Samantha Blankenship, University of Tennessee Knoxville
Alexander the Great’s decision to employ bematists and professional historians is best understood as another aspect of his appropriation of imperial structures and practices of the Achaemenid Persians. Traditionally this aspect of his campaigns has been considered an Aristotelian legacy (Dilke 1985: 29, 59-60), though the possibility that such an interpretation represents an anachronistic back-projection has been recently raised (Henkelman 2017: 70 n. 39). Henkelman 2017: 66-70 points, instead, to Persian management of imperial space—particularly with the possible construction of parasang-markers—as a suggestive analogue or precursor.
As Briant (1979; 1996/2002; 2012) and others have already highlighted, Alexander, in conquering the Persian Empire, began to adopt and re-purpose some of the Achaemenids’ imperial structures during his brief tenure as “king of Asia” (βασιλεύς ... τῆς Ἀσίας, Plutarch Alexander 34.1); Briant thus famously characterized Alexander as “the last of the Achaemenids” (Briant 1979: 1414; 2002: 876; notwithstanding the criticisms of Lane Fox 2007).
In addition to these political and administrative measures, we can detect similar appropriations in Alexander’s historiographical outlook—or rather, the historiographical practices of his historians and bematists. It is not the case, of course, that Alexander created royal inscriptions in the manner of the Great Kings whose dynasty he ended: but even in the form of the (mostly lost) Greek prose treatises that catalogued Alexander’s expedition, two distinct strands of Achaemenid practice can be traced in the fragments, testimonia, and/or reworkings of Callisthenes, Nearchus, Baeton, Amyntas, and other members of his entourage. This is even the case despite centuries of transformation of these eyewitness sources over the intervening centuries between Alexander’s contemporary witnesses and the surviving Alexander historians, in terms of ongoing developments in Greek and Roman historiographical standards and generic expectations, as well as the instrusion of presentist authorial agendas (Spencer 2009).
First, the emergence of bematistic literature, with its ethnographic component, recalls not only Persian conceptual control of space (with Henkelman) but also the Great King’s prospective investigations of the local customs, religion, and legal codes observed by the peoples within that space (Rollinger 2014; Frei 2001). Second, the king’s delegation of historiography to subordinates—even in the draft form of ephemerides—had already impressed Greeks as a strategy employed by Persian kings (see Herodotus, Histories 4.88, 7.100.1-2; cf. Grethlein 2009: 205-207). These compositional and discursive strategies of Achaemenid historiographical texts would have been available to Alexander and his staff alongside the core ideological tenets of Achaemenid kingship and empire repeatedly communicated in such texts (pace Lane Fox 2007: 277). Such engagement with Achaemenid treatments of imperial space and ongoing events would not be unprecedented in the Greek cultural sphere, moreover: less than a century earlier, Xenophon, for all the panhellenic elements of the Anabasis, had borrowed aspects of Persian-style documentation of space and resources to depict the Cyreans’ extended journey through Achaemenid territory (cf. already Tuplin 1991: 49; Henkelman 2017: 70 with n. 38). Alexander’s authorization and indeed institutionalization of analogous techniques demonstrates Greco-Macedonian receptivity to these Persian methods of doing history.