of a living epic cycle.
Alexander’s father, Philip II of Macedon, had fallen in love with Olympias when both were
initiated into the mysteries of the Kabeiri (earth gods) on the island of Samothrace. Later on,
Olympias was known to be devoted to ectastic Dionysian cults. During their ceremonies she entered
into states of possession, and to the festival processions in honor of the god she introduced large,
hand-tamed snakes that terrified the male spectators.
Strong-willed, intelligent, and ruthlessly committed to Alexander’s interests as she saw them,
Olympias apparently never read the chapter in the textbook of Greek culture that forbade women to
meddle in politics. She also passed along to Alexander her unshakable belief in his special
connection to the gods and his unique destiny. Alexander may have been the only man in Macedon
who was not afraid of his formidable, some have said terrible, mother.
Olympias probably married Philip in 357. We are told that before Alexander’s birth she dreamed
that she had heard a crash of thunder and that her womb had been struck by a thunderbolt. There
followed a blinding flash of light. A great sheet of flame blazed up from it, spreading far and wide
before it disappeared.
Philip, too, had a prophetic dream. He saw himself sealing up his wife’s womb; on the seal was
engraved the figure of a lion. Interpreting this dream, Aristander of Telmessus, who later served as
Alexander’s seer during his campaigns, declared that Olympias must be pregnant, since men did not
seal up what was empty, and that she would bear a son whose nature would be bold and lion-like.
That bold and lion-like son probably was born on July 20, 356, the very day when the great Temple
of Artemis at Ephesos, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, burned to the ground. Hegesias
of Magnesia claimed that the conflagration was no wonder: Artemis was away from her shrine
attending the birth of Alexander.
Philip received the news of his son’s birth just after he had captured the important city of Potidaea.
In fact, three happy messages were brought to Philip that day: that his one and only general, Parmenio,
had defeated the Illyrians in a great battle; that his racehorse had been victorious at the Olympic
games; and that Alexander had been born. Philip’s soothsayers predicted that a son whose birth
coincided with three victories would be invincible.
The soothsayers were right; but of course, they also knew that the blood of some nearly invincible
heroes flowed through the infant’s veins. Olympias did nothing to discourage Alexander’s belief in
his descent from heroes and divinities. When she sent Alexander off to lead his great expedition, we
are told that she disclosed to him the secret of his conception and exhorted him to show himself
worthy of his parentage. (Unfortunately, Alexander never revealed what his mother had told him.)
Even as a young boy, according to Plutarch, Alexander revealed his ambitious nature. He was a
fine runner, and when friends asked him whether he would be willing to compete at Olympia, he
replied that he would—“if I have kings to run against me.” He also astonished some visiting Persian
ambassadors by questioning them about the distances they had traveled, the nature of the journey into
the interior of Persia, the king’s character and experience in war, and the nation’s military strength.
His close interrogation of these ambassadors was later seen as particularly significant.
Indeed, even before he reached puberty, Alexander had already planned his career. Whenever he
heard that his father had captured some famous city or won an overwhelming victory, he was annoyed
and complained to his friends, “Boys, my father will forestall me in everything. There will be nothing
great or spectacular for you and me to show the world.”
THE TAMING OF BUCEPHALAS
Alexander’s precocity and ambition are perhaps best illustrated by the delightful story of the horse
named Bucephalas—“Oxhead,” for the shape of the mark on his forehead. The big black horse had
been brought to Philip by Philoneicus the Thessalian, who had offered to sell him for the huge sum of
thirteen talents. When Philip and his friends went down to watch Bucephalas being put through his
paces, however, they found him quite wild and unmanageable. He allowed no one to mount him; nor
would the horse endure the shouts of Philip’s grooms. He reared up against anyone who approached
him. Angry at having been offered a vicious, unbroken animal, Philip ordered Bucephalas to be led
away.
Alexander intervened with a wager: if he could not mount and ride Bucephalas, he would pay his
purchase price. Philip’s friends laughed at the bet. But Alexander had noticed what no one else had
seen: that Bucephalas was spooked by his own shadow. Alexander therefore turned Bucephalas
toward the sun, so that his shadow would fall behind him; then, running alongside and stroking him
gently, Alexander sprang lightly onto his back. When he saw that Bucephalas had been freed of his
fears and wanted to show his speed, Alexander gave him his head and urged him forward at a gallop.
As Philip and his friends held their collective breath, Alexander reached the end of his gallop, turned
under full control, and rode back in triumph. Philip’s friends broke into applause. Philip himself, we
are told, wept for joy, and said, “My boy, you must find a kingdom big enough for your ambitions.
Macedonia is too small for you.”
Philip was right, of course. But the real significance of this event was not what it revealed of
Alexander’s ambition; what really set the young prince apart were his keen powers of observation
and his ability to draw the correct inferences from what he saw. As a young man, Alexander applied
those powers to combat; he was able to observe and then act upon data—features of topography, for
instance—whose implications no one else could understand as clearly or as quickly.
