We shall not go far wrong if we regard these rites as orgies both in the original and the contemporary senses of the word—namely, a frenzied mystical trance and sexual license.
Half a century or so earlier, during his stay at Pella under King Archelaus, the aged Euripides wrote his last play and masterpiece, The Bacchae, which tells a tragic story of the lethal power Dionysus exerts over his followers. A chorus of female devotees sings,
What sweetness is in the mountains!
Whenever the Bacchant, wearing the sacred fawn skin,
Falls to the ground after the running dance,
He hunts the blood of the slaughtered goat,
A raw-eaten delight.
Stupefied by the god, the worshipper sees a transformed paradisal landscape:
The plain flows with milk, it flows with wine,
It flows with the nectar of bees.
The air is thick with the smoke of Syrian myrrh.
As a member of the royal family, the queen probably played a leadership role in the Bacchic revels. Plutarch writes that Olympias used
to enter into these states of possession and surrender herself to the inspiration of the god with even wilder abandon than the others. She would introduce into the festal procession numbers of large snakes, hand-tamed. They terrified the male spectators as they raised their heads from the wreaths of ivy and the sacred winnowing-baskets, or twined themselves around the wands and garlands of the women.
Snakes were associated in ancient times with religious cults, representative, or at least suggestive of, the phallus. The god of medicine, Asclepius, used them as healers. The dead were sometimes believed to return as serpentine revenants.
Many years later when Pella had dwindled into a village, the stories about the Macedonian queen received some surprising confirmation. The Greek author Lucian reported in the second century A.D. that snakes were still to be found there, perhaps descended from those belonging to Olympias. They were
great serpents, quite tame and gentle, so that they were kept by women, slept with children, let themselves be stepped upon, were not angry when they were stroked, and took milk from the breast just like babies.
Whichever way one looked at the matter, Olympias was a formidable agent in a man’s world.
* * *
—
THE CHILDHOOD OF HER SON, Alexander, is encrusted with legends invented after he had grown up and indeed postmortem, but they are worth noting because they reflect authentic insights of his contemporaries into his personality. They show him to have been as much of a handful as his mother.
From about the age of seven the boy left the care of women and received schooling in the Greek manner. He was provided with a paedogogus called Leonidas, a relative of Olympias. A paedogogus was usually a trustworthy slave who accompanied a boy to his classes. He made sure his charge behaved politely and obediently and was protected from unwelcome sexual advances. But in this case Leonidas acted as a kind of headmaster and supervised a range of specialist teachers. He became, in effect, the boy’s moral tutor.
Leonidas was a severe disciplinarian. The young Alexander accepted, but never forgot, a reprimand. Once the frugal and austere paedogogus caught him throwing an excessive amount of frankincense onto an altar while sacrificing. He told the boy: “Once you have conquered the lands that produce this spice you can be as extravagant as you like. Till then, don’t waste what you’ve got.”
Years later, at the siege of Gaza, when he could access as much frankincense as he liked, Alexander sent Leonidas half a ton of it together with a large quantity of myrrh, with the message “I have sent you plenty of myrrh and frankincense so that from now on you don’t need to be mean to the gods any longer.” This was generosity so crushing as to qualify as revenge. Alexander had an excellent memory and he watered his grudges.
It appears that in due course a tutor took over Alexander’s education, a boorish (but also well-born) personality called Lysimachus. He understood the art of flattery and apparently got the job by emphasizing the royal family’s fine Homeric family tree. He referred to Alexander as Achilles, a much appreciated compliment. He called Philip by the name of Achilles’ father, Peleus, and spoke of himself as Phoenix, the trusty warrior who had helped raise Achilles as a child and looked after him as if he were his son.
* * *
—
A FAMOUS STORY ABOUT ALEXANDER, perceptive if perhaps apocryphal, throws light on his ability to notice a telling detail, however slight, and use it to his advantage.
Thessaly with its broad plains in northern Greece was well-known for the high quality of its horses. Then one day, perhaps in 347 when the little crown prince was about eight or nine, a tall, finely bred stallion was presented to Philip for sale by a Thessalian dealer. He was a beautiful animal, in his prime, black with a white blaze on his forehead. He had been branded with the mark of his owner, a bull’s head, and was named by the Greek word for bull’s head, Bucephalas. The king showed some interest, despite the extraordinarily high asking price of thirteen talents, and went down to the plain to watch the horse’s trials.
The animal proved to be unmanageable and evidently had not yet been broken in. He was upset by the shouting of the grooms and refused to allow anyone to mount him. Philip was angry and ordered that Bucephalas be taken away.
A small voice piped up. “What a horse they are losing,” said Alexander. “And all because they’ve no idea how to handle him, or don’t dare try.” He repeated his complaint several times and his father realized the child was upset.
“Are you criticizing your elders and betters?” Philip asked. “Do you think you know more than them or could handle a horse better?”
“Well, I could handle this one better.”
“If you can’t, what punishment will you deserve for being so cheeky?”
“I’ll pay for the horse!”
Everyone laughed, but Alexander was being serious. He agreed to the bet with his father.
