Alexander the Great (6 page)

Although the army noticed his sexual preference for males, Alexander was undoubtedly bisexual. He married four or five wives and had several favorite concubines; among these was a certain Greek whore named Thaïs. The prologue to most Greek celebrations was a drunken brawl featuring heavily intoxicated males supplemented by a handful of high-class prostitutes called
hetairae
. A
hetaira
had to be young, fifteen to twenty-five years of age, and preferably clever and well educated. She was supposed to be able to recite Homer and some lines from Greek tragedies. These were the circumstances in which Alexander encountered Thaïs, a Greek courtesan. They were attracted to each other when they met in the Persian emperor’s palace in Persepolis, which Alexander had occupied and where he sat on a throne with a diadem on his head.

Late at night in the middle of a drunken brawl, Thaïs grabbed a torch and set fire to the Persian emperor’s palace. It had cedar ceilings, and the fire spread rapidly. Alexander, as usual, was drunk and joined Thaïs in torching the palace, which was totally destroyed. The next morning, when he sobered up, Alexander expressed remorse that the palace was gone, but by then it was too late. The palace at Persepolis was never rebuilt but was left for modern archaeologists to disinter.

Alexander had another relationship with a concubine by whom he had a child, a daughter for whom he took little responsibility. But his generals told him it was time to get married so that he could produce a legitimate son and successor. In 326 BC he married a Bactrian (Uzbekistani) princess, Roxane, reputed to be the most beautiful woman in the empire—but legends always say that about queens. Plutarch describes the episode in this way:

After their marriage Alexander had little to do with Roxane, who did not become pregnant until after the death of Hephaestion. Just one act of copulation was sufficient, since Roxane had been acquired only for her fertility, meant to assure Alexander’s generals of the continuation of his dynasty. When Alexander died in 323, Roxane was pregnant. She then delivered a son who appeared to assure the future of the Macedonian line.

Such was not to be, however. Cassander, who emerged as the strongman in Macedonia after Alexander’s death, had Roxane, her infant son, and for good measure Alexander’s mother, Olympias, all killed. Cassander was not related to Philip; he was, in effect, a usurper. Nonetheless his dynasty lasted until 164 BC, when Macedonia was conquered by the Romans.

Alexander had two other wives: the eldest daughter of the Persian emperor Darius III, and the youngest daughter of Darius’s immediate predecessor. These marriages occurred at Susa near Babylon in 325 BC, when Alexander was trying to persuade his generals to take Persian wives. He set an example for them by marrying the daughters of the late emperors.

Before the weddings Alexander would not let himself gaze upon the wife, daughter, and granddaughter of the emperor. He sent someone else to deal with them and inform them after his second battle with Darius III. When the Persian women were captured, Alexander saw to it that they would be treated with the respect, dignity, and comfort suitable to their rank. Presumably Alexander would not look upon these beautiful women because he could not avoid the temptation to ravish them, more for political than sexual reasons. Whether Alexander’s marriages to the daughters of the Persian emperors were consummated is unknown. He certainly had little enough to do with them after the marriages at Susa. (While Alexander’s treatment of women was not exemplary, it was probably a little better than that of most Greeks of the upper class in his time.)

There is an ancient story that Alexander was visited by the queen of the Amazons (who—if she actually existed at all—seems to have come from the Crimea). She wanted to sleep with the king for thirteen straight nights so that he would impregnate her. Whether she did or not is unknown, but ancient biographers tell stories similar to the following:

