by Mary Renault
Perhaps the face, perhaps Greek patriotism, worked upon the young Plutarch long before he embarked on the Parallel Lives. Two of his earliest works were essays on the Fortune or Virtue of Alexander, upholding the second above the first—the hostile writers had given Fortune most of the credit. Much later this warm-hearted, charming and long-lived man put Alexander into the Lives alongside Julius Caesar. He was, unfortunately, a ragbag of a biographer, scarcely ever discarding a good story, seldom distinguishing primary from secondary sources, deeply concerned to edify. But “books have their destinies,” and his account of Alexander’s youth and childhood is the only one we have; his sources for it have disappeared.
Some time towards the end of Plutarch’s life span, in the second century AD, Alexander was rescued for history by a fellow soldier. He was Flavius Arrianus, a Romanized Bithynian Greek. Hadrian made him governor of Cappadocia, an honour seldom granted to his race; he was a brave and able general who fought off a dangerous barbarian invasion. Epictetus, whose pupil he had been, had taught him:
Don’t you know that all human ills and mean-spiritedness and cowardice arise not from death but from fear of death? Against this therefore fortify yourself. Direct all your discourses, readings, exercises thereto. And then you will find that by this alone are men made free.
Perhaps it was Alexander’s freedom which attracted Arrian. But the clutter of hindsighted romance and committed lying annoyed the honest general. Happily, he was in time to find the primary sources still intact in unburned libraries. He assessed their value, a chance we no longer have, and settled for Ptolemy, Aristobulus the architect-engineer, and Nearchus, Alexander’s admiral and boyhood friend.
This I claim; and never mind who I am; never mind my name although it is not unknown among men; never mind my country, or my family, or any rank I have held among compatriots. I would rather say: for me, this book of mine is country, kindred and career, and it has been so since my boyhood.
He did not, in his lifetime, enjoy any conspicuous fame, and it is sad that he cannot know how much we owe him.
Some time about AD 300, on the fertile shore of Alexandria, crossroads of trade and of traditions, all the flotsam of romance, folk tale, rumour, agitprop, and moralistic fantasy, combined with some tattered shreds of history, was gathered by some untalented but limitlessly credulous author, and cast on the waters of time. Implausibly attributed to Callisthenes, who died four years before Alexander, it became the first work of fiction to achieve bestsellerdom in translation throughout the known civilized world. Far beyond its circle of hearers and readers at first hand, illiterates without number heard it retailed at second, third, fourth, or hundredth remove, by bazaar storytellers, itinerant entertainers, people beguiling a journey, pedagogues, court poets, jongleurs and priests. It spread first among the peoples he had known and conquered, then on and on among those he had never seen and only known from rumour, till it reached the Far East which, having been taught that the land mass ended with India, he had not believed to exist.
Greek variants proliferated; versions appeared in Armenian, Bulgarian, Hebrew, Ethiopic and Syriac, the last being done into Arabic. Most significantly, soon after its appearance, one Julius Valerius did it into Latin, the universal language of the literate Western world. Greek in the Dark Ages, and well beyond them, was rarer in the West than gold. Latin was everywhere. From Valerius’ Callisthenes, along with the Roman sources, and from them alone, the image of Alexander came down to the Middle Ages. The Middle Ages split his image in two.
To the Church he was a gift, as he had been to the republicans. Here was Virtue corrupted by Fortune; the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the pride of life, riding fast to dust and judgment. In an age when Crusaders were proud to approach the Holy Sepulchre up to their horses’ fetlocks in Jewish blood; when heretics were burned alive; when holiness was seen in a hair shirt crawling with lice of ten years’ breeding; when excommunicate kings, to escape damnation, had to bare their backs to the scourge or kneel in ashes, there were stern useful morals to be drawn from King Alisaunder.
But an age of oppressive orthodoxy, whether under priest or commissar, breeds rebels. “To hell will I go!” cries young Aucassin, defying Nicolete’s censorious guardian.