Alexander walked briskly up to Bucephalas and took hold of his bridle and turned him to face the sun. This was crucial, for he alone had noticed that the horse shied at the sight of his shadow as it fell in front of him and moved whenever he did.
He ran alongside Bucephalas, stroking him to calm him down. Once the horse had recovered his spirits, Alexander threw aside his cloak and vaulted onto his back. He used the bit cautiously and then gave him his head. Bucephalas, his confidence fully restored, broke into a gallop.
The king and his court were on tenterhooks, but once they saw that the boy had mastered the horse, broke into spontaneous applause. Philip, we are told, wept for joy. He kissed Alexander when he had dismounted and is supposed to have remarked: “My boy, we’ll have to find a suitable kingdom for you. Macedonia is too small.”
A Corinthian merchant and aristocrat called Demaratus was a strongly pro-Macedonian statesman and a guest-friend of Philip. To be a “guest-friend” was to be protected by the iron taboos of ancient Greek hospitality. A traveler on political and commercial missions, Demaratus was present at the incident with the horse and immediately volunteered its selling price. He gave Bucephalas to Alexander.
Just as he had an indelible memory for an insult, so the boy never forgot a favor. Loyalty was his watchword. The Corinthian will reappear in this long story.
* * *
—
ALEXANDER WAS OBLIGED TO grow up quickly. He was introduced to the alcoholic world of Macedonian diplomacy when still only a child. In 346, the year after his acquisition of Bucephalas, a political delegation from the city of Athens, the most formidable sea power of the age, arrived in Pella and was treated to the usual boisterous banquet. As the wine went round after the meal, the ten-year-old crown prince played music on the cithara (a kind of lyre). Doubtless he acquitted himself admirably—perhaps too admirably, for it may have be
en on this occasion that Philip asked drily: “Aren’t you ashamed to pluck the strings so well?” It was enough if a ruler could find time to listen while others played. That was the point and the boy took it. We hear no more of the cithara.
The presence of foreign embassies in Pella gave Alexander an opportunity to soak up detail about the world beyond Macedonia. He was especially interested in the great, mysterious empire of the Persians, which in the unforgotten past had conquered and annexed his father’s kingdom. In the same year as his performance at the feast for the Athenian envoys, a famous public intellectual, Isocrates, issued a much read and much debated pamphlet inviting Philip to lead all the Greeks on a military expedition that would pay the Great King back for his predecessors’ invasions not only of their homelands, but also of the Ionian cities of Asia. The king had not taken up the offer, but his son could dream of leading a crusade.
One day envoys from the Great King in faraway Susa, the Persian capital, arrived in Macedonia. Philip happened to be away, so Alexander, still a boy, received them in his place. According to Plutarch, he cross-examined them carefully, showing no interest in the famous Hanging Gardens of Babylon nor in how the Great King was dressed, but only in matters of substance.
What especially won his attention was the system of roads the Persians had established. Old caravan routes had been transformed into military highways, and bridges or fords were installed at river crossings. This enabled imperial troops to move fast to trouble spots. At intervals, state rest houses provided accommodation and a change of horses: this allowed official messengers to communicate speedily with the provinces, and state dignitaries to travel easily around the empire.
The incident gives us an Alexander who was a greedy consumer of data. He seems already to have grasped the fact that a military victory required competent logistics and organization. A good general—and we may be sure that he already imagined himself as one—found out all he could about the land in which he intended to campaign before marching into it.
* * *
—
PHILIP AND OLYMPIAS WERE very proud of their son, but two aspects of his personality worried them—his violently impulsive nature and, after the arrival of puberty, his surprising lack of interest in sex.
Alexander resented and resisted direct orders, although he could be persuaded by an appeal to reason. His parents took the view that he needed, in the words of the great Athenian tragedian, Sophocles, “the rudder’s guidance and the bit’s restraint.” The task of training him could not be left to the common run of teachers and the routine curriculum of poetry, music, and rhetoric, or the art of public speaking.
So who in the civilized Greek world was the leading spokesman for rationality? There was no competition. At the age of forty, Aristotle was a well-known philosopher with a high reputation. He had studied for twenty years at Plato’s informal university, the Academy in Athens. He conducted groundbreaking zoological research in the eastern Mediterranean, for in the ancient world there was little distinction drawn between philosophical thought and practical research. He also wrote and taught.
Aristotle spoke with a lisp; he had skinny calves and small eyes. He dressed well, wore rings, and had his hair cut short. His smart appearance contradicted the example of Socrates, the very model of a Greek philosopher, who seldom washed either his clothes or himself.
In 343 Philip decided to hire Aristotle as tutor to his thirteen-year-old son. Recruiting him was made all the easier because his father had been an official physician at the Macedonian court during the reign of Philip’s father, Amyntas III. In their late teens they had met at Pella and so were already acquainted. The philosopher understood Macedonian culture in general and the exotic ways of the Macedonian royal family in particular.
