The Nature of Alexander Read online

  A noble called Attalus, a friend of Philip, perhaps the dead man’s kinsman or tribal chief, devised a black farce by way of retribution. He got Pausanias dead drunk at his house, threw him out in the stable yard and invited the slaves to rape him.

  Unable to kill Attalus in the midst of his retainers, Pausanias went to the King demanding vengeance. Since Attalus could not legally be executed without a public trial even had Philip wished it, he naturally refused; but, Pausanias being an Orestid of almost royal family, offered him some kind of compensation in land or rank. He accepted it and the affair seemed closed. It is unlikely that Alexander, by now twelve or thirteen, missed hearing the sordid tale; No doubt he suffered what was natural to his age, his nature and the event.

  However, it was to set him upon the throne.

  Soon after, Philip extended his power decisively southward. By invitation, he became Archon of Thessaly: leading chieftain, judge, war leader, virtual king. It genuinely benefitted the country with its long history of oppressive and warring barons; neither he nor his son ever had trouble in recruiting cavalry among the famed Thessalian horsemen. But Athens, with its democratic commitment and traditional hatred of monarchy, thought only of the growing menace from the north.

  In fact, the last thing Philip wanted was war with Athens. He had larger and better plans. After the disastrous Peloponnesian War, the Spartans had propped their hated tyranny in south Greece by ceding to Persia the Greek colonies in Asia Minor, in return for Persian support. It had killed their prestige before their power declined. Since then all the city-states had agreed, in principle, that they had a sacred duty to liberate their Hellene kinsmen. Only, enmeshed in feuds many generations old, they could never combine to do it. To achieve it was Philip’s dream.

  Objective minds had long seen the necessity of a single high command. The nonagenarian political philosopher Isocrates, who remembered Socrates as a contemporary, had been urging it for decades, sometimes on rather unsuitable leaders; now he saw in Philip a really promising candidate, and wrote at some length to tell him so. Philip was indeed well qualified for the task. Had he not sired a genius, he would be remembered as the most brilliant general of antiquity next to Julius Caesar. He was neither a harsh ruler nor, by the time’s standards, superfluously cruel in war. He respected culture, was at ease with statesman or peasant, and could undermine hostility with charm. His good balance is indeed surprising, seeing that his Theban captivity had not been his first: as a very small child he had had the shock of being sent as hostage to the wild Illyrians by the usurper Ptolemy, his mother’s lover, whom his elder brother had to kill before he was ransomed back.

  He could take a joke. After one of his victories he was supervising the routine business of selling his captives to the slave dealers, sprawling in his chair. “Spare me, Philip!” called a resourceful prisoner. “I was your father’s friend!” Asked for details, he said they were confidential. Philip beckoned him up. “Pull down your cloak, sir,” he whispered. “Your crotch is showing.” With a grin Philip told the guards, “Yes, he’s a good friend, let him go.” To him is first credited the classic put-down to a chatty barber: “How do you like your hair cut, sir?” “In silence.”

  This robust humour was not passed on to his son. Alexander’s recorded sayings have pith rather than wit; and the jokes which endeared him to his men were boyishly simple. Having thawed back to life a soldier dazed with cold in his own chair by the campfire, he said, “You’re lucky it’s not Darius’s, he’d have had your head for it.” This is a long way from Philip’s pungent irony; perhaps the boy had felt its bite too young.

  It was liked still less, however, by Philip’s arch-enemy, the Athenian orator Demosthenes; a man entirely humourless, but with a notable gift for vituperation. He was the heir to a great ideal and its last defender. Inevitably, his name is touched with its grandeur, and with the aura of a lost cause. He was without doubt a patriot by belief as well as by profession; his faith in the free city-state was real—so long as the state was Athens. But only with effort does justice to Demosthenes survive a reading of his orations, well polished and published by himself. They were admired in eighteenth-century England when political scurrility was not impeded by libel laws. Their counterparts were the brutal cartoons of Gillray; Hogarth would have been too moral and Rowlandson too jolly. He catches no gleam from the brilliance of Athens’ zenith, gives back no echo of Pericles’ immortal affirmation that man’s individuality is his right and his city’s pride. Page after page is loaded with invective, against political or private enemies as often as against Macedon (“a country from which it was never yet possible to buy a decent slave”). No weapon is too mean for him; he will sneer at the poverty of an opponent’s childhood, and he sticks at no lie he can get away with. He has all the skills of rhetoric; but his popularity is a dark comment on the Athens of his day. One cannot read him without feeling sure he would have spoken for the death of Socrates.

