The Nature of Alexander (2 page)

One thing is constant; in the terms of each epoch, Sikandar is the supreme hero. “To iron men he is iron, but gold towards the golden.” When the Dauphin sent Henry V a bat and ball in scorn of his youth, he must have chosen his ill-judged gift with some vague recollection of Dara’s challenge to Sikandar. He founds Sikandria, “a city like the joyous spring.” He is full of cunning devices, not all of which he would have approved. He invents the mirror—for strategic reasons, but not without some unmeant psychological truth. He venerates the tomb of Cyrus the Great; this was never forgotten in Persia. His tactics are likened to skilful chess, his troop dispositions
to enamelled miniatures. Indeed the miniaturists never tired of depicting him, elaborately Persianized with chain mail, pointed helm and scimitar; using a horseman’s bow, or catching a giant with an expert lasso; wearing the regal moustache and beard obligatory where a smooth face marked the eunuch; lamented at his death by the sages Aristo and Aflatun (Aristotle and Plato); the Happy World-Possessor, whose cavalcade is like a rose garden. No victor in world history has left an image comparable with this in the land he conquered. Coeur-de-Lion, it may be remembered, survived in Arab memory as a bogyman with whom mothers threatened bad children.

Meantime, while Persian folk memory and fable were putting down the earliest pieces of this extraordinary mosaic, a quite different process, sophisticated and purposeful, was going on to the westward. In Macedon the formidable Antipater, Regent in turn for Philip, Alexander, and the shadowy boy Alexander IV, died like some great rock releasing landslides. His son Cassander, Alexander’s bitterest enemy, future murderer of his mother, widow and son, settled down to the serious work of murdering his reputation.

A willing tool was the educational establishment of Athens, bitter at the collapse of the city-states from within, which had left them open to Macedon; blaming on Alexander his Regent’s stern hegemony which he had been trying to loosen when he died; smarting at the death of Demosthenes whom he had spared all his life in spite of much provocation, and of the dubious Callisthenes, whose provocation had been too much. They had expelled Aristotle for his links with Macedon. Cassander made it clear, to the lesser men left as opinion formers, that enemies of Alexander were friends of his; and he was a powerful friend. With his encouragement—probably fed by him with misinformation they believed, for he had
visited the court at Babylon—they set to work on their own Alexander legend; no organic growth like the Romances, but efficient hatchet work, producing vicious caricatures of an Orientalized, lecherous despot, incongruously active among excesses which might have exhausted Sardanapalus. His failure to beget by this mode of life a horde of bastards was put down to alcoholism; drink made his semen watery, pronounced Theophrastus, Professor of Science at the Lyceum—who, in common with the rest of Athens, had not set eyes on him since he was eighteen.

All this time the involved Wars of the Successors were going on; his former generals were further polluting history by issuing bogus last testaments of his to support their claims. He was a favourite set subject, too, for the schools of rhetoric, which industriously wrote letters for him, describing the marvels of India, lecturing Aristotle, or telling his mother how he was getting on. Modern scholarship has had to labour at extracting these burrs from the cloth of history, in which some of the most striking had become firmly wound.

Romance, however, still kept pace with propaganda. Judaea in the harsh grip of Antiochus thought nostalgically of the Beast with Two Horns who had harmlessly passed that way, and soon pictured him on his knees before the Torah, honouring the One God. The Ethiopians, original models perhaps for the fearful Zangs, evolved their own Alexander story in which, besides conversing with an angel who supports the world, he kills an enormous dragon by getting it to swallow a kind of bomb, and blowing it up. “How is the great Alexander?” the two-tailed mermaid would demand of Aegean sailors, who must hasten to answer “He lives and reigns” if they wanted to save their ship.

In Rome Caesar was struck down in the Forum, to save
the Republic, which promptly died of it. Under Divine Augustus, no one had a motive for praising Alexander. Caesarians cared to eulogize no rivals. Greeks, in Roman prejudice, were lightweights, Greeklings, slick Levantines; panders, procurers and profiteers. To the learned world, on the other hand, Athens was the university where they sent their sons to pick up the intellectual polish of the conquered; and there the dead hand of the Lyceum still wrote on.

But among the republicans, in their bitter underground, interest in Alexander was keen and active. Had he not lived, it would have been necessary to invent him. His was an imperial effigy which could be safely burned.

