The Virtues of War

by Steven Pressfield

  “They don’t look like much now, do they?” Philotas cries. Indeed they don’t. “Yet these are the same villains who sided—not once, but twice—with the barbarians against their fellow Greeks, who to this day take Asiatic gold, and save their bravery to spend against us! They would rather kneel to the Persian than take us of Macedon as mates and allies!”

  I command him to cease. He glares daggers at me. I see our men would loot the foe. They want souvenirs. A sword or shield, the helmet of some valiant man.

  “Cease!” I command. Philotas is thirty; I am eighteen. His jaw works. I will cleave him where he stands, regardless of all his favor with my father, and he knows it. The king must appear soon, Philotas reckons. Philip will give him his way. Philotas spits and wheels his mount, showing me his back.

  Moments pass. All eyes have returned to the survivors of the Sacred Band. Then the oddest thing happens. As we stand across from these men who hate us and are hated by us, they become, by some inexplicable alchemy, not enemies, but fellows of flesh and blood, soldiers like ourselves. We have all seen zealots and fanatics, eager for death. These men are not that. They are rational men, defenders of their homes and families, who simply would not quit. We make out faces of individuals now. Their postures of devotion, each true to his mates and his corps, derive from that code to which we, too, have sworn allegiance. Not a man speaks, yet each of us of Macedon, beholding the exhaustion and soul-spentness of these warriors, understands that they have fought, this day, upon a plane that we have not. They have given more than we. They have suffered more than we. And we reckon, too, that if we aim, as we do, to cross to Asia and overturn the order of the earth, we must mount to that sphere of sacrifice that we read now upon their beaten, shattered visages. This knowledge sobers us. Our hatred is supplanted by compassion, even love.

  In the dust kneels the gentle knight Coroneus, his right arm hacked away at the elbow, hovering above the corpse of his son Pammenes. I feel tears burn. Soon my father and his retinue will arrive to savor their triumph. How will Philip use these men? He will be moved by their valor, as we are. But he will hold them. With honor, yes, but to exploit their capture, to wring payment and concessions from their countrymen, and to break their hearts.

  “Let them go.” I hear my voice, as if that of a stranger.

  “Do not!” cries Philotas, incredulous.

  “Restore their arms,” I command. “Release them!”

  “You cannot! Wait for Philip!”

  My hand is on my lance; my heels punch my horse’s ribs. At once Hephaestion and Telamon interpose their mounts between me and this man who would defy me. Coenus and Antipater support them with vehemence.

  “Alexander . . .” Philotas displays empty hands, seeking to appease me. “This is your victory here. But the field belongs to Philip. You must obey the king!”

  I am past speech. Only the sight of my dear mates’ and senior commanders’ faces, fixed to quell my wrath, checks me from soiling my iron with this patriot’s blood.

  Philip approaches. His seer Aristander precedes him, with a dozen Pages and Bodyguards; Parmenio and Antigonus One-Eye come next; then the king himself. In moments the tale of the clash between me and Philotas is wrung from captains on the ground. “I should crack your skulls,” Philip says, “the pair of you.”

  His eye has found Coroneus. I see my father weeps. The Macedonian colonel on the ground is Eugenides, whom the men call “Payday” for the scrupulousness of his accounting.

  “Has my son,” Philip addresses this officer, “commanded the release of these men?”

  Eugenides acknowledges.

  Philip nods, confirming.

  “You heard the order!” Payday barks to his complement. “Restore the enemy’s arms! Let them go!”

  Philip does not upbraid me then. He accepts without protest my preemption of his authority. Only next morning, when we sacrifice in thanksgiving to Heracles and Zeus Hetaireios, does he take me aside.

  “You could have eaten the lion’s heart, my son. But you gave it back to him. He will hate you for it, I fear. You will pay on another day for this act of misplaced chivalry.” He sets his hand on my shoulder. “Still I cannot fault you for it.”

  Chaeronea is Philip’s last victory. Twenty-one months later he is slain, struck down by an assassin in the procession preceding the games celebrating my sister’s wedding.

