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

16 FATHER, SON, AND COURT
from the viewpoint of counter-factual history: what if Philip had not
died at Aegae? The bearded man attacking the Persian monarch
would, then, not be Alexander, but his father, the king who had survived
the assassination attempt of Pausanias and who had already
planned to cross the Hellespont, the experienced commander who
fi nally managed to pass into Asia and, joining his generals Attalus
and Parmenion, fought Darius at Issus. Even after Granicus, Alexander
owed his victories to the army trained by his predecessor, not to
speak of his own life, saved in battle by an offi cer of the old guard.
For most Greeks, and for many Macedonians too, Alexander was not
yet Alexander the Great, but the son of a conqueror hitherto unparalleled
in Europe, whose plans he was carrying out and whose image
overshadowed his successor’s.
Given that facial hair had belonged to the artistic vocabulary of
royal majesty, a break with this canonical image could entail some
risks. After all, Alexander had already attained the majority when he
became king: He was twenty years old in 336 and he did not need a
tutor. So he was expected to look and to act as a young man ( neos), but
still a man, not a stripling ( meirakion), a status that included the
growing of a “shaveable” beard. If men under thirty could be characterized
in classical cities by the lack of a beard, the reason was that
they had not yet assumed the status of married people, chiefs of the
oikos and full citizens, with facial hair refl ecting their social position,
rather than their biological age. 27 This is why the Apulian painter took
for granted Alexander’s hirsute face in his encounter with Darius: an
adult king had to be depicted unshaven, no matter his actual appearance
at a given moment, his capacity to develop a beard more or less
thick (Alexander was between 23/25 years old at Issus/Gaugamela),
or even his position as an unmarried man. Consequently, the challenge
for court artists like Lysippus, Apelles, and Pyrgoteles, lay in
suppressing beardedness as a traditional symbol of patriarchy and
paternalism without diminishing the very ideal of the Argead warrior
monarchy. The image of Zeus wearing the beard uncut, featured, for
example, on the obverse of Philip’s tetradrachms, established a cosmological
archetype for every Greek and Macedonian ruler. Needless
to say, the Spartan basileis (kings) sported moustaches and beards
(Plut. Cleom. 9.2), as did Asiatic dynasts like Mausolus, not to mention
the Great King. 28 Moreover, men with true axiōma (reputation)
had the incentive to let their facial hair grow to look more worthy of
respect, because in classical antiquity, as in many other civilizations,
age meant prestige and wisdom, i.e., full maturity as a person. 29
Beardlessness was not the only change in royal image Alexander
introduced. At the same time, the monarch wore his hair long, making