Andrew Chugg has written what anyone interested in the AlexanderGÇÖs career must consider an important book. Although I am by profession a historian of the Cold War and Soviet-American relations, I have long maintained an interest in ancient history and have kept up with the literature on Alexander. In my opinion, Mr. Chugg has offered the most plausible explanation of the SomaGÇÖs location yet ventured. With his suggestion that a surviving section of Ptolemaic wall north of the Rosetta Gate was once part of the SomaGÇÖs outer wall, he has usefully defined a test for his hypothesis. One hopes that archaeologists will not be slow to follow up. A survey of the site with ground-penetrating radar could provisionally resolve the question without a first resort to expensive and disruptive excavations.
The most provocative of Mr. ChuggGÇÖs hypotheses is surely that Alexander may lie entombed in St. MarkGÇÖs Cathedral in Venice. He is appropriately cautious about this, but his proposal about the location of AlexanderGÇÖs body, like his suggestion about the location of the Soma, has the virtue of being subject to empirical test. I have just read Paul DohertyGÇÖs GÇ£The Death of Alexander the Great.GÇ¥ While I should have more confidence in the work if the author did not relentlessly confuse Lucian and Lucan, it has served to remind me what a great and satisfying thing it would be to establish for a certainty how Alexander died.
It is of course difficult to be confident that Alexander has found a final resting place in Venice, but Mr. Chugg has at least suggested a way to resolve a debate that has continued since the contentions of the Diodochoi. But how to effect an examination of the body of GÇ£St. MarkGÇ¥? A powerful sponsor would help. I propose, accordingly, that Mr. Chugg, with his good book in hand, approach the government of Greece, a land which (not without a certain irony) is so eager to claim Alexander as its son.
But before taking such a step, I think that Mr. Chugg should try to strengthen the connection between the Alexander and the corpse in St. MarkGÇÖs. His connection rests upon propinquity, temporal and locational. While it is even more difficult to believe that the body is that of St. Mark (the most shadowy of the Apostles) than it is AlexanderGÇÖs, it must be obvious that in late fourth century Alexandria there can have been no shortage of high-class mummies. How then to strengthen the connection, or rather the hypothesis? I can see only one way:
Alexander in St. Mark's? A Program of Action
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