Brill’s Companion to the

Reception of Alexander the Great

Edited by

K.R. Moore

leiden | boston

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Contents

Preface ix
K.R. Moore
List of Illustrations xii
List of Contributors xiv

part 1
Ancient Greek, Roman and Persian Receptions

1 Framing the Debate 3

K.R. Moore

2 Attic Orators on Alexander the Great 41

Elias Koulakiotis

3 The Reception of Alexander’s Father Philip ii of Macedon 72

Sabine Müller

4 The Reception of Alexander in the Ptolemaic Dynasty 96

John Holton

5 Alexander after Alexander: Macedonian Propaganda and Historical

Memory in Ptolemy and Aristobulus’ Writings 119
Giuseppe Squillace

6 The Reception of Alexander in Hellenistic Art 140

Olga Palagia

7 Metalexandron: Receptions of Alexander in the Hellenistic and

Roman Worlds 162
Shane Wallace

8 Alexander between Rome and Persia: Politics, Ideology, and

History 197
Jacob Nabel

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9 Beyond Persianization: The Adoption of Near Eastern Traditions by

Alexander the Great 233
James Mullen

10 Sons of Heracles: Antony and Alexander in the Late Republic 254

Kyle Erickson

11 The Ambivalent Model: Alexander in the Greek World between

Politics and Literature (1st Century bc / beg. 1st Century ad) 275
Federicomaria Muccioli

12 The Latin Alexander: Constructing Roman Identity 304

Dawn L. Gilley

13 Alexander the Great in Seneca’s Works and in Lucan’s Bellum

Civile 325
Giulio Celotto

14 Plutarch’s Alexander 355

Sulochana R. Asirvatham

part 2
Later Receptions in the Near- and Far-East and the Romance
Tradition

15 Alexander in the Jewish tradition: From Second Temple Writings to

Hebrew Alexander Romances 379
Aleksandra Klęczar

16 Jews, Samaritans and Alexander: Facts and Fictions in Jewish Stories

on the Meeting of Alexander and the High Priest 403
Meir Ben Shahar

17 The Reception of Alexander the Great in Roman, Byzantine and Early

Modern Egypt 427
Agnieszka Wojciechowska and Krzysztof Nawotka

18 Byzantine Views on Alexander the Great 449

Corrine Jouanno

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contents vii

19 Church Fathers and the Reception of Alexander the Great 477

Jaakkojuhani Peltonen

20 Medieval and Renaissance Italian Receptions of the Alexander

Romance Tradition 503
Barbara Blythe

21 Syriac and Persian Versions of the Alexander Romance 525

Krzysztof Nawotka

part 3
“Modern” and Postmodern Receptions

22 Alexander and Napoleon 545

Agnieszka Fulińska

23 The Men Who Would be Alexander: Alexander the Great and His
Graeco-Bactrian Successors in the Raj 576
Rachael Mairs

24 Receptions of Alexander in Johann Gustav Droysen 596

Joseph Wiesehöfer

25 “The Unmanly Ruler”: Bagoas, Alexander’s Eunuch Lover, Mary

Renault’s The Persian Boy, and Alexander Reception 615
Elizabeth Baynham and Terry Ryan

26 Alexander’s Image in German, Anglo-American and French

Scholarship from the Aftermath of World War i to the Cold War 640
Reinhold Bichler

27 Alexander as Glorious Failure: The Case of Robert Rossen’s Alexander

the Great (1956) 675
Alastair J.L. Blanshard

28 Go East, Young Man: Adventuring in the Spirit of Alexander 694

Margaret E. Butler

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29 The Great Misstep: Alexander the Great, Thais, and the Destruction of
Persepolis 717
Alexander McAuley

30 Avoiding Nation Building in Afghanistan: An Absent Insight from

Alexander 739
Jason Warren

31 The Artist as Art Historian: Some Modern Works on Alexander 754

Ada Cohen

32 Alexander the Great Screaming Out for Hellenicity: Greek Songs and
Political Dissent 795
Guendalina D.M. Taietti

33 The Conscience of the King: Alexander the Great and the Ancient
Disabled 823
Alexandra F. Morris

Index 845

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 chapter 23

The Men Who Would be Alexander: Alexander the

Great and His Graeco-Bactrian Successors in the
Raj
Rachel Mairs

In the Geographical Journal for 1901, Colonel Sir Thomas Hungerford Holdich,
retired Superintendent of Frontier Surveys for the Government of India, re-
viewed a new collection of translations of Classical Greek and Roman texts
by John Watson McCrindle. The review is very positive, but Holdich has one
criticism of McCrindle’s new book, which is that it is “heavier and not quite
so handy as its predecessors in the series”. Why should a British army offi-
cer in India care about the weight of a work of Classical scholarship? The
answer lies in a British imperial obsession with the campaigns of Alexander
the Great in India and Afghanistan. This obsession is manifest in the scholarly
and semi-scholarly literature of British India, in works of fiction, and in the
discourse of British imperialism. It goes beyond hero-worship of Alexander,
to explicit identification with him. In Rudyard Kipling’s The Man Who Would
be King (1888), his antiheroes Dravot and Carnehan call on the narrator to
use his books and maps to plan their expedition to Kafiristan. The narrator
duly “hauled down volume inf-kan of the Encyclopædia Britannica” from his
bookshelf. Real life adventurers had more portable reference works at their dis-
posal.

