Alexander the Great

CHAPTER 4 THE LONE WOLF

Alexander was dead. There was no doubt about it.

He had wandered off into darkest Thrace, where he had fallen victim to the barbarians who lived there. His army had been wiped out and the young king had fallen. The civilized world heard reports to this effect in political circles, believed them, and breathed easily again. It recovered its balance and forgot about Macedonian bullies.

But this is how the future actually played itself out.

—

FOR ALL HIS QUARREL with Philip, Alexander ought to have been grateful for his inheritance. He now presided over a highly disciplined and effective army and a large and wealthy empire. But without its tricky founder, it appeared to be breaking up. There would be no simple handover. The boy king would have to fight for what he had been given.

On his accession in June 336, Alexander’s advisers urged caution. He should leave the Greek city-states to their devices and, above all, refrain from using force against them. As for the restless tribes on the Macedonian border, he should treat them gently and negotiate deals before they opted for war. The king totally disagreed. Safety lay in speed and risk.

The Greek city-states were thrilled by Philip’s assassination, which their leading citizens had witnessed in person in the theater at Aegae. All across Hellas they moved to recover their independence. The Thebans voted to expel a Macedonian garrison and to deny Alexander overall leadership of the grand anti-Persian coalition. Despite the fact that they had given Philip citizenship rights, the Athenians and their leading orator, Demosthenes, could hardly restrain themselves. Plutarch writes that they

immediately offered up sacrifices for the good news and voted a crown for Pausanias, the king’s assassin, while Demosthenes appeared in public dressed in magnificent clothing and wearing a garland on his head, even though his daughter had died only six days before.

Demosthenes sneered that Alexander would never set foot out of Macedonia, for he was perfectly happy to saunter around Pella and “keep watch over the omens.”

Meanwhile the young king took action. He marched south, persuading the Thessalian confederation and the Amphictyonic League to vote resolutions that he succeed his father as hegemon of the Greeks.

Envoys from Ambracia, an ancient city in southern Epirus, apologized for declaring independence; Alexander politely replied that “they had been only a little premature in grasping the freedom that he was on the point of giving them voluntarily.”

He continued down through the undefended pass of Thermopylae. One day the citizens of Thebes were amazed to see a large Macedonian army standing outside their walls. The Athenians were sure that their turn would be next. But Alexander only had time for clemency. He simply insisted that the two cities accept him as hegemon. Offering profuse apologies, they immediately capitulated and he proceeded to convene a meeting of the Panhellenic League of Corinth.

Demosthenes was appointed to an embassy that made its way north to grovel before the king, but at Mount Cithaeron he lost his nerve and went back to Athens. Perhaps he was worried that his compromising correspondence with Attalus had fallen into the king’s hands. Also, he needed to give Darius something for all the Persian gold he had received.

League members fell over themselves to please their new master. Alexander made fun of the tiny city-state of Megara when it offered him honorary citizenship, but he accepted the honor when he was told that the only other person to have been granted it was the demigod Heracles (the king’s alleged ancestor). When the League duly gathered again at Corinth, its members were reconfirmed as free and independent—a status contradicted for the open-eyed by the ever-present threat of military force. The League members elected him as their leader in succession to Philip and appointed him as general plenipotentiary in the great war of liberation against Persia. An inscription of the oath they took has survived:

I swear by Zeus, Earth, Sun, Poseidon, Athena, and Ares, by all the gods and goddesses, I shall abide by the peace and I shall not break the agreement with Alexander the Macedonian….I shall fight against the breaker of the common peace in whatever way seems good to the general council and may be prescribed by the hegemon.

During his brief stopover in Corinth, Alexander is said to have made arrangements to meet Diogenes, one of the most celebrated thinkers of the day. He had acquired a taste for philosophy thanks to Aristotle’s tutorials in the Gardens of Midas and liked to reward those of whom he approved with his patronage.

Diogenes made a point of living as simply and “naturally” as possible. He begged for his necessities. He wore only a loincloth and slept wherever he chose, sometimes (apparently) in a large ceramic jar. He defecated and masturbated in public. In his austerity and poverty, Diogenes bore some resemblance to the near-naked religious ascetics, or holy men, of India, the Brahmins.

He acted in this way to draw attention to the luxury and corruption of the present age, and is reported to have said: “Humans have complicated every simple gift of the gods.” He was a founder of the Cynic (Greek for “doglike,” hence without shame) school of philosophy. Virtue was realized by action, Cynics believed, not in theory. The greatest of Greek philosophers, Plato, thought little of Diogenes’ ideas and is said to have called him “a Socrates gone mad.” None of his writings have survived.

Diogenes was extremely independent-minded. He spent his days in a suburb of Corinth and declined to go to the city center to meet Alexander. The Macedonian king, not at all put out, made his way to where Diogenes was lying on the ground and basking in the sun.

When the philosopher saw Alexander and his entourage approach, he raised himself a little on his elbow and stared at him.

“Can I do anything for you?” asked the king.

