#perdikkas

First part - Mydei mistakes five times Phainon with some of their past friends, breaking the heart of the poor hero. Based in the ending of 3.3

Second part- Happy ending inspired in the finale of 3.4 / cycle of 3.5 (Mydei's family is alive blablabla) Mydei wants to reconciliate with Phainon after he brokes his heart but his past friends are now with him and they pretty dislike Phainon so much ~~

Did Alexander say, “To the strongest” or “To Krateros”?

From the first time I saw this suggested, I’ve believed Alexander was conveniently “misheard” with the excuse that his voice was practically nothing at that point. Or essentially, they were reading his lips. We’re told he couldn’t speak anymore at the end.

In Greek, “the strongest” would be Kratistos.

Which is damn close to Krateros.

Who was conveniently not there to fight for his rights.

Hmmm.

Now, that assumes he said anything at all, or was even asked. Because yes, the other obvious interpretation of the famous reply is that he predicted his own funeral games. Drama!

Also in favor of his not having said anything, aside from the fact we’re told he no longer had a voice, is that he supposedly gave his seal ring to Perdikkas. Did Perdikkas maneuver that? Maybe. But after Hephaistion’s death, Perdikkas was essentially raised to Hephaistion’s position, even if he didn’t get the title along with it.

So, I don’t find it impossible that Alexander was never asked anything, or that he preempted the ask by awarding the seal to Perdikkas. Of his age-mates, Perdikkas had risen to command positions the earliest, either through birth or competence—or both.* He very well might have been the son of the Prince of Orestis (a man named Orontes), which was an independent kingdom before Philip absorbed it.

Now, Krateros was also (we think) from Orestis, but his father was Alexandros. Again, we assume that he and Perdikkas were cousins at some remove, but Perdikkas appears to have been the higher-born. Or that’s Waldemar Heckel’s take. I’m only just getting into that this summer (it’s on my list) to look at the evidence myself and decide if I agree on the prosopography. That said, Waldemar has a Rolodex in his head of who’s related to whom, so while I don’t always concur with his conclusions, I do far more often than I don’t—especially for stuff like this.

Either way, with the earlier execution of Alexander of Lynkestis, Perdikkas was (probably) one of the highest born Macedonian nobles at court after ATG himself and Arrhidaios. Leonnatos (Lynkestis), Neoptolemos (Epiros), and Harpalos and Derdas (Elimeia) were a few more. Ptolemy too (Eordaia).

So I’d say there’s a very good chance Alexander was never asked, and if he was asked, an even better chance he actually said “Krateros”—which annoyed the fuck out of Krateros’s royal cousin enough to change it to “Kratistos.” 😉 Even if Alexander recognized the “misunderstanding” as it happened, he was past being able to jump out of bed and correct him. LOL

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Based on the post by @i-bring-crack I rotated it too much in my head and now it's cooked into an actual plot post. Anyway read Mydei's crash landing and him meeting the five dumbasses of the Kremnoan Detachment. Additional notes are at the bottom of the post. Also after cross posting it I found out this is 3000 words long I did not expect that. Content warnings: Death and resurrection, Swearing

What Color Were Alexander’s Eyes and Hair?

Combining with another ask…

Hello Dr. Reames! Quick question, I got into an argument with someone online that accused me of trying to "Nordicize" Alexander when I posted my fanart of him from Dancing with the Lion (i.e. strawberry blond with blue eyes) but I'm just curious, how do we know that for certain? I mean, doesn't the hunt fresco from tomb II at Vergina in northern Greece portray Alexander with brown eyes and hair? And doesn't the Alexander sarcophagus portray him as having brown eyes along with his red-brown hair, or do you think the brown eyes is a base paint maybe? Anyway, I'd love to hear from you! You're just as great as Mary Beard!

For some reason, this is a wildly popular question. LOL

I’m doing both these queries at once, as they came in almost back-to-back and are closely related.

And thanks for the compliment, re: Mary Beard. 😊 That’s high praise indeed.

So, I took a look at Wikipedia to see what the footnotes (if any) said, wondering where that information originally came from: an exhibit called Gods in Color. Fortunately for me, the person scanned the page from the exhibition catalogue and made it available. The Wikipedia author also notes the Akropolis Head (from Athens) had a yellow-y base coat for his hair. The newer reconstruction of the frieze on Tomb II does indeed show Alexander's hair as a medium brown, although it’s a reconstruction of a badly deteriorated painting. That said, the techniques they used to pull out the colors are really super-cool, so it could be entirely accurate.