British Imperialism, Greek Imperialism

As long as the study of Indian antiquities confines itself to the illustration

of Indian history it must be confessed that it possesses little attraction
for the general student, who is apt to regard the labour expended on
the disentanglement of perplexing and contradictory mazes of fiction as
leading only to the substitution of vague and dry probabilities for poetical,
albeit extravagant, fable. But the moment any name or event turns up in
the course of such speculations offering a plausible point of connection
between the legends of India and the rational histories of Greece or
Rome,—a collision between the fortunes of an eastern and a western

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the men who would be alexander 577

hero,—forthwith a speedy and spreading interest is excited which cannot

be satisfied until the subject is thoroughly sifted by the examination of all
the ancient works, western and eastern, that can throw concurrent light
on the matter as issue.1

In speaking of the existence of Grecian colonies in the remote regions

of Central Asia, said to be descended from alexander of Macedon, it is
necessary to premise, that I am not indulging in speculation, but asserting
a lineage of various tribes of people, that is claimed by themselves, and
merits therefore our attention.2

Dravot and Carnehan, although fictional, have much in common with histori-
cal British Alexander-chasers in India and Afghanistan. First, they themselves
identify with Alexander, and identify Alexander as a European conqueror of
India, in the same vein as the contemporary British. This is in contrast to an
India which is conceived of as ahistorical, whose only history worthy of the
name comes in its occasional contacts with the West. In their encounter with
the remote tribes of Kafiristan, Carnehan describes how “Dravot gives out that
him and me were Gods and sons of Alexander”. This is supposed to have a
positive effect because Dravot and Carnehan share a belief common among
many real British adventurers that there were in the mountains of Kafiris-
tan (modern Nuristan) actual descendants of the Greek soldiers of Alexander
the Great. Paradoxically, supposedly barbarian tribes might therefore also be
identified with Alexander. “I know you won’t cheat me”, Dravot says to the
Kafirs, “because you’re white people—sons of Alexander—and not like com-
mon black Mohammedans”.
These two preoccupations—to be Alexander and to find Alexander—were
common to many of the British travellers, soldiers and spies (who were often
all three) who journeyed through the easternmost regions conquered by Alex-
ander in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Not all such adventurers
were themselves directly in British service. Mercenaries in the armies of rulers
such as Ranjit Singh (1780–1839), Maharajah of the Sikh Empire, were among
the first foreigners to penetrate into the north-western parts of the Indian sub-
continent and Afghanistan, and play out their preoccupations with the region’s

1 James Prinsep, “Discovery of the name of Antiochus the Great, in Two of the Edicts of Asoka,
King of India”, Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal 3 (1838): 156.
2 Alexander Burnes, “On the Reputed Descendants of Alexander the Great, in the Valley of the
Oxus”, Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal 2 (1833): 305.

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‘Classical’ past under Alexander in antiquarian and informal archaeological

investigations.3 I shall discuss here two main periods—the 1830s–1840s, and
the 1870s through to the First World War—in which British scholars and adven-
turers pursued such research most actively, by travelling in the regions con-
cerned, collecting coins and artefacts and conducting excavations, first ama-
teur, then, from the time of the establishment of the Archaeological Survey of
India in 1861, increasingly scientific. One might also tell a similar story from the
Russian side, from the period when Central Asia became the theatre of an on-
going ‘Great Game’ between the expansionist powers of the Russian and British
Empires.4

The 1830s and 1840s: The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of
Bengal

Perhaps the most important organ for the collection, consolidation and diffu-
sion of constructed ‘knowledge’ about India’s ‘Classical’ past was the Journal
of the Asiatic Society of Bengal. From its first issue in 1832, the contents of the
journal were eclectic, containing articles by Indian and European writers cov-
ering every field of scholarly or semi-scholarly enquiry imaginable. Investiga-
tions into Alexander the Great and his Greek successors in Bactria and India
were very much the bread and butter of the jasb in its early years. Almost
every issue from the 1830s contains one or more articles on the subject, with
a much smaller number in the 1840s. The most visible traces of Alexander and
the Greeks were Graeco-Bactrian and Indo-Greek coins, which circulated in
bazaars, especially in the north-west. The Greek numismatic ‘gold rush’ towards
Central Asia is remarked upon by James Prinsep (1799–1840)—a scholar who,
not coincidentally, worked at the government mint in Calcutta—in the jour-
nal’s second volume:

Ancient Bactria, a country but recently opened to the investigation of

the antiquarian. It is from this unexplored part of Asia that we may
confidently expect a multitude of Grecian antiquities gradually to be

3 Elizabeth Errington, “Exploring Gandhara”, in From Persepolis to the Punjab: Exploring Ancient
lran, Afghanistan and Pakistan, ed. Elizabeth Errington and Vesta Sarkhosh Curtis (London:
British Museum Press, 2007).
4 See the lively account in Hopkirk, Peter, The Great Game: The Struggle for Empire in Central
Asia (London, Kodansha International, 1992).

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the men who would be alexander 579

