The Novels of Alexander the Great

by Mary Renault

  “This should settle it,” said Philip, “once for all. Time comes when one must put down the stake and throw. I think it’s long odds against war. If the Thebans are sane, they’ll declare for us; the Athenians will wake up and see where their demagogues have brought them; Phokion’s party will come in; and we can cross to Asia without a drop of blood shed in Greece.”

  Alexander turned his wine cup in his hands, and bent to smell the local vintage. They made better wine in Thrace, but Thrace had been given it by Dionysos. “Well, yes…but look what happened while you were laid up and I was raising the army. We gave out we were arming against the Illyrians; and everyone believed it, the Illyrians most of all. Now, what about the Athenians? They’ve been told for years by Demosthenes to expect us; here we are. And what becomes of him, if Phokion’s party gets the vote?”

  “He can do nothing, if Thebes has declared for us.”

  “They’ve ten thousand trained mercenaries in Athens.”

  “Ah, yes. But it’s the Thebans who will decide. You know their constitution. A moderate oligarchy they call it, but the franchise test is low; it takes in any man who can afford a hoplite panoply. There you have it. In Thebes, it’s the electorate that will fight in any war it votes for.”

  He began to talk about his hostage years there, almost with nostalgia. Time had misted the hardships; it had the taste of vanished youth. He had been smuggled once by friends into action under Epaminondas. He had known Pelopidas. Alexander as he listened thought of the Sacred Band, which Pelopidas had gathered into one corps, rather than founded; for their heroic vows were ancient, going back to Herakles and Iolaos, at whose altar they were sworn. Men of the Band, having each in his charge a twofold honor, did not retreat; they advanced, or stood, or died. There was much Alexander would have liked to know of them, and tell Hephaistion, had there been anyone else to ask.

  “I wonder,” he remarked instead, “what is going on now in Athens.”

  Athens had had the news at sunset, on the day Elateia was occupied. The City Councilors were at their civic meal in the Council Hall, with some old Olympic victors, retired generals and other worthies honored with this privilege. The Agora was clamorous; the courier from Thebes came only on the heels of rumor. All night the streets were like market-time, with kindred running to kindred, merchants to the Piraeus; strangers talking passionately to strangers, women running with half-veiled faces to the women’s rooms of houses where they had friends. At daybreak the City Trumpeter called Assembly; in the Agora the hurdles of the stock pens and the market stalls were set alight to beacon the outer suburbs. The men poured across to Pnyx Hill with its stone rostrum. They were told the news; that Philip was expected to march south at once, and that Thebes would make no resistance. Old men recalled a black day of their childhood, the beginning of shame, starvation, tyranny, when the first stragglers had come in from Goat River on the Hellespont, where the fleet had been annihilated; the Great War lost and the death-throes still to come. The crisp cool air of an autumn morning struck to the bone like a winter frost. The presiding Councilor called aloud, “Does anyone wish to speak?”

  A long silence followed. All eyes turned one way. Nobody had the folly to come between the people and their choice. When they saw him mount the bema, no one cheered; the chill was too deep for that; there was only a deep murmur, like the sound of prayer.

  All night the lamp had burned in Demosthenes’ study; men walking the streets, too troubled to go to bed, had been comforted by its light. In the dark before the dawn, the draft of his speech was ready. The city of Theseus, Solon, Perikles, at her crux of fate had turned to him. She had found him ready.

  Firstly, he said, they could dismiss their fear that Philip was sure of Thebes. If he were, he would not be sitting in Elateia; he would be here now before their walls, he who had always aimed at their destruction. He was making a show of force, to hearten his bought friends in Thebes and daunt the patriots. Now at last they must resolve to forget the ancient feud, and send envoys to offer generous terms of alliance, before Philip’s men had done their evil work there. He himself, if summoned, would not refuse the call. Meantime, let the men of fighting age put on their arms, and march up the Theban road as far as Eleusis, in token of readiness to take the field.

  As he ended, the sun rose, and they saw across the dip the Acropolis bathed in splendor; the mellow old marble, the white new shrines, the color and the gold. A great cheer ran over the hill. Those who had been too far to hear all joined in it, sure that salvation had been proclaimed.

