Quick questions on Alexander the Great: kingship, orientalism and the army - HSC Ancient History

The most explosive experiment was proskynesis. This was the Persian court gesture of obeisance, a bow and sometimes a prostration, that subjects performed before the Great King. To Persians it signalled social rank, not divinity; to Greeks and Macedonians, prostration belonged only to the worship of gods. In 327 BC in Bactria, Alexander tried to extend the practice to his whole court, reportedly prompted by the flattering sophist Anaxarchus, through a banquet at which each guest drank, performed proskynesis and received a kiss from the king.

Alexander's orientalising kingship ran alongside a widening breach with his own people, marked by a series of violent episodes.

At Phrada in Drangiana, Philotas, commander of the Companion Cavalry and son of the veteran general Parmenio, was accused of failing to report a plot (the conspiracy of Dimnus) against the king. Tried before the Macedonian assembly and tortured, he was condemned and executed. Because his father Parmenio, left in charge of the treasury and supply lines at Ecbatana, might seek revenge, Alexander sent orders to have him killed without trial.

At a banquet at Maracanda (Samarkand), a drunken quarrel over Alexander's growing arrogance and his adoption of Persian ways turned deadly: Alexander seized a spear and killed Cleitus, the officer who had saved his life at the Battle of the Granicus (334 BC). The sources present the episode as proof both of the king's temper and of the mounting resentment at his orientalism.

A group of the royal pages, led by Hermolaus, plotted to murder Alexander in his sleep. The plot was betrayed and the pages executed. Callisthenes, their tutor and the man who had opposed proskynesis, was implicated and put to death, though our sources disagree on how he died, Ptolemy saying he was hanged and Aristobulus that he died of disease in captivity, a useful reminder of how even the good tradition diverges.