by Tom Holt
Philip of Macedon (who hired me to teach his son military history) knew all about this, which was why he spent his life perfecting the Macedonian professional army. If you want to, you can interpret everything Philip did from the moment he became King as leading up to the invasion of Persia , and all the facts will fit that view. He united Greece , he trained and developed a magnificent army; in his dealings with the Greek cities he conquered he went out of his way to be nice so as not to alienate them and lose them from the grand design. And, if he’d lived, I believe he’d have achieved a substantial part of his objective, maybe even ending up after twenty years or so of war as ruler of a quarter of Asia.
He never got the chance. Shortly before the expedition was due to set off, he staged a magnificent wedding for his daughter Cleopatra, who was marrying the King of Epirus. It turned out to be a long, hard wedding, with days of good old-fashioned drinking lightly seasoned with mandatory cultural events befitting the taste and discrimination of the Captain of the Greeks, some of which Philip even attended. It was at one of these, an athletic contest held in the theatre at Aegae, that a young guardsman called Pausanias stuck him through the ribcage with a Celtic-pattern broadsword, rendering him as comprehensively dead as it’s possible for a man to be in just one lifetime, before running away, tripping over a trailing vine and falling smack on his nose in front of gods know how many thousand utterly stunned people.
Pausanias didn’t live very long after that. He certainly didn’t survive long enough to answer any questions, but that was all right because, apparently, it was common knowledge that he had a personal grudge against the King — lots of suitably squalid stuff about a clandestine love-affair that resulted in a gang-rape and all manner of prurient details; interestingly enough, the story struck me as remarkably familiar the first time I heard it, and it didn’t take me long to work out why. It was basically the same as the hallowed tale of Harmodius and Aristogiton, the two young heroes who killed the tyrant Hipparchus and set Athens free a century or so back. For some reason, this made me think quite hard about Aristotle, a man who knew a good story when he heard one and had a very good idea of the sort of thing that catches the public imagination.
If I’m right, the parallel between Philip and the lecherous monster Hipparchus was a singularly deft touch, which would compel me to raise my estimation of Aristotle by a significant factor.
Once the show was over (I assume they must have carried on with the wedding, because Cleopatra did marry the King of Epirus) and everybody had finally accepted that what they’d seen was for real, the speculation began. Favourite for the role of First Murderer was Olympias the Queen, and there’s no denying that she had a pretty substantial motive, because not long before, Philip had married a young and beautiful girl (also confusingly called Cleopatra), apparently neglecting to divorce Olympias first but in all other respects indicating that he’d had enough of her and her bloody snakes and was proposing to start over with someone a bit less exhausting to live with. This Cleopatra lived longer than the man Pausanias but not by much, and there were all sorts of rumours flying about that Olympias, far from denying her involvement, was worried in case other people stole the credit for her great accomplishment.
Entirely possible; but I don’t think so. The Olympias I knew could easily have smashed Philip’s skull with a chair-leg in the heat of an argument. She might even have poisoned his soup, if he’d done something that really upset her (and I don’t see going through a form of marriage with some girl as being enough to do that). But a public execution involving accomplices wasn’t her style at all; she was far too direct and self-reliant to bother with anything like that, and it seems pretty obvious that the whole purpose behind killing Philip at that particular time in that particular place was to stop Philip leading the army into Persia and starting the war with the Great King.
Nor do I believe that the Persians had anything to do with it, though that too would have been entirely possible; or the Athenians, come to that, though they rather crassly voted that Pausanias should be awarded the posthumous rank of Hero of Athenian Freedom, and Demosthenes showed up at Assembly in a flamboyant new outfit designed to represent Great Joy, even though his daughter had died a few days previously. Both the Persians and the Athenians would have realised that killing Philip wouldn’t solve anything as far as they were concerned unless Alexander died with him; and Alexander didn’t die. Oh no. Not one bit.
Alexander, in fact, became King; quite unexpectedly, while in the full flower of his youth and brilliance, which would otherwise have been wasted as he served his time as his father’s loyal lieutenant and second-in-command. If Philip had lived to a reasonable age, Alexander wouldn’t have succeeded to the throne much before his fiftieth birthday — by which time, quite possibly, all the best bits of the mighty purpose would already have been accomplished, and Alexander would’ve been stuck with the rotten job of consolidating and keeping in one piece the mighty empire Philip had carved himself out m the East. A fifty-year-old Achilles; I can’t see it, somehow. And I don’t believe that the Alexander I knew ever had the slightest intention of living to be fifty, if there was any way it could possibly be avoided.
Yapping Dog history, take it or leave it; none of it matters much now, in any event. If you’re ill-mannered enough to insist that I offer some token scrap of evidence to back up my wild innuendoes, consider this. The man Pausanias was a guardsman, one of the Companions. I don’t remember him from my time at Mieza, but Pausanias was a fairly common Macedonian name at that time, so who knows, maybe the poor fool was a student of mine. One thing that’s certain is that the young Companions had been raised from birth to be unquestioningly loyal to Prince Alexander, to do whatever he ordered them to do regardless of the consequences to themselves. Of course, it’s possible that one of these carefully prepared young noblemen could have been so obsessed with sexual jealousy over a middle-aged one-eyed drunkard that he broke clear of everything he’d been brought up to revere to the extent of stabbing his lord’s father to death on his daughter’s wedding day; anything’s possible where human nature is concerned, as witness my friend Tyrsenius and Callixena, or Anabruzas and his son. But I was taught to yap like a dog when I was a boy, and I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s as good a way of looking at the world as any, and probably better than most. So sue me.
