Empire of Ashes: A Novel of Alexander the Great (47 page)

Readers of forensic bent will note that the court procedure described here does not resemble current practice. Indeed, moderns first encountering the courtroom literature of classical Athens are often surprised that rumor, hearsay, irrelevancies and character assassination were rampant in the incubator of Western rationalism. Orators like had common recourse to insults, such as during a public prosecution of Timarchus in 346 Aeschines accused the defendant’s political sponsor, Demosthenes, of favoring girlish underwear.

In the popular court I describe, the Heliaia, standards of evidence, discovery, and examination of witnesses were all strikingly casual. When the prosecution and the defense had finished their statements, jurors were indeed called upon to render their judgment immediately, with no deliberation or politicking allowed. While I cannot claim that every detail of this procedure I describe is accurate (for much is unknown), it is likely that Athenians of the time would have recognized the procedure depicted here as typical of their courts.

Could there be any truth to Machon’s story of Arridaeus as the “secret weapon” of the Macedonians? Though it is known that Alexander’s half-brother was present on the march, the sources are notably silent on what, if anything, he did during the entire twelve years of the Asian campaign. My guess is that he impinged on events more than the official historians acknowledge. The precise nature of his mental deficiency would of course be nice to know. This side of the story, unfortunately, may never be recoverable. Given the substantially different developmental environment that existed in antiquity, it is not altogether clear to me that the kinds of illness seen then (or the kinds of sanity, for that matter) are exactly the same as the ones observed among modern people. The truth about Arridaeus may be far stranger than the autism I suggest for him here.

From the structure of the novel it should be clear that I see little profit in attempting to find the “real” Alexander. Alexander has been a perennially popular subject for classical scholarship, yet his study suffers from the fact that the man himself left relatively scant direct evidence for archaeology to uncover about him. New developments in our understanding of Alexander are largely restricted to re-readings and re-re-readings of the ancient texts, all of which are secondary, late, and ideologically-driven in one way or another.

Those looking for the key to Alexander’s fall will likewise be disappointed. To my mind, what stopped him is not as interesting as what kept him going. While Alexander clearly relished building and administering things, it was the opiate of conquest, of taming the new, that came to dominate his short life. One can only imagine what he might have accomplished had he realized otherwise.

Authorities will long debate the significance of the achievements ascribed to Alexander, including his military innovations, the founding of Alexandria, the spread of Greek culture over a vast area, the model of divine kingship he transmitted to Hellenistic, Roman, and later rulers, dreams of a trans-ethnic empire, etc. Perhaps the most unappreciated implication of his career, however, was the realization, dawning somewhere deep in the ancient mind, that such mythic accomplishments need not be the works of a god at all, but of the ingenuity, persistence, and vision of a flawed human being. In this sense, his story is a modern one.