number of gods; so that the chance always existed that there were
deities whom a given community had not yet discovered at any given
moment. There is, in such a world, a logical necessity that anarchy
should be absent from heaven. Hence each community had to rank its gods
and goddesses according to their power and spheres of activity. The
lowest god, demigod or hero was, accordingly, separated from mankind by
no deep or broad chasm. With most of their deities, in fact, the Greeks
were on terms of familiar intimacy, as were mediæval Christians with
their saints. Various of the lesser gods, Theseus and Heracles among
the ancestors of Alexander for example, had once been men who had been
elevated to Olympus by the grace of Zeus because of the many services
which they had rendered to men. It is true that they were the children
of Zeus; but had not Zeus also claimed Alexander as his own son? Why,
then, should not he too be deified?
The difficulty from the standpoint of religion--of the sentiment which
had led in the past to the heroizing of men--was that he was still
living. And this was an insurmountable difficulty. From the religious
conceptions of the Greeks the worship of the living ruler could never
be derived; and, in fact, it was by pious people and for theological
reasons that the rendering of divine honors to Alexander was opposed in
Athens and elsewhere.[72] The most that could be expected from men of
religious convictions was a sullen acquiescence in something which they
could not prevent.
The apotheosis of Alexander was grounded in impiety, in disbelief in
the supernatural altogether. For the age in which he lived was marked
by this very thing. In that time of storm and stress the ancient Greek
religion became bankrupt. For enlightened people--and their name was
then legion--the gods had ceased to have objective reality. Like the
spirits of the departed whom Ulysses had recalled to consciousness by
giving them blood to drink, they were dependent for their existence
upon the kindliness of men. Without the ministrations of the living
they would not merely be forgotten; they would be annihilated. It was
the gratitude of mankind which had kept the memory of benefactors
green by rites deemed and called religious. Once, to be sure, the
deities had been real beings, but that was before they had died, while
they were living upon the earth as men. Then they had performed great
services--had founded cities, conquered worlds, established laws,
invented arts, developed grains and fruits, and trained animals.
So at least many men of talent and learning already taught. But it
remained for Euhemerus of Messene, about fifty years later (_ca._ 280
B.C.), to give the idea classic expression in an entertaining work
of popularization.[73] With all the circumstantiality of Defoe, he
tells how, in the course of his voyaging, he was driven southward into
the Indian Ocean from Araby the Blest, till he came to the island of
Panchæa. There he found a model community whose social and political
organization he described in the manner familiar to us from Plato's
_Republic_. There, too, he made a remarkable discovery--an account
written on golden tablets in "reformed Egyptian" by Hermes of the lives
and achievements of Chronus, Zeus, and all the other gods and goddesses
of the Greek hierarchy. They had been kings and notables of Panchæa,
and some of them, like Zeus and Dionysus, had been world conquerors.
Others, indeed, had earned the favorable verdict of posterity by very
questionable acts. Aphrodite was the first prostitute, and Cadmus, the
grandfather of Dionysus, was the cook of a king in Sidon and had run
away with a flute girl named Harmonia.
This "sacred writ" was naturally the latest and most authoritative
revelation. It was saved, moreover, from being a gospel of atheism
because, as Cumont[74] says, "It left to the eternal and incorruptible
stars ... the dignity of original gods and exalted them in proportion
as it lowered their rivals of bygone days." The signal merit of Chronus
had been to introduce the worship of the heavenly bodies in Panchæa.
In this respect the _Scriptures_ of Euhemerus accorded with a strong
current of both earlier and contemporary religious thought. Most men
at that time recognized supernatural powers of a certain sort, like
Tyche, "Chance,"--the favorite deity of the Hellenistic world,--whose
play in human affairs modern disbelievers in religion also would be the
last to deny. But they declined to recognize as efficacious the gods
and goddesses in whose honor the cities maintained temples, priests,
sacrifices, and games, except when they had lived on the earth as men
and women.
At the best, therefore, these deities were simply prototypes of
Alexander, who had founded seventy cities and given them their
constitutions and laws, who had conquered all the territory which
Dionysus had once overrun, and who was planning to build a highway
along the coast of North Africa to the pillars set by Heracles at the
limits of the world; who, moreover, was moulding the masses of Europe
and Asia into a new race, and upheld, as no god had ever done, the
social and political framework of the world.
