God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great

SIX

Athens, autumn 338 BC–spring 337 BC

When I returned to the camp, it was to find that Alexander had been appointed ambassador to the Athenians, with Antipater and Alcimachus to support him. I was to go with him to Athens – in fact, I was the escort commander for the ashes of the dead Athenians. Kineas was appointed the commander of the Athenian escort – fifty troopers in armour as good as that of Philip’s inner circle.

One of the worst penalties of loving a commoner is that no one expects you to love her. When I returned from burying Nike, Alexander acted as if I should be done with her. She was dead, I had work to do as his escort commander – time to move on. Nearchus and Cleomenes avoided my eye when I showed signs of emotion. As when I discovered that no one had moved any of her things out of my tent – men can be the most thoughtless beasts. I packed her belongings – every chiton, every pin, every present I had given her.

Oh, the pain. Some men and women move in and out of love – it comes and goes. Yes? Not me, lad. I love for ever. I can still feel it – walking into the tent, thinking I was healed, and seeing her things strewn about. Zeus, I was nearly sick.

But royal pages are bred tough, for war. I survived it. I was enraged every time a man threw me a look that indicated that I should ‘get over it’, and I determined – in fact, I swore to Aphrodite – that the next time I knew love, I’d marry her, even if she was a common prostitute. If only so that I could have a year of mourning.

And the Cyprian was listening.

So as I relate the next few months, keep in mind that Nike was never far from my thoughts.

I’ll also note that two men never asked me to get over it. They were Kineas the Athenian and Cleitus the Black. Both of them seemed to understand at some unspoken level. One afternoon, I was helping Myndas make up a fire, and I found that he was using her firebox – a firebox I’d given her. Myndas got the fire started and I just crouched there on my haunches, holding the box in my hand.

Cleitus came to find me for Alexander – crouched by me. Took my hand, and held it for a second or two – pressed it, took the box away and said, ‘Alexander wants you,’ as calmly as if all had been well.

But perhaps it is the greatest tragedy of being a mere mortal – and greater men than I have written poems on the subject, I know – that all things pass. The pangs of love, the roaring fire of hate – even the pain of loss. Even a week after I burned her corpse, I was in Antipater’s tent, proposing to him that we buy a dozen Athenian armourers to have a better product in Pella, and he was agreeing that that was an excellent project. We were both impressed – and a little envious – of Kineas’s troop, in their ornate repoussé helmets like lion’s heads, men’s heads, with silver hair and gold cheeks, or with scenes from the Iliad on the cheekpieces – and still superb work that would turn a heavy blow. Not to say we didn’t have good armourers in Pella – but we didn’t have fifty cavalry troopers like that fifty.

Later, in the fullness of adulthood, I realised that they sent their very richest, best men – probably with the picked best armour of the whole city.

Worth noting here that soldiers are popinjays. Beautiful armour is good for morale. When you are shitting your guts out in a three-day freezing rain, waiting to be sabered by some Asiatic auxiliary, it raises your heart to know that you look like a hero, that your gold-figured spear is the best spear for parasanges. Men who look good are tougher and better. Only armchair generals think that you can coat a man in mud and get him to fight well.

At any rate, I started to use Polystratus as my hyperetes, just as Kineas had Niceas, and he was merciless on details of harness and dress. Men had got slack as royal companions – as veteran campaigners, with servants and grooms and leisure time. I wasn’t in a particularly good mood – in fact, I was unrelentingly savage, so much so that Nearchus and Cleomenes found somewhere else to eat for weeks.

But when we marched for Athens, my troop shone like the sun, and if their equipment wasn’t as spectacular as the Athenians’, the way they filed off from the right looked like a trick rider’s performance in the hippodrome, and every spear was held just so.

Polystratus got himself a trumpet. It wasn’t like any other trumpet in the Macedonian army – it must have been Keltoi or Thracian, with a hideous animal’s head and a long mouthpiece. Niceas, the Athenian, made a scabbard for it.

We went up over the passes, and came down the other side into Attika, the richest province in the Greek world. I couldn’t believe how thickly settled it was. There was a farm at every turn of the road, and it was a struggle every night after we came down the passes to find a campsite large enough for two hundred horse and their mounts and servants. We camped in farm fields, we camped on somebody’s recently cut oat stubble – gods, Attika is rich.

It was our third day. On the second, priests came out and blessed us, blessed the road, and welcomed the ashes of their dead home. But on the third, we met the families of the dead men.

Some of them were men I’d killed myself – panicked men who did me no harm, killed in the rout like cattle or sheep in a pen. It is one thing to kill them, and another to be blessed by their priests, and then to have to meet their wives, their sons and daughters – their parents.

They bore us no love, either. It was the mothers, I think, who got to me most. Their eyes would caress me with a kind of ecstatic hate – in my fine armour and on my mighty Poseidon, I was the Macedonian. Alexander looked young and innocent – and beautiful (unless you looked deep into his eyes). I looked young and hard and had a big, ugly nose.

Most of the time, it is human to react to hate with hate. Or love with love. But there was something in the hate of those Athenian women that made me feel only pity, anger, shame. Pity for them. Anger at the fools who had led them to fight us. Shame at what I had done in the pursuit.

Perhaps I was insufficiently brutalised as a page. Maybe if I’d been raped by one of the older pages – it happened all the time, as a punishment – I’d have been the sort of murderous bastard who likes a good rout.

But I looked at all those mothers, and I saw my own mother, I saw Nike . . .

Well. I went on killing men, so it didn’t change me for ever.

Alexander saw none of this. I know, because our first night in Athens, at Kineas’s father’s house, Cleitus the Black and I had a halting conversation about the mothers, and Alexander looked at both of us as if we were giggling girls.

