This chapter provides an overview of Alexander’s wealth by examining the sources of his income and his expenditure. In connection to the expenditure, the chapter provides an overview of Alexander’s coinage. The chapter suggests that while Alexander’s campaigns brought tremendous wealth to the king, much of his useable wealth was absorbed by the army necessary for the campaigns.

The subjected status of the coloni equalled them to persons alieni iuris, as slaves were too, but they were still free. It made marriages with those not in this way subjected with regard to the transmission of status ‘unequal’. It implies that children follow the status of the mother. This ‘unequal marriage’ and its consequence was introduced by earlier laws. To prevent the children out of marriages of a colonus with a not subjected woman being not subjected, the senatusconsultum Claudianum was applied. That made children follow the status of the father. The abolition of the senatusconsultum led Justinian to introduce the faculty of estate owners to recall coloni from such marriages in order to prevent the loss of labour force. CJ 11.48.19 established that every colonus after thirty years of service was no longer alieni iuris and thus subjected to their estate owner, but free from his control over him and his property. Such coloni are called ‘free’ coloni (coloni liberi). They remained tied to the estate and had to render services and to pay poll tax, but could now fulfill public functions as no longer being of subjected status.

Plutarch devotes two speeches and a biography specifically to Alexander. Current scholarship prioritizes the author over his subject. The erudite Plutarch employs numerous Alexander sources for his own writerly purposes. In the speeches he argues that Alexander’s successes are due to his own efforts rather than gifted by fortune. It is to be doubted that Plutarch had a serious polemical or philosophical point to prove; his epideictic oratory aims at rhetorical display and furnishing evidence from ready knowledge. The Life is similarly moulded by generic requirements. Plutarch provides an episodic birth-to-death account of Alexander, in which he presents himself as a competent interpreter and adviser. He quotes early sources, in particular from a collection of letters by Alexander, to render his depiction more authentic. Focusing on the ‘signs of the soul’, Plutarch is most interested in court politics and personal morals. His Alexander is determined by his physical make-up and greatness of soul on the one hand, and how effectively education and philosophy direct his ambition on the other. His biography is not apologetic; rather he wishes to educate his readership on how personal morality impacts on governance. References to his own context, if at all present, are oblique.

The chapter collects what may be known of Alexander’s life up until the battle of Chaeronea, for which the source of primary importance is Plutarch’s biography. It attempts to sift what may plausibly regarded as historical from embellishments of various kinds (contemporary and subsequent, propagandist, folkloric or mythologyzing). Particular attention is given to: Alexander’s three birth myths; his education at the hands of Lysimachus of Acarnania, Leonidas of Epirus and Aristotle; Aeschines’ vignette of him as nine-year-old boy; the intriguing traditions bearing upon his horse Bucephalas; his regency during the Byzantine campaign, his foundation of Alexandropolis and his dealings with the Persian ambassadors; his role in the battle at Chaeronea.

Women were interwoven into the politics of Alexander’s itinerant court. Alexander’s mother Olympias and his full sister Cleopatra played the most important and enduring roles at court, even though they remained in the Greek peninsula and never saw Alexander again. His half-sisters Cynnane and Thessalonice and his niece Adea-Eurydice (also all resident in the Greek peninsula during Alexander’s reign) only grew to some level of importance after his death. His first wife, the Bactrian Roxane, mother of Alexander IV, played more of a role, though a still limited one, than his two Achaemenid wives. Though he never married the half-Persian Barsine, he fathered a son by her. Men and women worked together, not infrequently for violent ends. Women’s access to information, their participation in information networks covering great distances, their attempts to influence events and decisions, and their ability to exercise patronage to their own ends is striking. The violent deaths of all the female Argeads (by birth or marriage) resemble those of male Argeads and many of the Successors. All these women were, in the end, killed because they somehow constituted a problem, a threat to others, just as the men did.

In the fourth and fifth centuries, the emperors had to combat the patrocinium: the protection offered by powerful persons to towns and individuals. This protection was often used for evading public law duties. The title in the Code deals only with Egypt, where it seems to have been rampant or been most detrimental, notwithstanding that it is also attested for Syria. It must have existed in other provinces as well. Yet, it does not seem in the west to have required legislation. Also coloni took advantage of it, offering patrons entire hamlets. As a result they seem to have neglected to work for their estate owners. In this context the coloni homologi turn up. Connecting this with CTh 13.10.7, it concerns most probably coloni registered on one tax list. They had to provide the aggregate of the poll tax, regardless of the number of present coloni. The solution was to combine lists and correct by cross-linking fiscal accounts.

We appraise Alexander’s court. We ask what constituted a ‘court’, as well as considering problems with assessing Alexander’s and those of the earlier Macedonian kings. A brief bibliographic survey follows, with salient literature about the court and institutions, Macedonian prosopography, and related topics. We then examine elite offices, specifically the Hetairoi or Companions, the Royal Pages or King’s Boys, the Royal Bodyguard, and specialized army units populated by the elite, such as the Royal Hypaspists. Finally, we consider two institutions exploited by the kings to engage with the Companions and read their mood: the royal symposium and the royal hunt.

Greek personal names are attested in the legal tablets from the city of Uruk, in the Astronomical Diaries, the Babylonian Chronicles, in royal inscriptions, and in documents from the cities of Babylon and Borsippa. After introducing the Greek language and its background, the chapter considers the types of Greek names attested in the cuneiform texts, the lexical items and theophoric elements used to form compounds, and the naming practices. Special attention is devoted to the rendering of Greek names with Babylonian script, especially because of the difficulties and constraints due to the use of a mixed logo-syllabic writing system to express onomastic items originally rendered in an alphabetic script and due to the differences between the Babylonian and Greek phonetic systems. The diffusion of Greek names in Babylonian is linked to the more general matter of the contacts between the Greek world and Mesopotamia, and to the debate on the significance of the Greek presence in Babylonia in the first millennium BCE; the chapter thus concludes – taking into consideration Greek royal names, Greek female names, and double (Greek and Babylonian) names in the sources – with a discussion of the social dimension of the use of Greek names in Babylonian society.

This chapter examines the religious role of Alexander as king and military commander in the Greek world and the territory of the Achaemenid empire. It explores how he used sanctuaries of the gods to develop his relationship with the Greek cities, as locations for the meetings of associations of Greek cities, and as sites for making dedications. It considers the honours offered to Alexander by the Greek cities, arguing that these were offered spontaneously, and were not a response to any request from Alexander. It discusses his use of diviners and other religious experts while on campaign. It considers the extent to which Alexander engaged with the religious practices and expectations of the territories he conquered, including in particular Egypt and Babylon. It discusses the evidence that Alexander consciously attempted to emulate Heracles and Dionysus, and suggests that this is unlikely to reflect any historical reality. It then explores the story of Alexander’s visit to the oracle of Ammon/Amun at the Siwah oasis, suggesting that while Alexander was aware of the significance of his pharaonic titulary, including the phrase ‘son of Amun’, this did not lead to claims of divine filiation beyond Egypt.

The Neo- and Late Babylonian text corpus, from the time of the Assyrian (Sargonid) rule until the Seleucid period, contains a very small number of Phoenician anthroponyms. Their patterns and theophorous elements generally correspond to those recorded in the general Phoenician–Punic onomasticon. They are discernible mainly by two criteria, namely theological – the typical Phoenician theophorous elements – and phonological – the Phoenician shift of á to ó. A hybrid Phoenician name is Aštartu-šezib, with the Phoenician–Punic theophorous element ˁAštart followed by an Aramaic–Akkadian predicative element. The identification of two individuals as Moabites and one as Ammonite is based on the fact that the theophorous elements of their names are Moabite (Kemosh) and Ammonite (Milkom). The Ammonite and one of the Moabites bear hybrid names, as their predicative element (in both cases) is Akkadian, viz. (DN-)šarru-uṣur, thereby being also basilophoric names, a fact betraying their link to the palatial sector. The occurrence of hybrid names is due to the Akkadian and Aramaic dominant linguistic milieu of Babylonia in the aforementioned periods.

After an introduction to the modern and ancient terminology of the languages involved as well as to the socio-historical background of the Babylonian texts with Anatolian names, this chapter describes the morphology and semantics of the Anatolian names, with ample examples both from Anatolia and Babylonia, in order to facilitate their recognition.