Religion was unable to elevate a living man to godhood. Even in Egypt
the sacred animals were but sacred animals till seventy days after
their death, when they became deities. But irreligion, having degraded
all gods to the level of human beings, had no reason to withhold from
great men the homage which it accorded to the great dead.
The fundamental document on the deification of Greek kings comes
to us stamped with the seal of the Athenian state. It was sung by
the multitude at the official reception of its sovereign, the young
Macedonian king, Demetrius Poliorcetes, on his return to Athens in
290 B.C.[75] "The king comes, light-hearted as befits a god, fair and
laughing, yet majestic withal in his circle of courtiers, he the sun,
they the stars: hail! child of mighty Poseidon and of Aphrodite. The
other gods are a long way off, or have no ears, or no existence, or
take no care of us, but thee we see face to face--a true god, not one
of wood and stone." This catchy bit of blasphemy makes it impossible
for any reasonable doubt to linger as to the regions of thought from
which the worship of Greek rulers sprang.
But why should men who regarded the gods they already had as useless
burden the state with the cult of another whose power was only too
real? Why abandon King Log for a possible King Stork? It is on this
point chiefly that scholars disagree to-day. There are those who
make the apotheosis of Alexander a tribute paid by the Greeks to
transcendant genius, a result of the reverence-compelling personality
of the man. I confess, however, that enthusiastic admiration such as
this presupposes does not seem to me to harmonize with the contemptuous
expressions which marked the establishment of his cult in certain
places in Greece.[76] In Sparta, Damis moved, in regard to Alexander's
message that he be decreed a god, that the Spartans "let him be
called a god if he wishes it"; while in Athens Demosthenes advised his
fellow-citizens "to acknowledge the king as the son of Zeus, or, for
all he cared, as the son of Poseidon, if such was his pleasure." In
other places, however, the recognition seems to have been spontaneous
enough, and to have been an expression of real gratitude for services
rendered or expected. But Greeks on earlier occasions, and other
peoples as well, were equally grateful and no less servile without
deifying the object of those sentiments. Why then did admiration,
gratitude, or servility take this form in this particular instance?
It is true that deification was _demanded_ of the Greek cities by
Alexander, and that it was in response to a mandate sent out by him
from Susa in 324 B.C. that "sacred ambassadors," such as were sent to
gods and not to kings or states, arrived at Babylon in the spring of
323 B.C. a few weeks before Alexander's death, bearing the decrees in
which his request was granted. But for the following fifty years it
was at the initiative of the Greek cities, and, at times, against the
will and interest of the recipient, that such honors were conferred
upon later rulers. Hence we may be certain that in the first instance
deification was an accommodation both to Alexander and to the cities in
his realm. Nor can we, I think, be in serious doubt as to the character
of the service it rendered.
It gave a legal position to Alexander in the world of city-states which
he was organizing. It was unjust, Aristotle had taught him, that a
man of supreme political capacity--such as he had displayed--should
be treated as worthy of mere equality in the cities of his realm. Yet
he could be treated in no other fashion if he were to be a citizen
of them. On the other hand, now that he had freed himself from the
constitutional limitations placed upon the earlier kings of Macedon and
from the treaties which he had formed with the Hellenic cities at the
opening of his reign, he ran the risk of being put to death or outlawed
or ostracized, if he were not, as Aristotle suggested, rated as a deity
upon the earth.
From his point of view, his rule was legitimatized when he was enrolled
among the deities recognized by each city; for thereafter he had a
clear right to issue orders to all the citizens of his world. From
their point of view, on the other hand, by deifying Alexander they
escaped from the intolerable necessity of obeying the commands of a
foreigner. They thereby gave their consent to be ruled by him. They
subordinated their will to his.
The deification of rulers was, accordingly, simply the proskynesis of
cities. Its consequences were an absolutism such as Europe--and for
that matter Asia--had never known before and has never ceased to know
since. And it is this melancholy consequence of apotheosis which has
only too frequently obscured its signal service: that it made possible
the lasting union of all the city-states of the world in a single great
territorial state.
