Текст книги "Alexander the Great"

Автор книги: Robin Fox

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same frontier town names a Greek contemporary, most probably a general from Thessaly who is known to have fought in Philip's advance force before he too defected to Persia. It is unsound to use these local inscriptions to link the two defectors with 'king' Amyntas. Maybe his friends were the two Lyncestian brothers who championed him, perhaps, as a king more suited to their tribe. But the defectors may have been dislodged differently, perhaps by the next coup, directed against the advance force in which one, maybe two, served. However, another Lyncestian defected too, perhaps the son of one of the suspect brothers. The links, therefore, between Amyntas, the Lyncestians and defection remain unclear, though these Macedonians' willingness to fight against their countrymen is proof of the affair's gravity.

Against Amyntas, Alexander took the traditional action, but it is not known exactly when he took it; Philip's death cannot be dated to any one summer month, although July is a sound guess, and Alexander's accession is only known to have been settled before October. Throughout those three months his baronial enemies may well have been turbulent; as quickly as possible he had the two Lyncestians executed; and, presumably soon afterwards, he had his rival Amyntas killed too, although his death cannot be dated more closely than within ten months of Philip's murder. There may have been a chase, there must have been drama, and these three deaths were only one side to the story.

Even without this 'king' Amyntas, Alexander was still exposed on two different fronts and required to appeal to three separate groups; the army and commoners in Macedonia, the palace nobles, and the advance force of some ten thousand men away in Asia. The main lines of opposition all now met in the three high commanders cut off in Asia, a convenience if Alexander acted swiftly in their absence. One was the baron Attalus, whose interest in palace intrigue was directed through his niece Eurydice and her infant son. Another was also an Amyntas, probably son of one of the offending Lyncestians; the third was Parmenion, over sixty years old and the most respected general in the kingdom. 'The Athenians elect ten generals every year,' Philip was once rumoured to have said, 'but I have only ever found one: Parmenion.' With Antipater already on his side, Alexander only needed one of the other two marshals, and as there could be no dealings with Attalus, committed to the family of Philip's second wife and loathed for his past remarks that Alexander was no longer a proper heir, he would have to turn hopefully to Parmenion. But two family ties were pulling the elderly general away from Alexander's ambitions; his daughter was married to Attalus, and his son Philotas was known for his friendship with 'king' Amyntas, one reason perhaps why he 38 had stood at the edge, not the centre, of Alexander's young circle of friends.

Alexander had one advantage, and he used it decisively: unlike his main enemies, he was at home in Macedonia with the court and the troops. Before Attalus could upset him, he gave orders for the execution of his stepbrother, Eurydice's infant son; he spared the women and the halfwitted Arrhidaeus, because nobody would ever rule through them, and thereupon he presented himself to the army as the one determined heir. The government, he told them, was changing only in name and Philip's example would remain in all things; there would, however, be a brief cut in taxation, and so his father's army accepted him despite their doubts. He was secure at home, and could organize Philip's funeral to please Philip's men. Philip would lie in state behind the bronze studded doors and pillared facade of a Macedonian mausoleum near the ancient palace of Aigai, home of the royal dynasty. By tradition, his funeral games would include armed duels among warriors and perhaps the killing of the nobles accused as his murderers; then, the army would be purified by ancient ritual, being led by Alexander between two halves of a dog's corpse. The ritual would bind them to him, and if 'king' Amyntas had not yet been seized it was becoming plain that his hopes were unfounded. One of Philip's most practised diplomats was also put to death, perhaps for their sake; the army were indifferent to the family murders which marked the start of every reign.

