The Nature of Alexander

Macedon

ALEXANDER’S EXISTENCE WAS DETERMINED in 358 BC, at a celebration of the Mysteries on Samothrace, where his parents met.

Philip II of Macedon, then about twenty-four, was a legitimate but not quite hereditary king. His elder brother, Perdiccas III, had been killed while his son was still an infant. The Assembly of fighting Macedonians had the traditional right to choose in such circumstances a king from the members of the royal house; a fact of primary importance to the country’s history. It was a time of civil feud and foreign invasion. A fighting regent was essential, and Philip was proven in the field. Not long after, the situation growing still more perilous, he was asked to assume the throne.

His surviving portrait shows a square powerful face, intelligent, ruthless, possibly brutal, but without the viciousness that chills in some of the Caesars. It has humour; looks capable of charm, and of the amatory success for which he was notorious.

A crucial event of his career had happened when he was sixteen. In the complex wars of the royal succession, Perdiccas, making a treaty with Thebes, had had to supply a royal hostage as security. Childless as yet, he had perforce sent his younger brother. Thebes had been then in its full brief blaze of glory after the overthrow of the Spartan tyranny. Intellectually provincial, in military lustre it was unmatched in Greece. Lately its cult of heroic homosexual love had reached its apogee with Pelopidas’ foundation of its corps d’élite, the Sacred Band, made up from pairs of friends who had already taken a traditional vow to stand or fall together. Philip, treated on parole more as guest than prisoner, learned the skills of soldiering from the finest masters. Here too he may have added to his lifelong love of women the taste for young men which was to cause his death.

It is tempting to wonder whether some friendly contrivance of his hosts could have got him, incognito, across the border to Athens. He was a young nonentity and it would have been easy. He was not likely in his days of power to admit having sneaked in under such humiliating conditions; but all his life he showed a deep regard for Athens’ history and culture, however great his contempt for her current leaders. Reared himself in a fifth-century palace at Pella, built by Athenian architects and decorated by her painters of the finest period, he could appreciate her material splendours, still in uncorrupted perfection.

His own inheritance was a highland kingdom of great scenic beauty and tall warlike men, where his capital, Pella, was an island of classicism in an archaic society. At his accession (as Alexander later reminded his men) all that the people owned were the sheep whose skins they wore for want of cloth, and even those were hard to keep, border raids from neighbours being constant. As in Homer’s day, the lords would follow the king to war—unless just then supporting some rival claimant—bringing each his meinie of tough undisciplined followers armed with what came to hand. The loose law of succession had ensured a series of civil wars and a long record of murders. Perdiccas had got his throne by killing a lover of his mother’s who had usurped it; she was rumoured to have procured the deaths both of her husband and her son. From him Philip inherited five rival pretenders to the throne, some in a state of active hostilities; and two foreign invasions. No account of Alexander’s life can be understood without remembering the record of his forebears which he must have picked up from his earliest years.

Philip killed at once the most dangerous of the claimants, who was his half-brother. The others, with restraint by family standards, he expelled or undermined. His hands thus free, he set about defending his frontiers. At some time during these early campaigns, he sailed to Samothrace.

The Mysteries retain much mystery despite the archaeologists, and it is not clear what benefit he hoped for. Their chief known gift was protection from shipwreck, one of the few perils he seldom met. Their “Great Gods” were pre-Hellenic deities, whose offerings were cast into a deep cleft, and who were somehow associated with dwarfs, perhaps by folk memory of an extinct race. The island is steep and sheer, the sanctuary near the shore; the rites, which involved corybantic dancing and much noise, were performed at night.

Legend was bound to make Philip fall in love with Olympias during the actual celebration; but it may be true. Such things excited her and must have made her striking looks dramatic. The visit would keep the initiates a day or two on the island, giving him a chance to see her by daylight, find out who she was, and most likely meet her. Fatefully, she was a girl who could only be had by marriage.

She was the orphaned daughter of a former King of Epirus, the region of modern Albania. It was more primitive than Macedon and the hegemony of the kings was even less secure; but it had important possibilities, and Philip, if he had hesitated, did so no longer.

No portrait of Olympias has survived which is not stylized to nullity. Her looks may be suggested by her son’s, which did not come from Philip. Most north Greeks were fair, red-haired or auburn. Otherwise, our one visual glimpse of her dates from just before her death, when she was about sixty. It consists in the single fact that two hundred of Cassander’s soldiers, who had agreed to kill her and broken into her house to do it, looked at her face to face and went away.

Her family claimed descent from Achilles. His son Neoptolemus had fathered their royal line upon Andromache, Hector’s widow, his prize from the sack of Troy. Unaware how momentous this lineage would be for history, Philip married the princess, and, leaving her pregnant, returned to his necessary wars.

The prophetic dreams of Philip and Olympias belong properly to the area of legend. He dreamed he was sealing her womb with the image of a lion; she, that kindled by a thunderbolt a fire spread from her body to the earth’s ends, and was suddenly quenched in darkness. Alexander was in fact born under the sign of Leo, in August 356.

Philip, on campaign in Thrace, got the news along with two other messages. His general, Parmenion, had soundly defeated the Illyrians in the west; and his racehorse had won at the Olympic Games. The right of Olympic entry was a prized inheritance of the kings of Macedon. The Games were only open to Greeks; and Macedonians were not recognized in the south as the offshoots of the original stock which in fact they were. They were regarded as semi-barbarous (the actual term “barbarian” was reserved for Persians) and the royal house had just scraped in on the strength of a remote Argive ancestry. For Philip, to whom acceptance in the Greek world was a lifelong dream, this news may have been the most welcome item of the three.

It was inevitable that Alexander’s childhood would later be described as precocious and brilliant; he was certainly not a late developer. Plutarch mentions, without quoting it, a long list of the teachers whom Philip imported for him. More to the purpose is what he learned from his parents.

By the time he was in his teens, they were not merely estranged but open enemies. Their one other child, a daughter called Cleopatra, was born not long after him; thereafter it can be assumed that sexual intercourse ceased. Whether Olympias had ever returned Philip’s feeling cannot, of course, be known; like all women of her time she had been “given in marriage.” Her pride ensured that if his infidelities did not torment her with jealousy they would be taken as deadly insults. It seems evident that the violent fracture of their relations must have happened in Alexander’s early childhood, the time when it would give the deepest pain and leave the deepest impression. It is the age at which the child, given ordinary kindness, will identify with the mother. For Alexander, his father’s constant absences on campaign, combined with his mother’s possessive love, made this a certainty.

She was a woman of great ability and intelligence, whose judgment was wholly swayed by her emotions; a visionary and an orgiast, though improbably in any sexual sense; she had the pride which does not stoop to common adulteries. The Dionysiac frenzy was for many women a kind of releasing drug trip, though only wine was used, the rest being auto-suggestion and mass emotion. Olympias brought to it a powerful imagination. To the anger and disgust of Philip with his Hellenic aspirations, she kept about her the tame snakes of the primitive Thracian cult. She may have had self-induced hallucinations. Alexander was probably still quite young when first she gave him to understand that Philip was not his father.

Daily life in those days, even for the great, had little privacy. That, in spite of the accusations she invited, no man was ever named as her lover, is significant. Hating her husband, she wished wholly to possess her son. Later events show that whatever mystery he believed to surround his birth, it was supernatural.

It cannot have been long, in a free-spoken society, before he learned what the alternative was; while to be Philip’s son may have seemed to him even worse. What hidden agonies he endured remained his secret; suppressed, perhaps, even out of his memory. That he did not emerge a psychopath like Nero is one of history’s miracles.

In calm interludes of this life he was taught, like all high-born children, his ancestry. It went back on both sides to Zeus; on his mother’s, there was the heroic strain of Achilles, but also the royal blood of Troy. He was brought up to honour both sides in that great war; to treat neither with contempt or hate. Whatever harm Olympias did him, for this at least the world was to be her debtor.

As heir of Macedon, he was reared from his cradle in unquestioning acceptance of having been born to the sword, as a farmhand’s son to the plough. Neither to Philip nor Olympias would any other future have been thinkable. It remained only to excel.

Philip had now won the struggle for mere national survival. He began to secure his frontiers by attack. The turning point had been his capture, from the loosely knit tribes of west Thrace, of Mount Pangaeus, with its rich veins of gold and silver. It freed him from dependence on tribal levies. Henceforth he could pay full-time soldiers, and turn them into professionals.

It was a military revolution. The labour of Helot serfs had given Sparta a citizen force in permanent training; but the Spartan mind was inflexible, and the dinosaur was at the point of death. Regular mercenaries existed in plenty: they might be exiles from other cities in the endless oscillations from democracy to oligarchy and back, when each change of government was accompanied by a vigorous settling of old scores; or younger sons whose portion only ran to a suit of armour; or criminals on the run. They would enlist with a mercenary general in good standing (this was important) and follow him where he was hired. But no Greek city-state would pay taxes for a standing army, which was distrusted, too, as a tool of potential coups. Philip now needed little of this casual labour; he could add to regular discipline the force of native loyalties and racial pride. As a matter of course, lords still officered their own tribesmen; it would take the full force of Alexander’s personality to bring in promotion on merit. But Philip was now permanent commander-in-chief; and he forged a formidable weapon.

