God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great

THREE

Pella and Greece, 340–339 BC

The problem was that Philip did not die.

He was a great man. And there’s a saying in Greece that I heard when I was in Athens before the Great War – that great men have useless sons. Phokion, Isocrates, Alcebiades, Leonidas – none of them had great sons.

But maybe the problem is that great men are too fucking hard on their sons, and most sons can’t stand the pain, and they fold – I’m just guessing, but sometimes it is easier to just knuckle under than to strive, endlessly, with the man of gold. I speak from some experience, youngster.

But Alexander – no man ever born of woman – or of goddess – was ever so competitive. He had to compete – so deep, the inner need to prove himself to himself every day, all the time, over and over. When you are young, this appears as a great strength. As you grow older, it appears weaker and weaker. Trust me on this. The best men – the ones untouched by gods and happy in their own skins, the prosperous farmers and the good poets and the master craftsmen, the mothers of good children, the priestesses of well-run temples – have nothing to prove to gods or men. They merely are like the immortal gods.

Then there’s the rest of us, of course. Hah!

And Alexander had that need to prove prowess, like a disease. So that he ran, wrestled or studied Plato with the same look on his face that he wore in mortal combat. To him, it was all mortal combat. To the death. To prove himself as good as his father. Or better.

Oh, it all sounds like crap – the sort of mumbo-jumbo that priests mutter. And he loved his father and his harpy of a mother, and they loved him. I’ve known many boys with worse parents. He did well enough. And he really loved them – he didn’t murder his mother, and that alone speaks volumes.

Don’t look shocked, boy. We’re talking Macedon.

But he was determined to be like a god – to be a god if ever he could be. To be a better man than his father, and his father was a colossus who bestrode the earth and made the mighty – Persia, Athens – tremble like small boys in a thunderstorm.

Your father was a great man in a different mould – but you have to measure up to him, don’t you? Aye. And all around you are relatives, tutors, officers – men and women who knew him. You must see the judgement in their eyes.

Good. Point made.

Philip had a bad wound, but he was far from dead. In fact, he never gave up the reins of power. He was lying in a litter, dictating the restructuring of the magazines from Pella to the Thracian borderlands so that his counter-strike would land faster and better supplied.

He looked up and caught my eye first. He was as white as a new-washed linen chiton, and his lips were pale, and his eyes had sunk into his head like those of a corpse – but he grinned.

‘Son of Lagus,’ he said. ‘You look ready for war.’

‘We heard you were dead, lord!’ I dismounted. The other pages dismounted behind me.

‘Not yet. Where is my son?’ Philip looked past me, and I saw him as he caught sight of Alexander, the only young man still mounted. He had his Boeotian helmet off, and the golden hair on either side of his forehead had made itself into ram’s horns, as it always did if he didn’t wash it for a few days. He looked like a god.

Philip’s face lit up – blood came to his cheeks. His smile – I hoped that my father smiled like that, some day, when he saw me. ‘Ahh,’ Philip said.

Alexander turned and saw his father’s litter and slid off his horse with his usual elegance. He bowed. ‘Pater,’ he said. Voice clipped, too controlled.

‘I’m not dead yet, boy,’ Philip said. Meant as humour. But delivered too deadpan.

‘My apologies, then,’ Alexander shot back. ‘I shall return to my studies.’

‘No – stay.’ The wounded man shifted. ‘They nearly cut my balls off, lad.’ Another try at humour.

Alexander managed a half-smile. ‘That would hurt you worse than many another blow, Pater,’ he said.

Philip laughed, slapped his leg and roared in pain.

I left them to it, gathered the pages and joined them to the column.

In fact, we never went back to the schoolroom. But it will take a long digression to explain how we ended up where we did, and you will have to be patient, because when you are young, life is an endless succession of elders forcing you to learn things, eh?

