According to Plutarch, “he did not cover over or hide his scars, but displayed them openly as symbolic representations, cut into his body, of virtue and courage.”
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CITY-STATES DOMINATED BY MIDDLE-CLASS farmers and traders succeeded the feudal realms. The style of battle changed to match the new politics. This was the age of the citizen militia. In place of well-born charioteers hurling spears at individual opponents came disciplined troops of hoplites. These were heavily armed soldiers who marched in a tight formation called the phalanx.
The hoplite wore a metal helmet, a breastplate, greaves, and thigh pieces. He carried two thrusting spears and swords for hand-to-hand fighting, and protected himself with a large round shield, which also helped to cover his neighbor on the left and presented a shield wall to the enemy. The main strength of the phalanx lay in its momentum. Its function was to be a human battering ram and crash through the enemy’s line. It pushed and it shoved. Most casualties were incurred once there had been a decision: the losers were slaughtered in flight.
Provided it held together and remained strictly in formation, the phalanx was hard to beat. However, it had some distinct disadvantages. It could not change front rapidly or keep up an orderly pursuit. It needed flat ground; bumps, holes, ditches, streams, and trees and bushes made it hard for men to keep their dressing. Once gaps appeared, they were vulnerable and could be broken up.
Because hoplites held their shields on their left arms, those who stood in the last file on the right were unprotected if outflanked, so they had a tendency to drift defensively rightward. This would stretch and thin the line, creating yet more dangerous gaps.
A further difficulty was that when each side in a battle presented a phalanx, the outcome could be a stalemate and a draw. The Thebans were the first to recognize this flaw and to find a solution. They tried it out on a summer’s day in 371, outside a village called Leuctra in Boeotia. They faced the Spartans, whose army was generally held to be the finest of the day, and their allies.
As was usual, the Spartan phalanx took up the place of honor on the right of the battle line. Facing it on the Theban left, Epaminondas massed a column of infantry that was a phenomenal fifty ranks deep. The rest of his army was much weaker and was echeloned back so that it would not be tested in fighting. After a cavalry engagement, his mega-phalanx smashed the enemy’s right wing by brute force. The result was a total victory for the Thebans, and Spartan power was broken for good.
Young Philip absorbed the military reforms of Epaminondas and the Theban’s great friend Pelopidas with red-hot interest. We may imagine him listening to talk of tactics at Pammenes’s dinner table and taking mental notes about the revolutionary new strategy of battle.
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SOME YEARS LATER, when Philip became king, he remodeled the remains of the Macedonian army. What he had at his disposal was a strong cavalry force, called the Companions, which was recruited from the aristocracy (who could afford the upkeep of horses), and an undisciplined and untrained peasant infantry militia, always anxious to return home and look after their farms and harvests. He developed it into a well-trained standing army, capable of taking on all comers.
First of all, he stole the idea of the deep Theban phalanx, with an important addition. Its weakness was that it would tend to crumble at the point of impact like a rugby football scrum. So he replaced the throwing spears with long pikes or sarissas. These were about eighteen feet long and had to be held two-handed. In a charge the sarissas of the first four or five ranks projected well forward beyond the front of the phalanx, which usually consisted of sixteen ranks. The remainder held their pikes up in the air to disrupt the impact of missiles. Hoplites who were used to hand-to-hand combat found it very hard to cope with this lethal outsized porcupine.
That said, the overwhelming phalanx shock could not always be repeated if other armies also deployed similar deep infantry formations. For victory Philip depended on his heavily armed cavalry, which was probably the best in the Hellenic world. Horsemen had the obvious advantage of mobility. While the phalanx was holding its ground and fully occupying the enemy infantry’s attention, his aggressive and fast-moving cavalry could gallop about the battlefield, slashing and stabbing foot soldiers from above, sway the balance of advantage, and win the day.
The Greek city-states, often democracies, paid little attention to cavalry because horses were expensive to run and associated with discredited aristocratic elites. Such Greek cavalry as there was usually formed into a square, sixteen horsemen wide and sixteen deep. The excellent Thessalian horsemen deployed in a diamond configuration, which Philip modified into a triangle. The commander would occupy the tip or point nearest the enemy. The cavalrymen behind him followed his galloping horse and shifted direction as and when he did. This unique flexibility came at a serious risk of injury or death to the commander if he was surrounded by the enemy. At every moment during a charge, men had to be ready to come to his rescue. As Asclepiodotus, a military strategist of the first century B.C., observed: “Wheeling was thus easier than in the square formation, since all have their eyes fixed on the single squadron-commander, as is the case also in the flight of cranes.”
In many armies of the day, civilians approached the number of combatants. Philip cut back the number of support staff and banned wives and children, prostitutes, small-time traders, and other camp followers. Carts were forbidden.
With the passage of time, Philip enlarged his army. When he assumed the throne he commanded about 10,000 infantry and 600 cavalry. By his death this had risen to 24,000 infantry and 3,000 cavalry. The wage for a foot soldier was one drachma a day; for a horseman, three drachmas. No Greek city-state could afford to keep a standing army of this size, but nobody drew the obvious conclusion that the balance of power in the eastern Mediterranean had been transformed. The change in degree was so great that it had insensibly become a change in kind.
