The Nature of Alexander

by Mary Renault

  The court chamberlain, Chares, wrote a book of anecdotes called Stories of Alexander; among its surviving fragments is an account of the wedding feast. On the wide platform before the palace was erected a pavilion 800 yards in circumference. Its columns were 20 cubits high (the cubit varied; they would have stood about 30 feet) jewelled and gilded. Gilded curtain rods supported side curtains woven in patterns. There were a hundred couches with silvered legs for the chief guests; the carpets were of purple, scarlet and gold. Arrian says the weddings were solemnized in the Persian manner; chairs were placed for the bridegrooms in order of rank; after the healths had been drunk, the brides entered and sat down each by her groom, who took her by the hand and kissed her, Alexander doing so first. The army and the lesser guests were entertained in the court outside. Even the bridal chambers were provided by Alexander, including bedsteads plated with silver (the royal one had gold). The feast lasted five days, said Chares; the most famous exponents of every art performed. Once more Alexander honoured the actor Thettalus, who had taken such risks for him in Caria long ago. The subject-allies sent gold crowns to the huge value of 15,000 talents; these masterpieces were probably melted down to meet the still huger expenses.

  Aristobulus averred that Alexander also linked himself with the older royal line of Ochus, by marrying his daughter Parysatis. If he did, it is unlikely to have been on this occasion, unless on a later day of the feast. He was sensitive to ridicule, and the only precedent for simultaneous royal bigamy had been set by the wildly unpopular and much-satirized Syracusan tyrant, Dionysius I. There is no word from Ptolemy, one of the bridal party, about this marriage. Yet it is hard to see why Aristobulus should have invented it.

  The manifesto of the weddings was on the grandest scale. Alexander regularized, and dowered, the marriages of all his common soldiers who had taken Persian concubines, some 10,000. Not a few had wives in Macedon; but it legitimized the children, whom he looked upon as his wards.

  Even less is known of his relationship with Barsine-Stateira than with Roxane. The one established fact is that in the following year, when Alexander died in Babylon, Roxane was there, but Stateira was at Susa. Remembering his lack of height, it is worth noting that Darius, a very tall man, had married his half-sister; so this family trait is likely to have been passed on. Roxane’s name means “Little Star.”

  Among Alexander’s boyhood friends, honoured with the noblest brides, one face was missing. Harpalus had fled. In Alexander’s absence he had moved to Babylon with its enormous treasure hoard, and had had charge of the mint. Already an aesthete, he had discovered in himself a love of profusion equal to Alexander’s own; and the difference of his now owning the money must have seemed trivial when were was so much. He had annoyed, rather than oppressed, the people, who resented being asked to pay semi-divine honours to two Athenian courtesans whom he had successively set up like royalty. It is uncertain whether he had counted on Alexander’s death, or just on his indulgence. They had been very close; Harpalus had stuck to him through his disgrace and exile, a thing he never forgot. In spite of colossal peculations, confession and charm would probably have got the sinner off lightly, if he had kept his head. He lost it when he heard about the purge of disloyal satraps, and bolted to Greece with 6,000 talents of specie, 30 ships, presumably bought in Asia Minor, and about 6,000 Greek mercenaries of similar provenance. He had earlier shipped grain to Athens to relieve a famine, and counting on goodwill there, had formed the harebrained plan of financing a revolt. More than 300 talents went in bribes to politicians (Demosthenes got the most, to his later downfall). After complex intrigues, they decided against it but kept the money. Olympias, a more terrifying enemy than Alexander, had ordered Harpalus’ arrest, and he fled by sea with his men, one of whom eventually murdered him in Crete, no doubt for his gold. If Alexander had made any real effort he could have had him seized, and his trial would have been a mere formality; even after disillusion, something of old gratitude must have remained. But the offering by a court dramatist of Agen—a satire-farce on Harpalus and his goddess queens, with a passing swipe at the Athenians, and Alexander as deus ex machina—was not unwelcome, for fragments still survive.