To this time belongs Trogus, the inaccurate and hostile Justin’s now vanished source; and Diodorus. The date most favoured for Curtius is just after the dreadful Caligula, one of whose little conceits was dressing as Alexander. A deified Macedonian, three centuries safely dead, was a propagandist’s gift for a tyrannic proto-Caesar. Such monsters did men become who presumed to claim divine honours from their fellow citizens—present company of course excepted.

Here and there the stream of calumny met intractable rocks of fact, too firmly fixed to be washed away. Working this awkward material in, the republican moralists said he had started well, but all power corrupts, and none so absolutely as power over servile, cringing barbarians. The adoption of their effeminate clothes and customs spoke for itself.

There remained the discrepancy of his face. All this while, his statues were being busily reproduced by Roman copyists, the demand being far greater than looted originals could supply. Even the originals had not all been done from life. Yet even with the least talented, something about the eyes shows who is meant.

Perhaps the face, perhaps Greek patriotism, worked upon the young Plutarch long before he embarked on the
Parallel Lives.
Two of his earliest works were essays on the Fortune or Virtue of Alexander, upholding the second above the first—the hostile writers had given Fortune most of the credit. Much later this warm-hearted, charming and long-lived man put Alexander into the
Lives
alongside Julius Caesar. He was, unfortunately, a ragbag of a biographer, scarcely ever discarding a good story, seldom distinguishing primary from secondary sources, deeply concerned to edify. But “books have their destinies,” and his account of Alexander’s youth and childhood is the only one we have; his sources for it have disappeared.

Some time towards the end of Plutarch’s life span, in the second century
AD
, Alexander was rescued for history by a fellow soldier. He was Flavius Arrianus, a Romanized Bithynian Greek. Hadrian made him governor of Cappadocia, an honour seldom granted to his race; he was a brave and able general who fought off a dangerous barbarian invasion. Epictetus, whose pupil he had been, had taught him:

Don’t you know that all human ills and mean-spiritedness and cowardice arise not from death but from fear of death? Against this therefore fortify yourself. Direct all your discourses, readings, exercises thereto. And then you will find that by this alone are men made free.

Perhaps it was Alexander’s freedom which attracted Arrian. But the clutter of hindsighted romance and committed lying annoyed the honest general. Happily, he was in time to find the primary sources still intact in unburned libraries. He assessed their value, a chance we no longer have, and settled for Ptolemy, Aristobulus the
architect-engineer, and Nearchus, Alexander’s admiral and boyhood friend.

This I claim; and never mind who I am; never mind my name although it is not unknown among men; never mind my country, or my family, or any rank I have held among compatriots. I would rather say: for me, this book of mine is country, kindred and career, and it has been so since my boyhood.

He did not, in his lifetime, enjoy any conspicuous fame, and it is sad that he cannot know how much we owe him.

Some time about
AD
300, on the fertile shore of Alexandria, crossroads of trade and of traditions, all the flotsam of romance, folk tale, rumour, agitprop, and moralistic fantasy, combined with some tattered shreds of history, was gathered by some untalented but limitlessly credulous author, and cast on the waters of time. Implausibly attributed to Callisthenes, who died four years before Alexander, it became the first work of fiction to achieve bestsellerdom in translation throughout the known civilized world. Far beyond its circle of hearers and readers at first hand, illiterates without number heard it retailed at second, third, fourth, or hundredth remove, by bazaar storytellers, itinerant entertainers, people beguiling a journey, pedagogues, court poets, jongleurs and priests. It spread first among the peoples he had known and conquered, then on and on among those he had never seen and only known from rumour, till it reached the Far East which, having been taught that the land mass ended with India, he had not believed to exist.

Greek variants proliferated; versions appeared in Armenian, Bulgarian, Hebrew, Ethiopic and Syriac, the last being done into Arabic. Most significantly, soon after its appearance, one Julius Valerius did it into Latin, the universal language of the literate Western world. Greek in
the Dark Ages, and well beyond them, was rarer in the West than gold. Latin was everywhere. From Valerius’
Callisthenes,
along with the Roman sources, and from them alone, the image of Alexander came down to the Middle Ages. The Middle Ages split his image in two.

