Alexander the Great

After the death of Alexander III in 323 BC, the coinage in his name and with his types continued to be issued by his successors. This posthumous coinage has been the object of various studies and discussions in the past decades because of the important volume of the coinage and also because of the difficulties of the attribution.

The present paper will discuss the posthumous Alexanders that were produced in various city-kingdoms in Cyprus, in Egypt (Memphis and Alexandria) and in Cyrene from 323 down to the end of the fourth century, also in relation to the local autonomous coinages of those areas. The above areas of control of Ptolemy I present a certain interest because the coinage in his own name and image replaced as early as the end of the fourth century the coinage in the name and types of Alexander, while his numismatic policy was particular and unique. In parallel, the paper will address in detail questions of attribution -or reattribution- of series and the circulation of those coinages abroad, based on the hoard evidence.

The present paper examines written sources pertinent to Alexander the Great's expedition in Bactria and Sogdiana. It focuses on the impact of the military campaigns on the local inhabitants in four interconnected fields of human activity (military, political, urban, and administrative) and addresses their responses to the invading army. It argues that Alexander's military activities took place not in Bactria-Sogdiana as a whole, but rather in specific Sogdian territories, inflicting heavy casualties in the process. It proposes that Alexander's decision to appoint Artabazus as satrap disrupted the political status quo, forcing a Sogdian faction to rebel and that his alliance with another local faction was crucial for pacifying the region. Comparing the available textual and archaeological evidence regarding the settlements of Bactria-Sogdiana in the 320s BC it assess that Alexander's city building activity was limited. Lastly, the majority of the local population seems to have accepted the regime change.

The previous and widely held approach to Alexander and Darius III during the Persian campaign was that Alexander was a brilliant and masterful commander—and that Darius was overpowered, and outclassed.  Indeed the Greek history of the campaign would have us believe that Alexander was ahead of Darius every step of the campaign, outwitting Darius and his commanders at every turn of the battle, boldly leading his men at precisely the right moment in the battle.  These accounts are wrong. 
We have in the Astronomical Diaries and Related Texts from Babylonia, as well as from Curtius, Diodorus and Justin, a series of key passages that must force us to reevaluate our previously held conceptions of not only Gaugamela, but of Darius III as well.  This paper will examine several key events that occurred prior to the battle, during the battle and offer  a hypothesis of events that may change our previously held notion of Gaugamela, Alexander, Darius and Battle that led to the fall of Persia as we know it.

The vanishing of the twelve magnificent altars set up by Alexander the Great has intrigued many scholars. This article shows that one of the altars was re-inscribed by Emperor Asoka, who was the Indo-Greek King Diodotus I. There is an indication that Alexander may have tried to promote brotherhood in these altars. It is just possible that the four-lion emblem of India may be linked to Alexander.

İslâmî dönem tercüme faaliyetleri (9. ve 10. asır) kapsamında Aristoteles'e atfedilen siyasete dâir ilk eser Sırru'l-Esrâr'dır. Bu eserin Ortaçağlarda Doğu'da ve Batı'da sıkça başvurulan ve bilinen bir eser olma hüviyetine sahip olmasında Aristoteles'e atfedilmesi ve İskender'e hitaben yazılması önemli bir rol oynamıştır. Ortaçağdaki yaygın kullanımına ve bilinilirliğine rağmen bu kitabın menşei üzerine sorunlar günümüze kadar gelmiştir. Her ne kadar bir sözde-Aristo metni olduğu kesinse de eserin girişindeki diğer iddialar da sorgulanmaya muhtaçtır. Söz konusu kitabın elimizdeki en eski nüshası Arapçadır ve bu nüshada tercümenin Batrîk oğlu Yuhanna tarafından yapıldığı bilgisi bulunur. Eser, Arapçadan sonra Latinceye ve birçok Avrupa lisanına tercüme edilmiş; birçok sultanın ve kralın, Doğu'nun ve Batı'nın devlet idaresi konusunda başucu kitaplarından biri olmuştur. Sırru'l-Esrâr ilgi alanı yalnızca devlet yönetimi olmayan bir siyasetnâmedir. Ele aldığı konular başta devlet yönetimi olmak üzere sırasıyla, ahlâk, devlet memurlarının tayini ve idaresi, savaş taktikleri, tıp, fizyoloji (ilm-i kıyâfet), kimya, astroloji, taşlar ve bitkiler… olmak üzere oldukça geniş bir muhtevaya sahiptir.

If you want to be remembered as “Great” it helps to be the child of a king, whether your name is Alfred, or Catherine, or ….Alexander.

It also helps to fight victorious wars.  History’s losers seldom get to be called “Great”

And it helps to be Rich.  Alexander’s father, king Philip II of Macedon was the richest man in Greece, thanks to the gold mines of Mt. Pangaion, and he left Alexander the best trained and equipped army in the world.

