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

ALEXANDER IN THE UNDERWORLD 209
“fortunate,” or, more particularly, “wealthy.” The word is found in
fi ve tablets (L9–10b, 7a–b), indeed in the intensive form trisolbios
(“thrice-fortunate”) in two of them (L7a–b), and another tablet associates
it with the term makaristos, “most blessed” (L9). 7 The tabletbearers’
condition in the underworld will then have been akin to that
of those who had been consigned to a blessed zone within the wider
underworld in the venerable literary tradition that went back all the
way to the Odyssey’s Elysium and the Hesiodic and Platonic Isles of
the Blessed ( makarōn n ēsoi) mentioned above, the former of which,
incidentally, is specifi cally said to be the home of the “fortunate”
(olbioi), while the inhabitants of the latter are said to live “in all good
fortune” ( eudaimonia). 8 The tablet-bearers were then evidently
heading for a condition very much akin to that afforded by the Land
of the Blessed, the makarōn ch ōra as Alexander terms the land in
which he travels (2.39, 41). And the land in which Alexander travels
could evidently be described as olbios in the more crude and reductive
sense of “wealthy,” being, as it is, a land in which the gravel
consists of precious stones.
Of what does the good fortune or the blessedness offered in the
underworld of the tablets consist? Two of them specify that their
bearers will become gods instead of being mortal (L8, L9) and a third
that their bearer will become divine ( dia, L11). It is of course precisely
divinity and immortality that is bestowed by the Romance’s
water of life, although this is a quality that its Alexander, more crudely
and more reductively, seeks to bring back with him into the world of
the living.
3. The Focal Importance of
Water Sources
The focal motif of the water source appears in the fi rst twelve tablets
in the Bernabé-Jiménez San Cristóbal series. In some of the tablets,
such as those from Eleutherna (L5a–L6a), we just get a single water
source, an evidently good spring from which the tablet-bearer professes
himself eager to drink, and the draught of which will, apparently,
though not explicitly, translate him to a state of blessedness.
However, in the more elaborate texts (L1–4) a more complex arrangement
is described. Here a spring, apparently a bad spring, or at any
rate a useless one, is differentiated from a lake of Memory. One must
avoid the former and drink rather from the latter. In one of these tablets
(L2), the bad source is a lake like the good source, in another (L4),
the good lake, having been introduced, seems to be reidentifi ed as a