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
1. Hogarth, D. _The Deification of Alexander the Great._ In _English
Historical Review_, II (1887), pp. 317 _ff._
2. Niese, B. _Zur Würdigung Alexander's des Grossen._ In _Historische
Zeitschrift_, LXXIX (1897), pp. 1 _ff._
3. Wheeler, B.I. _Alexander the Great_, (1900).
4. Bevan, E. _The Deification of Kings in the Greek Cities._ In
_English Historical Review_, XVI (1901), pp. 625 _ff._
5. Meyer, Eduard. _Alexander der Grosse und die absolute Monarchie._
In _Kleine Schriften_ (1910), pp. 283 _ff._
6. Kärst, J. _Der hellenistische Herrscherkult._ Beilage 2 in
_Geschichte des hellenistischen Zeitalters_, II, 1 (1909), pp. 374
_ff._
7. Ferguson, W.S. _Legalized Absolutism en route from Greece to Rome._
In _American Historical Review_, XVIII (1912), pp. 29 _ff._
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 58: Arrian, _Anabasis_, VII, 9, 2 _ff._]
[Footnote 59: _De Cor._ 67.]
[Footnote 60: Müller, F.H.G., I, _Frg._ 27.]
[Footnote 61: _Politics_, III, 11 (17), 12, p. 1288 _a_.]
[Footnote 62: _Politics_, III, 8 (13), 1, p. 1284 _a_.]
[Footnote 63: _Politics_, I, 1 (2), 9, p. 1253 _a_.]
[Footnote 64: Aulus Gellius, _Noctes Atticæ_, IX.]
[Footnote 65: Johnston, R.M., _The Corsican_, p. 498.]
[Footnote 66: See above, page 28, and below, page 243.]
[Footnote 67: Plut., _Alex._ 54.]
[Footnote 68: _Kleine Schriften_, pp. 314 _ff._]
[Footnote 69: VII, 4, 4 _ff._]
[Footnote 70: Athenaeus, XII, pp. 538 _ff._ (Translated by Wheeler in
his _Alexander the Great_, pp. 477 _f._)]
[Footnote 71: VII, 4, 7 _f._]
[Footnote 72: In Macedon, by the regent Αντιτροϛ ἁσεβἑϛ τοὑτο κριναϛ
(Suidas).]
[Footnote 73: Pauly-Wissowa, _Real-encyclopädie_, VI, 1, pp. 952 _ff._;
Wendland, _Die Hellenistisch-römische Kultur_ (1907), pp. 67 _ff._]
[Footnote 74: _Astrology and Religion among the Greeks and Romans_
(1912), p. 55.]
[Footnote 75: Ferguson, _Hellenistic Athens_, p. 143.]
[Footnote 76: Meyer, Ed., _Kleine Schriften_, p. 330, n. 2.]
V
THE EMPIRE OF THE PTOLEMIES
The death of Alexander the Great was followed by some days of
indescribable confusion. When a certain semblance of order was restored
the view was officially promulgated that he had not died at all,
but had simply "departed from the life among men." His memory was,
accordingly, not damned; and, in a sense, his presence in the world
which he had transformed continued to be recognized. But not in any
real sense. The imperial coins, wherever issued, bore for some time the
great king's face as Zeus Ammon; but no imperial cult existed to bring
steadily to men's consciousness the idea that their dead lord had an
honored place among the Olympians. It was not by the will of those who
succeeded to his power, but by the force of historic developments, that
his _acta_ were validated.
His heirs were the Macedonians whom he had recently tried to oust
from their ancestral partnership with him. They were now to be found,
partly in Macedon, partly in detachments throughout the empire, and
partly in Babylon where Alexander had died. Those in Babylon took it
upon themselves to act for the whole people; and what they did was
to establish a regency in the interest of Philip Arrhidæus and the
son whom Roxane was expected to bear, and to concur in the "grab" of
the important western satrapies which was at once made by their chief
officers.
It was they, too, who decided not to proceed with Alexander's ambitious
projects. These, as read to them from his papers,[77] were "to build
in Phoenicia, Syria, Cilicia, and Cyprus one thousand battleships of
the super-trireme pattern for the campaign against the Carthaginians
and the other peoples dwelling on the shores of the Mediterranean from
Libya and Iberia clear round to Sicily; to construct a road along the
coast from Cyrene to the Pillars of Hercules, and prepare harbors and
naval stations at suitable places; to erect six temples at the enormous
cost of $1,890,000 each (fifteen hundred talents); to found cities and
transplant men and women both from Asia into Europe and from Europe
into Asia, thus linking the two greatest continents by understandings
based upon friendly intercourse and by brotherly feeling due to
intermarriages." Alexander, it appeared, had looked upon his work as
only half done: the Macedonians were eager to enjoy the fruits of an
enterprise which they regarded as already finished.
