Empire of Ashes: A Novel of Alexander the Great

by Nicholas Nicastro

  At this, no one raised a cup, and Machon kept his eyes on the table. This response, far more than their eager agreement, compelled Swallow to go on.

  “But if you want to hear something I do know for certain,” he said, “understand this: the Macedonians will never accept a court verdict with which they so strongly disagree. It is not in their experience.”

  Swallow directed this warning at Machon. The latter, however, made no other response but to lead his entourage through the rest of the Chian wines, and then the Lesbian. They had moved on to a local vintage when someone began to sing the paean the soldiers gave before Chaeronea. At this, Machon’s eyes filled with tears, and he joined in the singing three times over until his voice gave out, worn down after his day of speechifying. The singing done, the party smashed their drinking cups against the wall. The tavern keep smiled, added the cost of the cups to their bill, and ordered up another amphora from the basement.

  Idling outside were the two Macedonians who had watched the trial from the spectator’s gallery. Another man was with them but stayed in the shadows. As gray light filled the eastern sky, they looked up to the Acropolis to see the night lamps snuffed out on the Propylaea. When the drinkers staggered out of the tavern at last, they lofted borrowed torches above their heads. The Macedonians stayed out of sight as they pointed out the figure of Machon to their hatchet-faced companion. He nodded, then stayed behind as the Macedonians disappeared into the warren of the Kerameikos.

  Decent lodging houses were not common in the center of Athens. There was one good place near the law courts, run by a Corinthian metic. It was beyond the west end of the Painted Stoa, just a little way toward the Dipylon gate. A man of Machon’s importance would only be found there.

  The leader of the assassins was moving up in the world: it would be his first job for the Macedonians. As Machon was reputed to be a tough old soldier, and Hatchet-face was by and large risk-averse, he invited a pair of friends with him to do the deed. The freelancers were of the kind of common hooligan usually seen on the roads out of town. They had all killed people before, though this was most often a side effect of stealing a good overcloak or a pair of lace-up boots. The three of them agreed to show up dressed the same way—wide-brimmed hats pulled down close to their eyes, tunics covered with leather butcher’s aprons. If they timed their escape well enough, they would exit through the tannery quarter just as the market day began. By then almost everyone would be wearing a bloody apron.

  No one stopped them at the door of the lodging house. Expecting that Machon would be in one of the better rooms away from the street, they proceeded down the hall with their knives still sheathed. As they approached the last door on the corridor they heard someone chanting in an unfamiliar language. That room no doubt housed a foreigner. They knocked instead at the room adjacent, taking out their blades and holding them behind their backs.

  A man opened the door. He was young, no more than twenty, with rouged cheeks and a dressing gown that hung off one shoulder.

  “Yes?” he asked.

  “We want to talk to Machon,” said Hatchet-face.

  “Who?”

  He pushed his way past the boy. Inside, a figure was cowering under a blanket. Hatchet-face signaled his men to surround the couch. Drawing the blanket aside with the point of his dagger, he found the boy’s terrified, graybearded patron.

  The old man lay there pale and trembling. He looked up without saying anything, his breathing becoming more audible each time he exhaled.

  “Machon?”

  “Not Machon.”

  Just then Hatchet-face realized that the chanting in the next room had stopped. Cursing his luck, he led his men to the next door. Finding it locked, they forced it off its flimsy hinges. What they saw inside brought them up short.

  The room was redolent of perfume. Peering into the smoke, they saw a small, round brazier with its flame still burning. Hatchet-face came in and looked down on the table where the fire danced: beside the brazier was a dish of ground spice that looked like frankincense, and fine twigs stripped of bark.

  “This stick smells like apricot,” said one of the hirelings, a dispossessed farmer. “And this one is pistachio.”

  Hatchet-face made a perfunctory search of the place, but it was obvious that their quarry was gone. The window curtain was pushed aside; there was no sign of a heavy cloak, so Machon must have taken that with him. He came back to the table, noticing for the first time that there was a rag of pure white cotton lying on the floor. He picked it up. The rag had two strings attached to it, as if it was meant to be tied around the face or the neck.

  “What is all this?”

  “I don’t know,” said Hatchet-face. “Get a sack for the spice.”

  After bagging the frankincense and stripping anything else of worth in the room, the assassins stored their loot under their aprons. With their knives hidden and hats pulled down on their faces, they slipped away. Machon’s little clay amulet of the winged disk—his symbol of Ahuramazda—was abandoned. His thanksgiving fire was left to burn itself out.

  Author’s Afterword

  In this portrayal of Alexander and his world I have attempted to remain faithful to the better-known facts. These facts, however, don’t always address the most interesting questions about his extraordinary life. Historical fabulists tend to be attracted to the lacunae and the mysteries of their subjects, where the truth may be lost, forgotten, or suppressed. It has therefore been necessary, at times, to aim not for the literal truth, but for the ring of it.

  A number of the events in Alexander’s life have therefore been deliberately relocated in time and place. Many of these elements have bases in fact, but have been fleshed out beyond the rather telegraphic versions reported by the ancient sources; others did not, in fact, happen at all, but should have. Certain events, such as the siege of Aornos, were left out because the themes they illustrate are adequately reflected elsewhere. Readers hungering for the full story (as far as it is known) are encouraged to consult the original sources or scholarly biographies.