Another common belief concerning Alexander’s excesses concerns alcohol. Several sources claim that he was an alcoholic, but whether he drank more than others of his day is uncertain. Alexander was given to drunken brawls while carousing with his generals. In the last two or three years of his life, however, days went by during which he did nothing else but drink. Some writers attribute his death to drinking—indeed, to what today we would call alcohol poisoning. There being no hard liquor in the ancient world, wine was his drink, beer being too plebeian for his tastes. (If he drank the resinated wine common in Greece today, he would be imbibing approximately 10 percent alcohol. It was noted that Alexander did not water his wine as was commonly done in ancient Greece.) According to Aelian, “The greatest drinkers, so they say, were Xenagoras, the Rhodian, whom they called ‘The Jar,’ the boxer Heraclides, and Proteas, son of Lanice, who was brought up with King Alexander. In fact, Alexander himself is said to have exceeded all men in his drinking.”
¹⁴

Alexander was very pious—or superstitious, depending on one’s point of view. He was forever offering sacrifices to propitiate or thank the gods. To offer a sacrifice meant providing a live lamb or chicken (or goat or cow) to temple officials who would slaughter, roast or barbecue, and eat the animal. This was how priests in temples to the gods received their supply of fresh meat. Of course monetary and other gifts to temples would also be welcome, but offering sacrifice was a religious ritual, and Alexander took pains to observe it.

Every time he crossed a large river on rafts, he offered sacrifice on reaching the other shore. Since the gods were an ever-expanding pantheon, he offered sacrifice at the shrines of Persian and Egyptian gods as well as Greek ones. Perhaps doing so was an exercise in hedging all bets: He wanted to be sure that he didn’t offend any powerful deity that might come back to haunt him. It was commonplace to find a temple to an unknown god, just in case one had been inadvertently forgotten. There was nothing chauvinistic or nationalistic about Alexander’s view of divinity. He sought the assistance of foreign gods, or at least he asked that they not interfere with his ambitions.

Alexander also took seriously oracles, temples run by priests who could foretell—cryptically—the future. On his return to Babylon after fighting for eight years in the East, the king would not enter the city because the oracles told him not to. How the priests arrived at their oracular forecasts was a well-kept secret, but it was usually by consulting the livers of dead chickens or watching the flights of birds. These soothsayers or prophets were very common in the ancient world; indeed, stories abound of famous encounters with the prophets. The death of Julius Caesar was foretold by both the interpretation of his wife’s dream the night before his assassination and the words of the soothsayer who attempted to warn him on the day of his death. Philip was told on the night Alexander was born that his son was destined for greatness.

Another famous story concerns the untying of the Gordian knot. Shortly after one of Alexander’s first victories, the Battle of Granicus, he learned that a few miles away a certain King Gordias had left as a legacy a very difficult knot to untie. It was said (probably by Alexander’s propagandists) that whoever untied the knot would conquer all of Asia. Sources disagree about what happened. Some say that Alexander cleverly untied the knot, others that he simply unsheathed his sword and cut it. But one way or another he untied or “cut the Gordian knot.” Fox relates the tale this way:

Alexander believed that untying (or cutting) the Gordian knot would enable him to become “lord of Asia.” This was obviously an indulgence on his part in wish fulfillment, but he would not stop until he reached the Indus River in northern India.

Before he set out to the East, Alexander consulted the oracle at Delphi in Greece, by far the most famous of the Greek oracles. According to a common story, the oracle was closed from mid-November until mid-February—the oracle would not speak during those months. When Alexander called for the priestess Pythia to come out, she said she could not—it would be unlawful. Impatiently, Alexander proceeded to drag the priestess to the place where she usually prophesied, when she yelled out, “My son, you are invincible!” This was enough to gratify Alexander, and soon thereafter he left for the East.

When Alexander reached the Egyptian capital of Memphis on the Nile, he discovered that two hundred miles out in the Libyan Desert there was another famous oracle at Siwah. He immediately took a bodyguard and went there, being guided to the shrine, we are told, by crows. Once he had made sacrifice at Siwah—the priests did not taste meat often, the place being so isolated—he consulted the oracle there in a small room. Alexander never revealed what took place at Siwah’s oracle, but he was satisfied and emboldened. He decided that the Egyptian supergod Ammon was the same as Zeus and thereafter usually prayed to Ammon Zeus. Plutarch tells us: