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Alexander the Great,Thais, and the Destruction of Persepolis

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Alexander the Great,Thais, and the Destruction of Persepolis chapter 29 The Great Misstep: Alexander the Great, Thais, and the Destruction of Persepolis* Alex McAuley Alexander the Great’s destruction of the Achaemenid palace at Persepolis in the winter of 330bc should have been many things. It should have been the moment at which the ideology of Alexander and Philip’s Panhellenic Cru- sade against the Persian Empire culminated in a stirringly symbolic gesture. It should have at last avenged the sack of the Athenian acropolis by Xerxes over a century and a half previously. It should have signified the victory of the Greeks under Alexander against the myriad nations of the Persian host, thus representing the collapse of the old world order under the sheer weight of Alexander’s energy. It should have been his greatest triumph, a moment of transition between the destruction of one empire and the construction of another. Despite these great expectations, the sack of Persepolis is almost uni- versally disparaged by our ancient sources as an act of wanton violence that represents one of the few but nonetheless magnificent failures of Alexander’s judgment.1 The gusts of confusion that blew around the ashes of Persepolis have fanned the flames of ancient and modern speculation over the perplexing question of why Alexander would have done such a thing. The divergent reactions of Greek and Roman commentators on the event have been rewoven by dozens of contemporary scholars into different webs of causality.This “great puzzle in the history of Alexander”, as Bloedow once termed it, tends to be solved by three * A preliminary version of this chapter was first presented at the conference Persepolis: 40Years On, organized by Prof. Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones and Dr Sandra Bingham at the University of Edinburgh, 14–16 October, 2011. My thanks go to the conference attendees for their invaluable feedback, and in particular to Prof. Llewellyn-Jones for his subsequent insight. Later versions of this research were presented at l’Université de Montréal and McGill University in 2013 and 2014, and in both cases the comments of the respective audiences were greatly appreciated. All translations from Greek, Latin, and Italian texts are my own. 1 Thre ancient accounts of the Palace’s destruction are: Arrian. Anab.3.18.11–12, Diod. 17.72.1–6, Curt. 5.7.11, Plut. Alex. 38.1–8, while the earliest mention of Thais is found via Cleitarchus in Athenaeus 13.576d–e, FGrH iib 137, Fr. 11. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi: 10.1163/9789004359932_030 718 mcauley different schools of thought: those who argue that this was simply an act of perversity and revenge, those who believe it was an act of drunken indiscretion, and finally those who give some measure of credit to Alexander by claiming that this was an act of calculated policy intended to tear down the walls of cultural memory separating the Greeks and the Persians.2 But the many brands that various scholars have tossed on the fire—from Olmstead’s dismissal of it as an “act of sheer vandalism” to the symbolic capital weighed by Tarn or the Greek context elucidated by Badian and the revenge motive of Noldeke, von Gutschmid, and Niese—have done little to illuminate the historical reality of the situation.3 Borza provides perhaps the best summation as he writes “Alexander committed an act which cannot be justified on political, military, or moral grounds within the context of the values of his own age.”4 This may well be the case, but the fact that Alexander burned down Persepolis remains, regardless of his specific motivations. Perhaps in the context of the present volume, then, it is more fruitful to steer away from the rocks and shoals of attributing historical causality to Alexander at Persepolis and instead consider its evolving cultural significance over the course of nearly two and a half millennia. If the event remains impenetrable when it comes to better understanding the historical figure of Alexander, then at the very least it can give some insight into how he has been interpreted and re-interpreted.5 Amid the fanfare surrounding the destruction of the palace stands a woman who figures prominently in three out of four of our ancient accounts, and thus provides the ideal foil for understanding both Alexander’s role in the episode itself and evolving perceptions thereof: Thais of Athens, the courtesan blamed for planting the seed of Persepolis’ destruction in the 2 Edmond F. Bloedow, ‘That great puzzle in the history of Alexander: back into the primal pit of historical murk’ in Rom und der Griechische Osten, Festschrift Hatto Schmitt, eds Ch. Schubert and K. Brodersen (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag), 20–41. 3 Bloedow, “That Great Puzzle”,20–35 provides a highly detailed overview of the historiography of the event and its evolving schools of thought, with full references. The most recent overview of Persepolis more generally is Ali Mousavi, Persepolis: Discovery and Afterlife of a WorldWonder (Boston: De Gruyter, 2012), with a thorough discussion of the sack of the palace at 57–72. 4 Eugene N. Borza, “Fire from Heaven: Alexander at Persepolis,” Classical Philology 67, no. 4 (1972), 233. 5 For other interpretations of the sack of Persepolis, see: N.G.L. Hammond, “The Archaeological and Literary Evidence for the Burning of the Persepolis Palace,” cq 42 no. 2 (1992): 358–386; also Edmund Bloedow and Heather Loube, “Alexander the Great ‘under fire’ at Persepolis”, Klio 79 (1997): 341–353..
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