Its solid centre was the infantry phalanx, a deep column (phalanx means finger) armed with the giant spear of his devising, the famous sarissa. Of graded length, those of the fourth-rank line being at least 15 feet long, these pikes enabled four ranks at once to take the enemy at spear-point, making them virtually immune from all but missile weapons. This was the holding force. The striking hammers were the flanking cavalry wings. Alexander was to be the virtuoso of this instrument; but Philip was its creator.

He had light-armed skirmishers, archers and slingers; Dionysius of Syracuse had made innovations in siegecraft which were not lost on him. His generalship was equalled by his political acumen, which enabled him to intervene in neighbouring wars at the request of one or other party (the ancient tragedy of divided Greece) to his own profit. His influence in Thessaly, his steady extension across Thrace towards the vital corn route of the Hellespont, were already alarming Athens.

One can only speculate what would have been the effect on Alexander if Olympias had died in childbirth; if he had kept her genes but escaped her influence. Such a father and son might have added affection to mutual pride. As it was, this towering figure was the enemy and oppressor; the gross lecher from whose loins some god—pray heaven—had saved him from being begotten; above all the rival, at all costs to be surpassed. All Alexander’s story testifies to the effect on natural genius of the deep insecurity felt in these tormenting early years. Compensation for it inspired his greatest achievements; when it took him unawares, it betrayed him into his greatest sins.

That he kept his sanity he must have owed to his capacity for friendship, a solace he turned to while very young. Psychologically his face must have been his fortune; to this attractive boy people were drawn without the pretences of flattery, and his true child’s instincts felt it. He grew up with a religious faith in friendship, making it a cult, publicly staking his life on it. The real loves of his life were friendships, including his sexual loves. Though he had the classic family pattern for homosexuality, it was probably the mere availability of men rather than women for friendship which directed his emotional life. To be loved for himself, as he certainly often was, ministered to his constant need for reassurance, and he returned affection so warmly that it seldom let him down. When it did, it shook him to his roots. He had committed too much, and could not forgive.

When he was seven, the recognized end of childhood, his father found him a tutor. He was a certain Leonidas, Olympias’ uncle; Philip the diplomat thus avoiding palace brawls. Both parents, it seems, agreed on the way in which the boy should be fitted for his destiny. As a man, he gave his own account of it.

Ada, whom he honoured with the title of Mother and made Queen of Caria … in the kindness of her heart used to send him daily many dishes and sweets, and finally offered him pastrycooks and chefs of noted skill. He said he did not need them; better cooks had been given him by Leonidas his tutor—a night march to make him want his breakfast, and a small breakfast to make him want his supper. “And,” he said, “the man himself used to come and look through my bedding-boxes and clothes-chests, to see my mother did not hide any luxuries or extras there.”

Spare diet, thin clothing, and the hard exercise his age and nature (as well as the need to keep warm) dictated may have been the chief causes of Alexander’s failure to reach the average height of the Macedonians, whatever that was; the great sarissa being a regular weapon suggests that it was impressive. Had he been a really little man, we should read of his being identified by it at a distance instead of by the other means always mentioned, his armour, actions and so on; and the Athenian propagandists could never have let it alone; but that his height was undistinguished, and probably less than his father’s, in a society which set great value on stature, must have been bad enough. When later he learned medicine and physiology he may have connected cause and effect. He showed no love for Leonidas after he left his charge, and the only gift he sent him back from Asia was ironical: a sack of incense. As a boy he was offering incense at a shrine, giving extravagantly as he would always do, when Leonidas had told him sharply to be sparing of precious things till he was master of the lands they grew in. He did not take Leonidas along.

He did take, and once risked his life for, an unimportant court hanger-on called Lysimachus, who styled himself his pedagogue. This was of course a joke, for it was servant’s work; but Lysimachus did take on the humble duties of the man-nanny from whom no teaching was required. Alexander’s gratitude for a personal devotion was always lifelong; but what he got besides is beyond computation, for good or ill. Lysimachus used to amuse the child by calling himself Phoenix, the pedagogue of Achilles. Alexander played his part in the game for life. To the end of his days he kept the Iliad under his pillow, along with the dagger for self-defence which was the commonplace bedroom furniture of a Macedonian king.

It seems an odd attraction in a man whose own impulses were to prove more generous. Achilles was merciless to the conquered; asserted the captor’s right over royal women; desecrated the body of a noble enemy; sulked in his tent while his friends were falling in battle, a thing rather than which Alexander would have died. But it must be remembered that Achilles was an ancestor, about whom he may have heard many tales not in Homer, embroidering on them in fantasy; the Duke of Wellington in the Brontë children’s romances was not the Duke of history, and Alexander’s Achilles may not have been ours. His interest in Amazons suggests, for instance, that he knew the Epic Cycle story about the romantic duel between the hero and Penthesilea; and the whole Cycle has now been lost. He knew at any rate what Homer says: that Achilles’ mother was a goddess; that he was despoiled and slighted by a king, whom he got the better of; that he had a comrade whom he loved as his own life; and that he was angry.

Plutarch says that from childhood Alexander had a longing to excel, and philotimia, the love of honour. Despite his childhood traumas, we hear nothing about fits of rage. Had his love of winning made him an unpleasant loser, he would not have been supported in disgrace and exile by his boyhood friends. Yet the enormous anger of Achilles must have touched some chord in him.

In the year of Philip’s accession, a reign had closed in Persia too. The long-lived, weak Artaxerxes II was succeeded by Artaxerxes Ochus his son. A strong but savage ruler, he began at once to reduce too-powerful satraps and to ban their private armies. Rebellion failed; two fugitives were sheltered by Philip and were at his court some years, one of them the important and aristocratic Artabazus, of whom much more will be heard. He was one of those astonishing old men who seem to survive today only in the Russian Caucasus. Already elderly when he rebelled, and getting old when pardoned and recalled, he was to survive, a vigorous nonagenarian, to campaign successively under Darius and Alexander, whose eager welcome when they met again many years later points to warm childhood memories. He had thus known Persians as long as he could remember, not as propaganda monsters but observable humans and friends; with the boys of Artabazus’ large family he must often have played. Though Macedonian was a broad Doric patois, the court spoke Greek, as did many travelled or well-bred Persians; so there is likelihood in Plutarch’s well-known story that when Persian envoys arrived bringing the exiles’ recall, and Philip happened to be absent, little Alexander took it on himself to welcome them.

He won them over by his cheerful friendliness, and by asking questions which were not childish nor trifling, but about the length of the roads, and what the journey was like inland; about the King himself, how he behaved in battle, and about the Persian prowess and strength.

His father had turned Pella into a military base and his palace into a staff headquarters; the child had probably run about among soldiers since he was on his feet. The sublime confidence with which he took command of them in his mid-teens suggests he had long known them with the privileged intimacy of a regimental pet.

It would be as a family guest that he first met a youth who, being eleven years his elder, would have seemed a man to him: his future historian, Ptolemy. He was a kinsman on his mother’s side, either in a regular way or, as tradition has it, by a liaison with the adolescent Philip before he left for Thebes, in which case the boys were half-brothers. Later generations of Ptolemys did not disclaim the bar sinister. Born as he was at Pella, Ptolemy I must have known Alexander throughout his life span.

Arrian’s History starts at his accession, probably because Ptolemy’s did, which is a pity, for his knowledge of earlier years would have been invaluable. Ptolemy is of course his own chief authority for himself, but is respected by ancient authors. He edited out his rivals’ exploits—a perennial liability in retired generals’ memoirs—and made the most of his own, but was honoured for not inventing any; and he wrote towards the end of a long life, when the tumult and the shouting had largely died, the captains and the kings departed. Arrian recommends him on the grounds that not only did he campaign with Alexander, “but, as he was a king himself, falsehood would have been more shameful to him than to anyone else.”

Modern sniggers at Arrian’s childish snobbery, evoked by these sensible words, are themselves curiously naïve. He is not of course attributing to kings a superior sense of honour, but stating the obvious fact that they are vulnerable to public disgrace. Ptolemy was more than a decade older than Alexander, who in turn had had in his army, towards the end of his life, many men at least ten years his junior. In a city like Alexandria, the recitals of the History—the method of publication in the ancient world—would have attracted plenty of alert veterans still in middle life, living on their memories. The founder of a dynasty cannot afford the ridicule of such an audience.

By then, Alexander had been out of the reach of flattery for a good twenty years; yet detractors, irked by the fact that the sources most “favourable” are men who knew him in life, have sought in Ptolemy for ulterior motive, apparently oblivious of the fact that their case is based upon the opposite of what it sets out to prove. Ptolemy’s interest is alleged to lie in creating propaganda for his own dynasty. But he wrote for a living audience, before posterity. Why, in the first place, drag all the way to Egypt the body of a corrupt tyrant about whom thousands of influential people would know the truth? Why not fill the History with stories to his discredit in which Ptolemy shone by contrast? Yet anti-Alexandrists have always assumed that he favours Alexander to bask in his reflected glory; which is certainly having it both ways.