From Asia, the outlook seemed far less fair than before. Attalus had lost his niece's baby, the only prince in his family; the elder statesmen were in peril, Olympias was returning and the troops had been wooed away by Alexander's promises. Attalus was popular with his own men, and cut off in Asia, he could only wait. It is uncertain how many months he waited, but soon, said his enemies, he received a letter from Athens, suggesting a common rebellion; he turned the letter in to Alexander, too glib a proof of his innocence, and Alexander seized his chance. Persuading a party of his newly won soldiery that Attalus was dangerous, he gave them a Greek friend as leader and ordered them to go cast and arrest him, or kill him if he struggled. This Greek, Hecataeus, was a crucial supporter; later a friend of Antipater, he may have been the elderly marshal's first contribution to Alexander's reign. He led the way to the Hellespont where he ruled as local tyrant, crossed into Asia, and when Attalus struggled, put him to death. The one man who still mattered watched the coup with most welcome indifference; Parmenion allowed his son-in-law Attalus to go to his death, preferring the cause of his own three sons who were trapped at a court secured against him. Others fled to the Persian high command, but a Greek, a Lyncestian and a senior Macedonian were no loss beside the gain of Parmenion.

With the death of Attalus, the first phase of Alexander's accession ended. His mother and his close friends could return, and with the highland tribes, he could compromise through his new clique of courtiers; the Lyncestians saw their Alexander favoured: the Orestids could look to a link with Epirote Olympias and the honour of three Orestid nobles as Alexander's intimate Companions; from Eordaea came two boyhood friends and future bodyguards; Elimea saw her nobility rise with Attalus's fall and an Elimiot, perhaps, favoured as one of Alexander's returning friends: the elderly king of the Tymphiots pledged support, helped by young Tymphiot nobles whom Parmenion would soon befriend. Each hill kingdom had its representative for the future, and over them all Parmenion and Antipater were wielding the same influence as before. And yet, on considering their king, there were those in the army who doubted him.

It is hard not to form a picture of Alexander; Alexander marching through the Libyan desert to put his mysterious questions to the oracle at Siwah, Alexander receiving the captive Persian queen and her daughters, or Alexander drunk, spearing an insolent Companion in a moment of blind passion. It is harder to be certain what he looked like, for the only descriptions are posthumous, and cither designed to suit a view of his character or else derived from his many statues and portraits. Officially, Alexander liked to control these, and as an adult he would only sit to be painted by Apelles, sculpted by Lysippus or carved on gems by Pyrgoteles; some originals survive, and others can be recovered from copies, but all are stylized when they are not official, and as Napoleon once remarked 'certes, Alexandre n'a jamais pose devant Apelles'. There is none which shows him warts and all.

There are features, however, which are either too unusual or too commonplace to be artists' fictions. His skin was white on his body, a weathered red on his face; unlike his father and all previous Macedonian kings, he kept his beard clean-shaven, a fashion which enemies called effeminate but which was common among Philip's courtiers and became a precedent for all Alexander's successors. His hair stood up off his brow and fell into a central parting; it framed his face, and grew long and low on his neck, a style which was in sharp contrast to the close-cropped haircut of athletes and soldiers and was already insulted in antiquity as a sign of moral laxity. In Pella's mosaic of a lion hunt he is shown with fair hair and dark eyes and in an early copy of a contemporary painting made for a Roman owner, his dark brown eyes are suitably Latin, while his dark brown hair shows a lighter streak which was more true to life. There is nothing to challenge their evidence although legend later claimed that his left eye was black, his right one blue-green, a double colouring which was meant to suggest a magical power of bewitchment. The liquid intensity of his gaze was famous and undisputed, not least because he believed in it himself; Lysippus the sculptor caught it best, and his Successors would imitate it, not only in their own bearing but also in their portraits of Alexander which exaggerated the eyes and showed them gazing upwards to suggest his acknowledged divinity; with this famous gaze went the turning of the neck and head to one side, stressed in art but also in life, and again, an example for his Successors; it is wrong to explain this as due to a wound, for official artists would not then have emphasized it. As for his body, a pupil of Aristotle said that he was particularly sweet-smelling, so much so that his clothes were scented; this may be a compliment to his divinity, for sweet scent was the mark of a god, but more probably, the comment referred to his suspect liking for ointments and sweet spices.