developed. Travellers of all nations are already flocking thither to trace

the steps and discover the monuments of Alexander’s Indian conquests.5

In the same issue, the man who had collected many of the coins studied by
Prinsep contributed a more romantic piece, “On the Reputed Descendants of
Alexander the Great, in the Valley of the Oxus”,6 followed by his account of
the “‘Topes’ and Grecian Remains in the Panjáb”. Alexander ‘Bokhara’ Burnes
(1805–1841) first came to India as a soldier in the army of the East India Com-
pany. His Central Asian travels, in the furtherance of British imperial interests,
made him an early celebrity travel writer, with his Travels into Bokhara: Being
an account of a Journey from India to Cabool, Tartary and Persia, published to
great acclaim in 1834, the year after his pieces for the Journal of the Asiatic Soci-
ety of Bengal. Burnes was later appointed British political agent in Kabul, and
assassinated there in 1841.
The papers published in the 1833 volume of the jasb are fairly representa-
tive of both the favoured topics and the authorial credentials of subsequent
articles on Alexander and Greek presence in the east and their writers. As well
as officials in government or East India Company service who took up antiquar-
ian research as a pastime, many of the authors were soldiers who had personal
experience of travel in the regions of Alexander’s campaigns, and developed
strong opinions about his most probable routes. As in later periods—a topic
to which I shall return below—these men travelled with Classical accounts in
their baggage and produced lengthy and detailed descriptions of the territories
through which they travelled, matching these as they saw fit to the topograph-
ical and anthropological data provided in Greek and Roman historians such as
Arrian and Quintus Curtius Rufus. Court’s “Conjectures on the March of Alex-
ander”,7 for example, supplies a level of topographical detail which was driven
by a desire both to explore unknown territories, and to chart them, as well as
to make them ready for conquest.
Amid its diverse geographical, astronomical and palaeontological studies
(inter alia), antiquarian research of this sort rapidly became the Journal’s staple
material. Its editor viewed this shift in focus in a most positive light, and aimed

5 James Prinsep, “On the Greek Coins in the Cabinet of the Asiatic Society”, Journal of the Asiatic
Society of Bengal 2 (1833): 28.
6 Burnes, Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal 2 (1833): 305–308; on a similar topic, see Mohan
Lál, “Further Information Regarding the Siah Posh Tribe, or Reputed Descendents of the
Macedonians”, Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal 3 (1834): 76–79, discussed below.
7 jasb 5 (1836): 387–395.

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to ensure that the Alexander and Graeco-Bactrian studies published would be

of the highest possible quality and take into account the latest antiquarian
discoveries:

The tenor of the chief publications of the past year has been turned
aside from the objects of natural science to which it was supposed future
Indian researches would principally be confined, by a train of antiquarian
discovery of an unexpected and highly interesting nature in the classical
field of ancient Bactriana. Every endeavour has been made to bring to
notice the novelties and facts, as they have been discovered; and this has
in some cases caused confusion in the recital, imperfect investigation,
and some contradiction in results too hastily announced. It is hoped,
however, that these inconveniences, incident to a periodical appearing
at short intervals, will be more than counterbalanced by the speedy and
faithful publication of the circumstances as they have been brought to
light … Much however remains to be brought to notice regarding the
Bactrian coins, and what has been learnt from the specimens furnished
by Dr. gerard, and by shekh keramat ali, has been purposely kept
back to be incorporated with the facts developed by the collection of
General ventura, now on its way to France under charge of the Chevalier
allard.8

Prinsep continued to contribute studies on Graeco-Bactrian coins to the jour-

nal over the following years.9 These studies, and his 1838 article, on the identi-
fication of the names of a Hellenistic king in the Asokan edicts, he viewed not
merely as contributions to the growing field of Graeco-Bactrian studies, or his-
torical curiosities, but as findings which might validate the whole mission of
Indian historical research.
Prinsep may have held a still greater Classical prejudice than was usual
for the period—or at least expressed it more stridently—but the identifica-
tion and exploration of traces of Alexander held a lasting attraction for British
scholars and travellers in India. The greatest contributor to this was undoubt-
edly Charles Masson (1800–1853), an East India Company Army deserter turned
explorer, who travelled extensively in the North-West and Afghanistan and

8 jasb 3 (1834): vi.

9 jasb 5 (1836): 720–724: “New types of Bactrian and Indo-Scythic Coins”; jasb 7 (1838): 636–
657: “Additions to Bactrian Numismatics and discovery of the Bactrian Alphabet”; jasb 7
(1838): 1047–1052: “Notes on Coins and Relics from Bactria”.

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the men who would be alexander 581

published accounts of his journeys, including a four-volume Narrative of Var-

ious Journeys in Balochistan, Afghanistan and The Panjab.10 In the first of sev-
eral memoirs published in the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal “On
the Ancient Coins Discovered at the Site Called Beghrám in the Kohistán of
Kábul”,11 identified as Alexandria in the Caucasus, he outlines a broad and
ambitious programme of historical research:

For the last six or seven years, I have directed my attention to the antiqui-
ties of Central Asia, particularly to the vestiges of its Grecian conquerors
and rulers. In spite of conflicting circumstances, I have made many dis-
coveries, which one day, by the favor of the Almighty, I shall make pub-
lic. I shall not remit my labors: notwithstanding the inevitable casualties
of time, notwithstanding the defect of historical records, notwithstand-
ing the merciless and destructive ravages of Muhammaden conquerors, I
think, I trust, we have sufficient evidences and indications still remaining,
to enable us to decide with certainty, or to arrive at plausible conjectures
on, most of the interesting points connected with these countries, from
the period of the Macedonian conquests to the introduction of the Islam
faith.12

Ambitious though this plan was, Masson succeeded in amassing a great body of
archaeological and numismatic material in his travels. The fruits of his labours
can be seen in the synthetic volume Ariana Antiqua,13 edited by H.H. Wilson
(1786–1860), another one-time employee of the Calcutta mint, and at that
time director of the Royal Asiatic Society in London. The volume presents
the collected wisdom on Alexander’s Greek descendants in Afghanistan, along
with the accounts of Greek and Roman historians, and discussions of the works
of modern historians including Bayer. Elsewhere, Masson also recounts the

10 Charles Masson, Narrative of Various Journeys in Balochistan, Afghanistan, the Panjab, &
Kalât, During a Residence in those Countries: To Which is Added an Account of the Insur-
rection at Kalat, and a Memoir on Eastern Balochistan (London: Richard Bentley, 1844). On
Masson’s life and career, see Gordon Whitteridge, Charles Masson of Afghanistan: Explorer,
Archaeologist, Numismatist, and Intelligence Agent (Warminster: Aris & Phillips, 1986).
11 jasb 3 (1834); cf. jasb 5 (1836): 1–28, 537–554.
12 Charles Masson, “Memoir on the Ancient Coins found at Beghrám, in the Kohistán of
Kábul”, Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal 3 (1834): 161–162.
13 H.H. Wilson and Charles Masson, Ariana Antiqua: A Descriptive Account of the Antiquities
and Coins of Afghanistan with a Memoir on the Buildings called Topes by C. Masson (Lon-
don: East India Co., 1841).

