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

ALEXANDER IN THE UNDERWORLD 207
related to (and evidently better than) the text of A. It is also present,
in a differently abbreviated form, in the basic β recension as reconstituted
by Bergson, composed, it is thought, at some point between 338
and ca. 500 A.D. All the motifs upon which my analysis depends are
either explicit in the Armenian text or in Bergson’s β recension, or are
presupposed by them. However, the Leiden MS also embraces isolated
details that are indisputably medieval in the form transmitted,
such as the personal names Ounna and Neraida. 3
It does not take too great a leap of imagination to accept that
Alexander has in this episode entered the underworld, or at any rate
a land strongly assimilated to it: the very name of the place, the Land
of the Blessed, is evocative of that of a zone inhabited by the fortunate
among the dead in the Greek literary tradition, the Isle(s) of the
Blessed ( makarōn n ēsoi), to which Hesiod had sent the heroes of
Troy, to which Pindar had sent those who had lived through three life
cycles without injustice, and to which Plato in the Gorgias had sent
those that had lived a just and holy life. 4 Furthermore, the Land of the
Blessed’s perpetual darkness, gloom, and fog are also characteristic of
the canonical underworld, already in the Odyssey a land of Night
(Hom. Od. 11.12–19). Its location, too, at the very end of the world on
the horizontal plane, is similarly characteristic of the canonical
underworld. The Odyssey’s underworld lies beyond Ocean (10.508,
11.13), as do Hesiod’s Isles of the Blessed ( Op. 169–72).
But it is in fact possible to contextualize the central imagery of this
episode much more closely against an established and tight set of
ancient underworld-related motifs: those found in the so-called
Orphic—but more self-professedly Bacchic—tablets or “lamellae.” 5
Of these gold lamellae, or “plates,” about forty survive. They were
buried with initiates, either in amulet pouches that the initiates wore
around their necks, or dropped into their cremation urns. The plates
gave the dead person instructions on how to negotiate his (or her) way
through the underworld, and supplied him with password phrases to
utter before the underworld guards he would encounter, in order that
he might achieve a state of blessedness. The earliest tablet dates from
ca. 400 B.C., and they fl ourished from this point until the fi rst century
A.D.; a straggler from Rome is dated to the second or third century A.D.
period. They are found as far west as Rome and Sicily, as far east as
Lesbos, 6 as far north as Macedonia, and as far south as Crete.
The fl avor of the set may be conveyed by the earliest tablet, that of
ca. 400 B.C., which hails from Hipponion in Calabria. It helpfully
encompasses most of the most vigorously recurring and kaleidoscoping
motifs across the set as a whole. The tablet had been strung around
its owner’s neck as he was placed in his coffi n: