The Nature of Alexander

Troy

ALEXANDER’S REIGN BEGAN IN 336 BC. He was a little over twenty.

“His physical looks are best portrayed in the statues Lysippus made of him. [Plutarch does not divulge which of Alexander’s own contemporaries, if any, expressed this view.] And he approved being sculpted by him alone. [But he must have licensed a number of others.] For this artist has caught exactly those idiosyncrasies which many of his successors and friends later tried to imitate—the poise of his neck, tilted a little leftward, and his liquid eyes. Apelles’ painting, ‘The Thunder-Wielder,’ did not get his complexion right, but made it too dark and tanned; for he was blond, they say, shading to ruddy on the breast and face.”

His liquid eyes were grey. Their expressiveness altered Greek artistic convention. All important portrait heads feature a heavy bulge of the forehead above the brows (allowing for idealization, probably even more marked in life), caused perhaps by a development of the frontal lobes of the brain; and the loosely waving, heavy mane of hair, springing from a peak, its individual cut sloped down to the base of the neck when in south Greece the short curly crop was in fashion. Arrian, both of whose main sources were men who saw him often, says that he was very handsome.

Clean shaving, long general among young men in the south, did not reach Macedon till he introduced it. His looks must have been admired in childhood and boyhood; it was perhaps a sign of his ambisexual nature that he did not want to alter them with a beard. Once he had set the fashion, it was so widely followed that later legend had him ordering the whole Macedonian army to shave. He was quoted as saying that a beard gives the enemy a handhold in close combat. He may really have offered this reason to himself.

“In Aristoxenus’ memoirs it is said that a very pleasant scent came from his skin, and that there was a fragrance in his breath and all his body which permeated the clothes he wore.” His fondness for a daily bath, when he could get it, is evident from all the sources; but on campaign he must often have been unwashed, which makes the observation interesting. When not struck down by occasional local fevers, he was a very healthy man. In days before dentistry, a sweet breath testified to a good set of teeth, as well as a good digestion. He loved violently active exercise, hunting, running, ball games; but despised professional athletics, which in his century had grown degenerate, producing ugly specialized physiques, instead of the balanced beauty of classical sculpture. He was himself considered a runner of Olympic standard, but declined to enter for the Games “unless I had kings to run against.” His pride would not tolerate even a suspicion that he had been given the race.

He loved music and theatre; artists braved immense hard journeys to appear before him, and were received as guests, not mere entertainers. He had himself by nature the actor’s biological rhythm, liking when at leisure to sit up late and sleep on next morning; a pattern not necessarily associated with heavy drinking, as every man of the theatre knows.

He could not live without books, which he had sent out to him in the heart of Asia, adding to the favourites he carried along. Next after Homer, it seems the chief of these was Xenophon, whose influence shows unmistakably again and again. He heartened his men by reminding them of the Anabasis with its resolute Ten Thousand and its accompanying exposures of Persian inefficiency. The young Xenophon himself, who got out of bed on a night of despair to rally the army, because his seniors were dead and nobody else was doing it, must have been a man after Alexander’s heart (and Shakespeare’s, who transferred it to King Harry on the eve of Agincourt). No doubt the treatises on horsemanship and hunting were valued too; but above all Alexander, with his high sense of theatre, showed in the drama of his life where his chief debt lay: to The Upbringing of Cyrus, the author’s sole work of fiction.

He must have read it first as history. Later when in Persia he would have learned of some discrepancies; but that the real Cyrus had died in battle, instead of in Socratic composure, probably endeared him all the more. The image of a conqueror brilliant, powerful and merciful, making friends of enemies, hailed as a father by the conquered, does not conflict with the fragmentary Persian records. Alexander had no need to discard his hero cult, as is seen from the devotion he lavished on Cyrus’ tomb.

The military lore in the Cyropaedia he probably skipped as elementary; his own father had been a far more sophisticated teacher. But Xenophon claims to present not maxims for generals, but the pattern of an ideal ruler, governing his conquered peoples in a vast extended empire.

He ruled over these nations, though they did not speak the same tongue as he, nor one nation the same as another’s; yet he was able to stretch the dread of him so far that all feared to withstand him; and he could rouse so eager a wish to please him that they all desired to be governed by his will.

… A ruler should not only be really better than his subjects; he should cast a kind of spell on them.

The astonishing corpus of the Alexander legends bears tribute to this last precept beyond anything dreamed of in Xenophon’s philosophy.

Kindled by a spontaneous sense of affinity, admiration for Cyrus must have been a powerful antidote to Aristotle’s insularity. Again and again Alexander’s conduct displays his debt to what has been called the first historical novel of the Western world. The following excerpts could be taken for quotations from an Alexander history.

And on campaign, the general must show he can bear better than his men the heat of the sun in summer, the cold in winter, and hardship on a difficult march. All these things go to make him loved by those he leads.

When the rest went to dinner at the usual time, Cyrus stayed [among the wounded] with his aides and doctors, for he would not leave anyone uncared for.

The gods, like men, are more likely to incline to us if we pay them attention during our height of fortune, not just toady to them in adversity. And this too is the way to cherish one’s friends.

He showed them always as much kindness as he could; for he held that just as it is hard to love people who seem to hate us, or have goodwill to those who are ill-wishing us, in the same way one who is affectionate and well disposed could not be hated by those aware of love. He tried to win the devotion of those around him by taking thought and trouble for them, showing gladness in their prosperity and sympathy in their misfortunes.

You [his men] possess in your souls what is fairest and most soldierlike: you rejoice above all in being praised. All men in love with praise feel constrained to endure any hardships and any dangers.

Cyrus was most handsome in person, most generous in his soul, most fond of learning, most in love with honourable fame, so that he would bear all suffering and all dangers for the sake of praise.

These last two extracts are central to an understanding of Alexander. Moderns who have accused him of “an unpleasant concern for his own glory” are thinking in terms of another age. Greek literature up to, and on, its very highest levels is permeated by the axiom that to be fameworthy is the most honourable of aspirations, the incentive of the best men to the best achievements. Socrates, Plato, Aristotle all accepted it. Its ethos outlasted Greece and Rome. The last word of our single English epic is lofgeornost—“most eager for fame.” It closes the lament of the warriors for the dead Beowulf.

Alexander III opened his reign in the traditional Macedonian way, by removing those who endangered his succession.

Plutarch and Diodorus agree that he sought out and punished the conspirators to his father’s murder. Neither describes the process of this inquiry. The purge was not discriminate. Its most important victim was his cousin Amyntas, Perdiccas III’s son, who under more ordinary succession laws would have been the reigning king. He was a full-blooded Macedonian, unlike Alexander with his unpopular Epirote mother. Philip must always have seemed a usurper to Amyntas; he was the natural choice had the coup succeeded, but whether he was killed on evidence or suspicion is unknown. Alexander deserves the benefit of the doubt, for in spite of his own humiliation over the Carian marriage intrigue, he did nothing to his half-brother Arridaeus, a harmless pawn on whom he felt it demeaning to take revenge. He was a dangerous pawn, however, to leave on the Macedonian chessboard. Alexander simply attached him to his court and took him on its travels. He must have been well cared for; he was the longer-lived of the two.

Two princes of Lyncestis, a family of once-independent kings in west Macedon, were executed. They may have hoped to recover their former sovereignty. But the eldest, another Alexandros, was let off because after the murder he had at once hailed Alexander as king. At some stage it seems to have emerged that the plot had been financed with Persian gold. This was probably true, whether it was supplied through Demosthenes or direct from Darius himself, who had good reason to dread Philip and no suspicion of what he would get instead.

Attalus, a declared and dangerous enemy, presented a special problem. He was on campaign in Asia Minor, among his own troops, many of them bound to him by tribal loyalties. He was believed, correctly, to be planning treason. Alexander wanted him brought for trial according to Macedonian law, but could not risk his leading his army over to the other side. An officer called Hecataeus was therefore sent on a secret mission, to take him prisoner if possible; if not, to kill him. Attalus was already in correspondence with Demosthenes with a view to joining Athens; but, perhaps alarmed by Alexander’s swift initial successes—the sequence of events is uncertain—he lost his nerve, and sent Demosthenes’ letter to Macedon with a plea for pardon. Hecataeus, however, had meantime decided he could afford to take no more chances, and killed him out of hand. In these circumstances there were no complaints that the letter of the law had not been observed. Hecataeus would of course have been supplied with a royal warrant, which he could present before or after the deed to Attalus’ officers and to the other general of the expeditionary force, Parmenion.

The case of Attalus is important. It offered Alexander a precedent, which would become crucial at a later crisis in his career.

Certainly at this moment he could afford no legal quibbles, nor can the decision have detained him long. He had not the time. At the news that the great Philip’s imperium had passed to a youth of twenty, all his conquered lands rose up in instant revolt. Alexander was surrounded with more dangers than his father had faced at the death of Perdiccas III.

The most immediate was the defection of Thessaly, whose feudal lords had no notion of making the archonship hereditary to Macedon. They manned the impregnable pass between the massifs of Olympus and Ossa, the narrow river gorge of Tempe. Alexander saw at once that if they got away with it the whole south would rise, and he would face another Chaeronea. He marched swiftly down, surveyed the terrain, saw with his lightning strategic instinct where the pass could be turned by cutting steps on the Ossa flank; and appeared in the Thessalians’ rear while his advance was still awaited. Stunned, they did homage without a fight, and offered him all Philip’s former rights and tribute. (From the latter he exempted Phthia, because it had been the birthplace of Achilles.) At Thermopylae he summoned a conference of the Sacred League, which recognized him without a dissenting vote.

The panic at Athens was equal to that after Chaeronea. The vote of thanks to Philip’s assassin was remembered with alarm; an embassy was dispatched to Alexander, to plead for pardon. He received it with courtesy, accusing no one. His march did not cross the Attic border. He did not, and never would, revisit the immortal museum of Western civilization. He called a conference at Corinth, as Philip had done before him, and was invested with Philip’s commission as war leader against the Persians.

The passes and strongpoints commanding the south were manned. The magnificent Macedonian walls which crown the Acrocorinth had yet to rise, but its acropolis was garrisoned. Thebes, as in Philip’s time, had its Cadmea (a man-made citadel of no great height) held by Macedonians. South Greece was secured, and none too soon considering the threat from the north. No expedition to Asia was possible before Thrace was controlled. Parmenion’s expeditionary force was already in danger of having its communications cut.

In Macedon, Olympias had made good use of his absence. It is not credible that, as Justin says, she came galloping from Epirus to crown with gold the body of Pausanias, displayed on a traitor’s cross. But she had enjoyed a far greater satisfaction; she had forced her young rival Eurydice to hang herself, presumably by threats of torture, after first watching the death of her newborn second infant. When Alexander came back he was angry, Plutarch says. He had spared Arridaeus, and this girl too had been a pawn of state.

Winter had come. Over its short span Alexander had to ready his newly inherited army for the urgent work of safeguarding the force already committed to Asia. In early spring, when Thracian war bands ceased to hibernate, he marched northeast with his usual cool-headed speed; his mind not only on immediate but future dangers. The military road to the Hellespont once secured, his objective was the hinterland of the still unsubdued Triballians. These were the tribesmen who had fallen on Philip during his return march from Byzantium, and given him his crippling wound. Their habitat was the riverland of the Ister (Danube) beyond the wild mountain range of Haemon, the Stara Planina of today’s Bulgaria. When at sixteen he was left as Regent, his campaign against the Maedi had led him up that way; he would have pressed on then, had his father not recalled him “lest he should undertake too much.” His strategic sense had been sound. He would now square the account, and protect the lifeline to Asia.

He had held no command since the battle of Chaeronea, the climax of a campaign directed by Philip throughout; he had not independently led an army since his repulse of the Illyrians when he was seventeen. He had been in exile, followed by disgrace; his status in Philip’s planned expedition had been uncertain. Yet he had only to appear before the troops and lead them—and this into very difficult country, where Philip himself had been defeated—to be followed with élan and unquestioning trust. This fact, eclipsed in history by his later exploits, is perhaps as remarkable as any.

Beside his own Macedonians, he had a contingent of Agriani, a Thracian tribe whose young chieftain, Lambarus, he had already made a friend of, perhaps in his earlier wars, or because Lambarus had been sent to Pella, like some other noble Thracians, as hostage for his father’s fealty. In any event he was devoted to Alexander. The warlike Thracians, who tattooed themselves blue and collected enemy heads as trophies, were considered rather backward even by the standards of rural Macedon. But Alexander throughout his life was concerned with the individual.

He showed from the outset of the campaign his characteristic swift adjustment to the unexpected. The defenders of the Haemon pass had walled themselves behind a line of carts, which they started to bowl down on his men with the lethal force of gravity. Throwing the phalanx into open order, he told those who could not avoid a cart to crouch under a roof of shields (thus anticipating the Roman “tortoise”). The carts bounced over; not a man was lost, the pass was carried. He advanced into the river plain of the Triballians, a large force of whom shortly cut off his rear. He turned round at once to meet them; they withdrew into an impregnable gorge. He never wasted his men’s lives in stacking such positions; he sent archers and slingers to harass from a distance; when the enemy took the bait and came out in chase, he fell on them with all his forces. Panicking, they were cut down with the usual dire contrast of casualties between pursuer and pursued. To soldiers of the ancient world there was a force unknown today in what Alexander would say to his men a decade later: “While I have led you, not one of you has been killed in flight.”

After this battle he marched north to the Ister. Not only did he want to control the land it bounded; he had a longing, says Arrian, to cross to the other side.

This is the first time of many in his life story where we hear of such a craving—the Greek word is pothos. His many-sided nature had a powerful strain of the explorer. The Ister was the northern edge of the known Greek world; all beyond was hearsay. But his dreams had always their practical side; he did not aim to pass over the great river only “because it was there.” The tribes beyond were known for fierce warriors and raiders; and he wanted before he left for Asia to make a lasting impression. If he crossed to their side, they might later feel discouraged from crossing to his.

The Danube in its lower course was such a stream as neither he nor his men had ever before set eyes on. He had had some war galleys sent up from Byzantium (now subdued) but they were only a squadron, with their rowers taking up room, and he had to embark an army. Here Xenophon came to his constant reader’s aid; he has a passage about the inflated hide rafts used to cross the Euphrates. Hide was used also to make army tents (it must have made the baggage trains immensely cumbrous), and these Alexander had cobbled into rafts, stuffed with hay for buoyancy. He also commandeered the local dugout canoes. On this makeshift flotilla he crossed the Ister by night, with 4,000 foot and, astonishingly, 1,500 cavalry. The horses must have swum.

This whole campaign is described with the close detail of an eyewitness; presumably Ptolemy. He had not yet been promoted to high command; not till after Philip’s death had Alexander been able to recall his banished friends. His present chief of staff was another friend of those days, Parmenion’s son Philotas. Never having lost the royal favour, he had entered the new reign with higher rank.

However experienced the officers, this was a manœuvre quite new to the Macedonian army; its broad strategy and comprehensive grasp of detail must belong to Alexander. On the far bank the infantry advanced through high standing corn, flattening it by holding their sarissas sideways (they must have been extremely well drilled) to make a path for the cavalry. On open ground beyond, Alexander deployed his forces. But the local Getae were so shocked by this uncanny arrival in the dawn that they fled before the cavalry, first from their town, then on into the wilderness with such women and children as they could take on their horses’ cruppers. The Macedonians took the town and “as much plunder as the Getae had left behind”; which, in fourth-century terms, would include any remaining women and children. For such victims, massacre or slavery were the universal alternatives. These were enslaved.

On the Ister shore, Alexander sacrificed to Zeus the Preserver, to Heracles, and to the spirit of the river for graciously granting them passage. Having got everyone back across without a single drowning, he sat down to await results. Soon respectful embassies arrived from the tribes along the river. Their reception must have gone on for some time; for the last arrivals were Celts, from some distant settlement near the Adriatic. Men whom even the Macedonians thought very tall, they towered over the rumoured conqueror they had come to placate. Either from vanity or curiosity, he asked them what thing on earth they dreaded most. They feared nothing, they said, unless that the sky should fall on them. Amused by this gasconading brag (one he never made for himself) he sent them home with a pact of friendship.

Still in the north, he got news that the formidable Illyrians had risen; and that an intermediate tribe, the Antariates, planned to fall on him as he marched to meet the danger. At this the young Lambarus, still at hand with the pick of his Thracian warriors, told him to forget the Antariates at any rate; they were worth nothing as fighters, he would invade them himself and keep them occupied. Moved as always by a spontaneous act of friendship, Alexander loaded him with gifts of honour, and promised to join them in kinship with the hand of Cynna, one of his bastard sisters. They never met again; Lambarus, after a devastating performance of his mission, went home, fell ill and died. Whether or not Cynna shared her brother’s grief, the Agriani remained the most loyal of his auxiliaries.

Making haste over now familiar ground he reached the Illyrian frontier ranges. Cleitus, the Illyrians’ chief war lord, held the hill town of Pelium and the heights commanding it. The troops outside fled at sight of the Macedonians, leaving behind the freshly killed bodies of nine victims just sacrificed for victory—three black rams, three boys and three girls. (No wonder Alexander did not care to dwell on his Illyrian exile.) He invested the town; just avoided being encircled by a large relieving force; led out a troop to rescue Philotas, who was commanding a guard over the draught animals; but after doing so was himself dangerously trapped in a narrow pass between hills and river. This situation he met with sheer bravura. He had guessed from the Illyrians’ earlier flight that his name had run before him—in those parts he had been known for years—and he threw what troops he had into a polished display of aggressive drill. Their expertise and unknown intentions so dismayed the tribesmen that they started falling back. He ordered his men to yell and beat on their shields. The enemy abandoned their vantage points and bolted for the fort.

Still in difficult country, and harassed as he crossed a river, he got his archers firing from midstream, and set up his light catapults—a very smart operation, since they were taken apart for mule transport. His men were extricated in a fighting withdrawal, never once presenting their defenceless backs. Shortly after, taking advantage of the Illyrians’ indiscipline, which he must have known well, he put on a night attack and routed them out of the town. The west was settled; but he was to have no respite. A still more serious danger now threatened from the south.

Word of the risings had spread. The new King of Macedon, after a brief appearance at Corinth, had vanished into the wilds whence no news came. After no long delay, Demosthenes emerged and, contacting Darius and his leading satraps, offered, if they would finance him, to keep Alexander tied down in Greece. The Greek cities of Asia were tacitly written off to bondage; Demosthenes’ democratic principles were strictly parochial. So eagerly did Darius respond that his account rolls, when captured later in Sardis, showed disbursements to his ally of 300 talents.

Presently it was learned that the Thebans had admitted some anti-Macedonians whose lives Philip had spared after Chaeronea on condition of their exile, murdered two Macedonian commanders who in peacetime laxity had gone outside the citadel, and proceeded to invest the garrison within it. Elated by this news, and well supplied with funds, Demosthenes sent Thebes a large consignment of arms. Continuing to assure the Athenians that Alexander was a strutting boy, he urged them to join the war. They voted to do so, and started to prepare. Still no word came from the hinterland. Then rumour announced that Alexander was dead.

No sickness or wound had caused a genuine error. Demosthenes produced a man who swore to having seen him fall. On the strength of this, the Thebans openly proclaimed alliance with Persia against Macedon. When, within a week, they heard that an army led by Alexander was coming down through Thessaly, they refused at first to credit it. At all events, it could not conceivably be that Alexander. It would be Alexandros of Lyncestis. (They must have supposed him the new king.)

They were swiftly disillusioned. Alexander had brought his forces down from Pelium, through a series of mountain passes, a distance even by air of a hundred miles, in a six-day march. Scarcely pausing to pick up his allied troops from central Greece, in another six he was already in Boeotia. He appeared before Thebes next day.

Had he in fact been dead, it would have cancelled the Thebans’ treaty. His early forbearance may have come from knowledge of the rumour. For reasons which may have been emotional or religious, he encamped by the precinct of the hero Iolaus, Heracles’ charioteer and beloved companion, at whose shrine the couples of the Sacred Band used to take their vows. He sent an envoy to the city, offering to accept their surrender on terms if they would give up the anti-Macedonians who were there illegally. The Thebans refused, with a mocking counter-demand for Philotas and Antipater. They made a sortie against Alexander’s pickets, some of whom they killed. He now moved to a strategic position, near the gate that faced towards Attica and gave him the nearest approach to the beleaguered Macedonian garrison.

