Further strengthening the sense of a definite association between Alexander and the star Sirius, Jean-Michel Angebert also draws attention the so-called ascent to the sky of Alexander. This was an illustrative theme popularised in medieval times which showed the deified Alexander rising to heaven and the Sun on a carriage towed by griffins with a five-pointed star – identified as Sirius by Angebert – leading the way: Many scenes, sculptures, paintings and even jewellery represent this apotheosis … Concerning the ‘ascension’ of the hero, we often see Alexander standing in the chariot of Helios (the sun) pulled by griffins or lions; another type of representation shows him being carried on his throne; a third type shows Alexander being carried by eagles towards the sun. On all these representations, a star is seen shining over the head of the figure, an obvious symbol of Sirius, the celestial body which presides over the destiny of kings according to the Egyptians …13
This association with the ‘birth star’ Sirius is also found with Alexander's successors and in the city of Alexandria itself. For according to French Egyptologist Sydney H. Aufrère, a specialist in Ptolemaic studies, 14 the Ptolemaic queens were portrayed wearing the headgear of the goddess Sothis i.e. Sirius. Aufrère also shows that the goddess of the Pharos, the famous Lighthouse of Alexandria, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, was once again none other than Sothis-Sirius. This strongly suggests that the spot of bright light that mariners would see when approaching the coastline of Egypt was likened to the spot of light from the star Sirius when rising in the east to guide the mariners back to Alexandria.
Son of Amun
Plutarch also reported another version of the birth-myth of Alexander which seems to be related to the Nectanebo story told by Pseudo-Callisthenes, but this time without the presence of Nectanebo. In the Plutarch version Philip II peeped through the keyhole of Olympias's chamber on the night of their nuptials, and was aghast to see his virginwife in their bed copulating vigorously with a huge snake. Deeply shocked Philip went to consult the Oracle of Apollo at Delphi where he was told that he must henceforth make special sacrifice to Zeus-Amun, for the snake was a well-known symbol of Zeus-Amun.
Another incident that also seems to reflect this link between Alexander and Zeus-Amun concerns the city of Aphitis which surrendered to the forces of Phillip II without a struggle on the day of Alexander's birth. The people of Aphitis were worshippers of Zeus-Amun on account of which, 150 years earlier, Aphitis had been spared by the great Spartan general, Lysander. This was because Lysander himself was a devotee of Zeus-Amun and had actually performed a pilgrimage to Siwa to consult the oracle there.15
After Alexander was crowned pharaoh of Egypt at Memphis and recognised as the legitimate heir to Nectanebo II, he too set out with a small party of friends to the Oasis of Siwa. His companions included his childhood friend, Ptolemy (future ‘pharaoh’ of Egypt), and Callisthenes, the great nephew of Aristotle. They followed the desert route west from Rhakotis (the site of the future Alexandria) towards Mersa Matruh some 320 kilometers away. Today the journey from Alexandria to Mersa Matruh is covered in four hours by car, but Alexander and his group took at least week on horseback.
From there the royal party turned due south and inland and began their slow march towards Siwa, which required a further eight days. Now, as it would have been in Alexander's time, the whole route is arid flat desert with only the occasional mound or hill to change the monotony of the quasi-lunar landscape. After hours of this, however, the vista suddenly changes into a sort of mini-Grand Canyon, and in the distance, like some desert Shangri La, spreads the lush oasis flanked by two lakes in the east and west.
Upon entering Siwa, Alexander was hailed with the cries ‘son of Amun’. With great ceremony he was then escorted to the Temple-Oracle of Zeus-Amun where he was taken by the high-priest into the inner sanctuary. No one knows what happened to Alexander there, or what he saw, but it is probable, amongst other things, that he was shown an omphalos sacred to Amun as evidence of his own divinity.16
The intellectual parenthood of Alexandria
Far to the south of Siwa the city of Thebes, our modern Luxor, with its vast temple complex dedicated to the supreme god, Amun, was the sacred city par excellence of the ancient world even at the height of Greek civilisation. And although Heliopolis – in the north of Egypt near the Great Pyramids – had been pre-eminent in earlier times, it was now at Thebes that the solar kings of Egypt were deemed to be legitimised and divinised. So it was perfectly natural, and indeed predictable, that Alexander the Great, in his capacity as the ‘son of Amun’ would have wanted to link his own person to Thebes.
This was why he acted so swiftly to restore the temple complex there, the most important centre of Amun worship in Egypt. When we consider that he also had the temple's inner sanctuary converted into a chapel bearing his own name it is clear that he soon intended to perform a pilgrimage to Luxor – there to be consecrated, like all solar kings before him, as the ‘son of Amun’. Fate intervened, however, and Alexander died on campaign in Babylon. His troops decided that he should be buried in Egypt, in the land of his ‘father’ Zeus-Amun.17Ptolemy, now in control of Egypt, and soon to become pharaoh, intercepted the funerary cortege and took command of the body of Alexander which, some years later, he would finally bring to Alexandria.
