God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great

by Christian Cameron

  Oh – Sardis. I remember Sardis through the curtain of her hair.

  We marched as soon as Thaïs had a receipt for the twenty talents of gold, and the city opened its gates as we approached. Memnon’s garrison marched out through the Miletian Gate as we marched in through the Sardis gate, and Ephesus was Sardis all over again – another magnificent city, this one grander than Athens, surrendered without a fight, and even I felt a certain . . . sadness, if that’s the proper phrase.

  Thaïs had no such heroic scruples, and though she entered the city with the baggage, on a mule, Alexander sent her a box – inside was a gold statue of Artemis holding a tiny key.

  She kept it until she died. I wondered why Alexander found it so easy to admit publicly that she’d taken Ephesus, but couldn’t reward Cleitus for saving his life.

  Ephesus was more dangerous to us than Sardis. Sardis was an alien, Persian city, and our troops knew they were in enemy territory. Ephesus was Greek through and through, and for all I claim that Macedonians hate Greeks – we love Greece, and we are Hellenes. Women in Ephesus looked like Greek women, and spoke Greek. The temples were to Greek gods. The stalls in the agora sold Greek goods and the shopkeepers spoke Greek.

  And the artists and philosophers were Greek. Ephesus was the city of Heraklitus and of Thales – of Hipparchus the Comic Poet, and Archippos his son.

  Apelles the Artist was living in Ephesus when we took it, and the purge instituted by Thaïs’s democrats had almost killed him. Alexander had the good fortune to rescue him personally from a crowd of democrats who didn’t, apparently, appreciate the new taste in art.

  For a while, they were inseparable. Apelles was an agreeable man, I confess – and no sycophant, except out of pure sociability. He was an amiable man, gentle, brilliantly educated. Your father knew him.

  Kineas had come down from Phrygia with a squadron of Athenian cavalry, because Alexander wanted to garrison the city with Greeks and Ephesus and Athens were old friends. It was the first time Alexander gave Kineas a direct command, as well – Kineas was the son of a great Athenian aristocrat, and as such was the right man to keep the democrats in line and guarantee to the (surviving) oligarchs that the rule of law would be preserved.

  It was beautifully done, and typical of Alexander’s style. He let Thaïs’s partisans get carried away – and they killed almost everyone who might have resisted him. And then he ordered them to stop with a shudder of revulsion and appeared deeply contrite. And summoned his friend, an Athenian aristocrat, to put it all to rights, thus appearing even-handed and just – after ruthlessly exterminating opposition.

  Thaïs was disgusted – she’d intended to institute a truly popular democracy. Did I mention my lover was a firebrand? But again, Alexander’s brilliance was ahead of her. She loathed aristocrats (myself excepted, I assume) but deeply respected Kineas. She didn’t do anything to undermine him – although if Perdiccas (for instance) had been commanding the military police, she might have had a different . . . approach.

  And of course Kineas did an excellent job. But those few weeks made his career, with us – he dined every night with the king, and never abused the privilege. Only once did I see him anything but perfectly well behaved. One night Seleucus slapped him on the back. ‘You’re like one of our own officers, Kineas,’ he said. ‘I never even think of you as Athenian.’

  Kineas winced, and his eyes narrowed. ‘I am, though,’ he said. ‘I am not a Macedonian, Seleucus.’

  Apelles laughed aloud. ‘And thank the gods, Kineas!’ He raised a kylix of wine. ‘No Macedonian could have brought peace to the factions here.’

  Apelles had excellent social skills. He did tend to go on a bit about politics, and I sometimes think the king kept him around to make his staff look more worldly.

  At any rate, we had to wait for the allied fleet to catch us up, and Alexander had detached Parmenio to pluck the rest of Lydia if the garrisons were weak, so we had time to kill, and Alexander spent his time going to parties and getting his portrait painted by the foremost artist of the day. He was drunk a great deal.

  Philotas and I avoided each other.

  Memnon was gathering an army at Miletus.

  Kineas had an increasing number of crimes to deal with – rapes and thefts by Macedonians. He dealt with them as tactfully as he could, but he was also outraged when he found that any Macedonian he turned over to Philotas was released.

