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

200 RECEPTION OF FATHER AND SON
Plutarch
Plutarch’s view of statesmanship is, in general, essentially philosophical
and ethical, although it is rather unusual to see him meld philosophy
and politics to the degree that he does in the fi gure of Alexander. 36
Unlike Dio, who wrote under the constraints of Trajan’s potential readership,
Plutarch is free to dive wholeheartedly into the process of creating
his ideal Greco-Roman Alexander. His subordination of Philip to
Alexander is also more complete.
First there is Plutarch’s set of rhetorical treatises, De Alexandri
Fortuna aut Virtute, the idealized Alexander of which (as I have argued
in detail elsewhere) 37 is a philosopher-of-action who melds the best of
Greek culture, or paideia—which Plutarch confl ates here with philosophia—with
the best of Roman imperial ideology. 38 Here no pietas is
directed toward Philip—even when we are told that Alexander taught
the barbarians to reverence their parents and the gods (1.5). Indeed,
the sweeping generalization of De Alexandri Fortuna aut Virtute is
such that the subordination of Philip is in fact totally impersonal. Like
so many others, Philip is, in the end, just another non-Alexander.
At the outset, Philip’s war against the Greeks and the debt he left
behind are unceremoniously lumped together with all the other political
problems—Macedonian, Greek, and barbarian—that Alexander
had to overcome as he acceded to the throne (1.3). At another point,
Plutarch criticizes Philip along with Dionysius of Sicily, Alexander of
Pherae, the Scythian Ateas, and Archelaus of Macedon for lacking
philanthrōpia toward artists, which he considers to be among the virtues
of a good ruler (2.1). Plutarch also symbolically strips Philip of
his paternal claim, in a number of ways that recall Dio. In 1.4, we read
that Alexander had gained more knowledge from Aristotle than he
had from Philip, recalling the fi nal passage of Dio’s Oration 2, but also
making a more pointed statement against pure military might and in
favor of paideia: “Alexander crossed into Asia having much greater
equipment from his teacher Aristotle than from his father Philip.” His
military art itself is credited not to Philip but to Heracles and Achilles
in 2.2; his penchant for civilizing, to Heracles, Perseus, and Dionysus,
the last of whom is named a progenitor. Alexander is also said to have
been created by “a god” (2.12), presumably Zeus—which is interesting
considering the ambivalence Plutarch shows in the Life of
Alexander concerning the propaganda that claimed Zeus Ammon as
Alexander’s real father. 39
The reversal of hierarchy between father and son is even more
obvious in Philip’s moralizing and apologetic Life of Alexander, where
up until Philip’s death Alexander is systematically differentiated from