For to hell go the fair clerks, and the fair knights fallen in tourneys or in grand wars, the good sergeants-at-arms and the men of honour. With those will I go. And there go the fair courteous ladies, who have two friends or three besides their lords. There go the gold and the silver, the vair and ermine; there go harpers and jongleurs and the kings of the earth. With them will I go, so I have Nicolete, my most sweet friend, with me.
There, too, they would go with Alexander. His medieval romances are a vast ramifying theme. Their fascination is that, though their authors had access only to the most hostile sources, their residual relics of fact were enough to seize imagination and cast a spell. Incident might be wildly remote from history, yet the chivalrous knight saluted a kindred soul. In the Alexandreis and the Roman d’Alexandre, he is the pattern of valour and courtesy, glorious in arms, protective to ladies, fair and generous to enemies, liberal to vassals. God, not Fortune, directs his destiny; envious treachery, not Nemesis, contrives his death.
They had not seen his likeness; though he would have conformed well with their standards of beauty, he is given a conventional face in a conventional helmet, distinguished only by the elegance of his armour. He adventures to Darius’ camp, disguised as his own herald, wins Roxane’s heart, and escapes across a frozen river, later avenging his foully murdered foe. He flies in a chariot drawn by eagles, and views the monsters of the deep in a glass bell. Seeking the Water of Life once more through forests perilous, he consults the prophetic trees of the Sun and Moon, and with calm courage hears them foretell his end. Warned by an oracle that a close friend will kill him, and urged to purge those nearest him, he protests that he will die by the single traitor rather than wrong the innocent. (Cassander would have learned with some astonishment that he was a dear and trusted comrade.) He is poisoned, and the Seven Sages moralize over his grave.
Constantinople was sacked, its refugee scholars brought westward their salvaged books; the learned world of Italy rediscovered Greek literature and history. It was in the fifteenth century that the scholar Vasco of Lucena, writing to the Emperor Sigismund, told him that Arrian was more to be trusted than the Latin writers upon Alexander.
With the Renaissance, therefore, the Romances were consigned to children and the ignorant; the historical Alexander reappeared. But his image was still conditioned by the legends, and by an age without archaeology which, busily excavating all over Italy Roman copies of such Greek originals as had appealed to Romans, admired like them the soft, late style for its virtuosity, preferring the sentimental contortions of the Laocoön to the most majestic classical Apollo. In this spirit, for a century or two Alexander supplied the painters with subjects for great setpieces, defeating Darius, protecting the royal ladies, marrying Roxane. His eager profile is trimmed down to insipid perfection; his correctly rounded elbow sketches a stock art-school gesture; a resplendent waxwork in an impracticable helmet cascading ostrich plumes, he is the apotheosis of a tinsel-armoured male soprano in Baroque opera, the vacuous imperial puppet of Dryden’s Alexander’s Feast.
Serious scholars, of course, were meantime reading the sources and critical appraisal had begun, when in the mid-nineteenth century the most formidable of them, George Grote, amid many valuable services to history, disastrously revived the Ideological Alexander. Grote never set foot in Greece, then without tourist accommodation and much beset with bandits; a dedicated radical, he had the fatal commitment which vitiates conscientious fact with anachronistic morality. His whole capital of belief being invested in the Athenian democracy, he was resolute in attributing its fall to external villainy rather than internal collapse. Demosthenes could do no wrong, Philip and Alexander no right. For all practical purposes, Grote’s Alexander is back with
the Lyceum; a natural tyrant, forsaking the wholesome Greek virtues at the first taste of Oriental sycophancy and despotic power.
Commitment breeds counter-commitment; the defence was pushed too far. Sir William Tarn, active till this mid-century, was more learned than Grote, and larger minded. But in his sympathy with Alexander, he too applied, though favourably, his own moral code, often defending him where he can scarcely have thought his actions needed extenuation, and when they would certainly have shocked none of his followers; while his unprejudiced regard for quality in friends or enemies is expanded into an idealistic faith in the unity of all mankind.