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story behind how these acquisitions were made: the difficulties of tracing the
provenance of ancient coins in the bazaars of Afghanistan, and the problems
which this poses for modern numismatists and historians:

The solitary coin found at Jelalabad does not afford proof positive that
euthydemus governed there also, both because there is no certainty
where coins purchased in bazars were produced; and it is not impossible
but that it may have found its way there from Beghram, as the Afghan
shepherds, resident on its plain during the summer, migrate to Lughman
and the vicinity of Jelalabad, during the winter; and the few coins they
may bring with them, they disperse among the dealers in the small towns,
as their trifling wants of oil, tobacco, &c. may induce them.14

In Masson’s writings, as in those of his fellows in the pages of the Journal of

the Asiatic Society of Bengal, detailed and scholarly discussion of the remains
of Alexander and ancient Greek presence in the East is almost always jux-
taposed with more impressionistic musings on the possibility of present-day
descendants of Alexander still living in the mountains of Afghanistan, as well
as reflection on the parallels between ancient Greek and modern British con-
quest and colonialism in the region. The inspiration for Kipling’s The Man Who
Would Be King, with its lost tribe of descendants of Alexander in Kafiristan,
lies in speculative accounts such as Masson’s, where he muses on “Badakshan,
where if we may not be so sanguine as to allow its princes even the honor of a
bastard descent from alexander the great, we may be gratified in beholding
the posterity of oxartes, his father-in-law, and of sisymithres, his benefac-
tor and friend, or of those who govern in their seats”.15
Nor were the British the only ones to develop a fascination with purported
‘lost tribes’ of Greeks. In 1834, Munshi Mohan Lál published an account of some
‘kafirs’ in the hills, a group named the Siah Posh, which he had been given
in Jalalabad, along with further tales which he recorded from the testimony
of a Badakshani informant on his journey to Bokhara. Lál identified several
supposed Macedonian traits in these people, indicating possible descent from
Alexander the Great, including their method of warfare, long hair, goatskin
clothing, consumption of wine and preference for sitting on chairs rather than
upon the ground. Lál’s informant stated, in addition, that many local Muslim

14 Charles Masson, “Second Memoir on the Ancient Coins found at Beghrám, in the Kohistán
of Kábul”, Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal 5 (1836): 11–12.
15 Charles Masson, “Memoir on the Ancient Coins found at Beghrám, in the Kohistán of
Kábul”, Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal 3 (1834): 161.

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the men who would be alexander 583

rulers and their soldiers had their own traditions of descent from Alexander
and the Macedonians, which he relates to the stories of the Siah Posh which he
had heard in Jalalabad. Lál provides the following explanation for his findings:

In my opinion, the Siah Posh soldiers, who claim also the same descent,
were the countrymen of those of Badakhshan; but when the violent
invasion of Muhammad subverted the rich valley of the Oxus, many of the
Macedonian descendants were converted to Islam, and many, avoiding
that religion, left the valley and chose their ground upon the mountains
near the Hindu Kush. They live there now independently, keeping their
former principles of worshipping the idols, (as the Macedonians did
their heathen deities), and calling themselves the hero descendants of
alexander’s soldiers. They put on the black skin of the goat, and do not
believe in Muhammed; therefore they are called Kafir Siah Posh (or black-
dressed infidels).16

He concludes by expressing his disappointment at not having the opportunity

to see these people and their customs for himself and awaits, presumably in
knowledge of the British amateur researches taking place at the same time
as his own, “more authentic information from an European traveller in that
country”.17
British officers and administrators who had not travelled in the North-West,
and whose concern was not principally the identification of direct local descen-
dants of Alexander and his army, also found resonances of Classical antiquity in
India. Comparisons between the military exploits of Alexander and of the East
India Company were typically positive, with both the Greeks and the British as
bringers of order and civilisation. In a note on two coins with Greek inscrip-
tions which he had purchased, a Major D.L. Stacy suggests that:

The Greek jaêdad or territories we may suppose grew into consideration

much the same as did the Honorable Company’s after their first footing:
and like the infant Company too, we may suppose, the Greeks established
a currency of their own, through more perhaps with a view of handing
down their achievement to posterity than as a necessary medium of
barter.18

