Empire of Ashes: A Novel of Alexander the Great

by Nicholas Nicastro

  To my recollection Aeschines mentions Perdiccas son of Orestes only once, which is strange because he now sits on Alexander’s throne in Babylon! In most ways he was cut from the same cloth as Alexander: face full of curl-lipped arrogance, born to make war, hunt frequently, and drink his wine neat. He even took care to cut his hair just like Alexander. To his credit, he was a decent phalanx commander in the early years, and scaled the ladder of influence with hardly a misstep. Perdiccas never seemed ambitious, but events always seemed to go his way. For all his resemblance to the King, however, he lacked one important element: Alexander’s impulse to understand the world he was destroying.

  There were many others who had their moments on the stage over the next twelve years—Peucestas, Coenus, Nearchus, Craterus, Aristander the soothsayer…and Philotas, whom Aeschines mentions only in relation to the ridiculous charges that led to his death! If you and I were sharing a drink, I would tell you about them all—from their best moments to their worst, and how they shaped the success that has come to compose the legend of Alexander. But we have time today to speak only of Machon—a minor figure indeed! If I say to you, though, that Alexander was more a corporation than a man, and his myth a work of many authors, it is because I was there. Let only those who marched with me dispute my words!

  Hephaestion is another bit player in Aeschines’s story. Alexander would never have countenanced this. They were friends since boyhood, and lovers for almost as long. Alexander was the ‘bottom,’ and Hephaestion, who was bigger and stronger, the ‘top.’

  Olympias begged her son to produce an heir before he left for Asia, but he was too much in love with Hephaestion even to function as a man. Of the pair, Hephaestion was the more ambitious. It was he who encouraged Alexander to march on after Issus, to take on the entire Persian Empire, and it was he who argued the strongest for an invasion of India, though no one else would agree with him. So great was his influence with the King, he almost succeeded in cajoling him onto the Gangetic plain.

  But foremost among the forgotten characters is Arridaeus, Alexander’s half-brother. I see your faces—you don’t believe it! Bear with me, then, and you will see.

  You have been given a rousing account of the battle at the Granicus. I congratulate my opponent on his powers of description. Listening to him evoke the scene, it was as if I was there—until I realized I had been there, and it was nothing like he described!

  Imagine this: the Macedonians on one side of a river swollen with spring melt, the mounted Persians high on the other, backed up by a Greek army. Alexander, after a spirited invocation of Homer, single-handedly charges the entire Persian line—and lives! The Macedonians follow, and striking ‘like Hephaestus’s hammer,’ they smash the enemy. Thousands of Persians die, and the Greek mercenaries, astounded by this wonder, stand around and wait for the Macedonians to cross the river in force, organize themselves, and surround them. Thousands of the mercenaries are slaughtered too. And the toll for Alexander’s army? Just twenty-five dead, writes Callisthenes.

  Most of us are veterans of war here…do we not smell a rat? Do single riders charge entire armies and survive? How could it be that the Macedonians could cross a torrent, proceed uphill against their enemy, slash their way through the Persian lines, and lose only twenty-five men? Having seen cavalry cross muddy, miserable spring rivers, I would expect more than twenty-five to die just falling off their horses! To doubt this is not to engage in what Aeschines calls ‘sophistication.’ It is to use common sense.

  What really happened was this: our scouts reported that the Persians were gathered at the Granicus River, and Alexander proceeded with his officers to inspect their position. They observed that the enemy was blocking the only fording place, and that the manner of their deployment, on a bluff above the far bank, would result in horrific casualties among the Macedonians. Parmenion therefore recommended a subtler strategy. The Persians, the old general explained, were anxious to secure their horses against theft at night, and so made a practice of tethering them by both bridle and the feet. As these precautions made it hard for them to saddle and mount in an emergency, they were obligated to make their camps far away from their enemies. In this case the Persians would bivouac overnight well out of touch with their scouts on the river. Why not wait until before dawn the next morning, asked Parmenion, cross the river in secret, and take them all by surprise?

