[Chapter titles and authors are listed at the end of the review.]
The edited volume under review is of a type which is a fairly familiar sight in the scholarship on King Alexander III of Macedon.[1] It contains the conference proceedings of “Alexander’s Empire: The Legitimation of Conquest” (Villa Vigoni, Menaggio, Italy; May 10–12, 2018), plus an additional commissioned paper. It features chapters primarily by well-established scholars, with only one junior scholar. Some authors have already produced excellent research in the relatively large field of Alexander studies, whereas others come to the topic from other fields. The subjects under discussion are also familiar: the symbolic self-representation of the king and administrative matters across his empire. Such topics remain valid and even fundamental to this short period of ancient history so dominated by the Macedonian expedition across three continents.
Less familiar may be the theoretical framework chosen to underpin the volume, at least outside German scholarship. The editorial preface invokes the political theory of social theorist Max Weber (1864–1920), principally his sociology of domination, or Herrschaftssoziologie. The theory permeates the scholarly discourse on matters like Hellenistic kingship in a few European countries, mainly Germany and Italy (from which the majority of contributors hail). Broadly speaking, the theory presents political legitimacy as a mediated, reciprocal process between ruler and ruled. To explain this process, the Weberian theory operates with three ideal types of legitimate domination—charisma, tradition, and legality—which are not rigid concepts but flexible categories.
What categorises a particular instance of historical domination? Where does a particular legitimacy claim fall and did it become a valid norm that people accepted? These are questions for researchers to investigate. The guiding question of the volume under review may thus be phrased as, “how did one man establish and maintain his legitimacy over such a vast range of peoples, places, and cultures, and why did people accept those legitimacy claims and therefore consent to be ruled by him?”
The editors claim that the Weberian theory “is still very influential and stimulating as is proven by the fact that most studies assembled here directly or indirectly refer to it” (p. 10). Many of the contributors do not, however, explicitly engage with the theory, but instead bring their scholarship to long-standing debates. For example, the papers of Manuela Mari and Maxim Kholod collate in painstaking detail the evidence for and meaning of Alexander’s titulature in Macedonia (Mari) and abroad (Kholod). Michele Faraguna covers epigraphic evidence from Asia Minor to synthesise the various reactions to Alexander’s attempts to control Ilion, Priene and Iasos. There are points of individual interest for specialists in many of the papers.
In my view, the second part, titled “local perspectives and interactions”, contains the most intriguing and well-argued papers. Most chapters therein take a bottom-up perspective in how local elites could vie for attention, influence, and resources from the invading ruler. They had naturally done so long before Alexander’s entry into places like Babylon. For example, Michael Jursa explores how the priestly elite of Babylon coveted the king’s support by examining their methods of persuasion in Babylonian literature. In doing so, he introduces exciting evidence from a hitherto under-utilised dossier of texts written from the perspective of indigenous eastern elites, discusses the cultural coherence and significance of identity within that corpus, and offers original interpretations of literary production as a new hope for the Babylonian priests under the Macedonian regime. This paper thus gives us an important vantage point from which to evaluate how urban elites on the periphery of the Achaemenid world wooed the new regime of Macedonian overlords.
Maurizio Gianguilio applies postcolonial theory to Alexander’s city foundations, arguing that the Macedonian foundations in Asia were not simply military fortifications or continuities of Achaemenid city planning but rather attempts to improve the geopolitical situation with the input of local elites. Using these elites’ advice, and respecting their wishes, the Macedonians enhanced existing ecological systems, which led to a reconfiguration of the space in which the new city foundations operated. This is a valid challenge to the research of new Achaemenid historians who emphasise continuities from previous Near Eastern empires.
Shane Wallace turns to the question of how Alexander’s claims of legitimacy reached contemporaries in the Greek world. He takes both top-down and bottom-up approaches, discussing the king’s means of communication through e.g. the League of Corinth and the relaying of information from various actors, such as veteran soldiers, who returned to Greece after the expedition. While there are many excellent observations on individual pieces of evidence, the fact that that the veterans made much of their wartime experiences should not be as surprising as Wallace wants us to believe. After all, the expedition was their main claim to fame: the campaign was extraordinarily successful by Greek standards, and we know that proximity to the political leaders of Macedon gave grounds for self-aggrandisement.[2]
Less stimulating is the first quadriga of papers, plus the first paper in part 2. They suffer from notable deficiencies. For instance, their focus turns out to be Alexandrocentric to a high degree, despite the plurality of local actors on display in the second part. These papers read like reports from what several UK-based scholars, such as James Davidson, Mary Beard, and Hugh Bowden, have referred to as “Alexanderland”.[3] The papers concern themselves almost exclusively with the agency of the “historical” person, assuming that the manly ruler was an exceptional mover of history. Furthermore, it is presumed that we can unproblematically reach back to Alexander’s own self-presentation and royal personality. By exploring once more the literary source material, we can, they suggest, finally learn what really happened on the campaign. Readers of these chapters may at times feel transported back to a different era in the study of Alexander “the Great”.
Another consequence of bypassing source complexities is the extreme privileging of literary sources (acknowledged in the preface), which are mostly interpreted without literary theory, at least in the first five papers. The strong presence of texts also underlines the complete absence of important evidence like coinage (first explained by Alexander Meeus in the first of two epilogues).