Alexandria had been Alexander's dream. He had wanted to create a new city dedicated to wisdom and learning – a sort of intellectual bridge on the shore of the Mediterranean Sea that would unite East and West. It was to be a city that would enlighten the world.
When Alexander was a boy, his father, Philip II, selected for him a special tutor. The choice fell on Aristotle, the greatest and most imaginative and influential philosopher of the epoch.
Aristotle was born in the year 384 BC at the city of Stagira in Macedon. His father, Nicomachus, was the personal physician and friend of the king of Macedon, Amyntas III, the grandfather of Alexander the Great. At 17 Aristotle travelled to Athens and entered Plato's Academy, and soon became its most noted pupil, so much so that his master, Plato, called him the ‘intelligence of the school’. When Plato died in 347 BC, Aristotle left the Academy and embarked on a journey that took him to all parts of Greece and Asia Minor. Then in the year 342 BC Philip II of Macedon summoned him to his court at Pella, and appointed him tutor to his 14-year-old son, Alexander. Aristotle, who was now 42, brought along his brilliant nephew Callisthenes and also the scientist Theophrastus. The team of learned men were provided with a country residence at Mieza near Pella where, for the next three years, Alexander was tutored and groomed.
When Alexander became king at the age of 21, Aristotle left Macedon and returned to Athens, where he founded his famous Lyceum. It was there that he created the first prototype of a university library; it would eventually be transferred after his death to the Great Library of Alexandria in Egypt. Aristotle died at the age of 62, a year after Alexander's death in Babylon. His lectures were collated in 150 volumes devoted to philosophy, ethics, politics and, his great love, the natural sciences. Until the middle ages Aristotle was regarded as the supreme authority on all matters concerning science. He was to write, probably with Alexander in mind, that: If there is one man superior in goodness and political capacity to all others, such a person may be like a god among men … and should be gladly obeyed, for they are permanent kings.18
There is much speculation and debate as to what extent Alexander's sense of mission might have been influenced by Aristotle. Apart from teaching the sciences to Alexander, the philosopher's main objective was to install in his pupil his concept of ‘virtues’, the most important of which, according to Aristotle, was reason. A few years before Aristotle became tutor to Alexander, he had completed his famous work, the Politics, in which he examines various systems of constitutions and expounds on the idea of the ideal state. And it would seem almost certain that Aristotle discussed his concept of the ‘ideal state’ with the young Alexander and imbued the future hero-king with those high
virtues and ideals that were eventually to be put into practice at Alexandria in Egypt.19 Alexander also received from Aristotle copies of Herodotus's Histories as well as Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, which became the future world-conqueror's most precious possessions.
In the Odyssey Homer speaks of the fabled island of Pharos off the coast of Egypt in connection with the Argonauts, while Herodotus recounts how Helen of Troy and Paris took refuge at Heracleion, a few miles east of the future Alexandria. So enthralled and influenced was Alexander by these epics that apparently he once angrily slapped Callisthenes, the great nephew of Aristotle, for openly criticising Homer. It was such literary influences, and the influence of his mother Olympias, that must have fired Alexander in his quest to weld the Eastern and Western worlds into one great empire ruled from a capital ‘City of Light’ modelled on the ideal state: Alexandria.
The founding of the universal city
It is often said that sound military principles are sufficient to explain why the peninsula of Rhakotis on the Mediterranean Sea was chosen as the site of Alexandria. The assumption is that Alexander saw in the natural harbour formed between the small island of Pharos and the peninsula the ideal place to build a port. Tradition has it that although Alexander had selected the site, it was the architect Dinocrates of Rhodes who actually designed the city. In opposition to this view, we shall attempt to show that a strong Egyptian influence also cast its spell over the whole enterprise from the very beginning.
There was a kind of enchantment and magic about this place that was unlikely to have been ignored by Alexander and his other educated companions such as Ptolemy and Callisthenes, especially in the high spirits and frame of mind they were in. They all were keen readers of Homer's works and surely were now acutely aware that in the Odyssey Homer wrote: There is an island in the surging sea which they call Pharos, lying off the coast of Egypt … It has a harbour with good anchorage and hence they [the Argonauts] put out to sea after drawing water.20
To Alexander and his loyal companions, Homer's Iliad and Odyssey had the same forceful effect as the Bible had on the crusading Christian knights in medieval times. Most educated Greeks could quite easily recite long sections from Homer, and often quoted Homer, as we do the Bible today, as the source of moral and practical examples for daily life. Leaders such as Alexander – perhaps especially Alexander – used the Iliad and the Odyssey not only for spiritual and moral guidance, but also as a practical guidebook for their own lives. And there is much to suppose that Alexander saw himself as a Homerian hero of boundless courage and dash.
It must be realised that such heroes were not viewed by the Greeks as mythological and legendary characters but rather as real historical men and women who had lived in a golden age among the gods. When Alexander and his companions came upon the island that Homer had described in such warm terms we may therefore safely imagine that they took it as a favourable omen from the gods. It was recalled by Alexander and his engineers and architects that Pythagoras, the ‘father of geometry’, and likewise the noble Plato after him, had also sojourned in Lower Egypt as guests or ‘students’ of the Heliopolitan priests and had learnt from them the wisdom that had made Greek culture great. Such evocative visions of Homer, Pythagoras and particularly Plato, the tutor of Aristotle himself, surely inspired the young conqueror, then barely 24 years old, to raise, near this magical Homerian island of Pharos, a great and wonderful city. What he had in mind was a metropolis that would rival Athens and in which the teachings of Pythagoras, Plato and Aristotle could mingle with the ancient wisdom of Egypt.
