The death of Brian Bosworth in December 2014 marked the end of an era in Alexander studies, since no scholar has done more to define the study of the conqueror in our generation. The papers collected in this volume are based on a conference held in 2007 to mark his retirement; expanded by additional contributions, the book was to be a late 70th birthday present, but has turned out to be a memorial. It is a worthy one, not only to his work but to his influence on the many distinguished scholars now working on Alexander and the Diadochi.
The cover is adorned by a beautiful image of the ‘Gypsy girl’ from Zeugma, perhaps symbolising the border between east and west that Alexander did so much to make more permeable. One of the ways forward for Alexander scholarship is going to be the increased deployment of material from eastern sources, as is shown in a masterly technical article by W., which perhaps of all the contributions most breathes the spirit of Bosworth (‘Diadoch Chronology after Philip Arrhidaeus’).
Some overarching themes emerge. Several articles focus on the use of different kinds of sources. Besides W.'s use of the Babylonian Chronicle, Aramaean ostraca and the coinage of Sidon, D. Ogden, ‘Nectanebo's Seduction of Olympias and the Benign Anguiform Deities of the Ancient Greek World’, shows how the iconography of the cult of Hygieia may have influenced the presentation of the Nectanebo episode in the Alexander Romance, while K. Sheedy and B. Ockinga, ‘The Crowned Ram's Head on Coins of Alexander the Great and the Rule of Ptolemy as Satrap of Egypt’, provide a model of the deployment of numismatic evidence for historical purposes.
More than one paper raises the intractable issue of the sources for Alexander. J. Maitland, in a lucid discussion of Alexander's imitations of Achilles, ‘ΜΗΝΙΝ ΑΕΙΔΕ ΘΕΑ: Alexander the Great and the Anger of Achilles’, considers who was the vulgate source for these stories, and plumps for Hegesias, demonstrating the principle that the less we know about an author the easier it is to make him the solution. W. Heckel, ‘Alexander, Achilles, and Heracles’, also considers Alexander's relation to Heracles, rating the latter as more significant than Achilles because of the dynastic importance of the hero-god and warning that ‘the greatest impediment to the study of ancient history, and especially of ancient historical individuals, is preconception’. Another lesson of the master. L. O'Sullivan, too, ‘Callisthenes and Alexander the Invincible God’, persuasively explores Alexander's connections with Heracles (not least in his squabble with the Pythia) and makes some interesting characterisations of another joker in the historical pack, Callisthenes: for her, Callisthenes insisted on Alexander's status as a hero not a god.
Some of the most substantial articles focus on politics at home in Macedonia, and on individuals associated with Alexander. I. Worthington, in what may become a classic study, ‘Alexander and the Exiles Decree’, finds the reason for the decree in the need to stabilise the eastern part of the empire and reduce the number of mercenaries ‘running amok’ in Asia and elsewhere: Alexander is building an army that will not even want to go ‘home’ to Greece and will be more ready to follow him to the ends of the earth. N. Ashton's study, ‘Craterus Revisited’, which may likewise become a first point of reference on Craterus, considers why he took so long to return to Greece with his veterans in tow; he may have delayed because he hoped that his own popularity would lead to his becoming king: he was a fit successor, only eliminated by his death in June 321. T. Howe, ‘Cleopatra-Eurydice, Olympias, and a “Weak” Alexander’, offers a persuasive account of the murder of Cleopatra-Eurydice, explaining Alexander's anger at Olympias by Cleopatra's suitability as a possible bride for Alexander, stepping into his father's shoes; Olympias pre-empted such an alliance and thus secured her own dominance at court. E. Carney, in a typically lively and significant study, ‘Dynastic Loyalty and Dynastic Collapse in Macedonia’, demonstrates the importance of the king's charisma in maintaining loyalty to a dynasty, the obstacles that polygamy posed to smooth inheritance and the difficulties that Cassander faced, as a non-Argead, in consolidating his position.
R. Lane Fox, ‘King Ptolemy: Centre and Periphery’, offers a complex and vivid pen portrait of Ptolemy as author and as king. The discussion of Ptolemy's career is dense but rewarding; Lane Fox is reluctant to accept the evidence of P. Oxy. 4808 on the date of Cleitarchus, since he regards Ptolemy as correcting that author's ‘fanciful’ history. He makes much of Bosworth's brilliant demonstration (in Alexander the Great: Fact and Fiction [2000]) of the Ptolemaic origins of the ‘Will of Alexander’ found in the Alexander Romance. Other elements of Ptolemy's propaganda are discussed by Sheedy and Ockinga (already mentioned), on the way Ptolemy's coinage was designed to send messages to both the Greek and the Egyptian population of Egypt: the excellent illustrations are material to the argument.
A smaller number of papers look at the eastern part of Alexander's empire. The crossing point from west to east, Thapsacus on the Euphrates, has defied identification for many years. In 1996 M. Gawlikowski seemed to have carried the day with his proposal that it was identical with Zeugma, but D. Kennedy, ‘Thapsacus and Zeugma’, reopens the discussion with a detailed analysis of the likely route of trade and timber transport from the Levant to Mesopotamia, vividly evoking the laborious progress of the massive cedars of Lebanon, on painfully slow ox-carts, to the river. His favoured identification is Birecik. The maps in this article, unfortunately, are so small and grey as to be almost unreadable, and omit many of the locations mentioned in the text.
Another river crossing is the subject of E. Anson's paper, ‘Alexander at the Beas’, in which he argues against the controversial proposals of Spann and Heckel that Alexander never intended to go further than the Beas, and that there was no ‘mutiny’ there. For Anson, Alexander's ambition was infinite, bounded only by what he could do in a lifetime.
G. Cohen, ‘Polis Hellenis’, offers a careful analysis of the term, emphasising the cultural connotation of ‘Greek’, which is more than simply a linguistic term. The fact that there are no poleis Hellenides in Asia Minor indicates that the term does not refer to political structure, but to paideia.
Two papers are concerned with the Realien of Alexander's empire. B., ‘Why the Devil Wears Prada: the Politics of Display in Military Kit’, vividly characterises the clothing, armour and parade dress of the Macedonians, and the importance of the ‘look’ as part of the apparatus of power. D. Whitehead, ‘Alexander the Great and the Mechanici’, surveys the engineers and their work for Alexander, in a paper which provides abundant detail for the imagining of Alexander's matériel. Anyone for a reconstruction helepolis to complement Coates and Morrison's trireme?
J. Bellemore, ‘Valerius Maximus and his Presentation of Alexander the Great’, takes us into the interesting field of the reception of Alexander in antiquity. She discusses Valerius Maximus’ 24 references to Alexander, and concludes that the author regarded Alexander as a great man despite his faults. I argued in Roisman's Brill's Companion (2003), in an article not mentioned by Bellemore, that this line of interpretation puts the cart before the horse: it was because Alexander was a great man that he was a useful source of exempla. Philosophers use history for their own purposes.
Two final papers have nothing to do with Alexander but expand the representation of Antipodean colleagues. A. Pomeroy, ‘Tacitus and the Crises of Empire’, explores Tacitus and ‘periodization’. J.R. Melville-Jones, ‘Legitimizing an Emperor: the Solidus of Alexander III’, raises hopes, but the coin he examines is not of that Alexander, but of the homonymous Byzantine emperor (a.d. 912–3). The discussion is interesting, but lacks illustrations. These two last papers may get lost in the company they keep, but no historian of Alexander can afford to ignore the rest of the content of this book.