Their sentiment was shared by Ptolemy, son of Lagos, formerly one of
Alexander's aides. He had married a Persian princess at Alexander's
order, but now he deserted her, and, taking his Athenian mistress,
Thais, with him, he went off to Egypt, which had been given to him
as his province. There he established himself securely, governed
with power and sagacity for forty years, and, marrying in succession
two Macedonian princesses, founded a dynasty which gave to Egypt
its last great queen, Cleopatra VI, and prior to her accession, ten
kings,[78] all of whom were named Ptolemy. Between them they reigned
two hundred and seventy-one years; the average length of the reign was
over thirty-two years; several of them were expelled temporarily and
several of them had colleagues, but nine of them died in possession of
the throne. That constitutes a statistical record which it is hard to
parallel in all history.
It would be a fascinating study of human enterprise and human depravity
to trace the careers of these eleven monarchs. But to do so would be to
exhaust the space at my disposal without reaching the special subject
of my essay. It must suffice, therefore, to observe that the history
of the Ptolemies falls into an imperial period of four reigns and
one hundred and twenty years (323-203 B.C.); and a domestic period,
likewise of one hundred and twenty years (200-80 B.C.), in which the
native peoples, encouraged by the weakness of the Ptolemies abroad, and
by a ruinous schism between the military and the civil elements of the
foreign-resident population, gained point after point at the expense
of the dynasty. A third period follows of fifty years' duration, in
which Egypt was at the mercy, not now of the Roman Senate, but of the
all-powerful generals who had dethroned it.
The last king of Egypt, Ptolemy the Piper, a bastard by birth and
instinct, demeaned himself for twenty-eight years (80-52 B.C.); but
by bankrupting his treasury and sacrificing the good opinion of his
countrymen, he managed to transmit a badly tarnished crown to his
famous daughter, then a girl of seventeen years.
Cleopatra VI had an asset of much greater value than the servility and
buffoonery of her father, namely, her personal attractiveness. She
early lost all repugnance against using her physical charms, as well
as her even more notable mental graces, in what, with all our dislike
for the imperial courtesan, we must characterize as her gallant and
patriotic effort to rescue her country from the spoiler, to make the
queen of Egypt the consort instead of the slave of the coming Roman
monarch, to set proud Alexandria beside imperious Rome at the head of
the Mediterranean peoples.
She gave herself to Julius Cæsar; bore him a son; left her kingdom and
joined him in Rome, where Cicero and others paid her court in Cæsar's
gardens, wondering, perhaps, if she was to become their titular queen.
In contemporary documents Cæsar is called "the savior and benefactor
of the inhabitable world"; and during the last year of his life he was
busied with projects of universal empire. He meant to add the districts
not yet Roman to his realm, to subdue the Getæ, the Scythians, and
the Parthians. Why was not Egypt, the richest prize of all, included
in the list of his intended conquests? It was the country which he had
tried over twenty years earlier to secure as his own province. But that
was before he had met Cleopatra. That he left it out of the military
programme on which he was engaged at the time of his murder shows, I
think, that Cleopatra's solution of the Egyptian question was likely to
be his also.
Ten years later Alexandria witnessed an extraordinary spectacle.[79]
On a stage plated with silver two thrones of gold stood, and on them
sat side by side Antony as Dionysus and Cleopatra as Isis. At their
feet sat Cæsarion, Cleopatra's son by Cæsar, and on a level with him
Alexander, her oldest son by Antony, in Persian costume and with the
tiara of the Persian kings. Lower down sat Alexander's twin sister,
Cleopatra Selene, and at her side her younger brother, Philadelphus, in
Macedonian costume and with the headgear of the kings of Macedon. The
significance of the tableau Antony himself explained: Cleopatra, queen
of Egypt, Cyprus, and Coele-Syria, was henceforth 'queen of queens';
her son, Cæsarion, 'king of kings.' Alexander was declared king of
Armenia and of the states lying between the Euphrates and India,
Philadelphus, of Syria and all the lands between the Euphrates and the
Hellespont, Cleopatra Selene, queen of Libya including Cyrene. It was
the restoration of the ancient empire of the Ptolemies, and in Antony
"captured Italy" was symbolized. The Alexandrian siren had regained
what her ancestors had lost; and, had the Roman whom she had enthralled
only proved equal to the task of maintaining his initial ascendency in
Italy, she might, indeed, have fulfilled her boast and administered
justice on the Capitol. But Antony went down to defeat at Actium and
the young Augustus came to Egypt, like the comrades of Ulysses to the
shore of the tempters, with his ears stuffed with wax.
