Alexander at the World's End

by Tom Holt

  ‘Because of Homer,’ Alexander pointed out.

  ‘Because of Homer, thank you, destined to live for ever, yes. Dead, yes. And Homer’s still alive, I take it?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘I see. Homer’s dead too.’ I smiled. ‘Listen, everybody. Alexander would rather be Homer than Achilles. Tell me this, Alexander, who’d you rather be? The all-comers champion at the Olympic Games, or the little fat guy with a scroll who calls out the names of the winners?’

  Alexander didn’t like that. Not one bit.

  The rest of them did.They tried to keep straight faces; by and large they managed it. But they’d had to put up with Alexander being Alexander for a long time. I’d had enough of it after three or four weeks; they’d had to deal with it all their lives. I made a lot of friends that day.

  (Clever me. Just like the man who fell out of the fig tree; he broke his back, but he shook down an awful lot of figs.)

  ‘I take your point,’ Alexander said eventually. ‘I was wrong. Thank you for pointing out my mistake.’

  The look he gave me as he said that made me feel cold all over. Something had happened to him in that moment, and I’ve been wondering ever since what the hell it could have been.

  All right; consider Achilles. He was the son of a goddess and a mortal, forever torn between the limitless possibilities of his mother’s divinity and the constraints of his father’s gross mortality. When he was little more than a boy, the Trojan War began; almost single-handedly he overthrew the Trojan Empire and brought the war right up to the walls of the city itself. At that point, after fighting always in the front of the battle and achieving every possible objective, he made a mistake; he took offence, fell out with the king on a matter concerning his honour, backed himself into a corner so that he could no longer participate in the war without a disastrous loss of face. So he sulked in his tent, while Zeus gave victory to the Trojans and the Greeks were slaughtered like pigs in the autumn. Only when it was too late to save his dearest friend did he return to the war, kill the enemy champion and avenge his friend; and for his mistake he was punished, dying too soon before the city could be taken, shot with an arrow by a man by far his inferior. Achilles failed; yet he was the greatest hero of them all, and in Homer’s Iliad he’s caught for ever, like a fly trapped in amber mounted in gold on a brooch, everlastingly both pre-eminent and imperfect.

  Consider Homer. He was poor and blind, and he was taken prisoner by the enemies of his people, but all the same he won immortality in his old age by creating something that can never die. Homer’s life was wretched, and he was a success.

  Consider Alexander.

  Well, that’s my best shot at a theory; at that moment, because of my foolish verbal trap, Alexander made a conscious decision to be Achilles. Consider; when he was little more than a boy, he began the Persian War; almost single-handledly he overthrew the Persian Empire and brought the war into countries that none of us knew existed before he arrived there to conquer them. At that point, after fighting always in the front of the battle and achieving every possible objective, he made a mistake; he fell out with his friends and the Macedonian people over a matter concerning his honour, backed himself into a corner so that he could no longer give up the war without a disastrous loss of face. So he led them into the mountains and the desert, where so many of them died. Only after he had caused the death of his dearest friend did he think of giving up the war, and for his mistake he was punished, dying too soon before the empire could be established, wounded by an arrow shot by some common soldier, dying of a fever resulting directly from that wound.

  (And consider me, poor and half-blind among the enemies of my people — no offence, Phryzeutzis, but this city was built by Macedonians in Sogdiana and I’m a long way from home — trying in my old age to make a record of what I’ve seen, a book that only you will ever read.)

  Well, after that the atmosphere was rather strained for a day or so, and I decided I’d better do something to redeem myself, or at least help put that unfortunate incident out of everybody’s mind. Fortunately, I’d anticipated that sooner or later there’d be some sort of crisis in the student/teacher relationship, so I’d kept back a choice nugget of comic relief, the sort of thing that dissolves tension in a wave of shared merriment. It was a pity that I was going to have to use it up so soon; but the situation seemed to require it.

  I read them the bit in Aeneas the Tactician about the bees.

  CHAPTER NINE

  I remember once standing in the Potters’ Quarter in Athens , chatting aimlessly to someone about something, when quite suddenly I heard the most almighty crash.