  Book Three

  SELF-COMMAND

  Nine

  MY DAIMON

  AT THE INSTANT OF PHILIP’S ASSASSINATION, in the theater at Aegae in Macedon, I had just entered the colonnade, ahead of my father in the procession, to take station awaiting him beside his throne. The bridegroom, Alexander of Epirus, walked at my side; Philip had sent us ahead to demonstrate to the multitude that he needed no bodyguard. I heard the clamor in the theater. I knew at once that something terrible had happened, so dreadful were the cries, and went racing back, with Epirote Alexander. The women of the party were shrieking; the press of bodies resisted our passage like a sea. The assassin, a young noble named Pausanias, had been overtaken and slain by Perdiccas, Love Locks, and Attalus Andromenes, serving as Bodyguards of the Royal Person. At that moment it was not clear if the king still lived. To my surprise I found myself riven with anguish, not only for Philip’s sake—for despite our clashes I loved and revered him—but for our nation, bereft of his lion’s strength. Then came the cry. The king was dead. I still had not reached him. I found myself immediately to the rear of Philotas, Parmenio’s son (the same Philotas who had offended me so gravely at Chaeronea), just as he turned to his comrade, Coenus’s brother Cleander. “This is the end of Asia,” pronounced Philotas. He meant that the dream of conquering Persia had expired with Philip, as no other was capable of mounting and commanding an expedition on such a scale.

  I was two paces from Philotas’s shoulder. He had not seen me. At once all grief for my father fled. I felt myself enter a state of rage so monumental that I could see, as if it were transpiring in fact, my sword, clutched in both hands, hewing Philotas in two at the waist. Further I saw myself eradicating every mark of his existence, down to his infant son and every barn-brat by-blow. The fury passed, so swiftly that no one, not even those close beside me in the crowd, was aware I had felt it. This rage quelled itself, replaced by a cold determination to prove Philotas’s finding not only false but inverted: that Asia would be impossible without Philip’s death, that his extinction was necessary to make the conquest of Persia come true.

  I shoved through the press. My father had been carried into the shade of the wedding pavilion and laid out on an oaken bench, which made now a table for the surgeons to operate on. The blow that had slain Philip was an underhand thrust beneath the plexus of the rib cage; my father’s belly and loins were painted with blood but otherwise he looked no worse than if he were sleeping off a rough drunk. How many scars he bore on his body! The physicians had bared his torso to the knees, and now, out of modesty perhaps, or in deference to my arrival, a Page named Euctemon set his cloak over the king’s privates. The state of the assembly was near delirium; great generals and commanders stood one breath from panic. Only I, it seemed, remained composed.

  I felt cold, and preternaturally lucid. The surgeons were two, Philip of Acarnania and Amorges, a Thracian trained at Hippocrates’ academy at Cos. I thought, These doctors will fear for their personal safety now; they will dread my anger, and the nation’s, for failing to save the king. I took their hands at once to reassure them.

  Philotas had worked up and was making a show of his grief. My rage at him had abated; I saw him clearly for what he was, a born fighter and cavalry commander, yes, but a vain and shallow fop, as well. And I understood the source of my fury at him.

  What crime had Philotas committed?

  He had doubted me.

  He had doubted my daimon and doubted my destiny. For this, I could never forgive him.

  Ten years later in India, the army encountered for the first time the gymnosophists,
the so-called naked wise men. Hephaestion in particular was fascinated by these ascetics and sought to plumb their philosophy. The aim of their exertions, he reported, was to seat the center of their being not in the mortal part of their nature, as does the common run of men, but in the immortal—what they call the Atman, or Self. I know what they mean, though perhaps in a less felicitous way. My daimon was, and is, so strong that I am at times possessed by it. We have talked for hours, Hephaestion and I, and Telamon and Craterus as well, of this phenomenon. I have reported that my daimon, which was a stranger to me and which I did not understand and could not control, had seized me most powerfully in that hour succeeding my father’s assassination.