“Yes, you can stand a little to one side out of my sun.”

This putdown ended the interview. However, Alexander was not at all displeased, as he could well have been. This was because he recognized in Diogenes a fellow spirit. One of them had withdrawn from the world and the other meant to subjugate it, but both were stubborn, implacable, and self-absorbed.

Later, his courtiers laughed at the philosopher, but the king simply remarked: “You can say what you like, but if I were not Alexander, I should have liked to be Diogenes.”

—

ALEXANDER AND HIS ARMY promptly vanished. He was in a hurry to deal with the revolts in the north.

But first of all he called by at Delphi, home of the oracle of Apollo. Like his father before him, Alexander sought a consultation about his chances of success in Persia, but he was determined neither to be misled nor to mislead himself when assessing the divine hexameters. The discussions at Corinth had been lengthy and by the time Alexander reached the oracle it was late November. Unfortunately, the temple of Apollo was closed between mid-November and mid-February. The god was taking a rest.

The king was not used to being denied. He summoned the Pythia to explain herself. She refused to officiate, saying that to do so would be against the law. So he went up to her himself and tried to drag her by force to the temple where she held her seances. She cried out: “You are invincible, my son!” No ambiguity there.

The quick-witted Alexander immediately withdrew his request. He needed no other prophecy, he declared, for he had extracted from her exactly the prediction he was looking for. Thoroughly satisfied, he resumed his journey.

—

A MOMENT OF CRISIS was at hand. Tribal kingdoms along Macedonia’s borders were on a war footing and threatened Macedonia’s very existence. Not only did Alexander need to pacify them thoroughly if he was to be able to leave safely for a long absence in the east, but he also had to win his soldiers’ loyalty, not to mention the broader approval of Macedonia’s body politic. At present, these were only on loan.

How was Alexander to handle the uprising of Triballians and Illyrians? They occupied parts of Thrace, the wide-ranging territory which, as we have seen, lay south of the Danube (the Ister, to the Greeks) and north of Macedonia and the Aegean Sea. Thracian tribesmen were fierce and warlike, although in the heat of the moment they could be unruly and disorganized.

They had resisted foreign conquerors such as the Persians and the Macedonians. They were regarded as rather primitive, lived in large open villages rather than cities, and had few civic institutions, but had they managed to unite their forces they could have been more than a match for the Greeks, who founded colonies on the coast but left the hinterland to its own devices, or for that matter Philip’s invincible phalanx. In 339 the Triballians had inflicted a defeat on Alexander’s father as well as a serious wound that left him with a bad limp.

A war of outright conquest and annexation such as Darius the Great had conducted was out of the question. It would take too long and require a large army of occupation. Alexander had at his disposal perhaps no more than fifteen thousand highly trained Macedonians—which included a phalanx of foot soldiers, cavalry from Upper Macedonia, lightly armed troops, slingers, and archers. Of special value were the Agrianians, a Thracian tribe, who were crack javelin throwers and whose king, Langarus, was a personal friend; as already noted, he probably gave Alexander shelter during his brief exile from Macedonia. A force of that size could be supplied without too much difficulty and, above all, would be able to move fast. This was exactly what Alexander needed.

Alexander’s aim was to demonstrate complete military superiority in a brief but theatrically impressive campaign. He intended to fight his way to the natural frontier of the Danube. He arranged for a squadron of warships to sail up the river where they would rendezvous with the army at a predetermined place and time. This impressive maneuver would be an assertion of overwhelming power, after which Alexander would feel safe to march on Persia without risking insurgencies in his rear.

In the spring of 335, the king led his army into Thrace from the Greek port of Amphipolis on the Aegean Sea. After ten days in friendly territory, he reached the Haemus mountain range (in today’s Balkans), where he found the enemy, Free Thracians (that is, Thracians independent of foreign rule), holding a high mountain pass (perhaps the Shipka Pass) and blocking his advance. They had assembled wagons in front of their line as a defensive stockade.

Alexander decided to storm the pass frontally, but guessed that the Free Thracians intended to allow the wagons to roll down the steep but even contour of the hill and crash into his infantry. The tribesmen would follow this up by a general charge. Somehow the king had to neutralize such a plan. Should the wagons be released, he ordered his hoplites either to open ranks if there was room and let them through, or to stoop or lie down under linked shields so that the wagons would roll over them.

Extraordinarily enough, Alexander’s plan worked and not one of his men was killed, although we may suppose some bruises and broken bones. The Macedonians then stood up and charged uphill in close formation. At the same time, archers on the left and the king on the right, with some elite troops and Agrianian javelin throwers, threatened the enemy’s flanks should they advance down the hill.

In fact, the poorly equipped tribesmen were so daunted by the failure of the wagons and by the discipline of the Macedonian infantry that they fled down the mountainside, every man for himself. Fifteen hundred of them were killed and all the women and children who accompanied them were captured.

—

HAVING CROSSED THE BALKANS, Alexander now entered the territory of the Triballians.

