The Novels of Alexander the Great

by Mary Renault

  Now there was a war of succession boiling up in Epiros, where the King had lately died. He had been scarcely more than one chieftain among many; soon there would be chaos, unless a hegemon could be set up. Philip meant to do so, for the good of Macedon. For once he had his wife’s blessing on his work, since he had chosen her brother Alexandros. He would see where his interest lay and be a curb on her intrigues; he was eager for support and should be a useful ally, Philip thought. It was a pity that, the affair being so urgent, he could not stay to welcome the philosopher. Before he limped out to his war-horse, he sent for his son and told him this. He said no more; he had been using his eyes, and had been many years a diplomat.

  “He will be here,” said Olympias ten days later, “about noon tomorrow. So remember to be at home.”

  Alexander was standing by the little loom on which his sister was learning fancy border-work. She had newly mastered the egg-and-dart pattern and was anxious to be admired for it; they were friends just now and he was generous with applause. But now he looked round, like a horse when it pricks its ear.

  “I shall receive him,” said Olympias, “in the Perseus Room.”

  “I shall receive him, Mother.”

  “Of course you must be there, I said so.”

  Alexander walked away from the loom. Kleopatra, forgotten, stood with the shuttle in her hand, and looked from face to face with a familiar dread.

  Her brother patted his sword belt of polished chestnut leather. “No, Mother, it’s for me to do it, now that Father’s away. I shall make his apologies, and present Leonidas and Phoinix. Then I shall bring Aristotle up here, and present him to you.”

  Olympias stood up from her chair. He had grown faster lately; she was not so much the taller as she had thought. “Are you saying to me, Alexander,” she said in a swelling voice, “that you do not want me there?”

  There was a short, unbelievable silence.

  “It’s for little boys, to be presented by their mothers. It’s no way to come to a sophist, when one is grown up. I’m nearly fourteen, now. I shall start with this man in the way I mean to go on.”

  Her chin rose, her back stiffened. “Did your father tell you this?”

  The moment found him unprepared, but he knew it for what it was. “No,” he said. “I didn’t need Father to tell me I’m a man. It was I who told him.”

  There was a flush on her cheekbones; her red hair seemed to rise by itself from its central peak. Her grey eyes had widened. He gazed transfixed, thinking no other eyes in the world could look so dangerous. No one had yet told him otherwise.

  “So, you are a man! And I, your mother, who bore you, nursed you, suckled you, who fought for your rights when the King would have thrown you off like a stray dog to set up his bastard—” She had fixed him with the stare of a woman who drives home a spell. He did not question her; that she willed his hurt was truth sufficient. Word followed word like a flight of burning arrows. “I who have lived for you each day of my life since you were conceived, oh, long before you saw the light of the sun; who have gone through fire and darkness for you and into the houses of the dead—! Now you plot with him to beat me down like a peasant wife. Now I can believe that you are his son!”

  He stood silent. Kleopatra dropped her shuttle and cried urgently, “Father’s a wicked man. I don’t love him, I love Mother best.” Neither of them looked at her. She started to cry, but no one heard.

  “The time will come when you look back upon this day.” Indeed, he thought, it would not soon be forgotten. “Well? Have you no answer?”

  “I am sorry, Mother.” His voice had been breaking for some time; it betrayed him, cracking upward. “I have done my tests of manhood. Now I must live like a man.”

  For the first time, she laughed at him as he had heard her laugh at his father. “Your tests of manhood! You silly child. Come and tell me that when you have lain with a woman.”

  A shocked pause fell between them. Kleopatra, unheeded, ran outside. Olympias flung herself back into her chair, and burst into a storm of tears.

  He went up presently, as so often before, and stroked her hair. She wept on his breast, murmuring of the cruelties she suffered, crying that she would no longer wish to see the light of day if he turned against her. He said that he loved her, that she knew it well enough. Much time passed in such words. In the end, he hardly knew how, it was decided he should receive the sophist himself, with Leonidas and Phoinix; and a little after, he went away. He felt neither defeated nor victorious, merely drained.

