Alexander the Great

by Robin Lane Fox

  'Sex and sleep,' Alexander is said to have remarked, 'alone make me conscious that I am mortal'; his impatience with sleep was shared by his tutor, and many stories came to be told to illustrate his continence and his consideration for women, Alexander losing his temper with a man who offered to procure him small boys, Alexander punishing Companions for rape or agreeing to help a soldier's courtship provided it was pressed by means appropriate to a free-born woman. The theme may be near the truth, but philosophers liked to spread it, and no more can be said with certainty than that Alexander respected women rather than abused them. He was neither chaste nor prudish. According to Theophrastus, pupil of Aristotle, Philip and Olympias had once been worried by their son's lack of interest in sex, so they hired an expensive whore from Thessaly and told her to liven him up, but Alexander refused her advances in a mulish way, as if he were impotent. If his parents had tried to force a girl on him, he could hardly be blamed for refusing her; however, Theophrastus is known to have been thoroughly prejudiced against Alexander and Olympias, and his charge of impotence is a slander, not least because of Alexander's fathering of three or four children. Other stories are more to the point; when Alexander heard that his sister was having an affair, he is said to have commented that he did not see why she should not enjoy herself just because she was a princess. From a man who was to sleep with at least one man, four mistresses, three wives, a eunuch and, so gossip believed, an Amazon, the comment was honest enough.

  Not that the years of Aristotle's stay were only memorable for first loves and physical pleasure. There is a curious sidelight on Alexander's progress, a letter to him from the elderly Athenian Isocrates, who had corresponded with Philip and had hoped that the tutorship would be given to one of his pupils. ‘I hear everybody saying', he wrote soon after Aristotle's arrival, 'that you are fond of your fellow men, of Athens and of philosophy, in a sensible, not a thoughtless, sort of way', and he followed these politenesses with the sound advice to eschew academic quibbling and devote the time to the art of practical argument. The advice was a sly insult against Aristotle, whose school of philosophy gave time to such dry debating, but the politenesses which introduced it had a certain relevance; the widening of interests which is so noticeable among Alexander's friends was itself a widening through Greek culture, and here Aristotle stands as symbol of a process which bore Alexander the most valuable fruit. Again, the sons of highland nobles had come into contact with a civilized world of thought which had been denied to their fathers; Ptolemy, a nobleman from Eordaea, was said to blush if he was asked the name of his grandmother, but he died the pharaoh of Egypt, presiding over a bureaucratic kingdom and a system of state monopolies which needed skills that owed nothing to highland tribal life. The same could be said of Perdiccas, Seleucus and the other giants of the Age of the Successors; the young nobility were learning a little of what it meant to adapt; and in explaining Alexander's extraordinary successes, a high place must go to his officers, the widening of whose early days can only have broadened their contribution to Alexander's career. Alexander's own generation grew to share and support his ambitions with a new self-confidence which could be alarming and an intelligence which often went further than mere war. Aptly, the one Macedonian who adjusted to a Persian way of life was also a man from Mieza.

  But if Aristotle stands as a symbol of new horizons, he has added more to legend than to the facts of Alexander's life; to the east, especially the Arab east, the pair of them were a fascination, and their exploits as endless as the world itself, Aristotle and the Valley of Diamonds, the Wonder Stone or the Well of Immortality, Aristotle as Alexander's Vizier or as his magician, who gave him a box of wax models of his enemies and so ensured his success. In his own writings, he has left nothing to bring Alexander within reach, while the details of Pella and Olympias, Hephaistion and Bucephalas are a study in themselves but too disjointed to frame his personality. It seems as if a search for the young Alexander is bound to fail, and yet this personal issue cannot be avoided, for Alexander's personality is probably his most unusual contribution to history. As a conqueror he came less to change than to inherit and restore; but as a man he inspired and demanded what few leaders since have dared to consider possible. From his childhood there are only stories, of Alexander complaining that Philip would leave him nothing glorious to achieve, of Alexander snubbing an impossibly general question from Aristotle with a sensibly practical answer, or of Alexander refusing to compete in races unless his opponents were all of them kings; these stories are colourful, but they are mostly invented and the problem of his personality owes nothing to their perspective.