Throughout my youth, Macedon was at war with Athens. This takes some explaining, because we sent them money and trees for their fleet and they sent us actors and rhetoricians and politicians and goldsmiths. But they had an empire and we wanted it. They were perfidious and evasive and dishonest – and Philip was their match.

There was no principle involved at all. Just self-interest.

Athens held most of the Chersonese and all of the best parts of the Bosporus. Athens’ prosperity depended on a free flow of grain from the Euxine – but of course you know all this, you scamp! And that was fine with Philip and Macedon, until Athens started to use all her naval bases in the Chersonese to brew trouble for Macedon. That’s a game that, once started, can’t be stopped. It’s like playing with a girl – you can hold her hand and be in paradise, but once that hand has been on her breast or between her thighs, you can’t go back to holding hands, can you? So it is with nation-states. First they slight each other, and then they foment war through third parties, and then they accidentally sink each other’s ships – brewing more hatred at every action – and they can never go back without a lot of treaties and some reason.

Athens and Macedon were well matched. Athens was past her prime, but I didn’t need old Aristotle to tell me that Athens always bounces back – her prime is whenever she has a fleet. And Macedon was one generation from being a collection of mud huts in the wilderness, or like enough. In that one generation, Philip had pushed out borders in every direction, built an army as good as Sparta’s, built roads and supply centres, fortresses and alliances. But he didn’t have a fleet, and Athens could strip Macedon of her overseas possessions a few heartbeats after she acquired them. Macedon’s army was the better – but not really very much better, as the Athenians taught us in the Lamian War.

Everything that happened while Alexander and I were growing to manhood was the petting and kissing part, on the way to real war between Athens and Macedon. I can’t even remember all the convolutions. The truth is, I didn’t pay that close a heed – I wasn’t a statesman, I was a boy.

But even a very young man in Pella knew who Demosthenes was – knew that he rose every day in the assembly in Athens to denounce our king and our state and our way of life. Now – you’re an Athenian citizen, aren’t you, boy? I thought as much. So you probably know that we all admired Athens in every way – despite their prating against us, we all wanted to grow up to be Athenian gentlemen. We read their plays and their poetry and spoke their dialect and aped their manners and practised serving wine their way. But when it came to war, we were determined to beat them.

And we knew who Phokion was – their best general, the one even Philip feared, and we knew that he admired us. Your father’s tutor, if I remember rightly. Yes.

All by way of saying, in the spring when Philip came back from fighting Thracians, wounded – we were locked in a state of near war with Athens, and we were having the worst of it. Philip had seized a bunch of Athenian merchants – oh, he had provocation, but I remember old Aristotle saying it was the stupidest thing he’d ever done, and Aristotle was an admirer of wily Philip. At any rate, Athens declared war – a formal declaration, like going from kissing to intercourse. And Philip responded by marching an army into the Chersonese, laying siege to the major Athenian base at Perinthus – and failing.

Then he descended on Byzantium, their most important base – a surprise attack after a fast march, his favourite ploy.

And failed. Phokion outmarched him.

So the defeat by the Thracians, even though it was against only a tithe of our armies, was a bad blow. The Illyrians, always willing to raid us, began to agitate on the borders, and the Athenian privateers preyed on our shipping, and Athens put a vicious bastard into the Chersonese, a pirate called Diopeithes. His son, Manes, is there yet. And he’s a vicious bastard, too.

But the worst of it was that Athens had joined hands with Persia. That’s what Alexander and I were talking about, in the woods, over a trout dinner.

It’s a funny thing – Persia was always the enemy of my youth. We didn’t play ‘Macedonians and Athenians’ in the corridors of Pella or the Gardens of Midas. We didn’t play Macedonians and Thracians, or Macedonians and Illyrians. We played Athenians and Persians, and it was always the day of Marathon, with us. Or we played Achaeans and Trojans. And the Trojans were just Persians.

