Alexander the Great

by Robin Lane Fox

  There was also dispute about his parents. Much of this was posthumous legend; the Persians later fitted Alexander into their own line of kings by a story that Olympias had visited the Persian court, where the king made love to her and then sent her back to Macedonia because her breath smelt appallingly bad. There was more to the argument than nationalist romance. Olympias, it was said, probably by Alexander's own court historian, spread wild stories about the manner of Alexander's birth and referred his origins to a god: this will raise acute problems later in his life, but for the moment it is enough to remember that Olympias was a divorced woman who might well disown the husband who betrayed her. Her past behaviour and her character, itself a problem, make this only too plausible.

  Olympias was an orphan under her uncle's guardianship when Philip first met her; they caught each other's eye, so the story went, while they were being initiated into a mystery religion of underworld demons on the island of Samothrace; falling in love, they promptly married. There could be few more dramatic settings for romance than a night-time ceremony by torchlight in the huge triple-doored hall of Samothrace, and certainly, the mystery cult was later favoured conspicuously by Macedonians and their kings, a fashion which Philip himself may have started. Problems of age and dating confuse the story; perhaps Philip and Olympias first saw each other on Samothrace, but others maintained more plausibly that they did not marry until the year before Alexander's birth, when Philip had already stretched his power to the south and north-west of Macedonia and would have welcomed a political marriage with Epirus's princess. But the story of her Samothracian love-affair fitted the popular views of her person, and these are more difficult to judge.

  Olympias's royal ancestry traced back to the hero Achilles, and the blood of Helen of Troy was believed to run on her father's side; there is no contemporary portrait of her, but stories of her wild behaviour multiplied beyond the point of verification. They turned, mostly, on religion-Worship of Dionysus, Greek god of nature's vital forces, had long been established in Macedonia, and the processions which led to the slaughter of a goat and the drinking of its blood, or even in extreme cases to a human sacrifice, were nothing new to the women of the country. To the Greeks, Olympias was known as a devoted Bacchant, or reveller in the god's honour, and there must be truth in their exaggerations; she would head the processions herself, and on Philip's Macedonian coins, as never before, the portrait of Heracles, ancestor of the kings, is often combined with the grapes and cups of Dionysus, a deity honoured in Macedonia but surely also a reference to the religious preferences of the queen. 'During his rites', it was said, 'Olympias would drag out long tame snakes for the worshippers to handle; they would lie concealed in the ivy and ceremonial baskets, rear their heads and coil themselves around the wands and garlands of the women, so as to terrify the men.' Again, there is truth in this, for according to Cicero, Olympias kept her own pet snake, and snake-handling is a known practice in the wilder sorts of Greek religion; when Olympias's childhood home at Dodona was excavated, archaeologists were much impressed by repeated signs of its people's fondness for snakes.

  'Whereas others sacrifice tens and hundreds of animals,' wrote Aristotle's most intelligent pupil, 'Olympias sacrifices them by the thousand or ten thousand.' Theophrastus would have known Olympias personally, and although he had cause to slander her, his remark confirms her strong attachment to religious ritual which letters and stories of doubtful authorship suggest. On Alexander this example would not be wasted. His mother's wild mysticism was also combined with a quarrelsome temper and a reputation, at least partly deserved, for atrocity; certainly, she quarrelled with royal officials and other women of the family, and whatever the truth of Philip's murder, she showed herself as capable as any other Macedonian of killing family rivals who threatened her. The methods and number of these murders were enlarged upon by Greek gossip, whereas in Macedonia they were not inexplicable, but here too gossip was founded on truth. When Alexander heard how his mother was quarrelling with Antipater in his absence, he is said to have complained that she was asking a high price of his patience in return for the nine months she had taken to bear him. There can be no doubt that Alexander's mother was both violent and headstrong. She was seldom, however, without provocation.

  The influence of this highly emotional character on Alexander's development can be guessed but never demonstrated. For the last eleven years of his life, he never saw her; she still cared for him, and so, for example, she would send a dedication to the goddess of Health at Athens when she heard that he had recovered from a serious Asian illness; although they wrote letters to each other, no original survives of any significance. As a baby, she handed him over to a well-born Macedonian nurse, but she still took a mother's interest in his education; his early life can hardly be traced beyond his various tutors, but it was Olympias who began the choosing of them. From her own family, she chose Leonidas, and from north-west Greece, an area close to her home but not known for learning, came Lysimachus, a man of middle age; their welcomes made an amusing contrast. Lysimachus was much loved by Alexander and later followed him into Asia, where his pupil one day risked his life to save him. Leonidas was stem, petty and prying. He believed in hard exercise and, it was said, he would rummage through Alexander's trunks of clothing to satisfy himself that nothing luxurious or excessive had been smuggled inside; he reproached his pupil for being too lavish with his sacrificial offerings. At the age of twenty-three Alexander was able to retort. He had already routed the Persian king, and from the Lebanon he sent Leonidas a gigantic load of precious incense, pointing his present with a message: 'We have sent you frankincense and myrrh in abundance, to stop you being mean to the gods'; there is nothing worse than an old man's meanness, and Alexander used humour and generosity to show it up.

