Alexander the Great

by Robin Lane Fox

  'Wreathed is the bull; the end is near, the sacrificer is at hand': Philip's sudden murder seemed a mystery to his guests and in mysteries the Delphic oracle was believed once more to have told the only truth. The oracle, men later said, had given this response to Philip in the spring before his murder; the bull, he thought, meant the Persian king, the sacrificer himself, and the oracle's verse confirmed that his invasion of Asia would succeed. To Apollo, god of the oracle, the bull was Philip, wreathed for his daughter's wedding, and the sacrificer was Pausanias; the response came true, but an oracle is not an explanation, and in history, especially the history of a murder, it is not only important to know what will happen. It is also important to know why.

  Amid much gossip and confusion, only one contemporary account survives of Pausanias's motives. Philip's murder, wrote Aristotle the philosopher, was a personal affair, and as Aristotle had lived at the Macedonian court where he tutored the royal family, his judgement deserves to be considered: Pausanias killed the king 'because he had been abused by the followers of Attalus', uncle of Philip's new wife Eurydice and therefore high in Philip's esteem. Others knew the story more fully, and some fifty years later, it had grown and gained implausibilities: Pausanias, they said, had been Philip's lover, until jealousy involved him in a quarrel with Attalus, not a nobleman to be affronted lightly. Attalus invited Pausanias to dinner, made him hopelessly drunk and gave him to the keepers of his mules to assault according to their fancy: Pausanias had sought revenge from Philip, but Philip was not to be turned against his new bride's uncle, so he ignored the complaints. Soon afterwards, Attalus had been sent to command the advance invasion of Asia, and Pausanias was said to have turned against the only target who remained in Macedonia: in a fit of irresponsible revenge, he had killed the king who had let him down.

  Pausanias's grievance may perhaps be true, but the story which Aristotle sponsored is not a full or sufficient explanation. He mentions it in passing, in a philosophical book where Philip's murder is only one of a series of contemporary events which he can otherwise be shown to have judged too shallowly for history; he knew Macedonia well, though only as a court official, and in the matter of Pausanias it is not hard to criticize his judgement. Even if Pausanias was as unbalanced as most assassins, it was strange that he should have picked on Philip when avenging a sexual outrage allegedly sustained many weeks before from another man; too many crimes have been wrongly explained by Greek gossip as due to homosexuality for one more example to carry much conviction. There was cause, perhaps, for the story's origin; within weeks of Philip's death, Attalus would be murdered in Asia on the orders of Alexander, Philip's heir and Aristotle's former pupil. Possibly the new king's friends had blamed Pausanias's crime on the arrogance of an enemy who could no longer answer back; officially, they may have put it about that Attalus had raped Pausanias, and Aristotle believed them, involving Attalus in a murder for which he was not responsible; other enemies of the king can be proved to have been similarly defamed, and there was no name more hateful to Alexander's friends than that of Attalus.

  A different approach is possible, taken from the murder's timing and its beneficiaries, both of them broad arguments but backed by facts in Pausanias's background which owe nothing to Attalus or tales of unrequited love. Pausanias was a nobleman from the far western marches of Macedonia whose tribes had only been added to the kingdom during Philip's reign; he was not a true Macedonian at all, for his tribesmen had previously paid allegiance to Epirus beyond the border and called themselves by an Epirote name. But Epirus was Olympias's home and place of refuge: she could claim past kinship with Pausanias's people, accessible even in her exile, and she might not have found it hard to work on a nobleman whom Philip had recruited away from his local friendships. The puzzle was the timing of the murder, for a Macedonian seeking revenge would not naturally wait to kill Philip at a family wedding festival, in full view of a foreign public; Pausanias, some said, was one of the seven Royal Bodyguards, and if so, he would have had many chances of a murder in private. But for Olympias, the murder had been timed and planned ideally; Philip was killed at the wedding designed to discard her, within days of the birth of Eurydice's son and within hours of the family marriage which had made her Epirote ancestry irrelevant. No sooner was Philip dead than her own son Alexander could take the kingdom from rivals and restore her to her former influence. Officially, Pausanias's outburst could be laid to Attalus's charge; Olympias, perhaps, may have known that it had begun from more desperate instigation. Of the murder's convenience Olympias is said to have allowed no doubt:

  On the same night that she returned to Macedonia, she placed a golden crown on Pausanias's head, though he was still hanging on his murderer's stake: a few days later, she took down his body and burnt it over the remains of her dead husband. She built a mound there for Pausanias and saw that the people offered yearly sacrifices at it, having drummed them full of superstition. Under her maiden name, she dedicated to Apollo the sword with which Philip had been stabbed: all this was done so openly that she seemed to be afraid that the crime might not be agreed to have been her work.

  This may be exaggerated, but there is no reason to dismiss all its detail as false or as malicious rumour; its source cannot be checked independently, but Olympias was a woman of wild emotion, who would later show no scruple in murdering family rivals who threatened her. Gratitude alone cannot incriminate her but it is one more generality that involved her in what Aristotle, perhaps on purpose, failed to explain.

  These generalities can be extended. Pausanias had evidently been assisted, not least by the men who waited with his other horses, and if Olympias had been his adviser, she could not have rested content with the mere fact of the crime. She was plotting for her return, and only her son, Philip's probable heir, could have guaranteed it. If she had reason to turn to Pausanias, she had reason to turn to her son Alexander, and though no remotely reliable evidence was ever cited against him, it is proper to consider his position too.

  A year before, when Philip had married Eurydice, Alexander had quarrelled sharply with his father and followed his mother into retreat; he had soon been reconciled and restored to favour, as his presence at Philip's side on the day of the murder confirms, but he had not lived securely through the months since his return. Despite his age, ability still marked him out as Philip's probable successor, but he was living under the disgrace of Olympias's dismissal; too anxious for his own inheritance, he had recently caused his closest friends to be exiled, and when Eurydice bore a son his fears can only have gained in urgency. It had already been said by Attalus that Eurydice's son would be more legitimate than those by other wives and though the boy was only an infant, he had powerful relations to help him to a throne which had never passed on principle to the eldest son. He was a threat, though perhaps not an immediate one, but when Philip was murdered, Attalus was conveniently far away in Asia and the boy was only a few weeks old. No sooner was Alexander king than the baby was killed and Attalus assassinated as a traitor too far from court to rally his friends.

  Fears for the succession had twice divided Alexander from Philip, but it is one thing to profit as a father's heir, quite another to kill him for the sake of his inheritance. At most Alexander was later suspected by Greek gossip; there was no evidence whatsoever against him, and theories about his presumed ruthlessness can hardly fill such a gap. A ruthless parricide would have done better to encourage a secret coup, so much safer and neater for the seizure of a throne which nearly proved elusive. A wedding festival for foreign guests was an absurdly clumsy moment for Philip's aspiring heir to stage his murder, as its witnesses would quickly spread the news and inflame the many foreign subjects he would have to retain. Alexander's first year as king showed what dangers this could mean. Whether Alexander could ever have brought himself to connive at Philip's murder is a question which only faith or prejudice can pretend to answer; they had quarrelled, certainly, but Alexander had also saved his father's life on a previous
occasion, and there is no evidence to prove that he hated Philip's memory, let alone that he claimed credit for his death. Arguments from timing and benefit make Olympias's guilt a probability, Alexander's only a speculation; it is more relevant, as Alexander himself was aware, that they could be applied no less forcefully elsewhere.

  'The Persians say that nobody yet has killed his own father or mother, but that whenever such a crime seems to have happened, then it is inevitable that inquiry will prove that the so-called son was either adopted or illegitimate. For they say it is unthinkable that a true parent should ever be killed by his true son.' To the Persians, as seen by a Greek observer, Alexander's complicity would have been unthinkable on a point of human principle; to Alexander it was excluded on stronger grounds. The Persians, he said, had designed the murder themselves. 'My father died from conspirators whom you and your people have organized, as you have boasted in your letters to one and all': so Alexander would write in a published despatch to the Persian king four years later, and the reference to public letters proves that the Persians' boast, at least, was a fact of history. If benefit alone is a proof of guilt, then the Persians had as much reason to murder Philip as did any outraged wife or son, for their empire, an easy eleven days' march from Macedonia, had just been invaded, and if Philip could be killed, his army could be expected to fall apart in the usual family quarrels. Persian boasts, however, are no guarantee of the truth, especially when they could have been made to attract allies against Philip's heir. Of the murder's beneficiaries, at home and abroad, it is Olympias who remains most suspect; her guilt will never be proved, and the role of her son should not be guessed, but it is all too plausible that Philip was murdered by the wife he had tried to discard.