  Demosthenes went back home, and drafted a diplomatic note to Thebes, heaping scorn on Philip. “…acting as might be looked for in one of his race and nature; insolently using his present fortune, forgetful of his unforeseen rise to power from small mean origins…” Thoughtfully he chewed his pen; the stylos moved on over the wax.

  Outside his window, young men still new to war, on the way to report to their tribal officers, were shouting to each other; the jokes of the young, whose meaning he no longer knew. A woman was crying somewhere. Surely, it was in the house. It must be his daughter. If she had anyone to weep over, it was the first he knew of it. Angrily he closed his door; the noise was ill-omened, and disturbed his thoughts.

  When the Assembly met at Thebes, no man who could stand on his feet was absent. The Macedonians, being formal allies, had first hearing.

  They recalled Philip’s good offices to Thebes; his help in the Phokian war, his support for her hegemony over Boeotia; rehearsed her ancient injuries from the Athenians, their efforts to weaken her, their alliance with the impious Phokians, paying their troops with Apollo’s gold. (With this too, no doubt, they had gilded the Theban shields they had set up, in blasphemous affront to Thebes and to the god.) Philip did not ask that Thebes should take up arms against Athens; Thebans might do so if they chose, and share the fruits of victory; but he would still count them as friends, if they gave him only right of passage.

  The Assembly turned it over. They had been angered by Philip’s surprise of Elateia; if he was an ally, he was a highhanded one, it was late to consult them now. For the rest, it was true enough. The great issues of power remained unspoken. Once Athens had fallen, what would they be worth to him? And yet, he had power in Thessaly and had done no harm there. They had fought the long-Phokian war; Thebes was full of dead men’s sons with a family on their shoulders, the widowed mother and the younger ones. Was it not enough?

  Antipatros ceased, and sat down. A not unfriendly murmur, almost applause, was heard. The marshal called the Athenian envoys. Demosthenes climbed the rostrum, in a hush of expectation, mostly hostile. Not Macedon, but Athens, had been the threat here for generations. There was no house without a blood-debt from the endless border wars.

  He could strike one answering nerve: the common hate for Sparta. He recalled how after the Great War, when Sparta had imposed on Athens the Thirty Tyrants (traitors like those who wanted peace with Philip now), Thebes had given harbor to the Liberators. Beside Philip, the Thirty were mere schoolboy bullies; let the past be forgotten, only that noble act remembered. With skilled timing, he brought out the Athenian offers. Theban rights over Boeotia should be undisputed; if the Boeotians should rebel, Athens would even send troops to push them down. Plataia too, that old bone of contention. He did not remind his hearers that Plataia, in return for Athens’ protection against Thebes, had joined in the stand at Marathon, and been granted Athenian citizenship forever. It was no time for hairsplitting; Plataia should be conceded. Also, if there was war with Philip, Thebes should command all land forces, while Athens would meet two-thirds of the expense.

  The burst of applause was missing. Thebans in doubt were looking at other Thebans they knew and trusted, not at him. They were slipping his grip.

  Striding forward, lifting his arm, he invoked the heroic dead, Epaminondas and Pelopidas; the glorious fields of Leuktra and Mantinea; the record of the Sacred Band. His ringing voice dropped to a note of silken irony. If these
things were no longer of account to them, he had only one request to make on behalf of Athens: right of passage, to oppose the tyrant alone.

  He had caught them now. That nip of the old rivalry had done it.

  They were shamed, he could hear it in the deep muted sound. Here and there two voices called together for the voting to begin; the men of the Sacred Band were considering their honor. The pebbles rattled into the urns; tally-clerks under close scrutiny flicked their abacuses; a long tedious business, after the efficient slot-boxes at home. The Thebans had voted to tear up the treaty with Macedon, and ally with Athens.

  He walked back to his lodging, hardly feeling his feet touch ground. Like Zeus with his scales, he had held and tilted the destiny of Greece. If ordeal lay ahead, what new life came forth without birth-pangs? They would say of him now, forever, that the hour had found the man.