Their king was no fool. He understood the implications of Alexander’s victory and decided to avoid a full-scale battle. He sent a large number of his warriors together with the women and children to a place of safety, a large island on the Danube. Then as the Macedonians approached the river a force of Triballians countermarched in a bid to cut off his rear. If the enemy succeeded in garrisoning the Balkan passes, Alexander’s position would become very difficult. So he turned around his army and went in hot pursuit of the Triballians. He caught up with them as they were making camp in a densely forested glen. The trees were so closely grouped together that direct attack would certainly fail. Aware that tribal hordes were undisciplined and liable to react violently to provocation, the king devised a stratagem. He sent his archers and slingers to the edge of the wood where they discharged their missiles at the enemy. Meanwhile he formed up his phalanx out of view but ready for action.

As Alexander had calculated, he so irritated the Triballians that they rushed out of the wood and drove back the archers and slingers. The trap snapped shut when they were suddenly faced with the Macedonian phalanx and cavalry. It was too late to regain the safety of the trees and defeat was total; three thousand Triballians fell, as against Macedonian losses of eleven horsemen and forty foot soldiers.

Three days after the battle, Alexander arrived at the Danube, where he met the squadron of warships as prearranged. His next task was to land on the island and round up all the tribespeople who had taken refuge there. However, he soon saw that the water ran too fast and the banks were too steep for a landing to be practicable. So he was forced to come up with a new idea.

It would have to communicate shock and awe, to strike the enemy as an almost miraculous achievement. Otherwise the king would fail to achieve his strategic objective—namely, so to cow the insurgent tribes that they would create no trouble in the future.

Then inspiration came. Fortuitously, another tribe, the Getae, who lived on the far side of the Danube, arrived at its banks en masse with four thousand horse and ten thousand infantry. They were determined to prevent the Macedonians from coming over.

At this point, the historian Arrian applies to Alexander the ancient Greek word pothos. This means a desire or yearning for what one does not have. It was a notable feature of Alexander’s personality. He was not subject to personal ambition as ordinarily conceived so much as to a need to achieve the impossible. That was true glory, he believed.

On seeing the Getae, Alexander conceived a pothos to cross the wide river. Once again he improvised. He gathered together a number of dugout canoes, which the locals used for fishing, and ordered his men to make rafts out of their leather tent covers by stuffing them with hay. During the course of one night fifteen hundred cavalry and four thousand infantry were ferried across. This was an astonishing feat and our sources leave unexplained the transit of the horses; perhaps they swam supported by rafts.

The Macedonians reached the far bank while it was still dark and marched smartly to the Getae encampment, which they stormed while the tribesmen were still asleep. Survivors fled to a permanent but poorly fortified settlement three and a half miles away, which Alexander also attacked. The Getae abandoned it, put as many women and children as possible on horses, and set out for empty country as far away from the river as they could get.

Alexander called a halt to the fighting. Not one of his men had been lost. The settlement was razed and sacrifices were offered to Zeus, Heracles, and the benevolent god of the Danube. The king led his men back across the river in daylight and they returned to their camp.

The Triballians on the island looked on aghast. What they had witnessed was superhuman. Alexander was too good for them, they concluded, and immediately capitulated. A spate of shocked embassies from Thracian tribes arrived to make peace with the Macedonian king.

—

BAD NEWS SOURED THE savor of victory. The following day, Alexander learned that Macedonia itself was under attack. Illyrians governed by Cleitus, the ruler of a fierce tribe called the Dardani, had launched an invasion of the northwest frontier. He was the son of the old battler Bardylis, who had devoted his long life to transforming Illyria into a great power. As we have seen, Philip had destroyed him and his army in 358. Now his unforgetting offspring was pressing for another round of conflict.

Cleitus was occupying Pelium, a fortified settlement that commanded a mountain pass between Illyria and Macedonia. Before he launched his invasion he was awaiting another insurgent leader, Glaucias of the Taulantii, a cluster of Illyrian tribes on the Adriatic coast (roughly in today’s Albania). Alexander realized he had to move fast if he was to prevent the two monarchs from joining forces. He made for Pelium with all speed, determined to deal with Cleitus before Glaucias appeared on the scene.

As if he did not have enough enemies already, Alexander learned that his progress would be delayed, perhaps fatally, by another dissident tribe, the Autariates, which planned to intercept him en route.

Threatened by three hostile armies, the king had his back to the wall. He was to be rescued by his friend Langarus.

It is only between those who are good, and resemble one another in their goodness, that friendship is perfect. Such friends are both good in themselves and, so far as they are good, desire the good of one another. But it is those who desire the good of their friends for their friends’ sake who are most completely friends, since each loves the other for what the other is in himself and not for something he has about him that he does not need to have.

This was Aristotle, Alexander’s onetime tutor, asserting the high importance of friendship or philia—and, more particularly, of male friendship. It was a topic of great interest to the ancient Greeks, and the philosophers Socrates and Plato had devoted much thought to it.

