Alexander the Great

CHAPTER 1 GOAT KINGS

July 20 in the year 356 B.C. was a great day for Philip, and it marked a high point in his life so far.

An intelligent and charismatic young man in his midtwenties, he had been king of Macedonia for the past two years. This was no sinecure, for he was surrounded by enemies. On the day in question, he was with his army on campaign; three messengers arrived one after another at his camp, each bearing wonderful news.

The first rider brought a report from his trusty and talented general Parmenion, who had scored a victory against Macedonia’s hereditary foes, the fierce, wild Illyrians. Then came a dispatch from southern Greece, where the Olympic Games were being held. Philip had entered a horse in one of the equestrian events. Only the very wealthy could afford the training and upkeep of two- or four-horse chariots, but financing a competitor in a four-and-a-half-mile horse race was costly enough. Philip’s investment had paid off, for his mount came in first. The publicity would give a shine to his embattled reputation.

But the last messenger arrived from Pella, his capital city. His wife Olympias had given birth to a healthy boy. The official seers or soothsayers said that the arrival of a son timed to coincide with these other successes augured well. When he grew up he would surely be invincible. For his father, there was the prospect of continuing the dynasty.

The infant’s name was to be Alexander.

The baby crown prince faced the prospect of a daunting inheritance. He soon came to understand the realities of life and death as a member of the royal family. Being a clever and observant child, he remembered what he saw, and early lessons set the pattern of his adult attitudes.

Here are some of the things he must have learned.

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THE ROCKY AND VERTIGINOUS geography of Macedon was hostile to good governance. The kingdom lay to the north of Mount Olympus, traditional home of Zeus and the other anthropomorphic divinities of the Hellenic pantheon. Its center was a fertile alluvial plain bordered by the wooded mountains of northern Macedonia. Its coastline was interrupted by the three-fingered peninsula of Chalcidice, which was peppered with Greek trading settlements.

Macedonia was inhabited by unruly tribes which devoted their time and energy to stock-raising and hunting. They regularly moved sheep to and from grazing grounds—the lowlands in winter and the highlands in summer. They paid as little attention as possible to central authority. There was a myriad of villages and very few settled urban communities.

The kingdom had one important raw material in almost limitless amounts—high-quality timber. Trade increased around the Aegean Sea, for travel or transport by sea was easier by far than to go by land. There was growing demand for merchant ships and war galleys and, it followed, for planking and oars. The tall trees of Macedonia were ideal for the purpose, unlike the stunted products of the Greek landscape. Pitch was also exported for caulking boats.

Life, even for despots, was basic. The “father of history,” Herodotus, who flourished in the fifth century B.C., writes of the primitive Macedonian monarchy. His contemporaries would have recognized the simplicity of the royal lifestyle, which had changed little over the centuries. The king lived in a farmhouse with a smoke hole in the roof, and the queen did the cooking. Herodotus, who probably visited Macedonia, commented: “In the old days ruling houses were poor, just like ordinary people.”

Up to Philip’s day and beyond, the monarch adopted an informal way of life. At home he hunted and drank with his masculine Companions, or hetairoi. In the field he fought at the head of his army and was surrounded by a select bodyguard of seven noblemen, the somatophylaxes. His magnificent armor inevitably attracted enemy attacks.

He mingled easily with his subjects and eschewed titles, being addressed only by his given name or “King.” He had to put up with impertinence from the rank and file, just as Agamemnon, commander-in-chief at Troy, was obliged to hear out Homer’s Thersites, a bowlegged and lame troublemaker, whose head was filled “with a store of disorderly words.”

In effect, a king like Philip was not an autocrat but a tribal leader, and his success or failure would largely depend on his performance in war and his magnanimity in peace. It was important that he be generous with personal favors, together with gifts of estates, money, and loot on campaign.

Like Agamemnon, he was wise to consult his senior officers. Philip suited the role very well, ruling with a relaxed sense of humor on the surface and adamantine determination underneath. An anecdote epitomizes his style. At the end of one campaign, he was superintending the sale of prisoners into slavery. His tunic had ridden up, exposing his private parts. One of the prisoners claimed to be a friend of his father and asked for a private word. He was brought forward to the king and whispered in his ear: “Lower your tunic a little, for you are exposing too much of yourself the way you are sitting.” And Philip said, “Let him go free, for I’d forgotten he is a true friend indeed.”

Little is known about a king’s constitutional rights, but it seems that he was appointed by acclamation, at an assembly of citizens or of the army. Capital punishment of a Macedonian had to be endorsed by an assembly. But even if his powers were limited, a canny ruler could almost invariably get his way. The eldest son usually—but by no means always, as we shall see—inherited the throne.

The philosopher Aristotle, whose father was official physician at the Macedonian court, was thinking about Philip when he observed that “kingship…is organized on the same basis as aristocracy: [by] merit—either individual virtue, or birth, or distinguished service, or all these together with a capacity for doing things.”

Successive rulers tried again and again, without conspicuous success, to impose their will on their untamable subjects. Then, toward the end of the sixth century B.C., the outside world intervened in the shape of Darius I, absolute lord of the vast, sprawling Persian empire, which stretched from the shores of the eastern Mediterranean to the gates of India, from Egypt to Anatolia. It has been well described as a desert punctuated by oases. There were well-watered plains, often more abundant than today, and arid wastes. Rugged mountain ranges and broad rivers made travel—and for that matter warfare—complicated and challenging.

The empire was founded by Cyrus the Great in the middle of the fifth century B.C. The Persians were originally nomads, and even in their heyday as an imperial power, their rulers were always on the move between one or other of their capital cities, Susa, Persepolis, and Ecbatana. Their great throne halls were versions of the royal traveling tent in stone. Like all nomads, they were enthusiastic horsemen and their mounted archers were ferocious in battle.

It has been estimated that the empire was home to about fifty million inhabitants. They came from a variety of cultures, spoke a medley of languages, and practiced a wide array of religions; wisely, they were governed with a light touch. However, if they rebelled against the central authority, they could only expect fire, rapine, and slaughter. In the last resort, the empire was a military monarchy.

The Great King, as he was usually called, wanted to secure the northwestern corner of his wide domains by establishing an invulnerable frontier, the river Danube. This would entail subjugating Thrace, the large extent of land between the Balkan mountains, the Black Sea, and the Sea of Marmara. On today’s political map, it includes portions of Greece, Bulgaria, and Turkey.

About 512 B.C., a vast Persian army invaded Thrace and then marched on beyond the Danube, but here Scythian nomads outplayed Darius by refusing engagement. They knew perfectly well that his forces would run out of time and supplies and would be forced to withdraw.

The Great King saw that his gains were at risk from the mountain tribes in the west and he decided to annex Macedonia. He commissioned one of his generals to deal with the matter. Envoys were sent to the king of the day, Amyntas I, demanding earth and water, the symbols of submission and allegiance. Amyntas accepted his role as a vassal and married his daughter to a Persian high official, for he saw many advantages in allowing Macedonia to become an imperial province (or, to adopt the Persian word, satrapy). With Darius’s backing he knew he would have a good chance of enlarging his kingdom and beating down his independent-minded subjects.

His teenaged son, who was to succeed him as Alexander I, saw things differently and, according to Herodotus, took violent measures at a state banquet in honor of the envoys. As the evening wore on, the guests became more and more drunk. Respectable women did not usually attend such events, but were brought in at the Persians’ express request. Amyntas was deeply offended and, doubtless pressed by his furious son, laid a plot. He told the Persians they could have sex with any of the women they liked. He added: “Perhaps you will let me send them away to have a bath. After that they will come back again.”

The women were exchanged for beardless male teenagers, armed with daggers, who lay down beside the envoys in the dining room and made short work of them. Their retinue, carriages, and so forth were disposed of, and it was as if they had never existed. The Great King tried to have them traced, but without success. Any inquiry was received with a blank face.

The mature Alexander was probably Herodotus’s source for this story, and it may be a boastful fabrication, but it illustrates the humiliation felt in leading Macedonian circles by the Persian occupation, which was to last thirty years.

It was this humiliation, though, that laid the foundations of Macedonian power, for it did not prevent Alexander I, once he had succeeded to the throne, from using Persian support to make substantial territorial gains. It is a painful irony that without the Great King’s armed intervention Macedonia would never have become a great power.

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SOUTH OF MACEDONIA LAY the isles of Greece, populated by small, fierce, ambitious, and inventive republics, chief among them Athens, the ville lumière of the ancient world, and, in the Peloponnese, the military state of Sparta.

Although the Greeks, or Hellenes as they called themselves, disagreed with one another about almost everything, they were unanimous in the opinion that they were a cut above their foreign neighbors. Anyone who was not Greek was a barbarian, or barbaros: that is, he spoke a strange language which sounded like “bar bar.” He was not to be respected or trusted.

If the Greeks were members of an exclusive club, in other respects they were energetically outgoing. They were traveling traders and from the eighth century onward their ships sailed up and down the Mediterranean. They founded permanent settlements along the coasts and islands of the Aegean Sea as well as in Sicily and southern Italy. These were partly designed to protect and develop mercantile routes and partly to absorb excess citizens in an age when a rising population outstripped local food production.

As Plato put it, these new communities sat like “frogs around a pond” and greatly expanded the influence of the Hellenic world. They were proudly independent. Unluckily, many of them, the city-states of Ionia, lined the littoral of Anatolia. This marked the western edge of the Persian empire and, unsurprisingly, the Ionian city-states fell under the Great King’s control.