16 Lál, Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal 3 (1834): 78.

17 Lál, Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal 3 (1834): 79.
18 jasb 3 (1834): 431–433.

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For historical context, and for an insight into British imperialism beyond the
‘civilizing mission’, one might note that a subsequent issue contained a piece
“On the preparation of Opium for the China market”.19
From the early 1840s, the Journal of the Asiatic Society began to carry far
fewer articles on Alexander in India or the Greek kingdoms of Bactria. There
were still occasional notes on Graeco-Bactrian and Indo-Greek coins, such
as those by Christian Lassen (1800–1876) or a young Alexander Cunningham
(1814–1893), later founder of the Archaeological Survey of India.20 There were
also some stylistic analyses of Greek influence in Indian sculpture, which range
from plausible art historical arguments to plain wishful thinking.21 But after
1842 we find little or nothing.
The reason for this new silence is essentially political; although, the deaths
of both Prinsep and Burnes in 1840–1841 may also have contributed. The First
Anglo-Afghan War (1839–1842)—a British military disaster—and the Anglo-
Sikh Wars of the 1840s made travel in the north-west difficult. In 1842, two
British envoys, Charles Stoddart and James Connolly, were executed by the
Emir of Bukhara on charges of spying. These factors seriously impeded British
imperial ambitions in Afghanistan and Central Asia, and as a result curtailed
the surveying and antiquarian activities which had accompanied them, at
least partly as a front for spying. Later in the nineteenth century, in a period
of harsher and more stringent British control in India, and especially in the
aftermath of the suppression of the Indian Rebellion of 1857 and the imposition
of direct government by the British Crown, research and publication on the
antiquities of India once again increased, although Afghanistan and Central
Asia were still mostly off-limits.

The Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries:

Archaeological Explorations

Alexander Cunningham—who as a young man had published on Graeco-

Bactrian coins in the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal—became the first
director of the Archaeological Survey of India in 1861. His reports on the survey’s
activities in 1862–1865 began with a mission statement not unlike that of some

19 jasb 5 (1836): 165–179.

20 See, for example, the articles in jasb 9 (1840), and jasb 11 (1842).
21 jasb 5 (1836): 567–570: L.R. Stacy, “Note on the Discovery of a Relic of Grecian Sculpture
in Upper India”; jasb 16 (1847): 664–666: J. Abbott, “On a Sculpture from the Site of the
Indo-Greek city of Bucephalia”.

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the men who would be alexander 585

of his predecessors in British India, but with an attention to non-Classical

sources lacking in the priorities, or indeed scholarly purviews, of writers such
as Masson:

In describing the ancient state of the Panjab, the most interesting subject
of enquiry is the identification of those famous peoples and cities, whose
names have become familiar to the whole world through the expedition
of Alexander the Great. To find the descendants of those peoples and the
sites of those cities amongst the scattered inhabitants and raised mounds
of the present day, I propose, like Pliny, to follow the track of Alexander
himself. This plan has a double advantage for as the Chinese pilgrims, as
well as the Macedonian invaders, entered India from the West, the routes
of the conquerors and the pilgrims will mutually illustrate each other.22

This is not the place for a full overview of the development and activities of
the Archaeological Survey of India, which covered the entirety of the subconti-
nent, and periods long before and after Alexander and his successors.23 British
soldiers and administrators continued to travel in the north-west of the sub-
continent, tried to trace the routes of Alexander and published their conclu-
sions in various publications, scholarly and popular. Volume i of Cunningham’s
Ancient Geography of India24 provided a valuable synthesis of the geographi-
cal information available on the periods of Alexander’s campaigns, and of the
Greek kingdoms of the region and their successors. But it was another writer
whom I have already briefly discussed, John Watson McCrindle (1825–1913),
who did most to contribute to popularizing and diffusing knowledge of what
ancient Greek and Roman historians had to say about India and Afghanistan,
and whose books had perhaps the greatest impact on late Victorian explorers
with scholarly pretensions.
McCrindle graduated in Classics from Edinburgh University in 1854, and
worked as a Classics teacher in Scotland before moving to Calcutta in 1859,
where he served in senior positions in various schools and universities.25 In the

22 Alexander Cunningham, Archaeological Survey of India: Four Reports Made During the
Years 1862–63–64–65. Volume ii. (Simla: Government Central Press, 1871): 1.
23 Sourindranath Roy, The Story of Indian Archaeology, 1784–1947 (New Delhi: Archaeological
Survey of India, 1961).
24 Alexander Cunningham, The Ancient Geography of India. i The Buddhist Period, including
the Campaigns of Alexander, and the Travels of Hwen-Thsang (London: Trübner, 1871).
25 James Burgess, “Obituary Notices: John Watson McCrindle, ll.d”, Journal of the Royal
Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland (1913).

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1870s, McCrindle was approached by James Burgess, the editor of a new journal
called the Indian Antiquary, to contribute translations of the Greek and Latin
works which dealt with India. Over the following decades, in India and after
his retirement and return to Britain, he published several volumes of Classical
sources in translation, including those relating to the period of Alexander, and
the few passages in Classical histories which mention Graeco-Bactrian and
Indo-Greek kings.26
As well as reaching scholarly audiences through the Indian Antiquary, Mc-
Crindle’s translations were also used by a wider constituency of British soldiers
and bureaucrats in India, among whom it had become something of a popular
hobby to set out to trace the route of Alexander, or identify customs or peoples
from these ancient accounts in the present day.
The review of McCrindle’s Ancient India27 which was published by Holdich
in the Geographical Journal clearly shows the practical uses to which these
books were being put.28 Holdich, indeed, had previously brought the same

