The Nature of Alexander

by Mary Renault

  Plutarch’s note on this period is brief. Alexander, “not to sit idle, reduced the rebellious Maedi, and putting a colony of several peoples in their place called it after himself, Alexandropolis.” The idea that he was seeking pastime is dispelled by a look at the map. Maedian country was in the wilds of today’s Bulgarian frontier; raiders from there would descend into the cultivated Strymon valley, which intersected Philip’s supply route. A successful revolt, triggering others, might have involved him in a major military disaster.

  Alexander’s first “colony” was doubtless a mere hill village. His father had founded his Thracian Philipopolis; only later days reveal the triumph the boy must have felt in this act of emulation. More significant is the fact that at sixteen he could call upon the standing army of Macedon, be followed unquestioningly into barbarian fastnesses and obeyed in a hard mountain campaign. It would be interesting to know where and how they had previously got to trust him.

  After this he served under his father (Antipater now acting Regent), and was sent with the rank of general to subdue some rebel cities in south Thrace. At about this time he saved, as he claimed later, his father’s life. It was probably during Philip’s arduous siege of Perinthus, when he may have needed to hire extra troops. Even as Great King of Persia, Alexander still recalled it with resentment. Philip, he said,

  when a riot had broken out between Macedonian soldiers and Greek mercenaries, overcome by a wound he had got in the fracas, had fallen down and could do no more than sham dead; he himself had protected his body with his shield and killed with his own hand the men who were rushing at him. Which his father had never been man enough to admit, being unwilling to owe his son his life.

  Unfortunately that is all we know of it.

  Alexander’s formal education was over, and Philip paid his school fee. It was a city. Aristotle’s ruined birthplace, Stagira, was refounded, rebuilt, and repopulated, the people probably being bought out from slavery. This makes Alexander’s education the most expensive on record. It was formative. He remembered always that the only self deserving of self-love is what would now be called the super-ego; the “intellectual soul” which must be trained to rule, like a king, over all lesser and baser appetites; to spurn the limits of mortality; to covet as riches only honour, nobility and glory. Leaving this spell behind him, the eminent apprentice of the dead sorcerer went home, to be taken aback by the subsequent thunder and lightning.

  It is evident from Philip’s confidence in his son that they were still getting on well together, as they normally did while in the field and well away from Olympias. Alexander now returned to resume his regency while Philip went on besieging the fortress ports, Perinthus and Byzantium. But Athens was now at open war, and with her commanding superiority in sea power supplied the beleaguered garrisons, forcing him to raise both sieges in the end. On his homeward march he defeated some hostile Scythians; but his army, slowed down with its spoil of cattle and slaves, was cut up by the northern tribe of Triballians, and the King himself was wounded too badly to be moved.

  Meantime, the responsibilities of Alexander and Antipater were heavy. A complex politico-religious dispute about some sacred fields near Delphi had broken out in the southern states, promising a chance of Philip’s favourite gambit, the solicited intervention of Macedon. (Time and again, the geography of Greece with its beautiful but barren mountains, its covetable farmlands, has determined its history. The long disastrous Peloponnesian War, the grave of Athenian greatness, had begun in a quarrel over sacred land in Megara.)

  The Sacred League, a kind of religious United Nations, voted to punish the Amphissaeans, who had taken over the fields to farm. With the League Philip was in good standing, having evicted from Delphi some years earlier a Phocian force which had plundered Apollo’s treasuries and temple. He had behaved both correctly and humanely, persuading his allies to fine the Phocians instead of throwing them off the cliffs; and had been put out by Demosthenes’ propaganda representing them as oppressed martyrs and himself as a bloodstained tyrant. Now he sent word to the still-grateful League that his help, if asked for, would be forthcoming. The waiting time was crucial. Still laid up in Thrace, he ordered Alexander to mobilize the army; but lest Athens be alerted, he must give out that the campaign was to be against Illyria. He obeyed; before Philip could get back, rumour reached the Illyrians, who promptly rose in arms. For this risk Alexander must have been prepared; he swept west to the border, repelled the invaders and pushed them back; his third independent operation, in rough terrain, this time against a more dangerous enemy. He was seventeen.

  Philip returned, to await events in the south. During this interlude of peace, it seems, Alexander’s parents found time to worry about his lack of sexual interests.

  Perhaps he had turned down some marriage plan. Philip, a precocious womanizer if Ptolemy was his son, would be disconcerted to find a youth approaching eighteen, forward in all else, so backward here. The bloodstained and precarious royal succession made anxiety natural that he should beget an heir-presumptive in early life (and never was anxiety better justified by events). No more than other such parents in every age did these examine their own part in his reluctance. By now the very thought of marriage must have appalled him. Olympias nagged him, and is said to have hired a famous hetaira—one of those elegant “companions” who combined the skills of the geisha and the courtesan—to initiate him. She failed.

  Aristotle taught neither asceticism nor Platonic sublimation. But his doctrine of the intellectual soul as king over the lower self offered a refuge to Alexander’s pride for years. Never highly sexed, though with a deep need of affection, he had had his physical response to women frozen in childhood by his parents’ mutual hate; it would be long in thawing. Meantime he had gathered a group of close and devoted friends, nearly all his elders. Hephaestion was evidently the only one of his age who could keep up with him; none of the rest got letters from Aristotle. Of the others none can have been a lover; nor, as events were soon to prove, did the inner ring contain sycophants drawn by rank. In these friends he invested his capital of emotion; his passionate generosity, his powerful magnetism, his compelling charm. Almost all were bound to him for life.

  The Sacred League opened war upon the Amphissaeans; its scratch force proved ineffective. Demosthenes, foreseeing what must come, exhorted the unwilling Athenians to counter the menace of Philip by reaching accommodation with Thebes. The neighbours’ quarrel was so old that, a century earlier, the Thebans had even thrown in their lot with the invading Xerxes. Their later overthrow of Spartan tyranny had aroused more envy than esteem. They had now a treaty with Macedon, and it was doubtful if they would denounce it.

  When Philip had expelled the Phocians from the Delphic sanctuary in the earlier war, he had invited Athens, a League member, to send her own contingent. Demosthenes had secured a veto, mainly no doubt to prevent fraternization with the Macedonians, in whom fellow soldiers might discover fellow humans. When Philip’s moderation had saved the Phocians’ lives—they had to pay reparations and pull down their strongpoints—Demosthenes had denounced it as barbarity. As it now happened, the verdict against the Amphissaeans had just saved Athens herself, in the political infighting, from the dangers of a parallel charge of technical “impiety.” But this diplomatic triumph had been achieved by Aeschines, Demosthenes’ hated rival. Political commitment, and personal malice, now led him into a serious error. Next time the League met, he persuaded the Athenians to boycott it; and the meeting, unopposed by any Athenian delegate, accepted Philip’s offered help.

  His moment had come. His army was trained to a pitch unknown in Greece before. His cavalry, the aristocratic Companions, were augmented en route by the expert horsemen of Thessaly. The vital pass of Thermopylae was politely taken over from its Theban garrison. Philip marched on to Elatia on the Phocian border, about two days’ march from Thebes and three from Attica.

  Athens was in a panic. A beacon was built from the stalls and sheep pens of the
marketplace to alert the suburbs. The citizens’ Assembly was called by blast of trumpet. All moderates who dared to recall Philip’s restraint after the Phocian War were denounced as traitors by Demosthenes’ supporters. This time a Theban alliance got the vote; he headed the embassy sent to negotiate it.

  Philip too sent envoys to Thebes. Both sides were heard at one session. Thebans’ voting rights were confined to present and veteran soldier-citizens. The Macedonians cited their mutual treaty, recalled the hostile acts of Athens, and promised in return for alliance a fair share of victory gains. If the Thebans wished to be neutral, this would be granted them in return for right of passage.

