices and with races in armour about his tomb, in which he as well as the soldiers took part; and in honour of this occasion he gave them money, just as if they had gained some great success and had in truth captured the very Troy of old, and he set up a bronze statue of Achilles himself.
Dio, whose account of these activities is the fullest we have, does not make the comparison with Alexander explicit. He did not need to. By Dio's day, the city of Ilium was famous not only for its association with the Trojan war but also for its association with Alexander, where a local cult to Alexander is attested epigraphically.Footnote 14 Indeed, it is this double association that Dio seems to be playing with: Caracalla was no Alexander, nor yet Achilles.
It is worth noting how, in the hands of a sympathetic historian, these stories could have been presented in a radically different fashion – just as the stories of Alexander's visit to Ilium were interpreted in the tradition as examples of Alexander's heroic ideals and piety. But for Dio, whose agenda was to denigrate systematically and absolutely the reputation of the scion of Severus and Domna, these acts of piety are turned into acts of folly.Footnote 15 For our historian, the meagre deeds of Caracalla and his soldiers were unworthy of the memory of Achilles, whom Caracalla sought to honour, just as, by implication, they were unworthy of the memory of Alexander, whose actions Caracalla had sought to emulate.Footnote 16 The episode encapsulated for Dio exactly the sort of play-acting that characterized Caracalla's regime.Footnote 17
Play-acting as Alexander is a recurring motif in the Severan books, not just in the reign of Caracalla. Let us turn back to the example of Severus and his thirsty soldiers with which we began. As we have seen, the story parallels that told in Arrian's Anabasis and elsewhere. In Arrian's version, Alexander reveals his exemplary generalship and endurance by emptying the helmet filled with water onto the ground ‘in view of everybody’ (ἐν ὄψει πάντων ἐκχέαι). In Dio/Xiphilinus' version, Severus drank (ἐξέπιε) the water instead of pouring it out on the ground. This reading seems to be endorsed by the following line, when Xiphilinus adds, ‘and then after acting in this way, some others also drank and were refreshed’ (καὶ τότε μὲν οὕτω καὶ ἄλλοι τινὲς προσπιόντες ἀνερρώσθησαν; 75[75].2.3). If the transmitted text is an accurate reproduction of Dio's original, then the force of the anecdote is disappointingly flat. It may be that Dio is simply playing with the expectations of his readers, who, by the evocative set-up, expect the emperor to perform some exemplary action as Alexander had. Instead, we have an emperor who acted in a manner which was at best unexceptional, at worst selfish.
The apparent failure to match Alexander is a theme present from the start of Dio's contemporary narrative. According to him, Pescennius Niger, one of the pretenders of ad 193, became ‘exceedingly conceited’ (μᾶλλον ὠγκώθη) when his troops in Syria hailed him as a new Alexander.Footnote 18 The historicity of the claim need not bother us here. What matters is the ludicrousness of this suggestion in the context of Dio's narrative. Dio had characterized Niger as a nonentity, conspicuous for neither good nor bad qualities.Footnote 19 Here was a man who manifestly lacked the characteristics desirable in a new emperor, let alone a new Alexander. The parallel with the Macedonian did not stop there. The sluggish Niger was defeated near Issus, the site of Alexander's first great victory against Darius; the irony would not have been lost on Dio, nor on any of his attentive readers.Footnote 20 It was Niger's fate to play Darius, not Alexander.
Thus we see in these three examples from Dio's contemporary history the Alexander-motif employed as a means of criticizing rather than supporting the military and personal aspirations of the post-Antonine dynasts. Whether this pattern or similar patterns appear in Dio's earlier imperial narrative is a question to which we now turn.
