Текст книги "God of War -The Story of Alexander the Great"
Автор книги: Christian Cameron
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She smiled at me. It was a beautiful, radiant, confident smile, and it wasn’t a brief flash.
Then she turned and went down the steps.
I shrugged off my chlamys and went to meet the prince.
My shoulders hurt and my left hand was a dead thing, and I was back to being embarrassed by the scar tissue on my left breast – competitors are supposed to be beautiful. But when the stick came up between us, I didn’t give ground but jabbed with my left – over and over, my left fist like an annoying horsefly.
My fourth or fifth jab connected. Alexander’s head snapped back and his lip was split, blood already welling. He was stunned, and I stepped in and gave him my right to the gut, jabbed a few more times, making some contacts, and then my right to the exposed side of his head and down he went.
The other pages were silent.
Alexander got up slowly, putting the cloth wrapping of his fists against his split lip to slow the flow of blood. His eyes met mine – glanced away – came back.
He winked.
And then his lightning-fast right jab slammed into my head, while I was still trying to understand the wink.
When I came to, Alexander was sitting by my bedside in the infirmary. He loved everything about medicine, and always told us that if he wasn’t king, he’d want to be a doctor. He meant it, too – he was always trying medicines on himself and others, and for years he kept a little journal detailing what he’d tried and with what effect, under what conditions.
He grinned at me when I was obviously aware of him.
‘Have I told you, Ptolemy, how much you are a man after my own heart?’ he asked.
I smiled. Who wouldn’t? He was the most charming man who ever lived, and that smile was all for me. ‘Why so, lord?’ I asked.
‘How long since you decided to come back to us?’ Alexander asked me. ‘Two weeks? Perhaps three?’ He nodded. ‘And you hid your intentions carefully, like a wily Odysseus with the suitors all around him.’ He leaned forward. ‘You’d already started training when we were up the mountain, and you never said a word.’
‘My lord does me too much credit,’ I said. But I was grinning, too.
‘Welcome back, son of Lagus,’ Alexander said. ‘There is nothing I love better than a man in control of himself.’
He gave me a hug, forced me to drink some foul tea that really did make me feel better – a tisane of willow bark, I think.
Calixeinna came and read to me. I’d never really met her, and she had a beautiful voice and her reading was as good as an actor’s – at least, the kind of actors who came to Pella. She read to me from a play of Aeschylus and then she read me some of Simonides’ poem on Plataea. And then she recited a long section of the Iliad– the time from when Patroclus dies and Achilles is disconsolate.
‘You are one of his friends,’ she said, interrupting herself in the midst of the hero’s rage. ‘I just heard today – how you saved him.’ She looked at me – at my hand. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘You are too kind,’ I said.
She shook her head. ‘No. I’m not. I’ve been used – I know what torture is.’ She squeezed my hand.
My heart fluttered.
‘I need help with him,’ she said. ‘Would you help me?’
I sat up. I really didn’t need to be in bed. And she gave off a perfume, and a feeling – some women exude sex, the way some men exude power. Perhaps it is the same. I wanted her, she knew it, it didn’t matter a damn to her, and she was prepared to use it against me.
I wasn’t a fool, you know. Just young.
She ran her hand casually up my left arm and on to the missing nipple, her nails unerringly just between pain and pleasure. ‘I could teach you things that would mean that no woman would ever care about your scars,’ she said. ‘I need to sleep with the prince. I need to see into his head. No one told me when I took this job that he was a Spartan.’
My loyalty to my prince was absolute – nor had I ever had enough trouble with women, despite my looks, to worry overmuch in that regard.
But to look at Calixeinna was to want her. ‘I’ll think on it,’ I said, and I meant it. I seized one of her hands and kissed it.
Her free hand slapped my left ear, boxed it hard enough to drive my wits from my head for a moment. She was off the bed and across the corridor.
Alexander was in the doorway.
‘He has a great deal of life left in him, I suspect,’ the prince said. He was smiling.
Calixeinna sank gracefully to one knee and rose again, her back straight. Then she moved away.
Alexander’s eyes never left her. I watched him watch her, when he thought that I was lust-raddled myself.
In the same kind of flash that had come to me over the fighting skills, I understood him in that moment. Calixeinna didn’t have a chance.
He wanted her.
But to take her at his mother’s insistence would involve a loss of a battle.
‘I would not poach your deer,’ I said.
‘You may have her,’ he said. His eyes said otherwise.
