Alexander took a stool and sat down.
The King had calmed down and seemed to be in a good mood.
‘Well then, what do you make of my lad, Parmenion?’ he said, clapping his hand on his son’s shoulder.
‘Magnificent, Philip – he led that charge better than any experienced member of the Companions could have handled it.’
‘But General, your son, Philotas, also fought with great courage,’ said Alexander.
‘What have you done with that Athenian prisoner?’ asked the King.
‘Do you realize who he is? He’s Demades.’
Philip jumped to his feet. ‘Are you sure?’
‘Ask Callisthenes.’
‘By the gods! Send a surgeon immediately to take care of him; he has always spoken in favour of our policies.’
‘I’ve already stitched him back up, otherwise he’d already be dead. I’ve granted him a certain amount of freedom of movement within the camp. I think he’ll bring you a proposal for a peace plan tomorrow. As I understand it you’d rather avoid a war with Athens.’
‘Yes. To defeat a seafaring city means assuming mastery of the seas and that’s something we are certainly not ready for, as was made painfully clear to me at Perinthus and Byzantium. If you have any suggestions I’ll gladly listen to them and I’ll explain my own ideas to you. Finish your meat, it’s getting cold.’
*
Back in Athens the survivors of Chaeronaea initially spread nothing but despair. When they recounted the defeat and described the dead and the prisoners, the city was full of much wailing and consternation because many people had no idea whether their loved ones were dead or alive.
Later the atmosphere changed when the terrible realization of what might happen next began to take hold; even sixty-year-olds were called to arms and slaves were promised their freedom if they too agreed to fight for Athens.
Demosthenes, still exhausted and wounded, exhorted the Athenians to fight to the last and proposed that the rural population of Attica should be brought within the city walls. But all this proved to be immaterial because an escorted envoy from Philip reached the city a few days later and asked to be allowed to present a proposal for a peace treaty to a plenary assembly. The representatives of the people were amazed to see that the citizens held prisoner at Chaeronaea had already ratified the proposal and indeed it carried the signature of Demades.
The envoy entered the large semi-circle where the Athenians were sitting out in the open under the rays of the springtime sun and, having obtained permission to speak, began: ‘Your fellow citizen Demades, who is still a guest of King Philip, has negotiated for you a treaty that contains conditions I think you will find advantageous.
‘The King is not your enemy, indeed he admires your city and its wonders greatly. It was with deep regret that he was forced to go into battle against you. But he was simply complying with the request made by the god of Delphi.’
The assembly did not react as the orator had expected – they all fell silent, anxious to hear the real conditions of the treaty. The envoy continued.
‘Philip will now relinquish any idea of exploiting his advantage in this situation, he will recognize your possession of all the islands in the Aegean and he will return Oropus, Thespiae and Plataea, cities which your leaders ceded to the Thebans, thereby betraying an age-old friendship.’
Demosthenes, sitting in one of the front rows, near the government representatives, whispered to his nearest neighbour, ‘But don’t you see that this way he’s keeping hold of all our cities on the Straits? The cities he hasn’t named.’
‘It could have been much worse,’ came the reply. ‘Let’s hear what else he has to say.’
‘The King asks neither for compensation nor for a ransom,’ continued the envoy. ‘He will return your prisoners and he will return the remains of your dead so that you may bury them decently. His son, Alexander, will personally take charge of this sorrowful mission.’
The emotional reaction of the assembly to this news convinced Demosthenes that he had no hope left. Philip had touched their deepest feelings and he was intent upon sending the Prince himself to carry out this act of clemency. Nothing was more harrowing for a family than to know that the body of their own son lay unburied on a battlefield, prey to the vultures and the dogs and deprived of any funeral rites.
‘Now we’ll hear what he wants in exchange for all this generosity,’ whispered Demosthenes again.
‘In exchange Philip asks only that the Athenians should become his friends and allies. He will meet all the representatives of the Greeks in Corinth, in autumn, to put an end to the infighting, to establish a lasting peace and to announce a grand plan that has never been attempted before now, a plan which envisages the participation of all the Greek peoples. This means that Athens will have to dissolve its maritime league and enter into the great pan-Hellenic League – the only true league, which Philip is now building. He will put an end to the centuries-old internecine conflicts of the peninsula and will free the Greek cities of Asia from the Persian yoke.
‘I leave you now to decide wisely, Athenians, and when you are ready let me know your answer so that I may refer it to he who has sent me.’
*
The proposal was approved by a large majority, despite Demosthenes’ passionate speech in which he called on the city to fight to the very end. The assembly, in any case, sought to reassure him of the high esteem in which it held him by making it his duty to pronounce the funeral oration for those who died in battle. The treaty, which already bore Demades’ signature, was countersigned by all the representatives of the government and was sent back to Philip.
As soon as the King heard the news, he sent Alexander to Athens with the convoy of chariots carrying the ashes and the bones of the dead who had already been cremated on the battlefield. The prisoners had identified many of the corpses, and on the basis of their information Eumenes had had the name of the deceased and his family inscribed on each of the small urns.
