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

“YOU SHOULD NEVER MEET YOUR HEROES . . . ” 177
surviving sources. Texts describing Alexander show him operating a
sophisticated image factory from the start, creating a larger-than-life
“Alexander” for public consumption. The refl exive qualities of such a
persona make him an ideal point of reference for subsequent power
fi gures, and had a huge impact on how ideologies of power developed
in the Hellenistic world. His success in deploying these qualities also
made it very diffi cult for his “successors” to avoid comparisons when
Alexander-style, propagandist self-fashioning was key to their power
(whether Ptolemy, Antigonid, Seleucid; or eventually, Roman wouldbe
autocrat). They “make like” an Alexander who is already, famously,
doing the exact same thing.
The signifi cant role Alexander plays in Valerius Maximus is, then,
a fascinating episode in Roman self-fashioning for at least two reasons:
in the fi rst place, his prominence in a collection of noteworthy
sayings and deeds addressed directly to Tiberius provides us with a
glimpse into his Roman afterlife in the years between a gradual abandonment
of Alexander as a viable model in the Augustan Principate
and Caligula’s emulatory adoption of him. 6 It thereby offers an insight
into the changing focalization his image underwent as it morphed
between different kinds of users with different Alexander-style needs
and desires. We might argue that for Tiberius, Valerius’ Alexander offers
a menu of exempla (positive or negative role models) specifi cally
to highlight the Princeps’ modesty and good judgment in choosing not
to deploy them. Secondly, his appearance in Valerius is strikingly different
to his use by Velleius Paterculus, another “Tiberian” author, but
one who composed a fairly condensed and primarily annalistic history.
7 Valerius’ Alexander features in his own right as protagonist,
rather than solely as a comparative fi gure, as in Velleius. Where Velleius’
comparison of (for example) Julius Caesar to Alexander subsumes
Alexander into a grand narrative of Roman history (making his
story a prequel to Rome’s), Valerius’ array of sayings and deeds worthy
of memory makes an explicit division between Roman and foreign,
and thereby downplays Alexander’s role in any one Roman’s
ancestral self-fashioning. 8 Instead, this scheme locates Alexander, and
to an extent all the “foreign” exempla, within a shared, broadly nuanced
cultural memory. He is no one’s ancestor and everyone’s
ancestor. Less clear, however, is how well Valerius’ stated aim of
separating Roman from foreign plays out in practice, and this is an
issue to which we shall return. 9
Rome was key to the growth of Alexander’s legend. Rome enthusiastically
adopted “Alexander” into a pervasive anecdotal tradition
and developed him into something Greater than the sum of his parts:
a key fi gure in the changing political Zeitgeist of the last centuries B.C.