Few mainland Greeks were bothered by the annexation of Macedonia, but many deeply resented the fate of their counterparts across the Aegean. In 499 B.C. the Ionians raised the standard of revolt, throwing out the despots whom the Great King had appointed to govern them. Democratic Athens incautiously dispatched a small flotilla to assist the rebels. They helped burn down the great and wealthy city of Sardis, capital of Lydia, although they soon afterward sailed home. By 493 the rebels threw in the towel.

Darius was unused to opposition. According to Herodotus, “He strung an arrow and shot it in the air, shouting: ‘Lord God, grant me vengeance on the Athenians!’ Then he ordered one of his attendants to say to him three times whenever he sat down to dinner: ‘Sire, remember the Athenians.’ ”

In 490, after an abortive attempt two years previously, the Great King sent a fleet directly across the Aegean on a punitive mission. It landed at the bay of Marathon in Attica, the territory of Athens, where it was surprisingly but decisively defeated by an Athenian army. This was only a minor setback, but the Persians sailed home smarting, and Darius vowed a return match. However, other business, not to mention his own death in 486, led to a ten-year delay.

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HIS SON XERXES PICKED up the baton. He assembled an army of more than 200,000 men and about six hundred triremes, or war galleys. He marched along the Thracian coastline, shadowed at sea by the fleet, and in 480 came to Macedonia and northern Greece.

Since his accession, the new Great King had great expectations of Alexander I, whom circumstances had trained into a practiced dissembler. The historian Justin observed:

When that monarch overspread Greece like a thunderstorm, he presented Alexander with the sovereignty of the whole region between Mount Olympus and the Haemus mountain range in the north. Alexander enlarged his dominions not so much by his own aggressiveness as through the generosity of the Persians.

The Macedonian acted as the Great King’s emissary to Athens and we may surmise that, like the rest of the ancient world, he assumed that Xerxes would be victorious. And indeed that appeared to be the case. The population of Athens was evacuated en masse to a nearby island and the Persians took the empty city without difficulty and sacked it. They burnt its temples, the same fate that had been meted out to the citizens of Sardis. Athens was devastated, its broken columns smeared black with smoke. Modern archaeologists have found clear evidence of the flames. Darius’s revenge, if delayed, was complete.

However, the allied Greek fleet, dominated by Athenian triremes, defeated the armada of Xerxes at the island of Salamis, to everyone’s astonishment. The Great King withdrew hastily to his own realm, leaving a large army in central Greece to turn his fortunes around.

Alexander read the writing on the wall and his latent philhellenism began to revive. He was obliged to take part in the military campaign. He and a contingent of Macedonian cavalry stood loyally, it would seem, in the Persian ranks and faced a disputatious allied force on the field of Plataea in Boeotia.

The king decided to hedge his bets. During the middle of the night before the battle, when both armies were deeply asleep, he rode up to a Greek guard post and asked to speak to the allied commanders. Herodotus gives the details:

The greater part of the sentries remained where they were, but the rest ran to their generals and told them that a horseman had ridden in from the Persian camp, refusing to say anything except that he wanted to speak to the generals and identified them by their names. Hearing that, the generals straightaway went with the men to the outposts. When they had come, Alexander said to them: “Men of Athens, I give you this message in trust as a secret which you must reveal to no one but Pausanias, the supreme commander, or you will ruin me.”

He went on to advise the Greeks to expect the enemy, who had been inactive for some days, to attack on the morrow. This was invaluable information, and the Macedonian added: “Should you bring this war to a successful conclusion, remember me and help me to freedom. I have taken a huge risk for the sake of Hellas by revealing the Persian plans and preserving you from a surprise attack. I am Alexander of Macedonia.”

We may forgive the king a touch of exaggeration. He had simply bought an insurance policy: however the day went, he would be on the winning side. As we shall see, this double game of treachery and shifting loyalties was played by a long line of Macedonian kings. They had little alternative to deceit when trying to make the most of a weak hand.

The following day, as forecast, the Persians attacked, and were routed. Their commander was killed. Xerxes’ great invasion was over. Alexander did not wait long to turn his coat. We know that he attacked some Persian contingents on their gloomy way home, to considerable effect, for he dedicated gold statues of himself at the oracle of Delphi and at Olympia, headquarters of the Olympic Games, as a “first fruit of spoils from captive Medes.” A little later he grabbed land in western Thrace. Overall, Macedonia had quadrupled in size. The king was entitled to be pleased with himself.

Before the battle at Plataea, every Athenian soldier had made a vow: “I will not rebuild a single one of the temples which the barbarians have burned and razed to the ground, but will let them remain for future generations as a memorial to their impiety.” For many years the blackened ruins on the city’s citadel, the Acropolis, stood as a bitter reminder of Greek suffering.