  Of his other Greek teachers nothing certain is known, and not until the age often does Alexander appear for the first time in contemporary history. This appearance is itself unusual, and a proof that teachers had been busy with their job: it is to be found in the public speech of an Athenian politician. In the spring of 346 Philip's court had been thronged with ambassadors from all over Greece, none more prominent than those from Athens with whom, after much negotiation, he was preparing to swear an agreement of peace and alliance; they dined with him, and after dinner they saw Alexander for the first time. 'He came in,' said Aeschines the ambassador, 'to play the lyre, and he also recited and debated with another boy'; the memory was only revived back in Athens a year later, when the ambassadors had begun to disagree among themselves, for accusations flew in public that one or other Athenian had secretly flirted in Macedonia with the boyish Alexander. In these slanders his after-dinner performance before the ambassadors was used as a sexual double entendre; such bland charges of homosexuality are an interesting comment on their society, and ten years later, when a grown-up Alexander marched on Athens and demanded the surrender of her leading politicians, they must have seemed a very distant irony.

  Poetry and music continued to hold Alexander's attention throughout his life; his musical and literary competitions were famous all across Asia, and his favour for actors, musicians and friendly authors needs no illustration. In music, especially, his interest was perhaps more popular than informed. He enjoyed the rousing pieces of Timotheus, a poet and composer who had once visited Macedonia, and his own learning of an instrument is nicely put in a story, well found if not original: when Alexander asked his music-teacher why it mattered if he played one string rather than another, the teacher told him it did not matter at all for a future king, but it did for one who wanted to be a musician. For Macedonians, music was one of life's luxuries, and when Alexander next comes into view, at the age of eleven or so, it is in a more Macedonian manner.

  'Every man who has loved hunting', the Greek general Xenophon had recently written, 'has been a good man.' No Macedonian at Philip's court would have quarrelled with his judgement, for hunting was the focal point of a Macedonian's life. Bears and lions
still roamed the highlands, and elsewhere there were deer in abundance, for whose sport Macedonians grouped themselves in hunting societies with the hero Heracles as their patron, honoured under a suitable title of the chase. Alexander remained true to his native pastime. If he had a favourite interest, it was hunting, and every day, if possible, he liked to hunt birds and foxes; he was always keen to be shown fine dogs, and he was so fond of an Indian one of his own that he commemorated it by giving its name to one of his new towns. He also needed a horse both for war and relaxation. By the age of twelve, he had found one, for it was at this early age that he first met his black horse Bucephalas, with whom he would one day ride to India and far on into legend and distant memory, Bucephalas the first unicorn in western civilization, Bucephalas the man-eater whose master would conquer the world, Bucephalas born of the same seed as his master and whinnying and fawning with his front legs at the sight of the only man he trusted.

  The tale of his arrival is irresistible, and it was probably told by Alexander's future master of ceremonies, a man inclined to romance but none-the-less present at royal dinner-parties where he would often have heard the story. Demaratus the Corinthian, most valued of Philip's Greek friends, had bought the horse from his Thessalian breeder for a price said to be as high as thirteen talents, more than three times higher than any paid for other known horses in antiquity, and having bought it, he gave it as a present to Philip; Bucephalas must have been youthful to be so expensive, and the date of the gift is a nice point. Later, Alexander's officers believed Bucephalas to have been born in the same year as his master, but by then the horse was ageing and their dates can only have been a guess; it is an important fact that the Greeks never knew how to tell an adult horse's age from its teeth. Bucephalas's arrival can be dated better from the giver than the horse, for when Alexander was twelve, Demaratus had sailed to Sicily as a general, where he stayed to fight for some four or five years; probably, he had given Bucephalas before he left, and so Alexander was still a boy, a probability which makes the story more remarkable.

  On arrival in Macedonia, Bucephalas was led out into the plain for Philip's inspection, but he bucked and reared and refused to heed any word of command, and Philip ordered him to be taken away. Alexander had seen differently. Promising to master the animal, he ran towards him, took him by the halter and turned him towards the sun; by a plausible trick of horsemanship, he had noticed that Bucephalas was shying at his own shadow, so he patted, stroked and soothed, leapt astride and finally cantered round to shouts of applause from the courtiers and tears of joy from Philip, who is said to have predicted that Macedonia would never contain such a prince. Bucephalas was Alexander's for the keeping, and he loved the horse for the next twenty years; he even taught him to kneel in full harness before him, so that he could mount him more easily in armour, a trick which the Greeks first learnt from the Persians.