I want to note four things before digging in.

First, there’s been a shift lately in answers to this question. Once, Alexander was popularly considered blond/blue-eyed with arguments to the contrary dismissed. These days, perhaps in a deliberate kick back at “Nordicism,” the reverse is true (as the second asker found). He had brown hair and eyes because…Mediterranean! I’ve also increasingly heard it from Greeks who want him to look more like modern Greeks, ignoring the fact Greece has been a crossroads of cultures and peoples since the Bronze Age.

While without question modern Greeks are DNA-linked to ancient Greeks, there's also been an in-flow of various other ethnicities, depending on where. The islands [and which islands!] are different from the north (and northeast and northwest differ!). Cyprus is its own puzzle, as is Crete. Even the Peloponnese and the mainland are different.

So, in short, we can’t necessarily expect Alexander to match the coloring of modern Greeks. The various pebble mosaics from Pella would suggest otherwise. Several of these figures, not just Alexander, are dirty-blond/redheads. This is not just digital or screen settings; I’ve seen these mosaics in person.

Is that reddish color simply the pebbles fading? Or the “color palette” of the artist? Possibly, as the hair color of the figures in each mosaic matches. Yet there are brown pebbles in the mosaics, so it would've been perfectly possible to give these figures matching brown hair instead of matching reddish-blond. We have paintings from Macedonian tombs where we find both lighter- and darker-haired people. Then there are the nicknames. Kleitos Melas (the Black) and a Kleitos Leukos (the White). With our modern obsession with skin-color, I’ve seen people occasionally mistake this to indicate Kleitos Melas was a Black man. No, he had dark hair (melas = dark). Kleitos Leukos (leukos = light) was blond/light-haired.

Second, we in the modern world have a bit of an obsession with eye and hair color. The ancients… didn’t. This is why, for instance, Plutarch’s rather extensive description of Alexander’s appearance (Alex. 4) doesn’t give us anything about his hair or eye color. The most we get is that his complexion was “ruddy-fair,” leaning more to ruddy on the chest.

Furthermore, ancient Greek had fewer words for colors. The term used for blue eyes can also indicate gray or green. And we have a translation problem. “Gray-eyed” Athena is modern. Greek says γλαυκῶπις (glaukōpis) which means BRIGHT, not gray. E.g., her eyes seem to catch the light and flash. Yes, pale gray eyes do that, but so do pale blue or pale green. It’s really denoting her ability to perceive: a characteristic associated with, oh, I don’t know, wisdom. 😉

The Greeks seemed more concerned with levels of brightness than color. We find this frequently in their poetry. So, a “wine-dark” sea doesn’t mean the sea is red (or their wine was blue… yes, some have seriously tried to propose that). It means the sea is DARK, obscuring, like wine in a cup.

They just don’t seem to care as much about the color of things, but with shade, brightness, and tint. So rather than have fine(r) distinctions for colors: baby blue, royal blue, navy blue, etc. They talk about darkness and lightness for an entire HUE, or color family. That’s really what their “color” terms are. Interesting, no?

Third, we have two chief specialists on Alexander’s image. First, Andrew Stewart, who wrote Faces of Power: Alexander’s Image and Hellenistic Politics (1993), for the Anglophones, and who the Wiki article mentions. Then Paolo Moreno, who wrote Alessandro Magno: Immagini come Storia (2004), for the Italian-speakers. Both are simply MASSIVE books, with lots of plates. If you are serious about Alexander’s image, read them. The two don’t always agree, but both are just hugely respected art historians and archaeologists. Both books are pricey due to the image plates, so perhaps get friendly with this thing called “interlibrary loan,” if you’re not already familiar.

Stewart describes Alexander’s physical appearance in several places, but most notably p. 72ff, where he discusses three ancient traditions. He says, “modern investigators habitually conflate these three traditions, or (worse) select only those elements from them that fit their own preconceptions.” These three are: 1) contemporary observations, 2) Aristotelian physiognomic analysis, and 3) later (imperial era) the idealizing “paradigm of the romantically handsome prince,” and he names Arrian, Appian, and Apuleius as the chief perpetuators (73). The Blenheim Alexander, originally from Herculaneum, shows it.

Stewart summarizes his appearance, and I’ll quote him at length, as it’s useful:

Taken together, the two early traditions are not particularly flattering. Alexander was neither tall nor tanned; his neck apparently drooped and was twisted slightly towards his left shoulder, and he held his head high, tending to look upwards; he was clean-shaven; he had a loud, harsh voice; his eyes were limpid and melting; his brow was fierce; his hair formed a cowlick (anastolē) above it; and there was something altogether scary in his countenance. This is very far from the romantic crusader of the Roman imperial writers, the nineteenth-century biographers, and their latter-day followers such as Mary Renault: closer to the aptly named Alex of A Clockwork Orange or even to Sid Vicious than to a Prince Valiant! Only Lysippos was able to render these quirks (voice excluded) without diminishing Alexander’s kingly aretē—his virile and leonine nature. Lysippos’s task was not easy, for although a head held high and a loud voice were unmistakable signs of strutting masculinity, white skin, melting eyes, a smooth chin, and a drooping neck signaled exactly the opposite. Whatever this strange and somewhat uncanny fusion of masculine and feminine many have contributed to his electrifying charisma, it certainly fascinated and perplexed his contemporaries—his court artists in particular. (73-74, I suggest finding and reading this entire section, as it tells a lot about ancient assumptions, as well as Alexander’s possible goals with regard to his youthful appearance. Stewart adds, later….) To Alexander, the sarcasms of the Greeks were of no great importance. It was Macedonian opinion that counted, and in Macedon, the ancient traditions of heroic kingship were thriving still. (75)

All this is also why, in the novels, I have Hephaistion observe that only a flatterer would call Alexandros handsome. LOL

But also notice, in all the ancient hoopla about Alexander’s appearance… nary a mention of his hair or eye color.

Both Stewart and Moreno discuss the sarcophagus (Stewart, 294-306; Moreno, 227-32), but don’t really discuss eye- or hair-color there. There's also a Wikipedia article on the sarcophagus itself, which delves into the dispute over who it was FOR (Abdalonymos—bulk of scholars, Mazaeus—Heckel). And if I am not always a fan of Wikipedia, I thought this entry was better than average.

Fourth, when it comes to ancient statues, what we’re usually able to determine is the under- or base coat. (The second asker alludes to this, in fact.) When you see an ancient sculpture recolored, such as was done for the Alexander sarcophagus (images below), they tend to look a bit glaring—as if meant for a children’s display. I suspect this is (one) reason some fight so hard against the (absolutely proven) fact these statues weren’t white. Yes, racism is some of it, but TBH, the first time I saw one of these re-colorings, my reaction was “Eeew!” So, if one grew up on their beauty in white marble, seeing them painted can be a turn-off.

BUT that’s not what they actually looked like, any more than pure white is.

If we consider ancient Greek painting (mostly preserved today in tomb frescos), we see the Greeks had a fine sense of shading and tint. (Below, the Rape of Persephone from Royal Tomb I at Vergina.) THAT is what their sculptures would have looked like! Not Adventures with a Color Wheel for Kindergartners. It’s just that all we can really recover for sure is the base color that seeped into the marble/stone. Of course, the painter would then have finished it far more lifelike. (Note also that the figures here have reddish hair too, but as they're gods, I'm not taking it as indicative of Macedonians, and the paint has faded; the original was probably lighter brown.)

Now, finally getting to the question about the Alexander Sarcophagus….

We have a blessing of a sort: descriptions of the sculptures when the tomb was first opened, before fresh air got in there and oxidized the paint. His hair was described as reddish. I don’t recall that description specifying chestnut (which I think of as medium brown). Anyway, I found it quite plausible, as that matches Plutarch’s “ruddy-fair” complexion. (This recounting of the opening might come from Olga Palagia but I don't rightly remember.) Incidentally, while they had photography then (1887), it was still very much black-and-white. ☹

With redheads, eye color varies, but brown eyes are, in fact, more common. So Alexander very well could have had brown eyes and still been a ginger (or auburn). I chose to make his eyes blue in the novels simply because I wanted to play with the (very late and almost certainly invented) heterochromic eye-color tradition, but in a new way, giving him one expanded pupil. That would be more dramatic if his eyes were blue. Yet I don’t consider it at all implausible that his eyes were brown.

Now, here’s another potential fly in the ointment. Is the (Greek) figure on horseback on the lion-hunt long side of the sarcophagus actually Alexander? Alternative identities have been proposed (depending on when this hunt supposedly took place).