The unknown soldiers were all grouped together on the last carts, but the doctors had noted the features of the bodies – distinguishing marks, if any, the colour of their hair and their eyes and so on.
As a demonstration of his goodwill, Philip had even allowed the Athenians to bring back some of the weapons in order to facilitate identification of the nameless warriors.
‘I envy you, my son,’ he said to Alexander as he prepared to set off. ‘You are about to see the most beautiful city in the world.’
His companions came to say goodbye.
‘Look after Bucephalas for me,’ the Prince said to Hephaestion. ‘I don’t want to tire him out or make him run any unnecessary risks on such a long journey.’
‘I’ll treat him as if he were a beautiful woman,’ replied his friend. ‘You needn’t worry. I’m only sorry that . . .’
‘What?’
‘That you haven’t asked me to look after Pancaspe as well.’
‘Stop it, you fool!’ Alexander said as he started laughing. Then he mounted a well-built morel which a squire had just brought for him and gave the signal for the departure.
The long convoy started out with much creaking from the wheels of the chariots. The Athenian prisoners came behind on foot, each one carrying a bundle with a few personal effects and the food he had been able to gather. Demades was given a horse in recognition of the role he had played in securing the signing of the peace treaty.
The dead Thebans, however, still lay where they had fallen and for days had been prey to the crows and the vultures while at night the wild dogs and nocturnal birds of prey had been at work. All of this was witnessed by the many mothers who had come from the city and had congregated on the edges of the battlefield, their wailing harrowing and terrible. Others, within the walls of Chaeronaea, carried out strange magical rites through which they sought to invoke the worst possible death for Philip.
But their curses and invocations had had no effect whatsoever – the King had ste
adfastly denied his enemies any hope of having their dead to bury for the simple reason that he considered them all to be traitors.
In the end, convinced by the insistence of his own friends who were afraid of the ultimate consequences of such a heartless policy, the King acquiesced.
The Thebans left their city bedecked in mourning, preceded by the weeping of the hired mourners, and they dug a large pit in which they placed the remains of their young men who had fallen in battle. Over the tomb they piled earth to form a tumulus, alongside which they later erected a gigantic stone statue of a lion to commemorate the courage of their soldiers.
In the end a peace treaty was signed with the Thebans as well, but they had to accept a Macedonian garrison on their acropolis and the dissolving of the Boeotian League as they entered into Philip’s pan-Hellenic alliance.
*
Alexander was welcomed to Athens as an important guest and received full honours. As a sign of gratitude for the merciful mission he had carried out and for the way in which the Macedonians had treated their prisoners, the council of Athens decreed that a public statue of him should be installed and the Prince had to pose for the great Athenian sculptor Protogenes, although he had once declared that only Lysippus would ever create his likeness.
Demosthenes, still much loved by his fellow citizens despite the defeat, had been sent to Calauria, an island off the city of Troezen, so as to avoid any meeting that would have been embarrassing for both parties.
Alexander understood and wisely avoided asking for news of Macedon’s rival. His official duties over, he wanted to visit the Acropolis, the monuments of which Aristotle had praised so highly, showing him sketches.
He climbed up there one morning after a storm the previous night and was dazzled by the splendour of the colours and the incredible beauty of the statues and the painting. in the middle of the wide open space rose the Parthenon, crowned by its immense tympanum with the group of sculptures by Phidias representing the birth of Athena from Zeus’s forehead. The statues were enormous and their postures followed the inclination of the slopes of the roofs: the ones standing up in the centre were the main characters and gradually moving out towards the exterior they appeared kneeling or lying down.
They were all painted in bright colours and decorated with metallic elements in bronze and gold.
Alongside the sanctuary, to the left of the entrance steps, stood a bronze statue by Phidias representing the armed goddess Athena with a golden-tipped spear in her hand – the first thing the Athenian sailors saw when they returned to the port after a voyage.
But what Alexander most wanted to see was the gigantic statue of Athena inside the temple, also created by Phidias.
Alexander entered quietly, respectful of the sacred place, the goddess’s dwelling, and there he found himself facing the colossus of gold and ivory, the wonders of which had been described to him ever since he was a child.
The air inside the cella was saturated with the incense that the priests burned continuously in honour of the goddess and the room was immersed in half-shadow. Thus the gold and the ivory of which the statue was made stood out even more – their magical reflections glimmering from the end of the double row of columns that supported the roof.
The goddess’s weapons and her peplum – stretching down to her feet – as well as her helmet, spear and shield, were all of pure gold while her face, arms and feet were of ivory, in imitation of the colour of skin. Her eyes were of mother of pearl and turquoise, which reproduced the blue-green gaze of the goddess.
Her helmet bore three horse-mane plumes each dyed red – the central one supported by a Sphinx, the two lateral ones by Pegasuses. In her right hand the goddess held an image of winged Victory, as big, he had been told, as a person, which meant that Athena’s statue must have been at least thirty-five feet in total height.