  Alexander carped, complaining that he hadn’t crossed the mighty Hellespont just to be stopped at a mere trickle. Hephaestion declared that strategizing was for weaklings, and that the barbarians would scatter at the first flash of steel. But there was no denying that the river flowed fast and deep, the Persian armor was blindingly numerous, and that the Macedonian infantrymen were spooked. Even if they managed to break through the horses, at least twenty thousand Greek mercenary pikemen waited behind them, each one no doubt desperate to redeem the reputation of Greek arms against Macedon. Perhaps most important, a defeat or a costly victory there, at the very outset of the invasion, would doom the entire enterprise.

  The King took Parmenion’s advice. Overnight, swimmers were sent across to silence the Persian watchmen. And as the first blush of dawn appeared in the sky behind the enemy camp, Alexander got his Cavalry Companions across the river, and most of the pikemen, before they were observed by the Persians. A confused melee ensued in the twilight; Alexander led his horsemen forward to meet the enemy, who had been roused before their time and wore only half their armor. Marching with the hypaspists, I reached the enemy camp in time to see Alexander sitting on the ground, ministered by a doctor after he was struck in the helmet with an axe. Cleitus, who had saved Alexander at the last second, crouched with his hands on his knees, looking down at the King.

  That was when I noticed something curious. Alexander was out of the action, barely conscious, but someone very much like him, with the same build, same stature, and virtually the same voice, was still directing the attack on the Persian camp. With unerring perception of the flow of forces around the battlefield, he directed cavalry and footmen into flying columns that cut the disorganized enemy to pieces. As the sun broke over the horizon, we could see scattered remnants of the Persian cavalry fleeing, and much of Darius’ Greek hirelings still in their camp clothes, surrounded.

  Who was the commander who accomplished all this? Sighting him again, I followed some distance behind. His resemblance to Alexander in both movement and voice was striking, yet he wore far more armor than the King, including a muscle cuirass and greaves. Coming closer, I could see that he wore a lot of metal, but nothing else—no cloak, no tunic, no groin-flaps. His ass was bare for the world to see!

  This spectacle intrigued me, to say the least, for this half-naked apparition was directing the relentless slaughter of virtually all the Greek mercenaries. By midday more than fifteen thousand bodies formed an enormous mountain of fly-strewn flesh. But in the time it took me to glance at the dead and then look back, the mysterious commander was gone. In his place was Alexander, discussing with his officers the enormity of incinerating such a mass.

  To be sure, I made many inquiries into what I had seen. The Macedonians were aggressively reluctant to discuss it; Callisthenes acknowledged that he had seen the figure I described, but would not elaborate. In the months to come, using every method I could think of, including bribery, I was finally able to learn the truth.

  We know of him now as Philip Arridaeus. He was Alexander’s half-brother—a bastard produced by the union of Philip and a Thessalian concubine. The official historians are loathe to speak of him, because from a young age he was an idiot, barely able to speak or take care of himself. He had other odd problems, such as an inability to tolerate the touch of other people, and a deep aversion to the wearing of clothes. Instead, he preferred the feel of metal against his skin. For this reason he wore either armor or nothing for his entire life.

  Yet he did have certain talents. His memory, for instance, was prodigious. By the age of three he could recognize and
name all the different units of Philip’s army. By eight he memorized the entire text of the Iliad. He knew thousands of men by name, and the names of their fathers, and could recount their deeds in battle with precise detail. Alexander, on the other hand, was a charmer, but had no head for the common man. When he was forced to interact with them, he never knew their names. Arridaeus remembered everything.

  The man was in every way fascinated by war. From a young age he liked nothing better than to pore over maps, planning for his fanciful campaigns. As I will recount, he was also invincible on the battlefield, and his talents as a general turned out to be more than imaginary. But I shouldn’t get ahead of myself. Suffice it to say that you will never read of Arridaeus in any official history, because the combination of martial virtue and complete idiocy was incomprehensible to the Macedonians. They were, and are, deeply embarrassed by what they owe to him.