Also, to muddle the waters even further, identification of whom the sarcophagus belonged to has been questioned—although tbh, I think the arguments for Abdalonymos are sounder than Heckel’s suggestion of Mardonius. But back to the hunt. If the tomb were Abdalonymos’s, the Greek man riding to his rescue could also have been Perdikkas, or even Demetrios Poliorketes (Antigonos’s son). Alternatively, people have proposed Hephaistion, as the face isn’t particularly individuated in quite the same way as the lion-helmed rider on the battle side. If the figure on the pediment of one side, being executed by other Macedonian soldiers, is Perdikkas—which I find quite likely—his hair is also reddish.

So in short, if that’s Demetrios or Perdikkas, and not Alexander, the hair color (and eye-color) is a red herring. Alas, we can’t see (much of) Alexander’s hair under the lion-head helmet. Also, red can sometimes be a base color for brown--as with those eyes. No, he's not a vampire. Several figures on the sarcophagus have "red" eyes, both Persians and Greeks.

That brings us back around to the Pella mosaics, where in at least one, Alexander’s identity is about 98% certain: the Lion Hunt Mosaic from the House of Dionysos—a local copy of the famous bronze group commissioned by Krateros’s son (also a Krateros) for Delphi. Such copies in other mediums weren’t uncommon. The mosaic, however, has only the two chief figures: Alexander and Krateros. Both are what I’d call reddish/dark blond/light brown haired.

The Stag Hunt Mosaic (from the House of the Rape of Persephone) also has sometimes been identified as Alexander (and Hephaistion), but there’s not, imo, a good reason for that aside from the petasos flying off the head of the Alexander figure, linked by some to the petasos-sporting Alexander in the Lion Hunt Mosaic. Yet these mosaics are not from the same house, nor (probably) by the same artist. Look closely. The style doesn’t appear the same to me, even if the colors are similar. And the petasos was a rather common sunhat type—although not one as popular in Macedonia. (That was the kausia.)

Moreno wants to identify the stag-hunt figures as Alexander and Hephaistion, and then uses the axe wielded by a Page on the lion-hunt frieze from Royal Tomb II (above) to name that Page Hephaistion. But I am just not comfortable with that extrapolation. Back to my tendency to be rather conservative when it comes to identifying figures in artwork. If I don’t have a pretty good reason to name a particular figure so-and-so, I'll be cagey about it. I do think the lion hunt depicts Alexander and Krateros. Otherwise…not so fast.

Also, using the double-headed axe (labrys) as some identifier for Hephaistion because it was sacred to Hephaistos (the god) raises two problems. First, it's not sacred to Hephaistos. The HAMMER (and tongs) are. Second, worship of Hephaistos was virtually absent from Macedonia (Samothrace excepted). The figures in the stag hunt and lion hunt are clearly carrying an axe, not a hammer. If you want a god with a labrys outside of Hittite areas or Minoan Crete—one closer to Macedonia—that’ll be the Thracian-Getai-Dacian god Zalmoxis, who is usually conflated with Zeus, Hades, or even Pythagoros—not Hephaistos. Image below even shows him using it in a hunt! Given that logic, we might name the youth with the double axe a royal Thracian at the court! (Yes, they were there.)

But in any case, when you look at the coloring of these people in the mosaics…they’re on the fairer side. Maybe that’s to create a sense of artistic cohesion via color (as noted before), but compared to the hair color we see in polychromy on statues and art from, say, Athens—where a lot is brown/dark brown—I don’t think they’d pick reddish/dirty blond if it were something the people commissioning the art found atypical. In other tombs including Royal Tomb II, we do see brown and dark brown hair, but also fair. In the top frieze below from Agaios Athenasios tomb, most of the figures wear a kausia (Macedonian hat) or helmets, but the two at the end are bare-headed. The final figure has brown hair, but the figure just before him looks like a dark blond.

We are looking here at contemporary representations of actual Macedonians, not heroes or gods. And at least some of them are on the fairer side.

Yes, some folks like to point to the Pompeii mosaic, or the painting of Alexander from the House of the Golden Bracelet as proof that Alexander was dark. Problem: both date to the first century CE (or at most BCE, for the mosaic), and are Romanized in some ways (including the damn sideburns, which we don’t find until the Hellenistic era or later). That includes coloring.

Plutarch even complains about Apelles’ paintings (in Alexander's own day!) for getting Alexander’s coloring “too dark.” So while the mosaic may be remarkably accurate in the way of clothing and armor, I wouldn’t use it for Alexander’s coloring.