  He led his city to ruin, not through treachery—even her traitors could have done her better service—but from inveterate hate and spite. No doubt he believed of Philip exactly what he said of him, that he was a power-drunk barbarian whose intent was to sack Athens and set up a slave state there: Demosthenes had the envy which hopes for evil in other men. His belief in the free city did not pass his own city walls. He had no compunction in keeping up secret contacts with Persia, and got from King Ochus huge sums for use in propaganda and bribery against Macedon. Philip, of course, had his own fifth column also; partly composed of merely venal agents, but partly of men not without concern for their own cities, who saw in Macedonian hegemony, as did Isocrates, an end to the constant interstate wars, and a hope for the Greek Asian cities. Philip, an unashamed practitioner of realpolitik, was at least not sanctimonious.

  The antagonists had met when Athens sent envoys to Pella. (Alexander would have been about eight years old.) Demosthenes, the star, had saved himself till the last; but, face to face with Philip’s formidable personality, the orator “dried.” Indulgently the King invited him to start again from the beginning; but his nerve was gone. He learned his speeches by heart, and now had lost the thread. He could only stammer and sit down; and his rivals, to whom he had boasted that he would leave Philip without a word to say for himself, took care it was not forgotten. By such events the fate of nations can be determined, as well as by the price of corn.

  At the state dinner which followed, young Alexander, still doing his music lessons, sang part songs with a friend. Demosthenes on his return is said to have jeered at this performance, and made some obscene pun or other. He had had a hard youth, orphaned early and defrauded by his trustees, and he shouldered the chip for life. In his way he was as insecure as the boy whose lyre was soon to be laid aside. But the metals behaved differently in the fire.

  When Alexander was thirteen, a succession struggle in Epirus, Olympias’ homeland, threatened feudal war. Philip intervened, setting on the throne her brother Alexandros (the Greek spelling will distinguish him from Alexander). It was a shrewd choice of a man who, in the Macedonian family disputes, could be trusted to see where his own interests lay; one of Philip’s most successful diplomatic coups. Not faulty judgment, but the convergence of unseen forces, was to make it the engine of his fall.

  In the same year, he took another decision equally momentous. Alexander was ready for higher education. Athens being now virtually an enemy country, he would have to get it at home. Philip looked about for a tutor.

  There was a rush of applications. Isocrates, now running up to his century, showed some pique at being passed over. Speusippus, Plato’s successor at the Academy, offered to resign and come; but Philip wanted the culture of Athens, not her politics. Only four years before, when Alexander was already nine years old, Plato had died, posing one of the great Ifs of history. His dream of the philosopher-king had not survived his own ruined hopes. By his teacher Socrates, and by him, the pattern of the silk purse had been devised. Ironic fate had handed
a sow’s ear to each, the brilliant unstable Alcibiades, the vain shallow Dionysius II; while in Macedon the silk was being spun for Aristotle.

  Legend has Philip booking up the wisest man of the age on the day of Alexander’s birth, like a peer putting his son down for Eton. In fact, even thirteen years later he did not know the value he was getting. Aristotle in his early forties was a scholar with a rising reputation, and the important asset of having studied some years with Plato, whom, it was said, he had hoped to succeed at the Academy. But it is most unlikely that his academic status was decisive in Philip’s choice. Aristotle was the son of his father’s family doctor, a certain Nicomachus. He must have treated the childish ailments of Philip himself and his two dead elder brothers, who had probably known Aristotle himself as a boy. His native city, Stagira, in coastal Thrace, had been destroyed in the wars while he was studying in Athens; and, being homeless, he had formed connections of great use to Macedon.

