"The circuit of the court was half a mile. Everything was started at the signal of a trumpet-blast, whether it was the beginning of the feast, the celebration of the marriages, or the pouring of one of the various libations, so that all the army might know." "After the banquet," resumes Arrian,[71] "the brides entered and seated themselves each beside her fiancé, who thereupon took her by the hand and kissed her; and the first to do this was the king.... Then each man, taking his wife, led her away. Their dowries Alexander gave to every one of them. And he caused the names to be written down of all the other Macedonians who had married Asiatic women, and there were said to be over ten thousand of them. To these, too, gifts were given by Alexander at the marriage feast."
For five consecutive days artists from every land and people entertained the cosmopolitan assembly with displays of skill as various as were the ideas and interests to which they catered. But the discord was lessened and the dominant motiv repeated again and again by the appearance and reappearance of the greatest Greek masters of the dramatic and musical arts.
It being established by these many incidents that it was a salient trait of Alexander's character to disclose his fundamental policies by acts elaborately staged and performed before the largest possible audiences, we may return to his extraordinary visit to the temple of Ammon of Cyrene. He had first to proceed one hundred and seventy-five miles along the Libyan coast and then southwest for about seven days before reaching his goal. A month of the most difficult marching, at a time when every day was precious, was the high price which Alexander thought it economical to pay for the recognition which he there received as the son of Zeus. What was, then, the value of this well-advertised recognition?
That it had none for Egypt and the nations of Asia, to whom the god of Siwah, like the prophet in his own country, was without honor, implies that Alexander esteemed highly its value in the Greek world, where the voice heard at Siwah was in fact an admonition to the pious and might be an embarrassment to all in official positions. An oracle, however, was always addressed primarily to him who received it. Other persons could neglect it with impunity. Nevertheless, Alexander had made it improbable that anybody should be unaware that Zeus had acknowledged him as his son. Doubtless, much discussion was provoked; but there the matter seems to have ended so far as Hellas was concerned till seven years later, at the time of the feast at Susa, when Alexander issued a mandate to all the Greek city-states, new and old, that they should recognize him as a god.
Strange as it may seem to us, among whom church and state are separated sharply, and religion depends upon a revelation which can be interpreted but not supplemented, the question was one which came properly within the province of the general assembly of the citizens of each city. At this very time the Athenians, for example, had waiting within their gates many foreign deities whose claims to official recognition were being pressed upon the ecclesia by votaries among both the alien and the native population. Such were Isis the Egyptian, and the Cypriote Aphrodite. In comparatively recent times, moreover, the ecclesia had yielded to similar solicitations, and had enrolled among the deities of the Athenian people Asclepius and the Thracian Bendis.
In a polytheistic world there is no logical limit to the possible number of gods; so that the chance always existed that there were deities whom a given community had not yet discovered at any given moment. There is, in such a world, a logical necessity that anarchy should be absent from heaven. Hence each community had to rank its gods and goddesses according to their power and spheres of activity. The lowest god, demigod or hero was, accordingly, separated from mankind by no deep or broad chasm. With most of their deities, in fact, the Greeks were on terms of familiar intimacy, as were mediæval Christians with their saints. Various of the lesser gods, Theseus and Heracles among the ancestors of Alexander for example, had once been men who had been elevated to Olympus by the grace of Zeus because of the many services which they had rendered to men. It is true that they were the children of Zeus; but had not Zeus also claimed Alexander as his own son? Why, then, should not he too be deified?
The difficulty from the standpoint of religion—of the sentiment which had led in the past to the heroizing of men—was that he was still living. And this was an insurmountable difficulty. From the religious conceptions of the Greeks the worship of the living ruler could never be derived; and, in fact, it was by pious people and for theological reasons that the rendering of divine honors to Alexander was opposed in Athens and elsewhere.[72] The most that could be expected from men of religious convictions was a sullen acquiescence in something which they could not prevent.
The apotheosis of Alexander was grounded in impiety, in disbelief in the supernatural altogether. For the age in which he lived was marked by this very thing. In that time of storm and stress the ancient Greek religion became bankrupt. For enlightened people—and their name was then legion—the gods had ceased to have objective reality. Like the spirits of the departed whom Ulysses had recalled to consciousness by giving them blood to drink, they were dependent for their existence upon the kindliness of men. Without the ministrations of the living they would not merely be forgotten; they would be annihilated. It was the gratitude of mankind which had kept the memory of benefactors green by rites deemed and called religious. Once, to be sure, the deities had been real beings, but that was before they had died, while they were living upon the earth as men. Then they had performed great services—had founded cities, conquered worlds, established laws, invented arts, developed grains and fruits, and trained animals. So at least many men of talent and learning already taught. But it remained for Euhemerus of Messene, about fifty years later (ca. 280 B.C.), to give the idea classic expression in an entertaining work of popularization.[73] With all the circumstantiality of Defoe, he tells how, in the course of his voyaging, he was driven southward into the Indian Ocean from Araby the Blest, till he came to the island of Panchæa. There he found a model community whose social and political organization he described in the manner familiar to us from Plato's Republic. There, too, he made a remarkable discovery—an account written on golden tablets in "reformed Egyptian" by Hermes of the lives and achievements of Chronus, Zeus, and all the other gods and goddesses of the Greek hierarchy. They had been kings and notables of Panchæa, and some of them, like Zeus and Dionysus, had been world conquerors. Others, indeed, had earned the favorable verdict of posterity by very questionable acts. Aphrodite was the first prostitute, and Cadmus, the grandfather of Dionysus, was the cook of a king in Sidon and had run away with a flute girl named Harmonia.
This "sacred writ" was naturally the latest and most authoritative revelation. It was saved, moreover, from being a gospel of atheism because, as Cumont[74] says, "It left to the eternal and incorruptible stars ... the dignity of original gods and exalted them in proportion as it lowered their rivals of bygone days." The signal merit of Chronus had been to introduce the worship of the heavenly bodies in Panchæa.