Empire of Ashes: A Novel of Alexander the Great (2 page)

Dedicated with love to my wife, Maryanne

Sine qua non

Foreword to the 2009 Edition

      
Just a few weeks after
Empire of Ashes
was first published in 2005, I experienced what the people at National Public Radio call a “driveway story.” That is, I heard something on the air that was so compelling that I pulled into my driveway and sat in the car listening to it until it was finished.

The item was a commentary by writer and philosopher Alain de Botton, who had produced a year-end series of commentaries on Big Ideas. The title was “Having an idealized view of the world can be appealing and helpful.” The most relevant part is the following: “We’re obsessed with puncturing ideals. We’re obsessed by biographies which show us the man behind the statue and reveal that the great figure was, in fact, a weakling with a bad temper. We can’t quite get out of our minds how often the reality departs from the ideal…” To de Botton’s mind, this was unfortunate, because idealization has its uses, especially in helping us aspire to improve our world.

Now it must be admitted that, beyond simple judgments of thumbs-up or thumbs-down, it’s pretty rare to hear discussions of aesthetics on the radio, even on NPR. Still, having just published a decidedly mixed portrait of Alexander the Great, I couldn’t help but wonder if I was one of those people who is “obsessed” with puncturing ideals, who “can’t get it out his mind” that reality departs from the ideal. Was Monsieur de Botton talking to me as I sat there in my driveway, contemplating the chore of opening my manually-powered garage door in the middle of another sub-ideal late December in upstate New York?

By way of explanation,
Empire of Ashes
tells the story of Alexander the Great through the eyes of Machon, an Athenian soldier with historiographic pretensions. Alexander respects Machon as a representative of that sophisticated class of big-city Greeks who ordinarily look down their noses at the provincial Macedonians. Machon starts off admiring Alexander, but as he witnesses his patron’s gradual descent into paranoia and brutality, he comes to believe the man would be better off dead than let loose among civilized folk. After Alexander dies in Babylon, Machon is called to account by the pro-Macedonian faction in Athens for his suspected role in the king’s demise.

      
In response, my character paints a decidedly human portrait of the would-be god. What is important to remember, of course, is that narrator for most of the book is Machon, and he is not necessarily a disinterested observer. He’s on trial for his life. Nor should we believe everything said by Aeschines the prosecutor, who is in the pay of the pro-appeasement faction. In his statement, Aeschines praises Alexander to the skies, going out of his way to affirm every obsequious myth about the man. In this sense the novel is not really about Alexander, but about the fight over Alexander’s image in history.

      
Now even before the book’s formal publication I had some hints that this approach might lead to some trouble. My agent had been busy selling translation rights to the novel—and one of the first takers was a major publishing house in Athens. In fact, my wife and I met representatives of this company (which will remain nameless but is one of the leading Greek publishers) at Athens airport to cement our deal. You may well imagine my surprise, however, when I returned from my research trip to hear that the Greeks had withdrawn their offer to publish. Apparently, they had finally gotten around to actually reading the book they had purchased the rights to, and what they found troubled them. After inquiring further, I found that their concerns included the following (and this is their words):

-- “He [Nicastro] mentions Homer in a scene to state that scenes of brutalities have happened in the past, when Achilles has punished Hector.”

-- “There is a
jeu de mot
with the world
bottom
.  Ifestionas was the top and Alexander the bottom to explain the homosexual relation between the two friends.”

According to both the translator and the second reader the most important thing is that “the author underestimates the strategical and the political genius of Alexandros and emphasizes the bad aspects of his personality: homosexual, capricious, brutal, drunk. There are many biographers of Alexandros who mentioned all these problems but none of them ever implied that his brother was the real hero. We know that this is fiction and that the author writes a historical novel and not a non-fiction history book, but we also know that there is a respectable part of the public who won't appreciate
Empire of Ashes
.  That's why we decided to withdraw our offer.”

“We don't have anything personal with you or the agent (it was a real pleasure to meet you and your lovely wife) but we would like you to understand that the subject of the book is very important for the Greek public.  We wish you good luck with the publication of the book in the States and we are looking forward to collaborate with you in the future.”

Well, considering that the so-called “bad” aspects of Alexander’s personality, including his bisexuality and taste for drink, are among the best documented things about him, it seems this publisher’s rejection says more about the selective memory of the Greeks than about the book. Unfortunately, all this can’t be put down just to nationalist heroizing. Oliver Stone’s movie version of Alexander’s life ran into similar criticism on this side of the Atlantic. Consider the following review from
The New York Post
’s Lou Lumenick:

“Sporting a dreadful blond pageboy and a micro-mini toga while exchanging come-hither looks with his mascara-loving childhood pal, Hephaistion, Colin Farrell looks more like Alexander the Fabulous than Alexander the Great…Stone and Farrell end up going too far--their light-in-the-sandals Alexander is often such a simpering, indecisive wuss that it's hard to accept he conquered most of the known world before his mysterious death...”

Which begs the question, why couldn’t Alexander have been both fabulous and great?

Or to pose the question another way: what does it say about the job we’re doing as educators, when a fact as well attested as ancient Greek fabulousness is still somehow controversial?