It was also the approach route from Athens, of whose intentions he would by now have heard. But in that respect his vigilance was needless. No troops from the south appeared. The alarming speed of his march had brought painful second thoughts. Without protest from Demosthenes the Athenians closed their gates, leaving the Thebans to weather the storm alone.

It did not yet break. Alexander still awaited a parley. He had collected on his southward march contingents of troops from Macedonian satellites, chiefly Phocians and Plataeans. The latter, it will be remembered, were the descendants of the Marathon heroes, inheritors of their perpetual Athenian citizenship, whom Demosthenes had traded to the Thebans on the eve of Chaeronea.

Alexander kept close to the Theban siege lines, at their nearest point of approach to the Macedonian garrison, trapped inside the Cadmea. This, as can still be seen, was no acropolis perched on natural rock; it relied for defence on its massive walls. For the next sequence of events, which Arrian gives in vivid detail, he expressly says that his source is Ptolemy, who must have taken part. He claimed that Perdiccas, still at that time holding only a small command, was posted next the siege works. For some reason, without awaiting orders, he rushed his men to the palisade and started to tear it down.

For justice towards Perdiccas we shall look in vain to Ptolemy, who had been his mortal enemy many years before he wrote his History, and has probably suppressed a good reason for this apparent breach of discipline, such as a signal from the garrison of some weakness in the enemy dispositions which needed quick action. Perdiccas was the man for it, as he had shown at Philip’s death. He broke through and got in. A fellow officer, seeing this, led up his men in support. Alexander, not far off, perceived they were all in danger of being cut off inside; he sent reinforcements, still reserving his main army. Assaulting the inner palisade, Perdiccas fell badly wounded. The rest pressed on; then the Thebans, rallying, got them on the run. This was decisive for Alexander; he charged at once, thrusting back the Thebans with such force that the city gates, which had been opened to let them in again, were jammed and let in their pursuers too.

It was the end. As the Macedonians flooded in, “with Alexander appearing everywhere,” the Theban cavalry pelted off across the plain, the infantry fled as they could; and the ancient city was given up to sack. The Phocians and the Plataeans, Arrian says, were the chief agents of a massacre that spared neither age nor sex, nor even suppliants hauled out of the temples. It has been said that Alexander could have stopped it if he had liked. This would possibly have been true in Thrace or in Illyria; it would certainly have been true after he crossed to Asia, when his authority was absolute over all his forces. His position at Thebes was unique. The allied troops were men to most of whom, till they joined his forced march a week before, he had been unknown except by name, simply the awe-inspiring Philip’s twenty-one-year-old son; while the Thebans were familiar enemies, against whom generations of hatred had been stored. Before Philip’s intervention, the Phocian War had been marked with hideous savageries. The atrocities of the lately betrayed Plataeans, if anyone’s fault but their own, may most fairly be blamed upon Demosthenes.

Arrian says the “best” of the Theban citizens (a term often, but not always, meaning the upper classes) had wanted to ask for terms, but had been prevented by the extremists. Alexander’s genius for command included an unerring instinct for rare moments when commands will be disregarded with consequent loss of face; but for the rest of his life, he seldom refused the petition of a Theban; if he found one serving as a Persian mercenary, he pardoned him because he had no home. Even during the shambles, he saved where he could find them—it must have been hit or miss—priests, old guest-friends of Macedonians (probably the hosts of his father’s youth), and the descendants of Pindar, along with the poet’s house. By general vote of the allies, most of the city was razed.

After the sack, the Thracian troops dragged before Alexander a woman whom they charged with killing one of their officers. She admitted it freely. He had broken into her house, raped her, and demanded to know where her valuables were hidden. In the well, she had told him, leading him up the garden to it and, when he craned over, pushing him in. When his men arrived she had finished him off with stones. She added, defiantly, that she was the sister of Theagenes, who had fallen at Chaeronea, leading the Sacred Band. He pardoned her at once and freed her with her children. This well-known Plutarch anecdote upholds Ptolemy’s apportionment of the blame for the massacre. Its most significant fact is that the woman was brought before Alexander. These Thracians were not newly joined allies but his regular troops. If they had been let loose to sack the city, he could not have given a judgment which implied that their officer had got what he deserved; and in any case, they would have taken their own revenge.

Meantime the Athenians were celebrating the Eleusinian Mysteries, the most solemn rite of the Attic year, when the first Theban fugitives galloped up with the news. For the third time panic reigned in Athens. The Mysteries were abandoned. Villagers with their household goods crowded within the walls. A peace embassy was chosen to sue for mercy: some pro-Macedonians, and trustfully, the city’s eloquent champion, Demosthenes. He rode with the rest as far as the Attic frontier; where his reflections grew so disturbing that he excused himself and retired.

The miserable remnant brought the victor abject congratulations on his safe return from the north and recent victory. Civilly he accepted Athens’ submission, and agreed to spare her if the most virulent anti-Macedonians were given up. Even this he was talked out of by the tactful Demades, the same man Philip had used as his envoy after Chaeronea. Antipater in Macedon, getting the news that Demosthenes had been spared, must have thought the young King had taken leave of his senses. He was quick to correct the error after Alexander was dead. To Alexander himself, his own standards being what they were, it must have seemed unthinkable that Demosthenes could lift his head again. Here he failed to get the measure of fourth-century Athens. None the less, in withholding from that head a martyr’s crown, he proved wiser than old Antipater.

His work in the south was over. Greece was secured. He returned to Macedon, to prepare for the enterprise which was to fill the remaining third of his life.

In Macedon, Alexander performed the traditional sacrifices at the feast of Olympian Zeus, and held, besides the usual Games, contests for artists “in honour of the Muses.” During this time he got news that a famous statue of Orpheus, enshrined in south Macedon, had started to sweat profusely. The seers, pondering the omen, decided that the new King’s exploits would give the poets work.

He never had, as he must have hoped to have, his epic. Both he and posterity have been better served by the memoirs of a soldier, a sailor and an engineer. His best poetic epigraph was coined a good deal later by the Cavalier Montrose, thrown away in the middle of a love lyric.

I will like Alexander reign,

And I will reign alone;

My spirit ever did disdain

A rival near my throne.

He either fears his fate too much,

Or his deserts are small,

Who will not put it to the touch

To win or lose it all.

It is briefer than he would have wished; but it distils his essence.

Meantime Darius, whose troops had been waging local defensive war against Parmenion’s bridgehead, disturbed by the news from Greece, had hired, also from Greece, some 50,000 mercenaries. Their general was Memnon, a veteran of Ochus’ reign. He had been involved in the satraps’ revolt and spent his exile in Macedon, where he had studied his hosts’ tactics before being recalled. Alexander, who never thought the worse of old Artabazus for taking the field against him in the service of a Persian king, felt no such tolerance towards Greeks who did so. The army raised by Memnon had but few hard-up soldiers hiring their swords for bread; mostly it was of southerners continuing the war against Macedon after their cities had signed peace treaties. These Alexander resented as he did not the Persians who were only doing their duty.

He prepared to set out in spring. During the winter, he was urged by all those nearest him to marry and beget an heir before he left, lest he should be killed.

Antipater is said to have been insistent; loyal advice, for he was to be left as Regent, and if the King died childless would be well placed to seize the throne. But he had no more success than Philip and Olympias before him. Alexander impatiently replied that this was no time to sit at home “holding marriage feasts and awaiting the birth of children.” To have done the first need not have entailed the second. If offspring did not appear after his departure, he could have summoned his bride to Asia and tried again. Clearly he still found the whole idea repugnant. He may have reflected, too, that a child reared in Macedon in his absence would be wholly dominated by Olympias.

Had he taken Antipater’s advice, he might have been survived by a successor eleven years old; had he taken his parents’, one of perhaps fourteen; and the whole course of Hellenistic history would have been altered. It is said that when asked how he had contrived to subdue Greece so swiftly, he answered, “By never putting off anything till tomorrow.” This one thing he put off; and set in train a generation of wars.

At least it saved him expense. A much more pressing problem just then was money. It was said of Philip that at his accession his most valuable asset was a cup of thin gold, which he kept at night in the bed box under his pillow. Later he amassed much wealth, but he had also spent it: on his army, on buying support in Greece, on civilizing Macedon, and on preparing for the war. Alexander was to say later, “I inherited from my father a few gold and silver cups, less than sixty talents in the treasury; and debts of five hundred that he owed. When I had borrowed another eight hundred, I set out.” In spite of this, or because of it, he realized all his personal estate, and gave it away to friends and loyal supporters. Some would take nothing, like Perdiccas; whose inclusion suggests, in spite of Ptolemy, that he did the right thing at Thebes. “What are you keeping for yourself?” he asked. “Hope,” said Alexander, to which Perdiccas’ prophetic answer was, “That I’ll share.”

In early spring, Alexander marched east with 30,000 infantry, partly light-armed skirmishers and archers, and about 5,000 cavalry: scarcely more than the Macedonian numbers at Chaeronea, to invade an empire which, if marshalled by an enemy of a calibre anywhere near his own, could have put a million in the field. Tarn has well said that he embarked upon the war at first because “he never thought of not doing it; it was his inheritance.” It was in what the war engendered that his unique genius appeared.

He marched to the Hellespont alongside his fleet; but the far superior Persian navy did not attack. At the crossing of the straits he took the helm of his own flagship; probably as a boy he had sailed on the now-vanished Pella lagoon. Having sacrificed in midstream to Poseidon, on the further shore he cast his spear before him as an omen, and was the first to wade to land. He had no backward look for Europe, which he was never to see again.