So too, we may guess, had the young king. He derived his idea of self-worth from Homer’s epics, the Iliad and Odyssey. His lordly warriors owed their personal glory, their honor, not only to courage and victory on the battlefield, although that was a large part of it, but also to the conventions of friendship.

Aristocrats traveled around the Mediterranean and developed a network of equals on whose hospitality they could depend. These relationships had a basis in affection, but from a practical point of view they functioned as alternatives to the institutions of modern life—banks, travel agencies, passports, legal services, hotels.

When that great but god-bullied hero, Odysseus, is washed up on the shores of the legendary land of Phaeacia, he is offered food and drink and a bed for the night before he is even asked to identify himself. Only when all his needs have been satisfied is he invited to tell the story of his life and trials. He is laden with valuable gifts and sent on his way without cost in a Phaeacian ship.

Guest-friendship survived into the age of the Hellenic city-state. The underlying principle was that a favor given created a moral obligation to reciprocate. Philia’s mutually profitable courtesies facilitated the comings and goings of the merchant and the sailor. It also enabled politicians to explore foreign-policy issues with international counterparts or to deploy personal alliances against the interests of regimes in power. The interdependence of friends was supported by arranged marriages, homosexual pairings, and partnership in commercial enterprises.

Alexander pursued friendship with enthusiasm. Many of his fellow-pupils in the shady walks at Mieza reappeared in Alexander’s circle as adults. Those who committed crimes or misdemeanors were easily forgiven. Affection promoted the not-so-talented, and anyone who betrayed personal loyalty lived to regret it.

Alexander had gotten to know Langarus during his teen years, when Philip had appointed him regent at the age of sixteen. Langarus had been an open supporter of the young prince and the two had developed a strong relationship.

In 335 Langarus, accompanied by a crack troop of foot guards, was in attendance during the Thracian expedition and must have been pleased to see the confidence that Alexander placed in his fellow tribesmen. Arrian writes:

When he heard that Alexander wanted to know who the Autariates were, and how numerous, he told him not to give them another thought. They were the least military of the tribes in the region. He himself would invade their land, then they would have something of their own to worry about.

The Agrianian king was as good as his word. Fire and the sword silenced the hapless tribe.

Alexander was so pleased with his friend that, in addition to generous gifts, he offered him the hand of his half-sister, the redoubtable Cynane. She had been the wife of Amyntas, son of his uncle King Perdiccas, but seeing that Alexander had recently executed him she was on the market again. This was, to put it mildly, a good marriage. But nothing came of the project, for Langarus unexpectedly fell ill and died after his return from ravaging the Autariates. Had he survived, he would surely have played a considerable role in Alexander’s life.

—

THE FORTIFIED SETTLEMENT OF Pelium stood on a rise in the center of a small plain, inside a bend of the river Eordaicus. To the north, south, and west thickly wooded heights overlooked the plain. The river itself flowed westward through the narrow Wolf’s Pass. Here, between the river and some precipitous cliffs, there was room only for four men abreast, although there was more space on the other side, across a ford.

When Alexander’s weary army arrived at the plain, he was taking a considerable risk and he was relieved to find that Cleitus was still alone. The tribal chief was occupying Pelium and the surrounding heights. The Macedonians made camp in the vicinity. Relying on the superior fighting quality of his men, Alexander decided to launch a frontal attack on the fortified settlement, thus tempting the enemy to come down from the hills and take the Macedonians on their flanks and in the rear. Alexander was ready, of course. He smartly about-turned his army and routed Cleitus’s warriors. He then hemmed in the enemy inside Pelium with a contravallation. The corpses of three boys, three girls, and three black rams were found in the enemy’s deserted positions. In an act of futile cruelty that offended Hellenic sensibilities, they had been sacrificed for victory.

On the following day, the military situation was transformed, negatively. Glaucias and his army arrived and occupied the hills Cleitus had abandoned. From holding the initiative, Alexander was now outnumbered and surrounded. From every eminence enemies gazed threateningly down on him and his men.

What was worse, Alexander was desperately short of supplies. He ordered Parmenion’s son, the competent but conceited Philotas, to take the baggage vehicles and as many cavalrymen as he needed to guard them, and gather foodstuffs from nearby fields. When Glaucias learned of this foraging expedition he set out to attack it. Scouts reported the danger to Alexander, who marched off as fast as he could to the rescue. He took with him his elite foot guards, the hypaspists or “shield carriers,” the archers and his favorites, the Agrianians, along with four hundred cavalry. The rest of his army he left in front of Pelium to keep Cleitus boxed in. Glaucias preferred discretion to valor and after a skirmish allowed the Macedonian king to lead his foragers safely back to camp.

The supply problem had been solved, but otherwise Alexander’s situation remained desperate. How could he extricate himself from the trap he had so incautiously entered? To retreat in the face of two hostile armies was too dangerous, so he took the bold decision to advance between them to the Wolf’s Pass; in that way he would keep them divided and his own force united. Once beyond the pass he would be free from encirclement.

