Travels with Alexander the Great

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Giulio Romano 1499-1546: Alexandre le grand

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Handel set Dryden’s ode Alexander’s Feast to music in 1735 and the work premiered a year later to
great acclaim. Alexander’s Feast recounts Alexander’s susceptibility to the affective power of music. Dryden
combined the legend of Alexander and his flaws with the story of his devious court musician Timotheus to
create a story with a moral twist.

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Alexander’s Feast

Alexander the Great, the son of King Philip, is sitting on a throne in a city in Persia where he is accompanied by a beautiful Thais (courtesan). Along with the other Greek soldiers they are drinking wine while they celebrate their defeat of the Persian Empire. Then enters the musician/soldier Timotheus who begins to play his lyre. The lyre’s beautiful melodies seem to the soldiers to bring god down from heaven. As Timotheus continues to plays his lyre the soldiers consume more and more wine including Alexander.

Because of the music and the wine Alexander has become so drunk that he begins to relive all his battles in his mind which starts to cause him to go slowly go mad. Eventually Alexander begins to relive the death of the Persian king Darius. After the Greeks victory Darius was betrayed and killed by his own men and his body is left in the open. Though Darius had Alexander’s father killed, he was still a king, and no one especially a king should be murdered and his body left out in the dirt with his eyes open which was an act of dishonor to the Greeks. Alexander then begins to cry. Seeing this Timotheus begins to sing a song about love hoping that it will cause Alexander to pull himself together. Instead it only causes him to become so overwhelmed with emotion that he passes out collapses on to Thais.

To prevent Alexander from appearing weak in front of the other Greek soldiers Timotheus begins to sing a rousing song calling for the soldiers to take revenge against the Persians for all the Greek deaths in the battle. This succeeds in waking Alexander; however, he goes in to frenzy and caught in the moment orders his men to burn the city to the ground. Horrified at the chaos, Timotheus tries to play his flute in order to quell the riot but to avail. Eventually St. Cecilia descends from heaven and stops the riot but it’s too late to stop the burning of the city but is able to stop further deaths.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLsv2gAbsNI&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCcDPVUQ9e8&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2frvgXOa5I8&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6-7PmkrFp8

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An indelible scene from the life of Alexander the Great finds the prodigious warrior-king — just 25 years old in 330 B.C. — and his conquering army on a stretch of R&R at Persepolis, one of Persia’s great capitals, now marked out for plunder. During a drunken revel characteristic of the rough Macedonian court, an Athenian woman named Thais, the mistress of one of the high officers present, made a startling suggestion. It would be a fine thing, she said, if with her own hands and with Alexander looking on, she set fire to the palace built by King Xerxes, who a century and a half earlier had reduced her home city to ashes, “that it might be recorded to posterity that the women who followed Alexander had taken a severer revenge on the Persians for the sufferings and affronts of Greece, than all the famed commanders had been able to do by sea or land.”

Swept away by the general enthusiasm, Alexander “started from his seat, and with a chaplet of flowers on his head and a lighted torch in his hand, led them the way, while they went after him in a riotous manner, dancing and making loud cries about the place; which when the rest of the Macedonians perceived, they also in great delight ran thither with torches; for they hoped the burning and destruction of the royal palace was an argument that he looked homeward, and had no design to reside among the barbarians.”

It’s an irresistible story. Certainly Plutarch, who included this description in his masterly biography of Alexander in the second century A.D., couldn’t resist it. But he did scruple to note that not all historians accepted this account of inebriate vandalism. One who didn’t even consider it worthy of mention was Lucius Flavius Arrianus, a younger contemporary of Plutarch better known as Arrian. For him, Alexander’s burning of the palace at Persepolis — then and now a shocking act of destruction — was carefully deliberated public policy, a symbolic seal on an official campaign of vengeance: it was his own idea to pay the Persians back in kind for the burning of the Athenian temples in 479 B.C. and, Arrian wrote, “for all the other wrongs they had committed against the Greeks.”

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(Diod. 17.70.1-73.2) 17.70 (1) Persepolis was the capital of the Persian kingdom. Alexander described it to the Macedonians as the most hateful of the cities of Asia, and gave it over to his soldiers to plunder, all but the palaces. (2) +It was the richest city under the sun and the private houses had been furnished with every sort of wealth over the years. The Macedonians raced into it, slaughtering all the men whom they met and plundering the residences; many of the houses belonged to the common people and were abundantly supplied with furniture and wearing apparel of every kind….

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The first to make a real contribution to the study of the ruins and to identify them as the capital of ancient Persia, was a Dutchman, Cornelis de Bruijn (1652-1727), who visited Persepolis in 1704/1705. He made many beautiful drawings, which he published in 1711 in Reizen over Moskovie, door Persie en Indie. His drawings were long considered as the best representations available, until the first photographers visited the place in the twentieth century.

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Some of the stone columns still show the distinct scorch marks
left from 330 B.C. when Alexander set fire to the city.

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The palace of Xerxes, who had planned and executed the invasion of Greece in 480, received especially brutal treatment in the destruction of the complex. The city lay crushed under the weight of its own ruin (although, for a time, nominally still the capital of the now-defeated Empire) and was lost to time. It became known to residents of the area only as 'the place of the forty columns’ (for the still-remaining columns standing among the wreckage) until, in 1618 CE, the site was identified as Persepolis. In 1931 excavations were begun which revealed the glory which had once been Persepolis.