Typically, before doing anything else he made straight for Troy—ruined, but traceable on its site of natural rock—made offerings to its patroness Athene, and dedicated at her shrine his whole panoply of arms; taking for himself, as of right, his choice of her ancient, allegedly Homeric trophies, including a shield which would later save his life. Here he and Hephaestion paid their tribute to the immortal friends; Plutarch says also that Alexander and his comrades stripped and ran a ceremonial race round Achilles’ gravemound. All sources agree that he sacrificed to the hero. Some enterprising tourist tout offered him the authentic lyre of Paris (whose other name was Alexandros); he crisply rejected this relic of an effete hedonist, saying he would prefer the instrument to which Achilles sang about the deeds of heroes. The truth is perhaps that lyres and singing were still a sore subject, even after eight or ten years.

After this romantic dedication of his adventure, he marshalled his forces for the conquest of transpontine Greece, his only present objective. He marched north, then east along the coast of the Dardanelles, where the Persian force awaited him.

It was not yet led by Darius, who put nothing off till tomorrow if next week or next month would do. Its most expert commander was the mercenary general Memnon, leading 15,000 of his Greeks. He was, however, outranked by half a dozen aristocratic Persians. When he advised scorching the countryside and starving out the Macedonians, who could not live very long on what they brought, the local satrap indignantly refused and carried the others with him. They then decided to hold the eastern bank of the River Granicus, just inshore from its mouth; a reasonable alternative in view of their (much-disputed) numbers, which seem to have been inferior to the invaders’. Alexander would have to tackle them before he advanced inland, and the high river banks gave them a needed advantage.

As Alexander neared the river, his scouts reported the Persians’ position. Since his landing he had been joined by Parmenion, who had replaced his son Philotas as second-in-command. If Parmenion did advise Alexander against pitched battle and propose a dawn surprise—another disputed matter in view of later events—it was probably on the assumption that the enemy would adopt the obviously sensible tactic of posting their firm-stanced infantry on the top of the bank, to prod back with their spears the insecure and slithering horsemen as they scrambled up. Instead it was held by cavalry. General Fuller is surely right in seeing here another example of aristocratic noblesse oblige and racial pride. The mere infantry were foreign hirelings—no gentleman should shelter himself behind them.

Medieval knights, on big horses, anchored by stirrups into their massive saddles and holding their huge spears in rests, would have offered an impregnable defense line. But the Persians, with the insecure seat of the ancient horseman, were also handicapped by having not even small spears as combat hand weapons, but missile javelins, of which each man is unlikely to have carried more than two. The Macedonians had strong battle lances of cornel wood. Depending though they did on the rider’s arm movements, since using his horse’s forward impetus would have pushed him off, they were still superior armament. The armies were near enough for Alexander to be aware of this.

Drawing up his forces to front the river, he gave the left wing to Parmenion, himself taking up the time-honoured royal station on the right; his brigade commander here was Philotas. Arrian gives the name of all section leaders; and it is interesting to see the great future generals, Craterus and Perdiccas, still only phalanx commanders. Ptolemy and Hephaestion had as yet no commands at all. A true professional, Alexander had no favourites in the field.

The fact that he himself was so resplendently armed as to be recognizable as far as he could be seen, deplorable by modern standards, was professional too throughout all ages of war but ours. That practical soldier Xenophon relates approvingly of Cyrus that his arms shone like a mirror and his helmet had a white plume. Alexander put up two of them, one each side.

Having launched his first shock-troops into the river, he returned to the right wing, gave his war yell, and, riding in front, drove straight into the massive formation drawn up on purpose to receive him. He directed his thrust towards the Persian high command, traditionally in the centre, rescuing some of his own centre assault troops who were hard pressed. The scrimmage on the steep churned-up bank was for some time indecisive, the Macedonians being faced with hand-to-hand combat whenever they reached the top; the Persians, their javelins expended, now using side arms. In this hacking and shoving Alexander’s spear was broken; he got another from one of his squires, a Demaratus of Corinth, probably the grandson of the Demaratus who had negotiated his return from exile. With this he dashed at a conspicuous Persian general, killed him, and was at once involved in a mêlée, getting a blow on the helmet which removed one of its plumes. While he was accounting for this assailant, another raised his scimitar to bring it down on him; the brother of his childhood nurse Hellanice, Cleitus “the Black,” was in time to cut through the second attacker’s arm.

Resolution, discipline, and the strong cornel-wood lances carried the day. The Persians fell into confusion, then into flight. Alexander let them go; he concentrated his assault upon the mercenaries, whom he regarded as traitors to Greece. Here there was a savage slaughter. Some must have escaped, but he only took about 2,000 prisoners, whom he did not re-employ but sent to hard labour in Macedon. Memnon himself got away to fight again. The Persian satrap Arsames, who had overruled his advice before the battle, also escaped, but killed himself.

Macedonian casualties were light. To the twenty-five Companions who had fallen in the first assault Alexander gave special funeral honours with tax remission to their families, and had their statues cast in bronze. After the battle he went to see the wounded, Arrian says: “looking at their wounds, asking how they got them, encouraging each to tell about his deeds and even brag of them.” Glimpses like this explain the extraordinary relationship that was to evolve between him and his army in ensuing years.

He buried the Persian generals with the honours of war, and gave the dead Greek mercenaries a proper Greek funeral. To fourth-century men there was much more in this than a gesture; it was the rite of peaceful passage to the land of shades. What to modern man may seem cynical seemed to contemporaries generous and unusual; his effect on them will be better understood if this is borne in mind. Of a piece with it is his pardoning of local people who, unlike the mercenaries, had been serving the Persians under conscription.

He now marched south to Sardis, a formidable inland fortress on high rock, which surrendered without a fight. In Asia Minor he would be dealing mostly with cities where only the garrison and officials felt loyalty to Persia; these Lydians were the people of King Croesus, conquered in Cyrus’ day. The treasury of Sardis, if not quite up to Croesus’ legend, was well filled, and came just when he needed it. He built a temple to Olympian Zeus on the old site of the royal palace under the divine direction of a lightning bolt, garrisoned the acropolis, and allowed the people their traditional customs and laws. Olympian Zeus, the patron god of Macedon, is on the reverse of nearly all his silver coinage, enthroned, after Phidias’ famous statue at Olympia. The obverse has Heracles with his lion-mask hood. As the mints go east, the Zeus, carved by non-Greek craftsmen, grows increasingly vague, the Heracles more and more like Alexander.

The Greek coastal city of Ephesus opened its gates to him, disclosing a society seething with hate and vendetta. Greek oligarch collaborators had ruled it for the Persians. On the news of Alexander’s victory, these people had been lynched by the democrats, or dragged from temple sanctuary and stoned to death with their children. He restored the democracy, but strictly forbade any more reprisals, “knowing that once they got leave, the people would kill some men unjustly, from mere hate, or to get hold of their wealth, along with those who deserved it.” Arrian says his popularity soared after this decree.

He sacrificed there to Artemis (Saint Paul’s Diana of the Ephesians) and held a brilliant victory parade. Greek cities now fell to him like ripe fruit. In each he evicted pro-Persian quislings and established Greek-style democracies. This, he told them, was what he had come to do; and he may not yet have been looking further.

Fifty miles south he was in Caria, and gazed for the first time on that state so calamitous in his past. The satrap Pixodarus had been some time dead, succeeded by a kinsman devoted to Persian interests. Had Alexander’s intrigue come off, it would probably have brought him nothing but a redundant Carian wife. He got instead a Carian mother.

Pixodarus was a usurper. His predecessors had been a brother and sister, married (as in Egypt) by royal custom. On her husband’s death, Ada the wife had the right to rule alone, but had been expelled by Pixodarus. Retiring in good order, she had established herself in the strong harbour fortress of Alinda. This she now surrendered to Alexander, offering him allegiance if he restored her rights. Diplomatic courtesies soon turned to maternal adoration, indulgently and affectionately received. She cosseted and spoiled him; shocked by his plain diet, she plied him with cordon bleu till he was driven to polite excuses. Before long, she formally adopted him as her son. By now the irony may have amused him.

Unlike many men whose childhood has been mother dominated, Alexander was never drawn sexually to older women. He preferred the filial role. Later he was to assume it with much deeper involvement; and to a third such bond, seemingly the most casual and incongruous, he was to owe his life.

He marched to Miletus, a port in the usurper’s territory. Its garrison commander began to treat for surrender, got wind of seaborne reinforcements and changed his mind. Alexander’s small fleet of 160 ships slipped swiftly into the strategic harbour of Lade across the narrow strait; the Persians, forced to take second best, beached their belated 400 vessels northward up the coast.

Parmenion is said to have urged a sea fight, presumably because of the better Macedonian position. An eagle had been propitiously seen on shore at their ships’ sterns. Alexander preferred to let the Persians alone, because, he said, their ships were crewed by more experienced seamen, and a victory would give a fillip to their morale. The eagle had perched on land, pointing out where fortune lay. Finally, “he would not risk sacrificing the skill and courage of his Macedonians.” Reckless with his own life, he was never wasteful of theirs, a fact well known to them and never undervalued.

He breached and stormed the Miletus walls, his ships closing the harbour mouth against Persian aid. Some of the garrison escaped by sea, rafted with their wooden shields, to an offshore islet. He sailed after them, but, “seeing the men on the island would fight to the last, he pitied them as high-minded and faithful soldiers.” The Milesians he let go free; the mercenaries were Greek, but he hired them in his own service.

The powerful Persian fleet, denied the harbour, was still beached with all its soldiers. Warships of the ancient world could never carry stores enough to feed for long their rowers, their seamen and the troops they carried. They had constantly to put in for water and supplies; hence the importance of supporting land troops. This fleet had none. Alexander sent out Philotas to occupy the surrounding coast and virtually besiege them by cutting them off from provisions. On land they were vastly outnumbered; after one vain attempt to provoke a sea fight, their stores were exhausted and they had to go. The complete success of this minor operation suggested to Alexander’s logical mind a major long-term strategy. Why not refuse to the Persian navy all its ports of call?

“He interpreted the eagle to mean that he should conquer the ships by land.” Alexander’s impetuosity in battle went with a surprising readiness to form a long-term objective and to wait. His plan meant mastering the whole east Mediterranean seaboard before he struck inland; but it would secure both the liberated cities and his own communications. He laid a heavy stake on it by disbanding, except a couple of transports for his siege engines, all his own ships; which, despite his haul at Sardis, he could still not well afford to maintain. It would leave him cut off if he were defeated; but defeat, like fear, he presumed not to exist.

