It’s not difficult to trace an image these days, so I fairly
quickly found the mosaic and was delighted to see the rest of it, as it shows
not only baby Alexander but his parents too. The mosaic is now in the National
Museum of Beirut and was discovered in the villa of Soueidié near Baalbek in
Lebanon.
The mosaic was published by Maurice Chehab in Mosaïques du
Liban, Bulletin du Musée de Beyrouth, XIV, Paris 1959 and dated to the 4th
century CE. He, along with Father Mouterde, interpreted the part of the mosaic showing
Alexander as two scenes, the first being the ‘annunciation’ to Olympias that
her child will be a demi-god, and the second, the birth of Alexander.
Ross, in his article ‘Olympias and the serpent’ (see further
reading below), tales a different view on the ‘annunciation scene’, but before
discussing that, let’s take a look at the mosaic itself. I am indebted here to
the colour photographs of Egisto Sani who has kindly shared his photographs on
Flickr under Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0).
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| This is the more complete image, the one shared on Twitter is below |
Chehab is correct that the mosaic shows two scenes, divided
more or less down the middle of the floor. The left side shows a seated woman,
slightly forward of a man sitting to her right, and a man standing behind her
left side . This part of the mosaic has not survived intact, so we cannot see the man’s
head but we can see that he had one raised arm and held some kind of staff in
the other. A snake slithers its way from
the female’s lap up to her face, and it overlaps the figure behind. Helpfully,
the mosaicist has provided us with inscriptions that label the characters, but
unfortunately all of the inscriptions on the left side have been partially
destroyed, so we have to deduce what the names or labels might be.
On the right side of the room, the mosaic is much better preserved
and so are the inscriptions. The scene shows a woman reclining on a couch with
another woman standing behind her left side. Below, a female figure seated on
the floor bathes a small child standing in a scalloped vessel. The inscriptions
show that the child is Alexander, the female bathing him a nymph, the standing
woman in the rear Therapena, and the reclining woman ΟΛΥΜΠ… presumably
Olympias, Alexander’s mother.
This helps us to identify the figures in the scene to the
left. The seated man ΦΙΛ.. is surely Philip, Alexander’s father and the woman
in the middle (who resembles the reclining woman and is wearing the same clothes)
is Olympias (the inscription has …ΜΠ? …mp?).
This leaves the man standing next to Olympias with the snake
between them. Unfortunately here we only have a couple of letters of the inscription
which mostly likely reads ΠΟς (pos?).
Shehab and Ross identify this man differently. For Shehab
and Mouterde this is a messenger of the gods, probably Hermes, who has come to down
from Mount Olympos to announce to Olympias that she will bear a divine
child. The staff held by the man is
therefore the caduceus or herald’s wand carried by a messenger, and the ‘pos’
of the inscription is what is left of Olympos, meaning Mount Olympos or the
gods that dwell there. For them the snake is serpent mentioned in Plutarch’s
Life of Alexander at 2.4 where Philip’s ardour for his wife cooled after ‘a
serpent was once seen lying stretched out by the side of Olympias as she slept’,
and Mouterde also refers to the passage in Plutarch at 2.6 where Olympias
provides her tame serpents for Dionysian rites.
Ross’ identification of the man relates to a very specific incident
recorded in a text known as the Romance of Alexander. For him, these scenes are
illustrations from the manuscript of the so-called Pseudo-Callisthenes’ Romance
of Alexander, an account of the life of Alexander the Great originally dating
to the 3rd century CE.[1]
The Romance of Alexander was illustrated with a cycle of pictures showing
various aspects of the life and exploits of Alexander, including his birth.
The episode in Pseudo-Callisthenes referred to by Ross is found
in Chapter 1, part 10 (see link below). Whilst Philip was away on campaign, Nectanebo,
Pharaoh of Egypt, was in exile at the Macedonian court disguised as an Egyptian
astronomer. Dazzled by the beauty of the Queen, he deceived and seduced her in
the guise of Zeus Ammon in the form of a serpent. When Philip returned, having
dreamt of the god’s visit to Olympias, he proclaimed his wife’s innocence.