I shook my head. ‘Lord, if I were . . . in a moment of hubris, and even if she would part her legs for me – to take that woman, everyone would punish me for it.’ I shrugged. ‘Your father, your lady mother, Aristotle, the other pages – Aphrodite herself, no doubt.’
Alexander sat on my bed. ‘How’s your head?’
‘The tisane helped,’ I said, which made him happy. I took out a stylus and scratched a note on his wax tablet.
‘You want her,’ I said. Boldest thing I’d ever said to him.
He read the note. ‘Yes,’ he admitted. He sighed. ‘But I cannot. I think . . . doyou understand, son of Lagus?’
‘I think so,’ I said.
‘A king must never surrender to his lusts. A man must never surrender to the views other men have of him. This would be both.’ Alexander nodded, having learned his lesson by heart.
He was very serious. Only an eighteen-year-old can be that serious. You should know.
‘Have her in secret – win her to your side and have her deny that you were ever together,’ I suggested.
‘When did you become so wily?’ he asked.
It occurred to me that in one blow I could become his confidant, undermine Hephaestion and help him with his mother and father. But that wasn’t my intention.
On the other hand, once I’d thought these things, I realised that I had become wily – at some point between the bandit’s knife and pulping Amantys. Odysseus, not Achilles, was always my favourite.
Alexander’s nails were pressed into his palms. He used pain quite a bit, to control himself – I’d seen it, and he was hardly alone in that regard.
‘Prince – you will be king. If you want the woman – let’s arrange it.’ I smiled.
He didn’t smile. ‘It is a wrong action,’ he said.
Aphrodite, the things Aristotle drilled into him. ‘No,’ I said. ‘Aristotle doesn’t want you to have any fun. And your father wants to make you behave like a beast. Surely there’s a middle road. Your own road.’
Alexander’s self-control was such that he almost never touched his face. Try it – try to go fifteen minutes without touching your face. I mention this because I remember that at that moment he put his chin in his left hand and gave me a long look. ‘How?’ he asked me.
It took me ten days. I felt a little like a pimp, to be sure.
And of the two, the less willing conspirator was the prince. He did not like to conspire. He wanted to be Achilles. I was listening when Aristotle talked, by this time, and I’d finally figured out why we all love Achilles – who is, let us admit it, venal, selfish and somewhat given to boasting and drama.
What we love is the freedom that comes with absolute mastery. Achilles can do whatever he wants – sulk for days in his tent, as we all wish to, or rage among his enemies, or mourn his dead friend, or take Briseis back from a great king. The limitations on his absolute freedom drive him almost to madness. And because the rest of us don’t live that way at all – because we submit to the will of others every day – we admire Achilles’ freedom.
Alexander wanted to be Achilles, and sneaking about in the dark was not his way.
As it turned out, my plan was over-complex and almost unnecessary.
My plan involved Cleitus the Black taking a beating from Philip the Red – they could both be trusted. That evening, Hephaestion was to take wine to Aristotle – it was his turn. Every evening, one of the oldsters took him wine and sat and practised ‘good conversation’ for a few hours.
Alexander would go to visit Cleitus – no unusual thing.
But instead of Cleitus, he’d find Calixeinna, waiting on the bed in the infirmary. Not bad, eh?
But on the day, Hephaestion had a virulent head cold and stayed in the barracks. And I was sent for by Aristotle.
Alexander was nursing his best friend – a little too much nursing, and Hephaestion drove him away with his blanket snapping at his friend’s head and threw a vial of medicine after him for good measure. Sometimes Aphrodite takes a hand.
I went to see Aristotle. I took a flask of good Chian – my father was rich, after all. This was the sweet Chian made from raisinated grapes. Sweet and strong. And instead of cutting it with water, I cut it with a mixture of wine and water I’d made in advance, and my tutor was as drunk as Dionysus by the time he’d finished his second bowl.
He had a wife – a nice enough woman – whom he largely ignored. His tastes didn’t go that way, and she managed his household and not much more. I can imagine him telling others that a wife was cheaper than a slave butler – that’s what he’s supposed to have said to Alexander. On this evening, she came in, and she was on to me in a moment – saw me pouring my watered wine mixture into the Chian.
She said nothing. Either Aphrodite was with us, or Aristotle’s wife was as happy to see him too drunk to move his legs as I was. Before he was done with me, though, he’d told me that I was the best of the pages again, and he tried to kiss me. He really was a moral man, but no man, no matter how controlled, can restrain himself with a jar of Chian under his belt. His wife took him to bed, singing a hymn to Ares of all things, and I cleaned up the wine-serving things – part of the training was learning what to mix and how to judge taste against quality of conversation.
