Alexander the Great

by Philip Freeman

  Philip ordered the animal taken away, but Alexander confronted his father and proclaimed he was losing a priceless stallion because he lacked the courage and skill to manage him. The king was not used to being chastised before his men, especially by his young son, but Alexander was beside himself with frustration and repeated his charge. Philip was angry now and glared at his son with his eye.

  “Are you fool enough to criticize your elders? Do you really think that you know horses better than we do?”

  “This horse at least. I can handle him better than any man alive!”

  “Oh really? And if you can’t, what penalty are you willing to pay for your rashness?”

  “I will pay the whole price of the horse.”

  Even Philip couldn’t help but admire the bravado of his son and laughed along with his nobles at such youthful arrogance. But he agreed to the bargain and told his groomsmen to lead the horse to Alexander.

  Bold he was, but Alexander was not foolish. While the warriors of the court had seen only the wild nature of Bucephalas, the young boy had noticed something more—the horse became uncontrollable only when the sun was behind him. It was his own shadow on the ground that had frightened Bucephalas. Alexander cleverly took the reins and gently turned the stallion toward the sun so that he cast no shadow before him. He then stroked the horse and spoke to him gently for several minutes until he was calm. To the astonishment of his father and the watching crowd, Alexander then cast aside his cloak and sprang up on the horse’s back in a single motion. Bucephalas was ready to fight, but the boy held him on a tight rein as they started trotting across the plain. Little by little, as Alexander got the measure of the animal, he began to loosen the reins and let the mighty stallion gallop across the grasslands at full speed. Everyone was terrified that the prince would be killed, but Alexander and Bucephalas raced far away from the crowd then back at last toward his father. A great cheer went up from all assembled and Philip, bursting with pride, shed tears of joy and kissed his son as he dismounted. He then embraced Alexander and prophetically declared: “My son, you must seek out a kingdom equal to yourself—Macedonia is not big enough for you!”

  Philip knew that Alexander had now reached an age when his spirit and intellect had moved beyond the limits of his boyhood tutors. If he was someday to be king and take his place at the head of the rising power in the Greek world, he needed the kind of training that could come from only the greatest mind of the age. To Philip, this could be only one man—Aristotle. He was an unusual choice, since at this time Aristotle was a virtually unknown refugee living in exile, but the man who would one day become one of the most famous philosophers in history had known Philip since they were both boys. Aristotle was from the nearby town of Stagira on the Chalcidice peninsula, but he had been raised at the Macedonian court of Philip’s father, Amyntas, where his own father was court physician. Philip was only a year or two younger than Aristotle, so the boys had grown up together. At seventeen, Aristotle had left Macedonia and traveled to Athens, where he spent the next twenty years as a student of Plato at the famous Academy. When Plato died, Aristotle had expected to take over leadership of the school, but instead had been driven out of town by Demosthenes and the anti-Macedonian party because of his connections to Philip. That same year, his rebellious hometown of Stagira was destroyed by Philip’s army, so Aristotle fled to a city near Troy where the tyrant Hermias governed in the name of Persia. He remained there three years and even married the adopted daughter of the tyrant, but when Hermias was murdered, he retreated to the nearby island of Lesbos to teach and study the local flora and fauna. Three years later, when Philip invited him to return to Pella as Alexander’s tutor, Aristotle jumped at the chance.

  Aristotle was an inspired teacher. Just as Socrates had taught Plato and Plato in turn had instructed Aristotle, now the philosopher from Stagira would show Alexander the wonders of the universe. With his skinny legs, small eyes, persistent lisp, outrageous clothing, and gaudy rings, Aristotle must have made a laughable impression on the Macedonian prince, but when the man spoke, Alexander knew he was in the presence of genius. Unlike Plato, who valued theory and speculation above all else, Aristotle was a practical man. He was passionately curious about how things worked and was as likely to be found knee-deep in a swamp collecting tadpoles for dissection as in a library studying the art of poetics. In an age before specialization, Aristotle studied and wrote about everything. He practically invented logic and deduced that the universe must have been created by an all-powerful prime mover who, however, took no interest in his handiwork. Aristotle was the first great experimental scientist, with physics, astronomy, biology, embryology, meteorology, and much more in his realm of expertise. He knew from observation and experimentation that the earth was a sphere and that whales were mammals, not fish. He pioneered the study of ethics and argued that the greatest virtues come from moderation. He declared that man was a political animal—that is, a creature who finds his true home in the polis or city. No person could lead a meaningful life isolated from others, he declared, for a life without friends would not be worth living. But he also believed, as did almost everyone at his time, that slavery was a natural state of affairs and that men by nature were superior to women. He also held that people of barbarian nations were inferior to Greeks and should be treated as such.

