For nearly three centuries, while Macedon became a Roman province, the Ptolemys ruled in Egypt, and the priests of the deified Alexander served his shrine. At last in 89 BC, when the line had grown degenerate, the effete and bloated Ptolemy IX, rejected by his army and needing pay for mercenaries, took the gold sarcophagus and melted it down for coin. All Alexandria was outraged; to no one’s surprise, he was killed within the year.
The embalmers had been master craftsmen; Alexander’s three-hundred-year-old face had set into distinguished beauty. The Alexandrians piously rehoused him in a sarcophagus adorned with coloured glass. Fifty years later, the house of Ptolemy was extinguished by Cleopatra’s asp.
The Tomb remained. Caesar visited it; no doubt Mark Antony too with envy; Augustus left an imperial standard as tribute. The legends gathered.
In his lifetime they had begun, springing up in his wake from the Hellespont to the Himalayas. Through his torn empire and far beyond its fringes they grew like tropical jungle, throwing up exotic flowers of fantasy. Myth says that the robber Sciron, whom Theseus threw off the Isthmian cliff, was rejected by earth and sea, which tossed him back and forth. To possess Alexander, there was an inter-continental tug of war.
Egypt quickly annexed him. He had been thirteen years old when the last native Pharaoh, Nectanebo, fled into exile at the Persian conquest; but now it was told that he had been an adept in magic who, instructed by his art, had voyaged to Macedon, there to beget an avenger of his people’s wrong. Olympias, hearing of his fame, summoned him to cast her horoscope. He foretold her a hero son from the seed of Zeus-Ammon; his harbinger would be a monstrous serpent. It appeared, startling the court. Next night, Nectanebo put on the ram-horned mask of Ammon and fulfilled his own prediction. The stars were about to sign a portentous birth; when Olympias was in labour, he made her hold back till they were in the right conjunction.
Alexander had spent a few months of his life in Egypt. In Persia, his adopted kingdom, his memory was fresh and green. Careless of chronology, legend fathered him on Darius II, who had received a daughter of Philip of Macedon after a (wholly fictitious) victory over that king. In spite of her beauty, Darius only kept her for a night because she had bad breath; so Alexander was born in Macedon. Later on she improved her breath by chewing skandix (chervil) after which she called her son Sikandar. Since skandix is Greek, not Persian, the story shows that his work on the fusion of culture had not gone for nothing.
Persia spent upward of a millennium embroidering the story of Sikandar Dhulkarnein, the Two-Horned, the World-Seeker. In the pleasure houses, the bazaars, the inns, the harems, centuries before it got into written form, it collected fabulous exploits from eras before his birth, Märchen with which he himself may have been beguiled by his Persian favourite. Of no one else did they now appear so credible.
Assimilated at last to Islam, the romance spread out to enormous length, every rift loaded with ore, till it could take eighty-five stanzas to describe two opposing armies before the battle began. He was credited with deeds he would have disclaimed indignantly, the tendency being to equip him with whatever qualities seemed admirable to the poet, including religious intolerance. He is found galloping about destroying heathen temples and scattering Zoroaster’s sacred fires—he, the most cheerfully syncretist of religious men—in the name of Allah. When he gets to Egypt, it is to rescue the country from the black and hideous invading Zangs, drinkers of blood and eaters of brains. To put them in dread he has a Zang head cooked, and after a deft exchange of dishes affects to eat with relish. Victorious, he leaves the grateful Egyptians (there are still small outcrops of history) and defeats King Dara of Persia, who dies in his arms bequeathing him, in return for avenging his murder, the hand of his daughter Roshanak, who stirs his heart to “tumult like a Russian camel bell’s.” Dispatching Poros of India singlehanded he takes the surrender of the King of China, who bestows on him the Auspicious Horseman, a gallant warrior later revealed as a lady of dazzling beauty, with whom he spends an elaborately decorated night of love. (So long remembered was his wish to meet an Amazon.) Victorious over monsters and Russian savages, he marches up into the Arctic night, seeking the spring of eternal life, the immemorial quest of Sumerian Gilgamesh. (Probably no part of the legend would have surprised him more than this.)
One thing is constant; in the terms of each epoch, Sikandar is the supreme hero. “To iron men he is iron, but gold towards the golden.” When the Dauphin sent Henry V a bat and ball in scorn of his youth, he must have chosen his ill-judged gift with some vague recollection of Dara’s challenge to Sikandar. He founds Sikandria, “a city like the joyous spring.” He is full of cunning devices, not all of which he would have approved. He invents the mirror—for strategic reasons, but not without some unmeant psychological truth. He venerates the tomb of Cyrus the Great; this was never forgotten in Persia. His tactics are likened to skilful chess, his troop dispositions to enamelled miniatures. Indeed the miniaturists never tired of depicting him, elaborately Persianized with chain mail, pointed helm and scimitar; using a horseman’s bow, or catching a giant with an expert lasso; wearing the regal moustache and beard obligatory where a smooth face marked the eunuch; lamented at his death by the sages Aristo and Aflatun (Aristotle and Plato); the Happy World-Possessor, whose cavalcade is like a rose garden. No victor in world history has left an image comparable with this in the land he conquered. Coeur-de-Lion, it may be remembered, survived in Arab memory as a bogyman with whom mothers threatened bad children.
Meantime, while Persian folk memory and fable were putting down the earliest pieces of this extraordinary mosaic, a quite different process, sophisticated and purposeful, was going on to the westward. In Macedon the formidable Antipater, Regent in turn for Philip, Alexander, and the shadowy boy Alexander IV, died like some great rock releasing landslides. His son Cassander, Alexander’s bitterest enemy, future murderer of his mother, widow and son, settled down to the serious work of murdering his reputation.
A willing tool was the educational establishment of Athens, bitter at the collapse of the city-states from within, which had left them open to Macedon; blaming on Alexander his Regent’s stern hegemony which he had been trying to loosen when he died; smarting at the death of Demosthenes whom he had spared all his life in spite of much provocation, and of the dubious Callisthenes, whose provocation had been too much. They had expelled Aristotle for his links with Macedon. Cassander made it clear, to the lesser men left as opinion formers, that enemies of Alexander were friends of his; and he was a powerful friend. With his encouragement—probably fed by him with misinformation they believed, for he had visited the court at Babylon—they set to work on their own Alexander legend; no organic growth like the Romances, but efficient hatchet work, producing vicious caricatures of an Orientalized, lecherous despot, incongruously active among excesses which might have exhausted Sardanapalus. His failure to beget by this mode of life a horde of bastards was put down to alcoholism; drink made his semen watery, pronounced Theophrastus, Professor of Science at the Lyceum—who, in common with the rest of Athens, had not set eyes on him since he was eighteen.
All this time the involved Wars of the Successors were going on; his former generals were further polluting history by issuing bogus last testaments of his to support their claims. He was a favourite set subject, too, for the schools of rhetoric, which industriously wrote letters for him, describing the marvels of India, lecturing Aristotle, or telling his mother how he was getting on. Modern scholarship has had to labour at extracting these burrs from the cloth of history, in which some of the most striking had become firmly wound.