‘War kills,’ he said. He shrugged. ‘Women weep. Men fight.’ He turned back to our host, Kineas’s father, Eumenes, and his admiration of Phokion.

The Athenians dedicated a statue to Philip. Demosthenes was exiled – not for ever, but for a while. We got to meet Isocrates, who somewhat sycophantically suggested that the whole Panhellenic crusade had been Philip’s notion and not his own – and his speeches in praise of Philip were deeply flattering. Alexander was made a citizen of Athens.

I spent evening after evening sitting with Eumenes. I missed my own father, and Eumenes was a good man – deeply conservative, well read, equally interested in Plato and in the breeding of dogs. He bore us no rancour – he was sure that fighting Macedon had been a mistake from the first.

Altogether, our reception in Athens was a masterpiece of diplomacy. There were people who hated and feared us – and no one tried to hide that from us. There were people who had always wanted our alliance. There were men like Kineas who wanted our alliance but had fought hard at Chaeronea to stop us.

Every day I learned more about democracy. Democracy isn’t a theory of government – it is a code of behaviour that allows a lower-class man to call me a murderer in the street, if he wants to. His neighbour may call me the saviour of Greece. They may share a cup of wine in a wine shop, still arguing.

Not like home. Interesting. It didn’t seem to work very well – but the dignity of the commons was amazing, vital and not like anything you’d see at home, where a twenty-year veteran of the king’s army would stand in the mud to let a thirteen-year-old aristocrat go by with his feet dry. That just didn’t happen in Athens.

Kineas and his friends were very much like us – we shared so many things that it was difficult, sometimes, to comprehend how deeply they were not like us. They had a respect for their commons – an acceptance of their power, their needs – that seemed at once weak and noble.

Athens had a great deal to offer, and I drank it in as I recovered from my loss. I had no duties, so I arranged to go to the theatre and to the assembly – sometimes with Eumenes, sometimes with Kineas, sometimes with Diodorus, who turned out to be the political member of Kineas’s band. He was an aristocrat – but politically he was a radical democrat and an enemy of Macedon.

‘You watch,’ he said one day over a cup of bad wine. ‘Your Philip is going to demand that Athens send soldiers to support his crusade in Persia. And they’ll send the Hippeis – we’re all oligarchs, to the mob. And I’ll spend my youth fighting for Philip.’ He laughed.

I laughed back. ‘And you’ll do it – because you respect the institution of voting.’

He shrugged. ‘I’d be a piss-poor democrat if I didn’t obey the will of the people. Even when it is wrong.’

Athens had other pleasures. I think I mentioned earlier that Aristotle tried to teach us to hold a symposium. Well, suddenly I was living in aristocratic Athens, and I was invited to a symposium virtually every night. For the first few weeks I passed. My heart was ashes, and somehow I couldn’t face the Athenians – as friends. So I sat at home with Eumenes.

But after my third visit to the theatre – the festival of Dionysus, the real thing, in Athens – Diodorus was going down to Piraeus to be with friends. It was like something from Socrates come to life. Too good to miss.

We walked down inside the long walls, and Diodorus pointed out how the walls were built in layers.

‘Athenians only spend money on defence when they are in a state of panic,’ he said with a nasty laugh. ‘Look at the base layer – see the column bases turned on their sides? Pure Parian marble – try to crack one of those with your catapults. That was from the year Plataea was fought, when Themistokles came back from Sparta and led us in building as fast as could be done. And atop it – mud brick, unbaked. That’s how it was finished.’ We walked along for a while. ‘Look here. Another course of marble laid down – and heavy stone atop it – the Thirty Years’ War. Niceas, or even Alcibiades. Look at the towers!’ He shrugged. ‘We do good work when we’re at our best. We’re at our best when we’re threatened, scared, angry.’

‘Like men,’ I said.

Diodorus glanced at me.

‘You aren’t what you seem at all, you know that?’ he said. ‘Kineas said you were . . . a thinker.’

‘Doesn’t exactly show on my face,’ I said. ‘It’s OK – I thought you were just an angry young man, all talk and no depth.’

And stuff like that. Making friends is the best way to pass time that there is – I had months in Athens, and I made friends that lasted me the rest of my life. Kineas, Diodorus, Demetrios of Phaleron . . .

But I get ahead of myself. We walked down the hill, talking about ethics and whether it was possible to have trust in a ruling class (my point) or acceptance of the stupid crap that the mob sometimes votes (his point) on faith. We agreed that either way, a lot of people were forced into acting on faith in other people’s choices.

We arrived at a beautiful house in Piraeus – Graccus’s house. He wasn’t as wealthy as Kineas’s father, and not as aristocratic – his father had built a fleet of merchantmen to trade with the Black Sea, and despite losses, they remained prosperous. But the house was a delight – pale stone and red tiles, a little above the street, and with a high central courtyard that had steps to a platform in the corner – so that on the platform, you could see the sea. We lay on couches watching the sun set. I had dined outside – what soldier has not? But I had seldom enjoyed it so much, a dinner of fresh-caught tuna and red snapper in parchment; deer meat in strips cooked on a brazier; bowls of spiced almonds in honey and little barley rolls. My mouth waters to recall it. And the wines – Nemeans and Chians, raisinated and clear and red, mixed with sparkling, bubbly water from some local shrine.

Graccus was a masterful host, with a good staff who loved him and worked to make us love him too.

I noted that Niceas, who was friends with my Polystratus and whom I treated as a sort of upper servant, shared Graccus’s couch. Later – after four or five bowls of wine – Niceas came and sat by me. He was a courteous man – he sat, but didn’t recline, until I indicated that he was welcome.

‘I’m not a servant, here,’ he said. He met my eye – we were only about a hand’s breadth apart. ‘I think you handle us well, Macedonian.’

‘Are you and Graccus lovers?’ I asked.