  At the stair-foot Hephaistion was waiting. He happened to be there, as he happened to have a ball handy if Alexander wanted a game, or water if he was thirsty; not by calculation, but in a constant awareness by which no smallest trifle was missed. Now, when he came down the stairs with a shut mouth and blue lines under his eyes, Hephaistion received some mute signal he understood, and fell into step beside him. They went up along the path which wandered into the wood; in an open glade was an old fallen oak-bole with orange fungus and a lace of ivy. Hephaistion sat down with his back to it. Alexander, in a silence unbroken since setting out, came and settled into his arm. After a while he sighed; no other word was spoken for some time.

  “They claim to love you,” he said at length. “And they eat you raw.”

  Words made Hephaistion anxious; it had been simpler and safer to do without. “It’s that children belong to them, but men have to go away. That’s what my mother says. She says she wants me to be a man, and yet she doesn’t.”

  “Mine does. Whatever she likes to say.” He edged himself closer; like an animal, Hephaistion thought, which is reassured by handling. It was nothing more for him. No matter, whatever he needed he must have. The place was solitary, but he spoke softly as it the birds were spies. “She needs a man to stand up for her. You know why.”

  “Yes.”

  “She’s always known I shall do that. But I saw today, she thinks when my time comes I shall let her reign for me. We didn’t speak of it. But she knows that I told her no.”

  Hephaistion’s back prickled with danger, but his heart was full of pride. He had never hoped to be called in alliance against this mighty rival. He expressed his allegiance, but without risking words.

  “She cried. I made her cry.”

  He was still looking quite pale. Words must be found. “She cried too when you were born. But it had to be. So has this.”

  There was a long pause; then, “You know that other thing I told you?”

  Hephaistion assented. They had not spoken of it since.

  “She promised to tell me everything one day. Sometimes she says one thing, sometimes another…I dreamed I caught a sacred snake and I was trying to make it speak to me, but it kept escaping and turning away.”

  Hephaistion said, “Perhaps it wanted you to follow it.”

  “No, it had a secret, but it wouldn’t speak…She hates my father. I think I’m the only one she ever truly loved. She wants me all hers, none of me his. Sometimes I’ve wondered…is that all?”

  In the sun-steeped wood, Hephaistion felt a fine tremor running through him. Anything he needed, he must have. “The gods will reveal it. They revealed it to all the heroes. But your mother…in any case…she would be mortal.”

  “Yes, that’s true.” He paused, turning it over. “Once when I was by myself on Mount Olympos, I had a sign. I vowed to keep it forever between me and the god.” He made a little movement, asking to be released, and stretched his whole frame in a long shuddering sigh. “Sometimes I forget all this for months on end. Sometimes I think of it day and night. Sometimes I think, unless I find out the truth of it, I shall go mad.”

  “That’s stupid. You’ve got me now. Do you think I’d let you go mad?”

  “I can talk to you. As long as you’re there…”

  “I promise you before God, I’ll be there as long as I’m alive.”

  They looked up together into the tall clouds, whose scarcely visible drift was like stillness in the
sky of the long summer day.

  Aristotle, son of Nikomachos the physician of the line of the Asklepiads, gazed round him as the ship rowed into harbor, trying to recall the scenes of boyhood. It was a long time; everything looked strange. He had had a quick smooth voyage from Mytilene, sole passenger in a fast war-galley sent to fetch him. It was no surprise, therefore, to see a mounted escort waiting on the wharf.

  He hoped to find its leader helpful. He was well informed already, but no knowledge was ever trivial; truth was the sum of all its parts.

  A gull swooped over the ship. With the reflex of many years’ self-training, he noted its species, the angle of its flight, its wing-spread, its droppings, the food it dived for. The lines of the vessel’s bow-wave had changed with its lessening speed; a mathematical ratio formed in his mind, he stored it where he would find it again when he had time. He never needed to carry tablets and stylos with him.

  Through the cluster of small craft, he could not see the escort clearly. The King would have sent someone responsible. He prepared his questions; those of a man formed by his era, when philosophy and politics were totally engaged, when no man of intellect could conceive for his thought a higher value than that of being physician to Hellas’ sickness. Barbarians, by definition, were hopeless cases; as well try to make a hunchback straight. Hellas must be healed to guide the world.