I was never good at the subtleties, but I had just figured out how to knock a middle-aged philosopher out cold.
But I’m a worrier, and I cut across the compound, my slave laden with wine things, wondering if the prince had managed to make love to Helen of Troy, or whether some iron-clad principle had stood in the way.
I thought that I’d just have a look. I had as much right to take a peek at Cleitus as anyone.
I was sorry I looked. Not sorry, exactly. More . . . intrusive. Sensitive men do not last as household companions to princes – but at the same time, if you have no ability to read and feel other people, you’ll never be much of a battlefield commander, will you?
My prince was lying with his head on her chest in the light of the vigil lamp. He was asleep. Her eyes were open. They met mine, and the very smallest smile – the sort that Pheidias put on Aphrodite – flickered around the edge of her mouth.
I slipped away, mortified at his weakness – he looked like a boy sleeping on his mother.
What had I expected?
‘Lord, there’s a rider at the gate.’ That was my forgotten slave, Hermonius, a big barbarian from the north. He was laden with the wine service, and despite that he was alert enough.
‘Go and drop the wine things in a chest and wake . . .’ Herakles – the prince was in the wrong bed. ‘I’ll deal with it,’ I said.
I went to the gate, already wondering what could bring a messenger at this hour. Another way that the fight at the hunting camp had changed me – violence was real. Alone of the pages, or perhaps with Philip the Red, I realised that the Illyrians had intended to take or kill the prince and that meant he’d been betrayed. I’d only told two men – my father, and Aristotle. My father told Parmenio, or so he told me.
The man at the gate was Laodon.
‘My lord?’ I said, swinging the gate open. And wondering, all of a sudden, if Laodon could have been the traitor.
‘Hello, Ptolemy. I need the prince – we’re fucked, and that’s no mistake.’ He was covered in mud, wearing beautiful scale armour and a fine red cloak both fouled from the road. He slid from his horse and embraced me – that surprised me, and pretty much let him off the hook of treason in my mind. ‘Glad you are here. Get me the prince.’
‘Life or death?’ I asked.
Laodon paused just as Hermonius came out of the dark and started to untack his horse. ‘Yes,’ he said.
I grabbed his rolled cloak and led him to the infirmary. It was still dark – all I needed was some luck. ‘Swear on the furies you won’t say a word, lord,’ I said. ‘I stood my ground with you.’
Laodon shrugged. ‘He’s got that fool boy with him? Not my problem. This is the kingdom, boy – take me to the prince.’
I took his hand. ‘Swear,’ I said.
‘By the furies, damn you!’ Laodon said.
I took him into the infirmary. I got ahead of him, leaned over the bed – the oil lamp was still burning, and now they were both asleep.
I woke Alexander with a brush of fingers across his mouth – works on most folks – and he came up with a knife in his hand. But I’d been the duty page before and I knew his little ways.
‘News from Pella,’ I said. ‘Life and death. Gather your wits, lord.’
He looked past me and saw Laodon. Nodded to me. Rolled out of bed, naked but for a knife sheath on a string.
She was awake already. I lifted her, bedclothes and all, off the bed, and carried her out the back of the infirmary. I put her down on the porch – on her feet – and threw the end of the blanket over her head, and she smiled at me and ran. Problem solved.
As if we were in one of Menander’s comedies, Hephaestion came through the front door a heartbeat later. He was ready to be hysterical – he thought that he’d caught Alexander with Laodon.
I’d have laughed if it hadn’t been so sad, and if the news hadn’t been so bad.
Philip had lost a battle – and he was badly wounded. A combined force of Scythians and Thracians – not that the two are all that different – had caught him in the passes where he was carving out new territory, north and east of Illyria. He’d lost a lot of men – veterans – and part of his horse herd, and he’d taken a wound in the thigh.
Laodon shrugged when he was done with the barest relation. ‘He’s your da,’ he said. ‘So please accept my regrets. But I think he’s done – and the Thracians aren’t going to sit on the other side of the mountains and let us rebuild.’
‘My father’s going to die?’ Alexander asked. His voice had a curious timbre to it – hard to guess what he thought.
‘Almost dead,’ Laodon said.
Alexander didn’t raise his eyes from the rumpled bed – ‘Where’s Parmenio?’
‘Chasing Phokion in the south. Or being chased by him.’ Laodon shrugged.
‘Antipater?’ Alexander asked.