The avoidance of numismatic evidence becomes particularly striking when we reach the last proper paper of the volume. The lone North American contributor, Andrew Monson, discusses the economics of legitimacy, thus supplementing Weber’s sociology of domination, the theoretical premise of the volume, with fiscal sociology. Briefly put, Monson’s argument is that preindustrial monarchs needed to rule by consent if revenues were low, whereas rulers with financial surplus could afford to ignore “establishing credible and reciprocal obligations with the consent of his subjects.” As Alexander quickly made himself the (ancient) world’s richest person, not least through the weaponisation of his wealth through minting, he could rule by autocratic autonomy to an extent never seen before. In this sense, Alexander’s tributary empire can be viewed as an extreme case of personal authority in which the ruler routinely broke the laws of legitimacy because of the power that his wealth provided.
Monson’s framework is persuasive and seems a productive way forward in investigating monarchical representation and the art of government in Alexander’s empire. It offers a better model to explain a great many historical events, episodes, and choices, such as the semi-public killing of Clitus the Black, that the ancient authors could only provide partial explanations for (e.g. alcoholism, ageism, orientalism, internecine strife, etc.). It also illustrates rather well the clash of national methodologies in major scholarly traditions in German and Anglophone scholarship, principally in the US and Britain, with their alternate emphases.[4] However, it also calls into question how much scholarly progress is made by reuse of Weber’s Herrschaftssoziologie with more modern methodologies and approaches available.
To sum up: the volume is a mixed bag, as conference volumes often are. It features a combination of high-quality, innovative papers that respond to matters of import and some rather more timeworn approaches and dated theoretical grounding, which may give rise to puzzlement and perturbation, at least outside the central European context (and probably within it, too). The latter raises another significant point, that of timeliness. In this volume, we encounter the trope of the exceptional, almost godlike, greatness of a “western” hero from a cast of largely European contributors, of which most are male. Is this the direction in which Alexander studies are headed two decades into the twenty-first century? That is not the widespread perception in scholarship,[5] nor is it my personal impression. In my experience, there have been initiatives to bring change at conferences in several countries, as well as in the resulting publications.[6] Within the field of the “historical” Alexander—since some people would want to make that distinction—change is possible, and it is also sought outside the academic world.[7] There have been advances in recent years for inclusivity and diversity of thought, renewed interest in reception, materiality, and textuality, and awareness of other cultural contexts than the Greco-Macedonian background. This volume as a whole does not always reflect them.
Table of Contents
Kai Trampedach and Alexander Meeus, “Introduction: Understanding Alexander’s relations with his subjects”, 9-18.
Part I: Self-presentation and royal persona
1. Tonio Hölscher, “From early on to become a hero (“Held”): mythical models of Alexander’s image and biography”, 21-44.
2. Kai Trampedach, “Staging charisma: Alexander and divination”, 45-60.
3. Christian Mann, “Alexander and athletics or how (not) no use a traditional field of monarchic legitimation”, 61-75.
4. Matthias Haake, “Violence and legitimation: the social logic of Alexander the Great’s acts of violence between the Danube and the Indus – a conceptual outline and a case study”, 77-95.
Part II: Local perspectives and interactions
5. Ralf von den Hoff, “Alexander’s dedications to the gods: sacred space, pious practice and public legitimation”, 99-121.
6. Shane Wallace, “Communication and legitimation: knowledge of Alexander’s Asian conquests in the Greek world”, 123-44.
7. Wilhelm Köhler, “Legitimation – unwitting and unrequested: Alexander of Macedon’s portrayal as divine tool in Zechariah 9”, 145-64.
8. Michael Jursa, “Wooing the victor with words: Babylonian priestly literature as a response to the Macedonian conquest”, 165-77.
9. Maurizio Giangiulio, “Shaping the new world: once more on the cities of Alexander”, 179-94.
Part III: Administration and institutions
10. Manuela Mari, “Alexander, King of the Macedonians”, 197-217.
11. Maxim M. Kholod, “On the titulature of Alexander the Great: the title basileus”, 219-241.
12. Michele Faraguna, “Alexander the Great and Asia Minor: conquest and strategies of legitimation”, 243-261.
13. Andrew Monson, “Alexander’s tributary empire”, 263-287.
Part IV: Epilogues
14. Alexander Meeus, “The strategies of legitimation of Alexander and the Diadochoi: continuity and discontinuities”, 291-317.
15. Hans-Joachim Gehrke, “Concluding remarks”, 319-323.
Notes
[1] For another recent instance, see John Walsh and Elizabeth Baynham, Alexander the Great and Propaganda (London and New York: Routledge, 2021).
[2] See e.g. the satirical take on such a boastful person in Theophrastus’ Characters (23.2-4), a source not considered by Wallace.
[3] Summarised in Hugh Bowden, “Recent travels in Alexanderland,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 134.1 (2014), 136–48. One of the volume’s authors has previously published an article with this terminology: Ralf von den Hoff, “Neues im “Alexanderland”: ein frühhellenistisches Bildnis Alexanders des Grossen,” Göttinger Forum für Altertumswissenschaft 17 (2014), 209–245.
[4] Specified e.g. in Hans-Ulrich Wiemer, “Siegen oder Untergehen? Die hellenistische Monarchie in der neueren Forschung,” in: Stefan Rebenich (ed.), Monarchische Herrschaft im Altertum (Munich: Oldenbourg Verlag, 2017), 305–339.
[5] See the stimulating introduction of Elizabeth Carney, King and Court in Macedonia: Rivalry, Treason and Conspiracy (Swansea: Classical Press of Wales, 2015).
[6] Readers will soon be able to sample more inclusive and diverse approaches, as well as new perspectives, in Frances Pownall, Sulochana R. Asirvatham and Sabine Müller (eds.), The Courts of Philip II and Alexander the Great: Monarchy and Power in Ancient Macedonia (Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, forthcoming).
[7] See e.g. Yousuf Chugtai, “Revisiting the ‘Hellenistic’ period,” Eidolon May 21, 2018.