Niceas narrowed his eyes. ‘Not really your business, is it?’

I offer this by way of the thousands of things that showed me how free Athenians were – that this lower-class man could tell me to sod off, and then grin, slap my shoulder and go off to dance.

Dancing, it turned out, was the order of the evening. Graccus had musicians – famous ones, not that I knew who they were, but they were incredible, to me. I was used to a kithara and a couple of flutes. This was a group of seven players, and they played songs I knew – and songs of their own – with a sort of mad, elegant violence, fast, harsh and yet precise. As if I’d never heard the notes before. Later, Kineas explained to me that this was the fashion, created by this very group, and that a lyre player had to be extremely skilled just to get the staccato notes out so precisely.

They had a couple of dancers, who proved to be more like instructors – the whole thing was hopelessly complex, because it turned out that these musicians weren’t slaves, but freemen – famous freemen, who could demand high prices for their music and were playing for Graccus for free – because he had helped ‘discover’ them.

And the political discussion – that all government depends on the trust of one group in another, even in a tyranny – continued all around me. Men I’d never met – one of the kithara players, named Stephanos – sat on my couch, handed me the wine bowl and said, ‘Good topic.’

Another man – with curly blond hair like Alexander’s – sat down opposite me, on Kineas’s couch. ‘Are you really an oligarch?’ he asked. ‘I mean – you really believe in that horseshit, or are Macedonians so pig ignorant you’ve never thought about the rights of men?’

‘Well,’ I said, trying to not be offended while getting my point across. He was angry – so I smiled. That always helps throw oil on a fire, I find. ‘I studied with Aristotle.’

‘Pompous fuck!’ my debater said. ‘He thinks he’s better than other men.’

‘As do I,’ I said. ‘I think I’m better than other men. Debate me.’

There was a little hush – some men were still talking, but Kineas fell silent, as did Diodorus.

‘In what way?’ Blondy asked. ‘I mean, how exactly are you better?’

‘In every way. I am well born. Athletic. Intelligent. Rich. Educated.’ I shrugged. ‘I’m not handsome – which you are. So you are the better man in that respect, eh?’

‘You are certainly no prize for looks,’ he said, but he said it with a smile.

‘So you concede that some men may be better at one thing, and some at another,’ I said.

‘Look, I’ve been to the lyceum, I know where this goes.’ He shrugged. ‘But do my superior looks entitle me to superior political rights?’

I nodded. ‘If you combine them with superior oratory skills and a war record based on superior bravery and war skills, then they do – don’t they? Athenian?’ I asked.

Diodorus laughed. ‘Good shot, Macedonian. He’s got you there, Charmides.’

‘You democrats want to make everyone equal,’ I said. ‘And in time, you will, if we allow you. You will make war on excellence to raise up mediocrity. Cut the tall trees down and call the trees that remain tall.’ I looked around. Even the dancers had stopped. ‘What if all this equality costs us heroism? Ambition?’

‘Why?’ Diodorus asked. ‘I see a false assertion.’

‘Where?’ I asked. I was doing well, I thought.

‘Why can’t we all be equally great? Why not let every man be Achilles?’ Diodorus glowed when he spoke. He was a true believer.

I shook my head. ‘I’ve watched the circle around the king. The great men push other great men – but the petty men push only other petty men. Mediocrity breeds only mediocrity.’

I shut up then, realised I had spoken ill of my own among foreigners. Bad behaviour by any standard.

Diodorus snorted, dismissing my comment with a wave of his hand. ‘Just because a passel of Macedonians—’

But Kineas shook his head. ‘It is the same in the assembly,’ he said. ‘And you have said as much yourself, Diodorus.’

Blondy hopped off Kineas’s kline and slapped my shoulder. ‘All I care is that you believe in something,’ he said. ‘I’m Demetrios.’

Demetrios of Phaleron. The eventual Tyrant of Athens, and another of my lifelong friends. He was a rabid democrat in his youth.

So I count that argument as one for me and nought for the democrats, eh, lad?

The sixth bowl, and the seventh, and the eighth. I was dancing. Need I say more? The notes all made sense, and dancing a complex pattern with twenty near strangers was the most important thing in the world.

We danced the wine out of us – danced through moonrise. Lay back and drank water.

Graccus rose to his feet. ‘Now, friends,’ he said, and he mixed a fresh wine bowl – one to one, wine to water. Exciting. ‘Some of my friends have decried the absence of women at my parties.’

Much laughter. Some finger-pointing, some rude gestures.

‘And I thought perhaps to remedy this shortcoming’ – he made the words short and come sound obscene – ‘by inviting the most celebrated young woman in Athens to share our evening. Instead of a host of flute girls, I thought to bring one courtesan.’

‘Does that mean we take turns?’ Demetrios called out.

‘Shush – one does not hire a hetaera for such rude stuff.’ Graccus smiled.

‘How would you know?’ called Diodorus. ‘You’d hire her as a cleaning lady. You don’t even know what a porne is for!’

They were best friends, I gathered, because in Macedon, blood would have been shed.

Graccus made a face. ‘I’ve heard – from friends.’

Everyone laughed.

‘I think you are all too drunk to enjoy her wit,’ he said. ‘I promised her we weren’t a bunch of drunken barbarians.’ He looked around. ‘I am serious, gentlemen. She’s here as a guest, and not for wages. Treat her as such, or I send her home.’

Kineas glanced around the room. He was their leader – I don’t think I really needed to say that, but in that moment I saw how powerfully he was their leader. He caught almost every eye – looking around. His message was as obvious as if he’d spoken aloud. ‘Do not be bad guests, you louts!’ he shouted with those eyes.