  After the dowry payments, Susa overflowed with money; and the traders who lived off the soldiers thought it opportune to foreclose on their ruinous debts. They had lived with the riches and recklessness of buccaneers. They were now in trouble; and Alexander with one of his huge gestures announced he would settle up for them all. But they took it with a new suspicion. At Susa he had acquired not only a Persian bride but, automatically, a Persian court; over and above which, he had introduced Persian soldiers into the most exclusive regiments. The Macedonians began to feel slighted. He was, and ought to remain, their Alexander, not the barbarians’ Great King. Word went round that his offer had been made in order to find out, for disciplinary reasons, which of them were overspending their pay. Names were slow to come in. When he learned why, it hurt both his feelings and his pride. He said with dignity that the King must never lie, nor should his subjects ever suppose it. The sentiment was so Persian that it might have come from Cyrus; but he backed it up with proof. Writing things were removed from the money tables; any man who produced a debtor’s bond was paid, in the certainty that no record had been made of it. It cost him 10,000 talents, some of it in false pretences; and for the time it won them over. But their amour-propre was soon to be shocked again.

  Five years before, while still in Bactria, he had laid down a project which now matured: 30,000 Persian boys had been enrolled in their several provinces, trained in the use of Macedonian weapons (which had seemingly included teaching them Greek) and put into Macedonian dress. This seedling army was now ripe, and had been brought to Susa for his approval. Now about eighteen, they had been hand-picked for grace and physique. When in their handsome panoplies they manoeuvred before Alexander, he was so pleased with their dash and skill that in an unguarded moment he called them his Successors.

  How many of these boys, half a century on, must have told their grandsons that once in their youth, in distant Susa, with their own eyes they had beheld Sikandar! Thus are legends born. But the veterans of India, weatherworn, gnarled and scarred, looked sourly at the polished parade. There were already far too many Persians in the army. A campaign wife had been all very well in Bactria; a Persian royal wedding was another thing. They hated seeing a good Macedonian soldier like Peucestas cheerfully setting up a satrap’s court with the King’s approval, talking Persian like a native, going about disgustingly in trousers. They had been furious when a mixed regiment with Macedonians in it had been put under Persian officers. Now came a whole corps of Hellenized Persians, presuming to wear their clothes and show off with their weapons. It was not Alexander’s successors they saw here, but then-own; he was “devising every means of doing without Macedonians”; he was “getting entirely barbarized.” Old grouses and new were angrily milled over, but discipline still held.

  Alexander, as it happened, was occupied just then as a Greek with Greeks. He had sent to the cities of the League of Corinth—the states which had originally appointed him as war leader—requiring them to give him divine honours.

  There are rooted misinterpretations of history with which the truth seems never to catch up. There will always be people who believe that Canute was serious when he ordered the tide to turn, though all his own contemporaries knew it was a moral object lesson; and people who will go on supposing that this request of Alexander’s marked the onset of megalomania. Not only had such honours voluntarily been offered him years before by several liberated cities of Asian Greece; they had often been conferred on men with poorer claims. The oligarchs of Samos, less than a century earlier, had granted them to the brutal Spartan general, Lysander, for maintaining their tyranny. In a moment of sentiment, Harpalus had even set up a posthumous cult of his first hetaira as Aphrodite; he had been laughed at, not stoned for blasphemy. Divine honours, however solemnly awarded, carried no specific righ
ts or immunities. To the rationalist intellectuals of the day, they were an important distinction, like a Nobel Prize; to the many for whom religion still had meaning, they implied that the recipient had risen above the normal limitations of humanity, to a point where the gods must have had a hand in it. The birth legends which so swiftly adhered to Alexander after his death were not propaganda, but hagiography.