  Alexander must have studied all these ideas and more under Aristotle, but the subjects that seemed to have interested him the most were medicine, science, and poetry. Aristotle learned the healing arts from his own father and passed the knowledge on to Alexander. As a general on the field of battle in later years, Alexander was known personally to treat wounds and prescribe medicines for his men. He also collected specimens of plants to send back to his teacher and mapped out the world with a precision previously unknown. He loved reading, especially Homer’s Iliad, which he revered as a handbook of war. Aristotle edited a volume of the poem for him that he carried on his campaigns in a special box. At night, Alexander placed it reverently under his pillow—along with a very sharp dagger.

  At the site of Mieza west of Pella, where the plains of Macedonia met soaring peaks, Aristotle tutored Alexander and other young nobles of the court, many of whom became the prince’s most loyal followers. These included his friend Ptolemy, a distant member of the royal family from the wild Macedonian highlands who would one day become pharaoh of Egypt. There was also the son of Philip’s trusted companion Antipater, a youth named Cassander, who suffered from ill health all his life but managed to become a powerful king after Alexander’s death. The slightly older Laomedon from the Aegean island of Lesbos would become invaluable to Alexander as he was fluent in Persian, while his Macedonian comrade Marsyas would become one of Alexander’s earliest biographers. Alexander also made friends with Nearchus, originally from the island of Crete, who would use his seafaring skills to sail the Indian Ocean. But of all the companions of Alexander who studied with Aristotle, Hephaestion of Pella would become his closest friend.

  Plutarch describes Alexander as fair in complexion with a ruddy face and piercing eyes. He was shorter in height than the average Macedonian, though he never let this hold him back in boyhood games or on the battlefield. His image is preserved in copies of marble busts made while he was still alive by court artists employed by Philip. These follow the conventions of Greek art in many ways, showing a clean-shaven young man with lean cheeks, a square jaw, and a fierce look of determination. A remarkably detailed ivory carving of Alexander just over an inch high from Philip’s tomb at Vergina shows similar features along with a muscular neck and deep-set eyes gazing upward to the heavens. Plutarch also says a very pleasant odor rose from his skin. Whether or not this was true, sweet smells were frequently associated with gods in the ancient world, as they were with Christian saints in medieval Europe.

  In a court of sexual excess available in a bewildering variety of forms, it might have been expected that the adolescent Alexander would indulge himself shamelessly. But
he showed a surprising lack of interest in the pleasures of the flesh, though he was impetuous and bold in every other way. He greatly valued self-control and had about him an air of seriousness well beyond his years. From boyhood, his relationships with women were unusually respectful in a world where slave girls, concubines, and even wives were treated as property. His mother, Olympias, was so worried about Alexander’s apparent lack of interest in girls that she procured for him the services of a beautiful Thracian prostitute named Callixeina in hopes of sparking his interest, but to no avail. It seems that the unrestrained passion and subsequent weariness of lovemaking deeply troubled the young man. As Alexander would confess years later, sex and sleep more than anything else reminded him that he was mortal.

  One day, when Alexander was asked if he would be willing to compete in the footrace at the upcoming Olympic games, the prince replied that he would, but only if he could compete against kings. If anyone doubted his desire to rule and seek glory on the battlefield, he banished these doubts when he was only sixteen years old. While Philip was busy leading an expedition against his rebellious ally Byzantium, the king left his son at Pella as regent of the Macedonian kingdom. When Philip handed Alexander the royal seal ring granting him power to rule in his stead, there were surely stern words of fatherly warning not to do anything rash. The ring was meant to be a test. If Alexander could successfully resist the temptations of such power for a few months, his position as heir would be secured.