So, using Pythagorean geometry, Alexander's architect, Dinocrates, began to draw the plan of the future Alexandria, with Alexander himself supervising every small detail. The city, oblong in shape, would be developed on a system of parallel grids. The main east-west artery, to be known as the Canopus Way, would bear the name of the Homerian hero Canopus, the legendary navigator who steered the ship bearing Helen of Troy. According to a legend, Helen and her lover, Paris, had taken refuge at the city of Canopus (modern Abu Qir) at the eastern end of the Alexandrian shoreline on their way to Troy. Helen was the daughter of the god Zeus from his union with Leda, as well as the sister of the famous immortals the Dioscuri, i.e. the twins Castor and Pollux, who became stars in the zodiacal constellation of Gemini.
Helen of Troy, the Egyptian Aphrodite and Isis-Pharia
There is curious story told of Helen which is of relevance to the connection Alexander the Great felt with Egypt, and gives us more background to his mystical claims to descend from the divine lineage of the pharaohs. This story is found in a poem of Stesichorus ( 632 – 553 BC) which has it that after escaping from her husband, King Menelaus, Helen and Paris attempted to sail to Troy. On the way their ship was driven by a storm to the shores of Egypt near Canopus. Here the ‘real’ Helen was detained by the Pharaoh Proteus, whilst a ‘phantom’ Helen – a very similar idea to the ‘phantom’ or ‘apparitional’ Christ of the later Gnostic gospels – went on to Troy with Paris.
Stesichorus's version of the story was later made into a play by Euripides around 412 BC, but underwent further mutation, placing the ‘real’ Helen in the custody not of the legendary Proteus but of his equally legendary son Theoclymenus. Herodotus, too, reports a somewhat similar story which he tells us he obtained from an Egyptian priest.21He also speaks of a temple dedicated to ‘Aphrodite the Stranger’ in honour of Helen, within the royal city of Memphis: Within the enclosure there is a temple dedicated to Aphrodite the Stranger. I should guess, myself, that it was built in honour of Helen, daughter of Tyndraeus, not only because I have heard it said that she passed some time at the court of Proteus, but also, more particularly, because of the description of Aphrodite as ‘the Stranger’, a title never given to this goddess in any of her other temples (in Egypt).22
To the Greeks the ‘Egyptian Aphrodite’ was the goddess whom the ancient Egyptians called Hathor.23 But the Greeks also associated the goddess Isis, in her loving aspect, with Aphrodite. This suggests that they appreciated the very close connection that does in fact exist between Hathor and Isis in the ancient Egyptian pantheon and, presumably, the association that Hathor and Isis share with the star Sirius. In Ptolemaic Alexandria Isis also became the protecting deity of the port and of its famous lighthouse, the Pharos (named after the island of Pharos on which it stood). In this capacity, Isis was known as Isis-Pharia, the protector of mariners, suggesting another connection with Helen of Troy who – presumably on account of her many nautical adventures – was similarly called the ‘patron goddess of sailors’.
There was a temple dedicated to Isis-Pharia near the Pharos. Apparently also her colossal statue once stood directly outside the Pharos, and is likely to have been perceived as part of the lighthouse complex. In Roman times Isis was frequently known as Stella Maris, i.e. ‘Star of the Sea’,24 and the same epithet has, for a very long while, been applied by Christians to the Virgin Mary. Sir James George Fraser, the great British mythologist of the 1920s goes so far as to suggest a causal link: To Isis in her later character of patroness of mariners the Virgin Mary perhaps owes her beautiful epithet of Stella Maris, ‘Star of the Sea’, under which she is adored by tempest-tossed sailors. The attributes of a marine deity may have been bestowed on Isis by the seafaring Greeks of Alexandria. They are quite foreign to her original character and to the habits of the Egyptians, who had no love of the sea. On this hypothesis Sirius, the bright star of Isis, which on July mornings rises from the glassy waves of the eastern Mediterranean, a harbinger of halcyon weather to mariners, was the true Stella Maris, ‘the Star of the Sea’.25
Let us also note that many of the Ptolemaic queens of Alexandria, and especially the celebrated Cleopatra, identified themselves with Isis-Pharia or Isis-Sothis (Sirius) and, to emphasis their beauty and art of love-making, with Isis-Aphrodite as well. Glamorous Cleopatra posed as the goddess Isis-Aphrodite when she presented herself to Mark Antony in Tarsus. According to Egyptologist Julia Samson: T
he dramatic couple quickly became linked in people's minds with the gods: Antony with Bachus (Dionysos) whom the Greeks associated with Osiris; and Cleopatra with Venus (Aphrodite) and long associated with Isis …26