Текст книги "Alexander the Great"

Автор книги: Robin Fox

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"Take this son of mine away." ' King Philip is made to say to Aristotle in the fictitious Romance of Alexander, '"and teach him the poems of Homer", and sure enough, that son of his went away and studied all day, so that he read through the whole of Homer's Iliadin a single sitting.' In spirit, this charming fiction comes near to life, for the theme of Homer's Iliad,and especially of its hero Achilles, is the link which spans the figures and stories of Alexander's youth. Through his mother Olympias he was a descendant of Achilles; his first tutor Lysimachus owed part of his lifelong favour to giving his pupil the nickname of Achilles; his beloved Hephaistion was compared by contemporaries with Patroclus, the intimate companion of Homer's hero; Aristotle taught him Homer's poems and at his pupil's request, helped to prepare a special text of the Iliadwhich Alexander valued above all his possessions; he used to sleep, said one of his officers, with a dagger and this private Iliadbeneath his head, calling it his journey-book of excellence in war. In the second year of his march, when the Persian king had been routed, 'a casket was brought to him,

which seemed to be the most precious of Darius's treasure-chests, and he asked his friends what they thought was so particularly valuable that it should be stored inside. Many opinions were expressed, but Alexander himself said he would put the Iliadthere and keep it safe.' But the Iliadwas among the oldest Greek poems, at least three hundred years older than Alexander and seemingly as distant as Shakespeare from a modem king.

In deciding how he meant this, there is a danger of taking publicity too seriously or of following a theme of flattery too far. Nicknames from Homer were popular in Greece, Nestor for a wise man, Achilles for a brave one, and the mood of the Iliadwas not an irrelevant revival for Philip's heir. Homer's poems were widely known in Macedonia. One of Antipater's sons could quote Homer fluently, as could subsequent kings; even in Philip's highland Macedonia, pottery has been found painted with scenes of the sack of Troy. Philip had already been compared with King Agamemnon, leader of the Greek allies who fought for ten years round Troy, and the style of his infantry was likened to Agamemnon's; the Trojan War had been cited by Herodotus as the first cause of the ancient enmity between Greece and Asia's monarchies and Philip's pamphleteers continued to draw the parallel between a new Greek invasion of Asia and the expedition described by Homer. Past history bore witness that Agamemnon and the Trojan war were worthwhile themes for a Greek invader of Asia to evoke and imitate. But Alexander was stressing his link with Achilles, a younger and more passionate hero, and hardly a symbol of kingly leadership. There were public overtones here too, for Achilles was a hero of Thessaly, and Philip's heir was ruler of the Thessalians, a people essential for his army and control of southern Greece. Achilles was also a stirring Greek hero, useful for a Macedonian king whose Greek ancestry did not stop Greeks from calling him barbarian; in a similar vein, the great Kolokotronis, hero of Greek freedom, would dress and parade as the new Achilles when ridding Greece of the Turks in the 1820s. But, it was said, 'Alexander was emulous of Achilles, with whom he had had a rivalry since his earliest youth'; publicity and politics do not determine a young boy's heroes, and if Achilles can be proved to belong to Alexander's youth, and not to have been read back into it, then the man himself may still be within reach.

The proof is difficult, but again not impossible: it depends on a famous Athenian joke. In the year after Philip's murder, Alexander was fighting near the Danube, and back in Athens, his political enemy Demosthenes ridiculed him as a mere Margites; this obscure insult reappears in the history book of a Macedonian courtier, and it must have been apt to be remembered and repeated. Now Margites was one of the more extreme figures in Greek poetry. He was the anti-hero of a parody of Homer's Iliad,wrongly believed to be by Homer himself, and he was known as a famous simpleton who could not count further than ten and who was so ignorant of the facts of life that among much else he was only persuaded to make love to a woman when he was told it would cure a wound in her private parts. By calling Alexander the new Margites, Demosthenes meant that so far from being an Achilles, he was nothing but a Homeric buffoon; they had met in Macedonia when Alexander was a boy, and the joke was pointless unless Alexander's Homeric pretensions were known before he ever invaded Asia.

There is every sign, moreover, that others took them seriously, not least Alexander himself. He began his Asian expedition with a pilgrimage to Troy to honour Achilles's grave, and he took sacred armour from Troy's temple to accompany him to India and back again; his own court historian, who wrote to please him, picked up this theme and stressed parallels with Homer's poems in reports of his progress down the Asian coast; in art, the effects were more subtle, for if Alexander's appearance deliberately matched that of a youthful Greek hero, his features also came to influence portraits of Achilles until the two heroes could hardly be distinguished out of their context; the court sculptor Lysippus portrayed Alexander holding a Homeric spear and on the coins of the small Thessalian town which claimed to be Achilles's birthplace the pictures of the young Achilles grew to look like Alexander's own. The comparison mattered, and was known to matter: when the people of Athens wished to plead for the release of Alexander's Athenian prisoners they sent as their ambassador the only man by the name of Achilles known in fourth-century Athens; previous embassies had failed, but one Achilles pleased another, and this time, the Athenian prisoners were released. It is the smallest details which are always most revealing.

The rivalry, then, existed and was thought important, but it is a different question how it was meant to be taken. Whether written, sung or dictated, Homer's poems were at least three hundred years older than Alexander, and their heroic code of conduct, when men strove for personal glory and knew no greater sanction than public shame and disgrace, had probably belonged to a society at least six hundred years older than that. In this world of heroes, whose ultimate ancestors are the ruined palaces of Troy and Mycenae, no figure is more compelling than Alexander's chosen Achilles; like Alexander, Achilles is young and lordly, a man of passion as much as action with a heart which, though often merciless, can still respond to another's evident nobility. In war, he knows no equal, and even when he sulks in his tent, black anger filling his heart, his reputation overshadows the battle he refuses to join. Like his fellow-heroes, he fights in the name of personal glory, whose first ideal is prowess and whose betrayal is shame and dishonour, but success and status are not his only inspirations: respect for an ageing father, blind love for a favourite Companion, and for a mistress removed by his overlord, a regret which is not just the self-pity of a hero deprived of his prize, Homer's Achilles, of all poetic figures, is a man of intelligible emotion. Above all, he is tragic, for as he has been told by his goddess-mother Thetis, who knows his unhappiness long before he tells her and yet has the sense to ask for it to be retold, 'Two fates bear him towards death's end ...; if he stays and fights around the city of the Trojans, Gone are his hopes of return, but his fame will be everlasting. But if he goes home to his own dear land, Gone is his fair fame, but his life will be long. And the end of death will not be swift to find him.' Firmly, Achilles chose fame against return; like Alexander, he died a young man.

Such was Alexander's hero, and if he indeed took this rivalry literally, aspiring to what he had read, then his ambitions and character can still be brought to life. At first sight it seems so implausible, the emulation of a poem which looked back to an age of kings and prowess a thousand years before. But rivalry with Homer's world was not irrelevant romance; Homer's poems were still regarded by many Greeks as a source of ethical teaching, and from what is known of political life in Alexander's Athens, the combative code of the Iliadhad in no way been outgrown. It was a fiercely self-assertive society and what was still implicit in democratic Athens was written larger in the north. In aristocratic Thessaly, on the borders of the Macedonian kings, the bodies of murderers would still be dragged behind a chariot round their victim's tomb, just as Homer's Achilles had once dragged the dead Hector through the dust in memory of his victim Patroclus. But Homer's ethic belongs in an even longer tradition. For Homer's heroes, life was not so much a stage as a competition, and the word for this outward striving for honour, to philotimo,is still fundamental to the modern Greeks' way of life; it is an extrovert ideal, not a moral one, and it owes more to emotions and quarrels than to reason and punishment; it belongs with an open-air style of living where fame is the surest way to immortality; it is an attitude that has deep roots in Greece, and it is this word 'philotimo'which was used to describe Alexander's Homeric ambitions. Homer's Achilles sums up the doubts and conflicts of to philotimo,a hero's emulous struggle for glory; the ideal is a lasting one, and against the perspective of Macedonia it would have made living sense.