  But on the frontiers of a kingdom such as Macedonia, there were always enemies waiting to pounce. The wild Thracian Maedi in the mountains to the north had been kept in check for years by Philip’s army. When news reached them that Philip and his troops were in distant Byzantium with only a boy left behind on the throne, they smelled opportunity. The tribesmen left their mountain hideouts and began moving down the Strymon valley above Amphipolis with their hearts set on plunder and revenge.

  As soon as word reached Pella, Alexander gathered whatever forces his father had left behind and headed north for his first taste of battle. Details are few, but we know that over the next few weeks Alexander destroyed the Maedi and took over their land. Poorly suited though it was for all but raising goats, the mountains were rich in iron needed for forging weapons. Then in a bold move that foreshadowed future colonization in Asia, Alexander settled a mixed population of Macedonians and foreigners at a Maedi stronghold and renamed the settlement Alexandropolis—city of Alexander. Plutarch says Philip was pleased when he heard the news of Alexander’s victory, but any teenager who named a city for himself bore watching.

  Alexander soon had an even greater opportunity to prove his worth. Philip had reached the limit of his patience with the Athenians and their endless conspiracies against him. Demosthenes had been warning for years that Macedonia—not Sparta, Thebes, or even Persia—was the greatest threat to their city. With Athenian pirates harassing his coasts and the joint efforts of Athens and Persia to crush his kingdom, Philip decided to strike first. He seized the Athenian grain fleet sailing from the Black Sea as it passed Macedonia, depriving the city of its most important source of food. Then he marched south with his army before anyone knew what was happening and occupied the town of Elatea north of Thebes. Philip was hoping to provoke the Athenians into doing something foolish—and he was not disappointed. Athens was still an important sea power, but it had not fought a significant land battle in decades. Demosthenes, nonetheless, whipped the Athenians into a war frenzy, flattering them that they were the heirs of the victors at Marathon and would certainly crush this upstart barbarian on the field of battle. The Athenians also formed an alliance with Thebes, warning their northern neighbor that Philip would destroy them on his way to attack Athens. Thus on a hot day in early August of 338, the Athenians and their allies, including the elite Sacred Band of Thebes, arrived at Philip’s camp in a narrow valley in central Greece near the village of Chaeronea.

  The armies that gathered on the swampy plain little more than a mile across were enormous, perhaps sixty thousand men in all, with numbers roughly equal on both sides. But whereas the Athenians were mostly shopkeepers and farmers, the Macedonians were professional soldiers who for years had fought against both Greek hoplites and all manner of savage warriors from the mountains of the north. And yet, it was the three hundred grim-faced lovers of the Theban Sacred Band that worried Philip the most. He had to break them if he was to win the battle. It is surprising, therefore, that Philip placed his now eighteen-year-old son, Alexander, at the crucial point on the end of the Macedonian line opposite the Sacred Band.

  Philip’s strategy was essentially the same he had first used years earlier against the Illyrians. While the Athenians and their allies formed a straight line across the valley, the Macedonians stood at an angled formation pressing the Athenian line only on the far left. Philip then ordered his men to advance, so that the Athenians on the left felt the full force of the Macedonian attack while those to the right were still untouched. At first, the Athenians held the enemy and even began to force them back. Those farther down the line on the right saw the Macedonians retreating and broke ranks to join in the attack—exactly as Philip knew they would. While the more disciplined Thebans led by the Sacred Band held their line, a gap opened up in the Athenian center and in rushed the cavalry of Alexander. He quickly surrounded the Thebans while his father moved against the Athenians. The sons of Marathon collapsed in shambles and fled, with at least a thousand killed and twice that number captured. Many of Athens’s best generals stood their ground and were slain, but among those who ran in terror from the battlefield was the orator Demosthenes. The common soldiers from Thebes fared little better, but the men of the Sacred Band formed a circle and faced Alexander and his Macedonians, prepared to fight to the death. Their corpses soon piled on top of one another until at last there was no one left to fight. Only those few too wounded to resist were taken alive, while the rest fell where they stood. Philip honored the dead of the Sacred Band by burying them on the battlefield and celebrated their courage with the towering statue of a lion that still stands in the quiet valley of Chaeronea.