Sooner or later, patriots believed, the hour would arrive for revenge, for a rerun of the Trojan War, when Agamemnon, Achilles, and their expeditionary force crossed the sea and destroyed a great Asian power.

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THE QUESTION AROSE—WERE THE Macedonians Greek or of barbarian stock? Most proud Hellenes saw them as rough, vulgar, and simple-minded folk who fitted comfortably into the category of barbarian, but in fact their language, incomprehensible though it seemed to outsiders, was a dialect of Greek. The royal family claimed to trace its origins to Argos, a city-state in southern Greece, hence its name—the Argead dynasty. So they at least were sure of their identity.

But that was not enough. One Macedonian king after another worked hard to win over hostile opinion. The Olympic Games, then as now a festival of amateur athletics, were a Hellenic institution par excellence and only Hellenes were allowed to compete. When a young man, the wily Alexander I had trouble qualifying for the footrace and the pentathlon. According to Herodotus,

The Greeks who were to run against him wanted to bar him from the race, saying that the contest should be for Greeks and not for foreigners. Alexander, however, proving himself to be an Argive, was judged to be a Greek. He accordingly competed in the furlong race and tied for first place.

The greatest poet of the age, Pindar, specialized in odes that celebrated Olympic victors; he addressed Alexander as the “bold-scheming son of Amyntas” who fully deserved the praise he showered on his head.

It is right for the good to be hymned…

with the most beautiful songs

For this is the only tribute that comes near to the honors

Due to the gods, but every noble act dies, if passed over in silence.

Alexander’s efforts to erase his barbarian identity had some success, and even if he was not fully accepted, he acquired the complimentary sobriquet of “Philhellene.”

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AFTER HIS DEATH IN 452, some low, dishonest decades ensued. His successor, the equally wily Perdiccas II, lost many of Macedonia’s recent territorial gains. The kingdom’s once-tamed tribes kicked over the traces and became again more or less autonomous. When the Greek world led by Athens and Sparta entered into a long and exhausting civil war in the last third of the fifth century, the king sold them wood for triremes. He made and broke deals on the sidelines and played one side against the other. Unluckily, his duplicity did not always work to his advantage.

Then in 412 another outward-looking monarch assumed the throne. Called Archelaus, he instituted important economic and military reforms at home and was even more of a lover of all things Greek than his grandfather Alexander. He placed a special value on cultural production and invited leading Hellenic writers and artists to settle in Macedonia at public expense.

Apparently, the king was an effeminate homosexual and ran a relaxed and open court. The aged Euripides, the most popular and radical of the great Athenian tragedians, came to stay; he was accompanied by a younger playwright, Agathon, then about forty, who played a starring role in the philosopher Plato’s Symposium, a semi-fictional account of a dinner party in Athens. They were rumored to be lovers—rather daring if true, for many Greeks disliked permanent adult same-sex relationships. (They did value liaisons between teenaged boys and young adult males; these were partly educational and partly erotic in character, but were temporary and usually gave way after a few years to close friendships and heterosexual marriage—see this page for more details). The king challenged Euripides for kissing the middle-aged Agathon at a public banquet, but the old man replied, perhaps with a wintry smile: “Springtime isn’t the only beautiful season; so is autumn.”

Archelaus tempted the fashionable painter Zeuxis to decorate his house in the new Greek-style capital, Pella, to which he had moved his administration. However, he had no luck with Socrates. The philosopher turned down the king’s invitation to visit, saying that he never accepted favors he could not repay.

The king instituted and oversaw a nine-day festival beneath Mount Olympus, home of the gods. It featured athletic and dramatic competitions in honor of Zeus and the Muses. He may well have hoped, unrealistically, that his festival would outshine the Olympic Games, also dedicated to the king of the gods. Like his predecessor Alexander, he competed at Olympia, in his case winning the chariot race (he did the same during the Pythian Games at Delphi).

The tone of the court became increasingly Hellenic, and little ruffians from the Macedonian aristocracy were polished with a Greek education. How far did the king’s efforts succeed? The results were mixed. Royals and aristocrats were won over by the propaganda, but international snobbery was harder to overcome.

Thrasymachus was a noted philosopher and an educational and political consultant (what the Greeks called a sophist) who appears as a character in Plato’s masterpiece, The Republic. He asked: “Shall we, who are Greeks, be slaves to Archelaus, a barbarian?”

He was not alone in being immune to blandishment. Archelaus’s successors maintained the uphill struggle for acceptance, and Philip was no exception. When Plato died in 347, he went out of his way to “honor” the great philosopher’s passing. But a cultured Athenian like Demosthenes regarded Philip not only as a political opponent but also as a boor. The king, he said dismissively, was “not only not Greek and unrelated to Greeks…but a wretched Macedonian, from a land where once you couldn’t even buy a decent slave.”

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IF ARCHELAUS ENCOURAGED THE appurtenances of civilization, there were barbarian aspects of his public personality and of court culture at large that proved too ingrained to erase. The palace was a viper’s nest of ambition, and members of the royal family were often at risk of extermination, especially at moments of transition between one reign and the next.

The king was no slouch in this regard. According to Plato, he was Perdiccas’s illegitimate son by a slave and “had no claim to the throne he now occupies.” However, he clambered up to it through a bloodbath. He invited a leading contender, his uncle (in whose household he seems to have lived), and the uncle’s son to dinner. He got them drunk, packed them into a carriage, and drove them away by night; out of sight out of mind, they were then put to death.

The seven-year-old son of the late king, although far too young to rule, had a just title to the throne. He was thrown down a well and drowned. His surely incredulous mother was told that he had fallen in while chasing a goose.

Archelaus was a clever and farsighted ruler, but he should have known that those who live by the sword have a way of dying by it too. In 399, he was assassinated. The sources are confused and differ. According to one account, a boyfriend called Craterus killed him and seized power. Within four days he himself was murdered, the biter bit. Aristotle noted dryly: “At the bottom of the coolness between them was Craterus’s disgust with granting sexual favors.”

The king’s son, Orestes, succeeded his father, but, fatally for him, was another small boy. His guardian promptly put him to death and took his place. He lasted only a few years himself. Three more short-lived kings came and went, and finally in 393 a great-grandson of Alexander, lover of Greeks, took charge. This was Amyntas III—it is something of a surprise that any members of the dynasty were left standing after all the bloodletting—who stayed in place (barring a brief deposition) for two decades. He maintained the traditional Macedonian policy of routinely switching alliances, although he seems always to have had a soft spot for Athens.

On the domestic front, life was busy. Amyntas appears to have been a bigamist (not unusual among Macedonian royalty) and fathered at least seven children. One of his wives, Eurydice, has been presented as almost completely out of control. If we can believe the sources, she plotted the assassination of her husband, intending marriage to her son-in-law, Ptolemy. Her daughter, justifiably outraged, informed Amyntas of her intentions. He courageously forgave his wife and, against the odds, died in his bed in 370 at an advanced age.

Once again the royal family imploded, with Eurydice (it appears) at the sanguinary heart of events. Alexander II, a young man, ascended the throne, but was assassinated a couple of years later at the instigation of Ptolemy. The dowager queen’s lover then set himself up as regent for her second son, Perdiccas III, who was still in his teens. The young king was energetic and daring; in 365 he had Ptolemy put to death and seized the reins of power.

History does not record Eurydice’s fate, although she sought to retrieve her maternal reputation by encouraging her own education and that of her sons (not without some success, for Perdiccas developed a serious interest in philosophy). She dedicated an inscription to the Muses, in which she claimed that “by her diligence she succeeded in becoming literate.”

Perdiccas fell afoul not of palace conspiracies, but of a military disaster. In 359, he attempted to wrest northern Macedonia from the permanently pugnacious Illyrians, but was struck down in a great battle. All the gains of the previous century or so were lost and the kingdom’s neighbors gathered gleefully round to tear meat from the carcass.

The lost leader was survived by his son, Amyntas IV, yet another child heir who was obviously of no use in this emergency. Luckily, there was one final adult brother left alive. Old enough to show promise if too young to guarantee achievement, he was called Philip.

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PHILIP WAS LUCKY TO have avoided the machinations of his mother. This was because he had spent the last few years as a hostage among the Illyrians and then in Thebes, the capital of Boeotia and, for the time being, the leading state in Greece. Absence from Pella had kept him in good health and he learned a great deal from his hosts.

He was a young and attractive teenager and his Theban host, a distinguished but amorous commander called Pammenes, is reported to have seduced him. This was a routine adolescent experience at the Macedonian court and there is no evidence that the prince demurred. The episode is better understood as a rite of passage than as sexual abuse.

More importantly, Philip was introduced to a military genius, Epaminondas, whose mastery of tactics, discipline, and training had enabled Thebes to destroy forever the power of Sparta, the dominant military state of the age. He also encountered the three-hundred-strong Sacred Band, a crack regiment of male lovers. Its members were devoted couples, recruited on the principle that neither would want to disgrace himself in the presence of the other. This elite corps probably had its origin in the heroic age of solo champions and their chariot drivers.

Epaminondas was a cultivated man and employed a personal philosopher under whom Philip studied and was fascinated by, the thinker and scientist Pythagoras.

