Read Alexander the Great Online
Authors: Norman F. Cantor
It being my purpose to write the lives of Alexander the king, and of Caesar, by whom Pompey was destroyed, the multitude of their great actions affords so large a field that I were to blame if I should not by way of apology forewarn my reader that I have chosen rather to epitomise the most celebrated parts of their story, than to insist at large on every particular circumstance of it. It must be borne in mind that my design is not to write histories, but lives. And the most glorious exploits do not always furnish us with the clearest discoveries of virtue or vice in men; sometimes a matter of less moment, an expression or a jest, informs us better of their characters and inclinations, than the most famous sieges, the greatest armaments, or the bloodiest battles whatsoever. Therefore as portrait-painters are more exact in the lines and features of the face, in which the character is seen, than in the other parts of the body, so I must be allowed to give my more particular attention to the marks and indications of the souls of men, and while I endeavour by these to portray their lives, may be free to leave more weighty matters and great battles to be treated of by others.
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The trajectory of their lives was completely different, however. Caesar was a politician who incidentally acquired renown by fighting as a very effective general in Gaul (France) and then used his military fame to intervene in and dominate Roman politics. Alexander inherited a throne and a superb army and did not need to meddle in politics as Caesar did; he aimed instead at pure military glory. He was the unique hero of the ancient world. There was no one else in antiquity whose life followed quite the same path as Alexander’s.
Caesar was essentially a very clever and ambitious politician who pursued a military career, and became a military hero only because it suited his political aspirations. To Alexander, on the other hand, warfare was a primal life force, and he spent nearly all his adult life on the battlefield. Not only did he exult in war, but he also carried out innovations in battlefield tactics and sought and gained the devotion of his military companions. Caesar was more detached and conscious of a separation between his political and military careers. When Caesar crossed the Rubicon, he knew the political consequences were going to be much more significant than the military ones. Alexander experienced no such conflict between politics and his wars.
Alexander emulated Achilles, the hero of the Trojan War, whom he considered an ancestor on his mother’s side. Symbolically, his first stop toward conquest was in Troy. Historian Peter Green describes the landing:
The king’s first act on landing was to set up another altar, to Athena, Heracles, and Zeus …and to pray that “these territories might accept him as king of their own free will, without constraint.” Then he set off on his pilgrimage to Ilium. …Hewas welcomed by a committee of local Greeks…. They presented him with ceremonial gold wreaths. Alexander then offered sacrifice at the tombs of Ajax and Achilles…. He made lavish sacrifice to Athena, and dedicated his own armour at the goddess’s altar. In exchange he received a shield and panoply of guaranteed Trojan vintage, with which he armed himself for his first major engagement on Asiatic soil, at the Granicus River. However, they got rather badly knocked about during the fighting, and thereafter Alexander merely had them carried into battle before him by a squire.
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He proclaimed that he was the product of both Greece and Troy, and the worthy heir of both Achilles and Priam, implying that this conquest was his by right. Alexander was a man dedicated to war.
A
LEXANDER THE
Great, believed by many to be the mightiest general of antiquity, was born in July, 356 BC, of the marriage between Philip II of Macedon and his third wife, the Albanian princess Olympias. It is unclear exactly how they met or when they married, but it is known that the marriage was a stormy one. Philip was at the peak of his political powers when they married and when Alexander was conceived. The day Alexander was born, his father had just taken the town of Potidaea. Philip received three messages simultaneously—one of his generals had just overthrown the Illyrians, his racehorse had won at the Olympic games, and his wife had given birth to a son. The soothsayers assured him that a child born on the same day as two other such successful events would be invincible.
On her father’s side, Olympias traced her ancestry back to Achilles, and on her mother’s she traced her family to Helen of Troy. She belonged to a strange cult of snake worshippers, and she probably kept and sometimes slept with pet snakes. This snake cult was related to the orgiastic worship of Dionysus and encouraged its devotees to engage in frenzied rituals. The queen would pull large snakes out of ivy or baskets and encourage the other women to coil them around their bodies. The worship of Dionysus had long been wild and uninhibited, involving animal sacrifices and drinking of the blood. In ancient times even human sacrifices took place. Philip seemed to be repelled by the fanatic zeal with which Olympias led other women in this worship, but whatever his reluctance to sanction such a religion, the couple managed to cohabit long enough to produce a son.
Philip had other wives, but for a long time Olympias was his principal one. Wild and unprincipled in many respects, she still managed to take an interest in her child’s education. She brought two tutors, Lysimachus and Leonidas, from her own family to Macedonia to teach and train the young prince. The tie with Lysimachus continued into Alexander’s adulthood; Leonidas, on the other hand, was very austere, forcing Alexander to satisfy himself with nothing luxurious or excessive. His education, which emphasized doing without luxuries, even necessities, stood Alexander well in his later years of deprivation, when he was traveling through the deserts in the East.