Through Aristotle and the fine Greek art at Pella, it is easy to overstress one side of the contrast in Alexander's Macedonian background. Pella was also a palace society, and kings and palaces had vanished for some three hundred years from the Greek world; it was the centre of a tribal aristocracy, to which the highland chieftains had come down from their townless world, and on both accounts, it was more archaic than its patronage of Greek art and intellect suggested. 'Idomeneus,' Homer's Agamemnon had said, judging a hero in terms of the old heroic age, 'I honour you above all the swift-horsed Greeks, whether in war or any other work or at the feast when the heroes mix the gleaming wine.' Horses and hunting, feasts and fighting, these were a hero's fields of prowess, but in Macedonia kings and barons continued them each in their distinctive way. Once, according to an old Macedonian custom, a Macedonian could not have worn a proper belt until he had killed a man in battle, and in Alexander's day single combat not only belonged to the ceremony of a royal funeral but was the recurrent business of his officers, who wrestled, jousted and speared in duels worthy of any Homeric hero. Hunting promised similar glory, and was given free rein by Alexander from the Lebanon to the hills of Afghanistan; according to custom, a Macedonian could not recline at dinner until he had killed a wild boar, another link with the world of Homer's poems, for only in Homer's society, not in contemporary Greece, did Greeks ever dine without reclining.

At dinners, the king entertained his nobles and personal guest friends in a ceremonial style which recalled the great banquets of Homeric life. Gossip maintained that Macedonians would be drunk before they reached the first course, but such drinking was more a challenge than an indiscriminate debauch. Successes in battle were toasted formally and one noble pledged another to a cup which had to be equalled on pain of honour. These royal feasts were a vital part of the loose weave of the kingdom. They brought king and nobles together in a formal relationship, just as feasts in the palace halls had daily confronted Homer's kings with their counsellors and neighbouring aristocrats. It was a personal relationship, governed by favour and friendship; the old Homeric traditions of kingly presents, of generosity and pious respect for ancestral friends still lived on in Alexander, who always respected past ties with the Macedonian kings, whether of long-dead Greek poets, an Athenian general or kinsmen of his mythical ancestors, even after an interval of more than a hundred years.

This honour for guest friends had been central to the personal links which patterned the life of Homer's kings; others, the links of family and blood feuds, also found their parallel in Alexander's Macedonian home. But the nobles themselves shared a different and no less evocative honour, for at the court of their lowland king they served as his Companions, and to any lover of Homer, Companions are an unforgettable part of heroic life. Loosely, Companions may be partners in any common enterprise, fellow-oarsmen rowing with Odysseus or kings fighting with Agamemnon before Troy, but they also serve in a stricter sense. In Homer's Iliad,each king or hero has his own personal group of Companions, bound by respect, not kinship. Busy and steadfast, they dine in his tent or listen as he plays the lyre; they tend his bronze-rimmed chariot and drive his hoofed horses into battle, they fight by his side, hand him his spear and carry him, wounded, back to their camp. They are the men a hero loves and grieves to lose, Patroclus to the brooding Achilles or Polydamas to Hector rampant. With the collapse of kings and heroes, it is as if the Companions withdraw to the north, surviving only in Macedonia on the fringe of Europe. Driven thence when Alexander's conquests bring the Macedonians up to date, they retreat still further from a changing world and dodge into the swamps and forests of the Germans, only to reappear as the squires of early German kings and the retinues of counts in the tough beginnings of knighthood and chivalry.

In Alexander's Macedonia, selected Companions still attended the king in battle, but their ranks had been expanded to include the nobles of highland and lowland, while foreign friends from Greece and elsewhere had increased their number to almost a hundred. Not every Companion was the king's friend; they dined with him and advised him, and they had lost none of their aristocratic pride; a festival was held yearly in their honour, and when they died they were buried in vaulted underground tombs behind a facade of tapering Greek columns and double doors studded with bronze. It was a grand style, and they took it with them to the East. Its roots were older and more in keeping with the Companions' name, for the vaulted tombs of Macedonia recall the mounded burials of royal Mycenae, ancestor of Homer's heroic world.