To the Church he was a gift, as he had been to the republicans. Here was Virtue corrupted by Fortune; the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the pride of life, riding fast to dust and judgment. In an age when Crusaders were proud to approach the Holy Sepulchre up to their horses’ fetlocks in Jewish blood; when heretics were burned alive; when holiness was seen in a hair shirt crawling with lice of ten years’ breeding; when excommunicate kings, to escape damnation, had to bare their backs to the scourge or kneel in ashes, there were stern useful morals to be drawn from King Alisaunder.

But an age of oppressive orthodoxy, whether under priest or commissar, breeds rebels. “To hell will I go!” cries young Aucassin, defying Nicolete’s censorious guardian.

For to hell go the fair clerks, and the fair knights fallen in tourneys or in grand wars, the good sergeants-at-arms and the men of honour. With those will I go. And there go the fair courteous ladies, who have two friends or three besides their lords. There go the gold and the silver, the vair and ermine; there go harpers and jongleurs and the kings of the earth. With them will I go, so I have Nicolete, my most sweet friend, with me.

There, too, they would go with Alexander. His medieval romances are a vast ramifying theme. Their fascination is that, though their authors had access only to the most hostile sources, their residual relics of fact were enough to seize imagination and cast a spell. Incident might be wildly remote from history, yet the chivalrous knight
saluted a kindred soul. In the
Alexandreis
and the
Roman d’Alexandre,
he is the pattern of valour and courtesy, glorious in arms, protective to ladies, fair and generous to enemies, liberal to vassals. God, not Fortune, directs his destiny; envious treachery, not Nemesis, contrives his death.

They had not seen his likeness; though he would have conformed well with their standards of beauty, he is given a conventional face in a conventional helmet, distinguished only by the elegance of his armour. He adventures to Darius’ camp, disguised as his own herald, wins Roxane’s heart, and escapes across a frozen river, later avenging his foully murdered foe. He flies in a chariot drawn by eagles, and views the monsters of the deep in a glass bell. Seeking the Water of Life once more through forests perilous, he consults the prophetic trees of the Sun and Moon, and with calm courage hears them foretell his end. Warned by an oracle that a close friend will kill him, and urged to purge those nearest him, he protests that he will die by the single traitor rather than wrong the innocent. (Cassander would have learned with some astonishment that he was a dear and trusted comrade.) He is poisoned, and the Seven Sages moralize over his grave.

Constantinople was sacked, its refugee scholars brought westward their salvaged books; the learned world of Italy rediscovered Greek literature and history. It was in the fifteenth century that the scholar Vasco of Lucena, writing to the Emperor Sigismund, told him that Arrian was more to be trusted than the Latin writers upon Alexander.

With the Renaissance, therefore, the Romances were consigned to children and the ignorant; the historical Alexander reappeared. But his image was still conditioned by the legends, and by an age without archaeology which, busily excavating all over Italy Roman copies of such Greek originals as had appealed to Romans, admired like
them the soft, late style for its virtuosity, preferring the sentimental contortions of the Laocoön to the most majestic classical Apollo. In this spirit, for a century or two Alexander supplied the painters with subjects for great setpieces, defeating Darius, protecting the royal ladies, marrying Roxane. His eager profile is trimmed down to insipid perfection; his correctly rounded elbow sketches a stock art-school gesture; a resplendent waxwork in an impracticable helmet cascading ostrich plumes, he is the apotheosis of a tinsel-armoured male soprano in Baroque opera, the vacuous imperial puppet of Dryden’s
Alexander’s Feast.

Serious scholars, of course, were meantime reading the sources and critical appraisal had begun, when in the mid-nineteenth century the most formidable of them, George Grote, amid many valuable services to history, disastrously revived the Ideological Alexander. Grote never set foot in Greece, then without tourist accommodation and much beset with bandits; a dedicated radical, he had the fatal commitment which vitiates conscientious fact with anachronistic morality. His whole capital of belief being invested in the Athenian democracy, he was resolute in attributing its fall to external villainy rather than internal collapse. Demosthenes could do no wrong, Philip and Alexander no right. For all practical purposes, Grote’s Alexander is back with the Lyceum; a natural tyrant, forsaking the wholesome Greek virtues at the first taste of Oriental sycophancy and despotic power.