His next objective was Halicarnassus, the late Pixodarus’ capital. A commanding fortress rebuilt in later ages by Seljuks and Crusaders, it was a tougher proposition than Miletus and needed a full-scale siege. One of its two commanders was the expert Memnon. Arrian describes in detail the filling of its great moat to bring up the siege towers, the sorties from the fort to burn them, the final breach of the wall. When the city was clearly at his mercy, Alexander broke off the action and withdrew, offering a parley to discuss terms next day. He was roused at midnight to see the town in flames; Memnon and his men had fired it and a wind was spreading the blaze. He stormed inside, ordering all fire raisers caught in the act to be killed, but citizens spared. Memnon and his staff had got away.

Alexander was now master of Caria. He garrisoned its fortresses, and restored Queen Ada to the satrap’s throne.

His next action was to give Parmenion his separate command. If the young King’s rejection of his advice was stressed in later chronicles for expedient reasons, this is no proof that such incidents were fictitious. They suggest a familiar human pattern. Parmenion was now in his middle sixties. He had been Philip’s intimate friend for more than twenty years. He now found himself working with a high command mostly a full generation younger, under a leader in his early twenties. If he had adjusted with ease from Philip’s mental processes to Alexander’s, it would have been little short of a miracle. Shakespeare’s Antony complains that Octavius’ tutelary genius daunts his own, and Parmenion may have felt this perennial situation. On Alexander’s side, a man who had been so close to his father, who had married a daughter of Attalus when he was in power and Alexander in disgrace, must always have created some sense of tension. At all events, he now detached Parmenion to command the communication lines over the conquered territory. A tendency to repeat this policy was to have terrible results for both of them.

Alexander now gave home leave to all Macedonian soldiers newly married before setting out; a wildly popular directive, and thoughtful for future Macedonian manpower. He next moved against the mountain hill tribes, everywhere in the world intractable; midwinter had driven them down into the valleys, easing the task of subjugation. During this time, Parmenion intercepted a message from Darius to Alexandros of Lyncestis—whose two brothers had been executed for complicity in Philip’s murder—offering him the throne of Macedon if he would procure Alexander’s death. This prince had now been promoted to command of the Thracian cavalry. As a possible successor should Alexander die childless, he had always been a source of danger; his survival represented a notable departure from Macedonian royal precedent. Even now, however, Alexander, lacking proof that the Persian offer had been solicited, did not charge him with treason, but kept him under precautionary arrest. It was remembered that during the recent siege, a swallow had entered the royal tent, and fluttered over its sleeping occupant. Half waking, Alexander had gently brushed it away, but it had returned and perched on his head. The seers divined that the warnings of this domestic bird meant domestic danger. However, Alexander still held his hand.

The winter was spent in reducing coastal strongholds, working south and down round Asia Minor’s eastward curve. With the spring he struck inland as far as Gordium, locale of the famous knot. It was a leather thong, intricately wound about the shaft of an ancient vehicle on which their most famous king, the legendary Midas, was supposed to have arrived. Plutarch says, most probably by hindsight, that the man who could undo it was destined to rule the world. Arrian says that by some accounts Alexander cut it with his sword in proverbial manner; by others, he tugged out the shaft it was wound round, and discovered the hidden end. “I shall not try,” writes Arrian conscientiously, “to say exactly how Alexander dealt with this knot.” It is agreed he dealt with it. There were thunderings and lightnings, to clinch the matter.

Further south, he approached the almost impregnable pass of the Cilician Gates, but had not to force it. Its holding force fled as soon as they heard he was there in person. At Tarsus, he nearly killed himself by jumping into the Cydnus (the stream that carried Cleopatra’s barge to Antony) while tired, hot and sweating. It was snow water; he got cramp and a bad chill, and his life was thought in danger. Here he made one of his impassioned testimonies to friendship. His doctor, Philip, was about to dose him, when a letter arrived from Parmenion, assuring him that Darius had bribed the man to poison him. In view of the offer to Alexandros of Lyncestis, this cannot have seemed trivial. It may even have been tried on Philip, though ignored. Alexander handed him the letter and, while he read it, tossed the medicine down. Philip, looking up in horror, saw Alexander smiling and holding the empty cup. The potion was a strong purge. He endured without loss of trust this benighted treatment, though it must have delayed his recovery, which took some weeks.

Darius meantime, stirred at last to action, had marched west from Babylon with an enormous army, and made camp on level ground where he had plenty of room to deploy it, barring the Macedonians’ southward march, somewhere near modern Aleppo. Unaware that Alexander was ill—his convalescence probably prolonged by two years’ incessant labour—Darius thought he was hanging back from fear, and was much encouraged.

The Great King, who stood six and a half feet tall, is said by Diodorus to have won renown during Ochus’ reign by killing in single combat a Cilician champion whom no other warrior would face. He was now about fifty; the duel, if it ever took place, may have been fought a quarter century before. It may have been propaganda to support his accession, which needed support; power and luxury may have changed him; or his courage may have been, as courage can be, specific rather than general. It would seem at any rate that since the news from the Granicus he had been a frightened man. The recent death of Memnon, from illness while on campaign, had further disconcerted him.

Alexander, when on his feet again, conducted methodical mopping-up operations to safeguard his flanks and communications. Darius, much cheered by this further delay, began to think of offensive action. Arrian blames flattering courtiers for this overconfidence; it is also possible that keener soldiers simply wanted to push him into the field.

With a formidable battle now ahead, Alexander set up a field hospital by the inlet bay of Issus, left there his sick and wounded, and marched southward to meet Darius; unaware that Darius, by a different inland route, was marching north. Hidden from each other the armies passed. Darius arrived at Issus in Alexander’s rear. The only Macedonians he found were the patients in the hospital. Whether or not by his orders, they were cut up alive. This atrocity was never repaid in kind by Alexander; a restraint seldom practised in the ancient world or, indeed, in some parts of the modern one.

The news that Darius had left his first-class position in the plain, and marched to Issus where he had no room to manoeuvre, seemed so incredible to Alexander that he sent a scout ship to make sure. The bay was reported swarming with Persians. He assembled his officers for briefing.

Arrian says he told them how Xenophon and his Ten Thousand, a body of isolated, unsupported infantry, had successfully fought their way from Babylon to the sea. He recalled their own ordeals successfully overcome together, “and whatever else at such a time in the face of danger a brave general would say to hearten brave men”—a thing he was very good at. The fact that they were cut off if they lost was unworthy even of mention. At the end they crowded round him, grasping his hands and begging him to lead them on. Latter-day clichés about the stiff upper lip, derived from Roman tradition, tend to obscure the highly emotional bond between Alexander and his men, which was to last his lifetime.

As at the Granicus, the Persians formed up behind a steep-banked river. Their front stretched from the sea to the near hills; a host which could have encircled the Macedonians with ease, had the terrain given them room. As it was, a great mass of reserves stood uselessly in the rear.

Ptolemy’s reckoning of the Persian force at 600,000 is thought by modern historians much exaggerated. To the Macedonians, outnumbered even on conservative estimates at eight or ten to one, it must have looked like it at the time. Darius’ Greek mercenaries alone are still thought to have been 12,000; the 5,000 Macedonian horse were a squadron compared with the heavily mailed Persian cavalry. Its commander was the distinguished general Nabarzanes, for whom the battle would be the prologue to a sombre drama.

Alexander took the intervening passes unhurriedly, keeping his men fresh. When, on the edge of the bay, he formed them in battle order, he made no speeches. He rode about the line, having a word with the officers, singling out men who had done well before and speaking of their exploits. The fact that he must have known several thousand men by name was one of Alexander’s secret weapons. Xenophon speaks highly of this gift in a commander.

To Parmenion, who had rejoined him on the march, he gave the important left-wing posting next the sea. The centre was mainly infantry. He himself with the household cavalry and the Companions led on the right.

Arrian describes the battle in detail. The Persians massed their cavalry against Parmenion’s vulnerable flank on the beach. Alexander sent reinforcements, riding low behind the tall sarissas of the infantry, to attempt surprise; but Nabarzanes fought on undaunted. Towards the right the tough Agriani, legacy of the dead prince Lambarus, dashed out at opposing Persian skirmishers and made them run. In the centre, where the phalanx faced the Greek mercenaries, the contest was stubborn, the Macedonians fighting for their pride, the Greeks to humble it. Pride, discipline, morale and the long sarissa carried the phalanx slowly forward. Alexander, watching his time, hurled himself with the Companion Cavalry across the river, smashing the enemy left, and turned the flank of the Greeks. Leaving the phalanx to finish a now easy task, he made for the target he had all along had his eye on: the royal Persian guard, the “Immortals,” in whose midst stood the Great King, conspicuous in his ornate chariot by his height and royal robe. Mounted upon the ageing but still spirited Bucephalas (who probably owed his long life to the light weight of his rider) Alexander raised the battle paean, and led the yelling cavalry, already exalted by success, in a thundering relentless charge.

As it neared, perhaps when in the dust cloud Alexander could be clearly seen, Darius’ nerve broke. He turned his chariot and fled. In wild confusion the Persian centre followed him. The whole front crumbled. The huge army poured off into the narrow passes. Thousands of men who had never been used in battle were trampled to death or jostled over precipices, by fugitives themselves being ridden down by the Macedonians. Nabarzanes, still resolutely fighting an indecisive action against Parmenion, saw débâcle and heard that the King had fled. He then disengaged his men as best he could, with feelings that time was to reveal.

Had the royal chariot been occupied by Darius’ younger brother, Oxathres, it is unlikely the fight would have been so prompt. He put up a good fight beside the King till it was too late; a fact not lost on Alexander when next they met.

Eager to pursue Darius, he waited to be sure that victory was secure; the prize was great, but he was a professional. Then he changed horses for the chase; to find, some miles along, the royal chariot, the royal weapons and robe, of which Darius had disencumbered himself before hastening his flight on horseback. Alexander, returning with these trophies, found them the least of what the Great King had left behind.

His tent stood intact, with the appointments of a palace; toilet and table ware in gold and silver, inlaid furniture, a divan, a sumptuous bath, a throne. Alexander, looking around at a setting which must have made his father’s famous palace seem almost ascetic, is said to have exclaimed, “So this is what it means to be a king.”

