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

NOTES TO PAGES 191–194 295
7. These writers were not merely following traditions: Hellenistic
writers like Polybius and Diodorus seem to have preferred Philip to his
son. For Diodorus, for example, see Ian Worthington’s essay in this
volume.
8. General assessments: Bowersock 1969; Bowie 1974; Reardon 1971;
Anderson 1993; Gleason 1995; Swain 1996; Schmitz 1997; Whitmarsh
2001. See also the volume of essays edited by Goldhill (2001).
9. Whereas in the Archaic period of Greece, for example, a person
might prove his Greekness by stating his lineage (like Alexander I of
Macedon did when he wanted to qualify for the Olympics: Herodotus
5.22, 9.45; see Borza 1982; Badian 1982b; Borza 1999: 27–50), in the
empire he would be more inclined to do so by giving an excellent declamatory
speech in the style of Demosthenes, for which he would receive
kleos, or glory.
10. Graham Anderson’s suggestion that Greeks could make “their” subjugation
by Alexander and Philip “a very great virtue by necessity” rightly
hints at the analogy between these two powers (1993: 119), as do others
(see Asirvatham 2005: 109 n. 8). But Anderson’s view that the Macedonian
hegemony is something they could only hedgingly accept assumes
that Second Sophistic writers were compelled to tackle particular subjects
by the classicizing impulse. By contrast, I believe that Alexander
and/or Philip are useful as idealized fi gures only inasmuch as they help a
writer claim “Greek” authority on the Roman province of power.
11. Aristides wrote two anti-Philip orations carefully wrought from
a series of Demosthenean slurs (itself an unusual sign of interest in
Philip, and a sign of extreme Atticism); elsewhere in Aristides’ speeches,
Alexander gets credit for founding Alexandria, but little else. For
Aristides, Macedonian history is a foil to the superior might of Rome
(Asirvatham 2008).
12. Polyaenus, Strat. 1, praef. See Krentz and Wheeler 1994: xii.
13. Philip is not the only one whose shortcomings are criticized: Second
Sophistic writers who do not idealize Alexander are likely to take the
Rome-centric view that, while Alexander was impressive, he was unable
to keep his empire: see Arist. Rom. Or. 24; App. Rom., praef. 10 (where
Alexander and Philip of are largely spoken of as a unit).
14. Strauss 1993: 33. See also Roisman 2005: 41 and n. 51 for additional
bibliography.
15. Not all contemporaneous genres partook in this “masking.” Sons’
strong desire to subvert the potential oppression of patria potestas is
refl ected by the large number of Latin declamations from 50–200 A.D. that
deal with father-son confl ict, especially over matters of inheritance (according
to Vesley 2003 [180], over one-third of the speeches found in Seneca
the Elder, Pseudo-Quintilian, Calpurnius Flaccus, and Quintilian).