  Among the scattered ruins that survive from his childhood, a personal search might well seem an impossibility, and indeed it has often been said that personal judgements on Alexander owe more to their judge's psychology than to his own. There is, however, one delicate thread to explore. It begins among the stories of his youth and it leads, through his own publicity and popular image, to the way in which he wished himself to be seen; in the search for Alexander it is wrong to suggest that the man must be disentangled from the myth, for the myth is sometimes of his own making, and then it is the most direct clue to his mind. In this case contemporary hints support it and flattery helps to give it body; there are reasons, many of them within Macedonia, for assuming that Alexander meant its pattern to be taken seriously. It is on any view unusual, for it turns, not on power or profit, but on the poet Homer.

  "Take this son of mine away." ' King Philip is made to say to Aristotle in the fictitious Romance of Alexander, ' "and teach him the poems of Homer", and sure enough, that son of his went away and studied all day, so that he read through the whole of Homer's Iliad in a single sitting.' In spirit, this charming fiction comes near to life, for the theme of Homer's Iliad, and especially of its hero Achilles, is the link which spans the figures and stories of Alexander's youth. Through his mother Olympias he was a descendant of Achilles; his first tutor Lysimachus owed part of his lifelong favour to giving his pupil the nickname of Achilles; his beloved Hephaistion was compared by contemporaries with Patroclus, the intimate companion of Homer's hero; Aristotle taught him Homer's poems and at his pupil's request, helped to prepare a special text of the Iliad which Alexander valued above all his possessions; he used to sleep, said one of his officers, with a dagger and this private Iliad beneath his head, calling it his journey-book of excellence in war. In the second year of his march, when the Persian king had been routed, 'a casket was brought to him,

  which seemed to be the most precious of Darius's treasure-chests, and he asked his friends what they thought was so particularly valuable that it should be stored inside. Many opinions were expressed, but Alexander himself said he would put the Iliad there and keep it safe.' But the Iliad was among the oldest Greek poems, at least three hundred years older than Alexander and seemingly as distant as Shakespeare from a modem king.

  In deciding how he meant this, there is a danger of taking publicity too seriously or of following a theme of flattery too far. Nicknames from Homer were popular in Greece, Nestor for a wise man, Achilles for a brave one, and the mood of the Iliad was not an irrelevant revival for Philip's heir. Homer's poems were widely known in Macedonia. One of Antipater's sons could quote Homer fluently, as could subsequent kings; even in Philip's highland Macedonia, pottery has been found painted with scenes of the sack of Troy. Philip had already been compared with King Agamemnon, leader of the Greek allies who fought for ten years round Troy, and the style of his infantry was likened to Agamemnon's; the Trojan War had been cited by Herodotus as the first cause of the ancient enmity between Greece and Asia's monarchies and Philip's pamphleteers continued to draw the parallel between a new Greek invasion of Asia and the expedition described by Homer. Past history bore witness that Agamemnon and the Trojan war were worthwhile themes for a Greek invader of Asia to evoke and imitate. But Alexander was stressing his link with Achilles, a younger and more passionate hero, and hardly a symbol of kingly
leadership. There were public overtones here too, for Achilles was a hero of Thessaly, and Philip's heir was ruler of the Thessalians, a people essential for his army and control of southern Greece. Achilles was also a stirring Greek hero, useful for a Macedonian king whose Greek ancestry did not stop Greeks from calling him barbarian; in a similar vein, the great Kolokotronis, hero of Greek freedom, would dress and parade as the new Achilles when ridding Greece of the Turks in the 1820s. But, it was said, 'Alexander was emulous of Achilles, with whom he had had a rivalry since his earliest youth'; publicity and politics do not determine a young boy's heroes, and if Achilles can be proved to belong to Alexander's youth, and not to have been read back into it, then the man himself may still be within reach.

