Dialogues of the Dead (12.4-13.1)

Furthermore, you discarded the Macedonian cloak, they tell me, for a Median doublet, and took to a tiara worn upright on your head, and expected Macedonians, free men, to bow down before you. And, most ridiculous thing of all, you aped the habits of your defeated foes! I won’t mention your other activities—how you locked up educated [*] men along with lions, all your weddings, and your inordinate affection for Hephaestion. I’ve

Don’t you praise me for my adventurous spirit, father, and for being first man to leap into the fort of the Oxydracae, and for receiving so many wounds?

I don’t. Not that I think it’s a bad thing for a king to suffer an occasional wound and to face dangers at the head of his army; but that wasn’t at all the sort of thing for you. For you were supposed to be a god, and any time you were wounded and seen being carried out of the fighting on a litter, streaming with blood and groaning from your wound, the onlookers were amused to see how Ammon was being shown up as an impostor whose forecasts were false, and his prophets as mere flatterers. Who wouldn’t have been amused to see the son of Zeus fainting and calling for the assistance of the doctors? For now that you’re dead, don’t you think that there are many who wax witty about that pretence of yours, now that they see the corpse of the “god ‘” lying at full length, clammy and swollen like any other body? Besides, this policy, which you said was so useful, Alexander, the policy of gaining easy victories in this way, greatly diminished the glory of your successes. For everything seemed disappointing, when regarded as the work of a god.

People don’t think like that about me, but put me on a par with Heracles and Dionysus. And yet I alone have subdued the famous Aornos, a place captured by neither of them.

Don’t you see how you’re speaking just now like the son of Ammon, in comparing yourself to Heracles and Dionysus? Aren’t you ashamed, Alexander? Won’t you learn to forget your pride, and know yourself, and realise that you’re now dead?

What’s this, Alexander? Are you dead too, just like the rest of us?

As you see, Diogenes. There’s nothing strange in a human like me dying.

Ammon lied, then, when he said you were his son? You were Philip’s son after all?

Of course I was Philip’s son. I shouldn’t have died, if Ammon was my father.

And it was another lie about Olympias—that a serpent came to her and was seen in her bed, that that was how you came to be born, and that Philip was deceived in thinking that he was your father?

I heard that too, just as you did, but now I see that there was not a word of truth in what my mother and the prophets of Ammon said.

But their lies weren’t without practical advantage to you, Alexander. For many cowered down before you, thinking you a god.