Kineas had a measure of what Alexander had in bushels. In fact, they had a great deal in common, I think. Kineas was Alexander muted; he was not as brilliant, but I think more to the point, he had a loving mother and father, sisters, a home. He had never been betrayed, never brutalised, never taught that such things were normal. I saw it all in that glance of his eyes – when he commanded his friends to behave themselves, where Alexander would have enjoyed watching his friends make arses of themselves.

On the other hand – Kineas drew lines, and he never crossed them. Alexander never knew what a line was. I don’t think Kineas would have conquered the world. Or wanted to.

As an Indian philosopher once told me, there is not just one truth.

As usual, I digress. Graccus brought a woman in, modestly dressed and heavily veiled – wool veils that showed us nothing. She sat, picked up the kithara that one of the players had put by – the players were all guests now – and began to play.

She didn’t play the fast, harsh style of the men. Nor was her style particularly feminine. In fact, it had many of the same precise displays of notes – but it was slower, and she had phrases of music that seemed to have a rhythm of their own, like lines of song repeated.

But men are men, and most of the guests, fascinated at first to hear a woman play so well, drifted back to their conversations. I did. I wondered idly what kind of childhood a woman had to be so good at playing. I was thinking about Kineas and Alexander – at another level, I was thinking that in Athens, Nike and I might have married.

Demetrios was back, hectoring me to talk about oligarchy.

‘Let him be,’ Kineas said. ‘He is a guest, not a performer.’

I had to smile at the notion of me, the Macedonian monster, as a performer.

We were swiftly drunk again. Graccus and Niceas kissed – something that would never, ever happen in Macedon. Men may move each other, but never in public! And Demetrios picked a fight with Diodorus, and they rolled on the floor – and they were fighting – fighting hard, grappling with intent to do real injury. Diodorus had the better of it, and they rose, embraced, and Diodorus rubbed the back of his head where, apparently, he’d struck it against the base of a kline early in the struggle. Demetrios fell backwards theatrically on to my couch. ‘He’s just better than I am,’ he said, and giggled.

I had to laugh.

‘We’re going to go and get laid,’ Demetrios said. ‘Me and Diodorus. When he’s done chatting up the hetaera. He loves them all – swears that if he’s ever rich, he’s going to buy one.’

Diodorus came and sat with us. ‘Why not? Why have a twelve-year-old virgin just starting her courses when I could have a woman who can discuss Socrates and suck my dick with skill?’ He shook his head. ‘I’ll buy her contract for life and have sex whenever I want!’

We were all eighteen, remember.

Diodorus leaned over. ‘That’s Thaïs. She’s new – but a free woman, not a slave. People say she has a scar – never seems to take the veil off.’ He shook his shoulders. ‘Ooh, I want her.’

‘Excellent figure,’ I admitted. It is hard to hide a woman’s figure under a chiton. This one had strong shoulders, a long back and long legs. And beautiful feet, the only part of her that showed, but a most excellent part.

Diodorus laughed. ‘A man of taste, hidden under the barbarian! Come, let’ s get our spears wet.’

I must have looked at Kineas. He shrugged. ‘I’m a prig. I’m for home. Some people need to remember that tomorrow is a feast day – the cavalry must be on parade. Yes?’

So they left – Diodorus and Demetrios together, later inveterate enemies. Lykeles, who had not been there for dinner, came in, played a song, embraced me and left. People were coming and going now, and I was pretty drunk. I remember having a pleasant conversation with a very aristocratic man with beautiful manners who proved to be a former slave and professional musician. Athens.

There were other women circulating, now – four dancers who were, somehow, obviously not available (at a Macedonian dinner, any woman you could catch was available) and a trio of flute girls who played very well indeed. They were comediennes, and very funny – they’d play a song, and then play a sort of slur on the same song – the largest girl would start to run her flute in and out of her mouth in a lewd way, and another would . . . well, you are too young. Let’s just say they were available after the eleventh or twelfth bowl.

I went out to piss, came back and found the veiled woman on my couch.

Before I could flinch, she laughed. ‘I had nowhere else,’ she said with a chuckle.

I liked the chuckle. She was referring to the fact that the larger of the flute girls was entertaining two guests at the same time, and she, the hetaera, was as far across the room as she could manage. But the chuckle let me know that while she was no prude, she was neither afraid nor really interested. Quite a lot to convey in a chuckle.

‘Are you from Macedon?’ she asked.

‘Yes,’ I said. I suddenly felt drunk. ‘Are you really a hetaera?’

It is hard speaking to the blankness of a wool veil. I noticed that it was very fine, and moved slightly with her breath.

She nodded. ‘I am.’

I lay back – a sign of intimacy, Aristotle told us. ‘How do you choose such a road?’ I asked.

‘Women can have ambitions, just as men do,’ she said.

‘To open your legs for strangers? That’s an ambition?’ I said. Nasty words – I remember thinking as soon as they left the fence of my teeth that I should be ashamed.

She turned her head – a hand’s breath away, just as Demetrios had been. But covered by a veil. ‘Any way a woman turns, man, she is forced to open her legs for a stranger.’ She said it without the least heat. But with the utmost conviction. ‘I choose who they are, and see that they reward me.’

‘A husband—’

‘Is a tyrant chosen by others; an owner who pays no price, a client without a fee.’ She turned her head.

‘But marriage?’ I asked. I’d never heard marriage indicted before.

‘Sex from duty is like killing from duty, don’t you think?’ she asked. ‘I mean, I wouldn’t know myself, but I assume that when your prince orders you to kill, you kill, whatever you may feel about it. And when a girl’s husband says “lie down”, why then, she puts on perfume and lies down, or he beats her and does her anyway. Yes? So you would understand better than most.’

I sat up.

‘When I want a man, I can have him, or not. And when I don’t like him, I never have to have him.’ She also sat up.

‘I’m not sure the two are the same,’ I said.

