Alexander the Great

by Anthony Everitt

  He is two things: a good king and a mighty spearman too.

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  IT WAS A FINE spring day in the year 401, more than half a century previously, and a great battle was about to be fought on the left bank of the Euphrates.

  And now it was noon, and the enemy were not yet in sight; but when afternoon was coming on, there was seen a rising dust, which appeared at first like a white cloud, but sometime later like a kind of blackness in the plain, extending over a great distance. As the enemy came nearer and nearer, there were presently flashes of bronze here and there, and spears and the hostile ranks came into sight. There were horsemen in white cuirasses on the left wing of the enemy….Next to them were troops with wicker shields and, farther on, hoplites with wooden shields which reached to their feet, these latter being Egyptians, people said; and then more horsemen and more bowmen.

  This evocation of the prelude to battle is justly famous. It is taken from the Anabasis (or Journey Up-country), one of the great adventure stories of world literature. The author was a young Athenian, Xenophon, who was an officer in a force of ten thousand Greek mercenaries. These were hoplites (those heavily armed infantrymen who deployed in a tightly disciplined phalanx). They had been hired by a royal prince, Cyrus, namesake of the empire’s founder, to spearhead a revolt against his brother, Artaxerxes II.

  The Great King’s army so outnumbered the enemy that Cyrus’s left wing did not extend beyond his brother’s center. It was here that, as was the practice of Persian monarchs, Artaxerxes was standing in his chariot and surrounded by elite troops and bodyguards.

  The rebel mercenaries were stationed by the river, on Cyrus’s right wing. When their phalanx charged, the opposing troops lost no time in running away. The Greeks chased after them and, so far as they were concerned, victory was theirs. Then Cyrus, young and passionate, led a small cavalry force straight at his brother. Xenophon writes:

  He caught sight of the Great King and the compact body of men around him, and immediately he lost control of himself and, shouting “I see the man,” rushed upon him and struck him on the breast and wounded him through his breastplate.

  Artaxerxes fell from his horse and was brought out of the mêlée by some of his guardsmen. Cyrus’s bold maneuver had succeeded and many of the Great King’s people submitted to him. But he impetuously went on charging deep into the enemy ranks. By this time darkness was falling and all was confusion. Cyrus was wounded above the temple and then killed by a common foot soldier.

  The battle was won, but the rebellion was over. Artaxerxes recovered and reigned for nearly half a century.

  The victorious Greek mercenaries were dismayed by the turn of events. How would they be treated now? The Persians lured their generals to a conference and executed them. Their places were filled by new elected leaders, including Xenophon. The “ten thousand” resolved not to surrender, but to fight their way back to the Hellenic world. After great hardships and much fighting, they at last reached the coast of the Black Sea and safety. “The sea, the sea,” the men shouted joyfully as they crested rising ground and saw below them the wide expanse of blue water.

  There were few Greek boys who were not told of this astonishing feat of endurance and survival and for the literate it was a best seller. Serious politicians and soldiers studied the episode—and so, we may be sure, did the Macedonian crown prince, inquisitive as he was about the military strength of the Persians.

  So far as Alexander was concerned, Xenophon taught an essential truth. He observed:

  An intelligent observer could see at a glance that while the King’s empire was strong in terms of lands and men, it was weak on account of its lengthened communications and the dispersal of its forces, if someone were to launch a quick military strike against it.

  We have seen that the Great King governed through a system of provincial governors or satraps, but before modern technology information could not travel faster than a horse. It took ninety days to reach Sardis, on the Mediterranean coast, from Susa, the Persian capital. The satraps were almost impossible to control at such distances. Some were even allowed to establish hereditary dynasties. They had their own military capabilities, even if they exercised no control over garrison commanders, who acted as policing officials and reported directly to the Great King. As a further check on good behavior, a government inspector called the Eye of the King informed faraway Susa of what was going on in the empire.