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AT THE HEART OF Philip’s approach were training, discipline, and the maintenance of group morale. He held constant maneuvers and forced marches. He made his men carry their own provisions (including a thirty-day ration of flour) and equipment. He taught them to forage for food.
His objective was to make individual soldiers, and indeed the army itself, as nimble and self-sufficient as possible. The king mingled among his men, but he was no soft touch. Officers were disciplined as severely as other ranks. When Philip found one of them taking warm baths, he stripped him of his command. “In Macedonia,” he said tartly, “we don’t even allow a woman in childbirth to use warm water.” He beat another man for breaking ranks when thirsty and going for a drink in a tavern.
Off duty, though, Philip was very much more relaxed. If we are to believe a contemporary, the fourth-century historian Theopompus, who spent considerable time as the king’s guest, that would be to put it mildly. He wrote:
Philip’s court in Macedonia was the rendez-vous of all the most debauched and shameless characters in Greece or elsewhere. They were styled the king’s Companions. As a rule, Philip showed no favor to respectable men who took care of their property, but those he honored and promoted were high spenders who passed their time drinking and gambling. In consequence, he not only encouraged them in their vices, but made them past masters in every kind of wickedness and lewdness….Some of them used to shave their bodies and make them smooth despite the fact that they were men not women, and others actually had sex with each other though old enough to be bearded. They took two or three male prostitutes around with them and themselves offered the same service to others. In effect, they were not courtiers but courtesans, not soldiers but strumpets. They were natural man-killers, but their behavior turned them into man-whores.
We do not need to take this invective too literally, but throughout the ages soldiers at leisure have been known to binge drin
k and to hunt for sexual conquests. What is perhaps unusual is the impression given of an open and dominant homosexual subculture. We know Philip admired that brigade of lovers, the Theban Band. The deep phalanx may not have been the only innovation the young hostage thought worthy of imitation.
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PHILIP’S BABY SON, ALEXANDER, grew up in the court at Pella. If the boy fashions the man, the experiences of his early years must have cast a long shadow forward across his maturity.
As time passed and he moved from infancy through childhood and into his teens, he learned about the world he was growing up in. He was a bright little boy and stored the data in his mind for future use.
Alexander lived in a tough, bizarre environment. That palace conspiracies were toxic and bloody was one of the bitter lessons that history taught him. The only way forward was to react quickly and decisively to perceived threats. The gory fate of ancestral kings in general, and his father’s ruthless actions at the outset of his reign in particular, made the point very clearly.
The thrilling story of the two Persian invasions will have excited Alexander. It identified an enemy—defeated, but powerful and malevolent for all that. Revenge is a tasty dish for the young imagination, and the shame of Macedonia’s subjection to the Great King still rankled.
The victories at Marathon and Salamis underlined the superiority of the Greek civilization which his father and the Macedonians sought to emulate and to which they claimed brassily to belong.
He was introduced to the rudiments of warfare and understood that fighting was to be his destiny. He must also have taken on board as normal the rough-and-ready Macedonian court. He admired his often absent father, and his father loved and was proud of his clever and fearless son. Philip unwarily trained him for high command at the first possible moment.
Alexander inhabited a violently masculine society—with one exception, his terrifying mother. She was Olympias, a princess from Epirus. From the moment of his birth her only care was to advance her son’s interest with fiery ferocity. Even when he was a married adult, she was to remain the most important woman in his life.
CHAPTER 2
THE APPRENTICE
The young girl was helped down from the ship onto the open shore.
She was Polyxena, a princess of the Molossians, the leading tribe of the small realm of Epirus in northwestern Greece. She had just landed on the rocky island of Samothrace, some miles south of the coastline of Thrace.
The island looked as if a colossal boulder of granite and basalt had been tossed into the sea. Here and there, white foaming waterfalls streamed down precipitous cliffs. There was no cultivatable earth and the few inhabitants eked out a living, as they do now, from fishing and tourism. In Polyxena’s day, visitors stayed in the island’s only urban settlement, which was guarded by cyclopean walls built from trimmed granite rocks. They came as pilgrims, for not far from the town stood the Sanctuary of the Great Gods in a wooded gorge.
Here arcane rites, or Mysteries, took place in honor of deities of the underworld, among them the fertility goddess the Great Mother. Others have enigmatic non-Greek names—Axieros, Axiokersa, Axiokersos, and Kasmilos. The nature of the ceremonies was a deep secret and adepts were silent about them, so that little information has come down to us; but their main attraction will have been the promise of an afterlife. Anyone could take part, free or slave, man or woman, adults or children, and people came from across the eastern Mediterranean.