  And Alexander spent far too much time ignoring all this and sitting on Bucephalus in a tent by the agora, where Apelles painted him in encaustic, carefully coloured wax. I found the new, imperial Alexander a little grating and I had duties to perform, and frankly, I was besotted with Thaïs and we made love as often as I could catch her and get her clothes off – and the success of taking the city had made her as randy as I. We had a fine time, but Ephesus had a certain aura – it was too sophisticated for my taste, and I suspect it actually frightened some of our Pellan farm boys.

  At any rate, Apelles finished his military portrait, and I saw it. It was . . . accurate. It showed the fire in Alexander’s eyes, and the ram’s horns where his unruly blond hair rose in rebellion against the brush when he’d been on campaign a week or more. And there were the lines around his mouth that he got in combat, and there were the knuckles, white against the hilt of his sword – and there was Bucephalus, his deeply swayed, broad back accurate in every detail.

  Alexander hated it.

  By Apollo, I could have told Apelles if he’d asked me. Kineas and I had a laugh about it, and that was before the king saw it. It was a magnificent portrait of the King of Macedon at war.

  But Alexander didn’t see himself as the King of Macedon any more.

  I was there when he exploded. I wanted to be there. And besides, had I shown signs of chickening out, Thaïs was going to make me. Everyone in Ephesus knew the king was going to hate it, and everyone wanted to hear what he had to say.

  ‘It is bad art,’ Alexander said, his arms crossed, an entirely false smile on his face. ‘My dear Apelles – it is trite. You should be ashamed of yourself.’

  At the pronouncement, the apprentices at the back of the tent – busy grinding priceless substances to powders so fine they could be used to mix with melted beeswax – guffawed.

  Alexander’s ear was always tuned to the sound of derisive laughter. His head came up and he looked around, like a stallion hearing a mare.

  ‘What was that?’ he asked.

  ‘My apprentices,’ Apelles said. ‘They are mocking you for pretending to know anything about art.’

  Alexander’s face grew red. ‘I studied with Aristotle!’ he said, and Callisthenes nodded.

  Apelles shrugged. ‘He didn’t know shit about art, either.’

  Callisthenes had a mouth full of wine, and he spurted it all over the ground.

  Good times.

  ‘The likeness to me is good enough, I suppose,’ Alexander said. ‘I know it’s meant to be me.’

  Apelles stood stony-faced.

  ‘But Bucephalus is not a swayback carthorse, and my thorax doesn’t buckle under my right arm.’ Alexander moved around the painting. ‘And the light is odd.’

  Apelles laughed, and his laugh was unforced and unconcerned. ‘My lord, you are the greatest warrior in the circle of the world, and may indeed be the child of the gods, but you telling me about art is like me telling Ptolemy there about horses.’

  ‘Leave me out of it,’ I said.

  Apelles smiled a lazy, evil smile. ‘Why don’t you fetch an impartial judge?’ he asked the king. ‘Get your horse and bring him here.’

  The great war horse was brought, and as soon as the horse saw the likeness, he raised his head and gave a stallion trumpet call.

  He seemed puzzled when the other horse didn’t move. But he looked at the painting for a long time.

  ‘I rest my case,’ Apelles said.

  ‘What, your painting is good enough to please a horse?’ Callisthenes asked.

  ‘The horse re
cognises the likeness. Animals live in a natural world – art, to be art, must be natural.’

  Callisthenes shrugged. ‘Nonsense. Art is always artifice. Any child can copy nature.’

  ‘It is always easier for a pompous fool to imitate a philosopher than other men,’ Apelles said to Callisthenes.

  Apelles ended up executing another painting, this one of Alexander in the guise of Zeus, throwing a thunderbolt. Kineas, for example, found it horrible. Thaïs laughed and laughed.

  Alexander loved it. And so did the troops.

  Late summer, and we finally moved. Parmenio had done his usual brilliant job cleaning up Phrygia for his brother, and now he was coming to us with the army. The allied fleet – all one hundred and sixty ships – was riding snug in Ephesus’s near-impregnable harbour. But at sea, the Persians had it all their own way, and aside from a few minor ship actions – all won by Athenians – our fleet was too ill trained to risk in a straight-up fight.

  We marched to Miletus, and not a moment too soon. Kineas had taken to arresting Macedonians and trying them in military courts without handing them over to Philotas, who was nominally, at least, governor of the city, and the two of them were nearly at war when Kineas executed a pair of pezhetaeroi for rape. Alexander backed him, but Philotas swore to have his head. You can guess whose side I was on . . .

  The fleet anchored between the island of Lade and the mainland, virtually under the walls of the city. There was immense historical value in this – the Persians were anchored over by Mycale, and both places were redolent of past conflict. Here, the Ionian rebels and their Athenian allies had lost one of the greatest naval actions of all time – to treason – against the Persians.

  ‘My ancestor was here,’ Kineas said, pointing across the water. ‘Arimnestos the Plataean.’

  And here, on the beaches of Mycale, the Athenians smashed Persian seapower for a hundred years.

  ‘My ancestor was at Mycale, too,’ Kineas said, with a certain aristocratic insolence. He didn’t actually say ‘while your ancestors were herding sheep and sending tribute to Persia, mine ruled the world’. He didn’t say it, but he thought it.

  He was a fine man, nonetheless.

  Heh. Your ancestors, too, lad.

  Anyway, we beat the Persians to Miletus by days, and that was pretty much the siege. The Persian commander started negotiating as soon as we got there.

  The only battle was between Parmenio and Alexander.

  Parmenio had been away, marching around, taking the surrender of Phrygia and cleaning up the corners of Lydia. The king had been in Ephesus, surrounded by admirers and flatterers. Collision was imminent.

  The first issue was Philotas. Alexander attempted to fob him off with Ephesus to govern. Philotas had no intention of trading command of the Hetaeroi for one city, no matter how mighty. It’s funny, in a way – two years before, when Parmenio took Ephesus the first time, we’d heard rumours that he intended to keep it for his own and make his people into kings there.

  But fatter men have greater appetites, or so we say in Macedon. Since Granicus, we’d all begun to raise our eyes to wider horizons. And Parmenio and his family had their eyes on some major prize – although I’m not sure they’d actually named it, even to themselves.

  I’ll add that the other poison in the mix was that Philotas never bothered to hide that he felt – rightly or wrongly – that his father was doing all the hard work while Alexander was swanning around and flirting with artists.

  At any rate, Philotas flatly refused to stay in Ephesus when the army marched. Alexander only accepted him when he’d had a conference with Parmenio – a talk that none of us was welcome to overhear. It must have been something.

  But there was worse to come. Parmenio wanted a forward strategy. He wanted to commit the fleet to a major action at Mycale. He was willing to see either of two strategies – a night assault on the beached Persian ships, or a combined attack with the army and the fleet. Philotas marched off with half the hypaspitoi and half the Hetaeroi to close all the stream-heads to the Persians – so that they had to sail a hundred stades around the headland to get water for their rowers.

  Parmenio didn’t ask the king before sending his son away with half the Aegema, and a bitter dispute arose.

  ‘When I see an opportunity, I act on it!’ Parmenio roared. We were in the command tent – a dozen of the king’s friends, and most of the ‘college of old men’, as Diodorus called Parmenio’s generals.

  ‘Just as you did at Granicus?’ Alexander asked.

  Parmenio laughed. ‘Boy, you rode off with a wild hare under your arse and almost got yourself killed – as we knew would happen. That wasn’t an opportunity.’

  Alexander smiled, and his eyes got that glittery look they did in combat. ‘Then you are a fool. We could have had Granicus in an hour if your son hadn’t wasted so much time.’

  Parmenio shrugged. ‘I won’t debate with you, lord. Men know who won the Granicus, and how it was won.’

  Alexander nodded. ‘Precisely. You will not dispatch troops without my consent, Parmenio. Not ever again. And these were my own household.’

  ‘They were in armour and prepared,’ Parmenio said, but I could tell from his tone that he knew himself bested.

  ‘And I will not risk my empire and my future on a sea battle. The last time the Greeks made a stand here, half their fleet defected. I won’t allow it. I don’t trust them enough to lead them in person.’

  Parmenio crossed his arms on his chest. ‘Then we may as well go home. As long as the Persians hold the sea, we’re here on their sufferance. Any day now, Memnon will fill that fleet with marines and send it to Athens – and a day later, Greece will be afire behind us and we’ll have to march home.’

  ‘Really?’ Alexander asked. Again the smile.

  ‘Oh – you have one of your amazing plans?’ Parmenio was contemptuous. ‘Spare us. Let’s get this done. The Athenians are a match for any ten Persian ships. Let’s send to Athens for another fifty ships – they’ll send them after Granicus. Then we’ll have the ships and the skilled rowers. They could be here in two weeks. Less.’

  Alexander’s smile never faded. ‘You can be remarkably un-Macedonian, Parmenio. If we call on Athens for a fleet, whose victory will it be? And what price will Athens demand in the aftermath? And what will the League say?’

  ‘Who gives a fart?’ Parmenio roared. ‘Lord – you try my patience.’

  Alexander’s smile broadened. ‘Luckily for both of us, I’m the king and you are not.’

  It was the first time their conflict was open.

  We stormed Miletus anyway. But part of the garrison got away, and Memnon had already shifted his base to Halicarnassus, the best-defended city in Ionia – the birthplace of Herodotus, master of history.

  Alexander was determined to follow him. He was tired of men telling him that Memnon was the finest strategos in the world.

  So as the autumn rains started to fall on the green coast of Asia, we marched on Halicarnassus.

  EIGHTEEN

  It was four days’ easy marching south from Miletus to Ephesus.

  After a long argument with Parmenio, Alexander disbanded the fleet. He kept only the Athenians. The rest of the Greek ships he dismissed, and they ran home as fast as they could. The Persians couldn’t believe their luck – without a battle, they had deprived Alexander of his only hope of sea power.

  Cynical armchair strategists tell me that Alexander didn’t trust them, and that he hated the sea, and that he couldn’t afford a defeat, and a dozen other notions. There’s a little truth in every one, but the greatest was this – Alexander trusted himself. He had a new plan for the defeat of the Persian fleet, and he was sure that he could effect it. And he didn’t understand the sea, and he disliked the extent to which he could not control it. On land, he could walk through the worst weather, the driest desert, the most afflicting blizzard. I know – because he did. Sheer will can overcome weather, on land.

  At sea, you jus
t die. Poseidon is, in many ways, the mightiest god, and when you commit yourself to his element, you admit your humanity and your deep helplessness. Alexander was not particularly gifted at such admissions.

  But most of all, he wanted rid of the money they cost. Every ship had two hundred skilled oarsmen. The oarsmen cost more than his soldiers, and there were thirty-two thousand rowers to feed and pay. That’s why he disbanded the fleet. We were broke – we were literally living from town to town – and he needed to send all those oarsmen home.

  Parmenio had learned not to argue that we should quit and go home – but in one season, we had conquered all Phrygia and Lydia and we were poised to take Caria, as well. I’m not sure that it was unrealistic of him to suggest that we march back from Miletus to Ephesus and take up winter quarters.

  ‘You seem to have liked it well enough,’ Parmenio said. ‘And you found that nice city site – wouldn’t you like to be there when they start to build?’

  Alexander had, indeed, found a pretty site while hunting. I was there. It’s Smyrna, now.

  But Alexander just shook his head.

  ‘All Caria,’ he said. ‘I will face Memnon now.’

  Kineas and his squadron of Athenians were assigned temporarily to the Hetaeroi. This sort of thing happened all the time – we built temporary brigades for scouting, for flank guards, for night guards – all sorts of purposes. After Miletus, Alexander wanted to have all his Athenians together – where he could see them, I expect, because the most obvious strategy for Memnon was to spark revolt in Greece, as I’ve said.

  And we didn’t make the march to Halicarnassus in four easy days. We made it in ten brutal days, because we didn’t take the coast road into Caria. Oh no.

  We marched east, into the mountains.

  Armies live on rumours, and as soon as we marched on a sunny early autumn day, I heard veterans suggesting that we were marching on Susa or Persepolis. We were obviously going east, and into the mountains – hence, to many soldiers, this must be the great march.

  I couldn’t fight the rumour because, despite being a friend of the king, I had no more idea where we were going than they did. I knew that Parmenio was angry, and I knew that Philotas had attempted to block my very temporary promotion to command of the scouts. I had half the Agrianians and my Hetaeroi and Kineas and his Athenians, and we scoured the country ahead of the army, a broad ‘W’ with the Agrianians in the centre and the cavalry on the flanks. A ‘W’ is a superb way to counter potential ambushes – enemy troops close to a road or defile are caught by your outflung wings and exterminated.