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First, let me point to an important book by my colleague, Ed(ward M.) Anson, Eumenes of Cardia: a Greek among Macedonians (2nd ed., 2015). It’s a quite excellent discussion of Eumenes’s career, and was actually Ed’s dissertation topic. I reckon, like me, he waited a long while before turning the dissertation into a monograph (even the 1st edition). Alas, it’s expensive. Even I don’t own a copy, as I have access to the university library’s. But I do recommend that folks interested request it via Interlibrary Loan (ILL). Even smaller public libraries offer that service, although you might have to pay a (relatively) small shipping fee.

So, Eumenes is an interesting character in many ways. As you suggest, “secretary” gives the wrong impression. The word in Greek is grammateus, and it can mean any sort of scribe, clerk, records keeper…or the official in charge of the whole royal office: official correspondence, what letters the king actually saw, the keeping of the Royal Journal and other state records, etc., etc. A hugely influential position, his might be closer to what we’d call, in the US, the Chief of Staff.

In my opinion, that was the heart of Eumenes’s dislike of Hephaistion. I said it in my dissertation and still think it’s true. When Hephaistion was made Chiliarch, that put him above Eumenes in administration around Alexander. The Chief of Staff got demoted…and didn’t like it. It’s from Susa onward that the two men seem to clash—at least twice that we know about. (I differ with Ed on this; he thinks it was about personalities while I think it was more political- and status-driven.)

That Eumenes was loyal to Alexander—and the Argead family—isn’t in question. But it wasn’t just Hephaistion he had trouble with. We know he also didn’t like Antipatros—one reason he sided with Perdikkas, even when (his friend) Krateros joined Antipatros. He also had a long-standing family beef with Hekataios of Kardia, and later hated Kassandros (as the son of Antipatros). But he seems to have got on with Olympias and Kleopatra—who he tried to get Perdikkas to marry. Perdikkas took his advice and divorced Antipatros’s daughter Nikaia, which eventually led to his downfall. One can’t escape the sense that Eumenes was touchy. Then again, as I’ve said before, they all were. And he had to put up with being constantly looked down on both as a “mere secretary” and as a Greek among Macedonians. He advanced on Alexander’s favor…which probably made others jealous of him. In fact, I think that’s one reason he took Hephaistion’s promotion hard. He’d worked hard for Chief of Staff, and didn’t like Hephaistion butting in. And if Hephaistion was also of Greek descent (as I’ve argued), both may have had a sense that there was room only for one. Or at least Eumenes may have thought so.

Men in his position weren’t normally entrusted with military commands, but he proved to be surprisingly good and, according to Ed, probably had more army assignments during Alexander’s lifetime than he’s credited with. (He was allied with Ptolemy’s enemy, Perdikkas, remember and Ptolemy was Arrian’s chief military source.) When Perdikkas was elevated to Hephaistion’s position, Eumenes took Perdikkas’s old command, and later, was himself Chilliarch. The infantry seems to have liked/trusted him, and later, he was quite successful at securing Cappadocia. In fact, during the early Diadochi wars, it was his stratagem that defeated Krateros’ army and got him killed (perhaps to his own regret, although I think Plutarch exaggerated that account). He also fought—one-on-one—against Neoptolemos … another of Alexander’s officers he couldn’t stand. And beat him. Neoptolemos was a demonstrated military commander.

So he seems to have defied the usual expectation of what a grammateus could do—and become. He was the highest ranking Greek in Alexander’s army, the only one to really rub shoulders with the Macedonian inner circle.

Hard to say, in part because nobody was powerful enough to impose what Alexander (probably) wanted. Krateros came closest in power, but even he decided it was smart to ally with Antipatros (and Antigonos). Nor was he (or Antipatros) as keen on the fusion of empires that Alexander wanted. But at least they seem to have wanted to hold things together, but wound up against Perdikkas.

Perdikkas--and Eumenes--were closer on the inclusion of Persia, but Perdikkas was both more arrogant and thought smaller (he wanted to be king/king-maker), and neither man was especially well-liked. Ptolemy was hell-bent on carving out Egypt as richest, and Seleukos kinda came out of nowhere to eliminate Perdikkas and then fight Ptolemy. Leonnatos was always a hothead and got himself killed even faster than Krateros. Like Ptolemy, Lysimachos decided to carve out his own spot, but up in Thrace.

I think that's the real problem. None of them was strong enough, or sold enough on ATG's vision. So I think my honest answer here is: None of them.