II. The Alexander-motif and historical ‘parallelism’
By the time that Dio came to write his history, the exemplary status of Alexander was well established in Greco-Roman literature and rhetoric. Indeed, a third-century rhetorical handbook explicitly regarded Alexander as being a standard point of comparison to be used in any kingship speech.Footnote 21 The cultural phenomena of imitatio, aemulatio, and comparatio Alexandri in Roman art and letters are topics which have received sustained attention over the past fifty years.Footnote 22 On the surface, the great world-conqueror was an appropriate model for the politically alert representatives of an ambitious ruling caste, who subscribed to the notion of ‘empire without end’ (imperium sine fine).Footnote 23 But the exemplary status of Alexander was not straightforward. That the career and person of Alexander came to represent positive as well as negative models of kingship has been recognized by successive studies.Footnote 24
It is telling that all but two of the references to Alexander in Dio's history occur in the context of Caesarian and Imperial narratives.Footnote 25 The first of these falls in Book 37. The story tells of how Julius Caesar came upon a statue of Alexander in a temple to Heracles in Cádiz and lamented the fact that he had not yet achieved any great deeds.Footnote 26 In Dio's narrative, as in those of Suetonius and Plutarch, the story is illustrative of Caesar's ambition or philotimia (ϕιλοτιμία), a key concept to which we will return later. At this stage it is sufficient to note how Dio frames the story, presenting Alexander as a figure whom Caesar desired to emulate, a model for Caesar and perhaps, by extension, for the Caesars. It might well be that it was for this reason that Dio does not invoke the Alexander-motif in what survives of his account of Pompey, a man who did actively strive to imitate and emulate the deeds of Alexander.Footnote 27
The reign of Augustus provides more examples of both the explicit and the allusive deployment of the Alexander-motif. In the Tiberian funeral oration for Augustus in Book 56, Tiberius makes a point of stating that he will not be comparing the deeds of Augustus and Alexander; of course, by doing so he actually invites such a comparison.Footnote 28 After all, such a comparison is not unexpected. References and allusions to Alexander punctuate Dio's Augustan narrative. Right from the start, among the various omina imperii (omens of power) listed at the beginning of Book 45, we may find connections between the two rulers. Dio reports the story that Octavian's mother, Attia, believed that her son was the offspring of Apollo, having been impregnated by a snake while she slept in a temple of Apollo.Footnote 29 The story seems to be a variation on a common folkloric topos, for almost identical stories are told of Scipio Africanus and Seleucus Nicator; nevertheless, the connection with Olympias and Alexander is patent.Footnote 30 There are other more explicit parallels that tie Alexander to Augustus: for example, Dio tells us that, following the defeat of Antony and Cleopatra, Octavian desired to visit the tomb of Alexander, a man deemed by Octavian to be the only true (Macedonian) king of Egypt.Footnote 31
In a different and certainly more allusive vein we have Dio's set-piece treatment of Augustus' near fatal illness in 23 bc. As observed by John Rich, Dio has the scene play out almost exactly as Alexander's death-scene in the vulgate tradition of Alexander's life, the only difference being that Augustus does not die.Footnote 32 In the story, Augustus gives his signet ring to Agrippa, just as Alexander gave his ring to Perdiccas as described in Diodorus, Justin, Curtius, and the Metz Epitome.Footnote 33 Yet why Dio should choose to frame the story in such a way is not easily explained.
We can take the story in two ways. The first is to acknowledge the parallel and leave it at that. The allusive game played by Dio and his readers may be nothing more than that of spotting the parallel. Indeed, this seems to be the objective of the author of the so-called Parallela Minora found among the Moralia of Plutarch. In that work, similar stories are paired so as to render unbelievable stories of the past more believable by presenting a more recent parallel.Footnote 34 The tacit assumption behind such stories is that history is repetitive: that human nature determines that people will continue to act in similar ways when placed in similar situations.
The second way, not necessarily exclusive of the former, is to take the allusion further and to use it as the mental starting point for a more detailed comparison. Had Augustus died without leaving a clear indication of his successor, then what might the allusion reveal about the fate of the Roman state? The parallel with Alexander would suggest the commencement of a struggle for imperial power resulting in the fragmentation of the empire. Dio's offhand comments at 40.14 reveal that he was well aware of the factionalism between the diadochi which tore apart Alexander's empire. Thus, as a counterfactual, Dio's treatment of Augustus' near-death experience is not only provocative for the parallel with Alexander, but may be regarded as being based on a sound reading of the political conditions in Rome in the late 20s bc.Footnote 35
III. Thinking with Alexander (and Dio)
Before we can come to any firm conclusion on how we should read these stories, we should ask what Dio actually knew of Alexander and his career. Certainly we may assume from the various parallels already described that he knew some of the more famous anecdotes concerning Alexander. Such tales were undoubtedly circulated in both the literary and rhetorical traditions of the Hellenistic and Roman periods. Dio, for example, knew of the story of Aristotle's complicity in Alexander's death.Footnote 36 However, there are some clues in the text which suggest that the historian's knowledge and interest in Alexander was more substantial. Dio ties two geographical comments to the history of the Macedonian king's campaigns. In Book 40, he notes that the town of Zeugma on the Euphrates got its name from being the point at which Alexander had crossed the river.Footnote 37 Later, in Book 68, he links the district of the Adiabene (and the city of Arbela) with the site of Alexander's final battle against Darius.Footnote 38
Such explicit geographical references have added significance beyond conscious expressions of the historian's recherché knowledge. In the case of the former, the reference appears in the context of Dio's description of the various portents concerning Crassus' ill-fated venture of 54–53 bc.Footnote 39 In the case of the latter, the connection with the site of Alexander's battle seems even more superfluous than the reference to Zeugma, as no battle was actually fought on that particular site by Trajan. What the reference does do, however, is draw out an extended comparison between Trajan's campaigns and those of Alexander. The fact that no decisive battle was fought at Gaugamela/Arbela by Trajan serves as a subtle critique on the efficacy of his campaign. Indeed, the territory was soon lost.Footnote 40
A more significant, and perhaps enlightening, question would be to ask how Dio might have regarded the figure and reputation of Alexander. The son of Philip was the embodiment of the military monarch – the conquering hero par excellence. But we may question how positively Dio, a senator who was notably cool on imperial adventures beyond the establish boundaries of the Empire, regarded this aspect of the Alexander myth.Footnote 41 As we saw in the example quoted at the beginning, Severus' annexation of Mesopotamia was condemned as a costly folly – a view which would be justified by later events which saw the province change hands between the Romans and the Sassanians repeatedly throughout the course of the third century.Footnote 42
In a more abstract sense, Alexander was regarded as a model for philotimia – love of honour, or ambition.Footnote 43 While such an impulse might lead an individual to the ends of the earth, it was also something that was commonly regarded as being highly problematic, as it is certainly in Dio's narrative.Footnote 44 It was philotimia that drove Caesar and Pompey to civil war, just as it drove Trajan to an ill-fated expedition against the Parthians.
It has been suggested elsewhere that Alexander was ‘the stick by which “conquered Greece” could unsettle her Roman overlords'.Footnote 45 Whatever the value of such an assessment when considering Imperial Greek authors in general, it seems jarring when we apply it to our consular historian. Clearly, a more nuanced view is required. The point for Dio seems to be not so much that the emperors of his own day and those from the past failed to emulate or surpass Alexander's own achievements, but that they chose to emulate the wrong sorts of achievements. Alexander was famed as much for his humanity (ϕιλανθρωπία), his self-control (ἐγκράτεια), and his soundness of mind (σωϕροσύνη) as he was for his military prowess. It was these ‘soft’ virtues that Plutarch extolled in his treatise On the Fortune or Virtue of Alexander as being the virtues demonstrated most readily during his military campaigns.Footnote 46 Diodorus also believed that Alexander's benevolent treatment of Darius' kinswomen, and especially Darius' mother, Sisyngambris, was his greatest achievement.Footnote 47 Similarly, Cornelius Tacitus, in his comparison of Alexander and Germanicus in the second book of the Annals, singles out these qualities, in which Germanicus apparently excelled his exemplar.Footnote 48 Dio Chrysostom, too, in the second and fourth of his so-called Kingship Orations delivered to Trajan, chose to emphasize these non-martial qualities over the martial ones.Footnote 49
Dio himself endorsed such pacific characteristics in an emperor. His ideal was closer to the civilis princeps than the princeps invictus. If the speech of Hadrian in Book 69, the Livia–Augustus dialogue in Book 55, or even the speech of Marcus Aurelius in Book 72 are anything to go by, it was a mild, peaceable emperor, who exercised clemency as a matter of policy, whom Dio most favoured.Footnote 50 We may assume that, if there were a version of the Alexander story that Dio endorsed, it would have been the story of him sparing the conquered Indian king Porus, or the kinswomen of Darius – not the Alexander who demanded personal worship, or the one who slew Cleitus (son of Dropides) in a drunken, black rage.
Conclusions
The final portent recorded in Dio's history is the appearance of a spirit (δαίμων) resembling Alexander the Great who supposedly passed through Thrace before crossing the Hellespont into Asia Minor.Footnote 51 The meaning of the story is obscure. But in a way it is appropriate that a phantasmagorical Alexander should effectively close Dio's Roman History. As I have argued, Alexander the Great is a constant, if often spectral, presence in Dio's imperial narrative.
How should we account for these references? Certainly some of them would have already been in place in Dio's sources. The Caesar–Alexander pairing had been long established in the literary/historiographical tradition and is found in Lucan, Plutarch, and Appian.Footnote 52 We may go further and (speculatively) ascribe the appearances of the Alexander-motif in Dio's Trajan narrative to Arrian's lost Parthica.Footnote 53 But such forays into Quellenforschung soon turn into interpretative dead ends; what is important is that Dio chose to retain these allusions and weave them into his history. Given the frequency and consistency of the references to Alexander across his whole imperial narrative, we may assume that the employment of the Alexander-motif was a conscious authorial strategy employed by our historian.
In sum, the figure of Alexander provided Dio with a convenient yet potent cultural reference point which he employed to augment or nuance his characterization of individuals within his narrative, or to provoke thought or criticism about their actions, thus feeding into his broader evaluative agenda. The multi-faceted reputation of the Macedonian conqueror provided an appropriate exemplum for a range of themes in imperial history: from succession (Augustus), through ambition (Caesar), and imperial expansion (Trajan), to misguided emulation (Caracalla, Pescennius Niger). Dio's handling of the Alexander-motif can be clumsy at times, but it is often subtle and, as I hope to have demonstrated, frequently provocative.
