Alexander the Great

by Anthony Everitt

  Olympias made no attempt to disguise her joy at her husband’s demise. It was alleged that she arranged for the getaway horses. En route to the king’s funeral she is reported to have placed a golden wreath on Pausanias’s corpse, which was hanging on a cross. A few days later she had the body taken down and cremated. The queen then turned her attention to Philip’s widow, whom she made watch her baby daughter being grilled to death on a brazier. After that she forced the hapless young woman to hang herself. Alexander was furious at this cruel behavior, which reinforced the Macedonian reputation for barbarousness. However, he was too close to his mother, too much in her thrall, to punish her. We may suppose that it was he who found a place in Philip’s tomb for the two tragic corpses.

  It is perfectly possible that Olympias and Alexander encouraged or even commissioned Pausanias to kill the king. Alternatively, they may have been accessories to the deed, catching wind of his intentions, but not informing Philip.

  It is also conceivable that they had no idea of what Pausanias had in mind and were taken by surprise like everybody else. After all, it seems improbable that two such politically aware personalities would choose an international festival attended by many VIPs as the moment for an outrage that would seriously damage the Macedonian “brand” and that risked throwing the realm into terminal crisis.

  In summary, we know too little to convict, and there are other equally plausible scenarios.

  * * *

  —

  THE GREAT KING, for example (or one of his satraps), had every motive to remove the man who was planning to destroy him.

  Palace plots were not exclusive to Macedonia and the Persian succession had always been a problem. The current ruler was Darius III, who had recently emerged from a short but turbulent crisis.

  According to Herodotus, the Persians, like other Middle Eastern peoples, valued eunuchs highly for their fidelity. The mercenary soldier and writer Xenophon agreed. He observed that the founder of the Achaemenid empire, Cyrus, had recognized that a ruler is at greatest personal risk “when at meals or at wine, in the bath, or in bed and asleep.” He needed servants who were trustworthy. The advantage of eunuchs was that, being unable to procreate, they usually had no family members to promote and as a group were despised by society at large: consequently they were completely dependent on their masters.

  * * *

  —

  THERE WERE EXCEPTIONS TO the rule, though, as the career of the chiliarch, or grand vizier, Bagoas went to show. “A eunuch in physical fact but a militant rogue in disposition,” as Diodorus nicely put it, he poisoned his employer, Artaxerxes III Ochus, and replaced him with his son Arses. He put to death the new king’s brothers, doubtless to avoid any challenges to the regime and to isolate his protégé. Arses unwisely put it about that he was displeased with Bagoas for his outrageous behavior and intended to punish him. The vizier struck first, murdering Arses and his family. Having now disposed of most of the dynasty, he was hard put to find a replacement, eventually in 336 choosing a member of the royal house’s cadet branch called Codomannus. Codomannus took the regnal name of Darius III.

  A man of considerable courage, Darius once accepted a challenge to single combat during a campaign against a fierce Iranian tribe. He killed his opponent. He was also no dupe: he took care to give Bagoas a dose of his own medicine. When offered a poisoned cup, the Great King passed it to the eunuch, who had no alternative but to drink and die.

  The threat from Macedonia was imminent and will have been at the top of Darius’s agenda. He could well have attempted to eliminate Philip, just as he later tried to suborn Greek soldiers and a senior Macedonian to kill Alexander. That said, we will be hard pressed to imagine a plausible intermediary or link between Persepolis and Pella, between the Great King and a maddened youth.

  Guilt might also attach to Athens, with its long tradition of anti-Macedonian politicians, headed by the orator Demosthenes. He seems to have heard of the assassination suspiciously early, which has led some to suppose that he was an accessory before the fact; more likely, he had a fast messenger in his pay. He was happy to collaborate with the young monarch’s enemy, Attalus, although nothing came of this. He also willingly accepted large bribes from the Great King. According to Plutarch, Demosthenes was “overwhelmed by Persian gold.” He gave himself “prodigious airs” and had a shrine dedicated to the killer. He persuaded the boule, or state council, to offer a thanksgiving sacrifice, as if for good news. In his speeches, he gave Alexander the insulting nickname of Margites after the stupid hero of a mock epic on the Trojan War.