Macedon had been a Persian ally. It shamed us all, that during the wars of Salamis and Plataea, our forefathers had given earth and water to the Great King. Mind you, Alexander – the old one, from those days – did his bit for the Hellenes, and our boys turned on the retreating Persians and routed them at Hennia Hodoi.

And Sparta had a turn as a Persian ally, too. Mighty Sparta, but when the chips were down and Sparta was losing the Thirty Years’ War on the peninsula, she turned to Persia, took gold and ships in exchange for promises to remain aloof from Persia’s rebuilding of her empire.

Not that the Spartans kept their word. Agisalaos struck – and failed.

My point is that one of the constants of the diplomacy of the day was that Athens did not make deals with Persia. We did – there were almost always Persian envoys at Pella, even though we spoke openly of invading them after we’d subjugated Thessaly. And Philip took a stipend from them for a while, and threatened them at other times. He wanted to own both sides of the Bosporus. And the rest of the world, too.

I’m like a drunken carter roiling farther and farther from the track. My point is that the last thing we ever expected – even in the event of war with Athens – was for Athens to make common cause with Persia. Athenians did not love Persia, and even a rumour of ‘Persian gold’ was usually enough to send a politician into exile.

Philip’s speciality was to divide his opponents – split their alliances – and move on them one by one. He did it as automatically as a good swordsman makes a counter-cut. Wherever he saw a stable alliance, he sought to undermine it. He wasn’t above faked correspondence and he had a widespread intelligence net, assassins, bandits in his pay – we knew all this, because all the pages at one time or another were present for his diplomatic correspondence, which he read aloud when the foreigners were forbidden the court, such was his contempt for all the other nations of the earth.

Except Athens.

It had never occurred to him that he might be outplayed at his own game, but on the morning after Philip returned to Pella wounded and defeated, he discovered that Athens and Persia, his two mightiest opponents, had united; that they had added Thebes to the mix, with the best-trained infantry in Greece; and that his own allies were deserting in droves.

Later, Parmenio said that if the Athenians had put their fleet to sea and started plucking our colonies with Persian troops while the Thebans covered the passes into Greece, we’d have been wrecked by summer’s end.

But all too often – here’s the moral of my tale, lad, and no mistake – men carry the seeds of their own ruin in their own greatness. Demosthenes’ hatred of Macedon was rooted in a conservative, backward-looking idealism. He thought he was a democrat, but the men he idolised were the Athenians of Marathon. And although he was personally a very poor soldier, he – like many men – idolised what he was not – the hoplite. Demosthenes did not want to war Macedon down in an inglorious and efficient campaign of commerce-raiding and colony-snatching. That’s what Phokion or Philip or Parmenion, the great generals, would have done.

Demosthenes wanted us humbled the old way, man to man on the battlefield, our hoplites and theirs spear to spear, and may the better men teach the lesser what democracy really was.

Demosthenes was more than a hundred years out of date. But his foolish idealism saved Macedon.

At any rate, that early summer we knew that Athens had made a deal with Artaxerxes, and we were, in effect, surrounded. We waited – rebuilding forces as quickly as we could – for Athens and Thebes to invade. Sparta sat it out – but Sparta was a nonentity by then, more a fearsome name than a real power.

And around midsummer, after Olympias danced naked for Dionysus, after Philip discovered that his new bride Meda was pregnant, he gathered the main army – including all the royal companions, all the pezhetaeroi, all the mercenaries on whom he could lay hands and cash – and marched away like lightning, bound for the Chersonese.

He left Alexander, just seventeen years old, as regent. Antipater stood by him, with a regiment of cavalry and a regiment of Macedonian foot, a full taxeis – enough force to use on any rival baron or upstart noble who made trouble.

To our immense delight, as soon as the sound of Philip’s hobnailed sandals faded away into the south, the Thracians struck again – this time the Maedi, from up by Paeonia. Antipater concurred that a counter-attack was required, and the pages packed their war cloaks and gathered their horses.

We were going to war, and our prince would have his first command. Summer, in the mountains.