One need not of course discount the latter motive; it would be human enough. But Ptolemy’s loyalty predates all possible self-interest and indeed once cost him dear. Later, though never promoted to the eminence of Craterus or Hephaestion, this capable and, as it was to prove, very ambitious soldier remained unswervingly true. Is it too much to suppose that something in Alexander inspired these feelings and caused them to outlast his life, and that Ptolemy wrote among men who shared them? He wanted to remember the best, they wanted to hear it. It is after all the simplest explanation.

In 348, when Alexander was eight, Philip captured the Greek-colonized Thracian city of Olynthus, an ally of Athens, after an eventful siege. It had harboured his surviving half-brothers, in open revolt; so he killed them both. “Such tragedies,” remarks Grote with irrefutable truth, “were not infrequent in the Macedonian royal family.”

The chief reason was the polygamy of the kings. With luck, the Queen Consort’s eldest son might hope to inherit; but Macedonian rulers would combine business with pleasure, going through forms of marriage with the daughters of powerful noblemen or new allies to secure the valuable obligations of kinship. All the sons of these alliances were, and had been for generations, potential usurpers. Some had changed the succession. Philip dealt with the problem in the traditional manner. It did not warn him to avoid the cause.

Being both highly sexed and an expert diplomat, he made full use of his royal prerogative; it was a proverb that he had a new wife with every war. In all he had at least a half dozen of these minor wives, several of whom bore children, one being a boy. All sources agree on Olympias’ bitter resentment. Whether she felt the jealousy of a woman, the affront of a queen, or both, she watched like a nursing tigress for any threat to her son. The bastard boy, Arridaeus, was mentally retarded; and though it seems unlikely that she brought this about with drugs, people thought her capable of it, as in fact she was. There is no uncertainty about the mark she made upon Alexander.

As a boy, he played and sang to the lyre; for this we have first-hand evidence from one who heard him. As a man, he was a constant and generous patron of musicians, but we never read of his playing or singing a note. An anecdote of Aelian’s gives the reason. He had a rather high-toned voice, later to be much imitated, like all his other mannerisms; and Greeks preferred a sweet singing tone to a deep one. But one day his father heard him, and told him he should be ashamed to sing so well. Since someone recorded it, there was an audience. The slur of effeminacy must have been intended, and was certainly so received. It was probably not the only time his parents took out on him their hatred of one another.

The natural watershed between his boyhood and adolescence is the famous episode of his taming Bucephalas. It is a well-worn tale: the fiery charger offered at a high price to Philip, refusing to be mounted, and turned down as useless; the boy insisting that a great horse was being wasted; the father’s challenging him to do better than his elders; their bet on it, the horse to be bought for him if he could manage it, and if not, paid for by him; its instant trust when it felt his hands. But the popular notion is still of high-spirited youngsters meeting; the more interesting truth is that Bucephalas was twelve years old.

The horse must therefore have been trained, and no doubt for war. What this entailed in ancient Greece is vividly described in Xenophon’s treatise On Horsemanship. Neither saddle nor stirrups were yet known; the rider sat bareback or on a cloth. Thus the spear could not be used for an impact charge as in medieval war, but only for thrusting (Alexander himself favoured the sabre). Even so, the horseman needed a well-disciplined mount if he was to stay on; apart from knee grip, control was by the bit alone, and surviving examples are often horrible. Besides steadiness in battle, the high-class charger was expected to caracole on parade; and here Xenophon, who was fond of horses, has some revealing “don’ts.” “Some teach the curvetting action either by striking the horse with a rod under the hocks, or by having someone run alongside with a stick and hit him on the quarters.” He also deprecates simultaneously dragging up the head, spurring and whipping. It seems possible that someone, trying by such means to prepare this brave and spirited animal for a royal buyer, had got more than he bargained for. Arrian says that it never let anyone but Alexander mount it as long as it lived; for him, adds Curtius, it would lower its body to help him on.

No other incident of Alexander’s life is related by Plutarch in so much detail; it reads like total recall. Perhaps on nights when the world conqueror, sitting late over the wine, fell “into a kind of soldierly boasting,” this was a favourite tale which some memoirist got to know by heart. Its interest, however, is historical as well as human. At the battle of Gaugamela, Alexander, then twenty-five, was nursing his twenty-four-year-old charger, which was famous enough for this to be recorded. The years of its prime were those of his youthful wars before his accession; its exploits, and his, must already have been celebrated.

Philip, buying him the horse as agreed, showed great pride in his son’s achievement. Unluckily for their improved relations, at about the same time the King involved himself in the most unpleasant of the scandals his way of life invited. From Diodorus’ account of it, it seems that his homosexual love life had retained the pattern of Thebes only in that his favourites were socially presentable; he lacked the constancy of the Sacred Band. A certain Pausanias had been discarded for a new fancy; furiously resentful, at some drinking party he called his young rival a paid whore. Had he been right it would have altered history. He was wrong. With fierce Macedonian pride, the youth threw away his life to reject the insult. In the next Illyrian border war, having left a message to explain his action, he ran ahead of the King to certain death among the enemy.

A noble called Attalus, a friend of Philip, perhaps the dead man’s kinsman or tribal chief, devised a black farce by way of retribution. He got Pausanias dead drunk at his house, threw him out in the stable yard and invited the slaves to rape him.

Unable to kill Attalus in the midst of his retainers, Pausanias went to the King demanding vengeance. Since Attalus could not legally be executed without a public trial even had Philip wished it, he naturally refused; but, Pausanias being an Orestid of almost royal family, offered him some kind of compensation in land or rank. He accepted it and the affair seemed closed. It is unlikely that Alexander, by now twelve or thirteen, missed hearing the sordid tale; No doubt he suffered what was natural to his age, his nature and the event.

However, it was to set him upon the throne.

Soon after, Philip extended his power decisively southward. By invitation, he became Archon of Thessaly: leading chieftain, judge, war leader, virtual king. It genuinely benefitted the country with its long history of oppressive and warring barons; neither he nor his son ever had trouble in recruiting cavalry among the famed Thessalian horsemen. But Athens, with its democratic commitment and traditional hatred of monarchy, thought only of the growing menace from the north.

In fact, the last thing Philip wanted was war with Athens. He had larger and better plans. After the disastrous Peloponnesian War, the Spartans had propped their hated tyranny in south Greece by ceding to Persia the Greek colonies in Asia Minor, in return for Persian support. It had killed their prestige before their power declined. Since then all the city-states had agreed, in principle, that they had a sacred duty to liberate their Hellene kinsmen. Only, enmeshed in feuds many generations old, they could never combine to do it. To achieve it was Philip’s dream.

Objective minds had long seen the necessity of a single high command. The nonagenarian political philosopher Isocrates, who remembered Socrates as a contemporary, had been urging it for decades, sometimes on rather unsuitable leaders; now he saw in Philip a really promising candidate, and wrote at some length to tell him so. Philip was indeed well qualified for the task. Had he not sired a genius, he would be remembered as the most brilliant general of antiquity next to Julius Caesar. He was neither a harsh ruler nor, by the time’s standards, superfluously cruel in war. He respected culture, was at ease with statesman or peasant, and could undermine hostility with charm. His good balance is indeed surprising, seeing that his Theban captivity had not been his first: as a very small child he had had the shock of being sent as hostage to the wild Illyrians by the usurper Ptolemy, his mother’s lover, whom his elder brother had to kill before he was ransomed back.

He could take a joke. After one of his victories he was supervising the routine business of selling his captives to the slave dealers, sprawling in his chair. “Spare me, Philip!” called a resourceful prisoner. “I was your father’s friend!” Asked for details, he said they were confidential. Philip beckoned him up. “Pull down your cloak, sir,” he whispered. “Your crotch is showing.” With a grin Philip told the guards, “Yes, he’s a good friend, let him go.” To him is first credited the classic put-down to a chatty barber: “How do you like your hair cut, sir?” “In silence.”

This robust humour was not passed on to his son. Alexander’s recorded sayings have pith rather than wit; and the jokes which endeared him to his men were boyishly simple. Having thawed back to life a soldier dazed with cold in his own chair by the campfire, he said, “You’re lucky it’s not Darius’s, he’d have had your head for it.” This is a long way from Philip’s pungent irony; perhaps the boy had felt its bite too young.

It was liked still less, however, by Philip’s arch-enemy, the Athenian orator Demosthenes; a man entirely humourless, but with a notable gift for vituperation. He was the heir to a great ideal and its last defender. Inevitably, his name is touched with its grandeur, and with the aura of a lost cause. He was without doubt a patriot by belief as well as by profession; his faith in the free city-state was real—so long as the state was Athens. But only with effort does justice to Demosthenes survive a reading of his orations, well polished and published by himself. They were admired in eighteenth-century England when political scurrility was not impeded by libel laws. Their counterparts were the brutal cartoons of Gillray; Hogarth would have been too moral and Rowlandson too jolly. He catches no gleam from the brilliance of Athens’ zenith, gives back no echo of Pericles’ immortal affirmation that man’s individuality is his right and his city’s pride. Page after page is loaded with invective, against political or private enemies as often as against Macedon (“a country from which it was never yet possible to buy a decent slave”). No weapon is too mean for him; he will sneer at the poverty of an opponent’s childhood, and he sticks at no lie he can get away with. He has all the skills of rhetoric; but his popularity is a dark comment on the Athens of his day. One cannot read him without feeling sure he would have spoken for the death of Socrates.

