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

196 RECEPTION OF FATHER AND SON
mutual acts of pietas, and yet often this mutual pietas seems to mask
a subversion of parental authority. 15 There may be signifi cance in the
fact that from 27 B.C. (when Octavian became Augustus) onwards, the
princeps took on an explicitly paternal authority over the entire
citizen body, 16 revering the memory of the father and yet making it
fully dependent. But we can make a much more obvious connection
between the Second Sophistic Philip-Alexander pair and Rome: the
relationship between Nerva and Trajan, his adopted son. The latter,
during whose reign Dio and Plutarch both wrote, 17 brought imitatio
Alexandri back into vogue after Nero’s admiration of Alexander had
given the Macedonian king a bad name. 18 Like Alexander, Trajan was
both philhellene and a man of intense imperial ambition who proved
his legitimacy as optimus princeps through his expansionist policies
in Dacia, Arabia, and Parthia. From Trajan’s reign onward, offi cial
proclamations of the emperor’s pietas were directed more forcefully
away from the family toward the gods. 19 Trajan’s lack of displays of
fi lial pietas toward Nerva was, indeed, the ultimate rejection of fatherson
hierarchy.
The issue of familial pietas aside, however, the Second Sophistic
Philip sometimes seems less a “father fi gure” than a workaday foil to
Alexander’s superior image, particularly in Plutarch. Whether in a
certain context Philip appears signifi cantly as a “father” or as merely
part of an outdated past, the result is the same: subordination to
Alexander’s image of the “Greek” warrior who once had an empire.
That said, Philip is likely to be used more unforgivingly as a foil by
writers like Dio and Plutarch whose main concern is to emphasize
Alexander’s (actual or potential) paideia. It is not an accident that we
do not see the same judgment of Philip in Arrian, who admires
Alexander largely for his qualities as leader of the army.
Dio Chrysostom
Given Trajan’s dominance in this age of classicism, there is no better
starting point than Dio 20 for theorizing the Greco-Roman Philip and
Alexander—who are quite evidently stand-ins for the emperor and
his (adoptive) father in the Kingship Orations ( Orations 1–4). The
overlying theme is the paideia of kings. Dio is a philosopher, and an
eminently practical one who uses Platonic, Stoic, and Cynic ideas to
tackle the question of how to produce good rulers, 21 and argues that
the philosopher must learn how to “be” a ruler in order to teach powerful
men how to rule. 22 In the Kingship Orations, Dio makes the case
both for Trajan’s good rule and for his own role as philosophical