Alexander the Great

by Robin Lane Fox

  In Alexander's Macedonia, selected Companions still attended the king in battle, but their ranks had been expanded to include the nobles of highland and lowland, while foreign friends from Greece and elsewhere had increased their number to almost a hundred. Not every Companion was the king's friend; they dined with him and advised him, and they had lost none of their aristocratic pride; a festival was held yearly in their honour, and when they died they were buried in vaulted underground tombs behind a facade of tapering Greek columns and double doors studded with bronze. It was a grand style, and they took it with them to the East. Its roots were older and more in keeping with the Companions' name, for the vaulted tombs of Macedonia recall the mounded burials of royal Mycenae, ancestor of Homer's heroic world.

  It was among these Companions, turbulent and nobly born, that the Macedonian king had to force respect for his will, and his methods again picked up the style of Homeric kingship. Custom and tradition supported what no law existed to define, and as in Homer's poems, superlative prowess could justify a man in going beyond convention: the kings began with the asset of noble birth, and like Homer's kings, they could claim descent from Zeus, a point of the first importance both for Alexander and his father. Noble birth needed to be buttressed by solid achievement. No rights or constitution protected the king; his government was personal, his authority as absolute as he could make it; he issued his own coins, bound his people to his treaties, led their charges into battle, dispensed the plunder and attended to suitable sacrifices and yearly rituals of purification, hoping to 'rule by might', in a favourite Homeric phrase, and meet his duties with the proper energy of a king among lesser kings. It was a demanding position, and if age or achievement was against him, he was deposed or murdered. None of Alexander's ancestors had died in their beds. The common people, most of them wild tribesmen, respected his birth and were consulted, mostly, as a counter to turbulent nobles: if their will was displeasing, a strong king would defy it. Like Homer's King Agamemnon, Alexander twice ignored the opinions of his assembled soldiers. Agamemnon's reward was a nine days' plague from heaven; once, Alexander failed, but once he scared his men into agreement within three days.

  In this king's world of custom and prowess, where all power was personal and government still took place among Companions, success and achievement were the means to authority, and the restless ideal of a Homeric hero was a very real claim to them both. Throughout the letters of Greek academics to Philip, the theme of personal glory in battle or contest recurs deliberately; such glory is godlike, worthy of royal ancestry and the fit reward of a Macedonian king, and like a new King Agamemnon, Philip should lead the Greeks to plunder and revenge among the barbarians of the east. Such glory had been the mainspring of Homer's kings, but where Philip had been urged to follow Agamemnon. Alexander marked out Achilles for himself, more glorious, more individual, and less of a king and leader. Among his Macedonians, this combative ideal made sense, but Alexander grew to govern more men than his Macedonians; part, therefore, of his career is the story of an Achilles who tried, not always happily, to face the problems of an Agamemnon.

  From a new Achilles it would be a mistake to look for peace or a new philosophy. His rivalry was a response to the values of his own society. Fear, profit and glory had been singled out as three basic motives of man by his most percipient Greek observer, and it was to the last of the three that a hero's life was given over; glory won by achievement was agreed to be the straightest path to heaven, and so Alexander's Homeric rivalry led, through prowess, to his free worship by contemporaries as a living god-It was an old ideal, which Aristotle too had shared, but it also had its weaknesses. A hero rules more by reputation than by inherited majesty and cannot allow his prowess to be challenged often or excelled. If he fails, he often shifts a part of the blame on to others or on to causes outside himself, for a loss of face is loss of the title by which he lives and governs. It is a bold attendant who persists in praising another man's courage above his master's. Alexander's generosity was often commended, but it stressed the matchless excellence of his own riches and position; the slander of rivals and a taste for mocking others' failures are the hero's natural reverse to this open-handed display. Alexander's own historian belittled Parmenion's prowess, probably after his death; singers entertained the younger officers by belittling the generals who died commanding the one grave defeat of Alexander's career; Alexander himself is said to have added touches to a comic satire against a close friend, put on to amuse the court soon after he had deserted to Athens. These flatteries and slanders are not a proof that truth and a despot can never rule together. They belong more subtly to a hero's necessary ethic. 'Ever to be best and stand far above all others'; this was agreed to be one of Alexander's favourite lines in Homer. Personal excellence and the shifting of the blame for failure on to others have remained lasting principles of all political life, but they were most pronounced in a society ruled by a heroic ideal.