He led his city to ruin, not through treachery—even her traitors could have done her better service—but from inveterate hate and spite. No doubt he believed of Philip exactly what he said of him, that he was a power-drunk barbarian whose intent was to sack Athens and set up a slave state there: Demosthenes had the envy which hopes for evil in other men. His belief in the free city did not pass his own city walls. He had no compunction in keeping up secret contacts with Persia, and got from King Ochus huge sums for use in propaganda and bribery against Macedon. Philip, of course, had his own fifth column also; partly composed of merely venal agents, but partly of men not without concern for their own cities, who saw in Macedonian hegemony, as did Isocrates, an end to the constant interstate wars, and a hope for the Greek Asian cities. Philip, an unashamed practitioner of realpolitik, was at least not sanctimonious.

The antagonists had met when Athens sent envoys to Pella. (Alexander would have been about eight years old.) Demosthenes, the star, had saved himself till the last; but, face to face with Philip’s formidable personality, the orator “dried.” Indulgently the King invited him to start again from the beginning; but his nerve was gone. He learned his speeches by heart, and now had lost the thread. He could only stammer and sit down; and his rivals, to whom he had boasted that he would leave Philip without a word to say for himself, took care it was not forgotten. By such events the fate of nations can be determined, as well as by the price of corn.

At the state dinner which followed, young Alexander, still doing his music lessons, sang part songs with a friend. Demosthenes on his return is said to have jeered at this performance, and made some obscene pun or other. He had had a hard youth, orphaned early and defrauded by his trustees, and he shouldered the chip for life. In his way he was as insecure as the boy whose lyre was soon to be laid aside. But the metals behaved differently in the fire.

When Alexander was thirteen, a succession struggle in Epirus, Olympias’ homeland, threatened feudal war. Philip intervened, setting on the throne her brother Alexandros (the Greek spelling will distinguish him from Alexander). It was a shrewd choice of a man who, in the Macedonian family disputes, could be trusted to see where his own interests lay; one of Philip’s most successful diplomatic coups. Not faulty judgment, but the convergence of unseen forces, was to make it the engine of his fall.

In the same year, he took another decision equally momentous. Alexander was ready for higher education. Athens being now virtually an enemy country, he would have to get it at home. Philip looked about for a tutor.

There was a rush of applications. Isocrates, now running up to his century, showed some pique at being passed over. Speusippus, Plato’s successor at the Academy, offered to resign and come; but Philip wanted the culture of Athens, not her politics. Only four years before, when Alexander was already nine years old, Plato had died, posing one of the great Ifs of history. His dream of the philosopher-king had not survived his own ruined hopes. By his teacher Socrates, and by him, the pattern of the silk purse had been devised. Ironic fate had handed a sow’s ear to each, the brilliant unstable Alcibiades, the vain shallow Dionysius II; while in Macedon the silk was being spun for Aristotle.

Legend has Philip booking up the wisest man of the age on the day of Alexander’s birth, like a peer putting his son down for Eton. In fact, even thirteen years later he did not know the value he was getting. Aristotle in his early forties was a scholar with a rising reputation, and the important asset of having studied some years with Plato, whom, it was said, he had hoped to succeed at the Academy. But it is most unlikely that his academic status was decisive in Philip’s choice. Aristotle was the son of his father’s family doctor, a certain Nicomachus. He must have treated the childish ailments of Philip himself and his two dead elder brothers, who had probably known Aristotle himself as a boy. His native city, Stagira, in coastal Thrace, had been destroyed in the wars while he was studying in Athens; and, being homeless, he had formed connections of great use to Macedon.

After Plato’s death he accepted the invitation of a former fellow student, Hermias, a eunuch governor who had seceded from Persian rule and established a despotate, albeit a benign one, in Atarneus, which commanded the strait between the mainland and Mytilene. He had gathered round him a little court of philosopher friends, conferring the hand of his niece and ward on Aristotle, who thus had influence in a state of great strategic value to Philip. By him the philosopher was welcomed with the courtesy he always showed to distinguished Greeks, and offered a country house where, away from court and family distractions, the prince was instructed with a chosen group of friends.

Aristotle’s extant works date from later years when he had founded his own university, the Lyceum, in Athens. His Macedonian period must have been one of transition from Plato’s teachings, and we have no firm evidence of what he taught there; but Alexander’s later life provides many clues. Plato was a metaphysical philosopher whose work is suffused with the poetry he renounced for its sake in youth. His own mystical experience was one of the premises from which his logic constructed his universe. In him, Alexander’s glowing imagination would have found an interpreter and a guide. Aristotle’s whole temper was that of the inductive scientist. It is one of the great open questions of history, whether the gain balanced the loss.

He made an instant appeal to his pupil’s practical and inquiring intellect, to his passion for exploration and discovery. Botany and zoology fascinated Alexander all his life. So did medicine. He concerned himself closely with his soldiers’ wounds or sicknesses, and prescribed personally for his friends; and in this he must have been well taught, for all Greek doctors passed on their art to their sons. On campaign he studied the animal and plant life, having records kept and specimens sent to Aristotle; and is said to have released ringed stags to learn their life span (Plutarch romantically gives them gold collars, hardly an aid to their conservation). The Middle Ages had a whole collection of spurious epistles from him on these matters, chief source of the Romances’ fantastic fauna; his real observations, which would have been a treasure to more than biology, have disappeared.

He also learned philosophy. In the Greek world, this was central to all adult studies. It had not then become an abstruse specialization, absorbed in the minutiae of its own grammatical inflections. Its language was comprehensible to the lay ear, and its subject was ultimate human value judgments. Its conclusions on these were brought to bear in debate upon law, statecraft, and personal ethics.

Aristotle’s ethics were high principled, rather than profound. He would have agreed with Socrates that he who would be esteemed must buy it with reality whatever it costs to achieve; “be what you wish to seem.” But the prayer Plato gives to Socrates is, “Make me to be beautiful within; and may outward things chime with the inward.” Aristotle conceived the “great-souled man” as an image first; a superb role for which the man who would enact it must fit himself, below which he must never fall. Intellectual giant though he was, in giving this teaching to a man like Alexander he was a sorcerer’s apprentice. Plato, in his middle years, might have been the sorcerer. Aristotle unleashed a force beyond his own conceiving.

Alexander’s need for self-assurance was equal to his genius and strength of will. If he ever consciously resolved to be greatest among men, it was probably in his schooldays. As this dream became realized he would exult in it. And here it is vital not to think anachronistically. Modesty was not admired in the Greek world, but thought mean-spirited; the lying boast, only, was despised. That a man is entitled to his earned esteem is the kingpin on which the plot of the Iliad turns. The dying words of Euripides’ Hippolytus, “Pray that your lawful sons may be like me,” offended no Greek audience; he had earned the right. It was inevitable therefore that Alexander should in due course become one of the vainest men in human history. The secret of his magnetism, to those around him and to posterity, is that his vanity was redeemed by pride. To be truly what he wished to seem was his passion till his last breath. On the occasion when he sank below his own forgiveness, the shame of it almost killed him.

His course in law and civics was no doubt of use to him early in his campaigns, while he dealt with the old Greek colonies; he would have been taught the nature of Greek regimes: tyranny (then a technical term) through extreme and moderate oligarchy to democracy. The lessons would have taken for granted a homogeneous body of citizens (slaves, women and most immigrants being unenfranchised); all, at least by assimilation, Greek. Once outside such societies he would have to improvise. His tutor was explicit about the function of lesser breeds; Greeks were men, barbarians sub-men, created for men’s use, like plants and animals. It was the conventional view of the time; and if Aristotle did not rise above it, he had some excuse. While he was in Macedon his friend and kinsman Hermias was lured by treachery into Ochus’ hands, tortured to make him reveal his allies’ plans (which he did not do) then crucified.

During one of the civics lessons, the students were given some hypothetical situation and asked how they would meet it. Alexander, who probably knew the “right” answer well enough, said that when it happened, he’d see. It was prophetic. He would do what he did by being flexible steel in an age of iron.

Among Aristotle’s biological theories was that woman is an imperfect form of man. Himself a heterosexual, in the man’s world of Greece he took for granted, no less than Plato, that a man’s vital relationships would be with other men. Where Plato exalted love, he extolled friendship, wherein each should desire and promote the highest good in the other. Whatever reservations Alexander had about his civics course, to this precept he responded wholeheartedly. Whether they met in childhood or adolescence, by now he had the company of Hephaestion.

Like Ptolemy he was of local birth; they had probably met much earlier. At any rate Aristotle, who left Pella when Alexander was sixteen and never saw him or his friends again, wrote Hephaestion a whole book of letters. Lamentably, they are among his catalogued works no longer extant. Of still greater interest might have been Hephaestion’s answers.