Years later upon revisiting the city he had burnt, Alexander would regret his action. Plutarch  recounts an anecdote in which Alexander pauses and talks to a fallen statue of Xerxes the Great as if it were a live person:

                                  "Shall I pass by and leave you lying there because of the expeditions you led against Greece,
                                    or shall I set you up again because of your magnanimity and your virtues in other respects?

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Artist's impression of Persepolis, American Museum of Natural History, NY

Other resources:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/36/20101229_Top_panoramic_view_of_Persepolis_Iran.jpg
http://oi.uchicago.edu/museum/collections/pa/persepolis/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aaWCcdevwos
http://www.cais-soas.com/CAIS/Archaeology/Hakhamaneshian/persepolis.htm
http://www.pbase.com/bmcmorrow/persepolis&page=all

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The personal books and manuscripts of England's Medieval kings and queens, dating back to the 9th century, are to go on show at the British Library, shining light for the first time on essential royal reading. They are the "guides to kingship" that advised England's monarchs on everything from who to marry, how to sleep, what to eat and the cure for stomach ache (a hot maiden).

The exhibition will include manuals on royal etiquette known as "mirrors for princes", a genre developed during the medieval period to train monarchs how to effectively rule themselves and ultimately, their realm. They include the Secretum Secretorum (The Secret of Secrets), an adaptation of Aristotle's text written for the ancient Greek king Alexander the Great, presented to a teenage Edward III.

The 152-page manuscript, dating from 1326-1327, was written in Latin and illustrated with exquisite miniatures flecked with gold, each of which would have taken professional scribes up to a week to paint. Given to Edward at the beginning of his reign by the court cleric Walter of Milimete, it was intended as a "guide to better kingship" following the disastrous reign of his father, Edward II, a monarch so unpopular he was deposed in 1327.

On matters of the heart, the manuscript warns: "May you never trust in the works and services of women, and may you not commit yourself to them." However, the text later includes a description of the kind of woman the king should marry: "beautiful in appearance, descended from noble family, well-appointed in limbs, having an agreeable expression and an entire body well-adorned ... you may have a majestic wife ... with whom you may have sex as often as, and when, you wish."

In another passage, he is advised of the best remedy for stomach ache – a "hot maiden": "If you feel a pain or heaviness in your stomach and in your belly then the remedy is to clasp a hot and beautiful maiden or to place upon your belly a wide warm shirt."

http://www.bl.uk/whatson/exhibitions/royalman/index.html
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/theroyalfamily/8857250/Middle-Ages-illuminated-as-Royal-manuscripts-shine-in-new-exhibition.html
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2055338/Medieval-manuscripts-told-Englands-monarchs-king.html
http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digitisedmanuscripts/royal/

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Walter of Milemete commissioned this manuscript as a gift to the future Edward III and a companion
volume to his separate treatise on kingship. The Secret of Secrets, an Arabic compendium of knowledge
for a king, was believed in the Middle Ages to be a work that Aristotle composed for his pupil Alexander
the Great. Here, Alexander receives the book from a messenger who bears on his girdle the heraldic arms
used by Prince Edward as Earl of Chester. In the lower margins, Edward’s arms are accompanied by those
of his father, Edward II, and his two uncles.  

For a visual delight, zoom in on a Christies copy of the Secret of Secrets here:

http://www.christies.com/LotFinder/lot_details.aspx?intObjectID=5138506

Explore further here:

http://www.europeana.eu/portal/record/92037/0147849DE52B44A751DF00C84E5C73EFBC491BCD.html

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Alexander meets the Amazons (from the True History of Good King Alexander).

Another manuscript in the exhibition is the tenth-century Historia de Preliis Alexandri Magni (The History of the Battles of Alexander the Great), which, in turn, was the basis for an anonymous French version, the Vraye ystoire du bon roy Alixandre (The True History of the Good King Alexander).

Medieval accounts of Alexander’s adventures and exploits lend themselves well to illustration. This Royal collection copy of the French Vraye ystoire is particularly splendid, with eighty-six illustrations of Alexander’s adventures.  It was made in Paris in c. 1420-25. At that time, Paris was English territory, following Henry V’s military victories in France and the Treaty of Troyes in 1420, and it was also the unrivalled artistic centre of Europe. The artist of most of the paintings to be found throughout the volume is named after this manuscript – as the Master of the Royal Alexander.
 
As a great general, Alexander was a fitting role model for young princes and kings, particularly during the troubled period of the Hundred Years War, when a ruler’s military prowess was so important.  It is unclear whether this book was intended for a royal owner from the start, although the quantity and sophistication of its illustrations are certainly grand enough. Whoever its original owner might have been, by the mid-sixteenth century it had indeed found a royal home: the added inscription ‘HR’ (Henricus Rex) at the beginning of the book indicates that the volume eventually found its way into the library of Henry VIII.

A series of stunning illlustrations in the manuscript is shown in the following link (scroll down):

http://www.bl.uk/catalogues/illuminatedmanuscripts/record.asp?MSID=6533&CollID=16&NStart=200220