  I turned round and saw that a wall had collapsed. There was a cloud of dust, and someone was screaming, and people were starting to run. In the end, as I recall, they pulled four bodies out of the rubble, all dead. I didn’t see a thing, of course. I was looking the other way.

  Story of my life, I guess. I was certainly looking the other way while Philip was waging his not-quite-a-war against the Athenian people; I was in Mieza, teaching the next generation of Macedon’s best and brightest about the war before the war before last. I was teaching them about the theoretical weaknesses of the traditional Greek heavy infantry formation (I’d figured it all out for myself from first principles; I was ever so pleased with myself) while Philip was training these same kids’ fathers and uncles and elder brothers to command the new model Macedonian phalanx, which was designed to exploit those same weaknesses and turn the citizen-soldiers’ shield-wall (bulwark of Greek freedom for two hundred and fifty blood-spattered internecine years) into an easy joke.

  But we didn’t get much in the way of news in Mieza.We were living in an awful kind of cheesy literary epic, pastiche Homer of the worst possible kind, where Aristotle and Leonidas and Lysimachus and I were Cheiron and Peleus and Phoenix and whoever the hell I was meant to be (I objected so strenuously to being Ulysses that eventually I was relieved of duty) tutored the young Achilles and his comrades, the flower of Grecian youth. In that regard it was all very tasteless and tacky and, to be honest, quintessentially Macedonian. I was constantly reminded of the way the Macedonians periodically tried to put on a play, something famous by Sophocles or Euripides. They made up costumes that were nineteen parts out of twenty accurate and authentic recreations of what the Athenian chorus and actors would have worn, but that remaining one-twentieth was enough to spoil the whole effect. The heels of the boots would be too high or too low, the expressions of the masks too menacingly comic or too ridiculously sad, or one of the colours would be wrong, or (worst of all) some wealthy patron of the arts wouldn’t be able to resist fitting out the chorus with genuine purple scarves when the Athenian producer would’ve found a way to get roughly the same effect with henna. Likewise, they’d speak the lines with passion and feeling, but not quite understand what they were actually saying, while archaic or poetic turns of phrase that they weren’t familiar with could cause absolute and hilarious chaos.

  I particularly remember one well-meaning, conscientious soul who’d been dragooned into being an actor — in real life he spent his days smearing pitch round the necks of wine-jars — who turned out to have genuine talent and an uncanny insight into what he was saying. He was doing ever such a good job and I was sitting there enjoying the play no end when he came to a bit that he obviously hadn’t been able to puzzle out. The line should have been ‘After the storm, I see the blessed calm’; but he put the wrong emphasis on the word galen, and managed to turn it into ‘After the storm, I see the goddamn ferret’. Which was bad enough; but what reduced me to uncontrollable giggling was the way he said it, with a tremendous soaring rush and a both-arms-wide gesture of sheer joy, as the poor fool tried to gloss over the apparently meaningless gibberish with a spectacular piece of histrionics.

  Tsk. Macedonians. The fact that they were smart enough to overrun Greece while the majority of us didn’t even realise what they were doing pales into insignificance compared with their in
ability to get a line of poetry right. The point is, they had no business fooling about with poetry in the first place. A lion would look ridiculous pulling a farm-cart.

  By the same token, Macedonian princelings had no place sitting under the shade of carefully trimmed beech trees discussing the finer points of Alcaic prosody or the authenticity of the Dolon episode in the Iliad. At their age they should have been with their elders on the battlefield or in the camp, polishing armour and carving thick slabs of meat off the whole sheep roasting on the spit. But, being young noblemen, they laboured and strained and excelled themselves, to the point where they could just about have passed for my social equals at an Athenian dinner party.

  Case in point; Philip made one of his unaccounted impromptu visits, and made it known that he’d like to hear how Alexander was getting on with his music. So we all trooped into the little theatre (did I tell you we’d dug a little theatre out of the side of a hill? It was small and the seats were just banked-up turf and from time to time a stray goat would wander across during the course of a performance to nibble at the grass growing between the paving-slabs on the stage floor, but by the time we’d finished it was a theatre; or at least, it was useless for anything else) and made ourselves as comfortable as we could. Then, when we were all perching comfortably, Alexander strode onto the stage and started to play the harp.