Pascal[80] says: _Le nez de Cléopâtre: s'il eût été plus court, toute
la face de la terre aurait changé._ But Pascal speaks as a philosopher.
He probably did not know that Cleopatra had a prominent nose. He was
certainly ignorant that her death made little or no difference in the
constitutional position of Egypt. In a sense Augustus was simply the
executor of the great queen's policy; for, after his reorganization of
the Roman empire was completed, "it is," as Mommsen[81] says, "quite as
correct to say that the kings of Egypt ruled in Rome as that the prince
of the Roman people reigned in the valley of the Nile." Be that as it
may, the empire of the Ptolemies could not have been recalled from the
past even by the magic of a woman's beauty; for, as we shall see when
we come to look at the second period of its history, the death it had
died was a natural one. It had but experienced the fate to which its
constitution made it prone. It was beset from its birth with incurable
weaknesses.
None the less it made a brave show during the first century of its
existence; and during the reign of its second monarch, Ptolemy
Philadelphus (285-246 B.C.), its capital, Alexandria, was the London
of the ancient world. Its only rival in trade and commerce was its
neighbor to the west, Carthage. The golden age of the Ptolemies
coincides with the one epoch in the history of the world in which
Africa was the leader in business enterprise, in money power, in
naval strength, in luxury, in science, and, till the real test came,
in political prestige and influence. The commercial aristocracy
of Carthage and the enlightened despots of Alexandria had the
Mediterranean divided between them. West of Sicily lay a Carthaginian
lake, into which foreign ships entered at their own peril; east of it,
the chief harbors in the whole circuit from Cyrene to Corcyra, as well
as the islands which lay in the area thus inclosed, the Ptolemies aimed
to secure. Possession of the sea between Egypt and the Græco-Macedonian
world and of the coasts which it washed and the islands which it
surrounded, was the main object of the foreign policy of the early
Ptolemies.
The founder of the dynasty was a brave soldier, but a cautious
general. Again and again he withdrew from Asia before a land attack
and put his main reliance upon the natural defenses of Egypt. He was
no sailor at all; yet he became an admiral, and as the result of three
great maritime expeditions (308-306, 295-294, 288-287 B.C.), he handed
over to his unwarlike son the essential body of the possessions of the
family outside of Egypt. The founder of the dynasty was at the same
time the founder of the empire.
The Solomon of the Ptolemies, Philadelphus, is addressed by
Theocritus,[82] a Sicilian poet who had recently come to Alexandria
looking for a patron, in the following adulatory strains:--
"Lo he hath seen three hundred towns arise,
Three thousand, yea three myriad; and o'er all
He rules, the prince of heroes, Ptolemy.
Claims half Phoenicia, and half Araby,
Syria and Libya, and the Æthiops murk;
Sways the Pamphylian and Cilician braves,
The Lycian and the Carian trained to war,
And all the isles; for never fleet like his
Rode upon ocean: land and sea alike
And sounding rivers hail King Ptolemy."
The hero of these lines had just brought a war against his brother in
Cyrene and his rival in Asia to a successful termination (273 B.C.);
and, except for a probable interval of four years (253-249 B.C.), the
invincible fleet which he then possessed ruled the sea till his death.
But he was anything but a warrior king. During his whole life he never
commanded an army or a fleet in person. Like Augustus Cæsar, with whom
he has been compared, he had a delicate constitution which unfitted him
for the rough and tumble of war. He had a lively intelligence, which
was carefully cultivated, and, like the Emperor Hadrian, an insatiable
thirst for novelties. A new book, an old painting, a strange animal, a
useful invention, alike aroused his curiosity. One amazing woman--his
own sister--swept him from his self-indulgent moorings. She made
herself his wife--as any Egyptian woman might do with her brother--and,
though she was his queen for six years at most (275-270 B.C.), when
she was over forty and he over thirty-two, he followed her policy and
cherished her memory for many long years.
That her _acta_ might not be invalid he had her deified after her
death, and that he might still be her consort, he had himself elevated
at the same time to her side as the first self-constituted god-king
since Alexander.