  If the murder can be questioned, it is wrong to imply it can ever be solved, for even to contemporaries it remained a famous mystery. Not so its likely effects, for Philip was dead, the 'man whose like had never been seen in Europe', and there was no reason to suppose that his twenty-year-old son would ever claim his inheritance from the feuds of brother against brother, father against son which a change of king had always inspired. But within five years, that same boy would have left his father's extraordinary achievements far behind; he could look back on Philip, fairly, as a lesser man: he had overthrown an empire which had stood for two hundred years; he had become a thousand times richer than any man in the world, and he was ready for a march which seemed superhuman to those who freely worshipped him as a god. History has often seemed the study of facts beyond our control. With Alexander it would come to depend on the whims and choices of a twenty-five-year-old man, who ended by ruling some two million square miles.

  If his effects, necessarily, were swift, their consequences would prove more lasting. 'We sit round our sea,' Socrates the philosopher had told his friends, 'like frogs around a frog-pond.' Greek art had already reached to Paris; Greeks had worked as craftsmen near modern Munich or lived in the lagoons of the Adriatic south of Venice, but no Greek from the mainland had ever been east of Susa or visited the steppes of central Asia, and the frog-pond remained the Mediterranean sea. As a result of Alexander, Greek athletics would come to be performed in the burning heat of the Persian gulf; the tale of the Trojan horse would be told on the Oxus and among the natives of the Punjab; far from the frog-pond, Greeks would practise as Buddhists and Homer would be translated into an Indian language; when a north-west Indian city came to be excavated, the love story of Cupid and Psyche was found to have been carved on ivory and left beside the elephant-goads of a local Indian mahout. Alexander's story does not end with warfare or with the problems of his personality; had he chosen differently, the ground would never have been cleared for a whole new strand in Asia to grow from his army's reaping.

  Personally, his fascination was more immediate, and least of all did it die with him. His tent, his ring, his cups, his horse or his corpse remained the ambition of successors who even imitated the way he had held his head. One example can serve for them all, for once, on the eve of battle he appeared in a dream to Pyrrhus, boldest of Greek generals, and when Pyrrhus asked what help a ghost could promise, 'I lend you', he answered, 'my name.' True to the story, it was the name which retained a living fascination for two thousand years. It attracted the youthful Pompey, who aspired to it even in his dress; it was toyed with by the young Augustus, and it was used against the emperor Trajan; among poets, Petrarch attacked it, Shakespeare saw through it; Christians resented it, pagans maintained it, but to a Victorian bishop it seemed the most admirable name in the world. Grandeur could not resist it; Louis XIV, when young, danced as Alexander in a ballet; Michelangelo laid out the square on Rome's Capitol in the design of Alexander's shield; Napoleon kept Alexander's history as bedside reading, though it is only a legend that he dressed every morning before a painting of Alexander's grandest victory. As a name, it had the spell of youth and glory: it was Julius Caesar who once looked up from a history of Alexander, thought for a while and then burst into tears 'because Alexander had died at the age of thirty-two, king of so many peoples, and he himself had not yet achieved any brilliant success'.