Had he outlived Alexander we would know much more of him. Had Alexander outlived him long enough to memorialize him, even that idealized portrait would have filled in some blanks. Probabilities suggest he may be one of the most underrated men in history. In his lifetime he must have aroused enormous envy; he left no one behind him with any interest in promoting his reputation, and we have only the records of his rivals; that so little is adduced against him is remarkable. The worst we ever hear of him is that he was once slow to make up a private quarrel in which, since its details are lost, he may have had more provocation than we know. Starting his army career simply as a Companion (that is, a member of the king’s own regiment of cavalry) he was steadily promoted, obviously on merit, to the highest military and civil rank; was never defeated in any of his very responsible independent assignments; carried out impeccably numerous diplomatic missions of the first importance; and corresponded with two philosophers. His loss nearly unseated Alexander’s reason. Theories that this was some mere bedmate or boon companion prized for his doglike devotion are hardly tenable.

He is described by Curtius as being taller than Alexander, and better looking, in which case he was certainly handsome. No historian states plainly whether they were physically lovers; but Plutarch says that on the site of Troy, Alexander laid a wreath on Achilles’ tomb, and Hephaestion on Patroclus’. In spite of Homer’s reticence, classical Greece assumed the heroes’ love to be sexual. It would be characteristic of Alexander’s passion for personal loyalties to make so public an avowal. Olympias, at any rate, was wildly jealous of their attachment and railed by letter at Hephaestion half across Asia. A fragmentary retort of his survives: “Stop quarrelling with me; not that in any case I shall much care. You know Alexander means more to me than anyone.”

They had just under four years with Aristotle. When Alexander was sixteen Philip, committed to a long elaborate siege in eastern Thrace, appointed his son Regent of Macedon.

It is of course evident that he had already been at war. No record of it remains; but the trust committed to him was no sinecure. Though the experienced Antipater was left as his adviser, Philip cannot by this time have supposed he would not act on his own initiative if he thought fit. The border tribes, the still unsubdued Illyrians in particular, were a constant threat; so were the Athenians, who without declaration of war were using terrorist methods, seizing a Macedonian ship and selling the crew as slaves, capturing an envoy and demanding ransom; arresting in Athens a merchant shopping for Olympias, torturing him, on Demosthenes’ orders, till he confessed to spying, and putting him to death. More urgently, there were the west Thracians, previously subdued, but, if they rose, a threat to Philip’s communication line, now extended almost to the Hellespont.

Plutarch’s note on this period is brief. Alexander, “not to sit idle, reduced the rebellious Maedi, and putting a colony of several peoples in their place called it after himself, Alexandropolis.” The idea that he was seeking pastime is dispelled by a look at the map. Maedian country was in the wilds of today’s Bulgarian frontier; raiders from there would descend into the cultivated Strymon valley, which intersected Philip’s supply route. A successful revolt, triggering others, might have involved him in a major military disaster.

Alexander’s first “colony” was doubtless a mere hill village. His father had founded his Thracian Philipopolis; only later days reveal the triumph the boy must have felt in this act of emulation. More significant is the fact that at sixteen he could call upon the standing army of Macedon, be followed unquestioningly into barbarian fastnesses and obeyed in a hard mountain campaign. It would be interesting to know where and how they had previously got to trust him.

After this he served under his father (Antipater now acting Regent), and was sent with the rank of general to subdue some rebel cities in south Thrace. At about this time he saved, as he claimed later, his father’s life. It was probably during Philip’s arduous siege of Perinthus, when he may have needed to hire extra troops. Even as Great King of Persia, Alexander still recalled it with resentment. Philip, he said,

when a riot had broken out between Macedonian soldiers and Greek mercenaries, overcome by a wound he had got in the fracas, had fallen down and could do no more than sham dead; he himself had protected his body with his shield and killed with his own hand the men who were rushing at him. Which his father had never been man enough to admit, being unwilling to owe his son his life.

Unfortunately that is all we know of it.

Alexander’s formal education was over, and Philip paid his school fee. It was a city. Aristotle’s ruined birthplace, Stagira, was refounded, rebuilt, and repopulated, the people probably being bought out from slavery. This makes Alexander’s education the most expensive on record. It was formative. He remembered always that the only self deserving of self-love is what would now be called the super-ego; the “intellectual soul” which must be trained to rule, like a king, over all lesser and baser appetites; to spurn the limits of mortality; to covet as riches only honour, nobility and glory. Leaving this spell behind him, the eminent apprentice of the dead sorcerer went home, to be taken aback by the subsequent thunder and lightning.

It is evident from Philip’s confidence in his son that they were still getting on well together, as they normally did while in the field and well away from Olympias. Alexander now returned to resume his regency while Philip went on besieging the fortress ports, Perinthus and Byzantium. But Athens was now at open war, and with her commanding superiority in sea power supplied the beleaguered garrisons, forcing him to raise both sieges in the end. On his homeward march he defeated some hostile Scythians; but his army, slowed down with its spoil of cattle and slaves, was cut up by the northern tribe of Triballians, and the King himself was wounded too badly to be moved.

Meantime, the responsibilities of Alexander and Antipater were heavy. A complex politico-religious dispute about some sacred fields near Delphi had broken out in the southern states, promising a chance of Philip’s favourite gambit, the solicited intervention of Macedon. (Time and again, the geography of Greece with its beautiful but barren mountains, its covetable farmlands, has determined its history. The long disastrous Peloponnesian War, the grave of Athenian greatness, had begun in a quarrel over sacred land in Megara.)

The Sacred League, a kind of religious United Nations, voted to punish the Amphissaeans, who had taken over the fields to farm. With the League Philip was in good standing, having evicted from Delphi some years earlier a Phocian force which had plundered Apollo’s treasuries and temple. He had behaved both correctly and humanely, persuading his allies to fine the Phocians instead of throwing them off the cliffs; and had been put out by Demosthenes’ propaganda representing them as oppressed martyrs and himself as a bloodstained tyrant. Now he sent word to the still-grateful League that his help, if asked for, would be forthcoming. The waiting time was crucial. Still laid up in Thrace, he ordered Alexander to mobilize the army; but lest Athens be alerted, he must give out that the campaign was to be against Illyria. He obeyed; before Philip could get back, rumour reached the Illyrians, who promptly rose in arms. For this risk Alexander must have been prepared; he swept west to the border, repelled the invaders and pushed them back; his third independent operation, in rough terrain, this time against a more dangerous enemy. He was seventeen.

Philip returned, to await events in the south. During this interlude of peace, it seems, Alexander’s parents found time to worry about his lack of sexual interests.

Perhaps he had turned down some marriage plan. Philip, a precocious womanizer if Ptolemy was his son, would be disconcerted to find a youth approaching eighteen, forward in all else, so backward here. The bloodstained and precarious royal succession made anxiety natural that he should beget an heir-presumptive in early life (and never was anxiety better justified by events). No more than other such parents in every age did these examine their own part in his reluctance. By now the very thought of marriage must have appalled him. Olympias nagged him, and is said to have hired a famous hetaira—one of those elegant “companions” who combined the skills of the geisha and the courtesan—to initiate him. She failed.

Aristotle taught neither asceticism nor Platonic sublimation. But his doctrine of the intellectual soul as king over the lower self offered a refuge to Alexander’s pride for years. Never highly sexed, though with a deep need of affection, he had had his physical response to women frozen in childhood by his parents’ mutual hate; it would be long in thawing. Meantime he had gathered a group of close and devoted friends, nearly all his elders. Hephaestion was evidently the only one of his age who could keep up with him; none of the rest got letters from Aristotle. Of the others none can have been a lover; nor, as events were soon to prove, did the inner ring contain sycophants drawn by rank. In these friends he invested his capital of emotion; his passionate generosity, his powerful magnetism, his compelling charm. Almost all were bound to him for life.

The Sacred League opened war upon the Amphissaeans; its scratch force proved ineffective. Demosthenes, foreseeing what must come, exhorted the unwilling Athenians to counter the menace of Philip by reaching accommodation with Thebes. The neighbours’ quarrel was so old that, a century earlier, the Thebans had even thrown in their lot with the invading Xerxes. Their later overthrow of Spartan tyranny had aroused more envy than esteem. They had now a treaty with Macedon, and it was doubtful if they would denounce it.

When Philip had expelled the Phocians from the Delphic sanctuary in the earlier war, he had invited Athens, a League member, to send her own contingent. Demosthenes had secured a veto, mainly no doubt to prevent fraternization with the Macedonians, in whom fellow soldiers might discover fellow humans. When Philip’s moderation had saved the Phocians’ lives—they had to pay reparations and pull down their strongpoints—Demosthenes had denounced it as barbarity. As it now happened, the verdict against the Amphissaeans had just saved Athens herself, in the political infighting, from the dangers of a parallel charge of technical “impiety.” But this diplomatic triumph had been achieved by Aeschines, Demosthenes’ hated rival. Political commitment, and personal malice, now led him into a serious error. Next time the League met, he persuaded the Athenians to boycott it; and the meeting, unopposed by any Athenian delegate, accepted Philip’s offered help.

His moment had come. His army was trained to a pitch unknown in Greece before. His cavalry, the aristocratic Companions, were augmented en route by the expert horsemen of Thessaly. The vital pass of Thermopylae was politely taken over from its Theban garrison. Philip marched on to Elatia on the Phocian border, about two days’ march from Thebes and three from Attica.

