Alexander the Great

To sceptics, it soon became fashionable to explain away Alexander's divinity as a trick designed to impress his subjects. Historians are too inclined to father their own incredulity on to figures of the past; they would do better to ask why the response they find incredible was felt to be needed by men, like themselves, in a human predicament. If Aristotle's writings reflect the mood of contemporaries, then there was already a feeling that the gods were indifferent to man's fate and content to live in disinterested ease. After Alexander this sense of a universe drained of divinity is more apparent. 'The other gods,' said an Athenian hymn to one of Alexander's Successors, twenty years later, 'are either far away, or have no ears, or do not exist, or pay us no attention. But you we see before us, not made of wood, or stone, but alive and real.' There was truth in this sophisticated tribute: Alexander, more than any Successor, was the dominant source of power on earth, and power had long been the distinguishing mark of the Greek gods. Like the gods, he was extraordinarily rich and royally born, and by a single order, he could change the history of men's lives: divine honours recognized this power won by achievement, exactly as Greek pamphlets had predicted they would, and the little that is known of Alexander's character suggests he would have accepted the comparison gratefully and seriously. As to how it affected him at the end of his life, only one description survives: it was written by a Greek pamphleteer, well aware of the details of the court, probably because he had been there. It is, by any standards, remarkable.

'Alexander,' wrote Ephippus of Olynthus, in a pamphlet on The Death s of Hephaistion and Alexander,would wear the sacred clothes of the gods at di

This is not only a clear statement that Alexander wore female dress like Artemis; it is also the only surviving character judgement by a contemporary on the last months of his reign. It is true that in modem cases of religious delusion, paranoiacs who call themselves God will dress up irrespective of sex in male or female costume to suggest their divinity, but since the rise of Christianity, all such modem psychiatric evidence is of very dubious relevance to Alexander's world; more important, Ephippus himself is hardly a witness beyond reproach. His home town, shared by Callisthenes and possibly by Aristobulus, had been destroyed by Philip's Macedonians, and Alexander had recently a

In their factual outline they make sense: dressing up as a god has a curious history, which helps to put Alexander's alleged behaviour into perspective. There were Greek myths which warned of its evil consequences, but in practice, rulers and outstandingly talented individuals had long thought otherwise. Some ninety years before Alexander, the painter Parrhasios had walked in the streets of Athens, dressed in a purple robe, a golden crown, a white ribbon and golden shoes, carrying a golden staff and claiming to be son of Apollo, god of the arts, and in close contact through dreams with the deified hero Heracles. Priests would occasionally wear divine robes, as would swearers of a sacred oath in Syracuse, who dressed in a goddess's clothes; in Greek Heracleia, on the Black Sea, the tyrant Clearchus, pupil of Plato and a man who modelled himself on the Sicilian kings, had already worn a purple robe, soft boots and a golden crown and been preceded by the image of Zeus's golden eagle. He dyed his face red to impersonate Zeus and suggest divine ichor, and named his son the Thunderbolt, a symbol which he often carried instead of a sceptre. But there was a stranger precedent, which may have meant more to Alexander, as he had probably seen it himself.

During Alexander's youth there lived in Syracuse, always a city of pomp, the famous faith-healer Menecrates. He cured various cases of epilepsy of which the doctors had despaired and as epilepsy was known as the sacred disease, its healer, who asked for no pay, could fairly claim to be divinely inspired: Menecrates thus called himself Zeus, dressed in the usual purples and golds and surrounded himself with a troupe of former patients, who also attired themselves as gods. One was a general from Argos, who had served in high favour with the Persians, and now called himself Heracles and dressed accordingly; another, a tyrant in a small Asian Greek city which Alexander had freed after the Granicus, wore Hermes's robes and wings and carried a caduceus; a third was dressed

as Apollo, a fourth as the god of medicine, while the fifth was none other than Alexarchus, son of Antipater and possibly the most extraordinary man of Alexander's generation; he called himself the Sun, and after Alexander's death, he would found an eccentric community, called City of the Heavens, on the top of Mount Athos.

Linked to Macedonia's viceroy, Menecrates's troupe is said very plausibly to have paid Philip's court a visit, where among much mirth, the new Zeus reclined at a gorgeous table, while his attendants burnt incense and poured libations in his honour. It was later suggested that Macedonian fellow-guests laughed so much at the sight that Menecrates fled the dining-room in embarrassment, but in view of Philip's own ambitions, Pella was not the place for men to ridicule an aspiring god. Alexander would surely have seen, or heard about, the doctor's divine arrival.

It is important that, like Menecrates, Alexander is only said to have dressed as the gods at di