  He himself, as so often, was thinking on two planes at once. Within, he felt in himself the divine spark hailed by Amnion. Objectively, he needed for purely political reasons the status its recognition would give. He did not ask it in Persia or Macedon, in neither of which, for different reasons, it would have been understood; in Egypt, he already had it; he wanted it in Greece where it could be used. And he got it without trouble, not because he had inspired any reverence there, but because Greek politicians were profoundly cynical. What they did respect was power. Even Demosthenes shrugged it off with “Let Alexander be the son of Zeus. And Poseidon’s too if he likes.” Ritual religious embassies, with the ritual tributes, were planned to set out next spring. Without awaiting them, Alexander moved at once to the real object of the exercise. Unconstitutionally, but imperiously, he ordered the cities to receive back their exiles.

  No other man could have done it. Exiles were products of the blood feud. Party strife in the Greek city-states went back to before the time of the sixth-century tyrants, whom it had put in power. After every fifth-century coup, leaders of the ousted party were expelled, lest they get even with their enemies. So, often, were too-powerful rivals; some had retaliated by getting even with their country, like that baleful meteor Alcibiades. Others had welcomed foreign invaders in return for support. In the fourth century it had continued; Greek Asia was full of exiles. Darius’ 50,000 mercenaries had been partly made up of them; lest Alexander should have let the problem slip his mind, he had lately learned that Harpalus had been able to raise no less than 6,000 of such desperate men for his wildcat gamble. And there were still some 20,000 of them adrift, ready tools for any adventurer who could feed them. Alexander’s demand for their recall meant, of course, recall with immunity; common murderers and temple robbers were barred. When the herald gave out the news at the next Olympic Games, there was a furor of cheering.

  Overall it worked, averting much misery. But in the cities there was some perturbation. In that individualistic society, it meant getting back one’s personal enemy, knowing just who had worked his downfall; biding his time, and his sons along with him. Sometimes it meant the unwelcome restitution of his land. Last, and most seriously, it undermined the policies of Antipater in the southern states. He had ensured their subservience to Macedon by supporting many harsh oligarch governments, and large numbers of the exiles had been expelled by them. Alexander was getting into touch with the West after a long and busy absence; firmly, though civilly, he was letting it be known that he did not approve of everything that had been done in his name.

  In the spring of 324, after several months crowded with these activities, he made his way towards the beautiful hill palace of Ecbatana, the Persian kings’ summer resort. Probably he felt the need of rest. At all events, he had one of his longings, to explore the Tigris; it would take him the first stage by boat, while the army marched under Hephaestion’s command. Before making for the hills, they were to rendezvous at Opis. This river town lay on the Royal Road to the Mediterranean; and it was here that Alexander planned to discharge his oldest veterans, with substantial long-service bonuses. It took him a good deal out of his way; but it was unthinkable to him that anyone else should see them off.

  After a couple of weeks of almost unprecedented leisure, doing nothing more active than seeing waterways cleared, he got to Opis and ordered the parade. But in his short absence, the Macedonians on the march had had time to work up their grievances. Once freed from the disagreeable prospect of the Ganges campaign, and fresh after the easy return west with the inland contingent, tough old sweats in their seventh decade had no wish whatever to be discharged; they took it as an insult, prompted by his barbarian leanings, and they had enlisted their comrades’ sympathy. Unsuspecting, Alexander mounted the dais on the parade ground, and thanked them for their faithful service. He had just promised them bonuses which would make them the envy of their neighbours at home, when the storm broke about his head. His voice was drowned by furious shouts from the serving troops of “You can discharge the lot of us!” and “Go marching with your Father!”

  This was the kind of situation in which Roman emperors were to die like butchered boars; or, if strong enough, restore control with a bloodbath of decimations, beheadings, floggings to death. What Alexander did was to leap straight down off his dais at the yelling crowd.

