Part 17

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. "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. 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:

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, 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, 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. 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.