In the last three years of Philip’s reign, when Alexander was in his teens, Olympias’s sole ambition was to ensure the throne for her son. Alexander always remained fiercely loyal to his mother, faithfully sending her long letters after his ascension to power, reporting on his journeys and wars. These letters—except for a handful of fragments, possibly forged—have not been found and none of Olympias’s letters back to Alexander have been discovered either, even though Alexander maintained a good secretary who kept a daily royal journal of his activities.
It is curious that in the last year of his life, after he ceased his Asian campaign and reestablished himself in Persia, Alexander did not send for his mother. Indeed, after he crossed the Hellespont into Asia Minor—begining a decade-long separation—mother and son never met face-to-face again. All indications are that Alexander loved his mother deeply but did not want to be in her powerful, demanding presence. Sending letters to Olympias would suffice. Alexander asserted his own identity.
Alexander’s relations with his formidable and successful father were also tense. Philip conquered much of the Greek peninsula but left it to his son to organize. Philip was cautious in dealing with the noisy and resourceful cities of southern Greece. He did not try to conquer them, except for Thebes, which lay halfway down the Greek peninsula and rebelled actively against him.
Justin, a Roman writer of the late second or early third century AD and author of a life of Philip, drew a sharp distinction between Philip and Alexander:
Philip was succeeded by his son Alexander who surpassed his father both in good qualities and bad. Each had his own method of gaining victory, Alexander making war openly and Philip using trickery; the latter took pleasure in duping the enemy, the former in putting them to flight in the open. Philip was the more prudent strategist, Alexander had the greater vision. The father could hide, and sometimes even suppress, his anger; when Alexander’s had flared up, his retaliation could be neither delayed nor kept in check. Both were excessively fond of drink, but intoxication brought out different shortcomings. It was the father’s habit to rush straight at the enemy from the dinner-party, engage him in combat and recklessly expose himself to danger; Alexander’s violence was directed not against the enemy but against his own comrades. As a result Philip was often brought back from his battles wounded while the other often left a dinner with his friends’ blood on his hands. Philip was unwilling to rule along with his friends; Alexander exercised his rule over his. The father preferred to be loved, the son to be feared. They had a comparable interest in literature. The father had greater shrewdness, the son was truer to his word. Philip was more restrained in his language and discourse, Alexander in his actions. When it came to showing mercy to the defeated, the son was temperamentally more amenable and more magnanimous. The father was more disposed to thrift, the son to extravagance. With such qualities did the father lay the basis for a worldwide empire and the son bring to completion the glorious enterprise.
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Philip was satisfied not to try to conquer Athens, Sparta, and Corinth. He formed them into a league with himself as
hegemon
(similar to today’s chairman of the board or CEO). In Athens the orator Demosthenes so raged against Philip and forecast the threat he posed to the Greek city-states if he was not stopped (like Churchill on Hitler in the 1930s) that his speeches are a synecdoche for opposition to a tyrant. These orations are called philippics, the same term used later for the orations by Cicero against Mark Antony. (The term is still a synonym for speeches of rage and condemnation.) Alexander eventually succeeded in getting Demosthenes exiled from Athens; Mark Antony had Cicero killed.
Though Alexander was carefully trained and educated in the humanities and sciences, from the age of five he was meant to be a highly skilled soldier. He had an affinity for diplomacy, and by the time he was fifteen, he was engaging Greek ambassadors in discussions. He had a special inclination to be a horseman and is said to have personally broken in his horse Bucephelus, in whose saddle he rode into battle for the next twenty years until the animal died.
The story goes that in the Balkans King Philip had acquired a very handsome horse of a special, elegant breed, but Philip and his grooms could not break the horse. It stood taller than the common run of runty Macedonian horses, and it boasted a proud mane and shimmering brown coat.
Philip and his grooms were about to give up on the Balkan horse as incapable of ever being broken in when Alexander, who was there, remarked that they were losing a wonderful horse simply because they were too inexperienced and too spineless to handle him. Initially Philip remained silent, but after Alexander repeated his comment and became visibly upset, Philip asked Alexander if his criticism of his elders was due to his knowing more than his elders, to which Alexander replied that he could at least handle
this
horse better than they. His father then asked his son what the consequence of his impulsiveness would be, were he to not succeed in handling the horse. His answer, which was the promise to pay the price of the horse, resulted in much laughter. After the financial terms between father and son were settled, Alexander quickly ran toward the horse. He did not immediately mount the horse. Earlier, he had noticed that the horse was greatly bothered by the sight of its own shadow, and so after he took the reins, he turned the horse toward the sun. For a short while, he ran beside it, and patted it in order to calm its panting. Then, after gently setting aside his cloak, he quickly and firmly mounted the horse, using the reins to put pressure on the bit without hurting its mouth. Once Alexander felt comfortable that the horse had dropped its menacing demeanor and was eager to gallop, he gave it some rein and urged it on, using a firmer voice and kick of his foot.
Silence fell over the crowd. But when Alexander returned truly pleased with himself, he was welcomed with cheers and applause. Philip was said to have burst into tears of joy. After Alexander dismounted, Philip kissed his head and said to him, “Son, look for a kingdom that matches your size. Macedonia has not enough space for you.” Alexander was about twelve years old when this occurred.
