GETTING AWAY WITH IT IN ANCIENT ROME
One only has to search on YouTube for a brief time to find someone with a large following espousing some miracle cure or obscure religious philosophy. In ancient Rome, a world where superstition and fear of the gods reigned, a killing could be made by those savvy enough to exploit a person’s need to know. A notorious example of this is Alexander, the so-called false prophet, who appears on the scene in the second century AD. Our evidence of this character comes almost solely from the famous satirist, Lucian of Samosata, who claims to have met him, and who was very nearly killed on his account. This Alexander was responsible for the creation of the shady, yet influential, cult of Glycon (revolving around a human-headed snake that spouted forth oracles while sitting upon its master’s lap), and as Lucian says, he “filled the whole Roman Empire, I may say, with his brigandage”. Statues, coins, and inscriptions have been found attesting to the existence of the cult and verifying, to an extent, some of Lucian’s account.
Alexander, originally from Abonoteichus in Asia Minor, was “godlike” in appearance – tall, handsome, fair-skinned, bearded, and with long hair “in part natural, in part false” – and he artfully deceived those who met him. He supposedly started out life as a courtesan before falling in with a ‘quack’ physician from Tyana, in Anatolia, for a while. Then he kicked about with his mate Cocconas and
