These are annotations for the third chapter of the book Impossible Histories. I’m not saying you need to keep a copy of IH open next to you as you read, but it might make some things clearer?
p. 43
•Alexander the Great: This chapter had, and perhaps still has, more errors than any other, in part because of the unusual way it was written. Fifteen or twenty years ago I prepared a lengthy manuscript for a D&D game (the game took place in the “real” world in AD 989) about the wars of Alexander’s successors, interlaced with in-game hints. I had access to a university library at the time, and did a lot of research to get the MS. into a state that would make it seem like a plausible Hellenistic document that tenth-century characters could find. When the time came to write this chapter, I figured it would be foolish to try to recreate all my research, and so I used the old D&D MS. extensively. Unfortunately, I had fudged some things to make the MS. more “game relevant,” and over the years I had totally forgotten what things I fudged.
Did Roxane smother Strateira herself with a pillow when no other assassin could get close to Alexander’s wives? Did Lysimachus really construct a magnificent tomb for himself at Belevi, hewn from the living rock with 80’ ceilings, only to have his body tossed into a mass grave and the great tomb remain empty until the days of Seleucus’ grandson? Did Seleucus himself vomit with excitement when he heard a prophecy that he would be king? Or are these just things I made up years ago to add color?
I tried to make sure that what stayed in this chapter were things I could find sources for. But please catch me out!
•epigraph: The epigraph here was to be:
It is written in Proverbs that ‘For its sins a land has many rulers,’ and on the death of Alexander, when kings were multiplied, evils were multiplied, too.
§Abelard, letter to Heloise (C12).
•Alexander was the son of the last pharaoh of Egypt, Nectanebo: Traditionally Nectanebo takes the form of a serpent (in Gower “a dragoun”) to father Alexander. In 1767, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing wrote:
“The mothers of Aristomenes, of Aristodamas, of Alexander the Great, of Scipio, of Augustus, of Galerius, all dreamed in their pregnancy that they had to do with a serpent. The serpent was a symbol of deity, and the beautiful statues and pictures of a Bacchus, an Apollo, a Mercury and a Hercules were seldom without a serpent. The honest women had by day feasted their eyes on the god, and the bewildering dream called up the image of the reptile. Thus I save the dream, and surrender the interpretation which the pride of their sons and the shamelessness of flatterers gave it. For there must certainly be a reason why the adulterous phantasy was never anything but a serpent.”
Emphasis added, because I wanted to point out not only how often snakes conceived famous people, but also how Lessing, despite invoking the unconscious, was writing in a pre-Freudian context.
(Gower, op. cit., p. 356; Lessing, Laocoön | Nathan the Wise | Minna von Barnhelm (Dutton, 1970) p. 11.)
•None of these sources is in the least bit correct: Additional examples abound, as examples will, and I recommend Richard Stoneman’s Alexander the Great: A Life in Legend (Yale UP, 2008) for a good rundown; but I’ll add one I don’t think Stoneman includes: that Ibn al-Jawzi, a thirteenth-century jurist in Baghdad, claimed that Alexander the Great was a Black man. (Emeri van Donzel & Andrea Schmidt, Gog and Magog in Early Syriac and Islamic Sources: Sallam’s Quest for Alexander’s Wall (Brill, 2009) p. 165.)
p. 44
•the greatest general of all time: Hannibal’s other picks were Pyrrhus at #2 and Hannibal himself at #3.
Scipio Africanus asked Hannibal how the ratings would have changed if Hannibal had beaten Scipio himself at Zama.
“If that had happened I would have put myself first,” said Hannibal.
p. 45
•Alexander himself pulled open Lysimachus’s cloak: I seemed to remember reading this, the exposing of the wound, and when I went to check the source (Quintus Curtius Rufus), I found: “Id ipsum exprobrans ei rex fortius, quam locutus est, fecit,” i.e. that Alexander acted more forcefully than he spoke in castigating Lysimachus, and I assumed this was a reference to the dramatic unveiling of the wound; but in context, it appears that Quintus means that Alexander’s forceful deed was to kill the lion. So apparently I read that wrong. Did I make up the dramatic unveiling?
There are a host of legends in which Lysimachus gets locked (by an irate Alexander) unarmed in a cage with a lion, and Lysimachus manages to kill the beast with his bare hands (possibly by pulling its tongue out, like a character from The Volsung Saga), thereby earning Alexander’s respect. But all of that’s pretty clearly fake, and has no place in a book of scrupulous truth.
Alexander also had a tutor named Lysimachus, and at first I confounded the two Lysimachi, assuming they were the same person, until I noticed that they had separate entries in Waldemar Heckel’s Who’s Who in the Age of Alexander the Great. It’s too bad, because Lysimachus is more interesting if he is both general and tutor, especially since a rare encounter with honesty made me omit the lion taming nonsense.
p. 49
•Everyone feared Queen Olympias: Is this supposed to be her?
:
p. 50
•everyone was doing it: Alexander once accidentally wounded Lysimachus in the head with his spear, and, lacking a bandage, Alex chose to bind the wound with his diadem. Thus was Lysimachus’s future kingship foretold.
Alexander’s diadem once blew off his head while boating in the swamps near Babylon. Seleucus dived into the water to retrieve it, and, to keep it from getting wet, placed it on his head as he swam back. Thus was Seleucus’s future kingship foretold.
Ptolemy once went on a diplomatic mission disguised as Alexander, and, as part of the disguise, wore Alexander’s diadem, which Alex set on his head with his own hand. Thus was Ptolemy’s future kingship foretold.
Presumably none of these stories is true. But that didn’t stop the people involved from declaring themselves kings!