She let down a corner of her veil so that I could see one side of her face. She smiled. ‘You are not the barbarian they made you out to be. I’m not sure the two are the same, either. But philosophy is the land of assertion, is it not? And I will insist that while most men proclaim that killing is bad, few seem to think that sex is bad. A man should be more careful who he kills, and for whom, than a girl who she beds, and for what.’

I had to think that through – her Greek was so pure, so Attic, and she’d just said . . .

I got it, and I rocked the couch laughing. ‘You are a philosopher,’ I said.

‘I like a good time, too. Red wine. A fart joke.’ She laughed. ‘But a girl who can’t talk to philosophers won’t get far in this town.’

People were looking at us. Graccus raised his wine cup in my direction.

‘You are with Prince Alexander?’ she asked.

‘Do you always ask things to which you already know the answer?’ I asked.

‘It’s a good idea for a woman,’ she said. ‘Since men seldom listen to us, and often lie.’

She didn’t sound like a whore. At all. Or a stuck-up Athenian philosopher. Her eyes were beautiful – blue, deep as the sea.

‘I listened to you. And I assert that I kill for my prince of my own will.’ I lay back.

‘Well – I was married at twelve, and it wasn’t bad at all.’ She rolled on an elbow. ‘In fact, my husband and I had a physical attraction I’ve never felt for anyone else.’ She got a tiny furrow between her eyebrows. ‘Why am I telling you this?’

‘How on earth did you go from wife to . . . hetaera?’ I asked.

She shrugged. ‘Things happen,’ she said. ‘Not things I wish to discuss,’ she added, closing the subject. ‘You are easy to talk to – like a farm boy, not an aristocrat.’

‘Perhaps being a foreign barbarian has its advantages,’ I said. I saw a little under half of her face, and if she had a scar, I was the King of Aegypt. She had sharp cheekbones, a lush mouth and a nose – well, smaller and prettier than mine. But not by much.

‘You’re staring at my nose,’ she said.

‘I love your nose,’ I said.

‘It’s huge,’ she said.

‘Superb,’ I said.

‘Large,’ she said, but without coquettishness.

‘You wear the veil to hide it?’ I asked.

‘You are suggesting that I need to wear a veil to hide it?’ she said, and I couldn’t guess whether she was really being sharp with me, or whether I was being mocked.

‘Tell me about Prince Alexander,’ she said, after a pause.

‘He’s better-looking than me, and not very interested in girls.’ I was drunk.

‘I hear he’s not very interested in anyone.’ She had a wicked twinkle in her eye. ‘The party girls and boys say . . . that he doesn’t.’

I shrugged. Even drunk, there are things you don’t say about your prince. ‘Not something I will discuss,’ I said, since she’d been free enough in shutting me down.

She nodded. ‘Fair enough. You are married?’

I shook my head, and there it was – without pause, I burst into tears. Drink, and Nike.

She didn’t throw her arms around me, but she didn’t flinch, either. ‘Bad question. I’m sorry.’

It passed like a sudden rain shower. And drunkenness passed into sobriety. I wiped my face. ‘Thanks,’ I said, or something equally deep and moving.

She shrugged. ‘You love your wife. I’m not surprised. You seem . . . complete. More complete than most men your age.’

I shook my head. ‘I had a mistress. She died – a month ago.’ I sat on the edge of the kline. Wondering why I was babbling to this woman. ‘I should have married her, and I didn’t.’

The hetaera sat up with me. She was quite tall. ‘I don’t really know what to say. Men usually confide in me about their wife’s failings. Not . . . not real things.’

That made me smile. Somehow. ‘Well,’ I said. ‘You have a way with you.’

‘I’m a happy person,’ she said. ‘I try to spread it around. Not all the ground is receptive, but some is.’

A slave brought me my chlamys, and I pinned it. Graccus came up, kissed the hetaera on the cheek (she unveiled for him) and put an arm around me.

‘You have been a charming guest. I had you for Diodorus’s sake, but I’d have you again for your own. Diodorus or Kineas can tell you when I have another evening. I hope that you enjoyed yourself.’

The woman bowed slightly to me while she pinned her veil, so that I had a flash of her face, and then she went to the next kline, and sat with one of the kithara-playing men, who put his arm around her. They laughed together, and though I looked at her I couldn’t make her turn her head.

‘I had a wonderful time,’ I admitted.

‘I think she likes you,’ Graccus said, following my eyes. ‘But I admit, with Thaïs, it’s often hard to tell. She’s not like any other hetaera I’ve ever known.’

‘No,’ I said. I’d only known one, and she’d been . . . complicated. I looked at Thaïs again, and she had her head back, veiled, laughing.

I embraced my host, gathered Myndas from the kitchen, drunker than me, and started the long walk home.

That was the first of a long series of symposia, and while I don’t recall every one of them, I loved them as a whole. I found that I loved to talk – I loved to mix the wine, when invited. I went to the agora and purchased spices, and carried them in a small box of tortoiseshell. I still have it. I sent wine to friends – I was a rich man, even by Athenian standards.

With the permission of Eumenes, I used his andron and gave my own symposium. I invited Aristotle – he was far away, in Mytilene, and didn’t come, but it amused me to invite him. I invited Alexander and Hephaestion, Cleitus and Nearchus, Kineas and Diodorus, Graccus and Niceas, Demetrios and Lykeles and half a dozen other young men I’d come to know.

I agonised over the arrangements – no help from Eumenes or Kineas, who, for aristocrats, were surprisingly uninterested. Eumenes decried the expense, and Kineas just laughed.

‘A flash of good wine, a bowl to mix it, some bread and some friends,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing to it.’

I glowered at him. ‘I want it to go as well as Graccus’s parties,’ I said.

Kineas shrugged. ‘That’s all Graccus has – wine, bread. A good sunset and the right men.’

