It is this ability to inspire such personal themes and ratify them for the future by his own achievements that gives Alexander his strongest appeal. The visit to Siwah had not been calculated for the sake of the result that came of it; it was both secretive and haphazard, but its conclusion is perhaps the most important feature in the search for his personality. 'Zeus,' Alexander was later thought to have said, 'is the common father of men, but he makes the best peculiarly his own'; like many Roman emperors after him, Alexander was coming to believe that he was protected by a god as his own divine 'companion', not as a friend of god, like the notable pagans of late Roman antiquity, not as a slave of god, in the grimmer phrase of the Christians who replaced them, but as son of god, a belief which fitted convincingly with his own Homeric outlook, in whose favourite Iliadsons of Zeus still fought and died beneath their heavenly father's eye.

Alexander did not intend the truth of his visit to Siwah to be generally known and for that reason it is impossible to be sure exactly how his published view of himself had found its confirmation. Only the result is certain, and as he left the oracle and headed home to Memphis by a different caravan road through the desert, it would have been wrong to explain his consultation as deception or calculated arrogance. It is too easy to rationalize an age which expresses its human needs in different ways to our own, and as for the arrogance, dwelt on by Romans and elaborated since, it is a charge which can also rebound. The history of Zeus Ammon and Alexander was to be a long one, only brought to a forcible end.

Nearly nine hundred years later, in A.D. 529, the natives of a small oasis near to Siwah were still paying worship to Alexander and Zeus Ammon, although Christianity had been the recognized religion of their empire for the past two hundred years. The Roman emperor Justinian saw fit to intervene and ban their malpractice, putting an end, it might seem, to the history of a young man's impudent boast. But that same myth had driven a Macedonian to India and the eastern edges of the world and then remained firm, where it first became public, as a focus of loyalty for nine successive centuries in a rapidly changing world. When millions, now as then, still pin their faith on a subsequent son of god, it is not for the historian to explain away the belief which helped Alexander onwards. It is salutary, rather, to remember that claims to be the begotten son of god have been made before, upheld by companions and ended, so men said, in boos from angry mutineers.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

From Ammon to Memphis Alexander followed a direct caravan route eastwards through three hundred miles of desert, a journey which lasted eighteen days or more but involved no notable hazards, apart from the continuing guidance, in Ptolemy's opinion, of two talking snakes. Once back in Memphis, the new son of Zeus relaxed, giving free rein to his generosity and his sense of myth. Sacrifice was offered to Zeus the King, the Greek god whom Alexander believed that he had visited at Siwah in a Libyan form, and in Zeus's honour the army processed, a prelude to literary festivals and more athletic games. Meanwhile envoys arrived from Greek oracles in Asia Minor to find the army alive with rumours of their king's mysterious pilgrimage. 'At the temple of the Branchidac near Miletus,' wrote Callisthenes, meaning to please his patron,

the sacred spring had begun to flow again, though it had been abandoned by Apollo ever since its shrine had been sacked by the Persian Xerxes, one hundred and fifty years before. Its messengers brought many oracles about Alexander's birth from Zeus and the details of his future victories. Th e Sibyl at Ery thrae, an aged Greek prophetess, had also spoken up about his noble origins.

The end of Persian sacrilege, the prophecies of victory and divine birth; a year and a half later; these were themes which Alexander's historian intertwined. These envoys may have set sail for Egypt before Alexander returned from Siwah, but they need not have been forewarned of his divine sonship. They had reason to visit him anyway after the recent naval war, and at Erythrae, Alexander was also considering a generous building plan. On arrival at Memphis, they could have suited their message to the new theme of the pilgrimage; at Erythrae, Alexander was worshipped as a god, presumably soon after he had freed the city, and it was only natural to please him with the name of Zeus.

Having received nine hundred reinforcements from Antipater, who may already have been fearful for the safety of Thrace and southern Greece, Alexander arranged his Egyptian administration. The list that survives may be incomplete, but it reads most interestingly. As under the Persians and native Pharaohs, the country was divided into two, presumably into Upper and Lower Egypt. No satrap is named, perhaps

because the Persian title was offensive, but two nomarchs were chosen and if their title is official, it had many precedents in the native and Persian past. One nomarch, Petisis, bore a renowned Egyptian name and probably belonged to the highest native aristocracy of lower Egypt, from an area whose other well-known noble family had already been reinstated by Alexander; the other, Doloaspis, had an Iranian name and was probably meant to govern Upper or southern Egypt where he had no doubt held office before. Their duties involved local justice as well as administration, but because they were both Orientals a Macedonian general was set beside them in each half of the country, As before, an admiral was left with a small fleet in the Nile Delta; the two city centres of Memphis and Pelusium were garrisoned with mercenaries, a few Companions and various commanders, including an officer from a backward area of Greece who was awarded a secretary, perhaps because he was illiterate. Libya, so far as Alexander had entered it, was given a district governor, as was the land east of Memphis in which Arabs lived. As usual in Alexander's empire, these commands did little to disturb the pattern he had inherited from Persian rule.

Marvelling at the size and strength of the country, Alexander is said to have wished no one man to control it. And yet the native Petisis refused the job of nomarch, perhaps because the military and financial commands were loaded against him; Doloaspis is said to have been left as the only supreme official, while in lower Egypt there was one Greek officer with the brains and power to rule in all but name. Cleomenes the Greek had been living at Naucratis in the Delta, before Alexander had invaded; he was a sharp man, and he was well suited to his new office as Alexander's tax-collector in Egypt and Libya. It was a job of peculiar difficulty. The Egyptian economy had always been run in kind, not coin, and ever since the Pharaohs had lost the Nubian gold-mines, there had been no local source of precious metals for a currency. But the hiring of fleets and mercenary armies had needed ready money, and even before Alexander, the Pharaoh Tachos had entrusted his military finances to an experienced Athenian general, who had taxed bullion from the temple priests and nobles who alone still owned it and turned it into coin to pay troops. Clcomenes was alive to this Greek entrepreneurial tradition; his orders were to collect Egypt's taxes without interfering with the nomarch's powers and as he had to raise coined money for the fleet, the mercenary garrisons and the building of Alexandria, which he supervised, he began to enforce the same sort of taxes as his Athenian predecessor. His financial powers made him sole lord of Egypt, even if he was not named satrap; he struck his own coins and may also have prepared the system of state monopolies with which his successors the Ptolemies at last raised Egypt to a centralized economy. His officials, naturally, were no more philanthropic than any others who governed Egypt in antiquity.