  Philip was gracious in his victory, though he was reluctant to give Alexander the credit he deserved for his decisive role in the battle. The king could have marched south and destroyed both Thebes and Athens, but instead he sent an embassy, led by Alexander, to the Athenian assembly seeking peace. Philip’s magnanimity was based on the simple calculation that Athens, especially its navy, was more valuable to him intact. All Athenian property and persons would be respected, while he also returned the Athenian prisoners captured at Chaeronea unharmed and without ransom. He allowed the Athenians to maintain control over the Aegean islands they held and promised not to garrison Macedonian troops in their town. All he asked in return was that Athens become his ally. The assembly was so grateful not to be facing Macedonian troops on the city walls that it granted Philip everything he asked for and conferred Athenian citizenship upon the king and his son. The Athenians even erected a statue of Philip in the marketplace.

  For Alexander, the embassy to Athens must have been a grand occasion, the only time he would visit the most famous city in Greece. There he saw the Acropolis soaring above the town, topped by the Parthenon containing the gilded statue of the virgin goddess Athena. As with all ancient Greek buildings and sculpture, those on the Acropolis were painted in brilliant colors—no Greek would have endured bare white marble. Alexander surely visited the theater of Dionysus on the slopes just below the Parthenon, the very place where Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex had first been performed. On the hill of the Pnyx across from the Acropolis was the meeting place of the assembly, where Pericles had declared that future generations would marvel at all that Athens had achieved. Nearby was the Academy, where his teacher Aristotle had studied, and the agora, where Socrates had cornered hapless citizens, demanding they examine their most cherished beliefs. All of Athens stretched before him that glorious summer, the heart of Greek history and culture
whose image he would cherish the rest of his life.

  Meanwhile, Philip was wasting no time consolidating his hold on Greece. That winter he called for a general assembly of all the Greek cities at Corinth. In the aftermath of Chaeronea, no one dared to refuse, except for the eternally belligerent state of Sparta. Philip could have wiped the Spartans off the map, but they were no real threat to him and he must have calculated that their absence made the proceedings seem almost voluntary. The terms the king laid out at Corinth were simple—the Greek states were to live in peace with one another, defend each other in case of attack, submit to the decisions of a central representative council (the synedrion), and form an alliance with Macedonia, swearing to uphold him and his descendants as leaders of a unified military force. Although this League of Corinth was cast in a democratic mold, there was never any doubt that Philip was now the undisputed ruler of all of Greece.

  In his first decision as military leader of the League, Philip proposed a bold plan that he had nurtured for many years—the invasion of the Persian Empire. It was not a quixotic notion, given the political situation in Persia at the time. The Athenian orator Isocrates, now in his nineties, had in fact been advocating such a Panhellenic crusade for decades, though mostly in hope of giving the Greeks someone to fight besides each other. But the aged Isocrates saw at last in Philip a leader with the military might and authority to unite the Greeks in a grand campaign against Persia to avenge the atrocities of the past and liberate the Greek cities on the Aegean coast of Asia from Persian rule. Philip cared no more for the lofty ideals of Panhellenism than he did for democracy, but the respected orator offered him convenient propaganda for his own military ambitions. Not that he entertained foolish dreams of conquering the whole Persian Empire, but its rich Greek cities in nearby Asia Minor were far away from the heartland of Persia. The empire was stretched thin from years of rebellion in Egypt and other provinces, while the palace at Susa was in chaos with the recent assassination of the Great King Artaxerxes III by the eunuch and grand vizier Bagoas. Persian leadership had passed to Arses, the young and untested son of Artaxerxes III, who as Artaxerxes IV was firmly under the thumb of his father’s assassin. The timing could not have been better for Philip. With Greece unified under his command and the Persian leadership in crisis, the Greek cities across the Aegean were delightfully vulnerable. The League of Corinth had no choice but to elect Philip leader of the combined Greek and Macedonian crusade against the Persian Empire.