  They brought Philip the news next day, as he ate his noon meal with Alexander. The King sent his squires out, before even opening the dispatch; like most men of the time, he had not mastered the knack of reading with the eye alone, he needed to hear himself. Alexander, taut with suspense, wondered why his father could not have trained himself, as he had done, to read in silence; it was only a matter of practice; though his lips still moved with the words, Hephaistion had assured him that no sound at all came out.

  Philip read levelly, without anger; the lines of his face only deepened into seams. He laid down the scroll by his dish, and said, “Well, if they will have it, they will have it.”

  “I’m sorry, Father; I suppose it had to be.” Could he not see that however the Thebans had voted, Athens would still have hated him? That there was no way he could have entered her gates, but as a victor? How had he nursed so long this insubstantial dream? Better leave him in peace, and think about realities. It would be the second war-plan, now.

  Athens and Thebes made ready at fever-heat to meet Philip’s southward march. Instead he went west, into the mountain ribs and gorges that fringed the Parnassos massif. He had been commissioned to drive the Amphissians from the sacred plain; this he would do. As for Thebes, let it be said he had only tested a doubtful ally’s loyalty, and knew the answer.

  The young men of Athens, roused for war, prepared to go north to Thebes. The omens were taken; the fires smoldered, the diviners misliked the entrails. Demosthenes, finding the dead hand of superstition raised against him, declared these portents were meant to reveal the traitors in their midst, paid by Philip to stop the war. When Phokion, back from a mission too late to change events, urged that the city should get an oracle from Delphi, Demosthenes laughed, and said that all the world knew Philip had bought the Pythia.

  The Thebans received the Athenians as the Lynkestids had welcomed Alexander, with careful courtesy. The Theban general disposed his joint force to guard the southern passes, and to block Philip from Amphissa. All over the wild stony uplands of Parnassos, and in the gorges of Phokis, the armies scouted and maneuvered. Trees turned brown, then bare; on the tops the first snows fell. Philip took his time. He was busy rebuilding the forts of the impious Phokians, who gratefully leased them to his men, in exchange for a cut in their fines to the plundered god.

  He would not be tempted into a major battle. There was a skirmish in a river gorge, another in an upland pass, both broken off when he saw his troops being drawn into awkward country. Athens hailed them as victories, and thanksgiving feasts were held.

  One winter night, Philip’s tent was pitched out of the wind against a cliff-face, above a river in snow-spate churning its stony gorge. On the slopes between, a pine wood had been felled for cook-fires. Dusk was falling; eddies of pure mountain air pierced through the heavy mingled smells of wood-smoke, porridge, bean broth, horses, crudely cured tent hides, and many thousand unwashed men. On leather camp-chairs, Philip and Alexander sat warming their wet boots at the glowing crumble of their fire. The steamy reek of his father’s feet blended for Alexander with the other homely and familiar scents of war. He himself was no more than fairly dirty; when streams were hard to come at, he would rub himself down with snow. His attention to these things had created a legend, of which he was still unaware, that he was endowed with a natural fragrance. Most of the men had not bathed for months. Their wives would scrub them, when they returned to the marriage bed.

  “Well,” said Philip, “didn’t I tell you Demosthenes’ patience would wear out before mine? I heard just now. He’s sent them.”

  “What? How many?”

  “The whole ten thousand.”

  “Is the man mad?”

  “No, he’s a party politician. The voters didn’t like to see paid troops drawing pay and rations in Attica, while citizens went to war. They’ve been on my mind; trained men, and too mobile where they were, too mobile by far. At the clinch, ten thousand extra men is a good many. Now we can deal with them first; they’re being sent direct to Amphissa.”

  “So we wait till they’re there. Then what?”

  Philip’s yellow teeth grinned in the firelight. “You know how I slipped away at Byzantion? We’ll try that again. We’ll have bad news, very bad news from Thrace. Revolt, Amphipolis threatened, every man needed to hold the frontier. I shall reply, in good clear writing, that we are marching north with all our forces. My courier will be captured, or maybe sell the letter. The enemy’s scouts will see us starting northward. At Kytinion we’ll go to ground, lie low, and wait.”