It was among these Companions, turbulent and nobly born, that the Macedonian king had to force respect for his will, and his methods again picked up the style of Homeric kingship. Custom and tradition supported what no law existed to define, and as in Homer's poems, superlative prowess could justify a man in going beyond convention: the kings began with the asset of noble birth, and like Homer's kings, they could claim descent from Zeus, a point of the first importance both for Alexander and his father. Noble birth needed to be buttressed by solid achievement. No rights or constitution protected the king; his government was personal, his authority as absolute as he could make it; he issued his own coins, bound his people to his treaties, led their charges into battle, dispensed the plunder and attended to suitable sacrifices and yearly rituals of purification, hoping to 'rule by might', in a favourite Homeric phrase, and meet his duties with the proper energy of a king among lesser kings. It was a demanding position, and if age or achievement was against him, he was deposed or murdered. None of Alexander's ancestors had died in their beds. The common people, most of them wild tribesmen, respected his birth and were consulted, mostly, as a counter to turbulent nobles: if their will was displeasing, a strong king would defy it. Like Homer's King Agamemnon, Alexander twice ignored the opinions of his assembled soldiers. Agamemnon's reward was a nine days' plague from heaven; once, Alexander failed, but once he scared his men into agreement within three days.

In this king's world of custom and prowess, where all power was personal and government still took place among Companions, success and achievement were the means to authority, and the restless ideal of a Homeric hero was a very real claim to them both. Throughout the letters of Greek academics to Philip, the theme of personal glory in battle or contest recurs deliberately; such glory is godlike, worthy of royal ancestry and the fit reward of a Macedonian king, and like a new King Agamemnon, Philip should lead the Greeks to plunder and revenge among the barbarians of the east. Such glory had been the mainspring of Homer's kings, but where Philip had been urged to follow Agamemnon. Alexander marked out Achilles for himself, more glorious, more individual, and less of a king and leader. Among his Macedonians, this combative ideal made sense, but Alexander grew to govern more men than his Macedonians; part, therefore, of his career is the story of an Achilles who tried, not always happily, to face the problems of an Agamemnon.

From a new Achilles it would be a mistake to look for peace or a new philosophy. His rivalry was a response to the values of his own society. Fear, profit and glory had been singled out as three basic motives of man by his most percipient Greek observer, and it was to the last of the three that a hero's life was given over; glory won by achievement was agreed to be the straightest path to heaven, and so Alexander's Homeric rivalry led, through prowess, to his free worship by contemporaries as a living god-It was an old ideal, which Aristotle too had shared, but it also had its weaknesses. A hero rules more by reputation than by inherited majesty and cannot allow his prowess to be challenged often or excelled. If he fails, he often shifts a part of the blame on to others or on to causes outside himself, for a loss of face is loss of the title by which he lives and governs. It is a bold attendant who persists in praising another man's courage above his master's. Alexander's generosity was often commended, but it stressed the matchless excellence of his own riches and position; the slander of rivals and a taste for mocking others' failures are the hero's natural reverse to this open-handed display. Alexander's own historian belittled Parmenion's prowess, probably after his death; singers entertained the younger officers by belittling the generals who died commanding the one grave defeat of Alexander's career; Alexander himself is said to have added touches to a comic satire against a close friend, put on to amuse the court soon after he had deserted to Athens. These flatteries and slanders are not a proof that truth and a despot can never rule together. They belong more subtly to a hero's necessary ethic. 'Ever to be best and stand far above all others'; this was agreed to be one of Alexander's favourite lines in Homer. Personal excellence and the shifting of the blame for failure on to others have remained lasting principles of all political life, but they were most pronounced in a society ruled by a heroic ideal.

It is through Homer that Alexander still comes to life: only one of his dreams is recorded, and it could hardly be more appropriate. In Egypt, as he laid out his new Alexandria, a venerable old man with a look of Homer himself is said to have appeared in his sleep and recited lines from the Odyssey which advised him where to site his city. Even in his dreams, Alexander was later believed to be living out the poems he loved, and to any lover of Homer, his ideal is not, after all, such a strange one. For of all poems, Homer's Iliadis still the most immediate, a world whose reality never falters, not only as seen through the new dimension of its similes, where kings banquet beneath their oak trees, children build castles of sand, mothers keep flies away from their sleeping babies and old women watch from their porches as the wedding processions dance by, but also through the leisurely progress of a narrative rich in ritual and repeated phrases, deceptively simple but infinitely true, where heroes strive for glory, knowing that death is inescapable, where a white-armed lady laughs through her tears and returns to heat the bath-water for a husband who she knows will never return from the battle, where gods and goddesses are no more remote for being powerful, one raining tears of blood for the death of a favourite hero, another making toys, another bribing Sleep with the promise of one of the younger Graces and then making love with Zeus her husband on a carpet of crocus and hyacinth. Homer's only magic is his own, and if he still speaks directly to the heart how much more must his poems have come home to Alexander, who saw their ideals around him and chose to live them, not as a distant reader but more in the spirit of a marcher baron living out the ballads which mirrored his own home world.

