#onesicritus

Alexander and Propaganda

Well, I suspect all of them had some useful history embedded, but I reckon Onesikritos is the most notorious for writing nonsense recognized as nonsense in his own time. He reputedly cracked up Lysimachos with his account of the Amazon Queen. He seems generally to be regarded as a boaster. He certainly inflated his own place in the campaign.

Ephippos of Olynthos is almost certainly guilty of negative propaganda, although we have so little of it (reliably attributed to him), it's hard to tell a lot. He didn't like Alexander (or Hephaistion), apparently.

Pompeius Trogus (on which Justin's account is based) was also highly problematic (and negative), not unlike Theopompos of Chios, writing about ATG's father Philip. This is one reason (of several) that Justin simply can't be relied on unless it backs up something found elsewhere ... which is super-annoying as some things are found ONLY in Justin. But is he making shit up?

Last, I want to mention Kallisthenes, Alexander's own court historian. It would be LOVELY to have Kallisthenes in full, even if it cut off in Baktria ('cause he was arrested!). Yet as the official account, I think we can tag it as propaganda in at least some places. He wrote some nonsense to flatter Alexander, such as the waves of the Aegean bowing to the king at one point. 🙄 He's also the one who did the most to promote Alexander as the son of Ammon.

BUT it would be great to have him because there's probably quite a lot of useful detail embedded in the account thanks to access to official records. We'd have to be careful of some exaggeration (especially in enemy numbers and enemy dead, et al.) but it would still be info much closer to the source than anything we've got now. So yes, definitely propaganda, but I'd still like to have it.

(This doesn't address later, Roman accounts who used him for moral lessons, like Lucian of Samosata and Seneca the Elder. What they're writing is akin to modern preachers telling parable anecdotes in sermons, and about as divorced from history. After all, a good parable can be TRUE without being, you know, historically accurate.)

Alexander's Purported Affairs (Kleophais, et al.)

This isn’t about whether he would/could have slept with these women—of course he could—but whether these events even occurred, or these women existed. THAT’S the problem/question.

You bring up Thaelestris, Queen of the Amazons. But the Thaelestris episode never happened. There’s a funny story of Onesikritos reading his history of Alexander for King Lysimachos of Thrace, many years after ATG died. Lysimachos, of course, was one of Alexander’s close friends/advisors. When Onesikritos got to the story of the Amazons, Lysimachos broke up laughing and asked, “Where was I when this happened?” (Plut. Alex. 46, for a breakdown of the episode and why he and others dismiss it. Onesikritos was recognized even in antiquity as full of shit; he lied about a lot of things, including his own importance in the campaign.)

There was no incident with the Amazons. It’s fiction. And it’s stories like that one which caused earlier generations of historians to distrust the vulgate altogether. If we can hardly jettison all the vulgate, or accept all of Arrian (or Plutarch), episodes like Alexander’s dalliance with the Amazon queen are pretty easy to tag as fabrication—recognized as such even in antiquity.

The incident with Kleophis is, perhaps, less clearly fiction. There was probably such a person. The problem with the story is the mismatch between the atrocious things Alexander did to her people, and her (supposed) behavior towards him afterwards. Not only did he kill her son, albeit in combat, but when the warriors and people of the city of Masaga surrendered, he promised to let them leave…then surrounded and butchered them all once they’d done so. As they were screaming in protest, he said he’d only promised they could leave peacefully, not that he’d let them live afterwards. It’s one of the most inhumane, deceptive things in his entire campaign, made perhaps worse when compared to his earlier treatment of suppliants. If we see glimpses of that brutality from Alexander after Thebes, Granikos (Greek mercenaries), Tyre, the Branchidai...treatment of Porus after the Battle of the Hydaspes aside, Alexander’s march through Pakistan and India was over-the-top horrific.