  Already a horseman and a musician, Alexander passed his early years at Pella, and the contrasts in Macedonian life were all the sharper for being met at Pella's court. The Macedonian kings, who maintained that their Greek ancestry traced back to Zeus, had long given homes and patronage to Greece's most distinguished artists; Pindar and Bacchylides the two lyric poets, Hippocrates the father of medicine, Timotheus composer of choral verse and music. Zeuxis the painter, Choerilus the epic poet, Agathon the dramatist had all written or worked for Macedonian kings of the previous century. Most memorable of all, there had been Euripides the playwright who had left his Athens on the verge of old age and come to live at King Archelaus's Pella, where he was made an honorary Companion; he died, it was said, from a pack of wild dogs, owned by a Lyncestian nobleman. 'Loudias', he wrote of Pella's main river, 'generous giver and father of men's prosperity, whose lovely waters wash a land so rich in horses.' Alexander could quote Euripides's plays by heart and would send for his plays, together with those of Sophocles and his greater predecessor Aeschylus, as his leisure reading in outer Iran. It was Macedonia, perhaps, which left the deeper mark on its visitor, for it was probably there that Euripides wrote his Bacchae, the most disturbing and powerful play in Greek literature; its theme was the worship of Dionysus, and the Macedonians' wild cult of the god, which Olympias later upheld, may have worked on his imagination no less than the lush green landscape, which moved him to some of the few lines in Greek poetry with a romantic feeling for nature.

  The entertainment of these artists was only part of a wider encouragement of Greek settlers. The kings had given homes to many Greek refugees, once to a whole Greek town; they had welcomed exiled politicians from cities like Athens who could be usefully bribed with lowland farms.

  At the end of the fifth century Macedonian noblemen had fled for refuge to Athens. Some thirty years before Alexander's birth Pella was overrun by Greek neighbours, and in Philip's youth more than fifty Companions went as hostages to Thebes. These interludes among Greek culture must each have left their mark, even if other contacts were less of an enhancement: 'While we were in Macedonia,' the Athenian Demosthenes told his audience, back from his embassy to Philip's Pella, 'we were invited to another party, at the house of Xenophron, son of Phaidimus who had been one of the Thirty: naturally, I did not attend.' The orator was playing on every prejudice in his democratic public; Macedonia, a party, and worse, a son of the Thirty, for the Thirty were the toughest junta in Athenian history, having briefly tyrannized Athens at the turn of the century. 'He brought in a captive lady from Greek Olynthus, attractive, but free-born and modest, as events proved. At first, they forced her to drink quietly, but when they warmed up - or so Iatrocles told me the next morning - they made her lie down and sing them a song'; the wine took hold, butlers raced to fetch whips, the lady lost her dress, and ended up with a lashing. 'The affair was the talk of all Thessaly, and of Arcadia too.' Demosthenes Had made his point; the Pella at which Alexander grew up was a congenial home for a junta member, and the court which patronized Greek art also received Persian aristocrats in exile and invited the philosopher Socrates, although under sentence in democratic Athens because of his excessively right-wing circle of gentlemen pupils.

  Men who have to import all their art never lose a streak of brashness. 'They gamble, drink and squander money', wrote one visiting pamphleteer about Philip's Companions, 'more savage than the half-bestial Centaurs, they are not restrained from buggery by the fact that they have beards.' Theopompus, the author, was a man who wrote slander, not history, and his judgement is certainly exaggerated. Philip he called 'the man without precedent in Europe', a comment that referred more to his alleged vices than to his energy and diplomatic skills. But he had a certain truth, for Macedonians, especially highlanders, were indeed a rough company, as barbarous as the crude styles of their native pottery which persisted, of no artistic merit, long after Alexander's conquests. Young Alexander would have to fend for himself among them, but friends and stories show that the Greek civility at court already attracted him more. His reign and patronage saw a golden age of Greek painting, many of whose masters were drawn from cities governed by his friends, and from an early age, there are stories to show that he knew how to treat them. Once, when he arranged for his favourite painter Apelles to sketch a nude of his first Greek mistress

  Campaspe, Apelles fell in love, so he found, with the girl whom he was painting. So Alexander gave him Campaspe as a present, the most generous gift of any patron and one which would remain a model for patronage and painters on through the Renaissance and so to the Venice of Tiepolo.

  As Philip's fortunes rose, the court at Pella became increasingly cosmopolitan, a change that goes far to explain his son's sudden success. From the newly conquered gold mines on his eastern border, there was a sudden flood of gold to attract Greek artists, secretaries, doctors of the Hippocratic school, philosophers, musicians and engineers in the best tradition of the Macedonian monarchy. They came from all over the Aegean world, a secretary from the Hellespont, painters from Asia Minor, a prophet, even, from distant Lycia, who wrot
e a book on the proper interpretation of omens; there were also, as befitted him, the court fools, those 'necessary adjuncts of absolute monarchy', and the flatterers who wrote for pay. As Alexander grew up, he could talk with a man who had lived in Egypt or with a sophist and a secretary from Greek towns on the Dardanelles: in the late 350s, the exiled Persian satrap Artabazus brought his family to Pella from Hellespontine Asia and here Alexander would have met his beautiful daughter Barsine for the first time. Some ten years older than Alexander she could never have guessed that after two marriages to Greek brothers in Persian service, she would return to this boy among the spoils of a Persian victory and be honoured as his mistress, while her father Artabazus would later surrender near the Caspian Sea and be rewarded with Iranian satrapies in Alexander's empire. Barsine's visit had started a very strange trail for the future. No contact was more useful than this bilingual family of Persian generals whom Alexander finally took back on to his staff in Asia.