(These examples are all from an excellent and informative book: Daniel Ogden, The Legend of Seleucus (Cambridge UP, 2020) pp. 92–4.)
p. 51
•Demetrius in Athens started behaving badly: Polybius records the tale that when Demetrius paraded through Athens he was preceded by a mechanical snail that crawled along spewing slime. Is that even behaving badly? It’s just weird! (Polybius, The Rise of the Roman Empire (Penguin, 1979) p. 435.)
•Chandragupta: Chandragupta’s career is often compared to Alexander’s and I wanted to add a commonality I have not seen mentioned before. Both C. and A. survived attempts at assassination from “poison maidens”—women who had been raised Rappaccini-style on toxic food, so that their very lips caused death to whoever kissed them. C.’s assassination attempt is alluded to in the medieval Sanskrit play Mudraraksasa, A.’s given in more detail in the medieval prose collection Gesta Romanorum. I suppose I should admit that both these sources are somewhat less than authoritative, but I feel like I say that too often. (P. Lal, Great Sanskrit Plays in Modern Translation (New Directions, 1964) p. 209; Wynnard Hooper, ed., Gesta Romanorum; or, Entertaining Moral Stories (George Bell & Sons, 1888) p. 21.)
p. 52
•but Seleucus refused: Perhaps Seleucus in sparing Demetrius’s life was simply returning a favor. When Antigonus One-Eye first sought to kill Seleucus (back on IH p. 50), Demetrius secretly warned Seleucus by tracing the word “flee” in the dirt with the butt of his spear.
•somehow managed to frame Lysimachus’s son: Who framed Agathocles, Lysimachus’s son? Was it Lysimachus’s wife Arsinoe, the Thunderbolt’s half sister (and future wife)? Perhaps she wanted to get rid of the son from Lysimachus’s first husband in order to get her own children in line for the throne—that’s what Pausanias says in any event. In my D&D notes, the Thunderbolt smuggles a copy of Euripides’ play Hippolytus to Arsinoe to hint at how she could get rid of Agathocles; but that sounds like something I would have made up. (Pausanias, Guide to Greece Vol. I (Penguin, 1979) p. 34.)
p. 53
•not always clear what that legacy is: “Plutarch affirms that the cruel wars which followed the march of Alexander, introduced the civility, language, and arts of Greece into the savage East” (from Emerson). Ha ha!
•under the sobriquet Dhul-Qarnayn: Marco Polo asserts that the rulers of Badakhshan (in modern Afghanistan) take the title “Zulkarnen, which is the equivalent of Alexander.” Naturally the rulers also claim descent from Alexander, a common claim in central Asia. W.W. Tarn assembles a list of others who make a similar claim, including “the ruling families in Karategin, Darwaz, Roshan, Shingan (extinct), Wakhan (extinct), [and] Pokhpu.”
[The Travels of Marco Polo (Signet, 1961) p. 79; Tarn, The Greeks in Bactria and India (Ares, 1985) p. 302.]
p. 54
•Taught people not to marry their siblings: Incest just seems to be something you accuse people of to prove they are less civilized than you. For example, in one fourteenth-century (?) BC treaty between the Hittites and (proto?-)Armenians, Hittite king Suppiluliuma patiently explains that alliance with the Hittite city of Hattusa would mean shaping up this whole incest thing. “Your country being uncivilized [Suppiluliuma writes], it is customary there for a sister and female cousin to have intercourse with their own brother. At Hattusa, this is not permitted. [Etc.]” No response is recorded. (Johannes Lehmann, The Hittites: People of a Thousand Gods (Viking, 1977) p. 222.)
•Ptolemy’s son married his own sister: In fact, said sister, Arsinoe from the footnotes above, only married her brother after she had married and divorced her half-brother (the Thunderbolt).
To tie the generation after Alexander in with the Hyllus complex (IH p. 103), I should also state that Seleucus’s son married his own stepmother.
And just as an extra example: Alexander’s great-great-great grandmother married her own son (causing a scandal a century before Alexander was born).
•like attacking Carthage: Strabo (citing Aristobulus) also mentions a plan to conquer Arabia, apparently by sailing up the Euphrates. I don’t understand how this would work, but obviously I know a lot less about geography than Strabo.
“Alexander alleged as cause of the war [Strabo continues] that the Arabians were the only people on earth who did not send ambassadors to him, but in truth was reaching out to be lord of all.”
p. 55
•epigraph: The epigraph here was to be:
For my own Part, I confess, I look on this Death of Hanging to be as proper for a Hero as any other; and I solemnly declare that had Alexander the Great been hanged it would not in the least have diminished my Respect to his Memory.
§Henry Fielding, Jonathan Wild (1743).
•just to keep the lads “out of trouble”: The citation here is to Diodorus Siculus XX.40§41. That 41 seems to be an absurdity, and it should be 20.40§7.
The key phrase is “to rid themselves of their present evils,” which I take to refer to a superabundance of troops that were causing such troubles; but the passage could, admittedly, be clearer. I might have sworn I read a clearer statement in Peter Green’s Alexander to Actium, but going back and searching I couldn’t find the reference in that long book.
p. 56
•King Heracles was a cosmopolitan by blood: Similarly, in our “real” timeline, the Hellenistic Seleucid state had, for its second ruler, the half-Persian half-Macedonian King Antiochus.
p. 57
•Gerbert d’Aurillac: Gerbert, as Sylvester II, was history’s smartest pope, but he’s best remembered today for his oracular brazen head, which is explored in more detail in my upcoming (shameless plug) Apprentice Academy: Sorcerers (Macmillan, 2023). Preorder now!
