Alexander the Great

by Robin Lane Fox

  Among Greeks at Pella, Alexander made friends for a lifetime with Nearchus the Cretan, well versed in the ways of the sea, and with Laomedon from Lesbos, who could speak an Oriental language, while from the western end of the Greek world the old family friend Demaratus returned from Sicily with stories of the Greeks' recent fight for freedom. Six of the fourteen Greeks known as Alexander's Companions first came to Macedonia in Philip's reign, and there were others, less talented in war, with whom he retained a lasting friendship. Aristonicus, for example, his father's flute-player who later died in Afghanistan 'fighting not as a musician might, but as a brave man' and whose statue Alexander set up at Delphi, or Thettalus the tragic actor, whose playing of Oedipus had won him prizes at Athens and who remained a close friend from boyhood to death.

  This Greek class of king's friends were chosen for merit; the Macedonian aristocracy of King's Companions were assured by birth, and the growing pressure of Greek outsiders was one of the uneasier currents at the court of Philip and Alexander. Under Alexander, Macedonians defined themselves sharply as a distinct class against the Greeks, not in terms of race, for the Macedonians claimed to be of Greek ancestry and immigrant Greeks like Nearchus the Cretan or Androsthenes, son of an exiled Athenian politician, became recognized as Macedonians when they received estates near the lowland coast. The distinction was one of status and all the sharper for being so; Eumenes the secretary, Critobulus the doctor, Medeius the cavalryman remained mere Greeks against whom a mood of Macedonian superiority was never far from the surface. So Alexander was growing up a Macedonian in a rough Macedonian world, the more so as his father had brought the life of Macedonia's highlands directly into his daily circle: he had decreed that the sons of highland nobles should serve and be educated as pages at Pella. The plan was greatly to Philip's advantage, for the pages were a valuable hostage for the conduct of their baronial fathers, and as they grew up, they were given new estates and revenues from newly conquered farms in the lowlands to endear them to their second home. Alexander profited too; men of two worlds, the pages became officers more likely to be loyal, for they arrived in the lowlands at the age of fourteen and naturally, they turned to a prince of their own age for friendship. In four known cases, sons of the highland nobility rehoused at Pella are future members of Alexander's bodyguard, that intimate clique of seven or eight of his most trusted friends. This bridging of Macedonia's contrasts was of the greatest consequence for the age that followed.

  As royal pages, they were educated and set at the centre of affairs. They dined and listened at the king's dinner table, guarded his bedroom, helped him astride his horse and accompanied him out hunting or in war; in return, only the king was allowed to flog them. Their life was still rough and uninhibited, but there was a new side to it: Even in the towns which Philip was building in the highlands there were none of the signs of cultured life, but at Pella the sons of Upper Macedonia could take the plot of a Greek play in their stride, learn a Greek poem, listen to Greek orators, move among Greek paintings and sculptures, discuss modern strategy and know of its history and theory, attend a Greek doctor and watch Greek engineers at work. Like the warlords of Heian Japan who absorbed all their skills from China, the Macedonian barons owed their broader horizons to Greece. There had been highlanders of note before, a diplomat, for example, or a vigorous leader of cavalry, and against the long tradition of Greek culture. Macedonians of another age had already distinguished themselves; Antipater, Alexander's elderly viceroy, wrote a military history and edited his own correspondence, and Philip himself was a fluent public speaker. But Alexander's age-group grew to a new variety. Ptolemy, like Nearchus the Cretan, wrote an artful history, more notable for its attitude to Alexander than its rough literary style and Marsyas, brother of Antigonus the one-eyed, produced three books on Macedonian affairs. To Hephaistion, Alexander's favourite, two Greek philosophers dedicated volumes of letters, while Lysimachus listened attentively to a Brahmin guru in India and took an interest in botany and trees. Whereas Philip's mother had not learnt to read or write until middle age, Peucestas learnt to speak Persian and showed a marked favour for the customs and dress of the Persians he came to govern. As befitted the new generation that planned to invade Persia, Herodotus's great history of the Persian wars was read and enjoyed by Alexander's friends; one of Philip's Greek visitors had produced a shortened version, perhaps at Philip's request, and Alexander knew it enough to quote and follow its stories; both Ptolemy and Nearchus were influenced by Herodotus's way of seeing the foreign tribes of the north and east, although they could not aspire to his style. Whereas their highland fathers had owned rough pottery, primitive bone bracelets and archaic swords with gold-plated handles, this new generation had the money and taste for paintings and mosaic floors; their mothers had worn gold jewellery in rough and primitive styles and joined in battles against barbarians, but Alexander's friends maintained Athenian mistresses and introduced their women to bracelets and necklaces of oriental elegance and their artists to Iranian carpets whose patterns they copied in painted friezes. The tough life of drinking, hunting and war persisted, but there was more to Alexander's officers than is usually credited; out in Babylonia, Harpalus would help to supervise the largest treasury in the world and see to new plants for an oriental garden, while one of Antipater's sons became a drop-out and founded a community on Mount Athos with an alphabet of its own. Nothing could be further from the highland customs of his father's contemporaries; again Alexander escaped a purely Macedonian life.