It seems that prayers were offered up and pigs and sheep were sacrificed on rock altars. Libations were poured into ritual pits. Initiates underwent two stages. There were ritual dances in a large hall followed by a showing of sacred symbols in a smaller room. We may imagine torches in the darkness. Successful participants were probably given a purple belt and an iron ring to mark their sacred status and to symbolize the protection that initiation would confer.
Every summer, perhaps in July, a festival was staged, which centered on the performance of a sacred play featuring a ritual wedding. Although the island remained open for spiritual business all the year round, it may have been for this annual event that Polyxena and her family came to Samothrace.
During the ceremonies she met for the first time a dashing young prince, Philip of Macedonia. She was perhaps ten years old and the date was probably 365. This was soon after Philip had returned to his homeland following his spell as a hostage in Thebes. The trip to Samothrace may have been a celebration to mark his release.
We are told that the prince fell for Polyxena, whom we can suppose to have been a pretty and lively girl, and the couple were engaged. Presumably this was not an erotic infatuation, but a cool assessment of her likely future attractiveness. Rather more to the point, Epirus was of strategic importance, lying as it did on Macedonia’s northern frontier. A marriage alliance would cement friendly relations between the two countries. It is perfectly possible that the encounter in a famous religious setting was planned in advance. This would enhance the authority or distinction of a betrothal that was as much a business proposition as a romantic affair.
At some point Polyxena acquired another name, Myrtale, after the Greek word for myrtle. The plant was sacred to the goddess of love, Aphrodite, who may have had a connection with the Mysteries at Samothrace. This suggests that the name was conferred on the girl to mark her engagement to Philip. Alternatively, she adopted it a little later at a coming-of-age ceremony.
The wedding was solemnized about 358 or 357 when Polyxena or Myrtale was of childbearing age. It must have been on this auspicious occasion that the young princess name-shifted again. Doubtless inspired by the Macedonian festival of Olympian Zeus, she was addressed from now on as Olympias, the name by which she is known to history.
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ELITE WOMEN IN ANCIENT Greece were expected to spend their lives indoors and to concern themselves exclusively with household matters. They did not attend dinner parties even in their own homes. They might be briefly seen shopping in the marketplace under the watchful eyes of a domestic slave, or participating in religious festivals. Apart from their close male relatives, they met men only at weddings and funerals. The ideal female was one whom nobody talked about.
But in the northern kingdoms, such as Macedonia and Epirus, the situation was very different. A noblewoman or female member of a royal family played a far more prominent religious, social, and, in some circumstances, political role. She could hold and dispose of her own property and act as guardian for her children when minors. She engaged in diplomacy and corresponded with her relatives abroad; it is likely that she was literate. Throughout her life Olympias was a fervent letter-writer.
The career of Queen Eurydice, as reported, offered a ruthless role model for ambitious princesses such as Olympias. The nearest comparators to the Macedonian woman were to be found in the heroic pages of Homer and the great Athenian tragedies. These queens and princesses are ferociously independent.
Among them, Clytemnestra, queen of Mycenae in the Peloponnese, the peninsula that makes up southern Greece, ruled her kingdom without trouble during her husband Agamemnon’s ten-year absence at the siege of Troy. When he returned home she stabbed him to death in the bath after trapping him inside a voluminous purple robe. The murder was payback for the sacrificial death of their daughter, Iphigenia, at her father’s hands.
Here where I struck I stand and see my task achieved.
Yes, this is my work and I claim it.
Another fictional woman with agency was the witch Medea, who set up house in the Greek city of Corinth with Jason of the Argonauts. A weak but ambitious man, he decided to marry the king’s daughter. Medea, enraged, sent the bride a splendid but poisoned wedding dress and slaughtered her own two sons by Jason.
She admitted to no regrets. “It was not for you or your princess to trample on my love and live a life of plea
sure, laughing at me,” she said. “So call me lioness, yes, if you wish to, for I have my claws in your heart as you deserve.”
We have no evidence that Olympias was a student of Greek tragedy, but her character and career betray a remarkable family resemblance to these women of legend. Few laughed at her with impunity—not even her husband.
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SOME TIME AFTER THEIR MARRIAGE, Philip visited his wife’s bedroom to have sex with her. He was disconcerted to find a snake stretched out alongside her in her bed as she slept. Plutarch tells us this had the effect of cooling the king’s ardor and that he seldom came to sleep with the queen thereafter.
This would appear to have all the markings of a tall story. However, Olympias was a spiritual woman. An initiate of the transcendental Orphic religion, she took part, as did many Macedonian women, in the Bacchic rites of Dionysus. He was the god of transcendence through the wine harvest, theater, and out-of-body experiences.
Worshippers, mainly women but also men, flocked out into wooded mountains. They became delirious with excitement and began to rave. Exactly what took place during these nocturnal observances was a deep secret accessed only by initiates, but it seems that the climax involved the eating of raw goat flesh. This may have restaged the fate of Dionysus himself, who in his babyhood was ripped to pieces and eaten before being born again at the command of Zeus, king of the gods. The deep secret must have centered on the magical cycle of life, death, and rebirth. This gave new hope to adepts, desperate to ensure futurity.
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