  Once more, although many Athenians hated the Macedonian monarch and might well have plotted to put an end to him, there is no supporting evidence. Terrorism was not the Athenian style. In any case, a noisy democracy was not well suited to keep a secret, and we do not even hear of rumors.

  * * *

  —

  PHILIP II OF MACEDONIA was a very great man indeed. He transformed his country from a barbaric backwater into the leading power in Greece. He was hard to resist, for access to gold and silver mines and a deep reservoir of human capital enabled him to recruit and pay a large standing army. The Hellenic city-states did not have the resources to counter the threat he posed.

  The king had an acute sense of timing. Ruthlessness went alongside a sense of humor. He was not naturally cruel, but was violent when occasion called for it. He endured great pain without complaint. On the battlefield he led from the front, as his many scars testified. But he preferred to get his way through the diplomatic tools of bribery and marriages. Military conflict was a last resort, with the standout exception of the invasion of Persia.

  Is it going too far, though, to argue that Philip’s death was not quite so untimely as has been claimed? A case can be made that he was past his best. His mishandling of his wife and the crown prince, the provocative marriage to Cleopatra, the hubristic monument at Olympia, the Philippeum, the even more hubristic statues carried into the theater at Aegae all suggest a coarsening of his political instincts and a surprising insensitivity.

  Nevertheless, Alexander’s inheritance was his father’s towering achievement. Thanks to Philip, Hellas had become, in effect, an adjunct of Macedonia, and his army was a finely tuned instrument of war. The new king was a lucky man.

  * * *

  —

  HOWEVER, THE BEGINNING OF his reign echoed that of Philip. Suddenly, Macedonia looked as if it were falling apart again with a callow youth at the helm. The opportunity for old enemies was too good to lose. As before, the neighboring tribal kingdoms in the north rose in arms and the subdued Greeks threw off the Macedonian yoke.

  No one gave the boy a chance.

  CHAPTER 4

  THE LONE WOLF

  Alexander was dead. There was no doubt about it.

  He had wandered off into darkest Thrace, where he had fallen victim to the barbarians who lived there. His army had been wiped out and the young king had fallen. The civilized world heard reports to this effect in political circles, believed them, and breathed easily again. It recovered its balance and forgot about Macedonian bullies.

  But this is how the future actually played itself out.

  * * *

  —

  FOR ALL HIS QUARREL with Philip, Alexander ought to have been grateful for his inheritance. He now presided over a highly disciplined and effective army and a large and wealthy empire. But without its tricky founder, it appeared to be breaking up. There would be no simple handover. The boy king would have to fight for what he had been given.

  On his accession in June 336, Alexander’s advisers urged caution. He should leave the Greek city-states to their devices and, above all, refrain from using force against them. As for the restless tribes on the Macedonian border, he should treat them gently and negotiate deals before they opted for war. The king totally disagreed. Safety lay in speed and risk.

&nb
sp; The Greek city-states were thrilled by Philip’s assassination, which their leading citizens had witnessed in person in the theater at Aegae. All across Hellas they moved to recover their independence. The Thebans voted to expel a Macedonian garrison and to deny Alexander overall leadership of the grand anti-Persian coalition. Despite the fact that they had given Philip citizenship rights, the Athenians and their leading orator, Demosthenes, could hardly restrain themselves. Plutarch writes that they

  immediately offered up sacrifices for the good news and voted a crown for Pausanias, the king’s assassin, while Demosthenes appeared in public dressed in magnificent clothing and wearing a garland on his head, even though his daughter had died only six days before.