  But these precautions did not always work. In the middle of the fourth century, a number of satraps rebelled. When the insurgency, or more precisely a sequence of insurgencies, eventually collapsed, many were given back their old jobs. This was a clear sign—a tacit acknowledgment—that the center could not hold the periphery to its will.

  The empire looked fierce, but in fact was frail. Its vast armies wore attractive and exotic uniforms, but were mostly ill-trained levies. The performance of the Greek regiment at Cunaxa and afterward demonstrated beyond any doubt the superiority of the hoplite and the phalanx. Xenophon was exaggerating when he wrote, “If any man makes war on Persia, whoever he may be, he can roam up and down the country to his heart’s content without striking a blow,” but he had a point. Most agreed with Aristotle when he asserted the natural superiority of the Hellenes.

  Cyrus’s decision to hurl a collective spearhead of cavalry at his brother’s person was a brilliant, albeit risky, tactic. It eliminated the enemy’s numerical superiority by ending the battle before numbers could be brought fully into play. Once his hordes knew their master was dead, they had nothing left to fight for and would abandon the struggle. It was only Cyrus’s foolhardiness that transformed victory into defeat.

  Alexander digested Xenophon’s book. He took from it two lessons: first, a determined invader could survive, even thrive, in the heart of the Persian empire; and, second, in battle it made tactical sense to seek to kill the Great King. A late Roman writer was not far wrong when he observed: “Alexander the Great would not have become great if Xenophon had never existed.”

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  SO FAR AS HAVING sex was concerned, Alexander was incurious. He showed no signs of attraction to women. This does not necessarily imply a particular orientation. Terms such as homosexuality or heterosexuality had not yet been invented. For him and his contemporaries, sex was what you did, not what you were.

  Perhaps the general air of license at Pella put the boy off. Perhaps he simply had a low sex drive.

  Alternatively, a psychoanalyst might point to his closeness to his mother, and how he would do anything to please her. They both had their life projects—and for each of them he was that project. Her love may have been embarrassingly smothering, but he could completely trust her.

  Alexander was an eligible youth, not simply because of his high birth but also because of his good looks (or so we are told). He was short and muscular; his hair was blond “like a lion’s mane.” A straight nose rose to his forehead, which bulged slightly above the eyes; he had fair skin, and his chest and face would redden during exercise or under emotion; his eyes were heterochromatic, one being gray-blue and the other dark brown; his teeth were like small sharp pegs or nails. His voice was harsh and high-pitched, and early sculptural portraits give him a girlish air.

  Plutarch writes of his “neck which was tilted slightly to the left” and of “a certain melting look.” A less friendly interpretation of the same evidence speaks of a lopsided face and watery eyes.

  Alexander’s favorite sculptor, Lysippus, who worked in bronze, knew him from when he was a boy and was able to produce a convincing, and at the same time attractive, likeness. He was the only artist allowed to make three-dimensional representations of Alexander. This was not just a question of personal taste or a reward for flattery: sculpture and coins were among the best means a ruler had in those days of communicating his authority to large pub
lics. Lysippus can be said to have invented, or at least to have asserted, the Alexander brand.

  Although we cannot be absolutely sure today where the young Macedonian stood on the scale between beauty and ugliness, he seems to have been personable enough.

  Olympias and Philip were worried about their son. They feared that he would grow up into an effeminate man, in our terms a queen, someone like King Archelaus. They decided to hire the services of an attractive prostitute from Thessaly called Callixeina. They paid her to go to bed with Alexander and take his virginity. His refusal to cooperate may be ascribed to a weak libido, but it is just as likely to have been due to irritation. Few boys like parents to choose their first date. But Olympias was nothing if not persistent and often begged her son to sleep with the girl, albeit without success.