Once, men said, when a messenger arrived with news and could barely conceal his delight, Alexander stopped him with a smile: 'What can you possibly tell me that deserves such excitement,' he asked, 'except perhaps that Homer has come back to life?' Alexander could not revive his favourite poet, but there is one last twist to his Homeric rivalry, more extraordinary, perhaps, than he ever knew. In his cavalry, served a regiment of lowlanders, whom his ancestors had annexed on their eastern borders; they had migrated, said Aristotle, many hundreds of years ago from ancient Crete. In the same lowlands, there also lived Greek refugees to whom his ancestors had offered a home: they had come, on the ruin of their home town, from the ancient village of Mycenae. But the palace societies of Crete and Mycenae were the giants of the heroic age which Homer, centuries later, had used as the theme for his poem; their only descendants were living, by chance, in Macedonia, and at the call of a new Achilles they would prepare for Greece's last Homeric emulation, for a march as far as the Oxus and the Punjab, in search of the personal prowess which had once made their kings such a famous subject of song.

CHAPTER FOUR

Inside Macedonia Alexander had already shown a speed worthy of his Homeric hero. In mid-autumn it was time to extend his authority abroad, for Philip had left a foreign legacy which stretched from the Danube and the Dalmatian coast to the southern capes of Greece and the islands of the Aegean. The Macedonian throne was secure and it was Greece which first required his heir's attention.

When Alexander was asked how he managed to control the Greeks, he would answer 'by putting oft nothing that ought to be done today until tomorrow'. No sooner were palace affairs settling in his favour than he put this stern but admirable philosophy into practice. Leading the Macedonian soldiers whom he had befriended, he marched south from Aigai to the abutting foothills of mount Olympus, and so towards the border with Greek Thessaly, where his father had long been recognized as ruler. The vale of Tempe was entered by a pass five miles long and so narrow that cavalry could only ride it in single file; local Thessalian tribesmen were guarding it, and if the history of Greek warfare had one lesson to teach, it was that mountain passes were impenetrable for cavalry and infantry in formation and were not to be undertaken confidently even by the fashionable units of light-armed peltasts. Alexander improvised a bold alternative: he ordered steps to be cut in the cliff-face of nearby mount Ossa and he led his Macedonians over its peaks by the methods of a mountaineer. The pass was turned, the nobles of Thessaly welcomed the man they had failed to stop, and Alexander did not forget a stratagem which could serve him again in his career.

Like his father Philip, he was promptly recognized as ruler of the Thessalians, a remarkable honour for an outsider and crucial for the financial dues and disciplined cavalry to which it entitled him. In return, he reminded his subjects of their kinship with him through the hero Heracles, ancestor of the Macedonian kings, and through Achilles, to whom his mother's family traced their descent. Achilles's kingdom had lain in Thessaly, and as a personal tribute Alexander now dedicated the district to his hero. His father's diplomacy had bequeathed him his broad inheritance, but he had interpreted it in his own heroic way; the pattern ran deep in Alexander's early years.

If he was ruler of Thessaly, he was also by hereditary right the leader of the Greek allies, for Philip had exacted an oath from the Greeks that his newly created office of Leader should pass to his descendants. But his death had started disturbances in every allied city with a grievance, and only by a frighteningly fast march could Alexander win his rightful acknowledgement. Storming through Thermopylae, the narrow Gates of Greece, he carried the central Greek tribes, summoned the Delphic council, a body of more prestige than power, and made them ratify his Leadership, because he controlled them; there had been dissidence in Thebes and Athens, where news of Philip's murder had arrived very quickly from northern agents and caused the people to vote Pausanias the honour of a shrine, but Alexander careered southwards to their borders, scaring Thebes into surrender, Athens into herding her livestock and farmers inside her walls for fear of invasion. Fulsome honours were voted to him, including Athenian citizenship; he accepted them, and passed south to Corinth on the isthmus to summon the allied Greek council of which he was now leader both by example and by right. Not for the last time, he had shown his troops the value of speed, and yet this was the man whom Athenian politicians had predicted would never leave Pella.