The two or three years the prince spent in Thebes showed him what it was like to live in one of the myriad Greek-speaking mini-states and be a fully paid-up Hellene. For, despite the best efforts of kings such as Alexander II and Archelaus, the Macedonian court was rough at the edges, still more than a little barbarian. Philip was impressed. There is little doubt that, as his historian Justin writes, his time at Thebes “gave Philip fine opportunities to improve his extraordinary abilities.”

The prince probably returned to Pella about 365, soon after the accession of his sibling, the doomed Perdiccas. The new king trusted his little brother, whom he placed in charge of territory somewhere near the Thermaic Gulf on the eastern end of Macedonia and gave command of cavalry and infantry. There Philip was able to put into practice the military lessons learned in Thebes, as Perdiccas may have intended. It proved to be an essential apprenticeship.

The great Illyrian battle in 359 was a terrible moment in Macedonia’s history. Philip almost certainly fought in it and witnessed the catastrophe. The king and four thousand of his men lay dead on the battlefield. There was widespread disillusion in Macedonia with the war. Enemies approached from every quarter: the tribes of Paeonia raided the kingdom, the Illyrians were planning a wholescale invasion, a pretender to the throne was backed by the Thracians, and the Athenians were helping another one with a fleet and a not insubstantial army.

Philip was appointed regent to his nephew, Perdiccas’s infant son. Immediately he gave a master class of coolness under fire and tactical brilliance. Realizing that he could not defeat all his enemies at once, he placed them in a line and dealt with them one at a time. He married the daughter of Bardylis, the Illyrian king, bribed the Paeonians not to invade his kingdom, and suborned the Thracians not merely to abandon the Macedonian pretender, but to put him to death.

Philip then tricked the Athenians into holding back their expeditionary force by promising to hand over to them a prosperous coastal port, then ambushed their now isolated claimant and had him killed. The energetic regent soon persuaded the Macedonian assembly to advance him to the kingship. He was not cruel, but he was ruthless, and undeviatingly so, when his own survival was at stake. Learning from Archelaus and other royal ancestors that safety called for bloody hands, he eliminated his three stepbrothers, although he only caught up with two of them some years later. Seeing no threat from the infant ci-devant king, he did not touch him and brought him up at court: a rare case of a royal child surviving.

Philip had not the slightest intention of keeping any of his promises. After a year had passed, he invaded Paeonia, inflicted a terminal defeat, and annexed it. Turning almost at once to Illyria, he won a stunning victory. His father-in-law, Bardylis, now over ninety years old, met his death in the field and seven thousand enemy soldiers also lost their lives. Perdiccas was avenged. More to the point, Philip had wrested back control of Upper Macedonia. His kingdom was united again.

He now ruled over a large and settled territory. Like his recent predecessors, he faced the challenge of transforming his role from that of the Homeric leader of an unruly war band to that of a head of government.

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HOW WERE PHILIP’S TRIUMPHANT feats of arms achieved? He had been able to look back into the past for inspiration.

On the plain that lay between the city and the sea, two armies faced each other. It was the ninth year of a long and bitter struggle as a Greek expeditionary force attempted to capture the legendary city of Troy on the coast of Asia Minor. The origin of the war lay in the greatest sex scandal of the ancient world; the beautiful Helen had abandoned her husband, Menelaus, king of Sparta, and eloped with the handsome Paris, prince of Troy.

Homer, author of the great epic poem about the war, evokes the scene.

In their swift advance across the plain, their marching feet had raised a cloud of dust, dense as the mist that the South Wind wraps round the mountaintops, when a man can see no further than he can heave a rock.

Mingling among the rank and file, kings and aristocrats stood on chariots. Once one of them had identified an enemy, who would also be riding a chariot, he jumped down onto the ground and challenged him to a duel. Each warrior carried two light throwing spears and a sword. For protection he had a round shield, which he could hang on his back if retreating. While the warriors fought, their poorly armed retainers cheered them along. They advanced or retreated in a mêlée, as the fortunes of their leaders ebbed and flowed, and seem not to have played a decisive role in the battle.

On the present occasion Paris, the cause of all the trouble, stepped out from the Trojan ranks to challenge any Greek to a duel. The cuckolded husband, Menelaus of Sparta, enthusiastically responded and leaped from his chariot. Paris was a coward and was whisked away by his divine patron, Aphrodite, goddess of love.

Archers were unpopular, for they killed unfairly from a safe distance. Later on in the siege, Paris loosed a shaft at the greatest warrior of all, the hot-tempered, beautiful Achilles, and killed him. Bows and arrows were evidence of bad character.

Greeks in later centuries agreed with Homer’s (almost certainly) fictional heroes that war brought glory and that individual courage marked a man out for praise and fame. In that way he became almost godlike, isotheos.

By the eighth century B.C., the age of kings and lords in mainland Greece had passed. What is more, we have no idea whether the war at Troy ever took place. It may have been a literary invention. The Homeric description of warfare is implausible. Simply to use the chariot as a taxi service to the front line is odd behavior at a time when the Hittites in Asia Minor and the Egyptians deployed massed chariots in battle.

