The Nature of Alexander (6 page)

During one of the civics lessons, the students were given some hypothetical situation and asked how they would meet it. Alexander, who probably knew the “right” answer well enough, said that when it happened, he’d see. It was prophetic. He would do what he did by being flexible steel in an age of iron.

Among Aristotle’s biological theories was that woman is an imperfect form of man. Himself a heterosexual, in the man’s world of Greece he took for granted, no less than Plato, that a man’s vital relationships would be with other men. Where Plato exalted love, he extolled friendship, wherein each should desire and promote the highest good in the other. Whatever reservations Alexander had about his civics course, to this precept he responded wholeheartedly. Whether they met in childhood or adolescence, by now he had the company of Hephaestion.

Like Ptolemy he was of local birth; they had probably met much earlier. At any rate Aristotle, who left Pella when Alexander was sixteen and never saw him or his friends again, wrote Hephaestion a whole book of letters. Lamentably, they are among his catalogued works no longer extant. Of still greater interest might have been Hephaestion’s answers.

Had he outlived Alexander we would know much more of him. Had Alexander outlived him long enough to memorialize him, even that idealized portrait would have filled in some blanks. Probabilities suggest he may be one of the most underrated men in history. In his lifetime he must have aroused enormous envy; he left no one behind him with any interest in promoting his reputation,
and we have only the records of his rivals; that so little is adduced against him is remarkable. The worst we ever hear of him is that he was once slow to make up a private quarrel in which, since its details are lost, he may have had more provocation than we know. Starting his army career simply as a Companion (that is, a member of the king’s own regiment of cavalry) he was steadily promoted, obviously on merit, to the highest military and civil rank; was never defeated in any of his very responsible independent assignments; carried out impeccably numerous diplomatic missions of the first importance; and corresponded with two philosophers. His loss nearly unseated Alexander’s reason. Theories that this was some mere bedmate or boon companion prized for his doglike devotion are hardly tenable.

He is described by Curtius as being taller than Alexander, and better looking, in which case he was certainly handsome. No historian states plainly whether they were physically lovers; but Plutarch says that on the site of Troy, Alexander laid a wreath on Achilles’ tomb, and Hephaestion on Patroclus’. In spite of Homer’s reticence, classical Greece assumed the heroes’ love to be sexual. It would be characteristic of Alexander’s passion for personal loyalties to make so public an avowal. Olympias, at any rate, was wildly jealous of their attachment and railed by letter at Hephaestion half across Asia. A fragmentary retort of his survives: “Stop quarrelling with me; not that in any case I shall much care. You know Alexander means more to me than anyone.”

They had just under four years with Aristotle. When Alexander was sixteen Philip, committed to a long elaborate siege in eastern Thrace, appointed his son Regent of Macedon.

It is of course evident that he had already been at war. No record of it remains; but the trust committed to him
was no sinecure. Though the experienced Antipater was left as his adviser, Philip cannot by this time have supposed he would not act on his own initiative if he thought fit. The border tribes, the still unsubdued Illyrians in particular, were a constant threat; so were the Athenians, who without declaration of war were using terrorist methods, seizing a Macedonian ship and selling the crew as slaves, capturing an envoy and demanding ransom; arresting in Athens a merchant shopping for Olympias, torturing him, on Demosthenes’ orders, till he confessed to spying, and putting him to death. More urgently, there were the west Thracians, previously subdued, but, if they rose, a threat to Philip’s communication line, now extended almost to the Hellespont.

Plutarch’s note on this period is brief. Alexander, “not to sit idle, reduced the rebellious Maedi, and putting a colony of several peoples in their place called it after himself, Alexandropolis.” The idea that he was seeking pastime is dispelled by a look at the map. Maedian country was in the wilds of today’s Bulgarian frontier; raiders from there would descend into the cultivated Strymon valley, which intersected Philip’s supply route. A successful revolt, triggering others, might have involved him in a major military disaster.

Alexander’s first “colony” was doubtless a mere hill village. His father had founded his Thracian Philipopolis; only later days reveal the triumph the boy must have felt in this act of emulation. More significant is the fact that at sixteen he could call upon the standing army of Macedon, be followed unquestioningly into barbarian fastnesses and obeyed in a hard mountain campaign. It would be interesting to know where and how they had previously got to trust him.