  The origins of his illness are obscure. Some say he was born that way, others that Olympias, fearing competition for Alexander’s future throne, had the infant Arridaeus fed poison with his breast milk. Her intent was not to kill him, which would have been too obvious a crime, but to destroy his mind. I am told that there are preparations of mercury or arsenic that might have such effects if used in small quantities. But bear in mind that I have no proof that he was poisoned. I know only that, wherever he came from, and however he did it, he became the secret weapon of the Macedonians.

  Arridaeus’s skills were discovered by accident during the assault on Thebes. Alexander didn’t expect to take the city, but instead wished no more than to teach the Thebans a lesson. Arridaeus, who was dressed in his usual armor when he appeared on the field, was mistaken for Alexander when he began to issue commands. Sizing up the situation in an instant, he dispatched troops to the weakest part of the Theban wall. The city fell.

  This victory caught Alexander by surprise. In his confusion, he didn’t know what he wanted to do with the prize, so instead turned the decision over to Thebes’s petty and resentful neighbors. They, of course, wanted the city razed to the ground. Alexander acceded to their selfishness—a decision he regretted for the rest of his life.

  For later battles, Arridaeus was brought out on a horse, with an escort of mounted Companions around him to conceal his presence from the rest of the army. From this cocoon the simpleton sent orders around the battlefield. With each victory of Arridaeus, Alexander’s reputation for invincibility grew. Ever resourceful, Arridaeus added his brother’s renown to his arsenal, deploying Alexander like a psychological weapon. “Send Panic over there,” he would say, or “More Terror on the right.” The only thing that was more remarkable than his generalship was the Macedonians’ refusal to acknowledge it.

  Machon paused as the jury turned in a body to the Macedonian spectators. They just stood, shaking their heads in vaguely menacing way, as if the defendant had sealed his fate with this testimony.

  In any case, the Macedonians had their victory at the Granicus, and also managed to kill most of the Greeks fighting in the service of the Great King. Notice that, unlike Aeschines, I make a distinction between the two peoples. We kept hearing from him about the Greeks at Issus, the Greeks at Gaugamela. I assure you there were very few Greeks on campaign with Alexander in Asia, except for myself, and some Thessalian cavalry, who were held mostly in reserve anyway. The Macedonians have little use for Greeks except to kill them. Outrageous, you say? You would agree if you count the Greek casualties among the enemy at the Granicus and Issus. It is a fact that Alexander’s army killed more Greeks than anyone in history. By that I include Xerxes, Darius, or any other foreign king!

  Now I know the Macedonians like to argue that the Greeks they slaughtered were all mercenaries, in the employ of the barbarian, and therefore traitors to their nation. But I ask you, who declared them criminals? They are our fellow citizens in exile, our luckless brothers, cousins, and sons. Who declared them expendable, when we still justly celebrate the exploits of the glorious Ten Thousand? Xenophon’s men were every one employed by Persian paymasters, all dirt-poor Peloponnesian riff-raff. Yet without the example of their survival in Asia, though grossly outnumbered, neither Philip nor Alexander would have dared invade the lands of the Great King. So I ask again, who declared their lives forfeit, and on what pretext? Spare me the sanctimony of this contempt for mere mercenaries!

  As I have said, I will not revisit every word Aeschines has said, except to note that he has flattened the character of Alexander, who was a man in full, into something close to bas relief. Because he admired Athens and history so much, the King accepted me into his company as if I had always been there with him, in the opulent but cold palace in which he was born. His candor was astonishing. For example, when I asked him privately about the serious manner in which he drank, he told me it didn’t matter, since he expected to be dead by the age of thirty. Pressing him further on this, I learned that assassination was the acknowledged lot of Macedonian kings, with not a single one of his predecessors having died of old age. When he was somewhat deeper in his cups, I asked him why he bothered to go on campaign, if his future was so clouded.

  “But that is exactly why I do go, my dear Machon! If I am killed in battle, I will deprive them of a king to murder!”