Like his father, he was a very handsome young man. His nose, as statues and paintings stress, was straight; his forehead was prominent and his chin short but jutting; his mouth revealed emotion, and the lips were often shown curling. But art could not convey his general manner, and for his subjects that was more important. He walked and spoke fast, and so therefore, did his Successors; by contemporaries, he was believed to be lion-like in appearance and often in temper, and for a young man of streaming hair and penetrating gaze the comparison was apt, the more so as he had been born under the sign of Leo and was best known from the portraits on his coins, which showed him in the lionskin cap of his ancestor Heracles, a headdress he may have worn in everyday life. Later, the comparison was overdone, and his hair would be said to be tawny and even his teeth to be sharp like a lion cub's.

The problem, however, is his height, for no painting betrays it, any more than a Van Dyck reveals the smallness of Charles I. Certainly, he was smaller than Hephaistion, the man he loved, and he may well have been smaller than almost anyone else; when he sat on the throne of the Persian king, he required a table, not a stool, for his feet, and although the throne was designed to be high, this suggests a definite shortness of leg. His only measurement is given in the fictitious Romance of Alexander,where he is said to have been three cubits, or four feet six inches high; this surely cannot be correct, nor can it confirm his historical smallness, although legend liked to play on the theme that the world's great conqueror was reduced to a mere three cubits of earth. Only in German myth was Alexander remembered as king of the dwarfs, and it would perhaps be rash to explain his ambition on the assumption that he was unusually small. Physically, however, Alexander had inherited all of his father's toughness against wounds and climate.

To his Macedonians this new king would have seemed, above all else, young. His long hair, fresh clean-shaven skin and nervous energy belonged to the very essence of youth, and there was little enough in his past to imply that audacity would now be tempered with discretion. Two years before, he had galloped at the head of the cavalry charge which had defeated the army of Philip's Greek enemies, and after the battle he had gone as one of three envoys to Athens, the city which so affected his later politics in Greece. He had served with his father on a march to the Danube and two years before that, at the age of sixteen, he had held the seal of the kingdom while his father was away at Byzantium. Most notably, he had led an army to victory against a turbulent Thracian tribe and founded his first city, Alexandropolis, to commemorate this dashing success. There was decided promise in such behaviour, but more than promise was needed if Philip's inheritance was to be held together.

The tribes of Illyria threatened to north and west; to the east, Philip's many new cities could hardly suffice to hold down Thrace along the banks of the Danube and the shore of the distant Black Sea. The advance army, split by a quarrel, had begun to be hard pressed in Asia; to the south, there were few Greek states who did not see the death of their allied leader as the start of a new independence. Troubles within Macedonia had been settled with such speed and ruthlessness that the highlands had not, after all, deserted and Philip's two most respected generals had ignored their families to pledge support. But Olympias was back, and never peaceable. It may be significant that Alexander's two most trusted Macedonians, Perdiccas and Craterus, came from Orestis, the hill kingdom once closest, politically, to Olympias's own. There is reason to suppose that his intimate friend and future historian, Ptolemy, was born in Orestis too. If so, Alexander's personal clique may have drawn heavily on friendships derived from his mother, and after his mother's possible role in Philip's murder, these allegiances might not be to every courtier's taste. The deeper question of the new king's abilities remained, and an answer could only be gleaned from memories of his earlier years; men would be looking backwards, and in search of Alexander, it is time to turn in that direction too.

CHAPTER THREE

Born in an age when biography had not developed, Alexander is fortunate in the lack of detail for his early years. If children find childhood a time of boredom, the same is seldom true of their biographers, for nowadays, childhood is seen as a source of so much that follows and there may be lasting significance in the experiences of youth. In antiquity there was no psychological theory, and not until Augustine would a man write memoirs which treated the child as father of the man. Life's perspective was reversed, and youth was mostly described through a series of anecdotes which falsely mirrored the feats of the adult future; proven kings or bishops were remembered as kings or bishops when young, and so it was said of the boy Alexander, future conqueror of Persia, that he had once astonished Persian ambassadors to his father's court by precocious questions about their roads and resources. Such stories are no less suspect for being fashionable. At least three of Alexander's historians had grown up with him, and one wrote a book on his upbringing; another may have been connected with his first literary teacher, but none of their works survives, and Alexander's youth is left mostly to romance and fancy, to three famous figures, his mother, his horse and his tutor who have inspired a world of legend of their own.