This is the script for my podcast, which is online at:
https://coinweek.com/coinweek-podcast/coinweek-podcast-140-what-made-alexander-great/

The pseudo-Aristotelian Hermetica (hereafter PsAH) are a group of texts surviving in Arabic that claim to record conversations between Aristotle and Alexander the Great. In these conversations, Aristotle instructs Alexander about the cosmos, the comingto-be of everything in it, and astral magic-more precisely, talismanry, rituals for attracting the spiritual and planetary forces of the cosmos, the creation of amulets, and extensive astrological rules. The purpose of the instruction is to support Alexander's military career and personal life. Aristotle claims to have received this knowledge from Hermes Trismegistus. There are very few studies dedicated to these fascinating and influential texts; therefore, this article offers a preliminary study of the PsAH that introduces the texts and their contexts systematically.

This article proposes a function for the dates in the Behistun inscription of Darius I: that alongside its telling of an authorised story of righteous accession it made possible, and perhaps even established, a calendar of historical commemoration. The article makes observations about DB’s internal chronography – its synchronisation of the Persian and Babylonian calendars, the function of its single-year container for the battles’ day-month dates, and the stability, panimperial distribution, and continued availability of this information; it establishes parallels for annual victory calendars in Mesopotamia and Judea; and it identifies good, if infrequent, testimony to an Achaemenid concern with the institution of anniversary celebrations and battle commemorations.

A close reading of Amir Khusrau's Persian-language Alexander Romance titled "Aina-ye Eskandari", in the footsteps of A.M. Piemontese and M. Casari. Focus on Alexander's representation as a scientist-king in Khusrau's narration of the underwater expedition.

In Communal Creativity in the Making of the ‘Beowulf’ Manuscript, Simon Thomson analyses details of scribal activity to tell a story about the project that preserved Beowulf as one of a collective, if error-strewn, endeavour and arguing for a date in Cnut’s reign. He presents evidence for the use of more than three exemplars and at least two artists as well as two scribes, making this an intentional and creative re-presentation uniting literature religious and heroic, in poetry and in prose.

He goes on to set it in the broader context of manuscript production in late Anglo-Saxon England as one example among many of communities using old literature in new ways, and of scribes working together, making mistakes, and learning.

The visual devices used by Tony Blair and George Bush to get themselves elected and maintain power, come not from modern times, but a world that is thousands of years old. How Art Made the World ventures back to the creation of Stonehenge and the reign of Alexander the Great to reveal how imagery became an indispensable weapon in every leader's political armoury.

This episode explores how art can be used as a persuasion device by those in power and when did we learn to use images, to create a powerful icon or symbol, this way?

The use of art as a tool for those in power, started at different times, in different cultures. Near Stonehenge the grave of the Amesbury Archer was discovered in 2002, the grave was different to those previously found near the site, as this one was not Roman, but much earlier, dating to when the first sarsen stones were erected. What made him interesting were his gold hair tresses, possibly the oldest dated gold objects in Britain, and the fact that he was a foreigner, from the region that is now Germany / Switzerland. The archer had completed an epic journey for the time, and the treasures in his grave show a man of status. Art for personal adornment, like these hair clasps, elevated him above his peers.

As time progressed, art became a political tool, kings competed for more dazzling adornments. As kingdoms got bigger the kings had to overcome communication issues. Darius the Great of Persia, ruled over 20 nations from Persepolis. As very few people could read, Darius had stone reliefs created that combined styles from all over the empire, the carvings showed each nation bring tributes to their king. This showed respect, and the carvings communicated that Darius admired and respected his people. Darius created a symbol for himself, that of the archer, symbolic to Persians of leadership and wisdom, central to the concept of kingship. Darius embossed this symbol on gold coins, which became the currency to trade within the empire.

Darius’ conqueror, Alexander the Great, took this concept further. From an early age, Alexander’s image was being made for him. In his fathers tomb, an Ivory head recognisable as Alexander’s was found, showing that his image had been made for him in advance of him becoming king. In Pompeii, a copy of an original Macedonian painting, shows Alexander the Great, fearless, fixated on his enemy and leading from the front. He is in the midst of battle with king Darius, shown fearful and panicking. Where Darius had used a symbol to communicate his power, Alexander used his face. On defeating the Persians, Alexander melted down all their coins replacing them with coins bearing his head. Tests have shown that people are more influenced by the image of the head and this technique has endured 2500 years and still used today.

This artistic power can be used for sinister purposes, to persuade us to see things a certain way or even deceive us. The earliest known use of this dates back to the Romans. In 40BC Rome was in crisis, the city state was split between royalists and republicans. You could tell people’s political allegiance by how they dressed. Octavian (Augustus) understood the power of art and used it to his advantage. He needed to persuade his opponents ,and used artists to create a less threatening image, one that won over the republicans. Although the image showed him as a powerful general, it didn’t show any military arms, and his gestures were more about humility than power. His armour breast plates show him accepting surrender of the Parthian Empire, with the gods looking on approvingly. The statue offered reassurance, but it was all a lie. While he portrayed himself as a peace maker, he was getting rid of the opposition; while he was preaching humility, he lived like corrupt royalty and while pretending to hand power to the people he reinstated himself as a king.

The leaders of past used paint and marble, today we use digital manipulation. But as humans we still remain vulnerable to the persuasive power of art.