  His replies on these matters were not always consistent. Sometimes he expressed the outright desire to die; others he aspired only to deprive his officers of the pleasure of killing him. Still others he showed an overwhelming sense of grief for the destruction of Thebes, which he believed was a sin that the gods would never forgive. He carried this fatalism to the battlefield with him, letting it drive him to acts of reckless valor. His enemies perceived this desperation in him, this assurance of his own death, and stepped aside. It was the unique combination of Arridaeus’s madness and Alexander’s despair that drove the success of the Macedonians. No army could cope with them both.

  What I learned about him gives a different meaning to the old story about Alexander and his doctor. According to the legend, Alexander was suffering from sickness when he received a written warning from Parmenion that the royal doctor, Lycius, had been bribed by Darius to kill him. At the same moment Alexander read the letter Lycius was handing him an emetic to drink. The King, they say, cheerfully handed Parmenion’s warning to the doctor. Lycius read the accusation, and was preparing to deny it, when he saw that Alexander had already swallowed the drug! And although the stuff was foul, and was meant to sicken him to his stomach, the King did nothing more than soothe Lycius’s consternation, so sure was this innocent fellow that he would be executed.

  This tale, which I have no idea is true, is supposed to show Alexander’s implicit trust in his men. What it may show instead is his faith in his own destruction. Recall these lines from Alcestis: “My mother was accursed the night she bore me, and I am faint with envy of all the dead.” Euripides, by the way, was always Alexander’s favorite poet; that he favored Homer is an outright lie perpetuated by Ptolemy.

  Aeschines makes much of some documents found in the royal archives at Sardis. Please note that he presents none of the original records in evidence, but only letters from his dubious witnesses about what the records showed. Let the jury know that I deny knowledge of any payments to Demosthenes. They should also know that I have nothing to report about the records of the Great King at Sardis, because although I glimpsed them, I don’t read Akkadian or Elamite!

  Alexander approached the unraveling of the Gordian knot as something of a stunt. The episode ended up as a fiasco that has somehow has been transformed into a triumph. Aeschines says that I encouraged him to attempt the puzzle in order to see him fail. The truth is that I argued with him not to offend the gods by presuming he could solve it. He replied that the challenge would teach him something about himself. We argued in his tent as he prepared to go, and our quarrel continued outside in front of witnesses, where I could not speak freely. At last I threw up my hands.

  “Go ahead then! Bring the fury of heaven down on our heads!�
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  He posed with one hand behind the crown of his head, fingers wagging, like the wavering aura of some divinity.

  “You forget who I am, my friend!”

  Then he laughed, and was off to make a fool of himself. I anticipated disaster, but somehow couldn’t stay away from the spectacle.

  The wagon of Gordion was kept in the shadow of Midas’s great funeral mound, in the Temple of Zeus: an ox cart of very common appearance, it was very much like the rude wains Alexander must have seen on his youthful maneuvers in the fields around Pella. Legend held that this was the very vehicle that had carried Midas’s father from his farmhouse in Macedonia to the throne of Phrygia. The Knot, a great ball of stripped bark, fastened the heavy double-yoke to the shaft. The man who untied it was destined to seize the throne of the Great King.

  Standing in the back, I watched as Alexander circled the cart, quite possibly realizing the magnitude of the trouble he had taken upon himself. Generations of adventurers had tried and failed to untie the Knot. The entire population of Gordion seemed to be waiting outside the temple; the Macedonian officers were there too, their childish faith in their King yet unspoiled.

  The Knot was so long untouched that spider webs hung from it. Alexander began to pick at it, as if trying to find some loose end to work free. But public challenges go unmet for centuries for a reason: in this case, the Knot was as tight as a drumhead, and seemed held together by some kind of glue. He tried to get a fingertip under one of the leather strands but slipped, ripping off part of a nail. He cursed. The priests sucked in their breaths at this blasphemy in their sanctuary. Alexander ignored them, taking out his sword. Working the tip between two strands, he struggled to widen the opening, but the Knot moved too much, and he could not grip the blade tightly enough. The King became frustrated, stabbing at the wobbly thing until he went red in the face and everyone became embarrassed for him. The nervous whispers of the onlookers became louder, and Hephaestion looked as if he was ready to intercede. That was when Alexander raised his sword and commenced hacking at the Knot as if he were chopping wood.