The following morning the king staged a coup de théâtre unique in military history. He arranged his phalanx as a solid block, 100 men wide and 120 men deep, with a squadron of 200 horsemen on each flank. Arrian describes what happened next.

He commanded total silence and an instant obedience to commands. He first ordered “spears upright” to the foot soldiers, then at another order he had them lower their spears to the ready and simultaneously swing the massed points to the right and the left. After this he advanced the entire phalanx at a quick march, executing wheels on each wing in succession.

The enemy watched with growing amazement the speed and precision of the drill. Glaucias’s Taulantians came down from the high ground to have a better look. Suddenly the left half of the phalanx formed itself into a wedge and charged Cleitus’s Dardani. They panicked and fell back. Then the Macedonians shouted out their battle cry, alala, and beat their spears on their shields. Glaucias’s men were the target this time and, petrified by the din, hastily sought refuge inside the fortress.

By this extraordinary means Alexander had bought himself enough time to move his phalanx unopposed along the river to the Wolf’s Pass, where it could be forded. He and his bodyguards and Companion cavalry stormed a ridge from where he was able to guard his army as it crossed over.

Once the infantry had reached the other side it re-formed into a long thin rectangle. Presumably the baggage train followed. Before moving out from the pass, it waited for Alexander’s cavalry to descend the ridge. By this time the enemy had understood what was happening and did its best to impede the Macedonians.

Arrian takes up the story.

Alexander let them get close, then rushed them with his own company while the main phalanx shouted the war-cry and got ready to attack them through the river. Faced by this concerted onslaught, the enemy broke away and fell back. In the ensuing interval, Alexander brought the Agrianians and the archers down to the river at the double. He himself got across ahead of them, and when he saw the enemy closing in on the hindmost he had the catapults set up on the far bank and ordered fire at maximum range of all the missiles they could discharge: the archers had begun to cross, and he ordered them too to shoot from mid-stream. Glaucias’s troops would not venture within range.

The army then cheerfully marched off to safety. Although we do not know how long the whole operation had taken, we can assume that the shadows cast by the circumscribing hills were lengthening. Not a single Macedonian had lost his life.

Meanwhile, Cleitus and Glaucias took the view that they had soundly beaten the Macedonians—or at least driven them off. They saw no need to chase after them on the far side of the pass. Alexander had evidently taken fright and they would not be troubled by him again. Their armies bivouacked carelessly around Pelium and they did not trouble to build defenses or mount guards. This was unwise. Alexander had been given a fright, but had not taken fright. Presumably using excellent scouting methods once again, Alexander learned of these careless dispositions and launched a night attack. He assembled a strike force of hypaspists, Agrianians (as ever), and two infantry brigades—in all, some seven thousand men—silently reentered the Wolf Pass, and crossed the river undetected. The rest of the army followed on behind.

The king fell on the still sleeping enemy. Many were dispatched in their beds and others taken alive. The rest fled in an uncontrolled rout. Alexander pursued them for miles. Cleitus took refuge in Pelium. Then he set fire to the place and escaped to the land of the Taulantians. He and Glaucias had plenty of time to discuss what went wrong with their campaign, but one thing was certain—Thrace and Illyria would be quiet for many years.

Alexander had achieved his strategic goal and could safely follow his dreams eastward.

—

BUT ALTHOUGH ALEXANDER’S FIRST serious military outing under his own command had ended in victory, in truth it had not gone very well.

His impetuosity landed him in serious, nearly terminal, trouble, although his ready admission, however painful, of a setback helped him to win through. He never lost his delight in danger. We need to remember that he and his generals were very young men, mostly in their early twenties. Many of them had grown up with Alexander and gone to school with him. They were high-spirited and audacious. They were living out a boys’ own adventure.

There were two adults to lend a restraining hand—Antipater and Parmenion—although neither was present for this campaign. They knew better than to oppose the king’s will, but they contributed stability and sensible advice—which was sometimes taken. As the years passed Alexander and the others matured, but at heart he remained the kid who never grew up.

He enjoyed one huge advantage: he had inherited Philip’s army. His father had spent years drilling and disciplining it. It was now a flexible and highly efficient organism. The young king managed it with the firmness, sensitivity, and affection with which he rode his horse Bucephalas, and he found it instantly responsive to command.

Both Philip and Alexander were personally brave, led from the front, and risked life and limb in every battle. In one respect, though, the son was very different from the father. Both faced a similar challenge when they assumed the throne—attacks from old foes on every side. Philip preferred diplomacy and its subset, wholesale corruption, to war, although he resorted to war enthusiastically when necessary. In 358 he decided to act with caution. He dealt with his opponents one at a time, negotiating or paying for temporary cessations of conflict with some of them while facing the most pressing threats on the battlefield.

In 336, Alexander was much more impatient. One of his qualities was intelligent rapidity. He reacted instantly to events and combined this with a taste for subterfuge and surprise. He always sent scouts out ahead of his army so that he was well informed about the enemy and unlikely to become a victim of ambush. The speed with which he managed his campaigns constantly caught enemies on the back foot. Confronted with emergencies in mainland Greece and in northern Macedonia and Thrace, he made war precede, not follow, diplomacy. He took on everybody at once, marching his exhausted men at a hectic pace from hotspot to hotspot, and invariably arrived on the scene sooner than expected. To his opponents the effect was almost magical. It gave an impression of focused energy and invincible force. Resistance often collapsed without a fight.