  The proof is difficult, but again not impossible: it depends on a famous Athenian joke. In the year after Philip's murder, Alexander was fighting near the Danube, and back in Athens, his political enemy Demosthenes ridiculed him as a mere Margites; this obscure insult reappears in the history book of a Macedonian courtier, and it must have been apt to be remembered and repeated. Now Margites was one of the more extreme figures in Greek poetry. He was the anti-hero of a parody of Homer's Iliad, wrongly believed to be by Homer himself, and he was known as a famous simpleton who could not count further than ten and who was so ignorant of the facts of life that among much else he was only persuaded to make love to a woman when he was told it would cure a wound in her private parts. By calling Alexander the new Margites, Demosthenes meant that so far from being an Achilles, he was nothing but a Homeric buffoon; they had met in Macedonia when Alexander was a boy, and the joke was pointless unless Alexander's Homeric pretensions were known before he ever invaded Asia.

  There is every sign, moreover, that others took them seriously, not least Alexander himself. He began his Asian expedition with a pilgrimage to Troy to honour Achilles's grave, and he took sacred armour from Troy's temple to accompany him to India and back again; his own court historian, who wrote to please him, picked up this theme and stressed parallels with Homer's poems in reports of his progress down the Asian coast; in art, the effects were more subtle, for if Alexander's appearance deliberately matched that of a youthful Greek hero, his features also came to influence portraits of Achilles until the two heroes could hardly be distinguished out of their context; the court sculptor Lysippus portrayed Alexander holding a Homeric spear and on the coins of the small Thessalian town which claimed to be Achilles's birthplace the pictures of the young Achilles grew to look like Alexander's own. The comparison mattered, and was known to matter: when the people of Athens wished to plead for the release of Alexander's Athenian prisoners they sent as their ambassador the only man by the name of Achilles known in fourth-century Athens; previous embassies had failed, but one Achilles pleased another, and this time, the Athenian prisoners were released. It is the smallest details which are always most revealing.

  The rivalry, then, existed and was thought important, but it is a different question how it was meant to be taken. Whether written, sung or dictated, Homer's poems were at least three hundred years older than Alexander, and their heroic code of conduct, when men strove for personal glory and knew no greater sanction than public shame and disgrace, had probably belonged to a society at least six hundred years older than that. In this world of heroes, whose ultimate ancestors are the ruined palaces of Troy and Mycenae, no figure is more compelling than Alexander's chosen Achilles; like Alexander, Achilles is young and lordly, a man of passion as much as action with a heart which, though often merciless, can still respond to another's evident nobility. In war, he knows no equal, and even when he sulks in his tent, black anger filling his heart, his reputation overshadows the battle he refuses to join. Like his fellow-heroes, he fights in the name of personal glory, whose first ideal is prowess and whose betrayal is shame and dishonour, but success and status are not his only inspirations: respect for an ageing father, blind love for a favourite Companion, and for a mistress removed by his overlord, a regret which is not just the self-pity of a hero deprived of his prize, Homer's Achilles, of all poetic figures, is a man of intelligible emotion. Above all, he is tragic, for as he has been told by his goddess-mother Thetis, who knows his unhappiness long before he tells her and yet has the sense to ask for it to be retold, 'Two fates bear him towards death's end ...; if he stays and fights around the city of the Trojans, Gone are his hopes of return, but his fame will be everlasting. But if he goes home to his own dear land, Gone is his fair fame, but his life will be long. And the end of death will not be swift to find him.' Firmly, Achilles chose fame against return; like Alexander, he died a young man.

  Such was Alexander's hero, and if he indeed took this rivalry literally, aspiring to what he had read, then his ambitions and character can still be brought to life. At first sight it seems so implausible, the emulation of a poem which looked back to an age of kings and prowess a thousand years before. But rivalry with Homer's world was not irrelevant romance; Homer's poems were still regarded by many Greeks as a source of ethical teaching, and from what is known of political life in Alexander's Athens, the combative code of the Iliad had in no way been outgrown. It was a fiercely self-assertive society and what was still implicit in democratic Athens was written larger in the north. In aristocratic Thessaly, on the borders of the Macedonian kings, the bodies of murderers would still be dragged behind a chariot round their victim's tomb, just as Homer's Achilles had once dragged the dead Hector through the dust in memory of his victim Patroclus. But Homer's ethic belongs in an even longer tradition. For Homer's heroes, life was not so much a stage as a competition, and the word for this outward striving for honour, to philotimo, is still fundamental to the modern Greeks' way of life; it is an extrovert ideal, not a moral one, and it owes more to emotions and quarrels than to reason and punishment; it belongs with an open-air style of living where fame is the surest way to immortality; it is an attitude that has deep roots in Greece, and it is this word 'philotimo' which was used to describe Alexander's Homeric ambitions. Homer's Achilles sums up the doubts and conflicts of to philotimo, a hero's emulous struggle for glory; the ideal is a lasting one, and against the perspective of Macedonia it would have made living sense.