However, most people were convinced that this distant Hellenic conflict was historical. It inspired a belief in military glory. Philip knew it behooved a brave leader like Achilles to risk his life in the thick of the fighting, to fight hand-to-hand and to lead from the front. No skulking in the rear.

The Macedonian king fought by this rule and, unsurprisingly, was frequently wounded on his many campaigns. When one of his fiercest critics conceded that “he was ready to sacrifice to the fortune of war any and every part of his body,” he was not exaggerating. A hand and a leg were maimed, a collarbone broken, and, worst of all, Philip lost an eye during the siege of a city. His doctor succeeded in extricating the arrow and the king survived. Despite being in great pain, he remained in command. When he took the city, he did not punish the defenders for their resistance. This was a sign of magnanimity, a virtue expected of a great monarch.

According to Plutarch, “he did not cover over or hide his scars, but displayed them openly as symbolic representations, cut into his body, of virtue and courage.”

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CITY-STATES DOMINATED BY MIDDLE-CLASS farmers and traders succeeded the feudal realms. The style of battle changed to match the new politics. This was the age of the citizen militia. In place of well-born charioteers hurling spears at individual opponents came disciplined troops of hoplites. These were heavily armed soldiers who marched in a tight formation called the phalanx.

The hoplite wore a metal helmet, a breastplate, greaves, and thigh pieces. He carried two thrusting spears and swords for hand-to-hand fighting, and protected himself with a large round shield, which also helped to cover his neighbor on the left and presented a shield wall to the enemy. The main strength of the phalanx lay in its momentum. Its function was to be a human battering ram and crash through the enemy’s line. It pushed and it shoved. Most casualties were incurred once there had been a decision: the losers were slaughtered in flight.

Provided it held together and remained strictly in formation, the phalanx was hard to beat. However, it had some distinct disadvantages. It could not change front rapidly or keep up an orderly pursuit. It needed flat ground; bumps, holes, ditches, streams, and trees and bushes made it hard for men to keep their dressing. Once gaps appeared, they were vulnerable and could be broken up.

Because hoplites held their shields on their left arms, those who stood in the last file on the right were unprotected if outflanked, so they had a tendency to drift defensively rightward. This would stretch and thin the line, creating yet more dangerous gaps.

A further difficulty was that when each side in a battle presented a phalanx, the outcome could be a stalemate and a draw. The Thebans were the first to recognize this flaw and to find a solution. They tried it out on a summer’s day in 371, outside a village called Leuctra in Boeotia. They faced the Spartans, whose army was generally held to be the finest of the day, and their allies.

As was usual, the Spartan phalanx took up the place of honor on the right of the battle line. Facing it on the Theban left, Epaminondas massed a column of infantry that was a phenomenal fifty ranks deep. The rest of his army was much weaker and was echeloned back so that it would not be tested in fighting. After a cavalry engagement, his mega-phalanx smashed the enemy’s right wing by brute force. The result was a total victory for the Thebans, and Spartan power was broken for good.

Young Philip absorbed the military reforms of Epaminondas and the Theban’s great friend Pelopidas with red-hot interest. We may imagine him listening to talk of tactics at Pammenes’s dinner table and taking mental notes about the revolutionary new strategy of battle.

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SOME YEARS LATER, when Philip became king, he remodeled the remains of the Macedonian army. What he had at his disposal was a strong cavalry force, called the Companions, which was recruited from the aristocracy (who could afford the upkeep of horses), and an undisciplined and untrained peasant infantry militia, always anxious to return home and look after their farms and harvests. He developed it into a well-trained standing army, capable of taking on all comers.

First of all, he stole the idea of the deep Theban phalanx, with an important addition. Its weakness was that it would tend to crumble at the point of impact like a rugby football scrum. So he replaced the throwing spears with long pikes or sarissas. These were about eighteen feet long and had to be held two-handed. In a charge the sarissas of the first four or five ranks projected well forward beyond the front of the phalanx, which usually consisted of sixteen ranks. The remainder held their pikes up in the air to disrupt the impact of missiles. Hoplites who were used to hand-to-hand combat found it very hard to cope with this lethal outsized porcupine.

That said, the overwhelming phalanx shock could not always be repeated if other armies also deployed similar deep infantry formations. For victory Philip depended on his heavily armed cavalry, which was probably the best in the Hellenic world. Horsemen had the obvious advantage of mobility. While the phalanx was holding its ground and fully occupying the enemy infantry’s attention, his aggressive and fast-moving cavalry could gallop about the battlefield, slashing and stabbing foot soldiers from above, sway the balance of advantage, and win the day.