After this he served under his father (Antipater now acting Regent), and was sent with the rank of general to
subdue some rebel cities in south Thrace. At about this time he saved, as he claimed later, his father’s life. It was probably during Philip’s arduous siege of Perinthus, when he may have needed to hire extra troops. Even as Great King of Persia, Alexander still recalled it with resentment. Philip, he said,

when a riot had broken out between Macedonian soldiers and Greek mercenaries, overcome by a wound he had got in the fracas, had fallen down and could do no more than sham dead; he himself had protected his body with his shield and killed with his own hand the men who were rushing at him. Which his father had never been man enough to admit, being unwilling to owe his son his life.

Unfortunately that is all we know of it.

Alexander’s formal education was over, and Philip paid his school fee. It was a city. Aristotle’s ruined birthplace, Stagira, was refounded, rebuilt, and repopulated, the people probably being bought out from slavery. This makes Alexander’s education the most expensive on record. It was formative. He remembered always that the only self deserving of self-love is what would now be called the super-ego; the “intellectual soul” which must be trained to rule, like a king, over all lesser and baser appetites; to spurn the limits of mortality; to covet as riches only honour, nobility and glory. Leaving this spell behind him, the eminent apprentice of the dead sorcerer went home, to be taken aback by the subsequent thunder and lightning.

It is evident from Philip’s confidence in his son that they were still getting on well together, as they normally did while in the field and well away from Olympias. Alexander now returned to resume his regency while Philip went on
besieging the fortress ports, Perinthus and Byzantium. But Athens was now at open war, and with her commanding superiority in sea power supplied the beleaguered garrisons, forcing him to raise both sieges in the end. On his homeward march he defeated some hostile Scythians; but his army, slowed down with its spoil of cattle and slaves, was cut up by the northern tribe of Triballians, and the King himself was wounded too badly to be moved.

Meantime, the responsibilities of Alexander and Antipater were heavy. A complex politico-religious dispute about some sacred fields near Delphi had broken out in the southern states, promising a chance of Philip’s favourite gambit, the solicited intervention of Macedon. (Time and again, the geography of Greece with its beautiful but barren mountains, its covetable farmlands, has determined its history. The long disastrous Peloponnesian War, the grave of Athenian greatness, had begun in a quarrel over sacred land in Megara.)

The Sacred League, a kind of religious United Nations, voted to punish the Amphissaeans, who had taken over the fields to farm. With the League Philip was in good standing, having evicted from Delphi some years earlier a Phocian force which had plundered Apollo’s treasuries and temple. He had behaved both correctly and humanely, persuading his allies to fine the Phocians instead of throwing them off the cliffs; and had been put out by Demosthenes’ propaganda representing them as oppressed martyrs and himself as a bloodstained tyrant. Now he sent word to the still-grateful League that his help, if asked for, would be forthcoming. The waiting time was crucial. Still laid up in Thrace, he ordered Alexander to mobilize the army; but lest Athens be alerted, he must give out that the campaign was to be against Illyria. He obeyed; before Philip could get back, rumour reached the Illyrians, who promptly rose in arms. For this risk
Alexander must have been prepared; he swept west to the border, repelled the invaders and pushed them back; his third independent operation, in rough terrain, this time against a more dangerous enemy. He was seventeen.

Philip returned, to await events in the south. During this interlude of peace, it seems, Alexander’s parents found time to worry about his lack of sexual interests.

Perhaps he had turned down some marriage plan. Philip, a precocious womanizer if Ptolemy was his son, would be disconcerted to find a youth approaching eighteen, forward in all else, so backward here. The bloodstained and precarious royal succession made anxiety natural that he should beget an heir-presumptive in early life (and never was anxiety better justified by events). No more than other such parents in every age did these examine their own part in his reluctance. By now the very thought of marriage must have appalled him. Olympias nagged him, and is said to have hired a famous hetaira—one of those elegant “companions” who combined the skills of the geisha and the courtesan—to initiate him. She failed.