The need to idealize our heroes is not quite as dead as de Botton fears. For example, the following comments about the novel were posted on a popular online bulletin board by a reader who identifies him or herself only as “FicusFan”:

FicusFan has other choice things to say, including “
The writing is workman-like and it flows like Clive Cussler.”
 

Another poster, identified as “Jmarks”, wonders: “
How does a piece of crap like this get published? Just who did the author sleep with to get a book deal?”

The larger points here are not subtle: it is repugnant to present Alexander’s flaws, yet somehow “typical” that novelists do “hatchet jobs” of this kind. We are “obsessed” with puncturing this good and decent man. In this sense, FicusFan and JMarks make much the same complaint that de Botton does, except in a less “appealing and helpful” tone.

As some of you might be aware, my first forays into historical fiction focused on the life and times of John Paul Jones, of Revolutionary War fame. That portrayal also had its shadows and highlights. Yet despite the fact that John Paul Jones is about two thousand years closer to us in chronological terms, and an adoptive American to boot, my portrayal of Alexander the Great has generated far greater heat. Let that be a rejoinder to those who claim that classical history is somehow lost its relevance to modern audiences.

The two major accounts of Alexander’s campaigns were written by Romans, centuries after his death, based on first-hand Macedonian accounts that have since been lost. I take it as given that the renowned account by Ptolemy played down the negative aspects of Alexander’s campaign, not only because history is written by the winners, but because Ptolemy had his own legitimacy to build as the new pharaoh of Egypt.

The Romans, Quintus Curtius Rufus and Lucius Flavius Arrianus, likewise take generally positive view of the great man’s achievements. Yet even they, on occasion, could not restrain themselves from swinging the hatchet. For instance, Curtius is our source for infamous Massacre of Branchidae:
 
while campaigning across the Oxus River in Sogdia, Alexander encountered the descendants of a Greek clan that once administered the Sanctuary of Apollo at Didyma. The details are contradictory here, but it seems that during the wars with Persia in the early 5
^th
century BCE, these Branchidae had surrendered the temple to curry favor with the Persians. To pay back the collaborators, the Great King resettled them in a remote corner of this empire, forever out of reach of Greek retribution. Or so he thought.

According to Curtius, when Alexander happened upon the descendants of the Branchidae four or five generations removed, the king oversaw the following;

“The Branchidae, who were unarmed, were butchered throughout the city, and neither community of language nor the olive-branches and entreaties of the suppliants could curb the savagery. Finally, the Macedonians dug down to the foundations of the walls in order to demolish them and leave not a single trace of the city. Woods, too, and sacred groves, they not only cut down but actually uprooted, so that nothing would remain after the removal of the roots but empty wasteland and barren soil. Had this punishment been devised against the people responsible for the treachery, it might have appeared to be fair revenge instead of brutality but, as it was, the guilt of the ancestors was being atoned for by descendants who had not even seen Miletus and accordingly could not possibly have betrayed it to Xerxes.” (trans. John Yardley)

It should be noted that Arrian doesn’t mention this atrocity, and that some modern scholars, such as William Tarn, have questioned Curtius’ accuracy. On the other hand, in the years since Tarn’s two-volume biography was published many have wondered if that scholar was more interested in apologizing for Alexander instead of understanding him. Interestingly, TV documentarian Michael Wood, while he was off following in the footsteps of Alexander the Great, reported evidence of a cult of Apollo of Didyma at the remote mound site of Dilbergin Tepe near the Oxus—including amphorae bearing the stamp of the Branchid clan.

It is not hard to imagine motives for Alexander’s zeal to avenge Greek honor against the collaborators. It probably weighed heavily on his mind that his remote ancestor on the throne of Macedon, Alexander the First, posed no great obstacle to the invading army of King Xerxes. To put it less charitably, Alexander the Great had inherited a throne of Medizers—a fact that did not accord well with his image as avenger of the Greeks.

So it seems that even some historians who admired Alexander did not necessarily idealize him. Meanwhile, some of his recent fictional rhapsodes, such as Mary Renault, found it very easy to put the flaws of their hero out of their minds. Reading Renault’s beautifully crafted novels, such as
Fire from Heaven
, or her non-fiction
Nature of Alexander
, we are struck by her fervent, almost maternal capacity to defend her subject. It is reminiscent of what our 43rd President said upon meeting Russian President Vladimir Putin, about having looked into the man’s soul and seen a kindred spirit. Renault, whose own pioneering fabulousness has been explored in a recent biography, undoubtedly saw a kindred spirit in the ambisexual warrior-king.

Unfortunately, this also seems to have driven her to cast Alexander’s adversaries in a correspondingly bad light. We can say what we want about the orator Demosthenes—we may call his rhetoric overrated, his podium style overwrought, his politics paranoid. We might even call him the original exemplar of the Barry Goldwater principle that “extremism in defense of liberty is no vice.” But
dumb
is not a quality that springs to mind. Yet Demosthenes comes off quite stupid and venal in Renault’s books, the kind of cardboard demagogue we might expect from the pen of a true paleo-monarchist. I have particularly in mind the scene in
Fire From Heaven
where the boy Alexander outsmarts the politician by leaking the content of his speech to Demosthenes’ rival, leaving the supposedly eloquent Demosthenes nothing to do but lapse into a sputtering incoherence.