EPHEMERIS DACOROMANA EPHEMERIS DACOROMANA Fondatore: Vasile Pârvan Comitato Scientifico / Advisory Board / Comité scientifique / Wissenschaftlicher Beirat Cesare Alzati (Milano), Mihai Bărbulescu (Cluj-Napoca/Roma), Dan Berindei (Bucureşti), Antonello Biagini (Roma), Corrado Bologna (Roma), Smaranda Bratu Elian (Bucureşti), Lietta De Salvo (Messina), Konrad G. Gündisch (Oldenburg), Norman Housley (Leicester), André Hurst (Genève), Mihai Nasta (Bruxelles), Marius Porumb (Cluj-Napoca), Lorenzo Renzi (Padova), Augusto Roca De Amicis (Roma), Christopher Smith (St. Andrews/Roma), Victor Spinei (Iaşi), Anca Vasiliu (Paris), Alexandru Vulpe (Bucureşti) Accademia di Romania in Roma Direttore: Prof. Mihai Bărbulescu Redazione George Dragoş Blaga, Iulian Mihai Damian, Otilia Ştefania Damian, Andrea Fara, Dan Ioan Mureşan Piazza José de San Martin 1, 00197 Roma, Italia Tel. +39 06 3201594 / 3208024 / Fax +39 06 3216964 www. accadromania.it; e-mail: [email protected] Editura Academiei Române Casa Editrice dell’Accademia Romena Calea 13 Septembrie nr. 13, Sector 5 050711, Bucureşti, România Tel: (40-21)318 81 46, (40-21)318 81 06 Fax: (40-21)318 24 44 www. ear.ro; e-mail: [email protected] Redattore editoriale: Virginia PETRICĂ Redazione tecnica: Mariana IONICĂ Copertina: Mariana ŞERBĂNESCU ©2011 Editura Academiei Române, Accademia di Romania in Roma ISSN 1582-1854 ACCADEMIA DI ROMANIA IN ROMA EPHEMERIS DACOROMANA XIII 2011 EDITURA ACADEMIEI ROMÂNE INDICE DELLE MATERIE Dan Tudor Ionescu Alexander’s Monarchy and the Principate of Augustus. Meditating on Relevant Aspects of an Ideological Interface ................................................... 7 Alexandra Ciocârlie L’image de Carthage et des Carthaginois dans la littérature latine .............. 77 Juan Ramón Carbó García I sogni “orientali” in Dacia. Sottomissione e dipendenza personale dalla divinità ................................................................................................................. 115 Iulian Mihai Damian La disfatta di Solgat (Crimea) e i suoi echi nei trattati d’arte militare rinascimentale...................................................................................................... 129 Alexandru Simon Langage et chantage: discours et idéologie croisée à Venise .......................... 145 Otilia-Ştefania Damian La tradizione della Transilvania di Antonio Possevino e l’evoluzione temporale delle volontà del suo autore .............................................................. 165 Alina Dorojan L’evoluzione dell’emigrazione italiana nelle province storiche romene tra le due guerre mondiali ........................................................................................ 209 * Veronica Turcuş Prolegomeni alla costruzione dell’Accademia di Romania a Roma ............... 247 Francesco D’Andria Adameşteanu, l’Università e il Salento ............................................................. 287 * Accademia di Romania in Roma, 2008–2009 Symposia – Conferenze – Presentazioni di libri ................................................. 301 EPHEMERIS DACOROMANA, XIII, 2011, p. 1–312 ALEXANDER’S MONARCHY AND THE PRINCIPATE OF AUGUSTUS. MEDITATING ON RELEVANT ASPECTS OF AN IDEOLOGICAL INTERFACE Dan Tudor Ionescu* INTRODUCTION The main aim of this study is to find a specific relationship between the essential themes of the Augustan Imperial Ideology and the ideological paradigm of a World Empire, which found its legitimacy during the reign of Alexander the Great. In approaching the Augustan Imperial Ideology I examine at first the prospective idea of an empire related to an image of the cosmos. This approach and analysis will deal also with some pair concepts or twin notions like kingship/republic, freedom/subjection and war/peace. I intend to follow the thin, yet nevertheless very real (at least in my opinion) thread of evidence that links the idea of a world empire and that of a world ruler in Augustus’ times and respectively Alexander’s “vocation” of world ruler. Whatever the general retrospective idea of “World Empire” in the broad panorama of our western civilization is, it is obvious that the first European who put it into practice was King Alexander III of Macedon, also known to posterity as Alexander the Great. It does not matter so much for the aim of the present study that such an idea was not European at all, but was born and evolved in the Ancient Near and Middle East (Egypt and western Asia) at least from the 3rd millennium BC. The first roots of it can be found in the kingdom of Sargon I and of his nephew Naram-Sin, kings of Akkad and Sumer, in ancient Mesopotamia. The idea developed in the successive empires of the Near East and Middle East: the Egypt of the New Kingdom, the New Kingdom of the Hittites, the Mitanni