  “Then over the Grabian Pass, and attack at dawn?”

  “A stolen march, as your friend Xenophon says.”

  They stole it, before spring thaw had drowned the river-crossings. The mercenaries of Athens did their duty, as long as there was hope in it; after that, being professionals, they either got away to the coast, or asked for terms. Most of these last ended by enlisting with Philip, had their wounds dressed, and sat down to a good hot meal.

  The Amphissians surrendered without condition. Their government was exiled as the Sacred League had decreed. The holy plain was stripped of their impious husbandry, and left fallow for the god.

  In the first warmth of spring, at the theater of Delphi, the steep pale eagle-cliffs of the Phaidriades behind them, the great temple of Apollo before, and the vast gulf beyond, King Philip was crowned by the League with a golden laurel crown. He and his son were eulogized in long speeches and choric odes; a sculptor sketched them, for statues to adorn the temple.

  Afterwards, Alexander walked with his friends on the jostling terrace. It hummed and stank with the throng from all over Greece, and as far as Sicily, Italy and Egypt. Rich votaries marched with their offerings displayed on the heads of slaves, goats bleated, doves moaned in wicker cages; faces eager, devout, relieved, drawn with anxiety, came and went. It was one of the days for the oracle.

  Under the noise, Hephaistion said in Alexander’s ear, “Why don’t you, while you’re here?”

  “Not now.”

  “It would set your mind at rest.”

  “No, the time’s not right. One should take the seer by surprise, I think, in a place like this.”

  A sumptuous performance was put on in the theater; the protagonist was Thettalos, renowned for his heroic roles. He was a handsome ardent young man, whose Thessaliari blood was mixed with some Celtic strain; his training in Athens had contained his fire in good technique, and his natural rashness in good manners. He had often played in Pella, and was a favorite with Alexander, for whom he conjured some special vision of the hero’s soul. Now in Sophokles’ Ajax, doubling Ajax and Teukros, he made it unthinkable the one should outlive his honor, the other fail in loyalty to the dead. Alexander went round afterwards with Hephaistion to the skene-room. Thettalos had pulled off the mask of Teukros, and was toweling the sweat from his strongly carved face and short curly chestnut hair. At the sound of Alexander’s voice he emerged and glowed at him with large hazel eyes, saying, “I am glad if you were pleased. I was playing it all to you.”

  They talked awhile about his recent travels. At the end he sa
id, “I get about a good deal. If ever you have any business, never mind what, and need someone you can trust, you know it would be a privilege.”

  He was understood. Actors, the servants of Dionysos, were protected persons; often used as envoys, as secret agents even oftener. Alexander said, “Thank you, Thettalos. There is no one I would sooner ask.”

  When they were walking away towards the Stadium, Hephaistion said, “You know that man’s still in love with you?”

  “Well, one can at least be civil. He’s sensible, he doesn’t misunderstand. Someday I might need to trust him, one never knows.”

  With good spring weather, Philip moved down to the Gulf of Corinth, and took Naupaktos, which commanded its outer strait. In summer, he moved about in the country behind Parnassos, strengthening strongpoints, keeping alliances warm, making roads, feeding up his cavalry mounts. Now and again he would make feints to the east, where Athenians and Thebans tensely manned the passes. Then he would march away, leaving them flat and stale, and would hold maneuvers or games, to make sure his own men were neither.

  Even now, he sent once more envoys to Thebes and Athens, offering to discuss terms for a peace. Demosthenes proclaimed that Philip, twice repulsed by their arms, must be growing desperate; these offers proved it. One good push would finish him in the south.

  In late summer, when the barley between the trees in the olive orchards of Attica and Boeotia was yellowing in the ear, he went back to his base at Elateia, but left his strongpoints manned. The forward outposts of Thebes and Athens were at a pass about ten miles south. Till his offers were thrown back, he had done no more than tease them. Now he displayed his strength; they were outflanked, and could be cut off when he chose. Next day his scouts found them gone; he took and manned the pass.