Greeks and Macedonians when performed before a man, and when at Bactra in 327 Alexander tried to persuade the Macedonians to follow the Persians in according him this gesture, the Greek Callisthenes opposed him. There are two versions of what happened. According to the first, there was a debate between Anaxarchus and Callisthenes on Alexander’s proposal, in which the latter ‘while irritating Alexander exceedingly, found favour with the Macedonians’ (Arrian, Anabasis, iv, 12, 1), and the whole plan was dropped. According to the second, Alexander sent round a loving-cup, which each was to take, offer proskynesis, and finally receive a kiss from the king; Callisthenes omitted the proskynesis and was denied the kiss (Arrian, Anabasis, iv, 12, 3–5). Whatever the truth of the details – both versions could be true – the incident led to Callisthenes’ destruction, for he was soon afterwards accused of being privy to a murder-conspiracy by some of the royal pages.
Aristobulus declares that they [sc. the conspirators] said that it was Callisthenes who had urged them to the plot; and Ptolemy agrees. But most authorities do not say so, but rather that through his dislike for Callisthenes . . . Alexander easily believed the worst about him (Arrian, Anabasis, iv, 14, 1).
Callisthenes was tortured and executed; the sources disagree only on the details. The whole incident smacks of the tyrant’s court.
(c) Alexander’s authoritarianism revealed itself, as that of his successors was also to do, in his relations with the Greeks. The expedition, as planned by Philip, had as its excuse the avenging of the wrongs suffered by the Greeks at the hands of the Persians. At the outset Alexander had been at pains to emphasize the panhellenic aspects of the war (see p. 31 for the panoplies sent to Athens after Granicus) but unfortunately our evidence is not sufficiently clear to allow us to say what status was accorded by Alexander to the ‘liberated’ Greek cities of Asia Minor. According to Arrian
he ordered the oligarchies everywhere to be dissolved, democracies to be set up, each city to receive back its own laws and to cease paying the taxes they had paid to the Persians (Anabasis, i, 18, 2).
But an inscription from Priene (Tod, 185) shows Alexander interfering extensively in the city’s affairs and although the Prieneans are declared ‘free and autonomous’ and released from the payment of ‘contributions’ – the word used, syntaxis, suggests that these were payments made hitherto to Alexander for the prosecution of the war rather than tribute paid to Persia – it is not clear just what ‘free and autonomous’ meant to the king. Some scholars have argued that the Greek cities of Asia Minor became members of the League of Corinth. This seems to have been true of the cities of the Aegean islands for an inscription from Chios, dealing with Alexander’s restoration of exiles there (probably in 332), declares that ‘of those who betrayed the city to the barbarians. . . all still remaining there shall be deported and tried before the Council of the Greeks’ (Tod, 192), which suggests Chian membership of the League of Corinth. But there is no firm evidence to determine whether the same was also true of the cities of Asia Minor. In practice they certainly had to do what Alexander ordered, like Ephesus where he restored the democracy but ‘gave orders to contribute to the temple of Artemis such taxes as they had paid to the Persians’ (Arrian, Anabasis, i, 17, 10).
This, however, also applied to the cities of the League, as the events of 324 clearly show. Faced with a problem of rootless men in Asia – unemployed mercenaries, political exiles, and settlers who (like 3000 from Bactria) had abandoned their new colonies and were on their way back to Greece – Alexander published an edict authorizing their return. According to Diodorus (xviii, 8, 4) he stated in this that ‘we have written to Antipater (who was in charge in Europe) about this, that he shall use compulsion against any cities that are unwilling to take back their exiles’. To ensure the maximum publicity for this decree, which, as an inscription from Mytilene (Tod, 201) shows, applied to Asia and Europe alike, Nicanor, Aristotle’s adopted son, was sent to Olympia to have read out to the Greeks assembled for the games a statement that ‘all exiles were to return to their countries, excepting those guilty of sacrilege and murder’ (Diodorus, xvii, 109, 1). A Samian inscription (Syll., 312) shows that Alexander had already previously made a similar announcement to the army. Though Diodorus says that the decree was welcomed, it certainly caused complications and even chaos over property, confiscated and sold, in every city (as inscriptions make clear) and it can hardly have pleased Antipater. It is a measure of Alexander’s disregard for the rights of the cities that he could take such a step without consulting them. In this, as in so much else, his actions were arbitrary and authoritarian. Traditional Greek rights were disregarded.