Once the enemy had conceded, Alexander was inclined to clemency. The defeated chieftains Cleitus and Glaucias were left alone and, as we have seen, a treaty with Thebes and Athens was soon agreed. If obliged to run for a second time around the course, he could be violent and cruel. As at Pelium he refused to accept defeat, but insisted on returning to the fray until he obtained his bloodbath.

Alexander watched the enemy with close attention. He had an uncanny talent for noticing small changes or movements and correctly interpreting them. So he guessed the secret purpose of the stockade of carts. Once he had identified a problem he would instantly improvise a solution, however eccentric; to win an encounter by a consummate display of drill was a remarkable example of his imagination at work.

He knew the importance of small casualty lists to the morale of his soldiers. He learned a bitter lesson at Pelium when his logistics failed and the army ran out of food. It was a failure that he never allowed to occur again.

—

IN THE AUTUMN OF 335, news arrived in Athens that the young king was no more. Demosthenes produced a man before the ecclesia, or citizens’ assembly, who had been wounded in a battle with the Triballi a long way away in darkest Thrace. He had witnessed the destruction of the Macedonian army and seen the king fall. The account was plausible and was widely accepted. The outcome of this report was, as Justin observed, that “the feelings of all the cities were changed and the garrisons of the Macedonians besieged.”

Some exiles slipped into Thebes from Athens one night to stir up the people. They spoke at the assembly, “making play with the fine old words ‘liberty’ and ‘free speech,’ ” and persuaded the Thebans to shake off the Macedonian yoke. Two officers of a Macedonian force occupying the Cadmea, the city’s citadel, were assassinated. The Thebans were playing with fire, for they were signed-up members of the League of Corinth and the common peace. To abrogate unilaterally an international treaty was to break an oath sworn before the gods. This was sacrilege and could be punished by the destruction of one’s city, the killing of all adult males, and the selling of all women and children into slavery.

But the Thebans felt safe to launch their rebellion because, they argued, Alexander’s death freed them of their allegiance. They took comfort from a growing mood of resistance throughout Greece. The Athenian ecclesia voted for an immediate alliance with Thebes and planned to send troops in support. Armed contingents were on their way from the Peloponnese. Demosthenes, well funded by the Great King, scattered gold throughout Greece to win over uncertain consciences.

Alexander, undead, was informed of these developments and saw that he could not ignore them. He immediately abandoned any plans he had for mopping up in Thrace and ordered his expeditionary force to proceed south with all speed (presumably the baggage train followed at its own slower pace). The first stage of the journey was through an inhospitable and mountainous landscape with few inhabitants. He must have sent ahead for supplies of food and, after covering a distance of 120 miles as the crow flies, arrived on the seventh day in Thessaly. We may assume a brief pause for eating, drinking, and resting. Then the march resumed. After another 120 miles the Macedonians rushed through the unguarded Hot Gates, or Thermopylae, and six days after leaving Thessaly arrived in Boeotia.

This was a remarkable achievement. The Greeks had no idea that Alexander had passed through Thermopylae until he was in Boeotia with his army at the town of Onchestus, only a day’s march from Thebes. He showed that the gibes of Demosthenes had got under his skin. He remarked: “Demosthenes called me a boy while I was in Illyria and among the Triballi, and a youth when I was marching through Thessaly. I will show him I am a man by the time I reach the walls of Athens.”

The shocked Theban leaders made the best of a bad job by insisting on Alexander’s death and arguing that it had to be another Alexander who commanded the Macedonian force. Few were convinced and the heart went out of the rebellion. The Peloponnesians halted at Corinth and then went home. Athens had second thoughts about sending military assistance.

The trusted eyewitness packed away his bandages and vial of pig’s blood.

—

IT MAY HAVE BEEN at about this time that the king sent top-secret messages to the regent Antipater and possibly to his mother, Olympias. The last thing he needed was for a palace conspiracy to erupt, adding domestic to foreign troubles. It was too dangerous to allow Amyntas, son of Perdiccas, to continue as a potential pretender to the throne and a rallying point for his opponents, however innocent he was of intention. So he was put to death.

Olympias had killed Philip’s last queen, Cleopatra, and her little girl, Europa. As usual she overdid things. The exotic cruelty of their deaths (the mother forced to hang herself after watching her child incinerated) attracted adverse comment.

We do not know for certain that Olympias was acting under her son’s orders, but she may have been. As we have seen, though, he was reported to have been furious with her for acting so barbarically. One way or another, the historical record suggests that no holds were barred when it came to a dispute inside the Macedonian royal family. Cruelty to kith and kin was a popular tradition.

