by Mary Renault
It cannot have been long, in a free-spoken society, before he learned what the alternative was; while to be Philip’s son may have seemed to him even worse. What hidden agonies he endured remained his secret; suppressed, perhaps, even out of his memory. That he did not emerge a psychopath like Nero is one of history’s miracles.
In calm interludes of this life he was taught, like all high-born children, his ancestry. It went back on both sides to Zeus; on his mother’s, there was the heroic strain of Achilles, but also the royal blood of Troy. He was brought up to honour both sides in that great war; to treat neither with contempt or hate. Whatever harm Olympias did him, for this at least the world was to be her debtor.
As heir of Macedon, he was reared from his cradle in unquestioning acceptance of having been born to the sword, as a farmhand’s son to the plough. Neither to Philip nor Olympias would any other future have been thinkable. It remained only to excel.
Philip had now won the struggle for mere national survival. He began to secure his frontiers by attack. The turning point had been his capture, from the loosely knit tribes of west Thrace, of Mount Pangaeus, with its rich veins of gold and silver. It freed him from dependence on tribal levies. Henceforth he could pay full-time soldiers, and turn them into professionals.
It was a military revolution. The labour of Helot serfs had given Sparta a citizen force in permanent training; but the Spartan mind was inflexible, and the dinosaur was at the point of death. Regular mercenaries existed in plenty: they might be exiles from other cities in the endless oscillations from democracy to oligarchy and back, when each change of government was accompanied by a vigorous settling of old scores; or younger sons whose portion only ran to a suit of armour; or criminals on the run. They would enlist with a mercenary general in good standing (this was important) and follow him where he was hired. But no Greek city-state would pay taxes for a standing army, which was distrusted, too, as a tool of potential coups. Philip now needed little of this casual labour; he could add to regular discipline the force of native loyalties and racial pride. As a matter of course, lords still officered their own tribesmen; it would take the full force of Alexander’s personality to bring in promotion on merit. But Philip was now permanent commander-in-chief; and he forged a formidable weapon.
Its solid centre was the infantry phalanx, a deep column (phalanx means finger) armed with the giant spear of his devising, the famous sarissa. Of graded length, those of the fourth-rank line being at least 15 feet long, these pikes enabled four ranks at once to take the enemy at spear-point, making them virtually immune from all but missile weapons. This was the holding force. The striking hammers were the flanking cavalry wings. Alexander was to be the virtuoso of this instrument; but Philip was its creator.
He had light-armed skirmishers, archers and slingers; Dionysius of Syracuse had made innovations in siegecraft which were not lost on him. His generalship was equalled by his political acumen, which enabled him to intervene in neighbouring wars at the request of one or other party (the ancient tragedy of divided Greece) to his own profit. His influence in Thessaly, his steady extension across Thrace towards the vital corn route of the Hellespont, were already alarming Athens.
One can only speculate what would have been the effect on Alexander if Olympias had died in childbirth; if he had kept her genes but escaped her influence. Such a father and son might have added affection to mutual pride. As it was, this towering figure was the enemy and oppressor; the gross lecher from whose loins some god—pray heaven—had saved him from being begotten; above all the rival, at all costs to be surpassed. All Alexander’s story testifies to the effect on natural genius of the deep insecurity felt in these tormenting early years. Compensation for it inspired his greatest achievements; when it took him unawares, it betrayed him into his greatest sins.
That he kept his sanity he must have owed to his capacity for friendship, a solace he turned to while very young. Psychologically his face must have been his fortune; to this attractive boy people were drawn without the pretences of flattery, and his true child’s instincts felt it. He grew up with a religious faith in friendship, making it a cult, publicly staking his life on it. The real loves of his life were friendships, including his sexual loves. Though he had the classic family pattern for homosexuality, it was probably the mere availability of men rather than women for friendship which directed his emotional life. To be loved for himself, as he certainly often was, ministered to his constant need for reassurance, and he returned affection so warmly that it seldom let him down. When it did, it shook him to his roots. He had committed too much, and could not forgive.