AN EDUCATION FIT FOR A PRINCE
In charge of the nurses, pedagogues, and teachers expected to educate the tamer of Bucephalas was a
certain Leonidas, a relative of Olympias, known as a strict disciplinarian. Alexander’s pedagogue (or
minder, usually a slave) was an Acarnanian named Lysimachus, who pleased his charge by calling
Philip “Peleus,” nicknaming Alexander “Achilles,” and styling himself “Phoenix,” the name of
Achilles’ old tutor.
Once when Alexander was making sacrifice to the gods and was preparing to throw incense on the
altar fire with both hands, Leonidas stopped him: only when Alexander had conquered the spice-
bearing regions could he be so lavish with his incense. Later, after he had conquered those regions,
Alexander sent Leonidas 500 talents’ worth of frankincense and 100 talents’ worth of myrrh,
explaining that he had sent this abundance so that Leonidas might stop dealing parsimoniously with the
gods.
The grove of Mieza, in Macedon, where Aristotle taught Alexander the Great when he was about fourteen years old. Author’s
collection
This ending has always appealed to those who have endured a strict teacher. We should attend,
however, to the anecdote’s opening scene, which provides the real insight into the character of
Alexander. Even before he needed their favor to conquer the world, Alexander was extraordinarily
pious and generous to the gods.
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When Alexander was fourteen years old, Philip brought the great philosopher Aristotle to Pella as
Alexander’s tutor. In what was probably a consecrated precinct of the Nymphs near the beautiful
grove of Mieza, Aristotle tutored the young prince in ethics, politics, and eristics (formal disputation).
Aristotle also annotated a copy of Homer’s Iliad for Alexander. He took it with him on his
campaigns to the East; it was one of the very few material possessions he ever seems to have
cherished. During his campaigns he slept with it under his pillow, along with a dagger.
The influence of the Iliad upon Alexander cannot be overestimated. To begin with, it supplied a
model of a war of revenge against Asia. And Alexander seems to have been deeply moved by the
heroic example of his kinsman Achilles: when he visited the site of Troy in the spring of 334, he
honored Achilles and the other Greek heroes buried there with sacrifices, and proclaimed Achilles
happy in life, since he had, while he was alive, a faithful friend, and after death, a great herald of his
fame.
It was Achilles’ acceptance of the inevitability of his own death, however, that most inspired
Alexander. According to Homer, both Thetis (Achilles’ mother) and Achilles knew that once he had
avenged Patroklos by killing Hektor, his own death would be near. But in avenging his friend he
would win the only kind of immortality available to mortals: excellent glory.
Alexander too seems to have been willing to accept death, at a time of the gods’ choosing, in
exchange for the everlasting glory that came from achieving great deeds of arms. That acceptance
explains best the pattern of Alexander’s actions throughout his life. Like Achilles, to gain all,
Alexander was willing to risk all. In combat, that was his great advantage over those who wanted to
live longer—and therefore were destined to live shorter and less glorious lives.
Homer may have given Alexander some ideas about how to fight as well; Alexander reportedly
regarded the Iliad as “a handbook of warfare.” Since there are no completely convincing examples in
the epics of the massed hoplite warfare typical of Greek practice during the fourth century, we can
only assume that what Alexander meant by his remark was that, like Achilles, he should fight glorious
duels with his enemies out in front of his supporters. This is exactly what he did. And we know that
Alexander justified some of his more controversial actions, such as marrying “barbarian” women,
with references to the Iliad.
As for Aristotle himself, what influence he had on Alexander’s thinking otherwise is debatable.
According to some sources, he advised Alexander to treat the conquered peoples of his empire like
plants or animals. There is really no good reason to doubt this story; the general sense of the advice is
completely consistent with known Aristotelian theories about the natural and desirable submission of
slaves to masters, and of the conquered to their conquerors. Fortunately for the conquered peoples of
Asia, Alexander ignored his teacher’s counsel, preferring to treat at least some of them as human
beings.
From between the lines of Plutarch’s predictive account of Alexander’s early years, then, a picture
of the young prince comes into focus: a competitive and ambitious young man, pushed and pulled
between equally strong-minded parents, blessed with keen intelligence, pious in a traditional fashion,
sensitive and well educated, but with an independent streak, and, most important, fired by a
passionate engagement with Greece’s heroic past. Much of that past had been defined by violent
encounters with Greece’s powerful neighbor to the east, Persia.
CHAPTER 2
Ahuramazda’s Plan
IMPIETY FOR IMPIETY
The tribes of northern Greece had surrendered in 480 B.C.E. without a fight. The Thebans and the
Boeotians had offered earth and water—the ancient tokens of submission. The Spartan king Leonidas
and 300 of his city’s bravest lay dead in the pass at Thermopylae. Now, as the enormous host of the
Persian king Xerxes neared Athens, the Athenians abandoned their city.
