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

“YOU SHOULD NEVER MEET YOUR HEROES . . . ” 179
authority between Philip and Alexander. We shall return to this
later (in section 3).
Tiberius’ inherited divinity is tackled head-on and explicitly
affi rmed; Alexander’s, as we see later, is denied. This differentiation
may also be signifi cant when assessing how Valerius characterizes
Alexander: he shies away from magn-ifi cation, typically choosing rex
(king) rather than magnus. 12 Often “Alexander” is deemed suffi cient
to specify the correct Alexander—the third, of Macedon. 13 But the
basic question remains: why does Valerius frequently reference this
“Alexander” in an early fi rst-century A.D. handbook illustrating all
that’s most worth memorializing of the city of Rome and elsewhere?
Pinning down the themed compendium produced by Valerius
Maximus—and thereby Alexander’s role in it—requires an awareness
of how Romans engaged with the past and in particular with the hermeneutics
of exemplary history. 14 Turning back from Tiberius’ Principate
to that of Augustus, Livy’s famous Alexander “digression” in
Book 9 offers one yardstick. Writing broadly annalistic history, but
with a strong interest in the role of individuals and their relationship
with the state, Livy makes talk of Alexander equal talk of countless
Romans. By writing Alexander into Rome’s history as stalking horse,
Livy surely echoes and re-frames a preexisting Roman cultural awareness
of the Macedonian that almost guarantees him a walk-on part in
future attempts to understand the birth, adolescence, and imperial
young adulthood of Rome itself. 15 This model and its infl uence makes
Alexander ideal for Valerius, allowing a pleasing economy of scale
(saying “Alexander” speaks volumes) for an author who wants us to
know right from the start that encyclopedism is not his game. 16 The
virtue of Livy’s republican exempla when compared to Alexander is
that they appear interchangeable, whereas Alexander is by default
unique and therefore disastrous for stability and continuity. 17 By contrast,
in the early fi rst century A.D., we fi nd in Valerius’ Alexander a
paradigm for reading stability and continuity into even the most
anomalous and entropic of fi gures.
Valerius’ Alexander moves easily through his themed stories: we
meet him fi rst in “Religion” (1.1 ext.5), then “Augury” (1.4 ext.1),
“Dreams” (1.7 ext.2), and “Wonders” (1.8 ext.10). These lock him into
a set of intensely signifi cant themes. Belief is set against superstition:
the public necessities of formal religion rub up against the personal
and individual experience of unknowability. After a brief absence in
Book 2, he returns in a fl urry of key imperial values: “Fortitude” (3.3
ext.1, 4); “Resolution” (3.8 ext.10); repeatedly in “Abstinence and
Continence” (4.3 ext.3b, 4a); “Friendship” (4.7 ext.2a, b)—where this
chapter will linger; “Humanity and Mercy” (5.1 ext.1a, b); and “ Pietas