Recent scholarship is now restoring a balance; but these discussions, held in circles where it is agreed to respect the evidence, have filtered down as a turbid seepage to levels where only confirmation of the entrenched dogma is sought. An intractable resistance to levelling down has made Alexander the archdemon of egalitarians; while pacifists, well meaning but ill read, have projected on him their horror of modern atrocities (perpetrated after two millennia of Christianity) which this fourth-century pagan would scarcely have credited to savages.
Filtered and refracted by these layers of fable, history, tradition and emotion—a thing inseparable from him alive and dead—the image of Alexander has come down to us.
Macedon
ALEXANDER’S EXISTENCE WAS DETERMINED in 358 BC, at a celebration of the Mysteries on Samothrace, where his parents met.
Philip II of Macedon, then about twenty-four, was a legitimate but not quite hereditary king. His elder brother, Perdiccas III, had been killed while his son was still an infant. The Assembly of fighting Macedonians had the traditional right to choose in such circumstances a king from the members of the royal house; a fact of primary importance to the country’s history. It was a time of civil feud and foreign invasion. A fighting regent was essential, and Philip was proven in the field. Not long after, the situation growing still more perilous, he was asked to assume the throne.
His surviving portrait shows a square powerful face, intelligent, ruthless, possibly brutal, but without the viciousness that chills in some of the Caesars. It has humour; looks capable of charm, and of the amatory success for which he was notorious.
A crucial event of his career had happened when he was sixteen. In the complex wars of the royal succession, Perdiccas, making a treaty with Thebes, had had to supply a royal hostage as security. Childless as yet, he had perforce sent his younger brother. Thebes had been then in its full brief blaze of glory after the overthrow of the Spartan tyranny. Intellectually provincial, in military lustre it was unmatched in Greece. Lately its cult of heroic homosexual love had reached its apogee with Pelopidas’ foundation of its corps d’élite, the Sacred Band, made up from pairs of friends who had already taken a traditional vow to stand or fall together. Philip, treated on parole more as guest than prisoner, learned the skills of soldiering from the finest masters. Here too he may have added to his lifelong love of women the taste for young men which was to cause his death.
It is tempting to wonder whether some friendly contrivance of his hosts could have got him, incognito, across the border to Athens. He was a young nonentity and it would have been easy. He was not likely in his days of power to admit having sneaked in under such humiliating conditions; but all his life he showed a deep regard for Athens’ history and culture, however great his contempt for her current leaders. Reared himself in a fifth-century palace at Pella, built by Athenian architects and decorated by her painters of the finest period, he could appreciate her material splendours, still in uncorrupted perfection.
His own inheritance was a highland kingdom of great scenic beauty and tall warlike men, where his capital, Pella, was an island of classicism in an archaic society. At his accession (as Alexander later reminded his men) all that the people owned were the sheep whose skins they wore for want of cloth, and even those were hard to keep, border raids from neighbours being constant. As in Homer’s day, the lords would follow the king to war—unless just then supporting some rival claimant—bringing each his meinie of tough undisciplined followers armed with what came to hand. The loose law of succession had ensured a series of civil wars and a long record of murders. Perdiccas had got his throne by killing a lover of his mother’s who had usurped it; she was rumoured to have procured the deaths both of her husband and her son. From him Philip inherited five rival pretenders to the throne, some in a state of active hostilities; and two foreign invasions. No account of Alexander’s life can be understood without remembering the record of his forebears which he must have picked up from his earliest years.
Philip killed at once the most dangerous of the claimants, who was his half-brother. The others, with restraint by family standards, he expelled or undermined. His hands thus free, he set about defending his frontiers. At some time during these early campaigns, he sailed to Samothrace.
The Mysteries retain much mystery despite the archaeologists, and it is not clear what benefit he hoped for. Their chief known gift was protection from shipwreck, one of the few perils he seldom met. Their “Great Gods” were pre-Hellenic deities, whose offerings were cast into a deep cleft, and who were somehow associated with dwarfs, perhaps by folk memory of an extinct race. The island is steep and sheer, the sanctuary near the shore; the rites, which involved corybantic dancing and much noise, were performed at night.