‘Flute girls, actors, music, a hetaera, perfect fish . . .’ I said.

Kineas laughed. ‘Frippery,’ he said. ‘The guests make the evening.’

‘Thanks, Socrates,’ I said. ‘Go away and leave me to my barbarian worries.’

Diodorus was more help. ‘Get that girl,’ he said. ‘The hetaera. Everyone says she gives the best symposia in Athens. I’ve never been invited. Offer her money.’

‘She went to Graccus’s house for nothing,’ I said primly.

‘Are you Graccus?’ Diodorus said. ‘She’s a hetaera. Offer her money.’

In fact, I had no need to approach her, because a week later, after a state dinner where we discussed – in surprising detail – the logistics of the crusade against Persia with Phokion and a dozen of the leading men of Athens, Alexander took me to her house. Alexander took me to her house. He walked through the front door as if he owned the place.

‘Never known a woman like her,’ he said. ‘Brilliant. Earthy.’ He shrugged. He was lightly drunk.

Hephaestion wasn’t jealous, so it wasn’t sex. Or wasn’t just sex.

At any rate, I don’t know what I expected – a brothel? An andron writ large? But Thaïs’s house was a house – the house of a prosperous woman – and she sat at a large loom, weaving. She rose and bowed to Alexander, and he took her hands, kissed them and went straight to a kline with Hephaestion.

There were other men there – and other women.

She had no veil on, and she was beautiful. All eyes and cheekbones. And breasts. And legs.

‘The Macedonian,’ she said to me, quietly. ‘I wondered if I had offended you.’

I must have looked surprised. ‘How so?’

‘I invited you to come,’ she said. ‘You didn’t.’

I shook my head. ‘I never received any such invitation,’ I said. ‘I would most certainly have come.’

She nodded. ‘Eumenes probably destroyed it.’ She bit her lip. ‘He’s very . . . old-fashioned.’

I found myself smiling. ‘I’m giving a symposium,’ I said without preamble.

She looked up at me – she was back at her loom. ‘Splendid!’ she said, with a little too much emphasis.

‘I want your advice. Your help.’ I blurted this. She smiled and looked elsewhere.

‘Advice?’ she said.

‘I want it to be perfect,’ I said.

She smiled. ‘It’s all in the guest list,’ she said.

‘That’s what Eumenes says,’ I shot back.

‘He’s right,’ she said. She was looking around the room. There were eight couches, all full. ‘I am working right now,’ she said. ‘If you were to come back tomorrow afternoon, we might actually talk.’

Alexander raised a wine cup. ‘You are not your sparkling self tonight, Thaïs. Too busy weaving?’

She rose to her feet. ‘I was thinking about Persia,’ she said.

Alexander looked puzzled – as if a pig had just said a line of Homer. Women did not, as a rule, think about Persia. It was odd—he could see her as a woman—even as an intelligent woman. But as someone who could understand politics? Never! Which, of course, makes her later role all the more delicious.

‘What about Persia?’ he asked.

‘I was wondering how old I will be before you destroy it utterly,’ she said.

All talk in the room ceased.

Alexander looked at her with wonder. ‘Are you a sibyl? An oracle?’

She shook her head. ‘No. I am a woman who wants revenge. I cannot get that revenge myself. But I long to see it.’

‘Revenge?’ he asked. Odd – he was so good at leading men. His questions showed how little he saw in her.

‘A woman may crave revenge as well as a man,’ she said. ‘Look at Medea.’

‘For what does a pretty girl like you crave revenge?’ he asked.

‘Ask me another evening,’ she said. ‘Tonight, I think I will dance.’

There was suddenly something angry and dangerous about her. I couldn’t watch. So I took my leave. Alexander didn’t even see me go.

Antipater was waiting outside on the portico, and we walked towards our homes together.

‘He’s besotted with her,’ Antipater said.

That’s not what I’d seen.

‘He enjoys her company, and the privacy,’ I said.

‘He’s been making some dangerous statements,’ Antipater said. ‘I know that you’ve been enjoying Athens, but I need you to spend more time with him. And keep him from getting into trouble.’

I stopped walking and looked at him. ‘Trouble?’ I asked.

‘He keeps talking about what he’ll do when he’s king,’ Antipater said.

I shrugged.

‘Philip does not like to be reminded that there may be a time when he is not king,’ he said.

‘Alexander’s the heir,’ I said. ‘He doesn’t even have a rival.’

Antipater thumped his stick on the pavement. ‘That may change,’ he said. ‘Listen, boy. Your pater and I were guest friends. You’ve been a good soldier for me, a good subordinate. Can I trust you?’

I didn’t want this, any more than I had wanted the moment in which I had earned Attalus’s enmity. Didn’t want to take sides.

‘I am a loyal man,’ I said. ‘To the king and to Alexander.’

Antipater nodded. ‘Philip has put up statues at Delphi,’ he said, ‘as if he was a god.’

I shrugged. The things men do, when they achieve power. Look at me!

‘He’s said things . . . that lead me to wonder.’ Antipater looked away. ‘Never mind. Let’s get Athens on board for the war with Persia and hurry home, and all will be well.’

To be honest, I was so excited to have an afternoon tryst with a famous hetaera that I simply gripped his hand, went home and went to bed.

Next day, Isocrates met with Antipater and together they wrote out the basic tenets of the Pan Hellenic Alliance. Philip and his heirs to be hegemons of the Hellenic League and Strategos Autokrator, or supreme commander of allied forces. In the afternoon, Alexander went to the Academy and asked Xenocrates, the heir of Plato, Aristotle’s rival, to write him a treatise on good kingship.

I winced. I was there.

Xenocrates was bowing and scraping. All of Athens was there to see the two of them together, and all of Athens heard the Crown Prince of Macedon say, ‘I need a primer to keep me from the sort of acts of tyranny with which my father burdens his people.’