‘With your father, bringing the phalanx back as well as he can.’ Laodon was exhausted – I knew the signs. I poured him a cup of wine and water and he drank it off.
Alexander stood up, and he wasn’t just awake, he was quivering with energy.
‘I was afraid he would leave me no worlds to conquer,’ he said softly. ‘Ptolemy – all the pages over fifteen, with armour and remounts, in the courtyard at dawn.’
I thought that one through for fifty heartbeats. ‘Yes, my lord.’
‘Very good. See to it that the young person is suitably rewarded and silent, if you please.’ His eyes flicked back to the bed, but I knew who he meant. His voice was impersonal, military, like the better sort of Athenian orator. Like a king.
I like to think that if Alexander had lain with the courtesan and then had a good night’s sleep, it might all have been different.
By the time we cantered into Pella, our girths tight and our cloak rolls tighter, we looked like professional soldiers, the bodyguard of a king. We’d trained for it – and three days on the road moving at top speed tightened everything about us. Alexander had reached a new level of remoteness from us – he barely spoke, but when he did, his voice was light and he laughed with everyone.
He was working on a new version, a new mask. From ‘serious boy’ he was now on to ‘golden boy’.
When we reached Pella, the vanguard of the army was already coming in.
Macedon in those days was an armed camp, a state girded for war night or day, winter or summer – indeed, it was one of Demosthenes’ chief complaints about us that we made war all year long. Even the Spartans took the winter off, seemed to be the burden of his message.
But while Philip had certainly been beaten, and beaten badly – the Field of Crocuses comes to mind – Macedon was not used to defeat. Pella liked her victory celebrations, with rich, drunken pezhetaeroi swaggering through the streets and wild-eyed auxiliaries glutting themselves on wine and good bread and all the delights of civilisation.
But when we rode into Pella, War was showing his other face.
Philip’s companions brought him in. Every mouth was pinched, and every neck and shoulder bore the marks of ten days in armour and no rest. Men were missing helmets – helmets that had cost a year’s wages for a skilled man. Men were missing cloaks. Hardly a single knight had a spear, and some were missing their swords as well, and where there ought to have been four hundred noble cavalrymen, there were not many past two hundred.
The horses looked worse, first because so many knights were riding nags and scrubs and hill ponies instead of our best Persian-given bloodstock, and second because where you did see a charger, he was as knackered as his master, and many of them had more wounds than the men on their backs. So many men and horses were wounded that the whole column buzzed with carrion flies and the companions were too tired to brush them away, so that a wounded man, just keeping his saddle, might have forty or fifty flies on the open wound of his face, in the corners of his eyes.
Behind the companions came the pezhetaeroi, the ‘foot companions’. They had walked where the nobler companions had ridden, and they had lines like Keltoi work engraved on their faces, and their legs were mud to the thigh. Most of them wore quilted linen corselets, some leather, all splashed with mud and blood. Most of the infantry column had dysentery – not as uncommon as you might think, my lad – and some of them shat while they walked. Oh yes.
And behind the pezhetaeroi, the wounded. In baggage carts that had held officers’ tents and nobles’ spare horse tack – all abandoned to the foe. On blankets between two sarissas – our long spear, taller than two men. There’s a cruel Macedonian joke that every recruit wears the stretcher that will carry his corpse home – his infantryman’s cloak. There were quite a few wounded – later I learned that the pezhetaeroi had turned on the Thracians and stopped their last charge cold and then made sure of their wounded. Thracians torture any wounded they find – it is religious, for them, to test a man’s courage as he dies, but to us that is blasphemy.
I was sitting in the front rank, a few horses from the prince. Hephaestion was next to him – calm and professional. He was only a drama queen when his own interests were affected. Black Cleitus gave me a grim smile and walked his horse to my side. But I watched Alexander, and he watched Antipater.
‘Ready?’ Cleitus asked. He had the face of a loyal dog, a big hound that you send in after the bear, but he was as smart as any of us. He hid it from most men, but not from me.
I raised an eyebrow.
Alexander heard him. He couldn’t stop the smile from reaching his face.
But he was wrong. We all were.
THREE
Pella and Greece, 340–339 BC
The problem was that Philip did not die.
He was a great man. And there’s a saying in Greece that I heard when I was in Athens before the Great War – that great men have useless sons. Phokion, Isocrates, Alcebiades, Leonidas – none of them had great sons.