  Alexander, therefore, was finding his feet among adventurous friends in a widening world. His father Philip could do little more than guide the process, for in the years while he marched between the Dardanelles and the Dalmatian coast, fighting, founding towns and always negotiating for control in the Greek cities to the south, he could only appoint the most suitable Greek tutor for a son who had already outgrown his boyhood attendants. The post was enviable, and the candidates who hoped for it were a measure of Philip's new influence. He had long had close links with Plato's pupils, both as a boy- and as a politician, and in Athens the most famous teacher and speaker of the age had been his continual correspondent and might expect, in return for his flattering letters, that the tutor's job should go to one of his many former students. Candidates were canvassed from far Aegean islands and Ionian cities of Asia with the usual academic warring, but while praises of Philip were being sounded by the hopeful the king made up his mind; from the island of Lesbos, he sent for Plato's most brilliant pupil, Aristotle son of Nicomachus, 'thin legged and small-eyed' and as yet unknown for his philosophical publications.

  'He taught him writing, Greek, Hebrew, Babylonian and Latin. He taught him the nature of the sea and the winds; he explained the course of the stars, the revolutions of the firmament and the life-span of the world. He showed him justice and rhetoric: he warned him against the looser sorts of women.' That, however, is only the opinion of a medieval French poet, for in his surviving works, Aristotle never mentions Alexander nor alludes directly to his stay in Macedonia. According to Bertrand Russell, Alexander 'would have been bored by the prosy old pedant', but that, too, is only a fellow philosopher's guess.

  Personal connections would have drawn Aristotle to Macedonia, for his father had been a doctor at the court of King Amyntas III; Philip had also been friendly with his former patron Hermeias, who maintained an impressive local tyranny on the western coast of Asia and had married his daughter to the philosopher. Later, men said that he had taken the job to persuade Philip to rebuild his ruined home town Stageira, now annexed to Macedonia's eastern borders, but the story was told of too many philosophers at court to be especially convincing, and the ruin of Stageira was probably an error of legend; the motive may have gained favour as an answer to those who had protested, probably unfairly, that Aristotle had grown to ignore his fellow citizens. Privately, Aristotle did receive a handsome fee for his services, and so as his will proves, he died a rich man: according to rumour, Philip
and Alexander also patronized his researches into natural history by giving him gamekeepers to tag Macedonia's wild animals. As the observations for his astonishing works on zoology can be shown to have been made almost exclusively on the island of Lesbos, this rumour is untrue.

