Philip II and Alexander the Great: Father and Son ... - Historia Antigua

“WORLDWIDE EMPIRE” VERSUS “GLORIOUS ENTERPRISE” 169
So it was that he did battle with no adversary without defeating
him, besieged no city without taking it, and attacked no tribe
without crushing it entirely. (12) In the end he was brought
down not by the valour of an enemy but by a plot hatched by his
own men and the treachery of his fellow countrymen.
There is no question that this is a far briefer treatment of Alexander’s
end than Trogus/Justin lavish on Philip. All Alexander did was fi ght,
it seems (albeit always successfully), and in the end his men had
enough of him and he was brought down not in battle, as we might
imagine he might have wanted his end to be, but as a victim of a conspiracy.
14 It is thus an inglorious death, not a Homeric/heroic one, but
then so was that of Philip, cut down by an assassin’s dagger at Aegae
in 336 and perhaps also the victim of a conspiracy that may even have
involved Alexander. 15
Next, let us consider Diodorus. Again (as with Trogus/Justin), we
have the problem that affects all of the secondary ancient sources on
Alexander: to what extent do they accurately use the primary (earlier)
source material, existing today only in fragments, 16 and especially do
they give us views stemming from the historical and cultural backgrounds
in which they wrote or do they simply reiterate those of their
sources? 17 It has been convincingly demonstrated that Diodorus was
not merely a “scissors and paste historian,” virtually summarizing his
sources, when it comes to his use of the sources (as has long been
thought), but was his own distinctive writer and with his own opinions.
18 Since I have argued that the judgments of Diodorus and Trogus/
Justin are similar, they may well refl ect the Roman view of Alexander
in the early empire. However, it is the concluding passages in Diodorus
that I fi nd particularly telling because before each of these passages
Diodorus has given us a straightforward narrative of each king’s
reign. In the concluding sections what we read are his own opinions
of these kings, with Philip coming off better than Alexander.
Thus, at 17.117.5, Diodorus is of the opinion that “[Alexander]
accomplished greater deeds than any, not only of the kings who had
lived before him but also of those who were to come later down to our
time.” This is high praise, but fi tting for someone who within a decade
had expanded the Macedonian empire from Greece to what the Greeks
called India (modern Pakistan), and could not be matched by any
other king of Macedonia. However, in his concluding comments about
Philip in 16.95, Diodorus has this to say:
Such was the end of Philip, who had made himself the greatest
of the kings in Europe in his time, and because of the extent of