The Nature of Alexander (7 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Therefore it is our duty in the forefront of the Lykians

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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