  In addition to the ancient texts (the histories of Arrian, Curtius Rufus, and Plutarch; Xenophon’s Anabasis; the forensic speeches of Demosthenes and Aeschines; accounts of legal proceedings in Lycias, Antiphon, and Apollodorus; numerous tidbits of ancient knowledge from Herodotus, Athenaeus, Strabo, Diodorus, Pliny et al.), a number of modern sources were useful in researching this story. These included, but were not limited to, Alexander monographs by Robin Lane Fox, Mary Renault and Michael Wood, and treatments of ancient Greek life such as those by Robert Flaceliere (via Peter Green’s translation), Robert Garland, Sarah Pomeroy, and James Davidson (whose delectable Courtesans and Fishcakes is much recommended). Whatever is accurate about my portrayal of the Zoroastrians should be credited to Mary Boyce’s scholarship; whatever is inaccurate is my fault. The works of J.K. Anderson and Victor Davis Hanson were invaluable for envisioning infantry battle in the fourth century. Early modern accounts of travel in the near East (such as Charles Masson’s 1842 Narrative of Various Journeys in Balochistan, Afghanistan, and the Panjab) were helpful in envisioning Alexander’s route as it was in ancient times. Profuse thanks as well to Professor Ioannis Akamatis of the Aristotelian University in Thessaloniki, for an enlightening afternoon at his excavations in Pella, and to Professor David Hollander of Iowa State University for his feedback on the manuscript.

  Some may be interested to know what really happened to Athens after Alexander died. In fact, the anti-Macedonian faction, powered by the indefatigable Demosthenes, did rouse the city to resist the Macedonian regent in Greece, Antipater. The result was a bitter affair called the Lamian War. Things went well for Athens at first: having at last found capable leaders who had fully absorbed the lessons of Chaeronea, the Athenians and their allies compelled the formerly undefeated Macedonians to retreat. The regent holed himself up in the city of Lamia, and faced being overrun there—until some of Alexander’s veterans from the Persian war returned to break
the siege. The Greeks fought on, defeating the Macedonians yet again, until Antipater brought them to battle for the last time near the Thessalian city of Krannon. The immediate result was the Macedonians owned the field, though the allied army was still not destroyed. What finally ended the revolt was the age-old Greek problem—failure to hang together in the face of a common adversary. Demoralized, facing an enemy that was unchallenged at sea and getting stronger on land, the Greek allies melted away. At that moment, for all practical purposes, Athens ceased to exist as an independent power.

  The book suffers from its share of blunders. But just as not all who wander are lost, not all inaccuracies are mistakes. Purists may object, for instance, that I oversimplify the state of Athenian politics in many ways, including by making the historical Aeschines (390-circa 314 BC), into an undisguised Macedonian apologist. The most relevant question here, though, is whether the man was capable of playing the toady, if it suited his purpose. The answer is yes.

  Readers of forensic bent will note that the court procedure described here does not resemble current practice. Indeed, moderns first encountering the courtroom literature of classical Athens are often surprised that rumor, hearsay, irrelevancies and character assassination were rampant in the incubator of Western rationalism. Orators like had common recourse to insults, such as during a public prosecution of Timarchus in 346 Aeschines accused the defendant’s political sponsor, Demosthenes, of favoring girlish underwear.

  In the popular court I describe, the Heliaia, standards of evidence, discovery, and examination of witnesses were all strikingly casual. When the prosecution and the defense had finished their statements, jurors were indeed called upon to render their judgment immediately, with no deliberation or politicking allowed. While I cannot claim that every detail of this procedure I describe is accurate (for much is unknown), it is likely that Athenians of the time would have recognized the procedure depicted here as typical of their courts.

  Could there be any truth to Machon’s story of Arridaeus as the “secret weapon” of the Macedonians? Though it is known that Alexander’s half-brother was present on the march, the sources are notably silent on what, if anything, he did during the entire twelve years of the Asian campaign. My guess is that he impinged on events more than the official historians acknowledge. The precise nature of his mental deficiency would of course be nice to know. This side of the story, unfortunately, may never be recoverable. Given the substantially different developmental environment that existed in antiquity, it is not altogether clear to me that the kinds of illness seen then (or the kinds of sanity, for that matter) are exactly the same as the ones observed among modern people. The truth about Arridaeus may be far stranger than the autism I suggest for him here.

  From the structure of the novel it should be clear that I see little profit in attempting to find the “real” Alexander. Alexander has been a perennially popular subject for classical scholarship, yet his study suffers from the fact that the man himself left relatively scant direct evidence for archaeology to uncover about him. New developments in our understanding of Alexander are largely restricted to re-readings and re-re-readings of the ancient texts, all of which are secondary, late, and ideologically-driven in one way or another.

  Those looking for the key to Alexander’s fall will likewise be disappointed. To my mind, what stopped him is not as interesting as what kept him going. While Alexander clearly relished building and administering things, it was the opiate of conquest, of taming the new, that came to dominate his short life. One can only imagine what he might have accomplished had he realized otherwise.

  Authorities will long debate the significance of the achievements ascribed to Alexander, including his military innovations, the founding of Alexandria, the spread of Greek culture over a vast area, the model of divine kingship he transmitted to Hellenistic, Roman, and later rulers, dreams of a trans-ethnic empire, etc. Perhaps the most unappreciated implication of his career, however, was the realization, dawning somewhere deep in the ancient mind, that such mythic accomplishments need not be the works of a god at all, but of the ingenuity, persistence, and vision of a flawed human being. In this sense, his story is a modern one.