THE ROYAL COSTUME AND INSIGNIA OF ALEXANDER THE GREAT Andrew w. Collins
u Abstract. Alexander’s proclamation as King of Asia was not a claim to be the new king of Persia or the new Great King. Alexander’s empire was one above and beyond the local kingship of Persia, and this “revisionist” interpretation of Alexander’s kingship requires a new assessment of Alexander’s reconfigured royal costume. Alexander rejected the upright tiara (the symbol of Achaemenid kingship) and the “Median” (or riding) dress, such as the kandys and anaxyrides. In adopting a new and impressive royal costume, Alexander expressed the exalted nature of his recently won kingship of Asia by devising a hybrid Macedonian– Persian dress.
INTRODUCTION when AlexAnder wAs proClAimed the king of AsiA (Plut. Alex. 34.1),1 he came to adopt a reformed court style that included a fundamentally new and grand royal costume and an impressive set of royal insignia. As Hammond (1986) and Fredricksmeyer (2000) have argued persuasively, Alexander’s assumption of the kingship of Asia was not simply a claim to be the king of Persia or the Great King. Alexander thought of himself as the new foreign king of Persia, and he regarded the Persian kingship held by Darius III as extinguished and replaced by his greatly expanded autocracy. Although the Achaemenids themselves had a grand royal ideology and multiethnic empire, long familiar to the Greek world in their stereotypical view of the Great King as a semidivine or divine tyrant,2 Alexander still did not seek to succeed Darius on the Achaemenid throne in the strict sense, and the kingship of Asia—Alexander’s new empire—was a state above and beyond the Achaemenid imperial kingship
1 For the concept of the kingship of Asia and how this was distinct from the kingship of Persia, see Hammond 1986, 73–85, and Fredricksmeyer 2000. 2 On the ideology and iconography of Achaemenid kingship, see Root 1979; Brosius 2007; Kuhrt 2007, 467–664.
American Journal of Philology 133 (2012) 371–402 © 2012 by The Johns Hopkins University Press