  Two generations had seen each decent form of government decay into its own perversion: aristocracy into oligarchy, democracy to demagogy, kingship to tyranny. With mathematical progression, according to the number who shared the evil the deadweight against reform increased. To change a tyranny had lately been proved impossible. To change an oligarchy called for power and ruthlessness, destructive to the soul. To change a demagogy, one must become a demagogue and destroy one’s mind as well. But to reform a monarchy, one need only mold one man. The chance to be a king-shaper, the prize every philosopher prayed for, had fallen to him.

  Plato had risked death for it in Syracuse, once with the tyrant father, again with the trivial son. He had thrown away half his last harvest-time, sooner than refuse the challenge he himself had first defined. It was the aristocrat and soldier in him; or maybe the dreamer. Far better have collected reliable data first, and saved the journey…Yet even this crisp thought evoked that formidable brooding presence; the old unease, the sense of something eluding the tools of measurement, defeating category and system, came hauntingly back with the summer scents of the Academy garden.

  Well, in Syracuse he had failed. Maybe for want of good stuff to work on; but his failure had resounded through all Greece. And before the end, his mind must have been failing too, to bequeath the School to Speusippos, that barren metaphysician. At all events, Speusippos had been eager to give up even that, and come to Pella. The King cooperative, the boy intelligent and strong-willed, without known vices, the heir to yearly increasing power; no wonder that Speusippos had been tempted, after the squalors and miseries of Syracuse. But Speusippos had been turned down. Demosthenes and his faction had achieved this if nothing else, that no one from Athens had stood a moment’s chance.

  Good friends in Mytilene had praised his courage in braving the backward and violent northland; he had brushed it aside with his astringent smile. His roots were here; in the air of these mountains he had known childhood happiness, tasting their beauty while his elders’ minds were clenched in the cares of war. As for violence, he was no novice, having lived under the shadow of Persian power. If there he had succeeded in making of a man with so dark a past a friend and a philosopher, he need hardly fear failure with an unformed boy.

  As the galley threaded the shipping, backing oars to let through a troop-trireme, he thought with affection of the hillside palace at Assos, looking out to the wooded mountains of Lesbos, and the strait he had crossed so often; the terrace with its burning cresset on summer nights; debate or thoughtful silence, or a book read together. Hermeias read well, his high voice was musical and expressive, never shrill. Its epicene pitch did not reflect his mind; as a boy he had been gelded, to prolong the beauty his master prized; he had been through the depths, before he made himself ruler, but like a smothered sapling he had grown through to the light. He had been persuaded to visit the Academy, and from there he had never fallen back.

  He had adopted a niece, being condemned to childlessness. For their friendship’s sake, Aristotle had married her; the fact that she adored him had come as a surprise. He was glad to have shown gratitude, for she was lately dead; a thin dark studious girl, who had held his hand, gazed at him dimly with nearsighted eyes already beginning to wander, and begged that her ashes and his might share one urn. He had vowed it to her, and added of his own accord that he would never take another wife. He had brought the urn with him, in case he should die in Macedon.

  There would of course be women. He took some pride, not improper, he thought, to a philosopher, in his own healthy normality. Plato, in his opinion, had committed too much to love.

  The galley was docking, turning in with the suddenness of such maneuvers in crowded harbors. Ropes were flung and hitched, the gangplank clattered. The escort stood dismounted, five or six men. He turned to his two servants to make sure of all his baggage. Some stir among the seamen made him look up. At the top of the gangplank stood a boy gazing about. His hands were poised on the man’s sword belt round his waist, his bright heavy hair was ruffled in the offshore breeze. He looked as alert as a young hunting-dog. As their eyes met he jumped down, not waiting for the sailor who ran to help, landing so lightly that it did not check his pace.

  “Are you Aristotle the philosopher? May you live happy. I am Alexander son of Philip. Be welcome to Macedon.”