When he was seven, the recognized end of childhood, his father found him a tutor. He was a certain Leonidas, Olympias’ uncle; Philip the diplomat thus avoiding palace brawls. Both parents, it seems, agreed on the way in which the boy should be fitted for his destiny. As a man, he gave his own account of it.
Ada, whom he honoured with the title of Mother and made Queen of Caria … in the kindness of her heart used to send him daily many dishes and sweets, and finally offered him pastrycooks and chefs of noted skill. He said he did not need them; better cooks had been given him by Leonidas his tutor—a night march to make him want his breakfast, and a small breakfast to make him want his supper. “And,” he said, “the man himself used to come and look through my bedding-boxes and clothes-chests, to see my mother did not hide any luxuries or extras there.”
Spare diet, thin clothing, and the hard exercise his age and nature (as well as the need to keep warm) dictated may have been the chief causes of Alexander’s failure to reach the average height of the Macedonians, whatever that was; the great sarissa being a regular weapon suggests that it was impressive. Had he been a really little man, we should read of his being identified by it at a distance instead of by the other means always mentioned, his armour, actions and so on; and the Athenian propagandists could never have let it alone; but that his height was undistinguished, and probably less than his father’s, in a society which set great value on stature, must have been bad enough. When later he learned medicine and physiology he may have connected cause and effect. He showed no love for Leonidas after he left his charge, and the only gift he sent him back from Asia was ironical: a sack of incense. As a boy he was offering incense at a shrine, giving extravagantly as he would always do, when Leonidas had told him sharply to be sparing of precious things till he was master of the lands they grew in. He did not take Leonidas along.
He did take, and once risked his life for, an unimportant court hanger-on called Lysimachus, who styled himself his pedagogue. This was of course a joke, for it was servant’s work; but Lysimachus did take on the humble duties of the man-nanny from whom no teaching was required. Alexander’s gratitude for a personal devotion was always lifelong; but what he got besides is beyond computation, for good or ill. Lysimachus used to amuse the child by calling himself Phoenix, the pedagogue of Achilles. Alexander played his part in the game for life. To the end of his days he kept the Iliad under his pillow, along with the dagger for self-defence which was the commonplace bedroom furniture of a Macedonian king.
It seems an odd attraction in a man whose own impulses were to prove more generous. Achilles was merciless to the conquered; asserted the captor’s right over royal women; desecrated the body of a noble enemy; sulked in his tent while his friends were falling in battle, a thing rather than which Alexander would have died. But it must be remembered that Achilles was an ancestor, about whom he may have heard many tales not in Homer, embroidering on them in fantasy; the Duke of Wellington in the Brontë children’s romances was not the Duke of history, and Alexander’s Achilles may not have been ours. His interest in Amazons suggests, for instance, that he knew the Epic Cycle story about the romantic duel between the hero and Penthesilea; and the whole Cycle has now been lost. He knew at any rate what Homer says: that Achilles’ mother was a goddess; that he was despoiled and slighted by a king, whom he got the better of; that he had a comra
de whom he loved as his own life; and that he was angry.
Plutarch says that from childhood Alexander had a longing to excel, and philotimia, the love of honour. Despite his childhood traumas, we hear nothing about fits of rage. Had his love of winning made him an unpleasant loser, he would not have been supported in disgrace and exile by his boyhood friends. Yet the enormous anger of Achilles must have touched some chord in him.
In the year of Philip’s accession, a reign had closed in Persia too. The long-lived, weak Artaxerxes II was succeeded by Artaxerxes Ochus his son. A strong but savage ruler, he began at once to reduce too-powerful satraps and to ban their private armies. Rebellion failed; two fugitives were sheltered by Philip and were at his court some years, one of them the important and aristocratic Artabazus, of whom much more will be heard. He was one of those astonishing old men who seem to survive today only in the Russian Caucasus. Already elderly when he rebelled, and getting old when pardoned and recalled, he was to survive, a vigorous nonagenarian, to campaign successively under Darius and Alexander, whose eager welcome when they met again many years later points to warm childhood memories. He had thus known Persians as long as he could remember, not as propaganda monsters but observable humans and friends; with the boys of Artabazus’ large family he must often have played. Though Macedonian was a broad Doric patois, the court spoke Greek, as did many travelled or well-bred Persians; so there is likelihood in Plutarch’s well-known story that when Persian envoys arrived bringing the exiles’ recall, and Philip happened to be absent, little Alexander took it on himself to welcome them.