  'In Aristotle's opinion,' said the most reliable of his biographers, 'the wise man should fall in love, take part in politics and live with a king.' The remark, if authentic, suggests that the Macedonian visit should have made a happy memory. Critics complained that Aristotle had gone to live in a 'home of mud and slime', an allusion to Pella's lakeside site, but before long Alexander and his friends were sent to the lowland town of Mieza where they could learn in a peaceful retreat of grottoes and shaded walks, believed to be sacred in the nymphs; traces of their school surroundings have recently been found near modem Naoussa, but how long this interlude lasted and how continuously the boys were taught is far from certain. After two yean, Alexander became involved in government business, and although Aristotle is known to have been in Macedonia the following summer, it may no longer have been as a tutor.

  Whether briefly or not, Alexander spent these school hours with one of the most tireless and wide-ranging minds which has ever lived. Nowadays Aristotle is remembered as a philosopher, but apart from his philosophical works he also wrote books on the constitutions of 158 different states, edited a list of the victors in the games at Delphi, discussed music and medicine, astronomy, magnets and optics, made notes on Homer, analysed rhetoric, outlined the forms of poetry, considered the irrational sides of man's nature, set zoology on a properly experimental course in a compendious series of masterpieces whose facts become art through the love of a rare observer of nature; he was intrigued by bees and he began the study of embryology, although the dissection of human corpses was forbidden and his only opportunity was to procure and examine an aborted foetus. The contact between Greece's greatest brain and her greatest conqueror is irresistible, and their mutual influence has occupied the imagination ever since.

  'The young man', Aristotle wrote, 'is not a proper audience for political science; he has no experience of life, and because he still follows his emotions, he will only listen to no purpose, uselessly.' There speaks, surely, a man who had tried philosophy on Alexander and failed, for there is little evidence that Aristotle influenced Alexander either in his political aims or his methods. He did, however, write pamphlets for him, perhaps on request, although none survives to be dated: their titles, On Kingship, In Praise of Colonies, and possibly, too, Alexander's Assembly and The Glories of Riches, seem valid themes for a man who would become the richest king and the most prolific city-founder in the world, but Aristotle had already shown himself well able to flatter his patrons, and these works may have complimented Alexander's achievements rather than advised him to new ideas. Much has been made of Aristotle's supposed advice to 'treat the barbarians as plants and animals', but the advice may be fictitious. Although he did take the common view of his Greek contemporaries that Greek culture was superior to the ways of the barbarian cast, he cannot be condemned as a thoroughgoing racist; he was interested in Oriental religion and he praised very highly the constitution by which the Carthaginians were governed. When Alexander appointed Orientals to high positions in his empire, it is often said that practice had shown him the narrowness of his tutor's views on foreigners; their differences are not so very marked. Aristotle's political thought was formed from life in a Greek city, and it was these same Greek cities that his pupil planted from the Nile to the slopes of the Himalayas, where they lasted and mattered far longer than any age of kingship whose supposed importance Aristotle is often criticized for failing to anticipate. Not only through his cities, Alexander remained a Greek by culture in the world of the east, and although politics and friendship caused him to include Orientals in his Empire, he never took to Persian religion and may never have learnt an eastern language fluently.

  Though politics were not at issue, a boy could not help learning curiosity from Aristotle, and to fourteen-year-old Alexander, he would seem less the abstract philosopher than the man who knew the ways of a cuttlefish, who could tell why wrynecks had a tongue or how hedgehogs would mate standing up, who had practised vivisection on a tortoise and had described the life cycle of an Aegean mosquito. Medicine, animals, the lie of the land and the shape of the seas; these were interests which Aristotle could communicate and Philip had already instanced, and each was a part of adult Alexander. He prescribed cures for snakebite to his friends, he suggested that a new strain of cattle should be shipped from India to Macedonia: he shared his father's interest in drainage and irrigation and the reclaiming of waste land; his surveyors paced out the roads in Asia, and his fleet was detailed to explore the Caspian Sea and the Indian ocean; his treasurer experimented with European plants in a Babylonian garden, and thanks to the expedition's findings, Aristotle's most intelligent pupil could include the banyan, the cinnamon and a bush of myrrh in books which mark the beginnings of botany. Alexander was more than a man of ambition and toughness; he had the wide armoury of interests of a man of curiosity, and in the days at Mieza there had been matter enough to arouse them. 'The only philosopher', a friend referred to him politely, 'whom I have ever seen in arms.'

