Soldier, Priest, and God

by F S Naiden

  Alexander matured into an unprepossessing specimen. Cowlick and all, he was very short, his voice grated, his neck was twisted to one side, and his eyes were out of kilter. He did not wrestle as his father did. His will and his concentration were preternatural. To avoid falling asleep as he was being read to, he held a silver ball at the end of an arm he extended over a basin. When he dropped the ball it clanged, and he would wake up. Physically and temperamentally unlike his father, he was intellectually like him, and Philip trained him to be a cavalryman and commander from an early age, no doubt long before Alexander fought his first important battle, at age eighteen. In this contest, at Chaeronea near Thebes, he would learn both military and religious lessons.52

  chaeronea marked alexander’s emergence as a military leader and Philip’s emergence as the leader of Greece. By now Philip had advanced far enough to the south to arouse the opposition of both Thebes and Athens. In 338 these two joined forces and sent an army against him. Other Greeks held back—Sparta out of pride, some out of fear, more thanks to Philip’s bribes. The two armies, Macedonian and Thessalian on one side, and Athenian and Theban on the other, clashed at Chaeronea. Philip marched south on the same road the Persians once took, and the Thebans and Athenians marched north to meet him. They knew the city’s walls would not protect them against his artillery, and they also knew they had more soldiers.53

  Philip put his light infantry, known as the shield bearers, on his right by some hills opposite the Athenians. On the left he put the heavy infantry and cavalry under Antipater, who faced the Thebans. The eighteen-year-old Alexander, who had already been fighting for several years, commanded the mounted companions. A stream bordered one side of the battlefield and hills bordered the other, so the cavalry could not outflank the enemy, the tactic used against Bardylis. Philip would need to create an opening through which Alexander could lead his several thousand troops.54

  Philip’s Macedon and Philip’s Greece, 360–336 BC.

  Ancient World Mapping Center.

  Just before battle, the two sides made animal offerings, worshipping in the same way for the same thing. For the Macedonians, Philip presided, perhaps with the help of diviners. Among the Greeks, Athenian and Theban leaders acted separately. The Greeks may also have puzzled over oracles from shrines such as Delphi. Not the Macedonians, who never consulted shrines in military matters. The companions thought of their duty to aid and obey, the Athenians of their oath to stand fast by their comrades. The Macedonians were mostly veterans. The Athenians were mostly youths, under commanders who had never fought a big land battle. The Greeks were superior athletically, thanks to their gymnasiums; the Macedonians were superior technically, thanks to their officers. The Greeks, all prosperous citizen-soldiers, had larger, better-made shields. The foot companions took shelter behind a forest of pikes. The Greeks were proud to fight. The companions were glad to, as fighting was better than digging ditches.55

  When combat began, the difference between the two sides increased. More of the Macedonians were on horseback, and so they could see more. More of them were commanders, and the rank and file heard more orders, even if they did not hear or see more of any gods or heroes thought to be patrolling the battlefield. Philip played a different role than the Athenian and Theban generals. They led from the front. He may have been in combat, but not in the thick of it. Rather than make a visible display of courage, he controlled the passage of time and the use of terrain. Perhaps that appealed to Zeus as Philip conceived him—a god of force, but one who preferred an economy of force.

  Philip made a mock retreat and the Athenians fell for the trick, breaking ranks as they advanced. Philip gave an order to halt and stand fast, and the spears carried aloft during the retreat swung down by the hundreds, row upon row. The Athenians fell where they stood.56

  The Athenians’ advance created the gap Philip had hoped for. Alexander spotted it and led his cavalry through it and then around the Thebans. Alexander could pick his target, and he headed for the most important Theban unit, the Sacred Band. Relentless as well as aggressive, Alexander virtually exterminated this elite of 300 men. The remaining Greeks broke and ran. Macedonian solidarity, hierarchy, and expertise had defeated Greek solidarity, equality, and amateurism. As Philip put it, deer led by lions defeated lions led by deer.57

  Philip’s corps of doctors, another of his military innovations, tended to the wounded. Military doctors dated back to the time of Homer, but Philip organized his physicians better than the Greek states, even Sparta. Perhaps on this occasion Philip invited doctors from the other side to join his own, and also admitted enemy wounded into the makeshift hospital erected after the fighting ceased. He did not wish to humiliate the Greeks after defeating them.

  The Macedonians cremated their companions and put the ashes in a mound that reached seven yards high and seventy yards wide. This Macedonian site dominated the battlefield, but it lacked any statuary or enclosure. Philip did not wish to be profligate. He spent some money on a small circular building at Olympia, where he put statues of himself, Alexander, and other members of his family. By this gesture he thanked Zeus and advertised himself.58

  Capping these ceremonies were acts of thanksgiving by both sides. The Macedonians thanked the gods for victory and drank the unmixed wine that gave them a reputation for drunkenness. The Greek troops, back in their cities, thanked the gods because they were still alive. Religion encased the trauma of the battlefield as a frame completes a painting or a window, making it tolerable to contemplate. Sometimes the religious perspective on combat included additional ceremonies. At Athens, it included plays performed at festivals. Although the Macedonians did not write plays, they did read plays such as those of Euripides. Alexander and other companions quoted Euripides as readily as a Victorian gentleman would quote Shakespeare. Homer was their Bible, quotable for every purpose.59

  Chaeronea showed Alexander how to use subordinates, play tricks, manage gods, and secure peace. Above all, it taught him the paradoxical lesson of unified purpose before a battle, shared responsibility during it, and mercy afterward. Zeus symbolized unity, the companions shared responsibility, and the king himself, acting in Zeus’s name, showed mercy.

  Out of respect for Euripides, and regard for his own reputation, Philip treated the Athenians mildly. He nonetheless garrisoned several cities. He controlled nearly all of modern Greece, all of European Turkey, and most of the Balkans. As Theopompus admitted, Philip was now the greatest man in Europe—the greatest man who had ever been in Europe. He began to sit on a raised dais, something previous Macedonian kings had never presumed to do. Alexander, who had proved himself worthy to succeed Philip, would have a true throne to inherit.60

  Philip now took aim at a new target, the Persian Empire, heir to the empires of Egypt and Babylon, and much else besides. The Greeks, who wished to be rid of him, encouraged him to invade, saying that he should punish the Persians for destroying Greek shrines when they invaded in 480 BC. The oracle at Delphi agreed. The Greeks had destroyed Asian shrines, and also destroyed each other’s shrines, but this embarrassing fact did not prevent them from turning to Philip, a third party, and asking him to avenge Greek losses.61

  Whatever Philip thought of these religious appeals, Persia was the greatest state in the world, and Philip was nothing if not ambitious. He had made himself the most important member of the federation that ran the oracle at Delphi (explaining why the oracle endorsed his plan), and he had backed the winning team in a horse race at Olympia, perhaps the most prestigious Greek sporting event. When some Greeks in Asia Minor rebelled against the Persians, he sympathized, and they encouraged him to intervene by putting a statue of him in the biggest temple in the region’s biggest city, Ephesus.62

  Philip was not the only ambitious member of his family. Alexander’s vexatious mother, Polyxena, now called herself Olympias, “the Olympian woman,” after Philip’s victory. She wanted to be Philip’s chief wife. Alas, Philip had never given her this position. She resented
it, and passed on her resentment to her son, Alexander. Meanwhile, Philip married yet another wife, a Scythian princess. He had dealings with the Scyths on his northern, Danube frontier.63

  Imitating his father, Alexander tried to contract an advantageous marriage. The year after Chaeronea, he sent some of his companions to Western Anatolia to arrange a marriage with a daughter of a Persian vassal, Pixodarus. Pixodarus received the young men but refused their suit. Philip had already arranged for this girl to marry Alexander’s feeble half-brother. Philip punished Alexander for interfering. The punishment was characteristically Macedonian: Philip exiled some of Alexander’s friends, but did not act against Alexander himself. (The girl did not wind up marrying the half-brother. Perhaps Pixodarus feared his daughter would be one wife among many.)

  Philip had now taught his son another religious lesson: marriage and the goddess of marriage, Zeus’s wife Hera, were subordinate to the needs and gods of war. Alexander learned this lesson, but his mother, Olympias, refused to.

  no sooner had Philip laid plans for the invasion of Persia—sending Attalus and Parmenio, two top commanders, to Asia Minor with an advance force—than a jealous bodyguard assassinated him. Philip had more land, money, and soldiers than all his royal predecessors, but he was still a Macedonian—a sexual omnivore. His lovers and his in-laws combined to bring about his sudden death in the early fall of 336.

  The most important of Philip’s in-laws was Attalus, who happened to be the uncle of one of his wives. Not coincidentally, Philip’s latest male lover was Attalus’s protégé. The lover Philip had just discarded, Pausanias, hated this new favorite, and mocked him by calling him a hermaphrodite. Attalus retaliated: a gang of his stable boys got Pausanias drunk and raped him. Greek gossip said that the gang used him as though he were an hetaera, a “female companion” or prostitute.64 Pausanias complained to Philip, but when Philip did nothing, Pausanias decided to kill him.

  Like some other ancient assassins, Pausanias acted during a religious festival. Philip planned a parade at Aegae, and Pausanias wished to kill him in a way that showed the gods hated Philip. The only account of the assassination, adapted from an unknown companion’s memoir, criticizes Philip:

  Everyone paraded at dawn. Statues of the twelve gods, elegantly sculpted and richly adorned, dazzled the public. There was also a thirteenth statue, suitable for a god, which was of Philip himself. The parade reached the open-air, unfinished theater. Every seat was taken when Philip appeared wearing a white cloak. At his insistence, his bodyguards stood back, and followed at a distance. He wanted to show publicly that the goodwill of all the Greeks protected him. He had no need of an armed guard.

   After posting horses at the gates of the city, Pausanias came to the theater entrance carrying a dagger under his cloak. As Philip bade his friends precede him into the theater at Aegae, Pausanias saw the king was alone. He rushed him, pierced him through his ribs, and struck him dead.

   A group of bodyguards hurried to the corpse of the king and the rest pursued the assassin. Pausanias would have mounted his horse before they could catch him, but he caught his boot in a vine and fell. As he sprang to his feet, the rest approached and killed him with their javelins.65

  The assassination precipitated a succession crisis. Without delay, Alexander gathered the companions present at the scene of the crime. Other companions were a day away, in Pella, the capital, or far away on assignment, as were Parmenio and Attalus. Some asked whether Olympias had hired Pausanias to kill Philip. The rumor was absurd: however resentfully, Olympias depended on Philip. Alexander spread a counter-rumor that the Persians might have wanted Philip dead. He could not so easily scotch a rumor that an oracle had predicted Philip’s death. The oracle had vaguely said some “sacrifice” would soon take place.66

  Besides battling rumors, Alexander plotted against enemies and cultivated allies. He began by acting against Attalus, whom he hated for a remark Attalus had made about Olympias. Attalus told Philip he hoped Macedon would start having legitimate and not illegitimate kings. This allusion to Olympias’s foreign birth, and Philip’s failure to object to it, had prompted Alexander and his mother to retreat to her home in Epirus for several months. To dispatch Attalus, Alexander offered to give Parmenio sole command in Asia Minor in return for killing his fellow general. Couriers took the offer to Parmenio, and he accepted it.67

  To gain the support of Antipater, Alexander offered to give a high command to Antipater’s son-in-law, a prince who could have made a claim to the throne. Alexander did not need to worry about his half-brother, the incompetent Arrhidaeus.68

  Alexander made just one decision that evinced immaturity: he ordered his supporters to kill the young man who had been king of Macedon very briefly before being deposed by Philip. Philip had never felt threatened by this onetime child king and had spared him, but Alexander saw a threat where none existed. Olympias envisioned another such threat, and she ordered the death of Attalus’s niece. For Olympias, this young wife of Philip’s had been one wife too many.69

  Meeting and drinking in the many banquet rooms of the palace at Aegae, the companions coalesced around Alexander. He had fought well at Chaeronea, and he was taking the throne in a traditionally irregular manner.70

  Alexander now conducted his first funeral, held beside the Aegae palace. This ceremony would be traditional and irregular, too, because of Alexander’s need to act quickly. He burned his father’s body on a pyre and prayed for his father’s ghost, but he did not pause to hold funeral games in Philip’s honor, as was the Macedonian as well as Greek custom. Instead he immediately had a small mausoleum built in a cemetery on a slope below the palace. The two-room, one-story tomb was a trifling affair, no larger than many of the private houses in the village nearby. The workmanship showed haste. The plaster on the interior walls was never finished and thus could not be painted. After putting the sarcophagus inside, Alexander added a few weapons and other military gear, but no throne. Remains of the pyre lay about the tomb. Alexander shut up the high marble doors and rode to the capital at Pella for more alliance-building and killing.71

  A quorum of companions gathered at Pella and acknowledged Alexander as king. No one crowned him, as the archbishop of Canterbury crowns the king of England. The companions worshipped alongside him, he acted as their priest, and he became, Zeus willing, king of the Macedonians. Among his first duties, he made a purificatory offering in which the blood of a pig, poured over himself and his coadjutors, would wash away the gore of so many killings. Would Zeus approve this legerdemain? The god disapproved of murder, but Zeus approved of vengeance upon the guilty, and he preferred that thrones be occupied.

  The larger body of companions—the Macedonian army—acknowledged Alexander, too. He prayed for them, and they listened. He sacrificed, and they ate. He drilled them, and they obeyed.

  In now quiet Aegae, the builders painted a commemorative picture on the façade over the marble doors. It depicted Philip and ten companions hunting in a Macedonian grove. Two men had speared a buck and a doe, and two more were dispatching a boar with the help of four dogs. A third pair, one with a spear and another with a double-headed axe, attacked bigger game, a lion, as did some more dogs. A man on a rearing horse led the attack, aiming his spear at the back of the lion’s shoulders. That would be the fatal blow, but he had not yet struck it. To the side, a wounded bear had got the better of another hunter and was chewing his spear. A spearman and a man with a net made ready to deal with another bear. Although the trees are leafless and the weather must be cold, one of the hunters is naked. He looked young enough to be a royal page. Only the man with the net was well clothed, and he wore skins, like a mountaineer.72

  The Frieze atop Tomb II, Vergina, 336 BC.

  Museum of the Royal Tombs at Aegae. Artistic rendering by Daniel Lamp. Courtesy of the Trustees of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens.

  None of the hunters had distinguishing features except for the man on the rearing horse, whose face
was partly obscured but was plainly the late king. Only the left profile was visible, for Philip had been blinded in the right eye. And there was one other distinctive figure, a young man with dark, darting eyes, astride a horse in the center of the whole picture, not striking any animal, but spear aloft, as though he would finish off the lion himself. That was Alexander, wearing a laurel wreath that set him apart. Alexander was the one companion who was not interchangeable with the rest—the princely one fit to replace the dead king.73

  There was one distinctive animal in the picture, the lion—a species at home on Olympus and other Macedonian mountains. He looked at the hunters with not just ferocity but royal contempt. His death would be regrettable, for killing a brave opponent was always regrettable, and it would not go unremembered.74

  Three small statues atop a column identified the grove as sacred. Everything here happened according to the gods’ will. If the gods wished, they could change the setting, and replace the hunters with soldiers and the animals with enemies. The killing would go on.

  For all the violence of this scene, it was soundless and motionless, like a frame in a movie. Alexander and his comrades could step out of the frame, forswearing the moment of action, and then step back into the frame to reclaim it.

  The builders left the tomb unfinished. Perhaps Alexander never returned to see it. Once he departed for Asia, he would never have the chance to visit Aegae again.

  another account of Alexander’s birth appeared in the anonymous Hebrew Book of Alexander of Macedon, written somewhere in the Near East centuries later. Some features of this account are Jewish, and so Alexander resembles Moses, for he was to be put to death as an infant and then was spared. Other features are Egyptian, and so Alexander is the son of the ruler of Egypt. That ruler is Philip, an ordinary king of an important country, not an upstart regent of an unimportant one.75