26 J.W. McCrindle, Ancient India as Described by Megasthenês and Arrian: Being a Translation
of the Fragments of the Indika of Megasthenês Collected by Dr. Schwanbech, and of the First
Part of the Indika of Arrian (Calcutta, Thacker, Spink & Co., 1877); McCrindle, The Com-
merce and Navigation of the Erythraean Sea: Being a Translation of the Periplus Maris Ery-
thraei by an Anonymous Writer and Partly from Arrian’s Account of the Voyage of Nearkhos,
from the Mouth of the Indus to the Head of the Persian Gulf (Calcutta, Thacker. Sprink & Co.,
1879); McCrindle, Ancient India as Described by Ktesias the Knidian: Being a Translation of
the Abridgement of his “Indika” by Photios, and of the Fragments of that Work Preserved in
Other Writers (London: Trübner, 1882); McCrindle, Ancient India as Described by Ptolemy:
Being a Translation of the Chapters Which Describe India and Central and Eastern Asia
in the Treatise on Geography Written by Klaudios Ptolemaios (Calcutta, Thacker Spink &
Co., 1885); McCrindle, The Invasion of India by Alexander the Great as Described by Arrian,
Q. Curtius, Diodoros, Plutarch and Justin in Westminster, A. Constable and company, 1896;
McCrindle, The Christian Topography of Cosmas, An Egyptian Monk (London, The Hakluyt
Society, 1897); McCrindle, Ancient India as described in Classical Literature: Being a Collec-
tion of Greek and Latin Texts Relating to India, Extracted from Herodotus, Strabo, Diodorus
Siculus, Pliny, Aelian, Philostratus, Dion Chrysostom, Porphyry, Stobaeus, the Itinerary of
Alexander the Great, the Periêgêsis of Dionysius, the Dionysiaka of Nonnus, the Romance
History of Alexander and Other Works (Westminster, Archibald Constable and Co., 1901).
27 McCrindle, Ancient India as Described in Classical Literature: Being a Collection of Greek
and Latin Texts Relating to India, Extracted from Herodotus, Strabo, Diodorus Siculus, Pliny,
Aelian, Philostratus, Dion Chrysostom, Porphyry, Stobaeus, the Itinerary of Alexander the
Great, the Periêgêsis of Dionysius, the Dionysiaka of Nonnus, the Romance History of Alex-
ander and Other Works (Westminster, Archibald Constable and Co., 1901).
28 Thomas Hungerford Holdich, “Review: Dr. McCrindle’s ‘Ancient India’”, The Geographical
Journal 18 (1901).

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the men who would be alexander 587

journal with a report on “The Origin of the Kafir of the Hindu Kush”,29 the
tribe supposed to be descendants of Alexander’s army, whose customs had
been reported by Lál and other authors in the 1830s. In this earlier article,
Holdich had expressed his indebtedness to McCrindle’s books, and noted that
they “possess the invaluable attribute of portability”. His review of Ancient
India offers an invaluable insight into an army surveyor’s practical needs and
expectations of such a work:

The comparatively small world of Indian antiquarian scholars, no less

than the larger world of intelligent travellers, owe a debt of gratitude to
Mr. McCrindle for having placed within easy reach of them a compact and
handy series of references to those classical authorities whose writings
deal with Ancient India. … The book is … heavier and not quite so handy
as its predecessors in the series, of which the adaptability of each separate
volume to the capacity of an ordinary pocket, and its small considera-
tion as an additional weight to a traveler’s baggage, were by no means
a contemptible attribute. The value of the series lies hardly more in the
accuracy of translation and the scholarship exhibited by its author than
in its ready accessibility to those political, military, and commercial wan-
derers whose business leads them into the remoter corners of our Indian
Empire, and who can verify for themselves, as they go, the extraordinary
accuracy of some, at least, of those old-world records of the changeless
East. It is with the help of such practical scholars as McCrindle that the
unwritten history of a country which has never produced a historian can
be gradually unfolded by men whose knowledge of Greek literature prob-
ably ends with the Greek version of the New Testament; and the worst
criticism which can be passed on this latest volume is that the author
appears to be unconscious of the extent of the fresh information about
ancient India which has been evolved with the assistance of those parts
of the series which have preceded it.
[…]
McCrindle’s series has probably done more to awaken a general inter-
est in the antiquarian records of the most interesting part of Asia than
any work which has hitherto appeared. It should not only have its place
in every geographical library, but part of it, at any rate, should be a famil-
iar addition to the personal equipment of the Indian frontier official; for
it is on the frontier chiefly that the light of antiquity is required to assist

29 Holdich, “The Origin of the Kafir of the Hindu Kush”, The Geographical Journal 7 (1896).

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588 mairs

in unraveling the ethnographical problems of the present. An entire revi-

sion of our map knowledge of ancient India is one of the requirements of
the age, and to this, again, the study of McCrindle’s translations is almost
a necessary introduction.30

Holdich’s criticisms, naturally enough, centre on McCrindle’s limited acquain-

tance with the most recent surveys of the Indo-Afghan borderlands, his own
area of expertise. But the interest of a volume of translated Classical sources on
ancient India for a British administrator lay not just in satisfying his intellectual
curiosity, or passing his spare time in exploration along the routes of Alexan-
der, but in confirming his impressions and judgments about modern Indian
and Central Asian populations. Holdich paints a picture of an unchanging,
ahistorical India, in which the tribes identified by Herodotos may be matched
directly onto those of the present day: “Indeed, it may fairly well be doubted
whether any modern British official possesses a clearer idea of the ethno-
graphical and geographical affinities of the nations and tribes inhabiting Asia
between Syria and Indo-China at the present time, than that which was pos-
sessed by Herodotus four centuries and a half before Christ.” The Classical
historians were thus incorporated into a contemporary Orientalist discourse
about knowing and controlling the East. For some Britons in India, the appeal
lay not just in trying to identify the physical geography of the ancient Greek
and Roman historians, but also the human geography, claiming that peoples
and their languages and customs were unchanged from the time of Alexander.
Tensions in the borderlands between British India and the Emirate of Af-
ghanistan remained high. There were two further Anglo-Afghan Wars, in 1878–
1880 and 1919. In 1893, the Dunand Line was established to delineate the Afghan
and British spheres of influence. Afghanistan remained largely closed to the
outside world until the Third Anglo-Afghan War of 1919, when the Emir Aman-
ullah asserted the country’s right to establish diplomatic relations with other
countries independently of British control, and invited the French to establish
an archaeological delegation. It would be appropriate, however, to append a
brief coda to my discussion of British research on the Alexander the Great in
the East by considering the work of Sir Marc Aurel Stein (1862–1943), a British-
Hungarian archaeologist best known for his explorations of Chinese Turkestan
in the early years of the twentieth century.31