  “He is not me,” I have said, “but a creature to whom I am bound. It is as if this thing called ‘Alexander’ has been twinned with me at birth, fully formed, and that I only now discover it, aspect by aspect, as I grow. This ‘Alexander’ is greater than I. Crueler than I. He knows rages I cannot fathom and dreams beyond what my heart can compass. He is cold and canny, brilliant and ruthless and without fear. He is inhuman. A monster indeed, not as Achilles was, or Agamemnon, both of whom were blind to their own monstrousness. No, this ‘Alexander’ knows what he is, and of what he is capable. He is I, more than I myself, and I am indivisible from him. I fear I must become him, or be consumed by him.”

  All this came clear to me beside the plank bench that made my father’s bier. My anger at Philotas was not fury that I myself had been offended; rather, my heart leapt to the defense of my daimon, with an intensity I could never have mustered on my own. I stood outside myself, astonished at who I was and at the resources at my disposal. The sensation was joy, and utter certainty, of myself and of my destiny. I realized I could absolve any crime—murder, betrayal, treason—but not doubt. Not doubt of my destiny. This could never be forgiven.

  In that instant, over my father’s corpse, all plans for the next half year’s campaign presented themselves and were ratified within the private council of my heart. I knew every move I must make, and in what order I must make them. I knew, too (though I would never show it), that Philotas from this day would be my enemy.

  As to the loyalty of the army, this was never in question after Chaeronea. I did not wait for the Council of Nobles to convene. I went straight to Antipater and Antigonus One-Eye (the other senior commanders, Parmenio and Attalus, being overseas, preparing the bridgehead for the invasion of Asia). This was in the big covered passage called the East Stormway, by which carriages deliver their charges to the palace in raw weather, and where the king’s couriers’ mounts are kept, bridled and ready to ride. Antigonus and Antipater had repaired there, with Amyntas, Meleager, and several other brigade commanders, immediately after the assassination. I have never told this. I strode in under the stone arch with Hephaestion, Telamon, Perdiccas, and Alexander Lyncestis, who had garbed me in his own war cuirass (I had only a light ceremonial vest for the procession) as an emblem of command. Moments earlier I had cradled my father’s head in my hands; his blood was still wet on my forearms. Clearly the generals had been debating what to do about me. Rally to me? Accuse me?

  “Alexander . . .” Antigonus began, as if seeking to reprieve this conclave.

  I cut him off. “How soon can the army move?”

  Antipater declared at once that he stood with me. “But your father . . .”

  “My father is dead,” I said, “and report of this will fly on wings, not only to the tribes of the north but to all the cities of Greece.” I meant they would rise. “How soon can we march?”

  It took two months. I did not sleep six hours. I would not let my generals, even two at a time, conspire together without me present. I kept them on the drill field and in my hall. I napped with Hephaestion at one shoulder, Craterus and Telamon at the other, and a company of the Royal Guard outside my door. The throne had to be protected. A number of measures, regrettably, must be taken. I spared my half brother. My mother had gone quite cracked. She made no attempt to conceal her joy at Philip’s end, for his inattention to me and his infidelity to her. His newest bride was slain at her orders. She dispatched with her own hands the babes of this union, the youngest a boy, whose existence threatened my accession. This was not all. My mother was a master of the poisoner’s art and had cultivated as well her own secret order of young nobles, who would carry out her commands, consulting no other, including me. That violence was ordered by Olympias, if not in my name, then out of love for me and to secure my succession, was a source to me not only of extreme anguish but of outrage at its insult to the authority I was struggling so mightily to found. Three times in one night, I betook myself to my mother’s chamber to beg her to bring her excesses under control. I had resolved before entering to place her under house arrest, if not bundle her in a drawstring sack and cart her out of the kingdom. It was like calling upon Medea. As soon as I entered, Olympias recalled her self-command and, banishing all in attendance upon her, commenced to counsel me in a tenor both maniacal and irresistible. Which of my father’s generals could I trust. Whom must I coerce, whom influence, whom put out of the way. What must I wear, how must I speak; what steps must I take in relation to the League of Corinth, to Athens, Thebes, Persia. She was raving, yet lucid as Persephone. I could take no action against her; her guidance was too valuable. Each night as I departed, she seized my hands in hers; her eyes fastened on mine as if to fuse into me by the medium of her passion both her will to triumph and her conviction in the supremacy of my destiny.