  For the simplest explanation of his behavior we could do worse than consider Alexander’s sexual orientation. He studied under Aristotle with a small class of contemporaries drawn from Philip’s inner circle, the sons of aristocrats and generals. One of these was a boy called Hephaestion, who had attracted Alexander by “his looks and boyishness.” The two fell for each other and were inseparable for the rest of their lives. It is hard to believe that there was not a sexual component in the relationship. But if there was, it will have been short-lived, for Plutarch reports that Alexander “used to say that sleep and sex, more than anything else, reminded him of his mortality. By this he meant that tiredness and pleasure both proceed from the same human weakness.”

  We have already seen that homosexual activity was widespread among the Macedonian elite. But there was more to this than rough fun. Royal and aristocratic Macedonians looked southward, to Greece, for the conventions of male sexual behavior among the upper class.

  These were highly specialized. Young male adults were expected to enter into love affairs with prepubertal teenaged boys. These affairs were a form of higher education. The senior partner, the lover or (in Greek) erastes, was expected to train the loved one, or eromenos, in the cultural norms of Hellenic society. By imitation the eromenos would learn from his erastes how to be a good citizen, how to compete physically in the gymnasium, and, in the long run, how to be brave on the battlefield (exemplified, most notably, by that regiment of lovers, the Theban Sacred Band). Once the eromenos became an adult, the relationship was expected to cool into a lifelong friendship.

  Sex between the couples was allowable, but not compulsory, and many straight young Greeks doubtless heaved a sigh of relief when they were able to graduate to marriage and heterosexuality. However, there were conventions to be observed. The eromenos must never be buggered. The most widely approved sex act was intercrural (that is, the erastes frotted his erect penis between the legs of his beloved). The boy was not expected to show any signs of arousal; he was offering himself as a free gift to his mentor rather than satisfying his own desire.

  The most famous pederastic pair were Alexander’s hero Achilles, the protagonist of the Iliad, and Patroclus. They were widely recognized as lovers, but there was some doubt in ancient times as to which of them was the erastes and which the eromenos. Plato has one of the speakers in his dialogue The Symposium (or The Drinking Party), clear the matter up.

  Aeschylus [the tragic playwright], by the way, is quite wrong when he says [in his play The Myrmidons] that Achilles was the erastes of Patroclus. Achilles was the more beautiful of the two—indeed he was the most beautiful of all the heroes—and he was still beardless and, according to Homer, much younger than Patroclus.

  Achilles may indeed have been beautiful and beardless, but when we first meet him in the Iliad, he is certainly not prepubertal. We must assume that the lovers had graduated some while previously into an adult friendship.

  Alexander saw himself as a latter-day Achilles not only for his bravery and skill as a warrior, but also because he and Hephaestion were eromenos and erastes on the model of Achilles and Patroclus. It is a reasonable supposition that his schoolfellow was the older of the two, albeit only by a small margin. It appears that the liaison merely mimicked pederasty while being closer to a modern conjunction of more or less coeval partners.

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  THE EMERGENCIES OF REAL life interrupted the calm rural seminars at Mieza. In 340 Philip appointed his son, only aged sixteen, to be regent of the kingdom and keeper of the royal seal during his absence on a major campaign in the Thracian Chersonese. His education was over. This very remarkable promotion was not just a product of paternal love, but also a recognition of Alexander’s precocious maturity and ability.

  A senior general, Antipater, was appointed as his adviser, with the task of preventing any foolish mistakes. Philip trusted him completely; once on a campaign he slept for an unusually long time and when he woke up remarked: “I slept safely for Antipater was awake.”

  He seems to have thought well of his charge and allowed him latitude. In any case, the ambitious teenager seized the opportunity of power like a man offered water in a desert. He put down a rebellion by a Thracian tribe, capturing its city and replacing its inhabitants, whom he drove out, with a body of Greek settlers.

  He renamed the place Alexandropolis, or City of Alexander, which may have caused the king to raise his eyebrows; Philippolis would have been rather more appropriate. The boy was getting too big for his boots and, when he clumsily tried to bribe some Macedonians to win their allegiance, his father, grandmaster of the backhander, gave him a firm dressing-down. For all that, Philip thought the world of Alexander and kept up a regular correspondence with him.