  After Plato’s death he accepted the invitation of a former fellow student, Hermias, a eunuch governor who had seceded from Persian rule and established a despotate, albeit a benign one, in Atarneus, which commanded the strait between the mainland and Mytilene. He had gathered round him a little court of philosopher friends, conferring the hand of his niece and ward on Aristotle, who thus had influence in a state of great strategic value to Philip. By him the philosopher was welcomed with the courtesy he always showed to distinguished Greeks, and offered a country house where, away from court and family distractions, the prince was instructed with a chosen group of friends.

  Aristotle’s extant works date from later years when he had founded his own university, the Lyceum, in Athens. His Macedonian period must have been one of transition from Plato’s teachings, and we have no firm evidence of what he taught there; but Alexander’s later life provides many clues. Plato was a metaphysical philosopher whose work is suffused with the poetry he renounced for its sake in youth. His own mystical experience was one of the premises from which his logic constructed his universe. In him, Alexander’s glowing imagination would have found an interpreter and a guide. Aristotle’s whole temper was that of the inductive scientist. It is one of the great open questions of history, whether the gain balanced the loss.

  He made an instant appeal to his pupil’s practical and inquiring intellect, to his passion for exploration and discovery. Botany and zoology fascinated Alexander all his life. So did medicine. He concerned himself closely with his soldiers’ wounds or sicknesses, and prescribed personally for his friends; and in this he must have been well taught, for all Greek doctors passed on their art to their sons. On campaign he studied the animal and plant life, having records kept and specimens sent to Aristotle; and is said to have released ringed stags to learn their life span (Plutarch romantically gives them gold collars, hardly an aid to their conservation). The Middle Ages had a whole collection of spurious epistles from him on these matters, chief source of the Romances’ fantastic fauna; his real observations, which would have been a treasure to more than biology, have disappeared.

  He also learned philosophy. In the Greek world, this was central to all adult studies. It had not then become an abstruse specialization, absorbed in the minutiae of its own grammatical inflections. Its language was comprehensible to the lay ear, and its subject was ultimate human value judgments. Its conclusions on these were brought to bear in debate upon law, statecraft, and personal ethics.

  Aristotle’s ethics were high principled, rather than profound. He would have agreed with Socrates that he who would be esteemed must buy it with reality whatever it costs to achieve; “be what you wish to seem.” But the prayer Plato gives to Socrates is, “Make me to be beautiful within; and may outward things chime with the inward.” Aristotle conceived the “great-souled man” as an image first; a superb role for which the man who would enact it must fit himself, below which he must never fall. Intellectual giant though he was, in giving this teaching to a man like Alexander he was a sorcerer’s apprentice. Plato, in his middle years, might have been the sorcerer. Aristotle unleashed a force beyond his own conceiving.

  Alexander’s need for self-assurance was equal to his genius and strength of will. If he ever consciously resolved to be greatest among men, it was probably in his schooldays. As this dream became realized he would exult in it. And here it is vital not to think anachronistically. Modesty was not admired in the Greek world, but thought mean-spirited; the lying boast, only, was despised. That a man is entitled to his earned esteem is the kingpin on which the plot of the Iliad turns. The dying words of Euripides’ Hippolytus, “Pray that your lawful sons may be like me,” offended no Greek audience; he had earned the right. It was inevitable therefore that Alexander should in due course become one of the vainest men in human history. The secret of his magnetism, to those around him and to posterity, is that his vanity was redeemed by pride. To be truly what he wished to seem was his passion till his last breath. On the occasion when he sank below his own forgiveness, the shame of it almost killed him.

  His course in law and civics was no doubt of use to him early in his campaigns, while he dealt with the old Greek colonies; he would have been taught the nature of Greek regimes: tyranny (then a technical term) through extreme and moderate oligarchy to democracy. The lessons would have taken for granted a homogeneous body of citizens (slaves, women and most immigrants being unenfranchised); all, at least by assimilation, Greek. Once outside such societies he would have to improvise. His tutor was explicit about the function of lesser breeds; Greeks were men, barbarians sub-men, created for men’s use, like plants and animals. It was the conventional view of the time; and if Aristotle did not rise above it, he had some excuse. While he was in Macedon his friend and kinsman Hermias was lured by treachery into Ochus’ hands, tortured to make him reveal his allies’ plans (which he did not do) then crucified.

  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 be
dmate 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.