He won them over by his cheerful friendliness, and by asking questions which were not childish nor trifling, but about the length of the roads, and what the journey was like inland; about the King himself, how he behaved in battle, and about the Persian prowess and strength.
His father had turned Pella into a military base and his palace into a staff headquarters; the child had probably run about among soldiers since he was on his feet. The sublime confidence with which he took command of them in his mid-teens suggests he had long known them with the privileged intimacy of a regimental pet.
It would be as a family guest that he first met a youth who, being eleven years his elder, would have seemed a man to him: his future historian, Ptolemy. He was a kinsman on his mother’s side, either in a regular way or, as tradition has it, by a liaison with the adolescent Philip before he left for Thebes, in which case the boys were half-brothers. Later generations of Ptolemys did not disclaim the bar sinister. Born as he was at Pella, Ptolemy I must have known Alexander throughout his life span.
Arrian’s History starts at his accession, probably because Ptolemy’s did, which is a pity, for his knowledge of earlier years would have been invaluable. Ptolemy is of course his own chief authority for himself, but is respected by ancient authors. He edited out his rivals’ exploits—a perennial liability in retired generals’ memoirs—and made the most of his own, but was honoured for not inventing any; and he wrote towards the end of a long life, when the tumult and the shouting had largely died, the captains and the kings departed. Arrian recommends him on the grounds that not only did he campaign with Alexander, “but, as he was a king himself, falsehood would have been more shameful to him than to anyone else.”
Modern sniggers at Arrian’s childish snobbery, evoked by these sensible words, are themselves curiously naïve. He is not of course attributing to kings a superior sense of honour, but stating the obvious fact that they are vulnerable to public disgrace. Ptolemy was more than a decade older than Alexander, who in turn had had in his army, towards the end of his life, many men at least ten years his junior. In a city like Alexandria, the recitals of the History—the method of publication in the ancient world—would have attracted plenty of alert veterans still in middle life, living on their memories. The founder of a dynasty cannot afford the ridicule of such an audience.
By then, Alexander had been out of the reach of flattery for a good twenty years; yet detractors, irked by the fact that the sources most “favourable” are men who knew him in life, have sought in Ptolemy for ulterior motive, apparently oblivious of the fact that their case is based upon the opposite of what it sets out to prove. Ptolemy’s interest is alleged to lie in creating propaganda for his own dynasty. But he wrote for a living audience, before posterity. Why, in the first place, drag all the way to Egypt the body of a corrupt tyrant about whom thousands of influential people would know the truth? Why not fill the History with stories to his discredit in which Ptolemy shone by contrast? Yet anti-Alexandrists have always assumed that he favours Alexander to bask in his reflected glory; which is certainly having it both ways.
One need not of course discount the latter motive; it would be human enough. But Ptolemy’s loyalty predates all possible self-interest and indeed once cost him dear. Later, though never promoted to the eminence of Craterus or Hephaestion, this capable and, as it was to prove, very ambitious soldier remained unswervingly true. Is it too much to suppose that something in Alexander inspired these feelings and caused them to outlast his life, and that Ptolemy wrote among men who shared them? He wanted to remember the best, they wanted to hear it. It is after all the simplest explanation.
In 348, when Alexander was eight, Philip captured the Greek-colonized Thracian city of Olynthus, an ally of Athens, after an eventful siege. It had harboured his surviving half-brothers, in open revolt; so he killed them both. “Such tragedies,” remarks Grote with irrefutable truth, “were not infrequent in the Macedonian royal family.”
The chief reason was the polygamy of the kings. With luck, the Queen Consort’s eldest son might hope to inherit; but Macedonian rulers would combine business with pleasure, going through forms of marriage with the daughters of powerful noblemen or new allies to secure the valuable obligations of kinship. All the sons of these alliances were, and had been for generations, potential usurpers. Some had changed the succession. Philip dealt with the problem in the traditional manner. It did not warn him to avoid the cause.
