The Madness of Alexander the Great - And the Myth of Military Genius - 9781473852365 by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2016-10-26T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 7

Paranoia, Suicide, and Depression

One of the most lethal aspects of post-traumatic stress and one of the most common is the destruction of the capacity for social trust that creates a persistent expectation of betrayal and exploitation in a soldier suffering from prolonged exposure to war.1 This condition is a consequence of the soldier’s loss of authority over some of his mental functions, especially memory and the ability to make perceptions that the soldier can trust to be accurate. With confidence in his own perceptions lost, the soldier’s world seems uncertain in every aspect. The uncertainty creates anxiety, leading to a persistent expectation of betrayal by friends and everyone else.

A battlefield is a very uncertain place, where one’s very existence can no longer be assumed. Already suspicious by nature, Alexander’s prolonged exposure to war and slaughter, much of it occasioned by his own orders and often accomplished with his own hands, created the circumstances in which he could no longer trust anyone or even his own assessments of reality.

That something was psychologically wrong with Alexander must have been clear to his officers and troops. It was certainly clear to our sources. Cleitarchus, a main source for Curtius’ history, authored an influential history of Alexander (now lost) in 310-301 BC that painted a dark psychological picture of Alexander as corrupt, an alcoholic, a tyrant, and a murderer. Cleitarchus’ work seems to have been drawn from the eyewitness accounts of common soldiers, suggesting that Alexander’s behaviour did not go unnoticed by his troops and was widely known.2 Much of Arrian’s history of Alexander is based upon the lost history of Aristobulus, one of Alexander’s staff officers who accompanied him on campaign.3 We have no accounts of Aristobulus participating in battles, and his post as a staff officer afforded him a degree of detachment from the events he witnessed. Aristobulus began writing his history of Alexander during the Indian campaign, after Alexander’s cruelty had already been displayed in Afghanistan and was becoming genocidal in India. He was a friend of Alexander’s father and among Alexander’s admirers. Aristobulus was able to reconcile his admiration for Alexander with the terrible events he witnessed by introducing the pothos literary motif into his accounts.

Pothos means ‘longing’, and Aristobulus employed it as a literary device to explain Alexander’s ‘inner drives’. The pothos motif was incorporated by almost all later ancient historians, including our main sources, usually in the form that Alexander was driven by a desire to see foreign countries or seek new knowledge. W.W. Tarn incorporated the device into his nineteenth-century work on Alexander, transforming it into Alexander’s desire to spread a unity of mankind to different cultures through the importation of Hellenism. One of the attractions of the pothos device is that it removes any need to explain Alexander’s otherwise strange behaviour, since it could be attributed to or explained away by his pothos.

But pothos is more than a literary device. It is also a description of a psychological condition. Understood in the Greek context, Pothos was the god of sexual desire and sexual longing.

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