However, he later accused Olympias of infidelity and this accusation was overheard
by Nectanebo. That evening, at the royal banquet, Nectanebo appeared, but transformed
into a serpent. The diners were fearful as the snake approached the Queen “But
Olympias, seeing her own lover, sitting up stretched out from her couch her
right hand. He, rearing up, placed his chin in her hand, and coiled his whole
body in her bosom. Then, darting out his cloven tongue, he kissed her, giving a
proof of friendship and love to the spectators and to Philip himself.” This
epiphany persuaded Philip that he was to become the father of a god.
If we analyse the mosaic in the light of Ross’ thesis, the scene
shows the moment that Olympias puts out her right hand and the snake crawls up
to kiss her. The figure adjacent to the snake would be Nectanebo (for which we
have the fragmentary inscription Π?Ος ‘pos’- perhaps the end of the name Nectanebos
in Greek), rather than Hermes. The position of the snake, with its head close to
Olympias’ face, and her extended right arm, would seem to be consistent with
Ross’ theory and better accounts for the detail in the scene than an
annunciation.
The other part of the mosaic (detail above) is much easier to identify as
it shows the birth of Alexander. Olympias
(ΟΛΥΜΠΕ) reclines on a couch, on what could possibly be interpreted as a panther
skin, with the three dots being a stylised version of the pattern on a panther’s
pelt. The panther is an attribute of Dionysus, of whom Olympias is said to have
been a devotee. She is attended by a woman accompanied by the inscription ΘΕΡΑΠΕΝΑ
(meaning handmaiden, although this is a misspelling for ΘΕΡΑΠΑΙΝΑ).
In front of the couch there is a woman seated on the floor,
with the inscription ΝΥΜΦΗ (nymph), who is washing the infant Alexander as he
stands in a large fluted bowl. The child’s identity is confirmed by the
inscription ΑΛΕΞΑΝΔΡΟς. That Alexander is being bathed by a nymph underlines
his divinity, as nymphs were often tasked with bringing up the children of the
gods.
The inscriptions are important here, for mosaic scenes showing
the births - and first baths - of gods or heroes are known for Achilles and Dionysus as well as
this example with Alexander. Births of deities, and semi-divine heroes are part
of the stock episodes of Greek mythology and are depicted in a variety of
media.
The scene on the left hand of the Soueidié villa mosaic is much more unusual, and seems
to fit well with Ross’ theory about it illustrating a particular scene of the
Alexander Romance. Both of these scenes have parallels in various later versions
of Pseudo-Callisthenes’ Life of Alexander, as does a fragment of another mosaic
from the same complex. In this mosaic, the upper part of a seated man with a bald
head has the caption ‘Aristotle’. Aristotle was the tutor of Alexander, and there
are versions of the young Alexander being taught by the philosopher in other
Romance manuscripts. So the mosaic in Lebanon features three illustrations of
scenes from the image cycle of the Alexander Romance.
One of the things that makes Ross’ interpretation so important
is that the mosaic can be dated. Experts agree that it is from towards the end
of the 4th century CE, therefore within a century of the suggested
date of origin for the Pseudo-Callisthenes text. This means that not only is
this the earliest surviving examples from the picture cycle, but that the manuscript
must have been illustrated very close to when it was first written. Previously,
the earliest confirmed date for the picture cycle was in a manuscript (the
Marciana Pseudo-Oppian) dating to the early 11th century, so Ross’
interpretation pushes this back seven hundred years, to within one hundred
years of the presumed date of the text it illustrates.
Further Reading
Peltonen, J., Alexander the Great in the Roman Empire,
150 BC to AD 600, Routledge 2019
Ross, D. J. A. Olympias and the Serpent: The
Interpretation of a Baalbek Mosaic and the Date of the Illustrated
Pseudo-Callisthenes. Journal of the
Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, vol. 26, no. 1/2, 1963, pp. 1–21.
The Alexander Romance:
http://www.attalus.org/translate/alexander1a.html
[1] Often
referred to simply as the Alexander Romance, the original of the work was written
in Greek, probably in Alexandria, in the 3rd century CE, by an
unknown author usually referred to as Pseudo-Callisthenes. Largely fictional
(though with some basis in historical fact) the work was immensely popular and
was copied and translated many times, with elements and episodes added along the
way. Due to the number of languages, versions and types of the works, the Alexander
Romance is sometimes referred to as a genre rather than a literary piece.
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