ABSTRACT
In 324, at Susa, Alexander was faced by a new problem. In old Greece there was a mass of exiles from every city, many of them democrats exiled by Antipater or his governments. Some had taken service as mercenaries with Alexander's satraps while he was in India; when he made the satraps disband their private armies, they had returned to Greece with their arms and without occupation. The position in that overcrowded country had become difficult; at best the exiles were a focus for every kind of discontent, at worst a possible menace. Alexander saw that, if he were to have the peace in his world (not merely in his Empire, for Greece was not in his Empire) which soon after he was to pray for at Opis, the exiles must be restored to their cities and their cities must receive them. But his difficulty was that the cities were those of the League of Corinth, and as its President he had sworn to the Covenant of the League, which forbade him to interfere in the internal affairs of the cities; yet it was very necessary to interfere. In these circumstances he issued to the cities of the League1 a decree ordering them to receive back their exiles (which he had no constitutional power to issue) and also a request for his own deification (which probably came first); for the Covenant bound Alexander the king but did not, and would not, bind Alexander the god, and he could therefore set it aside without losing his self-respect. To us this may seem a quibble, but no one can say it was a quibble to him, or that his careful observance throughout life of the outer forms of religion meant that they were nothing to him but forms. It has been objected that deification did not actually give him any new powers, but that is not the point; he had all the power he wanted, but he had not the right to use it; and to be a god gave him a juridical standing in the cities which he could not otherwise have got, for there was no place for a king in the constitution of a Greek city. The cities of the League granted his request and deified him2, thereby (in form) condoning his breach of the Covenant; for while Alexander was thinking of a way of escape from the Covenant which bound him, the cities and States of the League were thinking primarily of the exiles decree which hit some of them hard, notably Athens and Aetolia, and was disturbing to them all; and they were hoping to appease Alexander by granting his request for deification, which by comparison seemed to them of little importance. Calling him a god did not mean that they were going to worship him; no cult of him was set up anywhere, and in fact there is no sign that, Egypt apart, anybody ever did worship him till after his death; the first known case is that of Eumenes and his Macedonian troops in the Alexander-tent. His request for deification, then, was a limited political measure for a purely political purpose, and nothing else. It is well known that some scholars have long believed this, while others have strenuously denied it; I trust that what I have written in this study will show that the view which I follow is not only true but inevitable. His deification showed that he meant to stand above parties and factions, for many of the exiles, banished by Antipater or by the governments he supported, were Macedonia's enemies; it also showed that he had no intention of adopting Aristotle's view that such as he were above the law and that he could break the Covenant of the League at his pleasure. That his deification was purely political seems to be further supported by two facts: one is that 326 he never put his own head on his coinage, as he must have done had he been a god in the sense in which many of the kings who followed him were gods; and the other is that his request for deification did not (so far as is known) extend to the Greek cities of Asia Minor, who were his free allies and who were not members of the League of Corinth.4 There may have been no exiles problem there; but had there been he could have settled it without being their god, for he was not bound to them by any covenant which forbade him to interfere in their internal affairs. His deification, therefore, in 324 B.C., like his preliminary attempt at Bactra, was entirely a political matter, but this time limited to the cities of the League of Corinth; and it only remains to consider two modern objections to this view.