  To Aristotle the meeting may have seemed more irksome. The young, he wrote, are at the mercy of their changeable desires. They are passionate and quick tempered, they follow their impulses: they are ruled by their emotions. They strive for honour, especially for victory, and desire them both much more than money. They are simple-natured and trusting, because they have not seen otherwise. Their hopes fly as high as a drunkard's, their memories are short.

  They are brave but conventional and therefore easily abashed. Unchastened by life, they prefer the noble to the useful: their errors are on the grand scale, bora of excess. They like laughter, they pity a man because they always believe the best of him ... unlike the old, they think they know it all already.

  Behind such a confident analysis, there must be memories of Alexander and his fellow pupils. 'A child must be punished ...': 'the young do not keep quiet of their own accord', wrote Aristotle, 'but education serves as a rattle to distract the older children,' Discipline, it seems, was none too easy at Mieza.

  Alexander was not his only Macedonian pupil. Aristotle began a friendship with Antipater, a man whose varied intelligence is easily forgotten, and Antipater's sons would have come for lessons at Mieza; so would the royal pages, and perhaps also Hephaistion, son of Amyntor to whom Aristotle dedicated a volume of letters. Hephaistion was the man whom Alexander loved, and for the rest of their lives their relationship remained as intimate as it is now irrecoverable: Alexander was only defeated once, the Cynic philosophers said long after his death, and that was by Hephaistion's thighs. There is only one statue that has claims to be of him; short-haired and long-nosed, he does not look unduly impressive, but looks may not have been his attraction. Philip had been away on too many campaigns to devote much time in person to his son and it is not always fanciful to explain the homosexuality of Greek young men as a son's need to replace an absent or indifferent father with an older lover. Hephaistion's age is not known and its discovery could put their relationship in an unexpected light: he may even have been the older of the two, like the Homeric hero with whom contemporaries compared him, an older Patroclus to Alexander's Achilles.

  In ancient Greece moderate homosexuality was an accepted companion of sex with wives and prostitutes. It was a fashion, not a perversion, and the Persians were openly said by Herodotus to have learnt it from the Greeks, just as émigré Englishmen have made it fashionable in smart Australian society. Extreme, promiscuous homosexual desire and male prostitution were as absurd or abhorrent as they often seem nowadays, but between two young men or a young and an older man affairs were not unusual; homosexuality, so Xenophon had recently written, was also a part of education, whereby a young man leamt from an older lover. Such affairs could be expensive, but if they could be
romanticized, they were unobjectionable.

  The Macedonian nobility may have been more extreme: there was a belief among Greeks that homosexuality had been introduced by the Dorian invaders who were thought to have swept down from Europe around 1000 B.C. and settled the states of Crete and Sparta. It is irrelevant that this belief was probably false. Educated Greeks accepted it because of what they saw around them and they acted according to what they believed; descendants of the Dorians were considered and even expected to be openly homosexual, especially among their ruling class, and the Macedonian kings had long insisted on their pure Dorian ancestry. They were credited with the usual boy-lovers by Greek gossip, and king Archelaus was said to have kissed the poet Euripidts. When Theopompus the Greek pamphleteer returned from a visit to Philip's court, he enlarged most virulently on the homosexuality of its noblemen, dismissing them as hetairai not hetairoi, prostitutes not companions. He was mistrusted for his wild abuse but he is more likely to have overstated his case than invented it entirely; if so, Alexander may have grown up in a court where the conventions of age were less respected and homosexuality was practised with the added determination of men of Dorian ancestry. At the age of thirty Alexander was still Hephaistion's lover although most young Greeks would usually have grown out of the fashion by then and an older man would have given up or turned to a young attraction. Their affair was a strong one; Hephaistion grew to lead Alexander's cavalry most ably and to become his Vizier before dying a divine hero, worthy of posthumous worship.