Content area
Full Text
Many have felt to be anachronistic the casting of proskynesis in the court of Alexander the Great as a matter of worship of the king. Taking this premise as its starting point, this article explores the possible origins of this presentation of Alexander's proskynesis, an understanding that is articulated most fully in the 'proskynesis debates' of Arrian (4.10-12) and Curtius (8.5-6). It is argued that the misrepresentation was a deliberate strategy cultivated in the Peripatos, and that it was designed to deflect opprobrium away from Callisthenes and, by extension, away from the Peripatos itself.
Keywords: proskynesis - Callisthenes - Peripatos - Chares - Greek impiety
Lara O'Sullivan
The attempted introduction of proskynesis into the court of Alexander the Great at Bactra in 327 BCE has been a locus of scholarly interest.· For a long time, that interest was centred around the meaning of the gesture: was its attempted extension to the Greeks and Macedonians of the court a bid to integrate the disparate elites of Alexander's new empire through a unified court ceremonial, or was it rather a move by the king to demand divine honours from his subjects?1 My concern here is not to pursue a further examination of that debate. Rather, I take as a starting premise a position formulated by Badian, who in 1996 cogently argued that while proskynesis did not lack important implications for Alexander's claims to status, its performance will have seen Alexander recognised not as a god in his own right, but rather as loóGeo&ecedil; in just the way that the Greeks understood the Persian king to be not a god but 'god-like' in his exceptional power.2 On Badian's reading, the tradition in which proskynesis is explicitly articulated as a matter of worshipping the king himself - notably, the logos (presented most fully in Arrian and in Curtius) of a heated debate at a public banquet staged for the introduction of proskynesis, in which the court historian Callisthenes mounted a spirited defence of traditional Greek piety - is the product of developments later than 327.3
The aim of this paper is instead to explore an important question raised in turn by acceptance of these (or similar) premises: namely, when did the representation ofproskynesis as an issue of actual...