Athens was in a panic. A beacon was built from the stalls and sheep pens of the marketplace to alert the suburbs. The citizens’ Assembly was called by blast of trumpet. All moderates who dared to recall Philip’s restraint after the Phocian War were denounced as traitors by Demosthenes’ supporters. This time a Theban alliance got the vote; he headed the embassy sent to negotiate it.

Philip too sent envoys to Thebes. Both sides were heard at one session. Thebans’ voting rights were confined to present and veteran soldier-citizens. The Macedonians cited their mutual treaty, recalled the hostile acts of Athens, and promised in return for alliance a fair share of victory gains. If the Thebans wished to be neutral, this would be granted them in return for right of passage.

Demosthenes then put up the offers of Athens. They consisted in shopping to Thebes two peoples protected by solemn Athenian pledges: the Boeotians of the neighbouring countryside, upheld against Theban rule in the sacred name of democracy; and, far worse, the Plataeans. This border tribe, Athens’ sole ally in the heroic defence of Marathon, had been granted Athenian honorary citizenship in perpetuity. The Thebans were dubious. Demosthenes, who had never set foot upon a battlefield, taunted them with cowardice. This simple expedient met complete success. The Thebans tore up their treaty (or rather broke it up, for such things were carved on marble) and voted to ally with Athens.

Philip now knew where he stood. He had wanted no war with Athens. Though, his ascendancy once established, he would certainly have expected to direct her foreign policy—the pattern of Greek hegemonies since the days of Pericles—he proved innocent of any aim to enslave her people or destroy her culture. Probably he nursed a secret wish to reincarnate Pericles in himself. His repeated overtures had been blocked by Demosthenes’ inveterate hate and rebuffed with studied insults. Reared in the traditions of Macedon, Philip took a simple and comprehensive view of leaders who led from behind. His belief that he had found one here was to prove correct.

Even now he did not march south. He first carried out the League’s commission. After a winter of manoeuvring about the Parnassan massif, he made by a ruse a lightning march on Amphissa, captured the mercenaries sent there by Demosthenes, and took the town’s surrender. The sacred fields were restored to the League. He and his son were ceremonially thanked, honoured and crowned at the Delphic sanctuary.

They did not go home. They got control of the Corinthian Gulf without trouble, fortified their strongpoints, and moved back to Elatia. Even then, Philip sent last offers of peace to Thebes and Athens. Demosthenes had ensured refusal. Another great If of history had passed its crossroads. In midsummer the forces of north and south, about 30,000 men a side, met on the Boeotian Plain of Chaeronea.

Philip commanded on the right, traditional station of Macedonian kings. The notion that the weapon-holding side is more “honourable” than the shield side is of immemorial age. It applied to the enemy as well; so Philip knew from his days in Thebes who would be the elite corps to meet the Macedonian left: the hitherto unbeaten Sacred Band. This post he entrusted to the Companion Cavalry, under Alexander.

Philip himself faced the Athenians, who had the advantage of rising ground. He lured them down from it with a feigned retreat, entrapped and routed them. Among those who fled the field was Demosthenes, getting his first and last taste of war. The other troops thinned out their line to fill the gap. Alexander had watched his moment. Now he hurled his horsemen against the Sacred Band, leading the charge.

By the standards of even the most courageous modern soldiering, Alexander exposed himself in battle as no responsible commander should. But ours were not the standards of Macedon, whose ethos was still Homeric. Not he alone, but his men, thought in terms of Sarpedon’s words before the walls of Troy. Alexander probably knew them by heart.

Glaukos, why is it you and I are honoured before others

with pride of place, the choice meats and the filled wine-cups

in Lykia, and all men look on us as if we were immortals,

and we are appointed a great piece of land by the banks of Xanthos,

good land, orchard and vineyard, and ploughland for the planting of wheat?

Therefore it is our duty in the forefront of the Lykians

to take our stand, and bear our part in the blazing of battle,

so that a man of the close-armoured Lykians may say of us,

“Indeed, these are not ignoble men who are lords of Lykia,

these kings of ours, who feed upon the fat sheep appointed

and drink the exquisite sweet wine; since indeed there is strength

of valour in them, since they fight in the forefront of the Lykians.”

Philip’s many wounds testify that he too, realistic expert as he was, took for granted this meaning of noblesse oblige.

It is true that throughout his career Alexander courted danger, though never without purpose, with almost religious fervour. He is often called fearless; but no man with so powerful an imagination is immune to fear. He had seen men die horribly in the field, in lingering agony after. Perhaps this was why fear was always the first enemy he had to kill.

In this first of his great battles, leading cavalry against infantry (which did not give the advantage it would acquire when stirrups were invented), after a fierce struggle he broke the Theban line. The Sacred Band, encircled, refused surrender and died to the last man. The marble lion which marked their common tomb is still to be seen at Thebes.

Victory was complete; and Philip, whose efforts to Hellenize himself had met with such bleak response, reverted to Macedon. At the feast held that night upon the field he proclaimed a Dionysiac “comus,” and led its tipsy, torchbearing procession over the battleground, singing a chant about Demosthenes. He was rebuked by an aristocratic Athenian in the prisoners’ pen; which sobered him up at once. In all versions of this event, Alexander’s name is conspicuously absent. Philip had had to do with bunglers and cowards, he with the brave; then and later he did not exult over such enemies. His view of Athens, however, was to remain that of a man who respects the treasures of a great museum despite its philistine curators.

Philip’s peace terms were conveyed to Athens by his aristocratic captive, whom he had freed and asked to supper. The despairing city had awaited only a barbaric horde swarming through Attica to the sack, Demosthenes having assured them that the Macedonian aim was “not slavery but annihilation.” All Philip in fact required was that his hegemony be recognized. He did not propose even to cross the border, and the prisoners could go home unransomed.

While he waited the dead were burned. This labour, carried out on pyres whose only fuel was wood, must have called for strong stomachs in the soldiers of the ancient world. Athenian casualties numbered more than a thousand. (Our age of firearms has forgotten the total defencelessness of the retreating hoplite once he had turned his back, and, his heavy shield discarded to help his flight, could only run before the pursuing spears.) The ashes were collected; to ask for the remains of one’s dead was the formal acknowledgment that the victor “possessed the field.” The Athenians asked; of course accepting Philip’s terms, which must have stunned them. He sent them the ashes in a ceremonial cortège, under the escort of Alexander.

He was eighteen. He would not pass that way again. He was obsequiously received. Statues on the Acropolis were decreed for his father and him, the head of the latter still surviving. It would seem he visited Plato’s Academy, and took Hephaestion; to whom its principal, Xenocrates, perhaps competing with Aristotle, wrote his own book of letters.

Philip marched unopposed into the Peloponnese in a show of strength. At Corinth he called a council, attended by envoys of all the southern states but Sparta; they voted him Supreme Commander of the Greek forces “for defence” against the Persians. He returned at once to Macedon to prepare his expedition.

Everything indicates that he and Alexander were now on friendlier terms than at any other time of their lives. Though it is likely that Philip’s death had already been determined and its authors awaited only opportunity, it might have happened as a parting of father and son, violent in circumstance like many in that age, but without the violence of inner conflict which marked the son for life. Fate decreed otherwise. Philip fell in love, and prepared for another wedding.

This time, the girl belonged to a noble Macedonian family. She was the niece and ward, her father being evidently dead, of that same Attalus who had avenged upon Pausanias the suicide of the King’s young friend. Whether his rise to power preceded the betrothal or followed it, the sources do not make clear; but his rank was high, and this marriage must have been seen in Macedon as more significant than those of former legal concubines. Some historians have inferred that Philip had already resolved to divorce Olympias. Against this stands a massive piece of evidence. Alexander went to the wedding feast.

The outcome proves that it was not from fear of Philip. Olympias, in view of her rage at the event, must surely have opposed his giving it his countenance. He may have thought it would convey to others that her status was not in doubt, that it was a gesture he could afford. Or he may have done it in simple goodwill to his father, with whom he had served harmoniously through a long campaign, in an atmosphere of male camaraderie away from palace intrigues.

It was of course an ordeal. An adolescent so sexually fastidious, and with the homosexual preference which marked this phase of his life, would hardly attend for fun a drunken Macedonian wedding with the prospect of seeing his father put to bed, amid the usual bawdy jokes, beside a girl younger than himself. The added thought of his mother must have made him very tense indeed. However, for reasons sufficient to himself, he went, and stayed till the bride had retired and the toasts were called. Attalus proposed the health of the happy pair, coupled—whether in drink or calculation—with the hope that their union would produce a legitimate heir for Macedon.

Alexander’s reaction was characteristically prompt. Shouting “What about me, you blackguard? A bastard, am I?” he hurled his goblet at Attalus’ head. Noisy chaos broke out. Attalus threw his own goblet back. During the brawl, words passed between father and son which have not come down to us. Alexander’s, whatever they were, caused Philip to draw his sword (he probably wore it for the ancient ritual of cutting the bride loaf) and lurch towards him. Lame from an old wound, and drunk, he fell sprawling. “Look, men,” said Alexander coldly. “He’s getting ready to cross from Europe to Asia, and he falls crossing from couch to couch.” On this he walked out; from the house, and from the kingdom.