Children were regarded as an extension of their father and mother, and their murder when politics destroyed their parents was almost automatic. It occurred in drama as well as during real-life dynastic struggles and is a central theme of Euripides’ masterpiece, The Trojan Women. The plot echoes the horrors of the Macedonian court: Troy has fallen and a Trojan princess’s daughter has been sacrificed at the tomb of Achilles. Her little son has to die too, because the Greek leaders are afraid that the boy will grow up to avenge his father, the great warrior Hector. Realpolitik trumps decency and mercy.

The queen mother’s intervention was perfectly understandable, contemporary observers will have felt. Maybe she had acted a little roughly, but within the conventions of the age.

—

THE DAY AFTER HIS ARRIVAL at Onchestus, Alexander made his way to Thebes and encamped in front of the walls.

On the way he halted at the shrine of Iolaus, a guardian demigod of Thebes and nephew of Heracles. He was the great man’s charioteer and companion of his Labors (some said his eromenos). The shrine was a place where male lovers worshipped and exchanged vows. We may assume that Alexander paid his respects (doubtless accompanied by Hephaestion).

Having rushed to the seat of the revolt, the king now waited patiently. It would be much more convenient if the Thebans submitted without a fight, just as they had done the previous year. However, during this interval, Alexander did not waste his time. He contacted city-states hostile to Thebes, all of them league members, and persuaded them to join him. They would give him useful cover if he captured the city and decided to punish it.

Over the preceding centuries Thebes had made itself unpopular with its neighbors. It had never succeeded in winning permanent control of the smaller city-states inside Boeotia, the territory it claimed as its own. The Thebans had infuriated the entire Greek community by siding with the Persians when King Xerxes invaded mainland Hellas in 480, and had made a name for themselves as traitors or Medisers (from the Medes, who were an ancient Iranian people; their name was used as a synonym for Persians). In the fourth century they became the greatest military power in Hellas, but only for an arrogant but brief decade, during which time they won no friends.

Alexander hoped for reconciliation, but enemy skirmishers made life difficult for his men and he decided to move camp to a better position. He settled outside the Electra Gate, near the Cadmea where the Macedonian garrison was holed up. He straddled the road from Athens up which a relief force might be expected to come.

The citadel was close to the city wall; to improve the wall’s defensive strength, the Thebans built two wooden palisades in front of it. Alexander agreed to a plan of attack with Perdiccas, the commander of two Macedonian battalions (which as the camp guard were in a forward position). He was among the king’s most loyal friends, and had been one of those who had pursued and killed Philip’s assassin. The men were growing impatient and were worried about their friends on the Cadmea. Perdiccas launched an assault before receiving orders to do so.

They broke through the first palisade and charged the defending troops. Their success forced the king’s hand. To avoid the battalions being cut off, he was obliged to send in the archers and Agrianians to occupy the space between the palisades. Perdiccas now forced his way through the second palisade, but was severely wounded and had to be evacuated (he survived).

The desperate Thebans turned on their pursuers and pushed them back. Alexander had foreseen this eventuality and had assembled his infantry in full battle array on open ground. As at Pelium, the Thebans lost formation as they chased the Macedonians away from the city’s defenses. They suddenly found themselves confronted by a phalanx bristling with long pikes. Routed, they ran into the city, so panic-stricken that they failed to shut the gates.

The Macedonians poured in behind them and the garrison in the Cadmea joined their victorious comrades. Bitter street fighting ensued. Alexander was to be seen here, there, and everywhere. Organized resistance lasted for only a short time and the Macedonians advanced to the city center. The Theban cavalry broke out and rode off in flight across the plain.

It was at this point that the embittered neighbors of Thebes took their long-awaited revenge. Arrian notes:

There followed a furious slaughter. It was not so much the Macedonians as the Phocians, Plataeans, and other Boeotians who began the indiscriminate killing of the now defenseless Thebans. They broke into houses and killed the occupants; they killed any who attempted to fight back; they killed even the suppliants at the altars; they spared neither women nor children.

Corpses were piled high in the streets. The number of the Theban dead was estimated at six thousand, and thirty thousand prisoners were counted. Five hundred Macedonians lost their lives, by Alexander’s standards quite a high number.

—

WHAT WAS TO BE done with Thebes, that ancient city of legend and history? This was where Oedipus had ruled, killed his father, married his mother, and blinded himself in expiation. Here too the man-woman seer, Tiresias, had prophesied. Alexander was in two minds, or possibly three. At heart, he favored a severe penalty. This would deter the Greeks from rising again during his absence in Persia and so support the overriding strategic aim which he had also pursued in Thrace. However, he preferred not to take the blame, so he handed the decision to the council of the League of Corinth. They should judge. He was well aware that there were scores to settle and that he could depend on council members to be harsh. Finally, he made a mental note to be magnanimous to individual Thebans, as occasion arose.

The council, convened in special session, behaved as he guessed it would. Among other witnesses, a Plataean reminded his audience that in 373 Thebes had attacked his tiny town on the edge of Boeotia and driven out all the inhabitants. That universal moralist, Isocrates, had denounced the crime and its perpetrator. Memories were long. An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.