  Needless to say he played it competently; competent verging on well, in fact, because he’d chosen quite an awkward piece with tricky fingering, but he was making it seem much easier than it was.

  ‘Well done,’ Philip grunted. ‘That’s very good.’

  Alexander looked up, grinned and started to play something else. This time he played something downright difficult, and what’s more he played it not only flawlessly but also with feeling, a genuine interpretation of the music rather than just making a noise that sounded like it. While this was going on, Philip was getting steadily more and more annoyed, until finally he stood up with a scowl on his face.

  ‘That’s too good,’ he said. ‘Aren’t you ashamed to be able to play the harp that well?’

  At which, as you can imagine, Alexander dropped the harp as if it had just come still cherry-red hot from the blacksmith’s forge and stomped back to join the other kids, with not the slightest trace of expression on his face and (to the best of my knowledge) never touched a musical instrument again as long as he lived.

  That was, of course, a slap in the face for Aristotle, because music was one of his subjects — oh, he didn’t actually teach the harp himself, there was a little man who came in to do that. But Aristotle taught the theory of music, and musical appreciation, and the mathematical foundations on which music is based;

  and there was Philip accusing him, by implication, of training his son and heir for the life of a four-obols-a-day professional musician, the kind you buy in the slave sales for two-thirds the price of a good quality field hand.

  Like Athens and Thebes around that time, Aristotle and I had formed an uneasy defensive alliance against Philip, not because he’d given us cause but just in case he ever did (a bit excessive, you think, Phryzeutzis? You never met Philip)

  and I remember him coming to see me that evening, after we’d managed to get away from the obligatory Macedonian family feast. If it’d been anybody else my heart would’ve bled for him.

  ‘What am I supposed to do,’ he complained sorrowfully, ‘teach mediocrity? Fair enough, if that’s what he wants, he has plenty of Macedonians far better qualified than I am. But I just can’t do that, Euxenus, I don’t know how to teach a boy so much and no more. I wouldn’t have the first idea how to go about it.’

  I nodded sympathetically. ‘Of course not,’ I replied. ‘It’s because you aren’t really a teacher. You’re a philosopher, a scientist; you have to teach the whole truth because it’s all you understand. A teacher doesn’t always understand;

  often as not he doesn’t. But he knows how to get across as much of the subject as is good for the pupil. It’s a different skill.’

  Aristotle sighed. ‘There you are,’ he said. ‘I don’t really understand what you’ve just said. I know what the words mean, but when you examine them carefully they don’t make sense. With respect, I feel that you’re much closer to your own definition of a teacher.’

  I yawned; it was late and I’d had a lot to drink, and I had to be up early in the morning. ‘That’s me,’ I said. ‘I’m just a porter who carries knowledge. I pick it up out of the book, lug it across and dump it in the boys’ minds, so many basketfuls per shift until I’ve filled my quota. What’s in the basket, I neither know nor care.That’s why I’m a good teacher, gods forgive me.’

  He smiled. ‘You have the knack of putting things in a striking way, with imagery and other pleasing rhetorical touches,’ he said. ‘I believe you would do well in politics if you ever found anything you believed in. But you don’t really believe in anything, I think; that’s your Yapping Dog philosophy.’

  I stretched out on a couch and rubbed my forehead. ‘That’s not quite true,’ I said. ‘I believe quite passionately in the imperfection of all known political theories. I believe that once you’ve brought them out of Plato’s Republic and tried to make them work in the cesspit of Athens , you’ll find that none of them can survive prolonged contact with the lowest common denominator, human nature.’

  I yawned again. ‘I don’t know, you have this fine slogan, Man is a political animal, and I suppose I agree. You can’t put three human beings together for more than a week without politics of some description breaking out, like mildew on damp apples. It’s definitely part of our nature, I’d never try and argue otherwise. All I’m saying is, it’s part of human nature in the same way that greed and violence and vanity are all parts of the mix. It’s there and it can’t be got rid of, but it’s wrong to encourage it. And it’s doubly wrong to make people believe that if we all sat down and put our thinking caps on and studied enough data and made a big effort, sooner or later we’d be able to come up with the perfect political system. It’s like saying that if only we tried really hard we could make ourselves grow wings.’

  Aristotle shook his head. ‘That’s just the Yapping Dog credo again,’ he said.

  ‘We are all imperfect, we are all doomed to stay that way, nothing can be done for us. I can’t accept that, I’m afraid. Humanity is capable of perfecting itself; if it wasn’t, it wouldn’t be human.’

  I put my hands behind my head and closed my eyes. ‘Now we’re just swapping slogans,’ I said. ‘You’re welcome to yours and I’ll keep mine, and that way we needn’t start a fight. Meanwhile, I really am feeling rather tired, so if it’s all the same to you—’

  I don’t think he heard any of that. All the time I knew him he suffered from this terrible intermittent deafness. ‘Consider the gods,’ he went on, sitting upright and looking at me as if to suggest I really ought to be taking notes.

  ‘Because they’re immortal and invulnerable, they can survive and flourish without needing to perfect themselves. Indeed, perfection would be torment for them, since they live forever; they’d be in a permanent state of having reached the end of a journey. Now consider animals, and the lesser forms of humanity that are little better than animals. They lack the resources and abilities that would make it possible for them to perfect themselves; they lack reason and self-awareness and the ability to differentiate between right and wrong, good and bad. Now, between the two extremes, consider Man. He has the ability to rise above the animal, and he has the need to do so, because he is mortal and finite, and because as a mere animal he would be entirely unsuccessful, having no fur to warm him or claws or sharp teeth or thick hide to defend him against the more powerful predators. Consider the means by which he is to achieve that perfection; surely by co-operation, by virtue of the fact that a combination of many men together is far more than the sum of its parts. This is Man in his political mode—’

  ‘Oh, I know,’ I said. ‘A pile of unlaid bricks is a pile of br
icks, but the same bricks put together is a wall. Comes a time, though, when all walls fall down.

  You show me a wall that’s still standing and I’ll show you a wall that hasn’t fallen down yet. Trust me,’ I added, with a quite ostentatious yawn, ‘I know about walls falling down.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’ Aristotle said, puzzled. ‘I don’t think I quite—’

  ‘You wouldn’t,’ I interrupted. ‘You weren’t there. Sorry, private joke.’ He’d annoyed me now, and I wasn’t feeling quite so sleepy. ‘All right,’ I went on, ‘now it comes down to ways of looking at things. I could say, why build a wall if it’s designed to fall down sooner or later? Where’s the point? Or I could say, just because it’ll fall down in a hundred years’ time, or a thousand, doesn’t mean to say we shouldn’t build it now and keep the sheep out of the newly-planted beans. Attitude, that’s all. I’m prepared to concede that you’ve got a good attitude and I’ve got a bad one, but that begs the question of what’s good and what’s bad. Your wall may keep the sheep out for a thousand years, or it may fall down tomorrow and kill a bunch of people. Your politics is dangerous, Aristotle, and if it tends to cause more harm than good, maybe you shouldn’t play around with it.’

  Credit where it’s due, he’d been listening attentively and not taken offence. ‘I see you sitting on a hillside,’ he replied, ‘surrounded by stones. You’re wet and cold, and sooner or later you’ll get fever in your lungs and die. Now, you have the wit and the skill to build a house out of the stones, and to light a fire inside it that’ll keep you warm. But you say, no, if I build the house it may fall on me and crush me, and if I light the fire it may throw sparks into the thatch and burn me while I sleep. So you stay out on the hill and die.’

  ‘Maybe,’ I conceded. ‘Maybe I last twenty years, whereas if I’d built the house and it had fallen on me — Attitudes, you see. Or opinions, if you prefer. The different ways you and I trade off risks and benefits. Maybe the real difference is that you’re trying to make me think the way you do, while I’m quite happy to let you do what the hell you like, provided you do the same for me.’