30 Holdich, “Review: Dr. McCrindle’s ‘Ancient India’ ”, The Geographical Journal 18 (1901).
31 Annabel Walker, Aurel Stein: Pioneer of the Silk Road (London, J. Murray, 1995); Helen
Wang, Sir Aurel Stein in The Times: A Collection of Over 100 References to Sir Aurel Stein and

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the men who would be alexander 589

Stein had long been interested in Bactria and its archaeology, but political
circumstances had prevented him from visiting Afghanistan. In the 1920s, he
undertook an expedition “On Alexander’s Track to the Indus”,32 a more than
usually scholarly contribution to the by now extensive literature of travelogues
tracing the route of Alexander the Great through the north-west of the Indian
subcontinent. In the early 1940s, when he was already eighty years old, he was
finally able to visit Afghanistan, but died en route to Bactria, in Kabul—where
he is buried in the British Cemetery alongside the Anglo-Afghan war dead of
the nineteenth century, and casualties of the 1960s and 70s ‘hippie trail’.

Postcolonial Alexanders

British adventurers and administrators explored the north-west frontier with

the Classical histories of Alexander the Great’s Indian campaigns in their sad-
dlebags, in much the same way in which Alexander himself is said to have slept
with the account of a still more ancient clash between East and West—Homer’s
Iliad—under his pillow (Plutarch, Life of Alexander, 8.2). In recent decades, war
in Afghanistan has led to a new wave of comparative exercises between ancient
and modern imperialism in the region.
Although judgements of the nature of European colonialism in South and
Central Asia have changed, comparisons continue to be made between Alex-
ander’s Graeco-Macedonian successors in the region and those, in the words
of Lord Curzon in a speech to the Annual Meeting of the Asiatic Society of
Bengal in 1900, “borne to India upon a crest of a later but similar wave”.33 I
have reviewed some of these comparisons in twentieth and twenty-first cen-
tury scholarship elsewhere,34 and will give only a few select examples here.
Raj nostalgia persists in some modern studies, somewhat incongruously,
alongside harsher judgements of colonialism. In the Western popular imagina-
tion, there is still room for romanticisation of the Raj in the very same breath as
condemnation of its values. This popular image of British India is dangerously

his Extraordinary Expeditions to Chinese Central Asia, India, Iran, Iraq and Jordan in The
Times Newspaper 1901–1943 (London, Eastern Art Pub., 2002).
32 Sir Marc Aurel Stein, On Alexander’s Track to the Indus (London, Macmillan, 1929).
33 Quoted by Himanshu Prabha Ray, “Alexander’s Campaign (327–326bc): A Chronological
Marker in the Archaeology of India”, in Memory as History: The Legacy of Alexander in
Asia, ed. Himanshu Prabha Ray and Daniel T. Potts (New Delhi, Aryan Books International,
2007), 107.
34 Rachel Mairs, “ ‘Hellenistic India’ ”, New Voices in Classical Reception 1 (2006).

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590 mairs

evocative, and its familiarity—from sources which include popular novels and
television series—means that it is all too easy to invoke it without further con-
sideration. Peter Green, for example, imagines local peoples in the territories
conquered by Alexander Hellenising and vying to join the gymnasium: “like
Indians under the British Raj angling for the entrée to European club member-
ship”.35 The Indo-Greek kings, on the other hand, are compared to Englishmen
who: “went native”, and he notes that in coin portraits: “many of these monar-
chs sport the solar topee (or a topee like helmet) latterly associated with the
British Raj: colonialism breeds its own symbols of continuity”.36
Colonialism, it goes without saying, could not casually breed its own sym-
bols of continuity independent of actual historical or structural connections
between the periods in question. A key text in postcolonial approaches to
the Hellenistic successor kingdoms to Alexander is Édouard Will’s “Pour une
‘anthropologie coloniale’ du monde hellénistique”. While recognizing the fun-
damental differences between the Hellenistic world and modern capitalist,
industrialized, imperial expansion,37 Will seeks out points of comparison be-
tween the two periods of colonization and uses these to orient his research
on the Hellenistic world.38 Further points can and have been raised against
the structural equivalence of the two colonial context, or sets of contexts, dis-
cussed by Will. Laurianne Martinez-Sève, for example, in direct response to
his views, notes that the Greek settlers of Bactria and India, after the time of
Alexander, lived in the conquered lands without direct and frequent contact
with an external imperial ‘metropolis’.39 Even the bipolar opposition between
colonisers and colonised can be broken down. Alexander and his armies came
from diverse points of origin within the Hellenised world, and the peoples
whom they encountered in Bactria and India were similarly diverse. Intermar-
riage with non-Greek women, whether locals or captives from other regions
through which Alexander campaigned,40 meant that from the first locally-born

35 Peter Green, Alexander to Actium: The Hellenistic Age (Berkeley, University of California
Press, 1990), 316.
36 Green, Alexander to Actium: 320 and 350.
37 Édouard Will, in The Craft of the Ancient Historian: Essays in honor of Chester G. Starr eds.
Eadie and Ober (Lanham, University Press of America, 1985), 288–289.
38 Will, in The Craft of the Ancient Historian: Essays in honor of Chester G. Starr eds. Eadie and
Ober (Lanham, University Press of America, 1985), 282.
39 Laurianne Martinez-Sève, “Les Grecs en Orient: portraits croisés”, in Portraits de migrants,
Portraits de colons. i ed. Pierre Rouillard (Paris, de Boccard, 2009), 133–134.
40 Stanley M. Burstein, “Whence the Women?: The Origin of the Bactrian Greeks”, Ancient
West & East 11 (2012).