Alexander was born son of Philip and Olympias in 356 B.C., at a time when his father's expansion to north, south and east was already proving diplomatic and extremely profitable. Three different dates are given for the day of his birth; accurate records for birthdays are a modem addition to history, and indeed it had once seemed strange to the Greeks that the Persians should celebrate their birthdays at all, but in Alexander's case, the disagreement was not only due to ignorance. Of the three dates mid-July, on or near 20 July, is the most plausible; one of his officers later vouched for a date in October, but this may be a confusion with his official birthday, which came to be celebrated, as in Persia, on the date of his accession. The third date, 6 July, reflects a different fashion, for the day was sacred to Artemis, goddess of childbirth and hence especially auspicious. In the same spirit, it could be said that Alexander's birth coincided with the fire that destroyed the goddess's great temple at Ephesus, because she was away supervising Alexander's arrival and had left her temple to chance, a fact which caused her Oriental priests to prophesy the birth of disaster for Asia's peoples.

There was also dispute about his parents. Much of this was posthumous legend; the Persians later fitted Alexander into their own line of kings by a story that Olympias had visited the Persian court, where the king made love to her and then sent her back to Macedonia because her breath smelt appallingly bad. There was more to the argument than nationalist romance. Olympias, it was said, probably by Alexander's own court historian, spread wild stories about the manner of Alexander's birth and referred his origins to a god: this will raise acute problems later in his life, but for the moment it is enough to remember that Olympias was a divorced woman who might well disown the husband who betrayed her. Her past behaviour and her character, itself a problem, make this only too plausible.

Olympias was an orphan under her uncle's guardianship when Philip first met her; they caught each other's eye, so the story went, while they were being initiated into a mystery religion of underworld demons on the island of Samothrace; falling in love, they promptly married. There could be few more dramatic settings for romance than a night-time ceremony by torchlight in the huge triple-doored hall of Samothrace, and certainly, the mystery cult was later favoured conspicuously by Macedonians and their kings, a fashion which Philip himself may have started. Problems of age and dating confuse the story; perhaps Philip and Olympias first saw each other on Samothrace, but others maintained more plausibly that they did not marry until the year before Alexander's birth, when Philip had already stretched his power to the south and north-west of Macedonia and would have welcomed a political marriage with Epirus's princess. But the story of her Samothracian love-affair fitted the popular views of her person, and these are more difficult to judge.

Olympias's royal ancestry traced back to the hero Achilles, and the blood of Helen of Troy was believed to run on her father's side; there is no contemporary portrait of her, but stories of her wild behaviour multiplied beyond the point of verification. They turned, mostly, on religion-Worship of Dionysus, Greek god of nature's vital forces, had long been established in Macedonia, and the processions which led to the slaughter of a goat and the drinking of its blood, or even in extreme cases to a human sacrifice, were nothing new to the women of the country. To the Greeks, Olympias was known as a devoted Bacchant, or reveller in the god's honour, and there must be truth in their exaggerations; she would head the processions herself, and on Philip's Macedonian coins, as never before, the portrait of Heracles, ancestor of the kings, is often combined with the grapes and cups of Dionysus, a deity honoured in Macedonia but surely also a reference to the religious preferences of the queen. 'During his rites', it was said, 'Olympias would drag out long tame snakes for the worshippers to handle; they would lie concealed in the ivy and ceremonial baskets, rear their heads and coil themselves around the wands and garlands of the women, so as to terrify the men.' Again, there is truth in this, for according to Cicero, Olympias kept her own pet snake, and snake-handling is a known practice in the wilder sorts of Greek religion; when Olympias's childhood home at Dodona was excavated, archaeologists were much impressed by repeated signs of its people's fondness for snakes.