Dining that night with his chief officers, in the tent, off the gold and silver, the stains of battle washed off in the royal bath, he heard women wailing not far off, and asked what was going on. He was told it came from the harem. Darius had left behind him his wife, reputed the fairest woman in Asia; their two young daughters; his heir, a boy of five or six; and his mother. Learning that his chariot and robe had been brought back with the spoils, they were lamenting his death, and the fate they foresaw for themselves.

Other eminent Persians had left their women in what then seemed safety at Damascus. Darius, self-indulgent and too confident, had brought his household along. To Alexander this in itself must have seemed highly unprofessional; the sequel of their abandonment—and to troops who owed vengeance for the hospital atrocity—came as a revelation. The ladies had so far been unmolested. They were, of course, the perquisites reserved for him.

He sent an officer at once to reassure them; Darius still lived, they would be protected. The Queen Mother, Sisygambis, would receive the names of noble fallen Persians, with his leave to direct their funeral rites. Next day, having seen the wounded—he had a sword cut on the thigh himself—he visited the family. Arrian admits that the event has accumulated legend. There is, however, no conflict of the evidence. He, Curtius and Plutarch vary only slightly, and all to the same effect.

Alexander brought Hephaestion with him. They walked in together, both simply dressed. Hephaestion’s looks and presence first struck the women, used to associate height with royalty, and the venerable Sisygambis began to prostrate herself before him. He drew back; the harem eunuchs made warning signs; in distress she began again with the King. He stepped forward and raised her up. “Never mind, Mother. You made no mistake, he too is Alexander.” Mystifying as this may have seemed when passed through an interpreter, she thanked him with regal dignity.

The Queen, Stateira, was Darius’ sister. Dynastic incest was common in the East, but this marriage predated his accession. Since, however, an accredited beauty of that day must have been well under thirty, she would be a legitimate half-sister by a younger wife of their father. Her two daughters, barely out of childhood, were old enough for the captive’s usual fate. Alexander promised them all his safeguard. He bent to the youngest child, the little boy, who fearlessly hugged his neck. Turning to Hephaestion—not to the interpreter—he said that Sisygambis’ grandchild shared her nature; a pity it had missed her son.

The family was given the dignity, seclusion and safety of a royal harem. To Sisygambis he had been drawn at once. Her age exempted her from strict purdah, and he called again on her.

She had never been the wife of a king, only the mother, and that late in life. But to the old aristocrat who had bewailed her son’s heroic death, the truth of his survival may have been a greater blow. She and Alexander seem to have found much in common, despite all gulfs of culture and language, and even the gaffe with which his next visit opened. Recalling his mother and sister doing fancy work at the loom, he arrived with a gift of choice coloured wools. Sisygambis had never seen such stuff but in the hands of servants; she felt bitterly what seemed a reminder of her new condition. He read her face, got to the bottom of the trouble, and begged pardon gracefully. Their friendship prospered.

The young Queen he never saw again; from self-mastery, Plutarch says; in any case, resolved that scandal should have no straw to catch at. In flattery or joke, friends urged him to claim his droit du seigneur; he forbade them to name her in his presence. Though the abstinence itself may have cost him little, the thought for the women’s pride and self-respect, the maintenance of their little court and accustomed service, came from natural generosity. A fact needing more explanation is that, with the troublesome train of their furniture, ladies and household eunuchs, he took them along on his march.

It may have been to enjoy the company of Sisygambis—only at his death did the depth of their bond appear—it may have been to be sure they were not molested. Yet he had captured strongholds where he could have established them in safety. There is another possible motive, which would have been very like him.

The most picturesque subplot of Xenophon’s Cyropaedia is the story (quite fictional, as far as anyone knows) of Cyrus and the Lady of Susa. After his great victory over the Assyrian confederation, she was reserved for him as the best of the booty, along with her wealthy household. Her beloved husband, away in distant parts, had missed the battle. The Persian officers, who had glimpsed her beauty as she tore her robe in lamentation, reported her “the loveliest woman of mortal birth in Asia.” They had assured her by way of comfort that she was destined for the finest among men; now they urged him to view his prize. No, he answered, by God he would not, especially if her beauty was so great. He might gaze on her too long, and forget his duties; love, when all was said, was a kind of slavery. He confided her protection to a trusted follower; when this man fell in love with her, for her safety he was sent away. Moved by so much chivalry, she offered to send her husband word of it, and beg him to ally with Cyrus. Trustingly he arrived. “They embraced each other with joy, as well they might when they had had no hope of ever meeting again.” She told him of Cyrus’ compassion and self-command, and begged it should be repaid with loyalty. Gratefully he took the King’s right hand; and remained faithful until death.

Alexander had not only a powerful sense of theatre; he had learned from Aristotle how the great-souled man chooses his role and lives it through. He had also a real delight in giving pleasure to others, whose sincerity is attested by many human anecdotes. It is tempting to guess that he had hopes of surpassing Xenophon’s drama. Darius had not shown himself in the light of an implacable foe who would fight while life was in him. The reunion with wife, mother and children, presided over by a gracious victor, would indeed have made one of history’s great set Alexander-pieces, to whose possibilities no one was more alive than Alexander. His determination to make such dreams come true was attended by much success. If he was disappointed of this one, fate rather than impracticability was to blame.

The Lady’s story had another aspect. Her husband become Cyrus’ vassal.

There is no moment in Alexander’s career of which it can be said with certainty that this was when he decided he need not stop short with his father’s aim of freeing the Greek cities; that he could, and would, be Great King of Persia. But the likeliest time is surely after Issus, when he saw what imperial splendours had enshrined a man of straw.

Darius fled through the night on relays of horses, with a handful of his suite. At daybreak he was joined by some 4,000 scattered fugitives. About 8,000 of his Greeks escaped home by sea. The King himself scarcely drew rein till he was across the Euphrates.

Alexander, his road swept clear before him, marched due south towards Judaea and the coastal cities of the Phoenicians. His Greek obligations were all fulfilled; he was now embarked on a war of conquest.

It is as foolish to apply anachronistic moral standards to this as it would be to condemn Hippocrates for not teaching aseptic surgery. In the long evolution of human thought (so generally in advance of human conduct) the notion that war was wrong had not yet entered the world. Socrates himself, who regarded his life work as a search for the good, said proudly at his trial, “It would be strange, Athenians, if I who stood my ground in the battle-line, facing death at my commander’s order, should desert the station where God posted me.” Aristotle warmly supported wars of Hellenizing conquest so long as “barbarians” were not treated as men. A century later, a handful of Stoics began to question war’s morality, but were little heeded. Rome’s soldier Christians went to martyrdom sooner than worship the Divine Caesar or the Eagles of their legion; not for refusing to fight. In our own generation, what has been tolerated, and even approved, by the same opinion formers who condemn Alexander, shows a discrepancy of standards so bizarre that one might suppose it is his better qualities, rather than his worse, that arouse resentment. The words of that underrated philosopher the Earl of Chesterfield are as true today as in 1748: “The things which happen in our own times, and which we see ourselves, do not surprise us near so much as things which we read of in times past though not in the least more extraordinary.”

From some camp in Mesopotamia Darius wrote to Alexander, requiring terms for the ransom of his family. His note was a general manifesto, accusing Philip as first aggressor, and Alexander for breaking an old alliance—an unwise reminder, to a man in a position of strength, of Macedonian humiliation in Xerxes’ war. He, Darius, had taken up arms against these injuries; but “the battle had gone as some god willed it.”

This almost invited Alexander to say, as he promptly did, that he held the land “by the gift of heaven.” The rest of his reply was an uncompromising challenge. He had been elected to avenge the wrong to Greece by Xerxes. Ochus had invaded the domain of his father Philip; Darius himself had procured Philip’s death, and “boasted of it in letters before all the world” (captured perhaps at Sardis?). Also, Darius was a usurper who had conspired to murder his predecessor (true or false, a suspicion natural to any king of Macedon). The royal family would be freely returned whenever he cared to come and ask in person. (The failure to blackmail him by threatening their safety makes a melancholy contrast with modern times.)

Later legends contain innumerable, and often interminable, spurious challenges of Alexander’s. The peroration of this one, probably from the royal archives, has an authentic ring.

… And in future when you send to me, send to the lord of Asia; and do not write to me what to do, but ask me, as master of all you own, for anything you need. Or I shall judge you an offender. If you claim your kingdom, take your stand and fight for it, and do not run; for I shall make my way wherever you may be.

Soon after, a force under Parmenion took the surrender of Damascus. The Governor had proposed it secretly; Parmenion, wary of treachery, would not lead his men inside, but told him to come out with his treasure under pretence of taking flight. He was followed, therefore, by a panic crowd, including the harems of the Persian nobles engaged at Issus.

These ladies, not being royal game, were not so strictly preserved. One has a role in Alexander’s legend, another in his history. Only Plutarch says that he took for himself Barsine, Memnon’s widow and Artabazus’ daughter; for the staggering reason that Parmenion—of all people!—told him she would be good for him. The dubiety of the story lies not only in this, but in the powerful motive for inventing it. No record at all exists of such a woman accompanying his march; nor of any claim by her, or her powerful kin, that she had borne him offspring. Yet twelve years after his death a boy was produced, seventeen years old, born therefore five years after Damascus, her alleged son “brought up in Pergamon”; a claimant and shortlived pawn in the succession wars, chosen probably for a physical resemblance to Alexander. That he actually did marry another Barsine must have helped both to launch and preserve the story; but no source reports any notice whatever taken by him of a child who, Roxane’s being posthumous, would have been during his lifetime his only son, by a near-royal mother. In a man who named cities after his horse and dog, this strains credulity.

A more convincing character is a Macedonian beauty, perhaps a high-class hetaira, who fell to Philotas’ lot. He found her worth impressing, and kept her entertained with his own and his family’s distinguished exploits. She listened most politely. It was to turn out, however, that he had overrated his own charm.

