The Nature of Alexander (9 page)

The value of John Williams’s comment rests not on his erudition but his personal experience. He published his life of Alexander in 1829, just after the Napoleonic Wars; and his words about the flight of important news through populous countries, written before telecommunications, have the ring of certainty. The ancient world used for long-distance signalling both the heliograph and the
beacon (the latter, in the
Agamemnon,
announces the fall of Troy). But since either called for a prearranged chain of signallers, their use would still be proof of complicity; for no verbal codes existed, and such signs could only confirm an expected fact.

Pausanias, the Captain of the Bodyguard, knew just where his men would be. He had had to form them up there. He can never have rated his chance of escape at more than even. However, he had horses ready, probably a ship too, and must have had some offered refuge. Demosthenes’ speeches show again and again how utterly he had failed to take Alexander’s measure. Even after the lightning victories which followed his accession, Demosthenes was mocking him as “Margites,” the anti-hero of a burlesque epic. For him, in the “vision” of the demagogue, there had certainly been a role: the theatrical young paladin, the inept untried king who, his formidable father gone, could be swept aside without trouble.

Demosthenes’ Persian paymaster had lately changed. The Vizier Bagoas, finding King Arses intractable, had poisoned him in turn, replacing him by a royal collateral, Darius III; one of whose first actions was to hand the Vizier a dose of his own medicine. The new Great King must have leaned greatly for the Greek intelligence on Demosthenes, who could have done him vital service in return for favours received, had he not been blinded by ingrained prejudice. Darius rested in false security; while Demosthenes broke off his mourning for his daughter’s death, put on a festal wreath, and proposed a posthumous vote of thanks to Pausanias.

If the role he had promised himself was to emerge, as soon as it was absolutely safe to do so, and proclaim himself the author of the enterprise, to defer this moment was the wisest act of his life.

A
LEXANDER’S REIGN BEGAN IN
336
BC
. He was a little over twenty.

“His physical looks are best portrayed in the statues Lysippus made of him. [Plutarch does not divulge which of Alexander’s own contemporaries, if any, expressed this view.] And he approved being sculpted by him alone. [But he must have licensed a number of others.] For this artist has caught exactly those idiosyncrasies which many of his successors and friends later tried to imitate—the poise of his neck, tilted a little leftward, and his liquid eyes. Apelles’ painting, ‘The Thunder-Wielder,’ did not get his complexion right, but made it too dark and tanned; for he was blond, they say, shading to ruddy on the breast and face.”

His liquid eyes were grey. Their expressiveness altered Greek artistic convention. All important portrait heads feature a heavy bulge of the forehead above the brows (allowing for idealization, probably even more marked in life), caused perhaps by a development of the frontal lobes of the brain; and the loosely waving, heavy mane of hair, springing from a peak, its individual cut sloped down to the base of the neck when in south Greece the short curly crop was in fashion. Arrian, both of whose main sources were men who saw him often, says that he was very handsome.

Clean shaving, long general among young men in the south, did not reach Macedon till he introduced it. His looks must have been admired in childhood and boyhood; it was perhaps a sign of his ambisexual nature that he did not want to alter them with a beard. Once he had set the fashion, it was so widely followed that later legend had him ordering the whole Macedonian army to shave. He was quoted as saying that a beard gives the enemy a handhold in close combat. He may really have offered this reason to himself.

“In Aristoxenus’ memoirs it is said that a very pleasant scent came from his skin, and that there was a fragrance in his breath and all his body which permeated the clothes he wore.” His fondness for a daily bath, when he could get it, is evident from all the sources; but on campaign he must often have been unwashed, which makes the observation interesting. When not struck down by occasional local fevers, he was a very healthy man. In days before dentistry, a sweet breath testified to a good set of teeth, as well as a good digestion. He loved violently active exercise, hunting, running, ball games; but despised professional athletics, which in his century had grown degenerate, producing ugly specialized physiques, instead of the balanced beauty of classical sculpture. He was himself considered a runner of Olympic standard, but declined to enter for the Games “unless I had kings to run against.” His pride would not tolerate even a suspicion that he had been given the race.