'Whereas others sacrifice tens and hundreds of animals,' wrote Aristotle's most intelligent pupil, 'Olympias sacrifices them by the thousand or ten thousand.' Theophrastus would have known Olympias personally, and although he had cause to slander her, his remark confirms her strong attachment to religious ritual which letters and stories of doubtful authorship suggest. On Alexander this example would not be wasted. His mother's wild mysticism was also combined with a quarrelsome temper and a reputation, at least partly deserved, for atrocity; certainly, she quarrelled with royal officials and other women of the family, and whatever the truth of Philip's murder, she showed herself as capable as any other Macedonian of killing family rivals who threatened her. The methods and number of these murders were enlarged upon by Greek gossip, whereas in Macedonia they were not inexplicable, but here too gossip was founded on truth. When Alexander heard how his mother was quarrelling with Antipater in his absence, he is said to have complained that she was asking a high price of his patience in return for the nine months she had taken to bear him. There can be no doubt that Alexander's mother was both violent and headstrong. She was seldom, however, without provocation.

The influence of this highly emotional character on Alexander's development can be guessed but never demonstrated. For the last eleven years of his life, he never saw her; she still cared for him, and so, for example, she would send a dedication to the goddess of Health at Athens when she heard that he had recovered from a serious Asian illness; although they wrote letters to each other, no original survives of any significance. As a baby, she handed him over to a well-born Macedonian nurse, but she still took a mother's interest in his education; his early life can hardly be traced beyond his various tutors, but it was Olympias who began the choosing of them. From her own family, she chose Leonidas, and from north-west Greece, an area close to her home but not known for learning, came Lysimachus, a man of middle age; their welcomes made an amusing contrast. Lysimachus was much loved by Alexander and later followed him into Asia, where his pupil one day risked his life to save him. Leonidas was stem, petty and prying. He believed in hard exercise and, it was said, he would rummage through Alexander's trunks of clothing to satisfy himself that nothing luxurious or excessive had been smuggled inside; he reproached his pupil for being too lavish with his sacrificial offerings. At the age of twenty-three Alexander was able to retort. He had already routed the Persian king, and from the Lebanon he sent Leonidas a gigantic load of precious incense, pointing his present with a message: 'We have sent you frankincense and myrrh in abundance, to stop you being mean to the gods'; there is nothing worse than an old man's meanness, and Alexander used humour and generosity to show it up.

Of his other Greek teachers nothing certain is known, and not until the age often does Alexander appear for the first time in contemporary history. This appearance is itself unusual, and a proof that teachers had been busy with their job: it is to be found in the public speech of an Athenian politician. In the spring of 346 Philip's court had been thronged with ambassadors from all over Greece, none more prominent than those from Athens with whom, after much negotiation, he was preparing to swear an agreement of peace and alliance; they dined with him, and after dinner they saw Alexander for the first time. 'He came in,' said Aeschines the ambassador, 'to play the lyre, and he also recited and debated with another boy'; the memory was only revived back in Athens a year later, when the ambassadors had begun to disagree among themselves, for accusations flew in public that one or other Athenian had secretly flirted in Macedonia with the boyish Alexander. In these slanders his after-dinner performance before the ambassadors was used as a sexual double entendre;such bland charges of homosexuality are an interesting comment on their society, and ten years later, when a grown-up Alexander marched on Athens and demanded the surrender of her leading politicians, they must have seemed a very distant irony.

Poetry and music continued to hold Alexander's attention throughout his life; his musical and literary competitions were famous all across Asia, and his favour for actors, musicians and friendly authors needs no illustration. In music, especially, his interest was perhaps more popular than informed. He enjoyed the rousing pieces of Timotheus, a poet and composer who had once visited Macedonia, and his own learning of an instrument is nicely put in a story, well found if not original: when Alexander asked his music-teacher why it mattered if he played one string rather than another, the teacher told him it did not matter at all for a future king, but it did for one who wanted to be a musician. For Macedonians, music was one of life's luxuries, and when Alexander next comes into view, at the age of eleven or so, it is in a more Macedonian manner.