  Demosthenes then put up the offers of Athens. They consisted in shopping to Thebes two peoples protected by solemn Athenian pledges: the Boeotians of the neighbouring countryside, upheld against Theban rule in the sacred name of democracy; and, far worse, the Plataeans. This border tribe, Athens’ sole ally in the heroic defence of Marathon, had been granted Athenian honorary citizenship in perpetuity. The Thebans were dubious. Demosthenes, who had never set foot upon a battlefield, taunted them with cowardice. This simple expedient met complete success. The Thebans tore up their treaty (or rather broke it up, for such things were carved on marble) and voted to ally with Athens.

  Philip now knew where he stood. He had wanted no war with Athens. Though, his ascendancy once established, he would certainly have expected to direct her foreign policy—the pattern of Greek hegemonies since the days of Pericles—he proved innocent of any aim to enslave her people or destroy her culture. Probably he nursed a secret wish to reincarnate Pericles in himself. His repeated overtures had been blocked by Demosthenes’ inveterate hate and rebuffed with studied insults. Reared in the traditions of Macedon, Philip took a simple and comprehensive view of leaders who led from behind. His belief that he had found one here was to prove correct.

  Even now he did not march south. He first carried out the League’s commission. After a winter of manoeuvring about the Parnassan massif, he made by a ruse a lightning march on Amphissa, captured the mercenaries sent there by Demosthenes, and took the town’s surrender. The sacred fields were restored to the League. He and his son were ceremonially thanked, honoured and crowned at the Delphic sanctuary.

  They did not go home. They got control of the Corinthian Gulf without trouble, fortified their strongpoints, and moved back to Elatia. Even then, Philip sent last offers of peace to Thebes and Athens. Demosthenes had ensured refusal. Another great If of history had passed its crossroads. In midsummer the forces of north and south, about 30,000 men a side, met on the Boeotian Plain of Chaeronea.

  Philip commanded on the right, traditional station of Macedonian kings. The notion that the weapon-holding side is more “honourable” than the shield side is of immemorial age. It applied to the enemy as well; so Philip knew from his days in Thebes who would be the elite corps to meet the Macedonian left: the hitherto unbeaten Sacred Band. This post he entrusted to the Companion Cavalry, under Alexander.

  Philip himself faced the Athenians, who had the advantage of rising ground. He lured them down from it with a feigned retreat, entrapped and routed them. Among those who fled the field was Demosthenes, getting his first and last taste of war. The other troops thinned out their line to fill the gap. Alexander had watched his moment. Now he hurled his horsemen against the Sacred Band, leading the charge.

  By the standards of even the most courageous modern soldiering, Alexander exposed himself in battle as no responsible commander should. But ours were not the standards of Macedon, whose ethos was still Homeric. Not he alone, but his men, thought in terms of Sarpedon’s words before the walls of Troy. Alexander probably knew them by heart.

  Glaukos, why is it you and I are honoured before others

  with pride of place, the choice meats and the filled wine-cups

  in Lykia, and all men look on us as if we were immortals,

  and we are appointed a great piece of land by the banks of Xanthos,

  good land, orchard and vineyard, and ploughland for the planting of wheat?

  Therefore it is our duty in the forefront of the Lykians

  to take our stand, and bear our part in the blazing of battle,

  so that a man of the close-armoured Lykians may say of us,

  “Indeed, these are not ignoble men who are lords of Lykia,

  these kings of ours, who feed upon the fat sheep appointed

  and drink the exquisite sweet wine; since indeed there is strength

  of valour in them, since they fight in the forefront of the Lykians.”

  Philip’s many wounds testify that he too, realistic expert as he was, took for granted this meaning of noblesse oblige.

  It is true that throughout his career Alexander courted danger, though never without purpose, with almost religious fervour. He is often called fearless; but no man with so powerful an imagination is immune to fear. He had seen men die horribly in the field, in lingering agony after. Perhaps this was why fear was always the first enemy he had to kill.

  In this first of his great battles, leading cavalry against infantry (which did not give the advantage it would acquire when stirrups were invented), after a fierce struggle he broke the Theban line. The Sacred Band, encircled, refused surrender and died to the last man. The marble lion which marked their common tomb is still to be seen at Thebes.