  It is through Homer that Alexander still comes to life: only one of his dreams is recorded, and it could hardly be more appropriate. In Egypt, as he laid out his new Alexandria, a venerable old man with a look of Homer himself is said to have appeared in his sleep and recited lines from the Odyssey which advised him where to site his city. Even in his dreams, Alexander was later believed to be living out the poems he loved, and to any lover of Homer, his ideal is not, after all, such a strange one. For of all poems, Homer's Iliad is still the most immediate, a world whose reality never falters, not only as seen through the new dimension of its similes, where kings banquet beneath their oak trees, children build castles of sand, mothers keep flies away from their sleeping babies and old women watch from their porches as the wedding processions dance by, but also through the leisurely progress of a narrative rich in ritual and repeated phrases, deceptively simple but infinitely true, where heroes strive for glory, knowing that death is inescapable, where a white-armed lady laughs through her tears and returns to heat the bath-water for a husband who she knows will never return from the battle, where gods and goddesses are no more remote for being powerful, one raining tears of blood for the death of a favourite hero, another making toys, another bribing Sleep with the promise of one of the younger Graces and then making love with Zeus her husband on a carpet of crocus and hyacinth. Homer's only magic is his own, and if he still speaks directly to the heart how much more must his poems have come home to Alexander, who saw their ideals around him and chose to live them, not as a distant reader but more in the spirit of a marcher baron living out the ballads which mirrored his own home world.

  Once, men said, when a messenger arrived with news and could barely conceal his delight, Alexander stopped him with a smile: 'What can you possibly tell me that deserves such excitement,' he asked, 'except perhaps that Homer has come back to life?' Alexander could not revive his favourite poet, but there is one last twist to his Homeric rivalry, more extraordinary, perhaps, than he ever knew. In his cavalry, served a regiment of lowlanders, whom his ancestors had annexed on their eastern borders; they had migrated, said Aristotle, many hundreds of years ago from ancient Crete. In the same lowlands, there also lived Greek refugees to whom his ancestors had offered a home: they had come, on the ruin of their home town, from the ancient village of Mycenae. But the palace societies of Crete and Mycenae were the giants of the heroic age which Homer, centuries later, had used as the theme for his poem; their only descendants were living, by chance, in Macedonia, and at the call of a new Achilles they would prepare for Greece's last Homeric emulation, for a march as far as the Oxus and the Punjab, in search of the personal prowess which had once made their kings such a famous subject of song.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Inside Macedonia Alexander had already shown a speed worthy of his Homeric hero. In mid-autumn it was time to extend his authority abroad, for Philip had left a foreign legacy which stretched from the Danube and the Dalmatian coast to the southern capes of Greece and the islands of the Aegean. The Macedonian throne w
as secure and it was Greece which first required his heir's attention.

  When Alexander was asked how he managed to control the Greeks, he would answer 'by putting oft nothing that ought to be done today until tomorrow'. No sooner were palace affairs settling in his favour than he put this stern but admirable philosophy into practice. Leading the Macedonian soldiers whom he had befriended, he marched south from Aigai to the abutting foothills of mount Olympus, and so towards the border with Greek Thessaly, where his father had long been recognized as ruler. The vale of Tempe was entered by a pass five miles long and so narrow that cavalry could only ride it in single file; local Thessalian tribesmen were guarding it, and if the history of Greek warfare had one lesson to teach, it was that mountain passes were impenetrable for cavalry and infantry in formation and were not to be undertaken confidently even by the fashionable units of light-armed peltasts. Alexander improvised a bold alternative: he ordered steps to be cut in the cliff-face of nearby mount Ossa and he led his Macedonians over its peaks by the methods of a mountaineer. The pass was turned, the nobles of Thessaly welcomed the man they had failed to stop, and Alexander did not forget a stratagem which could serve him again in his career.

