Up through the reign of Philip II, the Macedonian king was technically just the first among equals, a high-functioning bureaucrat rather than an omnipotent emperor. The prerogatives of the Macedonian nobility had to be honored, and Greece was governed through legally constructed leagues (like the Corinthian League) and alliances. In many ways, Philip II was little more than a new hegemon for the Greeks, following in the footsteps of Athens, Sparta, and Thebes (see chapter 4).
It was Alexander who divinized the Macedonian royalty. According to Arrian, after Alexander's conquest of Persia with all its domains, he traveled to the oracular sanctuary of Amun in Libya, where he was told that he was, in fact, the son of Amun, the Egyptian equivalent of Zeus. Furthermore, the final non-Greek pharaoh of Egypt adopted Alexander as a son, making Alexander a legitimate pharaoh. Since, according to Egyptian beliefs, the pharaoh is the human manifestation of the god Horus, this made Alexander the son of the king of the gods for the Greeks and the god Horus for the Egyptians. As the rule of Egypt continued through the Ptolemaic dynasty, the Ptolemaic pharaohs continued to be so regarded. Cleopatra was, technically, the god Horus.
The situation was different in the Near East. Although some early Mesopotamian kings did claim to be gods (such as Naram-Sin of Akkad), this was the exception rather than the rule. More common, both in earlier Mesopotamia and in Persia, was the idea that the king was responsible for his people before the gods. Divinity, therefore, was not at issue. However, the Persians did have their own concept of monarchy, which placed the king well above the common man. The Persian king ruled absolutely, and the population revered him, if not as a god, then as something between divinity and humanity. Ritual self-abasement before the king was an absolute necessity in his court, and it was absolutely anathema to the Greeks.
As one might imagine, this caused problems after Alexander's conquest of Persia, when both Greek and Persian functionaries were functioning next to each other in Alexander's court. The Persians treated Alexander with all due Persian respect, most notably an action called the proskynesis, which seems to have involved either physical prostration or blowing a kiss to the king from a bowed or prostrate position (Walbank 1992, 38). Whatever it was, the Greeks found it to be completely demeaning, and one courtier—Kallisthenes—utterly refused to perform it. Alexander had him tortured and killed but later ab-
Solved his Greek followers from having to do it. Nevertheless, between the Egyptian and Persian influences, Alexander and his successors completely changed Greek notions of monarchy. In contrast to the irritating tyrannies or constitutional kings, the Hellenistic monarch emerged as an absolute ruler whose word and will were law, and who could claim legitimacy not through ancestral custom or elected laws, but through divine right.
World History
