Between the throne and the cup: the inebriation of Macedonian kings as a literary topos in Hellenistic historiography and sources on Alexander the Great

Abstract

Although some historians have argued that the records of frequent inebriationamongst Macedonian kings in ancient sources illustrate a “national custom” (Walbank,1967), a deviation from the generic “aristocratic duty” in Polybius (Eckstein, 1995), oreven a tendency towards physical violence in royal banquets as an alterity trait (Murray,1996), the same has not been duly interpreted as a literary topos in late-classic and Hellenistichistoriography, with relevant late echoes in records about Alexander the Great.The hypothesis in this article is that the methodological isolation of this factor, whenput into perspective, allows us to observe how Polybius (the greatest representative ofHellenistic historiography about Macedonian kings) uses a common place already presentin Theopompus, specifically about inebriation in Macedonian kings (with a greatdisagreement between both about Phillip II), and how echoes of this alcoholism in lateraccounts about Alexander the Great reinforce the same literary topos in another traditionof primary sources (Ptolemy, Aristobulus and Cleitarchus, all predecessors of Polybius).