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

“YOU SHOULD NEVER MEET YOUR HEROES . . . ” 183
identity interact through performance and prosopopoeia. Whether in
public (the Forum) or “private” (the atrium) one becomes Roman by
repeatedly relating oneself to the everyday appearance of “great”
father figures— imagines and maiores, the plural comparative of
magnus.
The relationship between Philip and Alexander is also a factor
here: Alexander comes with key ready-made identities as son and
king, plugging into two areas of prime concern for Roman sociopolitical
identity and the transmission of cultural memory. Valerius’
Alexander is foreign by taxonomy (“external”) but fully intelligible in
Roman terms and Roman by epistemology—his greatest hits feature
strongly in the historical performance repertoire of ambitious citizens.
This simultaneous fl exibility and ambiguity, in tandem with the
potential overlap with Hannibal, makes Alexander a richly connotative
alter ego ripe for creating Roman innuendo. 29 He is at once a child
of Rome, a son of Philip, and also one of Rome’s most problematic
ancestors.
3. Philip and Alexander
Quae tam pertinax necessitas in patre fi lio Alexandro consimilis
apparauit (1.8 ext.10)
[on Philip’s attempts to outwit the oracle foretelling his assassination]
Such unwavering inevitability in respect of the father
had prepared something similar for the son, Alexander.
Valerius’ representation of the relationship between Philip and
Alexander has overarching potential for understanding his project as
one which takes dynasty in the broad sense as its fons et origo, as we
saw above. This grand narrative reading scheme plays up the inevitability
of hindsight. The father-son relationship between Philip and
Alexander carries over into a paternalistic and genealogical paradigm
for relations between man and gods; thus Praef. 1, discussed above,
becomes important again as this next extract (opening the “foreign”
section of the theme of arrogance and lawlessness) makes clear:
Satis multa de nostris: aliena nunc adiciantur. Alexandri Regis
uirtus ac felicitas tribus insolentiae euidentissimis gradibus
exsultauit: fastidio enim Philippi Iouem Hammonem patrem
asciuit, taedio morum et cultus Macedonici uestem et institute
Persica adsumpsit, spreto mortali habitu diuinum aemulatus est,
nec fuit ei pudori fi lium ciuem hominem dissimulare (9.5 ext.1)