Once upon a time in Paphos, so tells Plutarch (Mor. 340d), Alexander the Great decided that  the reigning king was unjust and wicked, and removed him from his throne. Problem was, a king of Paphos had to come from the Kinyrad dynasty, reputedly descended from its mythical founder Kinyras, the father of Adonis. And by the time Alexander reached the island, there seemed to be no available candidate. No available candidate? Well, actually there was one, a gardener called Abdalonymos, eking a living in obscurity. Imagine his surprise when Alexander’s messengers, after they found him drawing water in the garden beds, took him with them, cleaned him up, and presented him to Alexander, who, in turn, pronounced him King of Paphos, and a member of his own hetairoi.

But Abdalonymos is not the only one surprised here. Firstly, as anyone even casually familiar with Alexander’s history will note, the story is counterfactual. To begin with, Alexander, while receiving the loyalty and cooperation of the Cypriot cities and their respective rulers, and putting their expertise to good use in his campaign, as well as doing business with mints on the island, never visited Cyprus himself. Secondly, Abdalonymos was indeed a well attested historical person, who was indeed put into power by Alexander, but in Sidon, not Paphos.

Our explanation of this double surprise begins with the fact that already in the original Sidonian story we find the rags to riches, or rather cabbages to kings, motif. This is of course a late representative of a truly ancient symbolic tradition, that of the gardener-king. The notion of gardening as a royal occupation has precedents already in ancient Mesopotamia, and had come down to the very end of the Persian period through a venerable list of practitioners. It is thus not surprising to find this time honored symbol of royal self-representation either in the Levant or on Cyprus.

But why Cyprus? Given that Abdalonymos was a historical king of Sidon, it remains to ask why his story should be transplanted to Cyprus at all. The key to our answer, and the explanation for the main surprise, is the hook of the storyline: the extinction of the royal line. A comparable event actually did occur to the Kinyrads of Paphos, a couple of short generations after Alexander’s arrival in the Levant. It was during the Ptolemaic takeover of the island under Ptolemy I Soter that Paphos, like the rest of the Cypriot cities, lost its independence. Its last king, Nikokles, priest of the local great-goddess and self-claimed descendant from Kinyras himself, was forced to commit suicide under pressure from Ptolemy I. According to ancient reports (which have so far not been verified by archaeology), this was accompanied with mass-suicide by fire of the entire royal house. If anything like that happened, it would be hard indeed to find a royal scion spared.

Our main conclusion in this paper is that the story originated from circles with strong Ptolemaic interests, who borrowed from the Sidonian story both the venerability  of ancient near eastern royal symbolism and Alexander the Great’s star power, in order to offer an alternative popular narrative to the dramatic death of Nikokles and the loss of Paphian independence.

If so, the attempt was successful. The Kinyrads remained distinguished in their high priestly positions, an effective case of reductio ad sacra that survived intact as late as Tacitus. A second Ptolemaic interest is served by a juxtaposition of the story with the reality behind it. In the story, the agent bringing about the regime change is Alexander; in reality it was Ptolemy. This political myth helped therefore not only to smooth over the transition of Paphos to Ptolemaic rule, but also encouraged an identification of Ptolemy with Alexander by the story’s audience.

Beatrice Pestarino and Ory Amitay’s new open access article – ‘Transplanting kingship: Alexander’s visit to Cyprus and Ptolemaic power legitimation in the early Hellenistic period’ – is out now in Cambridge journal The Classical Quarterly.