Wondrous Signs Before the Birth of Alexander The Great

Alexander with a horned diadem. Coin by Lysimachus.

Alexander The Great was associated with Hercules, son of Zeus and may have believed himself the son of the Egyptian god Ammon, as well as the mortal king Philip. Stories about Alexander’s birth were embellished in order to fit someone of such an illustrious pedigree. Peter Green, in the second chapter of Alexander of Macedon 356-323 B.C., names some of the prodigious events that attended the conception and birth. These are also described by Plutarch.

1. The temple of Artemis burned, according to tradition, on the night on which Alexander The Great was born. The Persian Magi foretold great disaster fot the Persian Empire.

Plutarch on the birth of Alexander: “Alexander was born the sixth of Hecatombaeon, which month the Macedonians call Lous, the same day that the temple of Diana at Ephesus was burnt..the temple..took fire and was burnt while its mistress was absent, assisting at the birth of Alexander. And all the Eastern soothsayers who happened to be then at Ephesus, looking upon the ruin of this temple to be the forerunner of some other calamity, ran about the town, beating their faces, and crying, that this day had brought forth something that would prove fatal and destructive to all Asia” -Plutarch’s Life of Alexander-

2. His mother Olympias dreamed on the night before her wedding, that she was penetrated by a thunderbolt. Fire spread out in all directions. Plutarch writes: “The night before the consummation of their marriage, she dreamed that a thunderbolt fell upon her body, which kindled a great fire, whose divided flames dispersed themselves all about, and then were extinguished”.

3. Alexander’s father Philip looked inside his wife bedroom and saw her in the embrace of a snake. This was interpreted to be the god Zeus-Ammon, who was considered by some to have been Alexander’s father.

4. Another birth omen of a sort is reported by Plutarch who writes that Alexander’s father Philip received news of the birth of his son in a message containing three pieces of good news. The two others were that his race horse had won in Olympics and that Parmenio had beaten the Illyrians.

Source : N.S. Gill
http://ancienthistory.about.com

Alexander of Macedon, 356-323 B.C.: A Historical Biography by Peter Green

Book Description:

Until recently, popular biographers and most scholars viewed Alexander the Great as a genius with a plan, a romantic figure pursuing his vision of a united world. His dream was at times characterized as a benevolent interest in the brotherhood of man, sometimes as a brute interest in the exercise of power. Green, a Cambridge-trained classicist who is also a novelist, portrays Alexander as both a complex personality and a single-minded general, a man capable of such diverse expediencies as patricide or the massacre of civilians. Green describes his Alexander as ‘not only the most brilliant (and ambitious) field commander in history, but also supremely indifferent to all those administrative excellences and idealistic yearnings foisted upon him by later generations, especially those who found the conqueror, tout court, a little hard upon their liberal sensibilities’. This biography begins not with one of the universally known incidents of Alexander’s life, but with an account of his father, Philip of Macedonia, whose many-territoried empire was the first on the continent of Europe to have an effectively centralized government and military. What Philip and Macedonia had to offer, Alexander made his own, but Philip and Macedonia also made Alexander form an important context for understanding Alexander himself. Yet his origins and training do not fully explain the man. After he was named hegemon of the Hellenic League, many philosophers came to congratulate Alexander, but one was conspicuous by his absence: Diogenes the Cynic, an ascetic who lived in a clay tub. Piqued and curious, Alexander himself visited the philosopher, who, when asked if there was anything Alexander could do for him, made the famous reply, ‘Don’t stand between me and the sun’. Alexander’s courtiers jeered, but Alexander silenced them: ‘If I were not Alexander, I would be Diogenes’. This remark was as unexpected in Alexander as it would be in a modern leader. For the general reader, the book, redolent with gritty details and fully aware of Alexander’s darker side, offers a gripping tale of Alexander’s career. Full back notes, fourteen maps, and chronological and genealogical tables serve readers with more specialized interests.

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