The Novels of Alexander the Great

by Mary Renault

  “You could have gone out,” said Philip. “I didn’t think to tell you.”

  “I didn’t drink anything first. You told me once.”

  “Did I? Well; what did you make of Demosthenes?”

  “You were right, Father. He isn’t brave.”

  Philip let fall his robe and looked round; something in the voice had arrested him. “What ailed the man? Do you know?”

  “That man’s an actor, who spoke before him. He stole his lines.”

  “However do you know that?”

  “I heard him practicing them in the garden. He spoke to me.”

  “Demosthenes? What about?”

  “He thought I was a slave and asked if I was spying. Then when I spoke in Greek, he said he supposed I was someone’s bedboy.” He used the barrack word which came to him most readily. “I didn’t tell him; I thought I’d wait.”

  “What?”

  “I sat up when he started speaking, and he knew me then.”

  The boy saw, with unmixed pleasure, his father’s slow laughter inform his gap-toothed grin, his good eye, even his blind one. “But why didn’t you tell me first?”

  “He’d have expected that. He doesn’t know what to think.”

  Philip looked at him glintingly. “Did the man proposition you?”

  “He wouldn’t ask a slave. He just wondered how much I’d cost.”

  “Well; we may suppose that now he knows.”

  Father and son exchanged looks, in a moment of perfect harmony; unalienated heirs of bronze-sworded chariot lords from beyond the Ister, who had led their tribes down in past millennia, some driving further to seize the southlands and learn their ways, some taking these mountain kingdoms where they kept old customs on; burying their dead in chamber-tombs alongside their forebears whose skulls were cased in boar-tusk helms and whose hand-bones grasped double axes; handing down, father to son, elaborate niceties of blood-feud and revenge.

  Affront had been requited, on a man immune from the sword and in any case beneath its dignity; with finesse, in terms cut to his measure. It had been as neat, in its way, as the vengeance in the hall at Aigai.

  The peace terms were debated at length in Athens. Antipatros and Parmenion, who went to represent Philip, watched fascinated the strange ways of the south. In Macedon, the only thing ever voted on was the putting of a man to death; all other public matters were for the King.

  By the time the terms had been accepted (Aischines urging it strongly), and the envoys had journeyed back to ratify, King Philip had had time to reduce the Thracian stronghold of Kersobleptes, and take his surrender on terms, bringing back his son to Pella, as a hostage for his loyalty.

  Meantime, in the hill-forts above Thermopylai, the exiled temple-robber, Phalaikos the Phokian, was running out of gold, food and hope. Philip was now treating with him in secret. News that Macedon held the Hot Gates would strike Athenians like an earthquake; they could bear the Phokians’ sins (and had indeed an alliance with them) far more lightly than this. It must be hidden till the peace had been ratified by sacred and binding oaths.

  Philip was charming to the second embassy. Aischines was most valuable, a man not bought but changed in heart. He accepted gladly the King’s assurance that he meant no harm to Athens, which was sincere; and, which he saw as not false, that he would deal mildly with the Phokians. Athens needed Phokis; not only to hold Thermopylai, but to contain the ancient enemy, Thebes.

  The envoys were entertained and given conspicuous guest-gifts, which they all took except Demosthenes. He had spoken first this time, but his colleagues had all agreed that he lacked his usual fire. They had in fact been quarreling and intriguing all the way from Athens. Demosthenes’ suspicions of Philokrates had reached certainty; he was eager to convince the others, but also to convict Aischines; this charge, being doubted, discredited the other. Brooding on these injuries, he had gone in to dinner; where the guests had been entertained by young Alexander and another boy singing part-songs to the lyre. Across the instrument, two cool grey eyes had lingered on Demosthenes; turning quickly, he had seen Aischines smile.

  The oaths were ratified; the envoys went home. Philip escorted them south as far as Thessaly, without revealing that it was on his way. As soon as they had gone, he marched over to Thermopylai, and received the hill-forts from Phalaikos in return for a safe-conduct. The exiles went gratefully, wandering off to hire out their swords in the endless local wars of Greece, dying here and there as Apollo picked them off.