He loved music and theatre; artists braved immense hard journeys to appear before him, and were received as guests, not mere entertainers. He had himself by nature the actor’s biological rhythm, liking when at leisure to sit up late and sleep on next morning; a pattern not necessarily associated with heavy drinking, as every man of the theatre knows.

He could not live without books, which he had sent out to him in the heart of Asia, adding to the favourites he carried along. Next after Homer, it seems the chief of these was Xenophon, whose influence shows unmistakably again and again. He heartened his men by reminding them of the
Anabasis
with its resolute Ten Thousand and its accompanying exposures of Persian inefficiency. The young Xenophon himself, who got out of bed on a night of despair to rally the army, because his seniors were dead and nobody else was doing it, must have been a man after Alexander’s heart (and Shakespeare’s, who transferred it to King Harry on the eve of Agincourt). No doubt the treatises on horsemanship and hunting were valued too; but above all Alexander, with his high sense of theatre, showed in the drama of his life where his chief debt lay: to
The Upbringing of Cyrus,
the author’s sole work of fiction.

He must have read it first as history. Later when in Persia he would have learned of some discrepancies; but that the real Cyrus had died in battle, instead of in Socratic composure, probably endeared him all the more. The image of a conqueror brilliant, powerful and merciful, making friends of enemies, hailed as a father by the conquered, does not conflict with the fragmentary Persian records. Alexander had no need to discard his hero cult, as is seen from the devotion he lavished on Cyrus’ tomb.

The military lore in the
Cyropaedia
he probably skipped as elementary; his own father had been a far more sophisticated teacher. But Xenophon claims to present not maxims for generals, but the pattern of an ideal ruler, governing his conquered peoples in a vast extended empire.

He ruled over these nations, though they did not speak the same tongue as he, nor one nation the same as
another’s; yet he was able to stretch the dread of him so far that all feared to withstand him; and he could rouse so eager a wish to please him that they all desired to be governed by his will.

… A ruler should not only be really better than his subjects; he should cast a kind of spell on them.

The astonishing corpus of the Alexander legends bears tribute to this last precept beyond anything dreamed of in Xenophon’s philosophy.

Kindled by a spontaneous sense of affinity, admiration for Cyrus must have been a powerful antidote to Aristotle’s insularity. Again and again Alexander’s conduct displays his debt to what has been called the first historical novel of the Western world. The following excerpts could be taken for quotations from an Alexander history.

And on campaign, the general must show he can bear better than his men the heat of the sun in summer, the cold in winter, and hardship on a difficult march. All these things go to make him loved by those he leads.

When the rest went to dinner at the usual time, Cyrus stayed [among the wounded] with his aides and doctors, for he would not leave anyone uncared for.

The gods, like men, are more likely to incline to us if we pay them attention during our height of fortune, not just toady to them in adversity. And this too is the way to cherish one’s friends.

He showed them always as much kindness as he could; for he held that just as it is hard to love people who seem to hate us, or have goodwill to those who are ill-wishing us, in the same way one who is affectionate and well disposed could not be hated by those aware of love. He tried to win the devotion of those around him by taking thought and trouble for them, showing
gladness in their prosperity and sympathy in their misfortunes.

You [his men] possess in your souls what is fairest and most soldierlike: you rejoice above all in being praised. All men in love with praise feel constrained to endure any hardships and any dangers.

Cyrus was most handsome in person, most generous in his soul, most fond of learning, most in love with honourable fame, so that he would bear all suffering and all dangers for the sake of praise.

These last two extracts are central to an understanding of Alexander. Moderns who have accused him of “an unpleasant concern for his own glory” are thinking in terms of another age. Greek literature up to, and on, its very highest levels is permeated by the axiom that to be fameworthy is the most honourable of aspirations, the incentive of the best men to the best achievements. Socrates, Plato, Aristotle all accepted it. Its ethos outlasted Greece and Rome. The last word of our single English epic is
lofgeornost
—“most eager for fame.” It closes the lament of the warriors for the dead Beowulf.