This paper (in Dutch) places Alexander's universalism in the context of the tradition of universal empire that was current in the Ancient Near East. It is argued that Alexander's pothos, especially his urge to reach the edges of the earth and "to go where no man has gone before", was a Greco-Macedonian rendering of a rather genuine, and age-old, ideology of empire: the claim to world unity in a single, peaceful empire protected by a single benevolent emperor. Tarn may have been right after all when he postulated that Alexander aimed at creating a "Unity of Mankind", as this was indeed a central notion in the contemporaneous Macedonian ideology and propaganda of empire.

Il libro illustra la ricezione della figura di Alessandro Magno in Italia dalla fine dell’età antica all’Umanesimo compreso, concentrandosi in particolare sulla cultura ferrarese quattrocentesca da Leonello a Ercole I d’Este e propone inoltre l’edizione critica e commentata della traduzione latina di Niccolò Perotti e del volgarizzamento di Ludovico Sandeo di un opuscolo morale di Plutarco, il De fortuna aut virtute Alexandri Magni.

This brief chapter looks at the way Alexander deployed his forces for the battle of Gaugamela, with particular attention to the way Alexander marched his army obliquely across the battlefield, and the significance of that action.
This is quite a brief chapter but includes a number of diagrams to illustrate the Macedonian deployment.

The increasing influence in the governmental matters of the Macedonian and Epirote Royal Women during the 4th centyry BC is obvious acccording to the ancient sources. Most of the examples are found in the authors' written testimony. However, we have some archeological evidence that complement the words of Diodorus, Plutarch, Arrian or Curtius. In the present paper we want to show one of the epigraphical documents in wich those women appear and demonstrate from it how the increasing presence of Royal Women in the documents is explained by a bigger power in the Macedonian and Epirote Court. For that purpose we focus our attention on the examples of two women: Olympias and Cleopatra, Alexander the Great's mother and sister, doing a preliminary review about the Royal Women's role before them.

copyright : Alexandros TZIOLAS
Ο Μέγας ΑΛΕΞΑΝΔΡΟΣ στην πορεία του προς την Σογδιανή !
Διηγήματα των Ουζμπέκων : (Σογδιανή - Βακτριανή) για τον Μέγα Αλέξανδρο -
Τασκένδη 1974 : Έκδοση στα Ρώσικα
1η ΠΑΓΚΟΣΜΙΑ ΔΗΜΟΣΙΕΥΣΗ στα Ελληνικά, copyright.

In recent years the studies dedicated to famous women in Greek and Roman ages have been enriched by the volumes of Lorenzo Braccesi, who proposed new detailed analysis on some eminent females in ancient Greece and in the Roman Empire. Among these figures the mother of Alexander the Great, Olimpias, represents the subject of the last book titled Olimpiade, regina di Macedonia. La madre di Alessandro Magno, Salerno Editrice, Roma 2019. The review aims at highlighting some aspects discussed in the volume by Braccesi, who drives the reader to discover the role of Olimpias in the national and international dynamics during the kingdom of her husband, Filippo II, and of her son Alexander the Great.

ABSTRACT: Considering the controversial image of Alexander the Great that we receive via the texts of antiquity, it should not surprise that his representation in the movies be also very much varied and complex. The most ancient and least known of the films about him is Sikandar (1941, India) by Sohrab Modi, an interesting work not only because the characters are portrayed from the perspective of the defeated, but by the meaningful presence of Aristotle and Roxane. Later on, his story was screened in Alexander the Great (1956), by Robert Rossen, and Alexander (2004) by Oliver Stone. My objective in this article is to analyze some aspects of these three films comparatively, focusing on the images of Aristotle, in order to understand how the presence of this philosopher is portrayed and aligned to the construction of the Macedonian king´s image
KEYWORDS: Alexander; Aristotle; Reception Studies; Cinema.
https://revista.classica.org.br/classica/issue/view/47/showToc

Book review of:
The Legitimation of Conquest
Monarchical Representation and the Art of Government in the Empire of Alexander the Great
by Kai Trampedach & Alexander Meeus (editors)
ISBN: 978-3515127813, 363 pages
Franz Steiner Verlag, 2020

Contributors: Alexander Meeus, Andrew Monson, Christian Mann, Hans-Joachim Gehrke, Kai Trampedach, Manuela Mari, Matthias Haake, Maurizio Giangiulio, Maxim M. Kholod, Michael Jursa, Michele Faraguna, Ralf von den Hoff, Shane Wallace, Tonio Hölscher, Wilhelm Köhler

This paper was delivered at CAMWS in March 2015 for the 600th anniversary of the Battle of Agincourt at which Henry V trounced the French much like Alexander at Issus (for Harfleur consider Tyre).  I had started the paper thinking Tacitus was a role model for Shakespeare with a comparison between Henry V and Germanicus, while though true, is less of a recollection to the audience than Henry to Alexander (from mixed sources:  Alexander Romance, Plutarch, Quintus Curtius Rufus, etc).  I invote others to comment further.  This paper is not the exact version I gave at CAMWS which included sound bites from Branagh's Henry V (now better know than the Olivier version) and some powerpoint pictures.