'Every man who has loved hunting', the Greek general Xenophon had recently written, 'has been a good man.' No Macedonian at Philip's court would have quarrelled with his judgement, for hunting was the focal point of a Macedonian's life. Bears and lions still roamed the highlands, and elsewhere there were deer in abundance, for whose sport Macedonians grouped themselves in hunting societies with the hero Heracles as their patron, honoured under a suitable title of the chase. Alexander remained true to his native pastime. If he had a favourite interest, it was hunting, and every day, if possible, he liked to hunt birds and foxes; he was always keen to be shown fine dogs, and he was so fond of an Indian one of his own that he commemorated it by giving its name to one of his new towns. He also needed a horse both for war and relaxation. By the age of twelve, he had found one, for it was at this early age that he first met his black horse Bucephalas, with whom he would one day ride to India and far on into legend and distant memory, Bucephalas the first unicorn in western civilization, Bucephalas the man-eater whose master would conquer the world, Bucephalas born of the same seed as his master and whinnying and fawning with his front legs at the sight of the only man he trusted.

The tale of his arrival is irresistible, and it was probably told by Alexander's future master of ceremonies, a man inclined to romance but none-the-less present at royal dinner-parties where he would often have heard the story. Demaratus the Corinthian, most valued of Philip's Greek friends, had bought the horse from his Thessalian breeder for a price said to be as high as thirteen talents, more than three times higher than any paid for other known horses in antiquity, and having bought it, he gave it as a present to Philip; Bucephalas must have been youthful to be so expensive, and the date of the gift is a nice point. Later, Alexander's officers believed Bucephalas to have been born in the same year as his master, but by then the horse was ageing and their dates can only have been a guess; it is an important fact that the Greeks never knew how to tell an adult horse's age from its teeth. Bucephalas's arrival can be dated better from the giver than the horse, for when Alexander was twelve, Demaratus had sailed to Sicily as a general, where he stayed to fight for some four or five years; probably, he had given Bucephalas before he left, and so Alexander was still a boy, a probability which makes the story more remarkable.

On arrival in Macedonia, Bucephalas was led out into the plain for Philip's inspection, but he bucked and reared and refused to heed any word of command, and Philip ordered him to be taken away. Alexander had seen differently. Promising to master the animal, he ran towards him, took him by the halter and turned him towards the sun; by a plausible trick of horsemanship, he had noticed that Bucephalas was shying at his own shadow, so he patted, stroked and soothed, leapt astride and finally cantered round to shouts of applause from the courtiers and tears of joy from Philip, who is said to have predicted that Macedonia would never contain such a prince. Bucephalas was Alexander's for the keeping, and he loved the horse for the next twenty years; he even taught him to kneel in full harness before him, so that he could mount him more easily in armour, a trick which the Greeks first learnt from the Persians.

Already a horseman and a musician, Alexander passed his early years at Pella, and the contrasts in Macedonian life were all the sharper for being met at Pella's court. The Macedonian kings, who maintained that their Greek ancestry traced back to Zeus, had long given homes and patronage to Greece's most distinguished artists; Pindar and Bacchylides the two lyric poets, Hippocrates the father of medicine, Timotheus composer of choral verse and music. Zeuxis the painter, Choerilus the epic poet, Agathon the dramatist had all written or worked for Macedonian kings of the previous century. Most memorable of all, there had been Euripides the playwright who had left his Athens on the verge of old age and come to live at King Archelaus's Pella, where he was made an honorary Companion; he died, it was said, from a pack of wild dogs, owned by a Lyncestian nobleman. 'Loudias', he wrote of Pella's main river, 'generous giver and father of men's prosperity, whose lovely waters wash a land so rich in horses.' Alexander could quote Euripides's plays by heart and would send for his plays, together with those of Sophocles and his greater predecessor Aeschylus, as his leisure reading in outer Iran. It was Macedonia, perhaps, which left the deeper mark on its visitor, for it was probably there that Euripides wrote his Bacchae,the most disturbing and powerful play in Greek literature; its theme was the worship of Dionysus, and the Macedonians' wild cult of the god, which Olympias later upheld, may have worked on his imagination no less than the lush green landscape, which moved him to some of the few lines in Greek poetry with a romantic feeling for nature.