  Demosthenes sneered that Alexander would never set foot out of Macedonia, for he was perfectly happy to saunter around Pella and “keep watch over the omens.”

  Meanwhile the young king took action. He marched south, persuading the Thessalian confederation and the Amphictyonic League to vote resolutions that he succeed his father as hegemon of the Greeks.

  Envoys from Ambracia, an ancient city in southern Epirus, apologized for declaring independence; Alexander politely replied that “they had been only a little premature in grasping the freedom that he was on the point of giving them voluntarily.”

  He continued down through the undefended pass of Thermopylae. One day the citizens of Thebes were amazed to see a large Macedonian army standing outside their walls. The Athenians were sure that their turn would be next. But Alexander only had time for clemency. He simply insisted that the two cities accept him as hegemon. Offering profuse apologies, they immediately capitulated and he proceeded to convene a meeting of the Panhellenic League of Corinth.

  Demosthenes was appointed to an embassy that made its way north to grovel before the king, but at Mount Cithaeron he lost his nerve and went back to Athens. Perhaps he was worried that his compromising correspondence with Attalus had fallen into the king’s hands. Also, he needed to give Darius something for all the Persian gold he had received.

  League members fell over themselves to please their new master. Alexander made fun of the tiny city-state of Megara when it offered him honorary citizenship, but he accepted the honor when he was told that the only other person to have been granted it was the demigod Heracles (the king’s alleged ancestor). When the League duly gathered again at Corinth, its members were reconfirmed as free and independent—a status contradicted for the open-eyed by the ever-present threat of military force. The League members elected him as their leader in succession to Philip and appointed him as general plenipotentiary in the great war of liberation against Persia. An inscription of the oath they took has survived:

  I swear by Zeus, Earth, Sun, Poseidon, Athena, and Ares, by all the gods and goddesses, I shall abide by the peace and I shall not break the agreement with Alexander the Macedonian….I shall fight against the breaker of the common peace in whatever way seems good to the general council and may be prescribed by the hegemon.

  During his brief stopover in Corinth, Alexander is said to have made arrangements to meet Diogenes, one of the most celebrated thinkers of the day. He had acquired a taste for philosophy thanks to Aristotle’s tutorials in the Gardens of Midas and liked to reward those of whom he approved with his patronage.

  Diogenes made a point of living as simply and “naturally” as possible. He begged for his necessities. He wore only a loincloth and slept wherever he chose, sometimes (apparently) in a large ceramic jar. He defecated and masturbated in public. In his austerity and poverty, Diogenes bore some resemblance to the near-naked religious ascetics, or holy men, of India, the Brahmins.

  He acted in this way to draw attention to the luxury and corruption of the present age, and is reported to have said: “Humans have complicated every simple gift of the gods.” He was a founder of the Cynic (Greek for “doglike,” hence without shame) school of philosophy. Virtue was realized by action, Cynics believed, not in theory. The greatest of Greek philosophers, Plato, thought little of Diogenes’ ideas and is said to have called him “a Socrates gone mad.” None of his writings have survived.

  Diogenes was extremely independent-minded. He spent his days in a suburb of Corinth and declined to go to the city center to meet Alexander. The Macedonian king, not at all put out, made his way to where Diogenes was lying on the ground and basking in the sun.

  When the philosopher saw Alexander and his entourage approach, he raised himself a little on his elbow and stared at him.

  “Can I do anything for you?” asked the king.

  “Yes, you can stand a little to one side out of my sun.”

  This putdown ended the interview. However, Alexander was not at all displeased, as he could well have been. This was because he recognized in Diogenes a fellow spirit. One of them had withdrawn from the world and the other meant to subjugate it, but both were stubborn, implacable, and self-absorbed.

  Later, his courtiers laughed at the philosopher, but the king simply remarked: “You can say what you like, but if I were not Alexander, I should have liked to be Diogenes.”

