Travels with Alexander the Great

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The Triumph of Alexander the Great - Italian Early Renaissance : Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries
- Los Angeles County Museum of Art

For glorious close-up views click here (then click boxes above the painting to view the various segments):

http://worldvisitguide.com/oeuvre/photo_ME0000103521.html

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No Alexander – no Islamic civilisation?



Folio from a Shahnama (Book of Kings) by Firdawsi (d.1020); Recto: The bier of Iskandar

Carl Heinrich Becker was a prominent German orientalist and politician and one of the founders of the study of the contemporary Middle East. Becker noted that all the lands taken over by the Muslims in the seventh century, which were for long to be the core of the Islamic empire, had been affected by the classical art of Greece and Rome in its widest sense. He put his view succinctly: ‘Without Alexander the Great there would not have been a unified Islamic civilization'."

Maria Todorova  writes:

“German historian Carl Becker refutes the attempts to depict Islam as a product of the desert, as being purely an outgrowth of Arab culture. He shows its genealogy from Christianity and Judaism, its Aramaic, Greek and Persian roots, and persuasively argues that “Islamic civilization” was possible only because it was grafted onto a pre-existing civilization: the Hellenistic Near East. …
“Commenting on the constant clashes between Greece and Persia, and the subsequent conquests of Alexander the Great, he simply stated that ‘the borders between East and West were becoming increasingly less defined’.”

The historical argument is complex. Those interested can read on here:

http://www.iwm.at/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=365&Itemid=231

http://silenceisloud.com/caliphate/144-the-rise-of-islam-and-the-artistic-climate-of-the-period-part-3.html

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Professor of Classics at Cambridge, literary journalist and TV presenter, Mary Beard has several professional modes, but all favour what she calls a ‘bottom-up’ approach to her subject. Writing about Ancient Rome, for instance, she focuses less on the palaces and pavilions of the mighty than on the bars and bordellos of the meek. More generally, she challenges orthodoxy, with often exhilarating results.

In her chapter on Boadicea, she mentions the account in which it was the British queen’s flogging by Romans that prompted her revenge. But she also gives space to Cassius Dio’s version, whereby the rebellion was caused by economic crisis. According to Dio, Boadicea’s soldiers cut off the breasts of Roman women and sewed them into their mouths. Why? So they’d look as if they were eating them. ‘Even the most glamorous rebels,’ Beard concludes, ‘are just as unappealing, under the surface, as the imperialist tyrants themselves.’

Yet in her world view, tyrants too deserve a rational appraisal. When Caligula made his horse consul, she says, it wasn’t necessarily madness. He may have been making a satirical point, implying his horse could do as good a job as the asses surrounding him.

Alexander the Great comes off less well — as a drunken, psychotic child. Some have called this verdict anachronistic, reflecting Beard’s modern mindset, but as she points out, it can’t entirely be dismissed as such, when one reflects that a similar view was expressed by Lucan*, for one. ‘It is, of course, a general rule,’ she remarks, ‘that historians accuse each other of making anachronistic judgments only when they do not share the judgment concerned.’

It might equally be noted, of course, that when an author writes ‘of course’, it’s usually because they’re about to make a rash generalisation.

http://www.spectator.co.uk/books/8867641/the-bottom-up-approach/

* See next post.

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Marcus Annaeus Lucanus (November 3, 39 AD – April 30, 65 AD), better known in English as Lucan, was a Roman poet, born in  Córdoba.  Despite his short life, he is regarded as one of the outstanding figures of the Imperial Latin period. His Pharsalia (aka de Bello Civile or On the Civil War) recounts the war between Julius Caesar, seen as a tyrant threatening the Republic, and the forces of the Roman Senate led by Pompey the Great. The poem's title is a reference to the Battle of Pharsalus, which occurred in 48 BC, near Pharsalus, Thessaly, in northern Greece in which Caesar decisively defeated Pompey.

The Pharsalia is seen as a narrative of disillusionment and despair as Rome is torn apart in civil war. Events throughout the poem are described in terms of insanity and sacrilege. Most of the main characters are terribly flawed and unattractive; Caesar is cruel and vindictive, while Pompey is ineffective and uninspiring. Far from glorious, the battle scenes are portraits of bloody horror, where nature is ravaged to build terrible siege engines and wild animals tear mercilessly at the flesh of the dead (perhaps reflecting the taste of an audience accustomed to the bloodlust of gladiatorial games).

Lucan's sour account of Alexander the Great in Book Ten of the Pharsalia should be regarded in this context.

FROM LUCAN‘S PHARSALIA.
Translated by Rowe
Book X.

ALEXANDER THE GREAT.

HERE the vain youth, who made the world his prize,
That prosperous robber, Alexander lies:
When pitying death, at length, had freed mankind,
To sacred rest his bones were here consign’d’;
His bones, that better had been toss’d and hurl’d,
With just contempt, around the injur’d world.
But fortune spar’d the dead; and partial fate,
For ages, fix’d his Pharian empire’s date. *
If e’er our long-lost liberty return,
That carcass is reserv’d for public scorn:
Now, it remains a monument confest,
How one proud man could lord it o’er the rest.
To Macedon, a corner of the earth,
The vast ambitious spoiler ow’d his birth:
There, soon, he scorn’d his father’s humblest reign,
And view’d his vanquish’d Athens with disdain.
Driven headlong on, by fate’s resistless force,
Through Asia’s realms he took his dreadful course:
His ruthless sword laid human nature waste,
And desolation follow’d where he pass’d.
Red Ganges blush’d, and fam’d Euphrates’ flood,
With Persian this, and that with Indian blood.
Such is the bolt which angry Jove employs,
When, undistinguishing, his wrath destroys:
Such to mankind, portentous meteors rise,
When, undistinguishing his wrath destroys:
Such to mankind, portentous meteors rise,
Trouble the gazing earth, and blast the skies.
Nor flame, nor flood, his restless rage withstand,
Nor Syrts unfaithful, nor the Libyan sand:
O’er waves unknown he meditates his way,
And seeks the boundless empire of the sea;
E’en to the utmost west he would have gone,
Where Tethys’ lap receives the setting sun;
Around each pole his circuit would have made,
And drunk from secret Nile’s remotest head,
When Nature’s hand his wild ambition stay’d;
With him, that power his pride had lov’d so well,
His monstrous, universal empire, fell:
No heir, no just successor left behind,
Eternal wars he to his friends assign’d,
To tear the world, and scramble for mankind.

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Statue of Philip II, father of Alexander the Great in Bitola, one of the oldest cities on the territory in the Republic of Macedonia. It was founded by Phillip as Heraclea Lyncestis in the middle of the 4th century BC. 

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The 8th International Alexander the Great Marathon took place in Thessaloniki on Sunday 21 April with a very large turnout. Many of the more than 12,500 runners wore black wristbands with the slogan "Thessaloniki to Boston" and patches asking "Why?" Ethiopia's Metaferia Teklu Geto won the marathon for the second consecutive year, with another Ethiopian, Tefera Dedas Abate placing second and Greece's Antonis Papadimitriou placing third.

The ATG Marathon is the second largest sporting event in Greece, after the Athens Classic Marathon. The 42km route, begins at the statue of ATG in his birthplace, Pella, the capital of ancient Macedonia. The finish line is at the White Tower located in Thessaloniki’s seafront.

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