  Athens was in panic. They waited for Philip to sweep down on them like Xerxes. The walls were manned, refugees from Attica crowded in. But Philip only sent word that he wished to set in order the affairs of Delphi, so long a scandal, and invited the Athenians to send an allied force.

  Demosthenes made a fiery speech against the treachery of tyrants. Philip, he said, wanted the flower of their youth delivered him to use as hostages. No force was sent. Philip was sincerely puzzled; affronted, wounded in his soul. He had shown mercy when none was looked for, and had not even had thanks for it.

  Leaving Athens to herself, he pressed on with the Phokian war. He had the blessing of the Sacred League, the states who with the Phokians had been guardians of the shrine.

  Affairs in Thrace being settled, he could attack with all his force. Fort after Phokian fort surrendered or fell; soon all was over, and the Sacred League met to decide the Phokians’ fate. They had become a detested people, whose god-cursed plunder had ruined all in its path. Most of the deputies wanted them tortured to death, or hurled from the summits of the Phaidriades, or at least sold off as slaves. Philip had long been sickened by the savageries of the war; he foresaw endless further wars for possession of the empty lands. He argued for mercy. In the end, it was decided to resettle the Phokians in their own country, but in small villages they could not fortify. They were forbidden to rebuild their walls, and had to pay yearly reparations to Apollo’s temple. Demosthenes made a fiery speech, denouncing these atrocities.

  The Sacred League passed a vote of thanks to Philip, for cleansing from impiety the holiest shrine in Greece; and conferred on Macedon the two seats in the Council from which Phokis had been deposed. He had returned to Pella when they sent two heralds after him, inviting him to preside at the next Pythian Games.

  After the audience, he stood alone at his study window, tasting his happiness. It was not only a great beginning, but a longed-for end. He was received, now, as a Hellene.

  He had been the lover of Hellas since he was a man. Her hatred had burned him like a whip. She had forgotten herself, fallen below her past; but she only needed leading, and in his soul he felt his destiny.

  His love had been born in bitterness, when he had been led by strangers from the mountains and forests of Macedon to the dreary lowlands of Thebes, a living symbol of defeat. Though his jailor-hosts were civil, many Thebans were not; he had been torn from friends and kin; from willing girls, and the married mistress who had been his first instructor. In Thebes, free women were barred to him; his comings and goings watched; if he went to a brothel, he had not the price of a whore who did not disgust him.

  In the palaestra he had found his only comfort. Here no one could look down on him; he had proved himself an athlete of skill and stubborn fortitude. The palaestra had accepted him, and let him know that its loves were not denied him. Begun at first in mere loneliness and need, they had proved consoling; by degrees, in a city where they had tradition and high prestige, they had grown as natural as any other.

  With new friendships had come visits to the philosophers and teachers of rhetoric; and, presently, the chance to learn from experts the art of war. He had longed for home and had returned with gladness; but by then he had been received into the mystery of Hellas, forever her initiate.

  Athens was her altar, almost her self. All he asked of Athens was to restore her glories; her present leaders seemed to him like the Phokians at Delphi, unworthy men who had seized a holy shrine. Deep in his mind moved a knowl
edge that for Athenians freedom and glory went together; but he was like a man in love, who thinks the strongest trait of the loved one’s nature will be easily changed, as soon as they are married.

  All his policies, devious and opportunist as they had often been, had looked forward to the opening of her door to him. Rather than lose her, in the last resort he would break it down; but he longed for her to open it. Now he held in his hand the elegant scroll from Delphi; the key, if not to her inner room, at least to her gate.