(d) Both Alexander and, later on, the hellenistic kings reinforced their autocratic power with claims to divinity. About the same time as he ordered the return of the exiles Alexander published a further demand in Greece, which met with a mixed reception. According to Aelian ( Varia historia, ii, 19), ‘Alexander sent instructions to the Greeks to vote him a god’ and this is borne out by other sources, none of which, however, mentions the exact context in which this request was sent. However, according to the Athenian orator Hypereides (Funeral Speech, 6, 21, delivered 323), the Athenians had been forced
to see sacrifices accorded to men, the statues, altars and temples of the gods disregarded, while those of men were sedulously cared for, and the servants of these men honoured as heroes.
The reference must be to the worship of Alexander and to the heroic honours which he had accorded to his dead friend Hephaestion. In the spring of 323 Alexander was visited at Babylon by embassies from Greece ‘wreathed in the manner of sacred envoys arriving to honour some god’ (Arrian, Anabasis, vii, 23, 2). In view of this evidence and a number of other passages, often ironical like the report of Damis’ motion at Sparta – ‘if Alexander wishes to be a god, let him be a god’ (Plutarch, Moralia, 219E) – it seems likely that the request was sent about the same time as the demand for the restoration of exiles, though there is little to be said for Tarn’s view in Alexander the Great, Vol. II, pp. 370–3, that ‘his divinity was intended by Alexander to give a political sanction to the latter request, which no existing powers authorized him to make’.
The request for divine honours seems more likely to have been a final step in the direction in which Alexander’s thoughts had been moving for some time. His father Philip had been honoured at Eresus on Lesbos by the erection of altars to Zeus Philippios (Tod, 191, 11. 5–6), a statue to him stood in the temple of Artemis at Ephesus (Arrian, Anabasis, i, 17, 11) – though this need not necessarily imply a cult – and at Aegae in Macedonia for ‘because of the greatness of his rule he had counted himself alongside the twelve gods’ (Diodorus, xvi, 95, 1). Recently an inscription has been found which attests the existence of a cult to him at Philippi. As for Alexander himself, he had been recognized as a Pharaoh, and so as a divine being (see p. 217), and early in 331 he had visited the oracle of Amon at Siwah in the Libyan desert, where, Callisthenes reported, ‘the priest told the king that he, Alexander, was the son of Zeus’ (Strabo, xvii, 1, 43), a statement generally interpreted to mean that the priest greeted Alexander as ‘son of Amon’. Shortly afterwards, and quite independently, the oracles at Didyma and Erythrae put out the same story ‘concerning Alexander’s descent from Zeus’ (Strabo, ibid.). To Greeks and Macedonians it was common practice to identify foreign gods with their own and Callisthenes called Amon Zeus, just as Pindar had done in his hymn to Amon, where he addressed him as ‘Amon, lord of Olympus’, and in a Pythian ode (4, 16) where he speaks of Zeus Amon. That Alexander encouraged the connection with Zeus, as his son or (like Philip) identified with him, can be seen from a silver decadrachm issued later to celebrate his victory over Porus, which depicts Alexander on horseback charging Porus on an elephant and on the reverse shows a figure of Zeus, wearing a strange amalgam of dress and wielding a thunderbolt in his right hand, which has also been identified with Alexander.
A further stage in the advance towards deification can be traced in the scheme, already discussed above (pp. 38–9), to introduce proskynesis at Bactra. In order to raise the topic, Anaxarchus, the amenable philosopher from Abdera, asserted that
it would be far more just to consider Alexander as a god than Dionysus and Heracles;. . . there could be no doubt that when Alexander had passed away men would honour him as a god; how much