Two acts of Alexander’s at the end of his life spilled over into the world of the successors. The first, and more important one long-term, concerned his apparent wish that the Greeks deify him. This inaugurated the cult of the ruler so characteristic of the Hellenistic world. The second - the Exiles’ Decree -, however, had immediate consequences in Greece.
Shortly before the end of his life, various Greek cities deified Alexander (Arr. Anab. VII 23,2 - see Badian 1981 in Further Reading). Debates on the matter are attested in Athens (Din. I 94; Hypereides, Dem. fr. 7; Athen. VI, p. 258) and Sparta (Plut. Sayings of Lacedaemonians, p. 219). Although scholars once strove to see the roots of Alexander’s deification in the Near East, in no Near Eastern kingdom had a ruler hitherto been worshipped as a god while still alive. Moreover, no evidence that any of Alexander’s non-Greek subjects deified him exists, whereas the Greek world provides evidence of rulers who just before Alexander were approaching deification.
The Eresians on Lesbos, for example, had instituted a cult to a god called “Zeus Philippios” (Harding, Nr. 112B). The italicized “i” holds the key. In its absence the god would be “Zeus (who is) Philip,” but instead the god is “Philip’s Zeus, the Zeus who is closely associated with Philip.” In Syracuse the tyrant Dio (see chap. 17) had once received heroic honors (Diod. XVI 20 describing heroic honors; cf. Plut. Dio, 46, saying “god” - see Badian 1981 in Further Reading). Yet in Greek religion heroes were not gods, and mortals, albeit after they died, could become heroes (oecists, for example - see chap. 5). Both Philip and Dio had gone right up to the line, but had shrunk back from crossing it.
Alexander too had come close to the line on several occasions. At Siwah the priest had proclaimed him the “son of Zeus.” Divine sonship, though close to divinity, still stops short of it. Likewise, when Alexander had attempted to introduce proskynesis among the Macedonian troops, paths for explaining why this was not truly deification lay open - it was just a Persian custom, it did not actually mean what it appeared to mean, and so on.
When in his last year Alexander suppressed his own hesitations and strode across the line, he brought to conclusion a peculiar cultural development within the Greek world - one which just a generation later found its purest expression in the so-called Ithyphallic Hymn to Demetrius Poliorcetes, the son of Antigonus Monophthalmus (Athen. VI, p. 253), sung as that ruler entered Athens in 291:
The greatest and dearest gods are here in the city, for the occasion has hither brought Demeter and Demetrius together. . . He is gracious, as a god should be, and handsome and smiling. . . other gods are far away or have no ears or do not exist or pay no attention to us. . . but you [sc. O Demetrius] we can see are present, not made of wood or stone, but real; so we pray to you. . . (Athen. VI, p. 253)
Although Alexander’s deification at the time caused much soul-searching, replete with many rationalizations (“if Alexander wishes to be called a god, then let him” - Plut. Sayings of Lacedaemonians, p. 219), in the end most went along with it however reluctantly (e. g., Demosthenes - Din., I 94; Hyp. Dem. fr. 7). The next time, however, was easier; and the time after that easier still; and soon enough rulers like Demetrius were routinely recognized as gods because they were present and could, much as a god, intervene from above in their subjects’ lives. The cult of the ruler became an integral part of the social and political fabric of the Greek world.
World History