Alexander III opened his reign in the traditional Macedonian way, by removing those who endangered his succession.

Plutarch and Diodorus agree that he sought out and punished the conspirators to his father’s murder. Neither describes the process of this inquiry. The purge was not discriminate. Its most important victim was his cousin Amyntas, Perdiccas III’s son, who under more ordinary succession laws would have been the reigning king. He was a full-blooded Macedonian, unlike Alexander with his unpopular Epirote mother. Philip must always have seemed a usurper to Amyntas; he was the natural choice
had the coup succeeded, but whether he was killed on evidence or suspicion is unknown. Alexander deserves the benefit of the doubt, for in spite of his own humiliation over the Carian marriage intrigue, he did nothing to his half-brother Arridaeus, a harmless pawn on whom he felt it demeaning to take revenge. He was a dangerous pawn, however, to leave on the Macedonian chessboard. Alexander simply attached him to his court and took him on its travels. He must have been well cared for; he was the longer-lived of the two.

Two princes of Lyncestis, a family of once-independent kings in west Macedon, were executed. They may have hoped to recover their former sovereignty. But the eldest, another Alexandros, was let off because after the murder he had at once hailed Alexander as king. At some stage it seems to have emerged that the plot had been financed with Persian gold. This was probably true, whether it was supplied through Demosthenes or direct from Darius himself, who had good reason to dread Philip and no suspicion of what he would get instead.

Attalus, a declared and dangerous enemy, presented a special problem. He was on campaign in Asia Minor, among his own troops, many of them bound to him by tribal loyalties. He was believed, correctly, to be planning treason. Alexander wanted him brought for trial according to Macedonian law, but could not risk his leading his army over to the other side. An officer called Hecataeus was therefore sent on a secret mission, to take him prisoner if possible; if not, to kill him. Attalus was already in correspondence with Demosthenes with a view to joining Athens; but, perhaps alarmed by Alexander’s swift initial successes—the sequence of events is uncertain—he lost his nerve, and sent Demosthenes’ letter to Macedon with a plea for pardon. Hecataeus, however, had meantime decided he could afford to take no more chances,
and killed him out of hand. In these circumstances there were no complaints that the letter of the law had not been observed. Hecataeus would of course have been supplied with a royal warrant, which he could present before or after the deed to Attalus’ officers and to the other general of the expeditionary force, Parmenion.

The case of Attalus is important. It offered Alexander a precedent, which would become crucial at a later crisis in his career.

Certainly at this moment he could afford no legal quibbles, nor can the decision have detained him long. He had not the time. At the news that the great Philip’s imperium had passed to a youth of twenty, all his conquered lands rose up in instant revolt. Alexander was surrounded with more dangers than his father had faced at the death of Perdiccas III.

The most immediate was the defection of Thessaly, whose feudal lords had no notion of making the archonship hereditary to Macedon. They manned the impregnable pass between the massifs of Olympus and Ossa, the narrow river gorge of Tempe. Alexander saw at once that if they got away with it the whole south would rise, and he would face another Chaeronea. He marched swiftly down, surveyed the terrain, saw with his lightning strategic instinct where the pass could be turned by cutting steps on the Ossa flank; and appeared in the Thessalians’ rear while his advance was still awaited. Stunned, they did homage without a fight, and offered him all Philip’s former rights and tribute. (From the latter he exempted Phthia, because it had been the birthplace of Achilles.) At Thermopylae he summoned a conference of the Sacred League, which recognized him without a dissenting vote.

The panic at Athens was equal to that after Chaeronea. The vote of thanks to Philip’s assassin was remembered with alarm; an embassy was dispatched to Alexander, to
plead for pardon. He received it with courtesy, accusing no one. His march did not cross the Attic border. He did not, and never would, revisit the immortal museum of Western civilization. He called a conference at Corinth, as Philip had done before him, and was invested with Philip’s commission as war leader against the Persians.