But maybe the problem is that great men are too fucking hard on their sons, and most sons can’t stand the pain, and they fold – I’m just guessing, but sometimes it is easier to just knuckle under than to strive, endlessly, with the man of gold. I speak from some experience, youngster.
But Alexander – no man ever born of woman – or of goddess – was ever so competitive. He had to compete – so deep, the inner need to prove himself to himself every day, all the time, over and over. When you are young, this appears as a great strength. As you grow older, it appears weaker and weaker. Trust me on this. The best men – the ones untouched by gods and happy in their own skins, the prosperous farmers and the good poets and the master craftsmen, the mothers of good children, the priestesses of well-run temples – have nothingto prove to gods or men. They merely arelike the immortal gods.
Then there’s the rest of us, of course. Hah!
And Alexander had that need to prove prowess, like a disease. So that he ran, wrestled or studied Plato with the same look on his face that he wore in mortal combat. To him, it was allmortal combat. To the death. To prove himself as good as his father. Or better.
Oh, it all sounds like crap – the sort of mumbo-jumbo that priests mutter. And he loved his father and his harpy of a mother, and they loved him. I’ve known many boys with worse parents. He did well enough. And he really loved them – he didn’t murder his mother, and that alone speaks volumes.
Don’t look shocked, boy. We’re talking Macedon.
But he was determined to be like a god – to bea god if ever he could be. To be a better man than his father, and his father was a colossus who bestrode the earth and made the mighty – Persia, Athens – tremble like small boys in a thunderstorm.
Your father was a great man in a different mould – but you have to measure up to him, don’t you? Aye. And all around you are relatives, tutors, officers – men and women who knew him. You must see the judgement in their eyes.
Good. Point made.
Philip had a bad wound, but he was far from dead. In fact, he never gave up the reins of power. He was lying in a litter, dictating the restructuring of the magazines from Pella to the Thracian borderlands so that his counter-strike would land faster and better supplied.
He looked up and caught my eye first. He was as white as a new-washed linen chiton, and his lips were pale, and his eyes had sunk into his head like those of a corpse – but he grinned.
‘Son of Lagus,’ he said. ‘You look ready for war.’
‘We heard you were dead, lord!’ I dismounted. The other pages dismounted behind me.
‘Not yet. Where is my son?’ Philip looked past me, and I saw him as he caught sight of Alexander, the only young man still mounted. He had his Boeotian helmet off, and the golden hair on either side of his forehead had made itself into ram’s horns, as it always did if he didn’t wash it for a few days. He looked like a god.
Philip’s face lit up – blood came to his cheeks. His smile – I hoped that my father smiled like that, some day, when he saw me. ‘Ahh,’ Philip said.
Alexander turned and saw his father’s litter and slid off his horse with his usual elegance. He bowed. ‘Pater,’ he said. Voice clipped, too controlled.
‘I’m not dead yet, boy,’ Philip said. Meant as humour. But delivered too deadpan.
‘My apologies, then,’ Alexander shot back. ‘I shall return to my studies.’
‘No – stay.’ The wounded man shifted. ‘They nearly cut my balls off, lad.’ Another try at humour.
Alexander managed a half-smile. ‘That would hurt you worse than many another blow, Pater,’ he said.
Philip laughed, slapped his leg and roared in pain.
I left them to it, gathered the pages and joined them to the column.
In fact, we never went back to the schoolroom. But it will take a long digression to explain how we ended up where we did, and you will have to be patient, because when you are young, life is an endless succession of elders forcing you to learn things, eh?
Throughout my youth, Macedon was at war with Athens. This takes some explaining, because we sent them money and trees for their fleet and they sent us actors and rhetoricians and politicians and goldsmiths. But they had an empire and we wanted it. They were perfidious and evasive and dishonest – and Philip was their match.
There was no principle involved at all. Just self-interest.
Athens held most of the Chersonese and all of the best parts of the Bosporus. Athens’ prosperity depended on a free flow of grain from the Euxine – but of course you know all this, you scamp! And that was fine with Philip and Macedon, until Athens started to use all her naval bases in the Chersonese to brew trouble for Macedon. That’s a game that, once started, can’t be stopped. It’s like playing with a girl – you can hold her hand and be in paradise, but once that hand has been on her breast or between her thighs, you can’t go back to holding hands, can you? So it is with nation-states. First they slight each other, and then they foment war through third parties, and then they accidentally sink each other’s ships – brewing more hatred at every action – and they can never go backwithout a lot of treaties and some reason.