  Like his father Philip, he was promptly recognized as ruler of the Thessalians, a remarkable honour for an outsider and crucial for the financial dues and disciplined cavalry to which it entitled him. In return, he reminded his subjects of their kinship with him through the hero Heracles, ancestor of the Macedonian kings, and through Achilles, to whom his mother's family traced their descent. Achilles's kingdom had lain in Thessaly, and as a personal tribute Alexander now dedicated the district to his hero. His father's diplomacy had bequeathed him his broad inheritance, but he had interpreted it in his own heroic way; the pattern ran deep in Alexander's early years.

  If he was ruler of Thessaly, he was also by hereditary right the leader of the Greek allies, for Philip had exacted an oath from the Greeks that his newly created office of Leader should pass to his descendants. But his death had started disturbances in every allied city with a grievance, and only by a frighteningly fast march could Alexander win his rightful acknowledgement. Storming through Thermopylae, the narrow Gates of Greece, he carried the central Greek tribes, summoned the Delphic council, a body of more prestige than power, and made them ratify his Leadership, because he controlled them; there had been dissidence in Thebes and Athens, where news of Philip's murder had arrived very quickly from northern agents and caused the people to vote Pausanias the honour of a shrine, but Alexander careered southwards to their borders, scaring Thebes into surrender, Athens into herding her livestock and farmers inside her walls for fear of invasion. Fulsome honours were voted to him, including Athenian citizenship; he accepted them, and passed south to Corinth on the isthmus to summon the allied Greek council of which he was now leader both by example and by right. Not for the last time, he had shown his troops the value of speed, and yet this was the man whom Athenian politicians had predicted would never leave Pella.

  War was the natural state of every Greek city. In theory, they were considered to be at war with each other, except for particular cases where they had sworn a temporary alliance and theory was usually born out in practice. The Greece which Philip had outmanoeuvred and Alexander had overawed was a society obsessed with instability and poisoned with revolution. It was not a decadent society, which had somehow betrayed the ideals of a so-called golden age under Pericles's Athens a hundred years before; it was a more level world, both in the balance of power between its states and in the openness of office to men outside its traditional ruling classes. Being more level, it was also more varied. But it was also living proof that for all their variety, the Greeks had failed to produce any political or economic form which could hold a community together or offer to the majority of their citizens a life which was any comfort in a desperately poor landscape with a negligible stock of technology to surmount it. For the past twenty-five years the balance of power in Greece had declined, through feuds between states and upheavals between classes, into an uneasy balance of weakness. Philip had exploited this as an unattached outsider, and his final result, of a common peace among 'free and independent' Greek allies, was intended to stop dissension both between and inside the Greek cities by means to his own advantage. He had already set up friendly governments where necessary, and in the name of stability, Alexander froze them into power by an absolute ban on revolutionary disturbance; in the name of independence, like the Spartans fifty years before him, he broke up the local empires of the larger states on which so much of their mutual aggression had been based, and this measure won him popularity among their many smaller neighbours. Elaborate provisions were made for disputes between cities to be arbitrated, but the detailed clauses of this common peace among allies cannot now be recovered; even if they could they would be as dull as any other dead constitution from the past. The only point which mattered was that Philip and his Macedonians kept control despite their slogan of Greek freedom and that they did not mean to squeeze Greece for tribute or for any cooperation beyond a sullen acquiescence in their aims in Asia.