  His generals jumped down after him. (Hephaestion, standing next him, would have been the first.) If he had been mobbed, there would have been nothing they could do but die with him. Nobody touched him. Striding here and there he pointed out the ringleaders (so Arrian says, and Ptolemy must have been down there) and ordered their arrest. They were led away, no one obstructing. He then went back on the dais and made a speech. The army listened. Whether, in the short remainder of his life, he looked back on this as more remarkable than the storming of the Birdless Rock, there is no knowing. Perhaps he simply took it for granted.

  It would be strange if his speech had not stuck in Ptolemy’s memory till old age. It is magnificent, with a natural momentum far different from the frigid, baroque flourishes of Curtius’ compositions; it should be read in full in Arrian. They could discharge themselves one and all, he told them; but let them first remember how Philip and Alexander had raised them from the poverty of mountain shepherds harassed by neighbour enemies (“of whom you were scared to death”) to be masters of the world. It was a resounding roll of victories. He challenged them to name any wealth he had not shared with them, or hardships either. (“See here—let anyone who has wounds strip and show them, and I’ll show you mine. I’ve no part of my body without them—at least, in front.”) He reminded them that not a man had been killed in flight as long as he had led them. After a ringing peroration, he bade them go back and boast in Macedon of having abandoned him among the races they had conquered. “You will be famous among men and a pleasure to the gods when you tell the story. Go!” He flung off the platform, rode back to the royal lodging, and slammed his door.

  He had made his impact. The Macedonians hung about in camp, not knowing what to do with themselves next. Nobody left. For two days he did not appear. Then Persians were seen going in. Rumour came out. He had taken the troops at their words; he was replacing them. Alongside the great traditional Macedonian regiments, the Foot Companions, the Silver Shields, the Companion Cavalry, there would be Persian corps bearing their names. Only those who were now his kindred (the Royal Kin of the Persians, and his fellow bridegrooms) were entitled to give him the greeting kiss. The Macedonian rank and file, many of whom had joined the shouting in a mere gust of crowd excitement, now pictured young Successors marching under their old standards before they had reached the sea.

  Then came the climax of this extraordinary episode. The Macedonians ran in a body to the royal terrace. They flung down their weapons and their shields, the sign of surrender in the field. As unarmed suppliants, they stood before the doors, crying to be let in. They promised to condemn the men who had incited them. They vowed to remain there day and night, till Alexander pitied them. After a while he came out. By then they were weeping, and he could not hold back his tears. He stepped forward, struggling for words. A cavalry officer called Callines spoke first. What had hurt them, he said, was his having made Persians his kin with leave to kiss him, a privilege no Macedonian had enjoyed.

  Alexander answered, “But I make you all my kinsmen, I call you that from now on.” When he had said this, Callines came up and kissed him, and anyone kissed him who wished. Then they took up their arms again, and went back cheering and singing paeans to the camp.

  The instigators of the muti
ny were condemned to death as agreed. Arrian comments on Alexander’s having ordered their arrest, “For his temper had worsened at this time”; a startling light upon his earlier tolerance, but probably true; increased fatigue and recurrent pain do make for irritability. T. E. Lawrence says in The Mint, “After that Handley crash in Rome the X-ray showed one rib furred like the bristles of a toothbrush against the wall of my chest, and much lung-pumping thrusts its thin dagger-pain into my heart.” The wall of Alexander’s chest had been perforated; his rib is more likely to have had spikes than bristles; and his X-ray would probably have shocked a thoracic surgeon. But whatever his recent anger, its sequel had deeply touched the romantic in him. He had made it up like a lovers’ quarrel; but it needed a bigger gesture. With his usual mixture of drama and practicality, he offered public thanksgiving at which both Greek seers and Persian magi officiated, followed by an enormous open-air feast of reconciliation. All the Macedonians (Arrian must mean all the officers) sat round him; next came the Persians; the foreign auxiliaries took precedence by their military records. He and his comrades drank from the same loving cup. “And he prayed for all kinds of blessings, and for harmony; above all between Greeks and Persians in their common land. It is said that nine thousand shared the feast.”