Clearly this crisis was unforeseen by all concerned, unless by Attalus. He had played his hand well, and was shrewd enough to count on Alexander’s losing his temper; but even his insult may have been a drunken impulse. Philip cannot have had foreknowledge. He would not have accepted a generous gesture from the son who had shared his victories, to have him so affronted and rouse so predictable a fury. Philip was caught on the wrong foot while fuddled with wine; Alexander acted like Alexander; it was one of those situations where hidden fires, which the protagonists have been containing, are released by shock. Without more ado, Alexander told his mother to pack, and rode off with her over the rugged southwestern frontier to her brother’s capital, Dodona in Epirus.

Nothing between father and son would ever be the same again. Alexander, and his mother, had received the deadliest insult of the ancient world and been offered no redress. What he had said to Philip to bring him to the verge of homicide remains an interesting speculation. It may have released a long-suppressed jealousy of his son’s good looks, intellectual precocity, sensational popularity with his soldiers, and the tight loyal circle of “Alexander’s friends.”

Such a journey as the cross-country ride to Dodona cannot have been undertaken guarding a woman without some kind of escort. It is likely these intimates provided one. Their allegiance was well known to Philip later.

With what feelings King Alexandros of Epirus, owing his throne to Philip, received his outraged sister is not recorded; nor whether Alexander felt welcome at Dodona, famed for hard winters, and for its oracle, the most ancient in the Greek world. Its centre was an oak of immemorial age housing doves whose murmur was significant, and ringed with bronze vessels which reverberated in wind. Its god was Zeus, who was questioned in writing, on a strip of lead; many examples have survived. The answer was drawn as a lottery by the barefoot priestess. No question from Alexander has rewarded the spade; yet this shrine was linked with that of Zeus-Ammon at Siwah, which later he consulted at the cost of trouble and danger, and with dramatic results. Being the man he was, it is hard to believe that at this crisis of his fortunes he did not visit a great centre of prophecy when he was on its doorstep. If so, he kept the secret of its answer. At Siwah he was to do the same.

Leaving his mother in the house where she was born, he rode north into Illyria. To this warlike land, less than two years before, he had thrust back its defeated army. That he could show himself there, and be received as a guest, speaks volumes for the decency with which his campaign had been waged, and the respect it must have commanded. What he meant to do there remains a mystery. For a time he was his mother’s son, his judgment overwhelmed by his emotions. He may even have considered leading an Illyrian invasion, to seize his heritage by force, till his innate intelligence reasserted itself. He was, however, very capable of playing a war of nerves with Philip, who would certainly be reluctant to set out for Asia, leaving the home garrison depleted, with this dangerous and unpredictable presence in his rear. Never again would Alexander have to hold out in such harsh and humiliating conditions, conciliating uncouth hosts, wary of treachery, dossing down in primitive hill-forts after the grandeurs of Athens and Corinth where he had been fêted as a victor. Among the hardships whose endurance he used later to recall with pride, no word is ever quoted about his sojourn in Illyria. But it worked. A family guest-friend, Demaratus of Corinth, acted as a diplomatic go-between. Whether father or son put the first feeler out remains unknown.

Alexander returned to Macedon, most probably with his mother. The sources disagree, some leaving her in Epirus, but it is unlikely he would have accepted such terms; not only did her own good name hang on her reinstatement, but his legitimacy. Whatever the bargain struck between him and Philip their reconciliation was brittle. Soon it was strained enough to make him doubt his father’s good faith about his succession.

He would not of course have returned without some kind of warranty. But he did not trust it. Most of Philip’s offspring were girls, and the new wife had borne another; no viable heir but Alexander existed; his suspicions seem to have verged on the irrational. But the Attalid faction, the authors of his exile, were high in favour; many Macedonian heirs had been disinherited by treachery in the past; and to all this was added the emotional pressure of his mother, deeply affronted by the favours showered on the bride, which included the honorific royal name of Eurydice. His dependence on his friends’ loyalty and affection increased; and they rallied to him with an openness which Philip began to suspect as treasonable. The atmosphere was explosive, and the first spark ignited it.

Arridaeus, Philip’s retarded bastard, was of age to be betrothed. The father of his affianced, the only important factor, was Pixodarus, satrap of Caria, a powerful semi-independent state in southern Asia Minor, of vital expedience in the coming war. Plutarch’s account of what followed sheds a powerful light on Alexander’s state of mind. His mother (by this account she was obviously in Macedon) and his friends kept bringing him false rumours, “as if Philip, through a brilliant match and a great connection, was trying to settle the kingdom upon Arridaeus.” Alexander actually believed it. Almost crazily—and treasonably by any standards—he sent in secret a rival envoy to Caria, the tragic actor, Thettalus. Leading actors, who travelled widely, were often used in diplomacy; but to take on such a mission, Thettalus must have been a devoted personal friend. He was to dissuade the satrap from giving his daughter to “a fool and bastard,” and offer Alexander’s hand instead.

History is vague about the degree of Arridaeus’ imbecility. He outlived his brother for some six years as a puppet king, able apparently to speak a few words in public, but taking no decision and never produced in battle. The wife he eventually married was a capable woman who acted for him, but the union was childless and probably unconsummated. It seems incredible that he would ever have been adopted as king by the Macedonian Assembly in preference to Alexander, even if their father in his lifetime had so decreed. Philip owed his own accession to the call for a fighting king; the direct heir, then passed over, was now in his early twenties, the obvious choice if the succession had to be changed. What blinded Alexander to all this?

Intellectually, he was outstandingly flexible and swift in his adjustments. Emotionally it was another matter. His demands on himself were such that though to his life’s end he was equal to any physical hardship, pain or danger, under extreme psychological stress he would break rather than bend. This pattern appears in his story more than once.

The eagerness with which the satrap jumped at his offer must have opened his eyes; Pixodarus had clearly been promised no heir-apparent. But enlightenment came too late. Philip found out. And here the Plutarch manuscript has a tantalizing short gap. After the break, it says Philip went to Alexander’s room, taking with him Philotas son of Parmenion, one of Alexander’s close friends, and gave him a furious dressing down. He was probably confined to his room under house arrest. The presence of Philotas is unexplained, unless as a neutral witness, his father being Philip’s oldest friend; but the young man’s later record makes it not impossible that, unknown to Alexander, he had betrayed the plot.

Philip upbraided his son for being so unworthy of his rank as to seek an alliance with a mere Carian, the servitor of a barbarian king. In other words, he had been assured of his rank, and his doubts were as insulting as his action had been disastrous. For him the match was out of the question; and after Thettalus’ revelations, Arridaeus was of course turned down. The diplomatic coup was ruined. For a man with Alexander’s grasp of affairs it must have been a bitter moment. But worse was to come. The King, determined to show who was master and break up a subversive clique, banished from Macedon all Alexander’s intimates. The one interesting exception was Hephaestion. There are several feasible reasons, the most obvious being that Philip, like Aristotle, thought him a good influence on Alexander; for whose conduct, too, he might be a useful hostage, especially if Philip knew them to be lovers. He was a shrewd judge of men. As it was, he gave a last crack of the trainer’s whip; he had Thettalus, then in Corinth, arrested and brought to Pella in chains.

His professional status was that of an Irving or a Garrick. Even though only reprimanded—we hear nothing of any punishment beyond the gross humiliation of his fetters—it was an extreme step for Philip with his cultural aspirations. But he could have found no better way of flicking Alexander on the raw. His insistence on sharing every danger to which he exposed his men was almost an obsession. This time it had been impossible. The shame must have bitten deep; the resentment also. It is to his credit that he never pushed it out of his mind together with the friend concerned in it; Thettalus remained throughout his reign a welcome guest and favourite artist.

Meantime, the first phase of the Persian War had started. Parmenion and Attalus had taken an advance force across the Hellespont and secured a bridgehead. King Ochus had been poisoned the year before by his eunuch Grand Vizier, the king-maker Bagoas, whose power he had tried to curb; Arses his son was young and occupied with these internal dangers. The coastal satraps’ resistance seems to have been disorganized and weak. Had Alexander’s friendship with his father lasted, he himself would probably have held a command in the expedition. In his place went the hated Attalus.

Philip had one matter of home defence to see to before setting out himself: the conciliation of Epirus. Perhaps through Eurydice’s persuasions, perhaps because Olympias had made herself intolerable, or because he blamed her for what her son had done, Philip had decided upon divorce. This would naturally affront his brother-in-law, King Alexandros. Evidently, however, the family honour was of more concern to Alexandros than his sister’s feelings; for he readily accepted Philip’s offered amends, the hand of her daughter Cleopatra. That he was her uncle was in those days no impediment.

It would be of great interest to know what plans Philip had made for Alexander in the coming war. He would not now be trusted as Regent. If left behind, he would have had to be imprisoned, and there is no sign at all of any such intention. The alternative would have been taking him along to Asia, and giving him a command under conditions where his pride and ambition would have guaranteed good performance. In the field together, away from Macedon, it is probable that once more the father and son would have become good comrades-in-arms.

The wedding plans were resplendent. High-ranking guests and state envoys were invited from all over Greece, as befitted Philip’s status of pan-Hellenic war leader. Festival games in honour of the twelve Olympian gods were to be dedicated at a ceremony in the theatre at Aegae, near modern Edessa, the ancient capital. Their wooden images were paraded in gilded cars, to be set up in the round “orchestra” below the stage; each god with the lifelike colouring applied to all Greek sculpture, including its greatest marbles, bleached today only by time. A similar statue of Philip ended the pageant—making thirteen, a number already significant before the night of the Last Supper.