Aristotle taught neither asceticism nor Platonic sublimation. But his doctrine of the intellectual soul as king over the lower self offered a refuge to Alexander’s pride for years. Never highly sexed, though with a deep need of affection, he had had his physical response to women frozen in childhood by his parents’ mutual hate; it would be long in thawing. Meantime he had gathered a group of close and devoted friends, nearly all his elders. Hephaestion was evidently the only one of his age who could keep up with him; none of the rest got letters from Aristotle. Of the others none can have been a lover; nor, as events were soon to prove, did the inner ring contain sycophants drawn by rank. In these friends he invested his capital of emotion; his passionate generosity, his powerful
magnetism, his compelling charm. Almost all were bound to him for life.

The Sacred League opened war upon the Amphissaeans; its scratch force proved ineffective. Demosthenes, foreseeing what must come, exhorted the unwilling Athenians to counter the menace of Philip by reaching accommodation with Thebes. The neighbours’ quarrel was so old that, a century earlier, the Thebans had even thrown in their lot with the invading Xerxes. Their later overthrow of Spartan tyranny had aroused more envy than esteem. They had now a treaty with Macedon, and it was doubtful if they would denounce it.

When Philip had expelled the Phocians from the Delphic sanctuary in the earlier war, he had invited Athens, a League member, to send her own contingent. Demosthenes had secured a veto, mainly no doubt to prevent fraternization with the Macedonians, in whom fellow soldiers might discover fellow humans. When Philip’s moderation had saved the Phocians’ lives—they had to pay reparations and pull down their strongpoints—Demosthenes had denounced it as barbarity. As it now happened, the verdict against the Amphissaeans had just saved Athens herself, in the political infighting, from the dangers of a parallel charge of technical “impiety.” But this diplomatic triumph had been achieved by Aeschines, Demosthenes’ hated rival. Political commitment, and personal malice, now led him into a serious error. Next time the League met, he persuaded the Athenians to boycott it; and the meeting, unopposed by any Athenian delegate, accepted Philip’s offered help.

His moment had come. His army was trained to a pitch unknown in Greece before. His cavalry, the aristocratic Companions, were augmented
en route
by the expert horsemen of Thessaly. The vital pass of Thermopylae was politely taken over from its Theban garrison. Philip
marched on to Elatia on the Phocian border, about two days’ march from Thebes and three from Attica.

Athens was in a panic. A beacon was built from the stalls and sheep pens of the marketplace to alert the suburbs. The citizens’ Assembly was called by blast of trumpet. All moderates who dared to recall Philip’s restraint after the Phocian War were denounced as traitors by Demosthenes’ supporters. This time a Theban alliance got the vote; he headed the embassy sent to negotiate it.

Philip too sent envoys to Thebes. Both sides were heard at one session. Thebans’ voting rights were confined to present and veteran soldier-citizens. The Macedonians cited their mutual treaty, recalled the hostile acts of Athens, and promised in return for alliance a fair share of victory gains. If the Thebans wished to be neutral, this would be granted them in return for right of passage.

Demosthenes then put up the offers of Athens. They consisted in shopping to Thebes two peoples protected by solemn Athenian pledges: the Boeotians of the neighbouring countryside, upheld against Theban rule in the sacred name of democracy; and, far worse, the Plataeans. This border tribe, Athens’ sole ally in the heroic defence of Marathon, had been granted Athenian honorary citizenship in perpetuity. The Thebans were dubious. Demosthenes, who had never set foot upon a battlefield, taunted them with cowardice. This simple expedient met complete success. The Thebans tore up their treaty (or rather broke it up, for such things were carved on marble) and voted to ally with Athens.

Philip now knew where he stood. He had wanted no war with Athens. Though, his ascendancy once established, he would certainly have expected to direct her foreign policy—the pattern of Greek hegemonies since the days of Pericles—he proved innocent of any aim to enslave her people or destroy her culture. Probably he
nursed a secret wish to reincarnate Pericles in himself. His repeated overtures had been blocked by Demosthenes’ inveterate hate and rebuffed with studied insults. Reared in the traditions of Macedon, Philip took a simple and comprehensive view of leaders who led from behind. His belief that he had found one here was to prove correct.