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

210 RECEPTION OF FATHER AND SON
good spring, perhaps under the infl uence of the simpler texts. The
polarization between the water sources, and the identifi cation of the
good one as “Memory,” invites the supposition that the bad or ineffectual
spring is to be identifi ed with the spring well known from
other ancient epigraphic and literary references to the underworld,
that of Lethe, “Forgetting.” 9
The four more elaborate tablets make a three-way wordplay with
the terms “souls” ( psuchai), “cold” water ( psuchron) and “refresh”
(psuchontai, from psuchō). The existing “souls” “refresh” themselves
at the bad spring, whereas the tablet-bearer aspires to drink the “cold”
water of the lake of Memory. One might have thought that this “refreshment”
was a good thing for “souls,” replenishing them, as it
were, with their essential quality, especially when we recall that
Homer has Ocean sending breezes to “refresh” ( anapsuchein) those
in Elysium and that Pindar has Ocean breezes blowing around his Isle
of the Blessed, but evidently this is not the case. 10 It could be that
psuchontai is to be interpreted at one level, in this context, as meaning
that the souls “are given (new) life,” that is that they are reincarnated,
or at any rate destined for it, a process with which the erasure of the
memory of their previous life is appropriately coordinated. 11
How does this relate to the Romance? Alexander also enters a
world in which he fi nds two distinct varieties of water source. The
evidently good spring that offers the water of life and with it immortality,
and the bad or at any rate ineffectual springs that surround it,
from which he has the misfortune to drink himself. But the analogy
becomes a little more kaleidoscoped when we pay attention to vocabulary.
For when the cook puts his pickled fi sh into the water of life,
and it is restored to life, presumably to everlasting life, the word the
Romance employs for the action is epsuchōthē (from psuchaō, 2.39,
41), which, while not identical, is strongly reminiscent of the word
applied to the action of the water of the bad spring in the tablets—
more reminiscent of this certainly than of psuchron, the word the
tablets apply to the water of the good lake of Memory. And Alexander
laments, “O for my bad luck, 12 that it was not ordained for me to drink
from that immortal spring giving life to the lifeless” (2.39). This fi nal
phrase too, “giving life to the lifeless,” zōogonousēs ta apsucha, seems
somewhat akin to that describing the refreshment of souls at the bad
spring in the tablets, psuchai . . . psuchontai. But perhaps the kaleidoscoping
does after all make a kind of sense, and aligns with the
Romance’s crudely reductive take on “blessedness.” For the eternal
life on offer here, and that to which Alexander aspires, is not that of
an ethereal, underworld variety presumably offered by the tablets,
but a lusty, full-blooded, earthly variety, which is in some ways