  She informed me that Philip was not my father, but that on the night of my conception, Zeus had visited her in the form of a serpent. I was God’s son. She, my mother, was Heaven’s bride. The queen had gone mad as a magpie. To compound the singularity of this scene, Olympias seemed in that hour to have regained the beauty of her youth. Her eyes shone, her skin glowed; her jet hair glistened in the lamplight. She was spectacular. There was no woman like her in all Greece. The only real pleasure I took in those first days was sending my generals Antipater and Antigonus One-Eye to call upon her in her chambers. They practically pissed themselves. I don’t blame them. Who could know with what flavorings Philip’s consort had laced her wafers?

  Over my father’s grave, the corpse of his assassin was crucified, exposed, and burned. His young sons’ throats were slit on the site; also executed were the grown sons of Prince Aeropus, my cousins, convicted by the army of conspiracy. We buried Philip’s horses with him, those he loved most, and his youngest bride, Chianna of Eordaea. Here is the eulogy I pronounced:

  Knights and Companions, brothers of the nation in arms, Philip took the throne when most of you subsisted by following your herds, winter pasture to summer, clad in the hides of animals. When your savage neighbors raided, you fled to the mountains, and even there you could not hold the invaders off. Philip brought you down out of your hideouts and taught you to fight. He restored your pride. He made you an army.

  He settled you in cities, gave you laws, lifted you to a life beyond fear and squalor. He made you rulers over the Paeonians and Illyrians and Triballians, who had robbed and enslaved you before he came. What had been Thrace, he made Macedon. The ports Athens claimed, he brought beneath your command. He got you gold and trade. He made you lords over the Thessalians, before whom you used to tremble; he humbled the Phocians, and paved the broad highway for you into Greece.

  Athens and Thebes had raped your mothers and sisters and stolen your goods at their whim. Philip broke their pride, so that instead of paying tribute to the one and hopping at the beck of the other, they come now before us, suing for protection. How thorough is his mastery of war? I read down the roll of Greeks and Persians, Cyrus the Great and the elder Darius, Miltiades at Marathon, Leonidas at Thermopylae, Themistocles, Cimon, Pericles, Brasidas and Alcibiades, Lysander and Pelopidas and Epaminondas. All are children alongside Philip. The Greeks named him supreme commander for the coming war against Persia, not because they wished it (for they hate and despise us, as you know), but b
ecause his greatness commanded nothing less. Say “I am a Macedonian.” Before Philip, men laughed in your face. Now they quake. All this he did, and brought honor not only to himself but to you, and to our country.

  The army swept down to Greece and set things in order. At Corinth I was acknowledged hegemon of the League of States, succeeding to my father’s place. Now the tribes beyond the Danube made their break. We went north by forced marches. The men’s will to fight was unquenchable. We fought four battles in six days, crossing the mightiest river in Europe twice without ships or bridges, getting four thousand men and fifteen hundred horses to the far shore in a single day. In all this time, not a soldier was disciplined, nor a harsh command given voice.

  North of the Danube, the army broke ten thousand wild Celts and Germans in a field of wheat. These savages stand a head taller than we do, massive specimens who can lift their own ponies, yet they fled like rats before this machine founded and elevated to perfection by my father and Antipater and Parmenio.

  Crossing the Axius at Eidomene, trekking home victorious, I draw up just to watch the column pass. No wagons. Philip had banned them as too slow. No women, no traders. One pack animal for five men and one servant for ten. Everything the army needs it carries on its back, in wicker rucksacks (fifty pounds of kit) with a counterpack (thirty) across the chest and iron causia helmets strapped in front. Each phalangite packs his eighteen-foot sarissa in two pieces, with the bronze sleeve on his belt, and his oxhide shoes hanging by rawhide laces round his neck. Barefoot, the column takes the ford as if it were dry land. By heaven, how the men move! Where the foe expects us, we are forty miles past. Where he believes we’ll be tomorrow, we are tonight; where he makes us out to be today, we have passed through yesterday.