Being both highly sexed and an expert diplomat, he made full use of his royal prerogative; it was a proverb that he had a new wife with every war. In all he had at least a half dozen of these minor wives, several of whom bore children, one being a boy. All sources agree on Olympias’ bitter resentment. Whether she felt the jealousy of a woman, the affront of a queen, or both, she watched like a nursing tigress for any threat to her son. The bastard boy, Arridaeus, was mentally retarded; and though it seems unlikely that she brought this about with drugs, people thought her capable of it, as in fact she was. There is no uncertainty about the mark she made upon Alexander.
As a boy, he played and sang to the lyre; for this we have first-hand evidence from one who heard him. As a man, he was a constant and generous patron of musicians, but we never read of his playing or singing a note. An anecdote of Aelian’s gives the reason. He had a rather high-toned voice, later to be much imitated, like all his other mannerisms; and Greeks preferred a sweet singing tone to a deep one. But one day his father heard him, and told him he should be ashamed to sing so well. Since someone recorded it, there was an audience. The slur of effeminacy must have been intended, and was certainly so received. It was probably not the only time his parents took out on him their hatred of one another.
The natural watershed between his boyhood and adolescence is the famous episode of his taming Bucephalas. It is a well-worn tale: the fiery charger offered at a high price to Philip, refusing to be mounted, and turned down as useless; the boy insisting that a great horse was being wasted; the father’s challenging him to do better than his elders; their bet on it, the horse to be bought for him if he could manage it, and if not, paid for by him; its instant trust when it felt his hands. But the popular notion is still of high-spirited youngsters meeting; the more interesting truth is that Bucephalas was twelve years old.
The horse must therefore have been trained, and no doubt for war. What this entailed in ancient Greece is vivid
ly described in Xenophon’s treatise On Horsemanship. Neither saddle nor stirrups were yet known; the rider sat bareback or on a cloth. Thus the spear could not be used for an impact charge as in medieval war, but only for thrusting (Alexander himself favoured the sabre). Even so, the horseman needed a well-disciplined mount if he was to stay on; apart from knee grip, control was by the bit alone, and surviving examples are often horrible. Besides steadiness in battle, the high-class charger was expected to caracole on parade; and here Xenophon, who was fond of horses, has some revealing “don’ts.” “Some teach the curvetting action either by striking the horse with a rod under the hocks, or by having someone run alongside with a stick and hit him on the quarters.” He also deprecates simultaneously dragging up the head, spurring and whipping. It seems possible that someone, trying by such means to prepare this brave and spirited animal for a royal buyer, had got more than he bargained for. Arrian says that it never let anyone but Alexander mount it as long as it lived; for him, adds Curtius, it would lower its body to help him on.
No other incident of Alexander’s life is related by Plutarch in so much detail; it reads like total recall. Perhaps on nights when the world conqueror, sitting late over the wine, fell “into a kind of soldierly boasting,” this was a favourite tale which some memoirist got to know by heart. Its interest, however, is historical as well as human. At the battle of Gaugamela, Alexander, then twenty-five, was nursing his twenty-four-year-old charger, which was famous enough for this to be recorded. The years of its prime were those of his youthful wars before his accession; its exploits, and his, must already have been celebrated.
Philip, buying him the horse as agreed, showed great pride in his son’s achievement. Unluckily for their improved relations, at about the same time the King involved himself in the most unpleasant of the scandals his way of life invited. From Diodorus’ account of it, it seems that his homosexual love life had retained the pattern of Thebes only in that his favourites were socially presentable; he lacked the constancy of the Sacred Band. A certain Pausanias had been discarded for a new fancy; furiously resentful, at some drinking party he called his young rival a paid whore. Had he been right it would have altered history. He was wrong. With fierce Macedonian pride, the youth threw away his life to reject the insult. In the next Illyrian border war, having left a message to explain his action, he ran ahead of the King to certain death among the enemy.