Legend was bound to make Philip fall in love with Olympias during the actual celebration; but it may be true. Such things excited her and must have made her striking looks dramatic. The visit would keep the initiates a day or two on the island, giving him a chance to see her by daylight, find out who she was, and most likely meet her. Fatefully, she was a girl who could only be had by marriage.
She was the orphaned daughter of a former King of Epirus, the region of modern Albania. It was more primitive than Macedon and the hegemony of the kings was even less secure; but it had important possibilities, and Philip, if he had hesitated, did so no longer.
No portrait of Olympias has survived which is not stylized to nullity. Her looks may be suggested by her son’s, which did not come from Philip. Most north Greeks were fair, red-haired or auburn. Otherwise, our one visual glimpse of her dates from just before her death, when she was about sixty. It consists in the single fact that two hundred of Cassander’s soldiers, who had agreed to kill her and broken into her house to do it, looked at her face to face and went away.
Her family claimed descent from Achilles. His son Neoptolemus had fathered their royal line upon Andromache, Hector’s widow, his prize from the sack of Troy. Unaware how momentous this lineage would be for history, Philip married the princess, and, leaving her pregnant, returned to his necessary wars.
The prophetic dreams of Philip and Olympias belong properly to the area of legend. He dreamed he was sealing her womb with the image of a lion; she, that kindled by a thunderbolt a fire spread from her body to the earth’s ends, and was suddenly quenched in darkness. Alexander was in fact born under the sign of Leo, in August 356.
Philip, on campaign in Thrace, got the news along with two other messages. His general, Parmenion, had soundly defeated the Illyrians in the west; and his racehorse had won at the Olympic Games. The right of Olympic entry was a prized inheritance of the kings of Macedon. The Games were only open to Greeks; and Macedonians were not recognized in the south as the offshoots of the original stock which in fact they were. They were regarded as semi-barbarous (the actual term “barbarian” was reserved for Persians) and the royal house had just scraped in on the strength of a remote Argive ancestry. For Philip, to whom acceptance in the Greek world was a lifelong dream, this news may have been the most welcome item of the three.
It was inevitable that Alexander’s childhood would later be described as precocious and brilliant; he was certainly not a late developer. Plutarch mentions, without quoting it, a long list of the teachers whom Philip imported for him. More to the purpose is what he learned from his parents.
By the time he was in his teens, they were not merely estranged but open enemies. Their one other child, a daughter called Cleopatra, was born not long after him; thereafter it can be assumed that sexual intercourse ceased. Whether Olympias had ever returned Philip’s feeling cannot, of course, be known; like all women of her time she had been “given in marriage.” Her pride ensured that if his infidelities did not torment her with jealousy they would be taken as deadly insults. It seems evident that the violent fracture of their relations must have happened in Alexander’s early childhood, the time when it would give the deepest pain and leave the deepest impression. It is the age at which the child, given ordinary kindness, will identify with the mother. For Alexander, his father’s constant absences on campaign, combined with his mother’s possessive love, made this a certainty.
She was a woman of great ability and intelligence, whose judgment was wholly swayed by her emotions; a visionary and an orgiast, though improbably in any sexual sense; she had the pride which does not stoop to common adulteries. The Dionysiac frenzy was for many women a kind of releasing drug trip, though only wine was used, the rest being auto-suggestion and mass emotion. Olympias brought to it a powerful imagination. To the anger and disgust of Philip with his Hellenic aspirations, she kept about her the tame snakes of the primitive Thracian cult. She may have had self-induced hallucinations. Alexander was probably still quite young when first she gave him to understand that Philip was not his father.
Daily life in those days, even for the great, had little privacy. That, in spite of the accusations she invited, no man was ever named as her lover, is significant. Hating her husband, she wished wholly to possess her son. Later events show that whatever mystery he believed to surround his birth, it was supernatural.