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

NOTES TO PAGES 209–212 301
19. Virg. Aen. 6.540–43; cf. also Hegesippus F5 Gow-Page at PA 7.545.
20. Bernabé and Jiménez San Cristóbal 2008: 25–28; cf. Graf and Johnston
2007: 108–11.
21. Suppl.Hell. no. 980: “Go then as a blessed traveller, go as one destined
to see the fair places of the pious, Philicus, rolling out well-sung
words from an ivy-clad head and revel to the Isles of the Blessed . . . ”
( ἔρχεο δὴ μακάριστος ὁδοιπόρος, ἔρχεο καλοὺς / χώρους εὐσεβέων
ὀψόμενος, Φίλικε / ἐκ κισσηρεφέος κεφαλῆς εὔυμνα κυλίων / ῥήματα, καὶ
νήσους κώμασον εἰς μακάρων . . . ). Cf. Bernabé and Jiménez San Cristóbal
2008: 127. For shining trees in association with an Isle of the Blessed, see
Pindar Olympian 2.70–73.
22. See Bernabé and Jiménez San Cristóbal 2008: 13–14.
23. The term is mistranslated at Graf and Johnston 2007: 5, 17, 35, and
curiously excluded from discussion at 111–12.
24. τί χώραν πατεῖς, Ἀλέξανδρε, τὴν θεοῦ μόνου ;
25. ὅ τι δὴ ἐξερέεις Ἄιδος σκότος [i.e. σκότους] ὀρφήεντος . For
the questions put by the guards, cf. Edmonds 2004: 61–63 and Bernabé
and Jiménez San Cristóbal 2008: 37.
26. This subordinate episode is only partly represented in the Armenian
translation and in Bergson’s reconstruction of the β recension, neither
of which make mention of the old man or his sons, but even so it may
be presumed to lie behind them in full form. Both of these accounts contain
the device of the mares and the foals (savagely overedited in the case
of the Armenian translation), but attribute the initiative to take the mares
while leaving the foals behind to Alexander himself. However Bergson’s
β also includes the sequence in which Callisthenes advises Alexander to
take with him into the Land of the Blessed an army consisting only of his
“friends, a hundred boys and 200,000 [!] picked men.” In L this sequence
serves, quite appropriately, to account for the exclusion of the old men
from the army, but here it is redundant. Its inclusion therefore presupposes
that the full version of the subordinate episode, including the old
man and his sons, already exists.
27. It is a town’s custom to kill all the old men. But one young man
cannot bring himself to kill his father, and so he hides him in the cellar.
The town is then called to arms to fi ght a monster that lives deep in a
cavern with hundreds of labyrinthine passages. The father warns his son
that even if the monster is killed, death will await him and the other men
afterward, because they will not be able to fi nd their way out of the tunnels.
So, calling upon the wisdom of his years, he advises him to take
their black mare and her foal with him into the cave, to kill and bury the
foal at the cave-mouth and then take the mare with him into the cave, so
that she will then guide him back to the foal. The young man does as
bidden and after the monster has been killed does indeed use the mare to