Aristotle was a tough bargainer and only accepted the king’s invitation on the condition that he rebuild Aristotle’s native city, Stageira, a long-established city-state in the three-pronged peninsula of Chalcidice. Philip had sacked it five years previously in one of his many wars, but, ever the dealmaker, he seldom objected to changing his mind. He agreed to the condition: the inhabitants, who had been sold into slavery, were bought back, and the city rose from the ground again and was repopulated. A new aqueduct was constructed and two shrines to Demeter, goddess of the harvest, were built.
It was wisely decided that Alexander and a group of pupils of his own age should be removed from the temptations of a capital city and a busy court. Aristotle held his classes at Mieza, a pastoral retreat, also called the Gardens of Midas after its rich orchards and vineyards. Here a shrine sacred to the Nymphs was linked to two natural caves. Part of the complex was protected from the sun by a portico. Plutarch writes that in his day, around the turn of the first century A.D., guides still
show you Aristotle’s stone seats, and the shady walks where he used to spend time. It appears that Alexander learned from him not only the principles of ethics and politics, but also something of those more abstruse and esoteric studies which philosophers do not impart to the general run of students, but reserve for spoken communication with the initiated.
Like every Greek boy, Alexander will have practiced gymnastics and competitive sports throughout his childhood and teen years and presumably undergone some form of military training, although the ancient sources are silent. An anecdote has come down to us which shows him in a priggish light. He was the fastest runner among the boys of his own age, but when they suggested he enter the Olympic Games, he demurred. The contest would be unfair, he claimed. If he won, it would merely be over commoners, and if he lost it would be the defeat of a prince.
On the academic front, little is known in detail of what Aristotle taught him, although it will have included elements of the regular Greek syllabus, the study of poetry, and the art of public speaking. His royal student seems to have shown an interest in a branch of rhetoric called eristics. This is the art of arguing a case from opposing points of view. Isocrates came to hear of this and was displeased. He wrote to Alexander, warning him to take care: kings command rather than debate.
Aristotle’s career shows an abiding emphasis on information gathering in many fields of research—literary, scientific, medical, biological, political, and philosophical. He collected maps (surely of special interest to the crown prince) and manuscripts. He revised and continued a list of winners at the Olympic Games and he commissioned reports on the constitutions of Greek states. These concerns must have been reflected in his curriculum.
Aristotle, who had an opinion about everything, pronounced on the geography of the world. The earth was a globe at the center of the universe and was “far smaller than some of the stars.” A long habitable band of land lay in each of the two hemispheres. They were separated by an impassably hot zone and were surrounded by endless water, the outer Ocean. There was not the slightest suggestion of a New World somewhere beyond the seas and awaiting discovery.
The band in the northern hemisphere began at the Atlantic coast of Africa (which the Greeks called Libya) and the Pillars of Heracles, and stretched as far as to the Punjab. Beyond the Pillars of Heracles and India lay nothing except sea, which severed the habitable land and prevented it forming a continuous belt around the earth. This caught Alexander’s imagination and to reach India and the shores of Ocean became one of his dreams.
Presumably Aristotle discussed politics with his pupils. This must have led to some tricky moments, for the general direction of Greek thought was toward republics, and more particularly the most appropriate constitutions for the small city-states that dominated the Hellenic political landscape. None of this will have pleased either king or crown prince. However, the philosopher saw a way round the difficulty: monarchy could qualify as an ideal constitution, provided the king possessed a high level of virtue (in Greek, aretē). In the Politics, he writes:
When therefore either a whole family or a single individual among peopl
e at large can be found, whose virtue is so outstanding as to outstrip all the rest, then it becomes just that this family should become royal and sovereign over all things, and that this one man should become king.
Aristotle was not free from the vices of his age. Slavery was widespread throughout the ancient world and he endorsed it as a social institution. He believed that “by nature some are free, others slaves, and that for these it is both just and expedient that they should serve as slaves.” He took a similarly dim view of foreigners. It was only right and proper that Greeks should rule non-Greeks; indeed, “non-Greeks and slaves are identical.”
Alexander was greatly impressed by Aristotle, whom he saw as a surrogate father (Philip being frequently absent on campaign), and by the practical bent of his ideas. He was evidently an industrious student, even though he applied his studies strictly to his own personal interests. He developed a fascination for the practical sciences and was much taken by the diagnosis and treatment of disease. As an adult, he set himself up as an amateur doctor, looking after his friends when they were sick and prescribing therapies and diets. Years later, one of his generals, Craterus, fell sick, and Alexander was alarmed to hear that he was to be given hellebore, a toxic plant used as a purgative. He wrote to the general’s doctor expressing his anxiety and prescribing the correct dosage.
Aristotle encouraged his charge’s passion for Homer. He is reported to have prepared a special, annotated edition of the Iliad, which his pupil regarded less as a work of art than as a manual on the art of war. This was the so-called “casket copy,” which in later times Alexander carried about with him everywhere on his travels, almost as a holy relic.
He prided himself on knowing the Iliad by heart as well as most of the Odyssey. When at leisure or at an evening meal, he liked to involve those around him in a literary game, asking them to quote favorite lines from Homer. He always insisted that the following line from the Iliad was the finest of them all.
Alexander the Great Page 5
