by Mary Renault
“Oxhead wants exercise, let’s go riding.”
“Has he thrown the groom again?”
“No, that was just to teach him. I’d warned him, too.” The horse had consented, by degrees, to be mounted for the routine of the stables. But once his headstall was on with its buckles and plaques of silver, his collar worked with filigree, and his fringed saddlecloth, then he knew himself the seat of godhead, and avenged impiety. The groom was still laid up.
They rode through red new-leaved beech woods to the grassy uplands, at an easy pace set by Hephaistion, who knew Alexander would not let Oxhead stand in a sweat. At a coppice edge they dismounted, and stood looking out to the Chalkidian mountains beyond the plain and the sea.
“I found a book at Pella,” Alexander said, “last time we were there. It’s one by Plato, that Aristotle never showed us. I think he must have been envious.”
“What book?” Hephaistion smiling tested the hitch of his horse’s bridle.
“I learned some, listen. Love makes one ashamed of disgrace, and hungry for what is glorious; without which neither a people nor a man can do anything great or fine. If a lover were to be found doing something unworthy of himself, or basely failing to resent dishonor, he would rather be exposed before family or friends or anyone, than before the one he loves. And somewhere it says, Suppose a state or an army could be made up only of lovers and beloved. How could any company hope for greater things than these, despising infamy and rivaling each other in honor? Even a few of them, fighting side by side, might well conquer the world.”
“That’s beautiful.”
“He was a soldier when he was young, like Sokrates. I expect Aristotle was envious. The Athenians never founded a lovers’ regiment, they left it to the Thebans. No one’s yet beaten the Sacred Band, did you know that?”
“Let’s go in the wood.”
“That’s not the end, Sokrates ends it. He says the best, the greatest love can only be made by the soul.”
“Well,” said Hephaistion quickly, “but everyone knows he was the ugliest man in Athens.”
“The beautiful Alkibiades threw himself at his head. But he said that to make love with the soul was the greatest victory, like the triple crown at the games.”
Hephaistion stared out in pain to the mountains of Chalkidike. “It would be the greatest victory,” he said slowly, “to the one who minded most.”
Knowing that in the service of a ruthless god he had baited his trap with knowledge gained in love, he turned to Alexander. He stood staring out at the clouds, in solitude, conferring with his daimon.
Guilt-troubled, Hephaistion reached out and grasped his arm. “If you mean that, if it’s what you really want…”
He raised his brows, smiled, and tossed back his hair. “I’ll tell you something.”
“Yes?”
“If you can catch me.”
He was always the quickest off the mark. While his voice still hung in the air he was gone. Hephaistion threaded light birches and shadowy larches to a rocky scarp. At its foot Alexander lay motionless with closed eyes. Distraught and breathless Hephaistion clambered down, knelt by him, felt him for injuries. Nothing whatever was wrong. He eyed Hephaistion smiling. “Hush! You’ll scare the foxes.”
“I could kill you,” said Hephaistion with rapture.
The sunlight, sifting through the larch boughs, had moved westward a little, striking glints like topaz from the wall of their rocky lair. Alexander lay watching the weaving tassels with his arm behind his head.
“What are you thinking of?” Hephaistion asked him.
“Of death.”
“It does leave people sad sometimes. It’s the vital spirits that have gone out of one. I’d not have it undone; would you?”
“No; true friends should be everything to one another.”
“It is what you really want?”
“You should know that.”
“I can’t bear you to be sad.”
“It soon goes by. It’s the envy of some god perhaps.” He reached up to Hephaistion’s head, bent anxiously above him, and settled it on his shoulder. “One or two of them were shamed by unworthy choices. Don’t name them, they might be angry; still, we know. Even the gods can be envious.”
Hephaistion, his mind freed from the clouds of longing, saw in a divining moment the succession of King Philip’s young men: their coarse good looks, their raw sexuality like a smell of sweat, their jealousies, their intrigues, their insolence. Out of all the world, he had been chosen to be everything which those were not; between his hands had been laid, in trust, Alexander’s pride. As long as he should live, nothing greater could ever happen to him than this; to have more, one would need to be made immortal. Tears burst from his eyes, and trickled down on the throat of Alexander, who, believing he too felt the after-sadness, smilingly stroked his hair.
In the next year’s spring, Demosthenes sailed north to Perinthos and Byzantion, the fortified cities on the narrow seas. Philip had negotiated a peace treaty with each: if let alone, they would not impede his march. Demosthenes persuaded both cities to denounce the treaties. The Athenian forces based on Thasos were conducting an undeclared war with Macedon.
On the drill-field of the Pella plain, a sea-flat left bare in old men’s living memory, the phalanxes wheeled and countermarched with their long sarissas, graded so that the points of three ranks, in open order, should strike the enemy front in a single line. The cavalry did their combat exercises, gripping with the thighs, the knees, and by the mane, to help them keep their seats through the shock of impact.
At Mieza, Alexander and Hephaistion were packing their kit to start at dawn next day, and searching each other’s hair.
“None this time,” said Hephaistion, laying down the comb. “It’s in winter, with people huddling together, that one picks them up.”