Alexander stood there in raptures as he contemplated that splendour and he thought of the glory and the power of the city that had created it. He considered the greatness of the men who had built theatres and sanctuaries, forged bronze and sculpted marble, painted frescoes of wondrous beauty. He thought of the daring of the mariners who for many years had enjoyed uncontested domination of the seas, of the philosophers who had expounded their truths along those luminous porticoes, of the poets and playwrights who had produced their tragedies for thousands of involved spectators.
He felt himself swelling with admiration and feeling and then blushed with shame at the memory of the limping figure of Philip, his father, and his unspeakable victory dance among the dead of Chaeronaea.
26
ALEXANDER VISITED the theatre of Dionysus at the foot of the Acropolis together with the buildings and monuments of the great square in which all of the city’s history was represented. But above all else it was the Decorated Colonnades – the huge series of frescoes inspired by the Persian Wars and painted by Polygnotus – which captured his imagination.
The Battle of Marathon was depicted with its famous heroic exploits, including a scene showing Phidippedes, the athlete who ran to Athens to announce the victory only to drop dead from exhaustion.
A little further on were the battles of the Second Persian War – the Athenians abandoning their city, fleeing to the island of Salamis from which they watched in tears as the Acropolis burned and the temples collapsed. And then the huge naval battle of Salamis in which the Athenian fleet had given the Persian navy a good hiding – there was the Great King himself fleeing in terror, followed by black clouds and gale-force winds.
Alexander would have liked to stay in that wonderful place, this treasure chest in which human genius had deposited its most precious cultural valuables, but duty and messages from his father called him back to Pella.
His mother Olympias had also written several times, congratulating him on the battle at Chaeronaea and telling him how much she missed him. Although she never fully explained her insistence in writing, Alexander understood intuitively that there must be something behind these letters, some new event, some painful torment. He knew his mother well and could read between her lines.
So he left one day at the beginning of summer accompanied by his escort, heading in a northerly direction. They entered Boeotia at Tanagra, passed close by Thebes one sultry afternoon, crossing the plain under the burning rays of the sun, and then rode along the shore of Lake Kopais, shrouded in a thick fog.
Now and then ghost-like herons, their wings flapping slowly, would cut through the mists that covered the swampy shores. The calls of invisible birds penetrated the damp heat like muffled shouts. Black drapes had been hung at the entrances to the villages and at the doors of the houses because war and death had struck many families, carrying off their loved ones.
He reached Chaeronaea at sunset the following day and the city seemed haunted, deserted under the dark sky of the new moon. Alexander found it impossible to conjure up any satisfactory image of Macedon’s recent victory there. The cries of the jackals and the hooting of the owls simply brought anguish in the long, nightmare-filled night he spent in the tent pitched in the shade of an enormous, solitary oak.
At Pella his father did not come to meet him because he was in Lyncestis to meet with the heads of the Illyrian tribes, and the young Prince slipped into the palace almost unnoticed, after sunset. Only Peritas came to greet him – mad with joy, he ran around, rolling on the ground, whining and wagging his tail and jumping up on his master and licking his face and hands.
A pat or two was all that was needed to make him happy and Alexander immediately went to his own apartments where Pancaspe was waiting for him.
The girl ran to Alexander and held him tightly, then she took off his dust-covered clothes and bathed him, her soft hands lingering in massaging his tired limbs. When Alexander left the bath she began to undress, but just then Leptine entered the room; her face was red and she lowered her eyes.
‘Olympias would like you to go to her as soon as possible,’ she said. ‘She hopes you might
have supper with her.’
‘I will,’ replied Alexander. And while Leptine left the room he whispered to Pancaspe, ‘Wait for me.’
As soon as she saw him, the Queen pulled him to her in a frantic embrace.
‘What’s wrong, Mother?’ the young man asked as he moved away to take a look at her.
Olympias’ eyes were as unblinking and dark as the lakes in her mountain homeland. At that moment her gaze was an unbearably clear mirror of the violently contrasting passions that were boiling deep down in her soul.
She lowered her head and bit her lip.
‘What’s wrong, Mother?’ Alexander asked once more.
Olympias turned towards the window to hide her sorrow and her shame.
‘Your father has a lover.’
‘My father has seven wives. He is a passionate man and one woman alone has never been enough for him. What’s more . . . he is our King.’
‘But it’s different this time. He has fallen in love with a girl the same age as your sister.’
‘She’s not the first one. He’ll get over it.’
‘I’m telling you it’s different this time. He’s in love, he’s lost his mind. It’s just like . . .’ and she sighed deeply, ‘. . . it’s just like when we first met.’
‘What difference does that make?’
‘A lot,’ replied Olympias. ‘The girl is pregnant by him and he wants to marry her.’
‘Who is she?’ asked Alexander, his expression darkening.
‘Eurydice, daughter of General Attalus. Do you see now why I’m so worried? Eurydice is Macedonian, from a noble family . . . she’s not a foreigner like me.’
‘That doesn’t mean a thing. You come from a family of kings, a descendant of Pyrrhus, son of Achilles and of Andromache, Hector’s bride.’
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