  In the end, she must receive him. When he had freed her kindred cities of Ionia from their generations of servitude, he would be taken to her heart. The thought grew in his mind. Lately, he had had like an omen a long letter from Isokrates, a philosopher so old that he had been a friend of Sokrates while Plato was still a schoolboy, and had been born before Athens declared war on Sparta, to begin that long mortal bloodletting of Greece. Now in his tenth decade still alert to a changing world, he urged Philip to unite the Greeks and lead them. Dreaming at the window, he saw a Hellas made young again, not by the shrill orator who called him tyrant, but by a truer Heraklid than those effete and bickering Kings of Sparta. He saw his statue set up on the Acropolis; the Great King set down to the proper place of all barbarians, to furnish slaves and tribute; with Philip’s Athens once more the School of Hellas.

  Young voices broke his thoughts. On the terrace just below, his son was playing knucklebones with the young hostage son of Teres, King of the Agrianoi.

  Philip looked down with irritation. What could the boy want with that little savage? He had even brought him to the gymnasium, so had said one of the Companion lords, whose son went there too, and who did not like it.

  The child had been treated quite humanely, well clad and fed, never made to work or do anything disgraceful to his rank. Of course none of the noble houses had been prepared to take him in, as they would have done a civilized boy from a Greek city of coastal Thrace; he had had to be found quarters in the Palace, and, since the Agrianoi were a warlike race whose submission might not be lasting, a guard put over him in case he ran away. Why Alexander, with every boy of decent birth in Pella to choose from, should have sought out this one, was past comprehension. No doubt he would soon forget the whim; it was not worth interfering.

  The two princes squatted on the flagstones, playing their game in mixed Macedonian and Thracian helped out with mime; more Thracian, because Alexander had learned faster. The guard sat, bored, on the rump of a marble lion.

  Lambaros was a Red Thracian of the conquering northern strain which, a thousand years before, had come south to hew out mountain chiefdoms among the dark Pelasgians. He was about a year older than Alexander and looked more, being big-boned. He had a shock of fiery hair; on his upper arm was tattooed an archaic, small-headed horse, the sign of his royal blood—like every high-born Thracian, he claimed direct descent from the demigod Rhesos the Rider. On his leg was a stag, the mark of his tribe. When he came of age and his further growth would not spoil them, he would be covered with the elaborate design of whorls and symbols to which his rank entitled him. Round his neck on a greasy thong was a gryphon amulet in yellow Scythian gold.

  He held the leather dice-bag, muttering an incantation over it. The guard, who would have liked to go where he had friends, gave an impatient cough. Lambaros threw a wild look over his shoulder.

  “Take no notice,” said Alexander. “He’s a guard, that’s all. He can’t tell you what to do.” He thought it a great dishonor to the house, that a royal hostage should be worse treated in Pella than in Thebes. It had been in his mind, even before the day he had come upon Lambaros crying his heart out with his head against a tree, watched by his indifferent warder. At the sound of a new voice he had turned like a beast at bay, but had understood an outstretched hand. Had his tears been mocked, he would have fought even if they killed him for it. This knowledge had passed between them without words.

  There had been red lice in his red hair, and Hellanike had grumbled even at asking her maid to see to it. When Alexander had sent for sweets to offer him, they had been brought by a Thracian slave. “He’s only on sentry go. You’re my guest. Your throw.”

  Lambaros repeated his prayer to the Thracian sky-god, called fives, and threw a two and three.

  “You ask him for such little things; I expect he was offended. Gods like to be asked for something great.”

  Lambaros, who now prayed less often to go home, said, “Your god won for you.”

  “No, I just try to feel lucky. I save prayer up.”

  “What for?”

  “Lambaros; listen. When we’re men, when we’re kings—you understand what I’m saying?”

  “When our fathers die.”

  “When I go to war, will you be my ally?”

  “Yes. What is an ally?”

  “You bring your men to fight my enemies, and I’ll fight yours.”

  From the window above, King Philip saw the Thracian grasp his son’s hands, and, kneeling, arrange them in a formal clasp about his own. He lifted his face, speaking long and eloquently; Alexander knelt facing him, holding his folded hands, patient, his whole frame attentive. Presently Lambaros leaped to his feet, and gave a high howl like a forsaken dog’s, his treble attempting the Thracian war-yell. Philip, making nothing of the scene, found it distasteful; he was glad to see the guard stop idling and walk over.