And there was Alcimachus, watching it all.

I had missed weeks of this, off enjoying my own life and my own friends. The Athenians were good hosts, and they gave Alexander something he’d never had before – an audience of his own, a willing, responsive, intelligent audience. He couldn’t help but respond. He couldn’t help but respond as the kind of prince he sensed they wanted him to be – a liberal, educated promise of a better tomorrow. A hero.

I slipped away before cockshut time and arrived at Thaïs’s door. The slave there took my chlamys and sandals, washed my feet and led me to her. She was reading.

‘How was Xenocrates?’ she asked.

‘Better ask, “How was Alexander?”’ I said.

‘He does like an audience,’ she said. ‘And he’s never learned to control his mouth.’

‘He’s the very essence of self-control,’ I said. ‘Just not right now, apparently.’

She nodded. ‘Your symposium,’ she prompted.

‘I have my guest list. I want advice on wines, slaves, entertainment. And I’d like you to come.’ I didn’t even trip over that last.

She shook her head. ‘I couldn’t. Not in Eumenes’ home. He disapproves of me, and by having me there you would offend him. You are far too well bred for that.’

I felt crushed. She was absolutely correct. And I hadn’t seen it at all.

She had a stylus and a wax tablet, and she wrote quickly. ‘I’m quite sure that your evening will be splendid anyway – but here are the six wines currently most fashionable. Don’t bother trying to buy them – you can’t. But my steward will send a jar of each. I’m writing the names so that you know what you’re serving. The “Dark Horse” is really a Plataean wine from Boeotia, common as dirt, but I like it and it’s become rather a fashion.’ She grinned around her stylus. ‘Please don’t tell – I’m making a fortune reselling it. There’s a pair of women – they do not do sex – who play kithara superbly. Many houses won’t have them because they have political leanings. Women are supposed to be above – or below – such stuff. They’re sisters. You will need Eumenes’ permission, but if he gives it – well, singing for Alexander will make them. And I’d like to see them made. Do you mind my using you like this?’ She smiled at me.

‘No,’ I said.

‘Good. Because as I’m doing you a favour, I’m remorseless in collecting in return. My steward will ask for money for the wine – I assume you can pay?’ She smiled. ‘Friends need to be honest about money,’ she said.

‘I am probably the richest man you know,’ I said.

‘Excellent, then. All the better. I prefer men to be young, attractive, valiant and rich.’ She smiled again. She was smiling a great deal.

‘Well, so far I’m rich,’ I said.

‘You are not unattractive,’ she said. ‘I am in favour of your nose.’

Best compliment anyone ever paid me – half in delivery, and half in the words – the twinkle in her eye worth another half. My own desire to be handsome, revealed.

I blushed. For a Macedonian royal page to blush – well, you work it out. ‘You’re just saying that because I liked your nose first,’ I said.

She laughed. And laughed. ‘I like you, Macedonian. You’ll need food – you’re not having a dinner, are you?’

‘I was thinking—’ I began.

‘Don’t. Graccus gets away with it because of the view and the very intimate company he invites. You have to get these philosopher boys to settle down with your Macedonians – just because you like them all doesn’t mean they’ll like each other. Keep it shorter. After dinner. Less smelly, less to clean up. They’ll arrive sober, because it is Eumenes’ house. I think you’ll be golden. But serve Lesbian rolls – barley rolls, I’ll send you the recipe – and have almonds in honey. Again, I’ll – oh, Aphrodite, I’ll just have cook send you some.’ She smiled. ‘When people taste them, they’ll know they’re mine. And that will please some and raise other eyebrows.’ She got the little furrow between her own eyebrows. ‘Really, I’m taking over. Don’t let me. It’s your party, not one of mine.’

‘I’m delighted,’ I said. ‘You know, my lady, sometimes there are advantages to being a foreign barbarian.’

She raised an eyebrow. ‘Really?’

‘Well, I don’t know whether I’m supposed to offer you money for your advice,’ I said. ‘But since I’m a foreigner, I doubt you’ll be insulted.’

She chewed a finger for a moment. ‘No – I’ll make money from your wine and your almonds. And everything in life is not a moneymaking proposition.’

‘Perhaps you might view me, as a rich foreigner, as a long-term investment?’ I asked.

She looked up, and I realised that I hadn’t really looked into her eyes until that moment.

‘When the day comes, kill a Persian for me,’ she said. ‘That’s all you owe me.’

Well, well. I was too well bred to ask, so I found myself out on the street with Myndas, wondering why she hated Persia.

My symposium was splendid. The food was excellent, the wine was divine and widely commented on, and Eumenes not only allowed the two female kithara players but paid us all the compliment of attending during their performance and mixing us a very mild bowl. He was courtly to them, treating them like visiting matrons, friends of his wife, perhaps, or sisters of his friends, and they, despite being radicals of the most democratic stripe, responded in kind with the sort of well-bred courtesy he must never have expected from them. It was a war of sorts, conducted with manners, and both parties left with increased respect for the other.

And they were the finest kithara players I’ve ever heard. I remember their Sappho lyrics, a hymn to Aphrodite, and my favourite, which begins:

Some say a body of hoplites and some a squadron of cavalry, and some a fleet of ships is the most beautiful . . .

That Sappho. She’d grown up with soldiers.

The elder of the sisters gave me a clam shell as she left – a folded note on parchment that said only ‘good luck’, and a laughing face. I grinned for the rest of the evening.

Alexander was at his best. He lay on his couch with Hephaestion, or with other guests, sang songs, danced, once. He was brilliant – capping every quote, but mocking himself for it. The best I remember was the moment when he pretended to be both himself as a twelve-year-old and Aristotle, mocking the pretensions of both.