There were precedents for the execution of all adult males and the enslavement of the women and children. It was the convention when a city resisted a siege, and some argued for this ancient prototype of genocide. However, the council finally recommended that the king and hegemon take no more lives, but sell the entire population on the slave market and raze the city. Alexander will have recalled that it was the same penalty his father had imposed on the thriving city of Olynthus in 348. He accepted the judgment and put it into effect. It would be as if Thebes had never existed.

The final profit from the sale was the considerable sum of 440 silver talents (a talent was a measurement of weight and amounted to about 26 kilograms, or 57 pounds). It will have been some time before the cash became available and presumably it was added to the king’s war chest.

The king took steps that would, he must have hoped, sweeten his now blood-soaked reputation. The morning after the city’s capture, he restored order and called off his men. A decree forbidding any further butchery was proclaimed, and a large number of Thebans—guest-friends, pro-Macedonian politicians, priests, and any who could show that they had opposed the uprising—were set free together with their families. Of the thirty thousand prisoners it appears that only twenty thousand were sold. The Macedonian soldiery turned their energies to pulling down the city’s buildings, except for its temples and sacred places. These were spared to avoid offending the gods. It is said that Alexander compelled the Theban musician Ismenias to play his pipes while the city was being demolished.

One of the greatest poets of Hellas was Pindar. He flourished in the fifth century and most of his poems are celebrations of young athletes, victorious at the four-yearly Panhellenic games of Olympia, Delphi, Corinth, and Nemea. He has a deep sense not only of the tragedy of life, but also of the glory, however fleeting, of human achievement. This famous coda from one of his victory odes evokes the character of his work.

Creatures for a day! What is a man?

What is he not? A dream of a shadow

Is our mortal being. But when there comes to men

A gleam of splendor given of heaven,

Then rests on them a light of glory

And blessed are their days.

Pindar was a Theban and Alexander took good care to ensure that amid all the mayhem his house was left untouched and all his descendants were spared.

A troop of Thracians broke into the home of a noblewoman called Timocleia. While they were plundering everything they could find, their commander took the opportunity to rape her. When he had finished, he asked Timocleia whether she had any gold or silver hidden. She was a person of great presence of mind, and replied that indeed she had. If he came into the garden she would show him where it was. She led the man to a well and told him that when the city had been stormed she had dropped in it all her most valuable possessions. He leaned over and peered down the shaft, whereupon she gave him a firm push so that he fell in. She threw stone after stone onto him until he was dead.

The Thracians grabbed Timocleia, tied her hands, and brought her before the king for him to judge her fate. He was impressed by her calm demeanor and asked her to identify herself. She replied: “I am the sister of Theagenes who commanded our army against your father, Philip, and fell at Chaeronea fighting for the liberty of Greece.”

Alexander thoroughly approved of what she had just done and set her and her children free. The world should know that this was royal justice.

—

SOME WOLVES WERE TRYING to surprise a flock of sheep. Unable to reach the peaceable animals because of the dogs that were guarding them, they decided to use a trick to get what they wanted.

They sent some delegates to ask the sheep to give up their dogs. It was the dogs, they said, who created the bad blood between them. If only the sheep would get rid of them, peace would reign between sheep and wolves. The sheep did not foresee what was going to happen and gave up the dogs. The wolves could now follow their instincts: they made supper of the unguarded sheep.

Demosthenes told this fable to the Athenian ecclesia. Alexander had indicated that he was willing to overlook its support of Thebes provided that it hand over to him eight anti-Macedonian politicians, including the great orator himself. They were the guard dogs and Alexander was a lone wolf, worse than those who run together. According to Aristotle, “Wolves tend to be man-eaters when they hunt singly rather than in a pack.” Demosthenes strongly advised his fellow citizens not to surrender him and his colleagues if they did not want to be eaten up.

The statesman Demades had been on good terms with King Philip and had criticized his boorish behavior after the Battle of Chaeronea; he was also friendly with Alexander. For a handsome consideration, he volunteered to plead with the king on their behalf. Plutarch comments sardonically that the Athenian “may have trusted in his personal relationship with Alexander, or he may have counted on finding him sated with blood, like a lion that has been glutted with slaughter.”

At any rate, Demades persuaded the king to pardon all but one of the eight men, including Demosthenes, and arranged terms of peace for the city.

—

BUT ALEXANDER’S ATTEMPTS AT magnanimity failed to win over public opinion. The Greeks were horrified by the destruction of Thebes and were not deceived by his delegation of judgment to the League of Corinth. It was his will that had prevailed. Nor were they persuaded by the clemency he showed to individuals. Over time, he also came to regret what he had done, being too clearheaded to believe his own propaganda, and acted kindly toward Thebans who crossed his path in the years to come.

It was Alexander’s pothos, as it had been his father’s, to be received as a Greek and not as a barbarian. But even when he wore sheep’s clothing, the commander-in-chief of Hellas was still a wolf.