In the twelfth year of the colony we finally got a decent growth of grapes, and I was pleased and proud to announce, in my official capacity as cecist, that henceforth, for the first time in its history, our city was going to be self-sufficient in booze.
Naturally, we had to celebrate; but instead of letting us have a cheerful spur-of-the-moment party, our noble Founders decided that it would be more appropriate to combine our first vintage with a ceremony of thanksgiving to commemorate our tenth anniversary. This was an eminently reasonable thing to do in our twelfth year (by Founder logic, at any rate), and the highlight of the affair would be the official dedication of the city, something we’d unaccountably forgotten to do twelve years back, preferring to fritter away our time on building stockades and digging latrines.
The slight difficulty was that, in order to dedicate a city, you really do need to have a name for it, and we still hadn’t got round to thinking of one.
Instead, we’d thought of several. The Nowheresville joke had worn thin by now, and most of us simply referred to the place as Polis, ‘the city’. Our Greek neighbours called us Nea Polis (‘the new city ’) or Macedones (‘the Macedonians’), or just Houtoi (‘Oh, Them’). After Philip’s death, the Founders stopped calling it Philipsville-in-thebest-of-all-possible-worlds, for some reason, and found ways of phrasing their remarks so as to avoid naming it at all. What the Scythians called us we didn’t know for sure, though we could guess.
So, for a month or two before the planned vintage party, we talked about nothing else but what we were going to call the city. It was a game that everybody could play, and once the obligatory jokes were out of the w
ay, we took it surprisingly seriously. I guess it was a sign that we’d finally stopped thinking of ourselves as Macedonians or Athenians or Corinthians, or even as Illyrians or, come to that, Budini; we no longer regarded stories of what was going on as news from home, but rather as strange and rather irrelevant happenings in places we used to know, in a part of our lives that was getting more and more distant and improbable-seeming with every successive harvest and winter. We were, in other words, all starting to think of ourselves as citizens of something, so it’s logical, I suppose, that we should take an intelligent interest in what something was going to be called.
Tyrsenius, in a fit of that nauseating sentimentality that was becoming an increasingly dominant facet of his personality, proposed that we call the place Callixene, after his wife. On another level, of course, it could be interpreted as meaning ‘beautiful foreign city’, but that didn’t do terribly much for the rest of us, because of course it wasn’t foreign any more, it was home. A Founder called Menippus suggested Apoecia, which means both ‘colony’ and ‘home from home’; neat, but too slick for us. We wanted something plain but substantial.
Another Founder suggested Euxenopolis — a triple meaning; ‘city friendly to strangers’, ‘city on the Black Sea’ and ‘city founded by Euxenus’, but I persuaded him to withdraw the suggestion by offering to cut his throat for him if he didn’t. Nobody seemed to care much for my suggestion, Alexandria ap’Olbia.
Obviously, this was blatant patronage-seeking, just the sort of minor toadying that Alexander would appreciate — our balance of payments position wasn’t getting any worse, but it wasn’t improving much, either, and rather too much of the silver money we earned from selling our surplus grain to our better-established neighbours (for resale to the old country) tended to stay with them as interest on their original loans to us from a decade ago. For the price of our self-respect, we might be able to coax Alexander into letting us have some of the money his father had promised us and never sent, which would make it possible to clear off some of the overhead and start building up a little working capital of our own. When I tried to explain this idea, however, the eyelids of my fellow citizens began to droop and the eyes beneath those lids began to glaze, and I gave it up before I made myself unpopular.
In the end it came down to two contenders; Apollonia, because our temple was nominally dedicated to Apollo (and the reason for that was that Agenor the sculptor happened to have a statue of Apollo on his hands, as the result of a cancelled order, and offered it to the temple wardens at next best thing to cost); or Antolbia (‘Just across the way from Olbia’), a suggestion which, for all its manifold and obvious faults, at least had the virtue of being both accurate and useful for traders who wanted to visit us but didn’t know where to look for us.
We settled on Antolbia — it turned out there was another Apollonia near enough to cause problems — and moved on to the next phase of the job in hand, namely getting ready for our vintage party.
Well, the first thing you need for a successful vintage party is wine; so we made some of that, quite a lot of it, in fact. Needless to say we made our wine Greek style, and since (if the muck in the cup in front of me as I write is anything to go by) you people still have a lot to learn about this noble art, I think I’d better describe how we go about it. This isn’t a hint or anything; but the duty of a historian is to record things which may prove useful or inspiring to future generations, so pay close attention.