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the men who would be alexander 591

‘Greek’ generation of the colonial settlement, the supposed ‘European’ domi-

nant imperial caste had close connections to local peoples, cultures and lan-
guages.
Another problem in applying comparisons from British imperialism in India
to ancient contexts is that it can lead to leaps of logic which are not warranted
by the actual source material. The Greek inscription of a man named Sophytos
son of Naratos (traced by Pinault to the forms Subhuti son of Narada41) from
Old Kandahar, for example, has tended to be read in ways which view Sophytos
as an Indian acculturated to Greek ways, living in a Greek-dominated commu-
nity.42 His protestation of his Greek education, and the high literary quality and
aspirations of his inscription, have been viewed as a contrast to his supposed
Indian identity. Yet Sophytos at no point in his inscription claims an ethnic
identity of any sort, and we know too little about his contemporary milieu to
compare his behaviour and cultural points of reference to those of his neigh-
bours, ‘Indian’ or ‘Greek’, in the period after Alexander.43
The history of comparisons between the Alexander and the British in India is
nevertheless an interesting one, from an historiographical point of view: con-
temporary circumstances, whether imperial confidence or postcolonial anx-
iety, affect writers’ perceptions of Hellenistic Greek colonialism, and colour
their moral and emotional responses to it. Such comparisons are, in my view,
best kept at this level, rather than that of asserting any direct historical connec-
tion or deep and compelling similarity.
I would like to conclude by returning to the legends of descendants of
Alexander in the hills of the north-west frontier, which have acquired a new
resonance and popularity in an age when outside intervention in Afghanistan
has awakened interest in earlier western imperial ventures in the region.44 As

41 Georges-Jean Pinault, “Remarques sur les noms propres d’origine indienne dans la stèle de
Sôphytos”, in Afghanistan: Ancien carrefour entre l’ est et l’ouest, ed. Osmund Bopearachchi
and Marie-Françoise Boussac (Turnhout, Brepols, 2005).
42 Paul Bernard, Georges-Jean Pinault and Georges Rougemont, “Deux nouvelles inscriptions
grecques de l’ Asie Centrale”, Journal des Savants (2004).
43 Rachel Mairs, “Sopha Grammata: Greek Acrostichs in Inscriptions from Arachosia, Nubia
and Libya”, in The Muse at Play: Riddles and Wordplay in Greek and Latin Poetry, ed. Jan
Kwapisz, David Petrain and Mikołaj Szymański (Berlin, De Gruyter, 2012), 279–306; Mairs
“The Places in Between: Model and Metaphor in the Archaeology of Hellenistic Ara-
chosia”, in From Pella to Gandhara: Hybridisation and Identity in the Art and Architecture
of the Hellenistic East, ed. Anna Kouremenos, Sujatha Chandrasekaran and Roberto Rossi
(Oxford, bar, 2011), 177–189; Paul Bernard, “Hellenistic Arachosia: A Greek Melting Pot in
Action”, East and West 55 (2005), 13–34.
44 Corinne Fowler, Chasing Tales: Travel Writing, Journalism and the History of British Ideas

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592 mairs

in the early nineteenth century, such a descent has been both ascribed and
actively claimed. Controversially, Kalash communities in the mountains near
Chitral have received investment and support from Greek ngos, aid which
comes with an understanding that ancient connections with Greece and Greek
culture are both authentic and to be promoted. In a 2011 article in the British
newspaper The Observer, a reporter described:

[…] a museum, small hospital, library, hostel and school complex for the
Kalash (which Muslims cannot attend), housed within an absurdly Greek-
looking palace built by the ngo Greek Volunteers, with help from Greece’s
government body Hellenic Aid. Greek Volunteers’s director, Athanasios
Lerounis, a long-time champion of the Kalash and the man who raised the
money to build the centre, assures me that though there are “similarities
to the Ionic style”, the building came from “the local architecture”. The
attempted olive growing that goes on is, however, more likely to be an
ancient tradition of Athens.45

Such claims over the Kalash and their identity persist in the face of scientific
evidence to the contrary. Economic imperatives, and the international profile
which comes with recognition of the uniqueness—and picturesqueness—of
their culture, give the Kalash their own reasons for promoting the connection
to Alexander and to Greece, and they reveal themselves to be not without
appreciation of the ironies of the situation:

Almost all accounts of the Kalash fixate on the tribe’s mythological de-
scent from Alexander the Great. The romance of Alexander’s tribe is a
key part of Kalash tourism, although “they did a dna test and they found
no connection” is a familiar refrain here.46

The reality of a connection to Alexander is immaterial, if both locals and

foreigners want to believe it.

about Afghanistan (Amsterdam, Rodopi, 2007), 44–48; Frank L. Holt, Into the Land of
Bones: Alexander the Great in Afghanistan (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2005),
151–152; Timothy Howe, “Alexander and ‘Afghan Insurgency’: A Reassessment”, in Brill’s
Companion to Insurgency and Terrorism in the Ancient Mediterranean, ed. Timothy Howe
and Lee L. Brice (Leiden, Brill, 2016), 151–182.
45 Oscar Rickett, “Culture Kalash in Pakistan”, The Guardian, 16 April 2011.
46 Oscar Rickett, “Culture Kalash in Pakistan”, The Guardian, 16 April 2011.

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the men who would be alexander 593

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