The image of Alexander flourished across the disiecta membra of the empire he created and far beyond it. Consideration is given here to the appropriation of the king’s image in the broader sense – and principally through the medium of texts – in relation to the founders of the greater two of the Successor dynasties, those of the Ptolemies and the Seleucids. The legend of Seleucus was richly bathed in Alexander-imagery, and this imagery was focused, in different ways, on the person of Seleucus himself. Some of the tales focus syntagmatically on his personal interaction with the king, whilst he yet lived, and indeed in one case even after even he had died. Others serve to establish paradigmatic or typological parallel between the actions of Alexander and those of Seleucus, and some seek to do both. The case of Ptolemy is different: whilst there is again some focus on Ptolemy’s personal interaction with Alexander, much of the legend-generation focuses rather on Alexander’s relationship with Ptolemy’s city of Alexandria, the glory of which was the king’s tomb. So long as Ptolemy remained ensconced in the city, he could afford to bask in a more indirectly reflected variety of the king’s charisma.

In this chapter, the author considers Lapsarian Theodicy, according to which the originating cause of natural evil, including the suffering of animals in nature, was a cosmic Fall set in motion when the first human disobeyed God. He argues that, besides being antiquated by Darwinian science, this traditional explanation of animal suffering fails on four analytical-theologicalgrounds. For it entails (1) an implausible original fragility of the created world, (2) extreme moral impropriety on God’s part, (3) an implausible account of motivation to do evil in paradisiacal circumstances,and (4) an overvaluing of human freedom. Furthermore, the author argues that Lapsarian Theodicy is not supported unambiguously by the story of Adam and Eve in Eden, as commonly assumed. He concludes that theists are best advised to search for non-lapsarian alternatives, as the majority of participants in the controversy are doing.

This chapter turns to the many poems in which Hughes plays with the characters of Adam, Eve and the Serpent, including an attempt to tease out Hughes’s sense of human moral accountability. We tour some of the most raucous of Hughes’s Edenic rewrites, including “Theology” and “A Horrible Religious Error,” demonstrating how Hughes continues to pursue an essentially religious agenda in the teeth of his gleeful anti-ecclesiasticism. The chapter turns then to morality, addressing a central paradox of Hughes’s work: he seems on the one hand to embrace Nietzsche’s anti-Christian moral nihilism, but on the other hand he argues passionately on behalf of our moral obligations toward nature. The problematic biblical term “dominion” is discussed. Many of the moral inconsistencies presented in this chapter are seen to smooth out in Hughes’s farming poems, in which Mosaic moral duty and ecological responsibility unite within a lapsarian view of human existence.