Kingdom, the Assyrian and New Babylonian (Chaldean) Empires, eventually reaching its final Middle Eastern completion, in the Achaemenian Persian dynasty and into the Achaemenid Empire of the two Iranian tribes (Persians and Medes). Alexander the Great, by conquering the Persian (or rather Mede-Persian) Achaemenid Empire, took over the idea of a universal empire that covered the whole * Bucharest. Fellow “Vasile Pârvan” at the Accademia di Romania, 2008–2010. EPHEMERIS DACOROMANA, XIII, 2011, p. 7–75 Dan Tudor Ionescu οἲ κουμένη, the inhabited and civilized world, which tends in its turn to be equated with the ordered universe, the κόσμος. The idea, probably never forgotten by Alexander’s Hellenistic Successors (as proof one can only look for the myth of Alexander as world ruler in Ptolemaic Egypt, Antigonid Macedonia, and Seleucid western Asia), was later included in the Roman’s ideological strategies for conquering the Mediterranean world, at least from the 2nd century BC onwards. Looking at things from this point of view, Augustus is not a beginning, but an end, and early Imperial Rome is the climax of the political, strategic, but also cultural evolutions that spread from the Middle East to Southern Europe, during the last three millennia before the Christian era. After the split of Alexander’s empire, the image of Alexander the Great was a continuity symbol of world’s conqueror legacy. Perdiccas wanted Alexander’s corpse to be buried in the royal Macedonian necropolis of Aegae and in 322/321 a. Chr. the impressive funeral carriage with the embalmed body of Alexander the Great, with all his weaponry and parade armor travelled from Babylon to be intercepted and hijacked in Syria by the forces of Ptolemaeus son of Lagus, Macedonian military commander, governor of Egypt, and close friend and companion of Alexander during the campaigns of conquest; all in order for Alexander’s body to be brought into Egypt and stored in Memphis. After the failure of Perdiccas’ campaign of conquering Egypt and the subsequent death of Perdiccas, Alexander’s lifeless body remained in Egypt. It was kept initially in Memphis and afterwards was buried not at Siwah in the oracle-oasis of Zeus-Ammon, but in Alexandria on the Nile. The dead body of Alexander and his tomb (Σῆμα) became a symbol of the new Ptolemaic dynasty. In death, Alexander was transformed into a paradigm of the conquering hero and world ruler. In time, this myth will be appropriated and transformed by the conquering Rome1. Perhaps the first Roman military commander who consciously moulded something of his personality to the example of Alexander was Scipio Africanus. Nevertheless, even before the Punic wars, the Romans confronted themselves with a Hellenistic king and commander made from the same mould as that of Alexander, namely Pyrrhus of Epirus. Before Pyrrhus himself, the king Alexander Molossus of Epirus, Alexander of Macedon’s own uncle, was fighting in Italy on the side of the Greek city of Tarentum, against the Italic (Samnitic) populations of Lucani and Brutti, and later, in Alexander’s Romance of Pseudo-Callisthenes, Alexander the Great’s exploits and the deeds of his Epirotic uncle and homonym were conflated and made as one. Seeing things in this perspective, Alexander appears as a model in the history of Rome, although indirectly, from the late 4th and early 3rd centuries BC, that is just after his untimely death at Babylon, in 323 BC. Before Alexander Molossus, it was the king Archidamus of Sparta, who fought as a mercenary commander in the service of Tarentum, against the Italic populations of southern and central Italy. He (Archidamus 1 Vide STEWART 1993, 26-27 for the symbolism of Alexander’s figure in the Rome of Augustus, from the poems of Horace to Augustus’ visit to Alexander’s Σῆμα. 8 Alexander’s Monarchy and the Principate of Augustus the Spartan) fell in action in 338 BC, the year of the battle of Chaeronea, where the Macedonian army of Philip II and prince Alexander (the future Alexander the Great) hacked into pieces the Theban-Athenian army and cut to shreds the famous Theban Sacred Band that once triumphed over the allegedly invincible Spartans. However, between the cases of Archidamus and that of Alexander Molossus there is a crucial difference: Archidamus was only a condottiere in the service of Tarentum; on the contrary, although formally (at least at the very beginning) also a mercenary leader, Alexander Molossus was, or became very soon, a warlord with his own program of conquest and empire building in Italy (like his illustrious Macedonian nephew, Alexander the Great, was from the very beginning in the East). The same thing, even more obvious, can be said about his successor Pyrrhus, who trod in the footsteps of Alexander the Great and