Only a few temple stewards and poor old men remained on the Acropolis, huddled together in the
temple of Athena Polias. They had barricaded the gates to the Acropolis with some planks and
timbers, trusting in the oracle from Delphi, which had promised that “the wooden wall would not be
taken.”
But some Persians discovered a way up the steep cliffs of the Acropolis by the shrine of Kekrops’
daughter Aglauros. They flung open the gates to their fellow soldiers. All those who had taken refuge
inside the sanctuary were slaughtered. The Persians looted Athena’s temple and then burned the entire
Acropolis to the ground.
By the will of the wise god Ahuramazda, Xerxes had punished the Athenians for giving aid to the
Ionian rebels almost twenty years before. Truth had triumphed over falsehood. The world had been
put back in order.
The Athenians and their Greek allies saw the destruction of the temples rather differently. The
Persians had committed perhaps the gravest impiety in history. Such sacrilege required revenge; and
the Greeks swore a solemn oath to the gods not to rebuild the sanctuaries, but to leave them as a
reminder to coming generations of the impiety of the “barbarians.” True to their oath, the Athenians
did not begin to rebuild the temple of Athena until 447, by which point they had been fighting Persia
for nearly half a century. Even then, many considered that the Persians still had not paid for what they
had done. Almost exactly 150 years after Xerxes destroyed the temples on the Athenian Acropolis, a
young Macedonian king burned down the palaces of Ahuramazda’s divinely selected rulers, returning
impiety for impiety. His name was Alexander.
AHURAMAZDA’S PLAN
From a Persian perspective the destruction of the Greek temples was a part of the remarkable
imperial expansion that they had accomplished with Ahuramazda’s help. The empire’s founder, Cyrus
II, “the Great” (559–530), had brought first the Medes (550), then Lydia and the Greek cities of Asia
Minor (540s), next Babylonia (539), and finally Bactria and Sogdiana, under Persian rule.
After Cyrus’ death and burial in the new royal center of Pasargadae (in central Fars) his son
Cambyses II (530–522) added Egypt to the Persian empire. A constitutional crisis followed
Cambyses’ death; it ended in the elevation of the usurper Darius I (522/21–486) to the throne. Now
northwest India, several Greek islands including Samos, and the western part of Thrace (c. 513) came
under Persian rule, as Darius attempted to consolidate the empire’s frontiers.
By the end of the sixth century Persia had become the largest and most successful empire in the long
history of the ancient Near East, a success its kings attributed to the will and power of their great god.
On a trilingual inscription carved into a cliff at Behistun in the Zagros Mountains, along the main road
from ancient Babylon to Ecbatana, Darius, for instance, claimed to have fought nineteen battles and
captured nine kings in one year under the protection of Ahuramazda.
The Persians believed that Ahuramazda had made the Persian kings lords over the lands and
peoples of the earth to carry out his plan for human happiness and perfect order. It was the duty o
f the
Persian king to help maintain that order for the sake of all humanity. Those who disturbed the order or
caused commotion were rebels against Ahuramazda’s divine plan and had to be “put down.”
In 499, though, Ionian Greeks living on the coast of Asia Minor strayed from Ahuramazda’s plan by
revolting against Persian rule. Led by the city of Miletos, and with limited naval support from Eretria
and Athens, on the Greek mainland, the rebels managed to burn down Sardis, the local center of
Persian control, and its temple of the native goddess Cybele. By 494, however, the Persians had
subdued both the islands and the cities on the coast of Asia. Miletos was captured, its men were
killed, its women and children were enslaved, and the sanctuary of Didyma, which housed the oracle
of Apollo, was plundered and burned. Apollo had paid the price for the destruction of Cybele’s
sanctuary.
Darius then sent a punitive expedition against Eretria and Athens for the help their crews had given
to the Ionians. Although outnumbered, the Athenians and the Plataeans defeated that Persian force at
Marathon in late September 490.
Ten years later, however, Darius’ son and successor, Xerxes, led a much larger force back to
Greece, and this was the occasion when the Athenian Acropolis was burned. Yet, it was not
Ahuramazda’s will that Xerxes should make the mainland Greeks part of the divine plan for order: in
September 480, the Greek fleet decisively defeated the Persians and their allies in the Straits of
Salamis. Soon Xerxes himself retreated to the Hellespont, leaving his general Mardonius to engage
the Greek army on land. But Mardonius’ army succumbed to a Spartan-led force at Plataea in 479.
PERSIA AND GREECE, 479–346
Despite these Greek victories, the Persians remained in control of many of the islands in the Aegean
as well as of Thrace and the coast of Asia Minor. The Athenians, at the head of the Delian League (a
naval league of city-states), then fought for almost three decades to drive the Persians back across the
Aegean and out of Asia Minor. In 450 hostilities were brought to an end by the Peace of Kallias, by
whose terms the Greek cities of Asia were left to live under their own laws. But while the Persian
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