Consider, for a moment, all the literature of ancient Greece and Rome that is lost forever: to name just a few, there’s most of Sappho’s poetry, the scientific works of Democritus, the histories of Livy and Tacitus, hundreds of tragedies by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, the memoirs of Alexander’s peers, two-thirds of Aristotle, and, perhaps worst of all, Suetonius’s Lives of the Eminent Prostitutes. Time, as the ancients knew, is cruel, and papyrus brittle. But if I had to choose one book to find and bring back, I can think not just of the title, but a specific copy of a specific book, possibly the most fascinating lost book in history: Alexander the Great’s personal copy of Homer’s Iliad, with commentary by his private teacher, Aristotle. On his conquests, the king slept with it under his pillow, taking it with him all the way to India.
That Aristotle was briefly the teacher to Alexander, as all the major sources attest, is already a gobsmacking fact: Aristotle and Alexander! The greatest philosopher of the ancient world teaching history, science, and poetry to the greatest general! What did they talk about? For two thousand years, historians have been unable to resist speculating, whether in the blatantly false “Letters to Alexander” cooked up in a medieval scribe’s fantasies, or the more sober, modern researchers who wonder if Aristotle’s remarkable knowledge of science, geography, and culture was fed by his student’s treasure trains coming home from the battlefields. An important bridge to that theory is Alexander’s Iliad, gifted by his old teacher.
We have this story chiefly from Plutarch in his 1st century Life of Alexander. He writes, in Ian Scott-Kilvert’s Penguin translation, that Alexander
“regarded the Iliad as a handbook on the art of war and took with him on his campaigns a text annotated by Aristotle, which became known as ‘the casket copy,’ and which he always kept under his pillow together with his dagger.”
In a later chapter, Plutarch circles back to the story:
“Alexander asked his friends what he should keep [in his traveling trunk] as his own most precious possession . . . finally Alexander said that he intended to keep his own copy of the Iliad there. This anecdote is supported by many reliable historians, and if the tradition which has been handed down by the Alexandrians on the authority of Heracleides is true, then certainly the poems of Homer were by no means an irrelevant or an unprofitable possession to accompany him on his campaigns.”
As a book lover, I can’t think of any book that would have as much intrinsic value, as much historical weight, as much sheer interest as a copy of the Iliad marked up by Aristotle for Alexander to read as elephants snored outside his tent. I’ve seen it come up in countless popular books and documentaries on ancient Greece, told with gusto, firing up the imagination. As with so many other great classical stories, though, it’s probably not true.
It’s not that there couldn’t be an Iliad of Aristotle: references to Homer are spread throughout his extant works, Diogenes Laertius lists several books on poets and poetry among Aristotle’s lost books, and his library was famously large and comprehensive in a time when even very small libraries would have some Homer. It’d be more surprising if Aristotle didn’t have a copylying around, and, being Aristotle, wouldn’t be able to resist Aristotelizing over it with a pen in hand. I can’t find much scholarship on what form 4th century Hellenic commentaries might have looked like--were they just marginal notes, or blocks of full-on explication?--but we do know that it wouldn’t be the Iliad like we know it. As this historian on Reddit’s Ask Historians points out, the fixed text divided into 24 books that we read today probably didn’t exist in Aristotle’s time. Homer’s poems are extremely long and full of old, obscure language whose meaning was difficult to understand--a recipe, in an age before printing, for scribal errors, interpolations, and abridgements. When the librarians of Alexandria sat down a century after Aristotle to compile an “official” Iliad, they had to sort through heaps of variants and offshoots, correct the mistakes, and divide the book into regular chapters. Aristotle’s earlier Iliad, if we could snatch it from under Alexander’s pillow, would probably look to us like a rough draft.
The idea that Alexander would keep that book under his pillow, though, doesn’t seem to fit with what we know about Greek reading culture. To us, the idea of a pillow book suggests a kind of intimate privacy, a book to keep close by for solace during long, difficult nights. The Iliad can be a great book for that--if all else fails, the Catalog of Ships is a great sleep aid--but 4th century Greeks didn’t have that kind of relationship with reading: according to the evidence we have, reading was a social activity done out loud with groups, not a silent, individual activity. Now, if anybody could get away with waking up the army camp at midnight with a rousing rendition of the funeral games of Patroclus, it would be Alexander, but it would be odd for his historians to pass over such an obvious eccentricity as reading silently when every other aspect of his life was regularly mined for anecdotes and wisdom.
The bigger problem, literally, is that Aristotle’s Iliad wouldn’t be a book as we think of it, with hard covers and paper pages tied up in a neat package that could lay flat beneath a pillow. Books, in the 4th century BC, were papyrus scrolls, bulkier and less efficient than the codex. The Iliad is already big as a codex, but as a bundle of scrolls, it’d be huge: going by Christopher Brunelle’s marvelous calculations on how big Aristotle’s Iliad might run, we’re looking at 50 meters of continuous papyrus; even broken up into eight individual scrolls, each would be as thick as a beer can, and heavier. Alexander could have used his pillow book as an actual pillow. Plutarch’s “casket” would be less of a slip case and more of a trunk.
So much for Alexander sleeping with Aristotle’s Iliad under his pillow. The romance is at odds with the physics of papyrus and the role of books in pre-modern cultures. That Plutarch, a Greek also living in an age of scrolls, could write this story with a straight face is puzzling. But there is some hope: Brunelle also has a clever theory for what Plutarch or his sources might have meant by saying that Alexander kept Aristotle’s Iliad in a casket under his pillow: what the sources called the king’s proskephalaion (προσκεφάλαιον), “pillow,” might have been a direct translation from a Persian euphemism for the king’s treasure room: the shah’s pillow was a chamber where royal gold and valuables were kept. Keeping a copy of Homer as the crown jewel of a shah’s treasure hoard would be perfectly aligned with Alexander’s project to fuse Greek and Persian culture. Whether or not it was literally true, these are the kinds of stories Alexander’s historians wrote about constantly. I don’t have the skills or background to vet Brunelle’s classical sources (mostly Chares of Mytilene, as preserved in Athenaeus) but the explanation seems reasonable.
Then again, I’m probably too much of a book nerd to be completely fair about something as gobsmacking as Alexander the Great’s personal copy of Aristotle’s annotated Iliad. The conjunction of ancient Greece’s greatest philosopher and general has always seemed like a fabrication out of a bad movie. Two of the most consequential people who ever lived, gathering to talk about philosophy, poetry, and politics? And the general keeps the philosopher’s book in a treasure chest looted from the shah? You can almost see the producer’s casting notes.1 But they really did know each other, and that book really could have existed. To have that book, or even just a fragment of it, some proof of the association, some leftover ember from the spark of that collision between those two men—if there is a great, Borgesian heaven for Sappho and Tacitus and The Lives of the Eminent Prostitutes and all the other lost books, I know where I’d go first.
Colin Farrell was, in retrospect, a weird choice for Alexander in Oliver Stone’s 2004 movie. Farrell’s at his best playing baffled, small men muddling through an uncaring world, like In Bruges, or The Lobster. Alexander calls for a matinee-idol hunk with steely focus and an undercurrent of menace. I’m picturing a young Malcolm McDowell, or Christian Bale. But at least there’s Christopher Plummer as Aristotle, a fit so perfect it makes any other choice for the Philosophus look like Danny DeVito—who’d be a fun Socrates, come to think of it.