Aris and Phillips (Classical Texts) (Liverpool 2023) h/b 256pp £127.28 (ISBN 978-1-800-34862-2)
This revised text of a doctorate comprises an extended discussion in the form of the 93-page Introduction, followed by an edited selection—Greek text and the author Giustina Monti’s translation—of ancient literary citations of 34 letters supposedly written by Alexander the Great. The rest of the book comprises a detailed letter-by-letter commentary (76 pages).
Monti bases her selection on Plutarch, partly on the grounds that he preserves the largest number of citations of individual letters (33), 29 of them in his Life of Alexander, all of which she includes. She gives the reader a rather chaotic picture of the corpus of letters overall. She mentions two earlier studies from the 1890s, the earlier collecting 71 letters (Eugen Pridik), the later ‘slightly more’ (Alexander Zumetikos). She gives (p. 1) a total of five letters to Arrian, only for a later footnote to assign him an additional ten (p. 6 n. 16). Sometimes her catalogue gives in full all the further ancient references to the same letter, as with Alexander’s to Antipater about the discovery of a spring of oil (her F15, adding to Plutarch the essentially valueless Athenaeus and Eustathius), but sometimes not, as with what are probably the most historically significant of all these letters, Alexander’s replies to letters from Darius III offering terms after the Achaemenid king’s defeat at the battle of Issus (333 BC). Monti’s entry (FF7-8) starts with Plutarch, followed by Arrian’s two mentions (one of them a seemingly direct quotation), but relegates to the commentary (pp. 157-162) further references in Diodorus, Justin and Quintus Curtius, without reproducing their texts.
As Monti acknowledges, most of the ancient citations which she prints do not reproduce a given letter in full or even quote from it directly. It is therefore unfeasible to reconstruct the letter-writer’s authorial style or to generalise about epistolographic conventions such as the form of openings and farewells. Nevertheless, Monti further justifies her focus on Plutarch on the grounds that he ‘transmits the only contemporary information about the letters’: his Life of Phocion cites Chares of Mytilene, a court official of Alexander and one of his lost historians, for the claim that, after defeating Darius, Alexander dropped from his letters the greeting chairein, customary in Greek letter-writing by the later fourth century BC. Although the nature of the ancient citations does not allow this claim of Chares to be tested, Monti is right to probe its significance. She argues that from 330 BC Alexander’s growing adoption of the cultural practices of the Achaemenid court included the tradition of declamatory openings (‘So-and-so thus says’) in royal letters from the ancient Near East. That said, actual Achaemenid examples boil down to Ezra (Cyrus the Great, a ‘letter-edict’), the Behistun inscription (Darius I, not a letter but a bombastic declaration), and the Letter to Gadatas (Darius I), a Roman-period text of dubious authenticity, as shown in Pierre Briant’s long article (included in Kings, Countries, Peoples, ed. A. Kuhrt, 2017, 128ff.), which Monti overlooks. It’s not that Monti’s hypothesis is inherently improbable, just that its fragile underpinnings need highlighting.
Monti’s larger thesis is that Plutarch’s use of the letters informs what she sees as his portrayal of an Alexander who ‘transformed his mental attitude once he acquired the model of Achaemenid kingship in its entirety’ (p.4). This is interesting and, if demonstrable, an important addition to the armoury of arguments of scholars who stress Alexander’s ‘Persianization’ and, especially, of those who see this as more than skin-deep. Monti does not highlight how debated Alexander’s ‘Persianization’ continues to be and is not quite right to present him tout court as a new Great King (e.g. p. 5); the only Asiatic sovereignty which Alexander is attested as acquiring is the ‘kingship of Asia’—not necessarily the same thing. Monti’s interpretation of individual letters in support of the larger thesis also seems at times overdone. For instance, Alexander’s offer to the Athenian statesman Phocion of whole cities as a gift does indeed smack of Achaemenid practice, but only in the nature of the gift, not in the gift-giving itself, which was just as central to the attractiveness of royal service under the Macedonian Argeads (e.g. Philip II’s grants of estates to Companions) as in the Persian empire. The same might be said for Monti’s reading of Alexander’s solicitous letter to Peucestas after a bear had bitten him as a manifestation of the Achaemenid ideology of care for the king’s subjects: after all, Alexander early on is depicted as visiting his wounded troopers, and Peucestas was both a high-ranking Macedonian and a royal favourite.
This larger thesis depends less on the authenticity of individual letters than on Monti’s claims for the literary use made of them by Plutarch. That said, the elephant in the room which Monti commendably confronts full on is this very question of genuineness. As is well-known, the forgery of letters by famous figures was an ancient literary sub-genre in its own right. On the other hand, like the Achaemenids before him, Alexander undoubtedly used letters to communicate both officially and privately over the vast extent of his new conquests, aided, as Monti suggests, by the wondrous Achaemenid messenger-service. There is no direct evidence for any ancient collection of Alexander’s letters, real, fake or a mixture of the two, although some scholars are disturbed by Plutarch’s expression ‘from the letters,’ as if he might have had such a literary collection in front of him. Monti makes a case for seeing Chares as the keeper of Alexander’s private correspondence and also as an ultimate source for many of Plutarch’s citations. Monti’s position—and that of others before her—is that each letter needs its own evaluation. Her commentary section includes a survey of previous scholarly pronouncements—frequently contradictory—on each letter in her selection, as well a statement of her own view. What this survey illustrates time and again is the fact that, as Pierre Briant has also written, ‘it is so difficult to bring proofs that will command unanimous agreement’ (op. cit. p. 159). She reminds us that J. R. Hamilton in his 1961 article on the letters in Plutarch’s Life all too often concluded that ‘it is not possible to make a decision’.
This careful evaluation of each letter in Monti’s selection makes her book a new work of reference on its subject. Moreover, the commentary section also provides detailed discussion from a fresh perspective of important historical topics such as Alexander’s dedication of armour on the Acropolis after his victory at the Granicus, the diplomacy between the kings following his victory at Issus, his visit to Siwa, and his relations with Olympias and Antipater.
In all, she has not only breathed new life and insight into a knotty problem in Alexander Quellenforschung, but also has fashioned a desirable tool for anyone working in depth on Alexander-history.
Tony Spawforth
Brighton