  They exchanged the formal courtesies, taking stock of one another.

  Alexander had planned his expedition at short notice, adjusting his strategy to events.

  Instinct had made him watchful. His mother was taking it too well. He had known her agree with his father on this or that, only to cover her next move. Going to her room in her absence, he had seen a state gown laid out. A new battle would be bloodier than the last, and still indecisive. He had bethought him of the admirable Xenophon, who, when cornered in Persia, had decided to steal a march.

  It must be done correctly, not turned into an escapade. He had gone to Antipatros, his father’s Regent in Macedon, and asked him to come too. He was a King’s man of unshaken loyalty; he read the lie of the land with satisfaction, which he was not fool enough to show. He was here now on the quay; the reception was an official one; and here was the philosopher.

  He was a lean smallish man, not ill-proportioned, who yet gave at first sight the effect of being all head. His whole person was commanded by his wide bulging brow, a vessel stretched by its contents. Small piercing eyes were busy recording, without prejudgment or error, just what they saw. The mouth was closed in a line precise as a definition. He had a short neat beard; his thinning hair looked as if its roots had been forced apart by the growth of the massive brain.

  A second glance revealed him to be dressed with some care and with the elegance of Ionia, wearing one or two good rings. Athenians thought him rather foppish; in Macedon, he looked tasteful and free from harsh austerity. Alexander offered him a hand to mount the gangplank, and tried the effect of a smile. When the man returned it, it could be seen that smiling was what he would do best; he would not often be caught with his head back laughing. But he did look like a man who would answer questions.

  Beauty, thought the philosopher; the gift of God. And it moved with mind; in that house there was someone living. This enterprise was no such forlorn hope as poor Plato’s trips to Syracuse. He must take care that Speusippos had the news.

  Presentations went forward, the Prince performing them with address. A groom led up a mount for the philosopher, offering a leg up, Persian style. This seen to, the boy turned round; a taller boy moved forward, his hand on the headstall of a magnificent black charger with a white blaze. All through the for
malities, Aristotle had been aware of the creature fretting; he was surprised therefore to see the youth release it. It trotted straight to the Prince, and muzzled the hair behind his ear. He stroked it, murmuring something. With neatness and dignity, the horse sank its crupper on its haunches, waited while he mounted, and at his finger-touch straightened up. There was a moment in which the boys and the beast seemed like initiates, who have exchanged in secret a word of power.

  The philosopher swept aside this fantasy. Nature had no mysteries, only facts not yet correctly observed and analyzed. Proceed from this sound first principle, and one would never miss one’s way.

  The spring of Mieza was sacred to the Nymphs. Its waters had been led into an old stone fountain-house, where they tinkled hollowly; but the ferny pool below had been carved by the falling stream itself, swirling between the rocks. Its brown surface caught the sun; it was a pleasant place to bathe in

  Runnels and conduits threaded about the gardens, glittering streamlets sprang out in jets, or tumbled in little falls. Bay and myrtle and rowan grew there; in rough grass beyond the tended orchard, old gnarled apple trees and crabs still bloomed in spring. Fine green turf had been laid where the scrub had been cleared away; from the pink-washed house, paths and rough steps meandered, circling some rock with its small wiry mountain flowers, or crossing a wooden bridge, or widening round a stone seat with a view. In summer, the woods beyond were a tangle of huge wild roses, the gift of the Nymphs to Midas; the night dews were full of their briery scent.

  The boys would ride out at cocklight, to go hunting before the day’s school began. They would set up their nets in the coverts, and get their buck or their hare. Under the trees the smells were dank and mossy; on the open slopes, spicy with crushed herbs. At sunup there would be smells of wood-smoke and roasting meat, horse-sweat on leather, dog-smells as the hounds came coaxing up for scraps. But if the quarry was rare or strange, they would go fasting home and save it for dissection. Aristotle had learned this skill from his father; it was the Asklepiad heritage. Even insects, they found, he did not disdain. Most of what they brought in he knew already; but now and then he would say sharply, “What’s this, what’s this?” then get out his notes with their fine pen-drawings, and be in good humor for the day.