With Alexander, when he was dark or moody or absorbed in war or politics or any other passion, it was possible to forget this man – the lightning flash, we used to call it among the pages. Funny, witty, self-mocking, aware of what we thought of his flaws – wicked, too, with a turn of phrase that would have made a whore blush. It didn’t happen often – and I suspected it was as much a performance as any of the other Alexanders I knew. But when we lay on our couches roaring with laughter, unable to speak at the spectacle of Alexander/Aristotle attempting to seduce Alexander/Alexander with philosophy, with Lykeles actually rolling off the couch he was on to crash to the floor – with Kineas, always so controlled, spitting barley roll, with tears coming from his eyes, and Hephaestion pounding Antipater’s back because he’d swallowed wine the wrong way laughing too hard . . .

I was sober – I was too nervous to be drunk. And as he wound to the climax of his amazing, lewd, witty impersonation of a besotted Aristotle with an erection based entirely on his love of Philosophy, I caught his eye.

His face was wild with the exertion of the drama, and yet, as if it were a mask, I caught a glimpse of the actor within, coolly assessing his audience. The strength of his own performance.

I was standing at the wine bowl when he came to the end – clutching the serving table to keep from pitching to the floor.

Hephaestion embraced him. ‘Oh, my brother, why can’t you always be like this?’ he asked.

Alexander’s face of command slipped effortlessly back into place. ‘Like what?’ he asked. ‘I’ve heard of actors crowned, but never a comic.’ Aside, to me, at the wine bowl, he said, ‘Whenever I do that, I feel less a man afterwards. As with bedding a woman. Or too much sleep.’

He was drunk. Make what you will of his words.

At some point, Diodorus proposed that we run a race to the top of the Acropolis and back. I must have started drinking by then, because I thought it was an excellent idea. So did everyone else, so I suppose Antipater and Eumenes, the oldest men, were gone.

We stripped naked, of course.

Kineas, Diodorus, Graccus, Niceas, Nearchus, Cleitus the Black, Alexander, Hephaestion and me. Polystratus started us from Eumenes’ front gate. Every man had a torch – I forget whose idea that was.

I didn’t even know where the Acropolis was, when we started, so I followed Kineas. Kineas had a badly formed right leg – he didn’t trouble to hide it – and he wasn’t very tall. But he knew Athens, and he was probably soberer than the rest of us. Alexander was quite probably the drunkest of the lot of us, but he was a wonderful runner, and it was all I could do to keep the two of them in sight. I ran as hard as I could, and they vanished; corner after corner, I saw the tails of flame as I arrived. They’d always just turned the next corner.

Up and up through the town, which washes like waves of houses right to the base of the fortifications. Up and up, into a strengthening wind that blew our torches into blazing fires.

Out on to the broad stones of the Panathenaeum. Up and up and up. Now I could see them, neck and neck at the gates of the fortifications. I got a second wind, or perhaps I was not as drunk as I thought, but I caught them up on the steps below the temple to Nike.

Maybe she came to my aid, for the good of Greece. Who knows?

They touched the columns of the Parthenon together. I couldn’t tell you which had won.

When I came up, they were agreeing to settle it with a race back down.

They were greater than human. It’s in the eyes. It is a certain glow in the skin. I have seen it a few times, when a man rises above himself, usually in athletics or war. And they both had it, just then.

But they were courteous enough to wait for me.

And Niceas was right on my heels.

‘Don’t do it,’ Niceas panted. ‘Down is dangerous.’

Alexander’s eyes gleamed. ‘Dangerous is just fine.’

‘You could fall,’ Niceas said.

‘I’ll fly, then,’ Alexander said. ‘Kineas?’

Kineas took his hand. ‘You could run in the Olympics,’ he said.

Alexander laughed. ‘Only if they had a competition for demigods, heroes and kings,’ he said. ‘Come, before they dissuade us.’

Niceas grabbed my shoulder. ‘You stay with yours and I with mine,’ he said.

And we were off.

Alexander meant to go down the way he’d come, but as soon as we were clear of the steps by the temple to Nike – I touched the wall and said a prayer – Kineas turned on a side path down the hill.

Alexander knew tactics when he saw them. So he turned and followed.

Niceas and I were hard on them – a man can only run so fast down a cliff, even a demigod. And when the goat trail ended on a hard-packed street below a row of tiled roofs, Kineas shocked me by leaping from the hillside on to the roofs and running along the tiles as if they were a road – which they were if you don’t mind a slope to your road.

With torches. Leaping from roof to roof. Downhill, never touching the streets – down past the lower temples, past the watering fountains. Somewhere – I don’t know where, and I’d never be able to retrace the path except in a nightmare – we came to a drop of ten feet and a gulf perhaps two horse lengths wide – a side street.

Kineas didn’t hesitate, but leaped at full stride, and Alexander was with him, stride for stride.

That was the heir of Macedon, sailing through the air with a torch trailing white fire behind him.

Oh, there were gods, that night in Athens.

Another leap, and we were on Kineas’s street – I knew by the stables. We ran along the stable roof, and now Alexander lengthened his stride, and Kineas lengthened his.

At the courtyard of Eumenes’ house, they came to the end of the roofs.

Neither slackened stride.

I did.

Off the end of the stables, legs still flashing, Alexander a full body’s length ahead, the torches streaming fire . . .

A thirty-foot fall to the cobbled courtyard.

I didn’t even have time to call. Niceas did. He screamed.

And they were gone.

There was an enormous pile of straw below. And while I gather that Kineas knew that, I swear that Prince Alexander simply trusted that the gods would not let him die.

I slowed, stopped, heard no screams, looked, saw and jumped down.

Alexander rolled out of the straw, his torch out. ‘I win,’ he said, touching Eumenes’ andron door.

Kineas was laughing so hard he couldn’t get to his feet.

I went off and threw up.

Good party.