  It brought back to Lambaros the truth of his condition. His paean stopped; he looked down, sullen with misery.

  “What do you want? Nothing is wrong, he is teaching me his customs.” The guard, come to separate brawling children, was startled into apology. “Go back. I shall call you if I need you. That’s a fine oath, Lambaros. Say the end again.”

  “I will keep faith,” said Lambaros slowly and gravely, “unless the sky fall and crush me, or the earth open and swallow me, or the sea rise and overwhelm me. My father kisses his chiefs when he swears them in.”

  Philip watched, incredulous, his son take in his hands the red head of the young barbarian, and plant the ritual kiss on his brow. This had gone far enough. It was un-Hellenic. Philip remembered he had not yet given the boy the news about the Pythian Games, to which he intended taking him. That would give him better things to think about.

  There was a drift of dust on the flags. Alexander was scribbling in it, with a whittled twig. “Show me how your people form up for battle.”

  From the library window on a floor above, Phoinix saw with a smile the gold and the rufous head bent together over some solemn game. There was always relief in seeing his charge a child awhile, the bow unbent. The presence of the guard had lightened his duties. He returned to his unrolled book.

  “We’ll win a thousand heads,” Lambaros was saying. “Chop-chop-chop!”

  “Yes, but where do the slingers stand?”

  The guard, who had had a message, came up again. “Alexander, you must leave this young lad to me. The King your father wants you.”

  Alexander’s grey eyes lifted to his a moment. In spite of himself, he shifted his feet.

  “Very well. Don’t stop him from doing everything he wants. You’re a soldier, not a pedagogue. And don’t call him this young lad. If I can give him his rank, then so can you.”

  He walked up between the marble lions, followed by Lambaros’ eyes, to hear the great news from Delphi.

  4

  “IT IS A PITY,” said Epikrates, “that you cannot give more time to it.”

  “Days should be longer. Why must one sleep? One should be able to do without.”

  “You would not find it improved your execution.”

  Alexander stroked the polished box of the kithara with its inlaid scrollwork and ivory keys. The twelve strings sighed softly. He slipped off the sling which let it be played standing (sitting muted its tone) and sat down by it on the table, plucking a string here and there to test the pitch.

  “You are right,” said Epikrates. “Why should one die? One should be able to do without.”
/>   “Yes, having to sleep reminds one.”

  “Well, come! At twelve years, you are still pretty rich in time. I should like to see you entered for a contest; it would give you an aim to work for. I was thinking of the Pythian Games. In two years, you might be ready.”

  “What’s the age limit for the youths?”

  “Eighteen. Would your father consent?”

  “Not if music was all I entered for. Nor would I, Epikrates. Why do you want me to do it?”

  “It would give you discipline.”

  “I thought as much. But then I shouldn’t enjoy it.”

  Epikrates gave his accustomed sigh.

  “Don’t be angry. I get discipline from Leonidas.”

  “I know, I know. At your age, my touch was not so good. You started younger, and I may say without hubris that you have been better taught. But you will never make a musician, Alexander, if you neglect the philosophy of the art.”

  “One needs mathematics in the soul. I shall never have it, you know that. In any case, I could never be a musician. I have to be other things.”

  “Why not enter the Games,” said Epikrates temptingly, “and take in the music contest too?”

  “No. When I went to watch, I thought nothing would be so wonderful. But we stayed on after, and I met the athletes; and I saw how it really is. I can beat the boys here, because we’re all training to be men. But these boys are just boy athletes. Often they’re finished before they’re men; and if not, even for the men, the Games is all their life. Like being a woman is for women.”

  Epikrates nodded. “It came about almost within my lifetime. People who have earned no pride in themselves are content to be proud of their cities through other men. The end will be that the city has nothing left for pride, except the dead, who were proud less easily…Well, with music every man’s good is ours. Come, let me hear it again; this time, with a little more of what the composer wrote.”