Now then; it’s early autumn, Arcturus is rising and the grapes are the right size and shape. Having secured the services of everybody in your community who can walk but not move fast enough to get out of the way when you come round recruiting, you hasten to the vineyard, taking with you an ample supply of large wicker baskets, fine-meshed nets and the makings of your pressing-box. If possible, induce the others to do the hot, back-breaking work of filling the baskets with grapes. You’ll be far better off assembling the pressing-box, which consists of a block of timber about four feet square, with raised sides, four legs (the front pair shorter than the back pair) and a spout at the front for the grape-juice to drain through. Willing helpers then take the bunches of grapes from the baskets and load them into a dirty great bag made out of light, flexible wickerwork, which fits nicely inside the pressing-box. You then scramble up into the box and start crushing the grapes through the bag, starting off by using your knees, then standing up and squeezing out the remaining juice with firm, even pressure from the soles of your feet. The juice drains off down the spout into jars, which you later load onto your cart, take home and decant into your large fermentation vessels, where it stays for at least six months, until you’ve finished all your pruning and Arcturus starts rising at dusk; only then do you tap it off into small jars, seal them with resin and either drink it or sell it to the unwary. This method produces a light, sharp white wine that you can drink all night in a half-and-half mix without dying or having to be taken home in a wheelbarrow.
The other method we sometimes used, which is vastly inferior but still better than yours, is to cart the grapes home and crush them in a huge baked-earth vat, big enough to hold your entire crop of grapes and at least three people, and fitted with a tap or spigot a foot or so above ground level. You leave the skins and pips in with the juice, cover the vat over with dressed hides and go away for six months or so, until it’s time to draw off the dark, murky result of your endeavours into jars. This method gets you a heavy red wine that tastes of decay and death, and which is best drunk neat, with plenty of honey and grated cheese, by people who lead unhappy lives in some distant town.
Well, we made our wine by the first method, and settled down to wait for it to perform its small miracle. We had plenty of work to be getting on with in the meanwhile; ploughing and sowing, getting the beans in, followed by late ploughing at solstice and breaking up the fallow to let the frost in. As the summer faded, it became cool enough to sit out in the sun at midday , so we were able to catch up on the backlog of lawsuits we’d had to hold over during the hot season. That year, I recall, we had the Attack Rainwater case, which has stuck in my mind for no great reason other than the incredible ferocity with which it was waged by the two fools involved in it.
The fundamental premise was reasonable enough. If your neighbour’s land lies above yours on the hillside and it’s been an unusually hot summer (as this one was) there’s always a risk that if it rains heavily, the run-off will come cascading down the slope in a flood and wash out anything you’ve planted that happens to get in its way. The defendant in this case had anticipated this contingency when he first moved in and took the place in hand twelve years previously; he’d dug a conduit to run the water across the side of the hill and down to his barns, where it could be used for watering the animals and do some good. But there hadn’t been any flash floods for the next ten years, and in the meanwhile his neighbour (the plaintiff) had been rather careless about letting his goats wander, so the defendant built a stone wall on his downhill boundary to keep the four-legged pirates out. In building this wall he blocked the (by now forgotten) conduit; so when the rains came after our long, hot summer and the water was pouring down the hill in sheets, instead of being led safely away into docile captivity it dammed up at the foot of the wall, overflowed and rampaged through the plaintiff’s onion patch like a Spartan army.
There followed a sharp and forthright exchange of opinions between the parties, followed in turn by a punch-up and litigation. It wouldn’t have been so bad if the defendant (an Illyrian) hadn’t convincingly won the punch-up, thereby changing the nature of the conflict from a dispute between neighbouring farmers into a rematch in the eternal battle between good and evil.
If ever there’s a vacancy among the Judges of the Dead, and I’m co-opted to fill it, the first thing I’ll do is recommend that they punish people who’ve been very wicked indeed in this life by making them members of a jury hearing a dispute between two farmers. It’s a fine irony that, whoever wins or loses the case itse
lf, the people who suffer most are the poor fools who have to sit still for the best part of a day and find some way of staying awake while, for example, a small, excitable Greek and a large, taciturn Illyrian share their feelings for each other in a public place. The plaintiff, a man who seemed to believe that the more often you say something the truer it gets, alienated me so badly while presenting his side of the argument that I’d have unhesitatingly found for the defendant if the court had risen immediately after they turned over the clock. Once the defendant started to speak, however, I quickly revised my judgement. Where the plaintiff had told a simple tale at insufferable length, the defendant tried to compress a bewilderingly complicated narrative into a few incomplete sentences and a succession of inarticulate grunts. As far as I could reconstruct what he was actually trying to say, his argument was that he couldn’t be charged with Blocking A Watercourse Recklessly Or With Intent (which was what he was accused of in the statement of claim) because there had never been enough rain in previous years to cause a sufficient overflow, and so water had never actually coursed down the said conduit, which meant it had never been a watercourse within the meaning of the statute; further or in the alternative, he’d been more or less forced to build his wall by the ferocious onslaughts of his neighbour’s goats, which had frequently done more damage in an afternoon than the water had wrought in the space of a month; ‘furthermore,’ he’d added, ‘what was I supposed to do with all that water anyhow? Drink it?’ This wasn’t really what you’d call a convincing legal argument, but at least I could see the point he was trying to make without having to twist my imagination at right-angles to my brain.