Alexander and his Companions

The Primary Record

Ancient sources do not analyse the nature of Alexander’s Court, they just tell stories (which may or may not be true) about what happened there. Their descriptions reveal a Court which was drunken, bitchy, violent and openly homosexual – the scurrilous Greek writer Theopompus, having visited Philip II’s Court, suggested that his Companions (hetairoi) would be better named prostitutes (hetairai).

Later stories, such as those about Cleitus, Callisthenes and Bagoas – if you believe them – suggest that, despite the introduction of Persian nobles and the dress and rituals of the Persian Court, Alexander’s Court retained much of its Macedonian wildness to the very end.

The Secondary Historiogrophy

Opening his study of Alexander the Great: King, Commander and Statesman (1981), the academic historian NGL Hammond drew attention to the nature of the king’s Court. In Macedon, the king ruled from a Court which was a group of relatives, friends and powerful nobles – his ‘Companions’.

‘These acted as officers, envoys, governors, generals, treasurers, estate-managers … they attended him in public, fought at his side in war, protected him in the hunt, escorted him on ceremonial parades, and enjoyed his confidence and affection… A king’s success depended much upon his personal relations with his friends, and he lived most of the time in their company, feasting and drinking in epic manner.’

The historian Ernst Badian (2000) showed how such a community – so close and yet also so ‘closed’ to contact with the ‘real world’ – inevitably became a hotbed of intrigue, conspiracy and paranoia … in which Alexander as often as not was an active protagonist.

Continuity or Change?
For Gregor Weber (2009), Alexander’s Court remained basically the same throughout his reign – a personal, relationship-based men’s-club. Only at the very end did it move from the king’s tent into a fixed building, and even there it retained its essential character – although Weber accepts that it had to be ‘strengthened’ by the addition of the Persian elite (a development which caused great jealousy amongst the Macedonian Companions), as far as Alexander was concerned, little changed ... ‘government’ was essentially still about balancing/reconciling the personal relationships between the groups and individuals at a Court seething with intrigue:

‘Alexander was successful in organising the composition of his inner circle in a way that furthered his goals and supported his cause’.
 

By contrast, Tony Spawforth (2007) sees an ‘evolving role’ to the Court. He suggests that Alexander saw ‘holding court’ as the critical element to his monarchy – his Court was not just the place where he ruled, but the place whence he reigned – and in this he was a ‘master of self-representation’.
As his empire grew to include his Persian lands, therefore, Alexander gradually adopted Persian customs, not only to pacify his new Persian nobility, but to portray himself to his nobles and to the wider world as the monarch of an empire (in which light one has to see his orientalism, his proskynesis policy and his assumption of divinity).