War was the natural state of every Greek city. In theory, they were considered to be at war with each other, except for particular cases where they had sworn a temporary alliance and theory was usually born out in practice. The Greece which Philip had outmanoeuvred and Alexander had overawed was a society obsessed with instability and poisoned with revolution. It was not a decadent society, which had somehow betrayed the ideals of a so-called golden age under Pericles's Athens a hundred years before; it was a more level world, both in the balance of power between its states and in the openness of office to men outside its traditional ruling classes. Being more level, it was also more varied. But it was also living proof that for all their variety, the Greeks had failed to produce any political or economic form which could hold a community together or offer to the majority of their citizens a life which was any comfort in a desperately poor landscape with a negligible stock of technology to surmount it. For the past twenty-five years the balance of power in Greece had declined, through feuds between states and upheavals between classes, into an uneasy balance of weakness. Philip had exploited this as an unattached outsider, and his final result, of a common peace among 'free and independent' Greek allies, was intended to stop dissension both between and inside the Greek cities by means to his own advantage. He had already set up friendly governments where necessary, and in the name of stability, Alexander froze them into power by an absolute ban on revolutionary disturbance; in the name of independence, like the Spartans fifty years before him, he broke up the local empires of the larger states on which so much of their mutual aggression had been based, and this measure won him popularity among their many smaller neighbours. Elaborate provisions were made for disputes between cities to be arbitrated, but the detailed clauses of this common peace among allies cannot now be recovered; even if they could they would be as dull as any other dead constitution from the past. The only point which mattered was that Philip and his Macedonians kept control despite their slogan of Greek freedom and that they did not mean to squeeze Greece for tribute or for any cooperation beyond a sullen acquiescence in their aims in Asia.

'Covenants without the sword are but words, and of no strength to secure a man at all'; so Thomas Hobbes wrote in seventeenth-century England, and like Plato and Aristotle, he was mapping out his political philosophy in a real world of revolution and little stability. All three saw the need for authority around them, and Philip and Alexander, no less than Cromwell, appreciated the truth which was written large in the political philosophies of their time. In four key states Macedonian garrisons held the Greeks to their covenants, and if one was removed by Alexander to appease natives who had already rebelled to throw it out, a second was maintained at Thebes, despite similar protest by the Theban people. Events were soon to prove him right; meanwhile, a meeting of his father's allied council confirmed him as supreme general of the Asian expedition, and the last link in the chains of Philip's Greek inheritance had safely been forged for him: 'By his authority he hath the use of so much power and strength conferred on him that by terror thereof, he is enabled to form the wills of them all to peace at home and to mutual aid against their enemies abroad.' More than any clause of Philip's Greek alliance, it is Hobbes's ideal sovereign who sums up the Macedonian leadership of the Greeks.

Only one Greek state stood out against his authority: the Spartans sent Alexander a message saying that it was not their fathers' practice to follow others but to lead them. This splendidly stubborn comment was not as unwelcome as they might have hoped. By their past history in southern Greece, the Spartans had earned the anxious detestation of their smaller neighbours who remembered how Spartan calls to freedom or independence had persistently led to their subjection. Spartan power had been broken for thirty-five years, but it was showing unwelcome signs of a revival, and Philip had played astutely on small neighbours' fears of another Spartan tyranny. Although there were those in more powerful states who called Philip and Alexander the tyrants of Greece, their small and vulnerable neighbours did not see the rise of Macedonia as the death of Greek freedom. Such a concept begged too many questions. Several enemies of Sparta in southern Greece had shown unease at the death of their protector Philip, but Sparta's continued opposition to Alexander reminded them that their best hope of protection lay with a Macedonian leader.