Alexander’s real booty from Damascus was a vast haul of treasure, the Great King’s war chest and the private coffers of the nobles, relieving him at last of all worries about financing his campaign. He also captured four Greek envoys; two from Thebes, whom he released at once, accepting their Persianizing as natural; one from Sparta, imprisoned for a time and then let go; and an elderly Athenian, son of the famous general, Iphicrates, the guest-friend of his grandparents. This last he charmed into joining his suite, where he remained for life, his ashes being sent scrupulously back to his kin in Athens.

Sidon gladly opened its gates, turning out a pro-Persian governor. This had an interesting sequel: Hephaestion’s first independent mission. Before its conquest by Persia some generations back, Sidon had been a monarchy. Alexander directed Hephaestion to choose a king.

It was a graceful mark of honour, implying that Hephaestion himself was worthy of the office, if he could have been spared; but Alexander was realistic about such missions, and this called for both integrity and skill. Hephaestion was at once surrounded with sycophancy and intrigue. His own host, a leading citizen, perhaps fearful of hostile factions, declined with the excuse that he was not of the royal blood. At this, Hephaestion asked if any actual scion of the line survived; to get the unexpected reply that one did, but, born into peasant poverty, he was working as a daily gardener. Hephaestion took up his references and found them excellent; too tactful to intrude on him at his lowly job, he sent him emissaries with a royal robe in which he could arrive with dignity. They found him busy with the watering. The Sidonians, astounded by this choice of the one candidate who could not have produced a bribe, settled down to it pretty well. The carefulness of his own honour, and his friend’s, which such a choice implies, along with its success, tell us much about Hephaestion.

King Abdalonymus remained a good worker, respectable and honest. It is pleasant to record an instance of human gratitude. After Hephaestion’s death, while his grandiose memorials stood unfinished because Alexander too was gone, and jealous rivals were paring to the bone—as Ptolemy surely did—this brilliant officer’s record, Abdalonymus was designing his own sarcophagus. A fine Hellenistic frieze of tinted marble shows a battle scene, with Alexander in heroic action. But the central figure, a handsome cavalryman hewing down a Persian foe, is generally accepted as Hephaestion’s one surviving likeness.

From Sidon Alexander marched on southward towards the formidable obstacle of Tyre. This massive Phoenician fortress port was an island, separated by a deep channel from the shore. It had its own large merchant and war fleet, and a harbour open to Persian ships. On his approach it sent him envoys, offering to be at his orders. He tested them by asking to perform a state sacrifice at the temple of Melkart, the Tyrian Heracles. This brought a refusal to open their gates to Macedonians, with a claim that they would shut out Persians too, an undertaking they were unlikely to honour once he had passed by.

Alexander called a war council, aware of the huge task ahead. If they left Tyre two-faced in their rear, he said, the Persians could use it as an invasion base against Greece, where Sparta was now in open revolt against his Regent Antipater, and Athens awaiting her chance. Ahead lay Egypt, a rich objective, eager to receive him; the brutality and sacrilege of Ochus’ reconquest had never been forgiven there. The coast once secured, and all Asia this side of Euphrates in their power, they could march for Babylon.

This realistic assessment convinced his staff. He made a last attempt to avoid such a costly siege, by sending envoys with an ultimatum. The Tyrians, violating the immemorial sanctity of heralds, brought them out on the walls for him to view their murder, and threw their bodies in the sea. After this, Alexander announced that he had had a dream, in which Heracles stood on the Tyrian walls, with hand outstretched to lead him into the city.

These walls, made of dressed and mortared stone, were 150 feet high on the landward side. Stratagem and surprise were out; he settled down at once to business, and began to run a mole out from the mainland.

Out of missile range, the first stretch went quickly. He stood over the work, giving out prizes for zeal. But the channel deepened, the fill took more stones and time; they came into bowshot of the walls; Tyrian ships now had draught to approach and harry them. He had two moving towers built, mounted with catapults, armoured with hide and with a hide screen stretched between them. Dragged along as the work advanced, it could shelter the carriers till at the last moment they dashed out to tip their loads. When the wind was high, the Tyrians launched a blazing fireship, its tall yards hung with cauldrons of flaming pitch. The towers burned out, their crews leaping off or perishing inside. Alexander ordered new towers, and went off to Sidon to raise a war fleet.

This took a couple of weeks, during which he discharged his restless energy in a ten-day expedition to subdue the neighbouring tribes. With him, for company, went the now elderly Lysimachus, the obscure Macedonian gentleman who had beguiled his childhood with tales from Homer. When he went scouting in the hills, Lysimachus begged to come along, recalling this old game and declaring himself no older than his exemplar Phoenix, Achilles’ guardian. Plutarch continues,

But when, leaving their horses, they began to walk into the hills, the rest of the soldiers went a good way ahead, so that night approaching and the enemy near, Alexander lingered behind so long, to hearten and help the lagging tired old man, that before he knew it he was left in the rear a long way from his soldiers, with a small company, on a bitter night in the dark, and in a very bad place; till seeing many scattered fires of the enemy some way off, and trusting to his swiftness … he ran straight to one of the nearest fires, and killing with his dagger two of the barbarians who sat by it, snatched up a burning brand, and returned with it to his own people. They at once made a great fire, which so scared the enemy that most of them fled, and those who attacked them were soon routed; and thus they rested securely for what was left of the night.

After this tribute to friendship he went back to Sidon, where 120 Cypriot ships awaited him; the island rulers had thrown off the Persian yoke and joined his cause. In all he raised about 200 sail; and led them over to the attack. His own flagship took the post of danger nearest the city walls. But the Tyrians, startled by his numbers, merely closed their harbour with a boom of ships, as he had done himself at Miletus. He could not tempt them out.

His operations were now enormous, using engineers from Cyprus and the whole Phoenician littoral, besides the expert Greeks he had brought along. He mounted catapults on shipboard, and began to bombard the walls with heavy stones. The Tyrians cast rocks into the sea to obstruct the ships. Doggedly he had the rocks fished for and hauled up. For this his ships had to anchor; the Tyrians sent armoured ships to cut their cables. He brought up support ships. The enemy sent divers to cut the cables under water. He replaced the cables with anchor chains. At length the channel allowed his ships alongside the walls, which the mole was also nearing.

The inventive Tyrians, men in advance of their time, produced their most modern weapon. They heated sand red hot, and projected it at the foremost Macedonians. Diodorus says, “It sifted down under their corselets and their clothes, searing the flesh with intense heat … they screamed entreaties like men under torture, and none could help them, but with the excruciating pain they went mad and died.” Many threw themselves in the sea. Unaware that it was to become a commonplace of civilized warfare, Alexander considered it an atrocity. In view of his fondness for leading the van, only chance must have saved him from being flayed alive himself.

Half a year had passed in these labours. In the end it was by ships, supported from the mole though this ran short of the walls, that Tyre was stormed. Master now of the landward channel, he could bring round his assault craft under the weaker seaward walls. His torsion catapults could hurl heavy stones and crack ashlar masonry; the bow type were giant versions of the medieval crossbow, their pointed bronze bolts could pierce armour. His landing craft bore portable towers, a feature of his siege train which carted them in sections. On the day of the final assault he boarded a tower himself. One may picture a broad-beamed galley, with two or three oar banks to give it speed, the weird top-heavy-looking structure amidships crowned with armed men behind the glittering figure of Alexander who directed the pilot here and there on the lookout for a breach; the gangway lolling like a giant tongue, ready to be stuck out when one appeared. Meantime he watched, says Arrian, for brave deeds deserving of honour.

He saw one when the Captain of the Bodyguard, Admetus, leaped straight into the first good breach that opened, cheering on his men, and died there. By that time Alexander’s ship had raced up in support; he ran out across his gangplank and led the party through. Meantime his ships had forced the harbour boom. The Tyrians, knowing all was lost, fled from the walls.

The Macedonians pursued them, cutting down all they could overtake. Alexander forbade them to drag anyone out of temple sanctuary. (In one temple a famous statue of Apollo, Carthaginian loot from Sicily, was found chained to its base, the god having informed some Tyrian seer in a dream that he was leaving to join Alexander.) Arrian does not give the number of the slain, but reckons the captives enslaved at 30,000, obviously the large majority even in a populous merchant port. Curtius says 6,000 armed men were killed. Both he and Diodorus say that 2,000 were crucified. These may have been corpses; the Macedonians displayed the bodies of executed criminals in this way, though without the mutilations later practised in England. Curtius, never trustworthy with atrocity stories, infers they were alive. It would be wrong to exclude this entirely, because of the red-hot sand; but on Alexander’s general record, coupled with his concern at this stage of his career for Hellenic standards, the balance of probability is against it.

At some time during the siege he had another embassy from Darius, who now offered not only the large sum of 10,000 talents for his family, but also peace terms: all Asia Minor west of the Euphrates, a treaty of alliance, and his daughter’s hand in marriage. This was the occasion of the famous bit of dialogue with Parmenion: “I’d take it, Alexander, if I were you.” “If I were you, so would I. But I’m Alexander.” His answer was that he had no need of money, nor of being offered half the land, which he already held, instead of the whole. He would marry, if he liked, Darius’ daughter with or without his leave; and if he wanted an alliance let him come and ask. Leaving him to take any steps which this reply suggested to him, Alexander marched towards Egypt.

As Wilcken has pointed out in a masterly analysis, this moment of decision by Alexander is one of history’s great proofs that individuals, not mere economic forces, can change the destinies of mankind. Had he listened to Parmenion, Greek civilization would have been more solidly established in Asia Minor but would never have touched the East; the balance of power with Persia would have remained precarious, and the emergence of a stronger king there might have reversed the defeat of Xerxes in future years.

Hephaestion, getting promotion, was now put in charge of the fleet to patrol the coast. Alexander marched south to Gaza, the last point of coastal resistance. It was held by a eunuch general, Betis, who thought its high steep site impregnable. It was not a port; but if Alexander bypassed it, Darius would be encouraged to come down in his rear. His two-month siege included raising a high earthwork to bring his engines in range. While he was up there, some bird of prey dropped a stone on his head; perhaps mistaking his helmet for a tortoise whose shell it wished to crack, like the bald head of the poet Aeschylus, who died from the similar misjudgment of an eagle. Though unharmed Alexander asked the seer Aristander to read the omen. He pronounced that Alexander would take the city, but he must watch his safety today.