  * * *

  —

  ALEXANDER AND HIS ARMY promptly vanished. He was in a hurry to deal with the revolts in the north.

  But first of all he called by at Delphi, home of the oracle of Apollo. Like his father before him, Alexander sought a consultation about his chances of success in Persia, but he was determined neither to be misled nor to mislead himself when assessing the divine hexameters. The discussions at Corinth had been lengthy and by the time Alexander reached the oracle it was late November. Unfortunately, the temple of Apollo was closed between mid-November and mid-February. The god was taking a rest.

  The king was not used to being denied. He summoned the Pythia to explain herself. She refused to officiate, saying that to do so would be against the law. So he went up to her himself and tried to drag her by force to the temple where she held her seances. She cried out: “You are invincible, my son!” No ambiguity there.

  The quick-witted Alexander immediately withdrew his request. He needed no other prophecy, he declared, for he had extracted from her exactly the prediction he was looking for. Thoroughly satisfied, he resumed his journey.

  * * *

  —

  A MOMENT OF CRISIS was at hand. Tribal kingdoms along Macedonia’s borders were on a war footing and threatened Macedonia’s very existence. Not only did Alexander need to pacify them thoroughly if he was to be able to leave safely for a long absence in the east, but he also had to win his soldiers’ loyalty, not to mention the broader approval of Macedonia’s body politic. At present, these were only on loan.

  How was Alexander to handle the uprising of Triballians and Illyrians? They occupied parts of Thrace, the wide-ranging territory which, as we have seen, lay south of the Danube (the Ister, to the Greeks) and north of Macedonia and the Aegean Sea. Thracian tribesmen were fierce and warlike, although in the heat of the moment they could be unruly and disorganized.

  They had resisted foreign conquerors such as the Persians and the Macedonians. They were regarded as rather primitive, lived in large open villages rather than cities, and had few civic institutions, but had they managed to unite their forces they could have been more than a match for the Greeks, who founded colonies on the coast but left the hinterland to its own devices, or for that matter Philip’s invincible phalanx. In 339 the Triballians had inflicted a defeat on Alexander’s father as well as a serious wound that left him with a bad limp.

  A war of outright conquest and annexation such as Darius the Great had conducted was out of the question. It would take too long and require a large army of occupation. Alexander had at his disposal perhaps no more than fifteen thousand highly trained Macedonians—which included a phalanx of foot soldiers, cavalry from Upper Macedonia, lightly armed troops, slingers, and archers. Of special value were the Agrianians, a Thracian
tribe, who were crack javelin throwers and whose king, Langarus, was a personal friend; as already noted, he probably gave Alexander shelter during his brief exile from Macedonia. A force of that size could be supplied without too much difficulty and, above all, would be able to move fast. This was exactly what Alexander needed.

  Alexander’s aim was to demonstrate complete military superiority in a brief but theatrically impressive campaign. He intended to fight his way to the natural frontier of the Danube. He arranged for a squadron of warships to sail up the river where they would rendezvous with the army at a predetermined place and time. This impressive maneuver would be an assertion of overwhelming power, after which Alexander would feel safe to march on Persia without risking insurgencies in his rear.

  In the spring of 335, the king led his army into Thrace from the Greek port of Amphipolis on the Aegean Sea. After ten days in friendly territory, he reached the Haemus mountain range (in today’s Balkans), where he found the enemy, Free Thracians (that is, Thracians independent of foreign rule), holding a high mountain pass (perhaps the Shipka Pass) and blocking his advance. They had assembled wagons in front of their line as a defensive stockade.

  Alexander decided to storm the pass frontally, but guessed that the Free Thracians intended to allow the wagons to roll down the steep but even contour of the hill and crash into his infantry. The tribesmen would follow this up by a general charge. Somehow the king had to neutralize such a plan. Should the wagons be released, he ordered his hoplites either to open ranks if there was room and let them through, or to stoop or lie down under linked shields so that the wagons would roll over them.