Athens and Macedon were well matched. Athens was past her prime, but I didn’t need old Aristotle to tell me that Athens always bounces back – her prime is whenever she has a fleet. And Macedon was one generation from being a collection of mud huts in the wilderness, or like enough. In that one generation, Philip had pushed out borders in every direction, built an army as good as Sparta’s, built roads and supply centres, fortresses and alliances. But he didn’t have a fleet, and Athens could strip Macedon of her overseas possessions a few heartbeats after she acquired them. Macedon’s army was the better – but not really very much better, as the Athenians taught us in the Lamian War.
Everything that happened while Alexander and I were growing to manhood was the petting and kissing part, on the way to real war between Athens and Macedon. I can’t even remember all the convolutions. The truth is, I didn’t pay that close a heed – I wasn’t a statesman, I was a boy.
But even a very young man in Pella knew who Demosthenes was – knew that he rose every day in the assembly in Athens to denounce our king and our state and our way of life. Now – you’re an Athenian citizen, aren’t you, boy? I thought as much. So you probably know that we all admired Athens in every way – despite their prating against us, we all wanted to grow up to be Athenian gentlemen. We read their plays and their poetry and spoke their dialect and aped their manners and practised serving wine their way. But when it came to war, we were determined to beat them.
And we knew who Phokion was – their best general, the one even Philip feared, and we knew that headmired us.Your father’s tutor, if I remember rightly. Yes.
All by way of saying, in the spring when Philip came back from fighting Thracians, wounded – we were locked in a state of near war with Athens, and we were having the worst of it. Philip had seized a bunch of Athenian merchants – oh, he had provocation, but I remember old Aristotle saying it was the stupidest thing he’d ever done, and Aristotle was an admirer of wily Philip. At any rate, Athens declared war – a formal declaration, like going from kissing to intercourse. And Philip responded by marching an army into the Chersonese, laying siege to the major Athenian base at Perinthus – and failing.
Then he descended on Byzantium, their most important base – a surprise attack after a fast march, his favourite ploy.
And failed. Phokion outmarched him.
So the defeat by the Thracians, even though it was against only a tithe of our armies, was a bad blow. The Illyrians, always willing to raid us, began to agitate on the borders, and the Athenian privateers preyed on our shipping, and Athens put a vicious bastard into the Chersonese, a pirate called Diopeithes. His son, Manes, is there yet. And he’s a vicious bastard, too.
But the worst of it was that Athens had joined hands with Persia. That’s what Alexander and I were talking about, in the woods, over a trout dinner.
It’s a funny thing – Persia was always the enemy of my youth. We didn’t play ‘Macedonians and Athenians’ in the corridors of Pella or the Gardens of Midas. We didn’t play Macedonians and Thracians, or Macedonians and Illyrians. We played Athenians and Persians, and it was always the day of Marathon, with us. Or we played Achaeans and Trojans. And the Trojans were just Persians.
Macedon had been a Persian ally. It shamed us all, that during the wars of Salamis and Plataea, our forefathers had given earth and water to the Great King. Mind you, Alexander – the old one, from those days – did his bit for the Hellenes, and our boys turned on the retreating Persians and routed them at Hennia Hodoi.
And Sparta had a turn as a Persian ally, too. Mighty Sparta, but when the chips were down and Sparta was losing the Thirty Years’ War on the peninsula, she turned to Persia, took gold and ships in exchange for promises to remain aloof from Persia’s rebuilding of her empire.
Not that the Spartans kept their word. Agisalaos struck – and failed.
My point is that one of the constants of the diplomacy of the day was that Athens did not make deals with Persia. We did – there were almost always Persian envoys at Pella, even though we spoke openly of invading them after we’d subjugated Thessaly. And Philip took a stipend from them for a while, and threatened them at other times. He wanted to own both sides of the Bosporus. And the rest of the world, too.
I’m like a drunken carter roiling farther and farther from the track. My point is that the last thing we ever expected – even in the event of war with Athens – was for Athens to make common cause with Persia. Athenians did not love Persia, and even a rumour of ‘Persian gold’ was usually enough to send a politician into exile.
Philip’s speciality was to divide his opponents – split their alliances – and move on them one by one. He did it as automatically as a good swordsman makes a counter-cut. Wherever he saw a stable alliance, he sought to undermine it. He wasn’t above faked correspondence and he had a widespread intelligence net, assassins, bandits in his pay – we knew all this, because all the pages at one time or another were present for his diplomatic correspondence, which he read aloud when the foreigners were forbidden the court, such was his contempt for all the other nations of the earth.