On this advice he kept out of range for some time during which nothing much was happening. Then a sally in strength from the fort began to drive his men off the ring wall; on which he at once dashed to their help at the head of his troop. Soon he was nearly killed by a man who, after surrendering to him and being spared, whipped out a dagger; with his quick reflexes he dodged the blow, and struck home. Whether thinking the omen now fulfilled, or defying it, or just carried away by enthusiasm, he kept in action, till a heavy bolt from a crossbow catapult sank deep into his shoulder. His doctor pulled it out, causing a good deal of haemorrhage, and put on a field dressing which, since Alexander went straight back into the battle, soon slipped off. He fought on, pouring blood under his armour, till he fainted. The wound was serious and kept him out of action for some time, but he directed operations until the city fell.

All good historians have rejected Curtius’ story that the brave Betis was brought before him wounded, refused to bow the knee, and was thereon dragged round the city at his chariot tail. Anyone unconvinced by his constant generosity to brave enemies, in which he took some pride, may here safely trust his vanity. Achilles, before thus mistreating Hector, had personally killed him in the climactic duel of the epic. Alexander’s wound had kept him from fighting in the final assault at all; he was the last man in the world to put on such an unpleasantly inferior display. The tale is interesting as a typical piece of Athenian propaganda, written by someone who had learned of his Homeric aspirations but knew nothing of his nature at first hand, or was too “committed” to care.

In Egypt he had no campaigning, only a triumphal progress.

Hephaestion with the fleet awaited him at the Delta. The Persian satrap Mazaces, long aware of the Issus débâcle and with no adequate Persian garrison, put a good face on necessity and welcomed Alexander in. Leaving the harbour of Pelusium manned, he marched up the Nile, alongside his fleet, to Memphis.

There can be scarcely a European today not furnished with some visual image of ancient Egypt however trite. It takes an effort of imagination to conceive the pristine impact on Alexander and his men, most of whom had never seen even Athens, of this fabled civilization, a legend since their childhood, as they followed the great river which was its sustainer, arterial road and sacred way; when they reached the towering temples of Memphis, the Pyramids with sides of geometric smoothness, the still unravaged smile of the huge Sphinx. It must have changed the whole scale of their human vision.

Hailed everywhere as deliverer by the Egyptians, he was enthroned as Pharaoh, with the double crown and uraeus, the crossed sceptres of the crook and flail, symbols of the shepherd and the judge. Cartouches survive of “Horus, the strong prince, he who laid hands on the lands of the foreigners, beloved of Ammon and selected of Ra, son of Ra, Alexandros.” In respect of Egypt and its peoples, by immemorial tradition he was now a god.

He was also the King, by free choice of his subjects. His first action was to sacrifice to the bull god Apis, in the temple where Ochus had speared to death (and, it was said, ordered roast for dinner) the sacred beast which was the divine incarnation. Alexander reverenced all their gods; quite sincerely, for in the tolerant Hellenic way he identified each with some Greek god whose attributes seemed to fit. There was constant traffic between Greece and Egypt, and the priests could probably converse without interpreters.

He did not neglect the Greek world, but held ceremonial games, not only for athletes but—probably with more personal enjoyment—for the performing arts. Crowds of competitors flocked from the Greek cities. This was his first taste of real magnificence; he did not reach the palace of Persia as a raw provincial.

From Memphis he returned down river to the coast, where he had business to transact about his conquests in Asia Minor. Cruising across the Delta, he beached near Lake Mareotis. The spot looked to him just the place for a city; good harbourage, good land, good air, good access to the Nile. So keen was he to get the work begun that he walked over the site, trailing after him architects and engineers, pointing out positions for the marketplace, the temples of Greek and Egyptian gods, the sacred way. Being short of marker white, he accepted some meal from someone resourceful. Birds came to feed on it, from which the seers forecast that the city would prosper, and nourish many strangers; a prediction that Alexandria continues to fulfill. At some time in his eager progress, he must have crossed the site of his own tomb.

“After this,” says Arrian, “he was seized with a longing to visit Ammon in Siwah.” Though this oracular shrine was renowned throughout the Greek world, it had neither political nor strategic value. No Pharaoh, we are told, had ever been there before. In Persia, Darius was mobilizing; and, Egypt now secure, the sooner he was met the better. Yet on this pilgrimage Alexander was determined. He may have heard things from the priests at Memphis which made it indispensable to him; it is equally likely that he had heard something at Dodona.

Various reasons are offered on his behalf; that Perseus, a maternal forebear, and Heracles, a paternal one, had both sought before great labours the advice of Zeus-Ammon. He was their common ancestor, and therefore Alexander’s. But Arrian adds that he went “hoping to know more truly about himself, or at any rate to say he did.”

He turned from the coast to the dangerous inland route, where, if a dust storm rose, it could engulf an army, and was said once to have done so. As they toiled through the sand, water ran short, but rain came to save them. Ptolemy (here proprietorial) averred that two serpents guided them, speaking with human voices. Before calling him a charlatan it should be remembered that desert sands can emit uncanny sounds. At all events, they reached the green shady oasis of Siwah. The High Priest, used to Greek pilgrims and probably speaking some Greek, hailed Alexander as “Son of Ammon.” This formal address, which by now must have been familiar to him, was noted by his friends, who were admitted to the forecourt after ritual purifications. The divine Pharaoh, whose person could bring only sanctity, went in as he was, and entered the holy of holies quite alone.

The oracle worked on a peculiar principle: that of planchette on an immensely impressive scale. Originating in the Ammon temple at Thebes, its antiquity was immemorial. The symbol of the god, a round navel-shaped object, was carried in a kind of boat hung with precious vessels; long carrying poles rested on the shoulders of many priests. Under the god’s direction they would turn, halt or bow; from these movements the seer would read the god’s response. (A similar ritual is still carried out in Alexandria by a Muslim sect, though of course without the idol; the devotees say that divine guidance comes as pressure on their shoulders.) This strange procession may have been visible from the courtyard. Its meaning, however, was revealed to Alexander only, within the shrine. If he had indeed intended, as Arrian said, to declare what he had learned about himself, the solemn experience changed his mind. His sole comment was that he had had the answer his soul desired. He never told what the question was.

He is said to have written to Olympias that he would tell her in private when he got back to Macedon. Anything he would tell her, he probably told Hephaestion; if so, he was as silent as the grave to which he took the secret.

If the letter was written, Alexander’s main question must have concerned his origins. From this time, his sense of destiny acquired a daimonic force. Scientific rationalism is here anachronistic. Greeks (including philosophers) saw in all outstanding qualities a touch of the divine. He had excelled all other men again and again in leadership, courage, contrivance, endurance; and what he already felt in himself had been confirmed. He continued to acknowledge Philip as his human father, assuming perhaps a kind of dual fatherhood of seed and soul; a matter he must often have pondered without imparting his thoughts to anyone. But that he did henceforward regard himself as in some sort Ammon’s son is certain, and was commonly known. It was not irreconcilable with the mortality witnessed by his battle scars; god-begotten men died, but were received into the heavens.

No one, of course, in his lifetime supposed he could have been begotten by the pharaoh Nectanebo. This freak of later legend stems solely from his high prestige in Egypt. Folklore, which can be neither enforced nor bought, should never be ignored.

Alexander returned to Memphis by the ordinary and safer pilgrim route. Here he received Greek embassies graciously, sacrificed to Zeus, held a parade, and more contests for athletes and poets, the latter being at little loss for a theme. Getting down to the business of government, he gave as usual the civil posts to native governors, the garrison commands to officers of his own, and restored all rites and customs which the Persians had suppressed.

At some time in Egypt, Philotas was accused to him, by persons unknown, of some unknown disloyalty. This may have been when his fair captive from Damascus, Antigone, began to talk. Philotas, she widely revealed, was forever bragging that he and Parmenion his father had done all the real work of conquest, though its credit went to The Boy. Such careless gossip hardly suggests devotion; and it cannot have amazed her when the loyal Craterus brought her for a private interview with Alexander. He did nothing about it—it must have struck him as just Philotas’ usual style—merely telling her to warn him of anything serious. She returned to Philotas, in whom she did not confide.

His younger brother, Hector, to whom Alexander had been much attached, had lately lost his life when a crowded ferry foundered in which he was trying to catch up the royal barge. Alexander had given him a splendid funeral. Perhaps there had been a love affair, of which Philotas had not much approved; and after his bereavement it would be a time for tact.

From Egypt Alexander marched to Tyre, now refortified for Macedon. The Persian fleet, without a base in the Mediterranean, already mostly captured or dispersed, was no further threat. It was time to turn east. He sacrificed to Melkart-Heracles—he had Herculean labours ahead—and held more games. The theatre was splendidly represented, two of its sponsors being tributary kings. One lavish production starred the now famous Thettalus, Alexander’s devoted envoy to Caria. Keeping his eager partisanship to himself, he was bitterly disappointed when the judges, whom he had scrupulously refrained from nudging, gave someone else the award. Only later in private did he confess he would have given half he had to see Thettalus win the crown.

It was in the same spirit, and at about this time, that he made one of his few bad misjudgments of men. Among his friends exiled by Philip had been one Harpalus, a Macedonian aristocrat; whose attachment can only have been genuine, for Alexander could then offer no material return. Those days were over; Harpalus, recalled at the accession, and prevented by lameness from serving in war, was put straight into a treasury appointment. He had probably never had his hands on money before. During the Issus phase of the campaign he had got into some unspecified scrape, presumably financial, and gone off to Greece with an obscure accomplice. Alexander, loyal and grateful, apparently convinced he had been led astray, sent a “come back, all is forgiven” message. He reappeared; he must have had considerable address, was a cultivated person on whom Alexander relied to send him books, and may really have been touched and penitent. To prove that all was indeed forgiven, Alexander returned this luxury-loving man to the temptations which had lately overset him, and put him in charge of the whole army chest. For a time he accompanied the expedition. Lack of opportunity, and the old easy charm, confirmed Alexander’s misplaced confidence. Disillusion would be long delayed.

Western Asia, Egypt, and all his communications with Macedon were now secure. He turned east to meet Darius; leaving forever the Greek world, except what he took with him.