  Through Aristotle and the fine Greek art at Pella, it is easy to overstress one side of the contrast in Alexander's Macedonian background. Pella was also a palace society, and kings and palaces had vanished for some three hundred years from the Greek world; it was the centre of a tribal aristocracy, to which the highland chieftains had come down from their townless world, and on both accounts, it was more archaic than its patronage of Greek art and intellect suggested. 'Idomeneus,' Homer's Agamemnon had said, judging a hero in terms of the old heroic age, 'I honour you above all the swift-horsed Greeks, whether in war or any other work or at the feast when the heroes mix the gleaming wine.' Horses and hunting, feasts and fighting, these were a hero's fields of prowess, but in Macedonia kings and barons continued them each in their distinctive way. Once, according to an old Macedonian custom, a Macedonian could not have worn a proper belt until he had killed a man in battle, and in Alexander's day single combat not only belonged to the ceremony of a royal funeral but was the recurrent business of his officers, who wrestled, jousted and speared in duels worthy of any Homeric hero. Hunting promised similar glory, and was given free rein by Alexander from the Lebanon to the hills of Afghanistan; according to custom, a Macedonian could not recline at dinner until he had killed a wild boar, another link with the world of Homer's poems, for only in Homer's society, not in contemporary Greece, did Greeks ever dine without reclining.

  At dinners, the king entertained his nobles and personal guest friends in a ceremonial style which recalled the great banquets of Homeric life. Gossip maintained that Macedonians would be drunk before they reached the first course, but such drinking was more a challenge than an indiscriminate debauch. Successes in battle were toasted formally and one noble pledged another to a cup which had to be equalled on pain of honour
. These royal feasts were a vital part of the loose weave of the kingdom. They brought king and nobles together in a formal relationship, just as feasts in the palace halls had daily confronted Homer's kings with their counsellors and neighbouring aristocrats. It was a personal relationship, governed by favour and friendship; the old Homeric traditions of kingly presents, of generosity and pious respect for ancestral friends still lived on in Alexander, who always respected past ties with the Macedonian kings, whether of long-dead Greek poets, an Athenian general or kinsmen of his mythical ancestors, even after an interval of more than a hundred years.

  This honour for guest friends had been central to the personal links which patterned the life of Homer's kings; others, the links of family and blood feuds, also found their parallel in Alexander's Macedonian home. But the nobles themselves shared a different and no less evocative honour, for at the court of their lowland king they served as his Companions, and to any lover of Homer, Companions are an unforgettable part of heroic life. Loosely, Companions may be partners in any common enterprise, fellow-oarsmen rowing with Odysseus or kings fighting with Agamemnon before Troy, but they also serve in a stricter sense. In Homer's Iliad, each king or hero has his own personal group of Companions, bound by respect, not kinship. Busy and steadfast, they dine in his tent or listen as he plays the lyre; they tend his bronze-rimmed chariot and drive his hoofed horses into battle, they fight by his side, hand him his spear and carry him, wounded, back to their camp. They are the men a hero loves and grieves to lose, Patroclus to the brooding Achilles or Polydamas to Hector rampant. With the collapse of kings and heroes, it is as if the Companions withdraw to the north, surviving only in Macedonia on the fringe of Europe. Driven thence when Alexander's conquests bring the Macedonians up to date, they retreat still further from a changing world and dodge into the swamps and forests of the Germans, only to reappear as the squires of early German kings and the retinues of counts in the tough beginnings of knighthood and chivalry.