  'Covenants without the sword are but words, and of no strength to secure a man at all'; so Thomas Hobbes wrote in seventeenth-century England, and like Plato and Aristotle, he was mapping out his political philosophy in a real world of revolution and little stability. All three saw the need for authority around them, and Philip and Alexander, no less than Cromwell, appreciated the truth which was written large in the political philosophies of their time. In four key states Macedonian garrisons held the Greeks to their covenants, and if one was removed by Alexander to appease natives who had already rebelled to throw it out, a second was maintained at Thebes, despite similar protest by the Theban people. Events were soon to prove him right; meanwhile, a meeting of his father's allied council confirmed him as supreme general of the Asian expedition, and the last link in the chains of Philip's Greek inheritance had safely been forged for him: 'By his authority he hath the use of so much power and strength conferred on him that by terror thereof, he is enabled to form the wills of them all to peace at home and to mutual aid against their enemies abroad.' More than any clause of Philip's Greek alliance, it is Hobbes's ideal sovereign who sums up the Macedonian leadership of the Greeks.

  Only one Greek state stood out against his authority: the Spartans sent Alexander a message saying that it was not their fathers' practice to follow others but to lead them. This splendidly stubborn comment was not as unwelcome as they might have hoped. By their past history in southern Greece, the Spartans had earned the anxious detestation of their smaller neighbours who remembered how Spartan calls to freedom or independence had persistently led to their subjection. Spartan power had been broken for thirty-five years, but it was showing unwelcome signs of a revival, and Philip had played astutely on small neighbours' fears of another Spartan tyranny. Although there were those in more powerful states who called Philip and Alexander the tyrants of Greece, their small and vulnerable neighbours did not see the rise of Macedonia as the death of Greek freedom. Such a concept begged too many questions. Several enemies of Sparta in southern Greece had shown unease at the death of their protector Philip, but Sparta's continued opposition to Alexander reminded them that their best hope of protection lay with a Macedonian leader.

  So it suited Alexander to leave Sparta alone, and instead he had words with a Greek philosopher whom he happened to find in Corinth's suburbs. Diogenes, founder of the Cynic school, was visiting Corinth and as a believer in the vanity of wordly riches, he was living in a wooden tub: passing by, Alexander saw him and asked if there was anything this abject figure wanted. Yes, replied Diogenes, stand aside a little, for you are blocking the sun. One of his pupils later joined Alexander as an admiral and wrote a colourful history, including the story of this meeting, but it was probably his fiction that Alexander went on to comment: 'If I had not been Alexander, I would like to have been Diogenes.' And yet both of them shared, for d
ifferent ends, an extraordinary power of physical endurance.

  As winter began, Alexander left Corinth and returned northwards, stopping to make a dedication at the Delphic oracle. His visit was the start of a new and persistent theme. The priesthood had always repaid Philip's favours, but Alexander, it was said, was refused an oracle because he had come on an unfavourable day. He man-handled the priestess and dragged her to the shrine, and during the struggle she acknowledged him as invincible. These 'unfavourable days' are not known until Roman times and the story of the struggle and refusal is likely to be a Roman slander, belittling Alexander's invincibility against that of their own emperors. But the theme is rich in consequences. The troops would believe that the Delphic oracle had somehow guaranteed it, probably because Alexander encouraged the story at Delphi himself. When he was later proposed for divine honours at Athens as an invincible god, the title must have been known to be his favourite. No man, and only one hero, had been called invincible before him, and then only by a poet, but the hero was Heracles, ancestor of the Macedonian kings. Alexander emphasized the theme of Victory on his coins, in his dedications and the names of his cities, and as a result of his exploits, a newer and mightier Heracles the Invincible entered into Greek and Roman religion. In Iran, his Successors continued the titles he had begun, and the idea of Invincibility passed from the Greek East to Caesar and finally to the Sun whose worship grew to rival Christ's. When Alexander began to stress this powerful link with Victory and the hero Heracles, whose assistance he constantly recognized, a new concept was born for divine kingship. It was the first, and not the least, of his legacies to religion and it also caught his confident mood; on returning to Macedonia, he called out his father's army for training and drill, and on this army, more than any claim to victory, his invincibility always depended. To modern field-marshals the Macedonian army has seemed the most enviable force in history. Its design is intriguing and leads straight to Philip, the most immediate reason why Alexander ever became great.