Alexander, sitting at his knees, shoved off a dog of his that was trying to lick his face, and changed places. “Fleas one can drown,” he said as he worked, “but lice are like Illyrians creeping about in the woods. We’ll have plenty on campaign, one can at least start clean. I don’t think you’ve…no, wait…Well, that’s all.” He got up to reach a stoppered flask from a shelf. “We’ll use this again, it’s far the best. I must tell Aristotle.”
“It stinks.”
“No, I put in some aromatics. Smell.” During this last year, he had been taken up with the healing art. Among much theory, little of which he thought could issue well in action, this was a useful thing, which warrior princes had not disdained on the field of Troy; the painters showed Achilles binding Patroklos’ wounds. His keenness had somewhat disconcerted Aristotle, whose own interest now was academic; but the science had been his paternal heritage, and he found after all a pleasure in teaching it. Alexander now kept a notebook of salves and draughts, with hints on the treatment of fevers, wounds and broken limbs.
“It does smell better,” Hephaistion conceded. “And it seems to keep them off.”
“My mother had a charm against them. But she always ended in picking them out by hand.”
The dog sat grieving by the baggage, whose smell it recognized. Alexander had been in action not many months before, commanding his own company as the King had promised. All of today the house had sounded with shrill susurrations, like crickets’ chirping; the scrape of whetstones on javelins, daggers and swords, as the young men made ready.
Hephaistion thought of the coming war without fear, erasing from his mind, or smothering in its depths, even the fear that Alexander would be killed. Only so was life possible at his side. Hephaistion would avoid dying if he could, because he was needed. One must study how to make the enemy die instead, and beyond that trust in the gods.
“One thing I’m scared of,” said Alexander; working his sword about in its sheath till the blade glided like silk through the well-waxed leather. “That the south will come in before I’m ready.” He reached for the brush of chewed stick with which he cleaned the goldwork.
“Before we march into Greece, I hope to be a general.”
Hephaistion looked up from rubbing the hilt of polished sharkskin. “Don’t set your heart on it; time’s looking short.”
“They’d follow me already, in the field, if it came to a push in action. That I know. They’d not think it proper to appoint me yet, though. A year, two years…But they’d follow me, now.”
Hephaistion gave it thought; he never told Alexander what he wished to hear, if it could cause him trouble later. “Yes, they would. I saw that last time. Once they thought you were just a luck-bringer. But now they can tell you know what you’re about.”
“They’ve known me a long time.” Alexander took down his helmet from the wall-peg, and shook out its white horsehair crest.
“To hear some of them talk, one would think they’d reared you.” Hephaistion dug too hard with the brush, broke it, and had to chew a new end.
“Some of them have.” Alexander, having combed the crest, went over to the wall-mirror. “I think it will do. It’s good metal, it fits, and the men can see me.” Pella had no lack of first-class armorers. They came north from Corinth, knowing where good custom was. “When I’m a general, I can have one to show up.”
Hephaistion, looking over his shoulder at his mirrored face, said, “I’ll bet on that. You’re like a gamecock for finery.”
Alexander hung back the helmet. “You’re angry, why?”
“Get made a general, then you’ll have a tent of your own. We’ll never be out of a crowd from tomorrow till we get back.”
“Oh…Yes, I know. But that’s war.”
“One has to get used to it. Like the fleas.”
Alexander came swiftly over, struck with remorse at having forgotten. “In our souls,” he said, “we’ll be more than ever united, winning eternal fame. Son of Menoitios, great one, you who delight my heart.” He smiled deeply into Hephaistion’s eyes, which faithfully smiled back. “Love is the true food of the soul. But the soul eats to live, like the body, it mustn’t live to eat.”
“No,” said Hephaistion. What he lived for was his own business, part of which was that Alexander should not be burdened with it.
“The soul must live to do.”
Hephaistion put aside the sword, took up the dagger with its dolphin hilts and agate pommel, and agreed that this was so.
Pella rang and rattled with sounds of war. The breeze brought Oxhead the noise and smell of war-chargers; he flared his nostrils and whinnied.
King Philip was on the parade ground. He had had scaling-ladders rigged up against tall scaffolding, and was making the men climb up in proper order, without crowding, jostling, pinking each other with their weapons, or undue delay. He sent his son a message that he would see him after maneuvers. The Queen would see him at once.
When she embraced him, she found he was the taller. He stood five foot seven; before his bones set, he might make another inch or so, not more. But he could break a cornel spear-shaft between his hands, walk thirty miles in a day over rough country without food (for a test, he had done it once without drink either). By gradual unnoticed stages, he had ceased to grieve that he was not tall. The tall men of the phalanx, who could wield a twenty-foot sarissa, liked him very well as he was.
His mother, though there was only an inch between them, laid her head on his shoulder, making herself soft and tender like a roosting dove. “You are a man, really a man now.” She told him all his father’s wickedness; there was nothing new. He stroked her hair and echoed her indignation, his mind upon the war. She asked him what kind of youth was this Hephaistion; was he ambitious, what did he ask for, had he exacted any promises? Yes. That they should be together in battle. Ah! Was that to be trusted? He laughed, patted her cheek, and saw the real question in her eyes, which sought, like wrestlers, for a moment’s failure of nerve which would let her ask it. He faced her out, and she did not ask. It made him fond of her and forgiving; he leaned to her hair to smell its scent.
Philip was in the painted study at a littered desk. He had come straight from the drill-field, the room smelled acridly of his horse’s sweat and his own. At the kiss of greeting, he noticed that his son, after a ride of less than forty miles, had already bathed to wash off the dust. But the real shock was to perceive on his jaw a fine golden stubble. With astonishment and dismay, Philip perceived that the boy was not, after all, behindhand with his beard. He had been shaving.
A Macedonian, a king’s son, what could have possessed him to make him ape the effete ways of the south? Smooth as a girl. For whom was he doing this? Philip was well informed about Mieza; Parmenion had arranged this secretly with Philotas, who made regular reports. It was one thing to take up with Amyntor’s son, a harmless and comely youth whom Philip, indeed, could himself have fancied; it was another to go about looking like someone’s minion. He cast his mind back to the troop of young men he had seen arriving; it now occurred to him that there had been older chins there, beardless too. It must be a fashion among them. A vague feeling of subversion stirred under his skin; but he pushed it out of the way. In spite of the boy’s oddities, he was trusted by the men; and, since business stood where it did, this was no time to cross him.
Philip waved his son to the seat beside him. “Well,” he said, “as you see, we’re well forward here.” He described his preparations; Alexander listened, elbows on knees, hands clasped before him; one could see his mind running a step ahead. “Perinthos will be tough to crack, but we shall have Byzantion on our hands as well; openly or not they’ll support Perinthos. So will the Great King. I doubt he’s in a state to make war, from what I hear; but he’ll send supplies. He has a treaty for that with Athens.”
For a moment, their faces shared a single thought. It was as if they spoke of some great lady, the strict mentor of their childhood, now found to be plying the streets in a seaport town. Alexander glanced at the beautiful old bronze by Polykleitos, of Hermes inventing the lyre. He had known it all his life; the too-slender youth with his fine bones and runner’s muscles had always seemed, under the divine calm imposed by the sculptor, to conceal a deep inward sadness, as if he knew it would come to this.
“Well, then, Father; when do we march?”
“Parmenion and I, seven days from now. Not you, my son. You will be at Pella.”
Alexander sat bolt upright staring; he seemed to stiffen all over. “At Pella? What do you mean?”
Philip grinned. “You look for all the world like that horse of yours, shying at his shadow. Don’t be so quick off the mark. You won’t be sitting idle.”
From his scarred and knotted hand he drew a massive ring of antique goldwork. Its signet of sardonyx was carved with a Zeus enthroned, eagle on fist; it was the Royal Seal of Macedon.
“You will look after this.” He flipped it up and caught it. “Do you think you can?”
The fierceness left Alexander’s face; for a moment it looked almost stupid. In the King’s absence, the Seal was held by his Regent.
“You’ve had a good grounding in war,” his father said. “When you’re old enough to be upgraded without a fuss, you can have a cavalry brigade. Let’s say two years. Meantime, you must learn administration. It’s worse than useless to push out frontiers, if the realm’s in chaos behind you. Remember, I had to deal with that before I could move anywhere, even against the Illyrians who were inside our borders. Don’t think it can’t come back again. Moreover, you’ll have to protect my lines of communication. This is serious work I’m giving you.”
Watching the eyes before him, he saw a look in them he had not met since the day of the horse fair, at the end of the ride. “Yes, Father. I know it. Thank you; I’ll see that you don’t repent of it.�
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“Antipatros will stay too; if you’ve sense you’ll consult him. But that’s your own choice; the Seal’s the Seal.”
Each day till the army marched, Philip held councils: with the officers of the home garrisons, the tax-collectors, the officers of justice, the men whom the tribal chiefs, enrolled with the Companions, had left to rule their tribes; the chiefs and princes who for reasons historic, traditional or legal remained at home. Amyntas was one, the son of Perdikkas, Philip’s elder brother. When his father fell he had been a child. Philip had been elected Regent; before Amyntas came of age, the Macedonians had decided they liked Philip’s work and wanted to keep him on. Within the royal kin, the throne was elective by ancient right. He had dealt graciously with Amyntas, giving him the status of a royal nephew, and one of his own half-legal daughters for a wife. He had been conditioned to his lot from infancy; he came now to the councils, a thickset, dark-bearded young man of five-and-twenty, whom any stranger might have picked out of a crowd as Philip’s son. Alexander, sitting on his father’s right at the conference, would steal a look sometimes, wondering if such inertia could be real.
When the army marched, Alexander escorted his father to the coast road, embraced him, and turned for Pella. Oxhead, as the cavalry went off without him, blew restively down his nose. Philip was pleased he had told the boy he would be in charge of the communication lines. A happy thought; it had delighted him; and in fact the route was very well secured.
The first act of Alexander’s regency was a private one; he bought a thin slip of gold, which he wound round the hoop of the royal signet to make it fit his finger. He knew that symbols are magical, in perfection and in defect.