  By contrast, the crown prince’s filial devotion was coming under strain. He wanted to become a great warrior and had been watching his father’s victorious progress in war after war with rising resentment. The greater his paternal inheritance, the less there would be for him to conquer. He used to say bitterly to his friends: “My father will get in before me in everything.”

  And indeed Philip had been doing extraordinarily well since his first astonishing year on the throne, when he had defeated a ring of enemies by a judicious combination of force, deceit, and diplomacy. He overcame the little principalities that made up northern Macedonia and recruited their clan leaders as courtiers in Pella and as commanders in the field. These were the Companions we have previously seen. As Macedonian power grew, some of them were non-Macedonians who saw exciting career prospects under Philip (Nearchus of Crete, for example, and Eumenes his Greek secretary, whom we will meet later). These men were the poet Hesiod’s “gift-devouring lords,” who expected munificence from their monarchs. They were lavishly rewarded with land and cash for their loyalty and their labors. Their young sons were recruited as Royal Pages.

  In a word, Macedonia had become a united and populous state. It was no longer a backwater that could safely be ignored.

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  THE KING’S MILITARY REFORMS were leading, as he intended, to the establishment of a substantial but expensive standing army and here he was caught in a complicated vicious circle. The more soldiers he employed, the more resources he needed to cover their cost. As a result he was obliged to go on enlarging the territories he controlled, for their tax revenues and their gold or silver mines. And then he needed even more conscripts to defend these new possessions and fight his endless wars.

  Over more than twenty years, Philip massively expanded his kingdom. At its greatest extent it may have boasted a population of 500,000, far larger than that of any Greek city-state. Perhaps as early as 352, he was appointed archon (Greek for ruler) for life of Thessaly. The Thessalian plain stretches down to the famous pass of Thermopylae and lies alongside Epirus in the west, Olympias’s homeland and a close Macedonian ally. He invaded the tribal lands of Thrace and after hard-fought campaigns became their overlord. His army threatened the Bosporus. The Athenians, who had already lost their traditional influence in Chalcidice to the Macedonian king, depen
ded on grain imports from the Black Sea and felt threatened.

  They were right to worry. Philip cast his roving eye on the city-states of southern Greece, looking out for opportunity (in the historian Justin’s words) “as from a watch-tower.” A ruinous war between a small polis called Phocis and the Thebans, who were declining from their brief zenith after the battle at Leuctra but were still easily provoked, gave the king his entrée. The Phocians were responsible for guarding the oracle at Delphi, a township in its territory, perched precariously on the steep lower slopes of Mount Parnassus.

  They raised large mercenary armies, which they paid for by raiding the national treasuries that stood around the shrine of Apollo. These were packed with gold and silver thank-offerings to the god of prophecy from all over the Hellenic world. The Phocians promised, hand on heart but fingers crossed behind their backs, to reimburse him.

  The conflict was called the Sacred War because of the link to Delphi. The Thebans were soon on the run, suffering (in the words of a contemporary) “an Iliad of woes.” The Macedonian king decided it was his convenient duty to punish the desecrators of the holy site. To begin with Phocis did well, even beating Philip in battle on one occasion, in 353. He withdrew, but promised to return “like a ram, which next time would butt harder.”

  He was as good as his word. The following year, 352 or 353, he won a decisive victory at the charmingly named Battle of the Crocus Field. The king made his men wear wreaths of laurel, Apollo’s tutelary plant, but his motive was of course strategic rather than religious. He was using the opportunity to strengthen his hold as a defender of Greek values. Hostilities persisted, but by 346 Philip had destroyed the final remnants of Phocian resistance. He was appointed president of the Amphictyony of Delphi, an association of local states charged with ensuring the oracle’s independence. Philip’s power now touched the frontier of Thebes and was within striking distance of Athens.