  Victory was complete; and Philip, whose efforts to Hellenize himself had met with such bleak response, reverted to Macedon. At the feast held that night upon the field he proclaimed a Dionysiac “comus,” and led its tipsy, torchbearing procession over the battleground, singing a chant about Demosthenes. He was rebuked by an aristocratic Athenian in the prisoners’ pen; which sobered him up at once. In all versions of this event, Alexander’s name is conspicuously absent. Philip had had to do with bunglers and cowards, he with the brave; then and later he did not exult over such enemies. His view of Athens, however, was to remain that of a man who respects the treasures of a great museum despite its philistine curators.

  Philip’s peace terms were conveyed to Athens by his aristocratic captive, whom he had freed and asked to supper. The despairing city had awaited only a barbaric horde swarming through Attica to the sack, Demosthenes having assured them that the Macedonian aim was “not slavery but annihilation.” All Philip in fact required was that his hegemony be recognized. He did not propose even to cross the border, and the prisoners could go home unransomed.

  While he waited the dead were burned. This labour, carried out on pyres whose only fuel was wood, must have called for strong stomachs in the soldiers of the ancient world. Athenian casualties numbered more than a thousand. (Our age of firearms has forgotten the total defencelessness of the retreating hoplite once he had turned his back, and, his heavy shield discarded to help his flight, could only run before the pursuing spears.) The ashes were collected; to ask for the remains of one’s dead was the formal acknowledgment that the victor “possessed the field.” The Athenians asked; of course accepting Philip’s terms, which must have stunned them. He sent them the ashes in a ceremonial cortège, under the escort of Alexander.

  He was eighteen. He would not pass that way again. He was obsequiously received. Statues on the Acropolis were decreed for his father and him, the head of the latter still surviving. It would seem he visited Plato’s Academy, and took Hephaestion; to whom its principal, Xenocrates, perhaps competing with Aristotle, wrote his own book of letters.

  Philip marched unopposed into the Peloponnese in a show of strength. At Corinth he called a council, attended by envoys of all the southern states but Sparta; they voted him Supreme Commander of the Greek forces “for defence” against the Persians. He returned at once to Macedon to prepare his expedition.

  Everything indicates that he and Alexander were now on friendlier terms than at any other time of their lives. Though it is likely that Philip’s death had already been determined and its authors awaited only opportunity, it might have happened as a pa
rting of father and son, violent in circumstance like many in that age, but without the violence of inner conflict which marked the son for life. Fate decreed otherwise. Philip fell in love, and prepared for another wedding.

  This time, the girl belonged to a noble Macedonian family. She was the niece and ward, her father being evidently dead, of that same Attalus who had avenged upon Pausanias the suicide of the King’s young friend. Whether his rise to power preceded the betrothal or followed it, the sources do not make clear; but his rank was high, and this marriage must have been seen in Macedon as more significant than those of former legal concubines. Some historians have inferred that Philip had already resolved to divorce Olympias. Against this stands a massive piece of evidence. Alexander went to the wedding feast.

  The outcome proves that it was not from fear of Philip. Olympias, in view of her rage at the event, must surely have opposed his giving it his countenance. He may have thought it would convey to others that her status was not in doubt, that it was a gesture he could afford. Or he may have done it in simple goodwill to his father, with whom he had served harmoniously through a long campaign, in an atmosphere of male camaraderie away from palace intrigues.

  It was of course an ordeal. An adolescent so sexually fastidious, and with the homosexual preference which marked this phase of his life, would hardly attend for fun a drunken Macedonian wedding with the prospect of seeing his father put to bed, amid the usual bawdy jokes, beside a girl younger than himself. The added thought of his mother must have made him very tense indeed. However, for reasons sufficient to himself, he went, and stayed till the bride had retired and the toasts were called. Attalus proposed the health of the happy pair, coupled—whether in drink or calculation—with the hope that their union would produce a legitimate heir for Macedon.