The Greek city-states, often democracies, paid little attention to cavalry because horses were expensive to run and associated with discredited aristocratic elites. Such Greek cavalry as there was usually formed into a square, sixteen horsemen wide and sixteen deep. The excellent Thessalian horsemen deployed in a diamond configuration, which Philip modified into a triangle. The commander would occupy the tip or point nearest the enemy. The cavalrymen behind him followed his galloping horse and shifted direction as and when he did. This unique flexibility came at a serious risk of injury or death to the commander if he was surrounded by the enemy. At every moment during a charge, men had to be ready to come to his rescue. As Asclepiodotus, a military strategist of the first century B.C., observed: “Wheeling was thus easier than in the square formation, since all have their eyes fixed on the single squadron-commander, as is the case also in the flight of cranes.”

In many armies of the day, civilians approached the number of combatants. Philip cut back the number of support staff and banned wives and children, prostitutes, small-time traders, and other camp followers. Carts were forbidden.

With the passage of time, Philip enlarged his army. When he assumed the throne he commanded about 10,000 infantry and 600 cavalry. By his death this had risen to 24,000 infantry and 3,000 cavalry. The wage for a foot soldier was one drachma a day; for a horseman, three drachmas. No Greek city-state could afford to keep a standing army of this size, but nobody drew the obvious conclusion that the balance of power in the eastern Mediterranean had been transformed. The change in degree was so great that it had insensibly become a change in kind.

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AT THE HEART OF Philip’s approach were training, discipline, and the maintenance of group morale. He held constant maneuvers and forced marches. He made his men carry their own provisions (including a thirty-day ration of flour) and equipment. He taught them to forage for food.

His objective was to make individual soldiers, and indeed the army itself, as nimble and self-sufficient as possible. The king mingled among his men, but he was no soft touch. Officers were disciplined as severely as other ranks. When Philip found one of them taking warm baths, he stripped him of his command. “In Macedonia,” he said tartly, “we don’t even allow a woman in childbirth to use warm water.” He beat another man for breaking ranks when thirsty and going for a drink in a tavern.

Off duty, though, Philip was very much more relaxed. If we are to believe a contemporary, the fourth-century historian Theopompus, who spent considerable time as the king’s guest, that would be to put it mildly. He wrote:

Philip’s court in Macedonia was the rendez-vous of all the most debauched and shameless characters in Greece or elsewhere. They were styled the king’s Companions. As a rule, Philip showed no favor to respectable men who took care of their property, but those he honored and promoted were high spenders who passed their time drinking and gambling. In consequence, he not only encouraged them in their vices, but made them past masters in every kind of wickedness and lewdness….Some of them used to shave their bodies and make them smooth despite the fact that they were men not women, and others actually had sex with each other though old enough to be bearded. They took two or three male prostitutes around with them and themselves offered the same service to others. In effect, they were not courtiers but courtesans, not soldiers but strumpets. They were natural man-killers, but their behavior turned them into man-whores.

We do not need to take this invective too literally, but throughout the ages soldiers at leisure have been known to binge drink and to hunt for sexual conquests. What is perhaps unusual is the impression given of an open and dominant homosexual subculture. We know Philip admired that brigade of lovers, the Theban Band. The deep phalanx may not have been the only innovation the young hostage thought worthy of imitation.

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PHILIP’S BABY SON, ALEXANDER, grew up in the court at Pella. If the boy fashions the man, the experiences of his early years must have cast a long shadow forward across his maturity.

As time passed and he moved from infancy through childhood and into his teens, he learned about the world he was growing up in. He was a bright little boy and stored the data in his mind for future use.

Alexander lived in a tough, bizarre environment. That palace conspiracies were toxic and bloody was one of the bitter lessons that history taught him. The only way forward was to react quickly and decisively to perceived threats. The gory fate of ancestral kings in general, and his father’s ruthless actions at the outset of his reign in particular, made the point very clearly.

The thrilling story of the two Persian invasions will have excited Alexander. It identified an enemy—defeated, but powerful and malevolent for all that. Revenge is a tasty dish for the young imagination, and the shame of Macedonia’s subjection to the Great King still rankled.

The victories at Marathon and Salamis underlined the superiority of the Greek civilization which his father and the Macedonians sought to emulate and to which they claimed brassily to belong.

He was introduced to the rudiments of warfare and understood that fighting was to be his destiny. He must also have taken on board as normal the rough-and-ready Macedonian court. He admired his often absent father, and his father loved and was proud of his clever and fearless son. Philip unwarily trained him for high command at the first possible moment.

Alexander inhabited a violently masculine society—with one exception, his terrifying mother. She was Olympias, a princess from Epirus. From the moment of his birth her only care was to advance her son’s interest with fiery ferocity. Even when he was a married adult, she was to remain the most important woman in his life.