  Alexander, then, is that rare and complex figure, a hero, and in his own lifetime, he wished to be seen as the rival of his society's heroic ideal. Through the continual interest of the educated West in the Greek past and through the spread, mostly in Oriental languages, of a legendary romance of Alexander's exploits, his fame reached from Iceland to China; the Well of Immortality, submarines, the Valley of Diamonds and the invention of a flying machine are only a few of the fictitious adventures which became linked with his name in a process which each age continued according to its preoccupations; when the Three Kings of the Orient came to pay homage to Jesus, Melchior's gold, said Jewish legend, was in fact an offering from Alexander's treasure. Nor has he been forgotten by ordinary men at either end of his empire. Because of the spread of the Romance of Alexander* there are Afghan chieftains who still claim to be descended from his blood. Seventy years ago they would go to war with the red flag they believed to be his banner, while on stormy nights in the Aegean, the island fishermen of Lesbos still shout down the sea with their question, 'Where is Alexander the Great?', and on giving their calming answer, 'Alexander the Great lives and is King', they rest assured that the waves will subside.

  'But where is Alexander, the soldier Alexander?' Neither fame nor legend has helped his history, and the young man who first took power from a murder at Aigai has been lost among varying stories and an array of half-reported histories.

  * This legendary narrative took shape in Egypt, mostly some five centuries after Alexander's death. Earlier elements and a few facts survive among its wild fiction.

  More than twenty contemporaries wrote of his career, but not one of their books survives in its original and only one extract from a letter of Alexander is genuine beyond dispute. Four hundred years or more after his death, two historians and two abbreviators interwove or cut down his original histories and it is from their long narratives that his life must mostly be recovered. Writing under the Roman empire, they did not understand Alexander's age, and it is as if the history of Tudor England could only be recovered from Macaulay's essays and the histories of Hume the philosopher. And yet by minute comparison, their originals' outline can mostly be mapped out and art and inscriptions can help to discount their prejudices; they yield a picture and by building a frame from each of the societies in which Alexander moved, this picture can often be set in a convincing perspective. Alexander is the subject for a search, not a story, for such was the style and content of his first written histories that any confident narrative can only be disreputable. Still less is he a lesson or a moral warning. To study the past for human folly or popular superstition is only to be patronizing about our own same hopes and fears, expressed in a different society. The merit of ancient Greek history is not as a moral sermon, but as a study that reaches back through a vast passage of time; it is still possible to share what men, even Alexander,
experienced at such a distance, and after two thousand years, the search, though never easy, is often vivid, always worthwhile.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The search for Alexander begins darkly but dramatically. When Philip was murdered, the Macedonian court could only expect another of the family struggles which had weakened their kingdom for the past hundred years; such struggles are seldom reported in detail, but clues can be found, often in the most unlikely places, and together they suggest a pattern, misleading perhaps by its thinness but consistent with the way in which Macedonian kings had always had to behave. First, the pattern needs a background.

  Set on the northern borders of the Greek-speaking world, adjoining Europe's tribesmen, Philip's Macedonia was a broad patchwork of kingdoms, stitched together by conquest, marriage and the bribes and attractions of his rising fortune. At the time of Alexander's birth, it would have seemed a land of impossible contrasts, and thirteen years of Philip's energy had not altogether removed the differences of interest which had troubled previous kings. It was still a land of lowlands and highlands, which Philip and his ancestors ruled from the south-east plains, a fenland of the four great rivers which water the crops and the winter pasturage on their rich light loam. Marshy and densely forested, these fens and their bordering hills were a land for pioneers and Philip and his ancestors had attacked them with the necessary spirit. Drainage had channelled the flooding rivers for irrigation; roads had been cut through the dense pine-forests and pitch had been boiled from their logs by a native technique and sold to Greek shipbuilders in the timberless south; old gold mines had been seized on Philip's eastern border and forced to yield a thousandfold by a mass of new slave labour and Greeks skills of extraction; wild oxen, bears and lions were hunted on horseback for sport and food; Macedonians near the coast had mastered the art of fly-fishing for trout on their rivers and had introduced the fig and olive to lands where they fruited twice yearly. 'Lovely Emathia' Homer had called these rolling plains, a fit home for herds of cattle; an old Macedonian dance mimed the life of the cattle-rustler, clearly the trade of many local farmers. Cattle had never abounded in Greece where meat was seldom tasted outside religious sacrifices; Maccdon's more frequent diet of meat may not be irrelevant to her toughness on the battlefield.