Ensured of publicity through the whole Greek world, Philip thought the time ideal for refuting Athenian propaganda about his “tyranny.” Greek despots had traditionally gone about hedged with bodyguards. In planning the procession he arranged that, after all the notables had gone into the theatre (this must have included Alexander), his personal guard should be halted in the road outside, for him to make his entrance alone. The Captain of the Bodyguard, whom he thus instructed, was none other than Pausanias, promoted to this rank over the years.

The King’s throne at such a ceremony would be on the stage. He would enter through the parodos, the imposing side entrance to a Greek theatre’s open wings. That the Captain of the Bodyguard should be standing there awaiting him must have seemed correct, or at any rate unsuspicious. As he came through the gateway, Pausanias thrust a dagger into his heart.

According to Diodorus, the only source to describe the scene in detail, the killer then ran away across a vineyard behind the theatre, towards horses standing by for his escape. He was ahead of his pursuers, when he caught his foot in a vine root. Before he could rise, he was cut down by the first men to overtake him.

The chiefs and nobles crowded to Alexander, unarmed at this sacred ceremony, and formed a bodyguard to take him to the citadel. His accession was not disputed. No other claimant was so much as named. He was King of Macedon.

The trial-by-historians of Alexander for his father’s murder, more or less closed since Plutarch’s day, has in modern times been reopened, despite a total lack of evidence for the prosecution. It would otherwise be a waste of space to re-examine it.

That he may have wished his father dead is neither here nor there. He had probably done so for at least a year. The world has been, and is, full of people visited by such wishes, who would be appalled at the thought of implementing them. Parricide was the most dreadful crime in Greek thought and religion, cursed by all the gods. That Alexander with his beliefs and temperament could not have borne this weight without going mad is obvious. However, this must not be taken as a decisive answer, in view of the possibility that Olympias had persuaded him he was not Philip’s son.

The mating of gods in physical shape with mortals was as sincere a belief with Greeks as is the Immaculate Conception to Catholics, with the difference that the former was not a unique event. Unlike the latter, it had never been attacked by science; Aristotle’s genetic studies steered well clear of such hemlock-worthy blasphemies. Olympias in a Dionysiac trance may genuinely have imagined almost anything. The issue of parricide being inconclusive, we must proceed to more practical considerations of motive. Assuming Alexander morally prepared to kill, why do it now?

He was on display at a pan-Hellenic festival, with the precedence due to his rank; presented before the state envoys as heir apparent. The worst of his disgrace had blown over; ahead was the war with its great opportunities. He had lived under Philip’s roof, and could surely have compassed his death when the incentive was far greater; for instance, just after the wedding speech of Attalus. It is true that Olympias’ position had worsened as Alexander’s had improved; but he did not later kill people at her demand, refusing even to remove a Regent she detested. There always remain, as credible human motives, sheer hate, and revenge; these must indeed have impelled the actual killer. But to Alexander the coming war would have offered many occasions of passing off a death as due to enemy action; this would surely have been the course of an intelligent man with devoted partisans. Why the public drama? Of all possible suspects, Alexander had least to gain by it.

Accomplices favoured by the prosecution are the three young men who struck down the murderer, allegedly to silence him; this on the grounds that two, Perdiccas and Leonnatus, later held commands under Alexander and were among his friends. The objection here is glaring. When Philip fell, says Diodorus, “immediately one group of the bodyguards hurried to the body of the King, while the rest poured out in pursuit of the assassin.” Naturally they would. How could Alexander possibly have determined who would get there first? As our own age should know, no explanation is needed for their killing their man, beyond the violence engendered by a violent scene. Pausanias was making good his escape till the vine root tripped him, which does not suggest efficient pre-arrangements. Soldiers with quick reactions in a crisis do tend to get promoted; and had Alexander been cold to those who so zealously avenged his father, he would have been highly suspect to his own contemporaries.

Pausanias’ accomplice with the horses must be borne in mind. That these were known to have been meant for the getaway suggests he was caught and interrogated. His evidence may have been of much importance in the subsequent trials.

The one item of “evidence” against Alexander in any ancient writer, indeed the only opinion, even, of the kind, occurs in Plutarch, that anecdotal holdall.

… most of the blame was laid on Olympias, because she had added her exhortations to the young man’s anger and urged him to the deed. But some slander [the Greek diabole means a false accusation] fell also on Alexander. For it is said that when Pausanias met him after the outrage and complained of it, Alexander quoted him the iambics from the Medea [Medea’s revenge wiped out most of the other characters]: “The bride, the groom and the bride-giver.”

It is perhaps sufficient to say that the last Illyrian frontier war at which Philip is known to have taken the field, and where his young friend presumably died, occurred when Alexander was twelve years old, and the “bride” about nine or ten.

Throughout his reign, Alexander never stands suspect of a surreptitious killing. When his power was vast, and he could have had anyone he chose put quietly out of the way, he suffered annoyance, frustration and downright insult from men he heartily disliked or distrusted; nothing happened to these people till he was ready to proceed against them openly. Whether on principle or from pride, he found furtiveness impossibly repugnant. Another constant trait was loyalty to his friends, and gratitude carried to extravagance towards those who had supported him when in disgrace with Philip. To believe he could have used Pausanias, sworn to protect him (which Pausanias as Captain of the Bodyguard would have known he could not do) and then shopped him with less compunction than a Mafia boss, calls for as much credulity as anything in the Romances.

As against all this, the incident is immemorially typical of a Greek blood-feud killing, where honour demands that revenge be taken, and be seen to be taken, by the wronged man himself or his next of kin. (The two such killings carried out in Athens while the present writer happened to be there were both public; one in front of a Plaka taverna, one in Omonia Square.) One editor of Diodorus notes with apparent scepticism that “Pausanias waited a long time for his revenge”; a startling observation in the context of ancient or, for that matter, modern Greece. It also ignores the recent rise of his enemy Attalus to high military rank and the status of royal father-in-law; favours which may well have seemed like rewards for the injury on which Pausanias had brooded for long obsessive years. He may even have been told so. That he was used, though not by Alexander, there is no need to doubt.

This was a time when most Athenian politicians were men on whose unsupported word one would not convict a dog. When, however, they remind their public of public events, we may start to listen. Some years after the murder, Aeschines accused his enemy Demosthenes of having ruined Athens through his blind hatred of Macedon. The speech goes on:

Now this was the man, fellow-citizens … who when informed through Charidemus’ spies that Philip was dead, before anyone else had been told, made up a vision for himself and lied about the gods, pretending he had had the news not from Charidemus but from Zeus and Athene … who he says converse with him in the night and tell him of things to come.

The most authoritative comment on this “vision” remains that of the historian John Williams, written a century and a half ago.

The event was public and could not be concealed. The deputies of all Greece were assembled there, and no message from Charidemus to Demosthenes could have outstripped the speed with which the news of such an event passes from mouth to mouth in a populous country. Not to mention that Charidemus would not have been the only deputy likely to despatch a messenger on such an occasion. Yet Demosthenes announced the death of Philip long before the news reached Athens from any other quarter… The accuracy of his information, and the falsehood respecting the alleged sources of his intelligence, almost indisputably prove that he was an accessory before the fact, and that he had previous notification of the very day on which the conspirators were to act.

The value of John Williams’s comment rests not on his erudition but his personal experience. He published his life of Alexander in 1829, just after the Napoleonic Wars; and his words about the flight of important news through populous countries, written before telecommunications, have the ring of certainty. The ancient world used for long-distance signalling both the heliograph and the beacon (the latter, in the Agamemnon, announces the fall of Troy). But since either called for a prearranged chain of signallers, their use would still be proof of complicity; for no verbal codes existed, and such signs could only confirm an expected fact.

Pausanias, the Captain of the Bodyguard, knew just where his men would be. He had had to form them up there. He can never have rated his chance of escape at more than even. However, he had horses ready, probably a ship too, and must have had some offered refuge. Demosthenes’ speeches show again and again how utterly he had failed to take Alexander’s measure. Even after the lightning victories which followed his accession, Demosthenes was mocking him as “Margites,” the anti-hero of a burlesque epic. For him, in the “vision” of the demagogue, there had certainly been a role: the theatrical young paladin, the inept untried king who, his formidable father gone, could be swept aside without trouble.

Demosthenes’ Persian paymaster had lately changed. The Vizier Bagoas, finding King Arses intractable, had poisoned him in turn, replacing him by a royal collateral, Darius III; one of whose first actions was to hand the Vizier a dose of his own medicine. The new Great King must have leaned greatly for the Greek intelligence on Demosthenes, who could have done him vital service in return for favours received, had he not been blinded by ingrained prejudice. Darius rested in false security; while Demosthenes broke off his mourning for his daughter’s death, put on a festal wreath, and proposed a posthumous vote of thanks to Pausanias.

If the role he had promised himself was to emerge, as soon as it was absolutely safe to do so, and proclaim himself the author of the enterprise, to defer this moment was the wisest act of his life.