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So the oft-told story goes. Alexander called the horse Bucephalus, and the two were devoted to each other. He loved that horse and for twenty years, until Bucephalus died on the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, Alexander rode Bucephalus into battle and would ride no other until the aged steed died. For Alexander the horse was much more than an instrument. After Bucephalus’s death, Alexander founded a city on the Hydaspes River and called it Bucephala in honor of his loyal mount.
During the earlier years, Bucephalus accompanied Alexander during many of his ordeals and dangers. Only the king rode Bucephalus, as he refused all others to attempt to mount him. He was a large horse with a noble spirit, and his distinguishing characteristic was the brand of an ox-head, for which he was given the name Bucephalus. Another story claims that, though black, he had on his head a white colored mark that resembled most of all an ox-head.
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The horse never flinched from battle, proudly carrying Alexander into the middle of the fray. There is a contemporary wall painting showing Alexander and Bucephalus encountering the Persian emperor Darius III with his scythed chariot. Alexander on horseback hacks away at the Persian soldiers, and his army prevails over the Persian emperor, who is driven from the field. It is said that Alexander and Darius met face-to-face, and proud Bucephalus helped Alexander to triumph.
When Alexander was a preadolescent, Philip chose the philosopher Aristotle as his tutor. Though Aristotle had not yet entered into his stage of philosophical writings, he was nonetheless interested in a wide variety of subjects. Philip had maintained a long-standing correspondence with Plato, and when he needed a tutor for his son, he turned to Plato for advice. Among Plato’s students, the job of teaching the young Alexander was much coveted—testimony to Philip’s increasing influence—and Aristotle was chosen. It is not known exactly how long the student-teacher relationship lasted or what Aristotle and Alexander discussed, but what is known is that the years they spent together had long-lasting results. Robin Lane Fox gives us some information on this subject:
Whether briefly or not, Alexander spent these school hours with one of the most tireless and wide-ranging minds which has ever lived. Nowadays Aristotle is remembered as a philosopher, but apart from his philosophical works he also wrote books on the constitutions of 158 different states, edited a list of the victors in the games at Delphi, discussed music and medicine, astronomy, magnets, and optics, made notes on Homer, analysed rhetoric, outlined the forms of poetry, considered the irrational sides of man’s nature, set zoology on a properly experimental course in a compendious series of masterpieces whose facts become art through the love of a rare observer of nature; he was intrigued by bees and he began the study of embryology, although the dissection of human corpses was forbidden and his only opportunity was to procure and examine an aborted fetus. The contact between Greece’s greatest brain and her greatest conqueror is irresistible, and their mutual influence has occupied the imagination ever since.
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Aristotle felt that political science was wasted on the young because they had no experience of life and still followed their emotions. This may be a “sour grapes” feeling, since there is very little evidence that Aristotle influenced Alexander’s politics at all. Once the tutoring was accomplished and Alexander was on his own, they met infrequently, if at all. There is some evidence of a correspondence, but there was a falling-out in later years. Alexander had hired Aristotle’s nephew Callisthenes as his court historian. Callisthenes accompanied the king on his conquests and wrote about him in highly flattering terms—a situation that lasted until 327 BC, when Alexander had Callisthenes executed because he had become too open with his criticisms of the king and had joined a conspiracy to unseat Alexander. Even though Aristotle described his nephew as a blockhead to involve himself in such a plot, the execution had a decided dampening effect on Aristotle’s relationship with Alexander.
But when politics was not an issue, many of Alexander’s interests during his adult life show a definite effect of the old philosopher:
He [Alexander] prescribed cures for snakebite to his friends; he suggested that a new strain of cattle should be shipped from India to Macedonia; he shared his father’s interest in drainage and irrigation and the reclaiming of waste land; his surveyors paced out the roads in Asia, and his fleet was detailed to explore the Caspian Sea and the Indian ocean; his treasurer experimented with European plants in a Babylonian garden, and thanks to the expedition’s findings, Aristotle’s most intelligent pupil could include the banyan, the cinnamon and a bush of myrrh in books which mark the beginnings of botany. Alexander was more than a man of ambition and toughness; he had the wide armory of interests of a man of curiosity, and in the days at Mieza there had been matter enough to arouse them. “The only philosopher,” a friend referred to him politely, “whom I have ever seen in arms.”
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No description of Alexander’s early life would be complete without some mention of his friend Hephaestion. Likely he was also a student of Aristotle’s in the mini-school Aristotle had established at Mieza. Fox comments:
Hephaistion was the man whom Alexander loved, and for the rest of their lives their relationship remained as intimate as it is now irrecoverable: Alexander was only defeated once, the Cynic philosophers said long after his death, and that was by Hephaistion’s thighs. …Philip had been away on too many campaigns to devote much time in person to his son and it is not always fanciful to explain the homosexuality of Greek young men as a son’s need to replace an absent or indifferent father with an older lover. Hephaistion’s age is not known [but] he may have been the older of the two, like the Homeric hero with whom contemporaries compared him, an older Patroclus to Alexander’s Achilles.
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