The Nature of Alexander (3 page)

Commitment breeds counter-commitment; the defence was pushed too far. Sir William Tarn, active till this mid-century, was more learned than Grote, and larger minded. But in his sympathy with Alexander, he too applied, though favourably, his own moral code, often defending him where he can scarcely have thought his actions needed extenuation, and when they would certainly have shocked
none of his followers; while his unprejudiced regard for quality in friends or enemies is expanded into an idealistic faith in the unity of all mankind.

Recent scholarship is now restoring a balance; but these discussions, held in circles where it is agreed to respect the evidence, have filtered down as a turbid seepage to levels where only confirmation of the entrenched dogma is sought. An intractable resistance to levelling down has made Alexander the archdemon of egalitarians; while pacifists, well meaning but ill read, have projected on him their horror of modern atrocities (perpetrated after two millennia of Christianity) which this fourth-century pagan would scarcely have credited to savages.

Filtered and refracted by these layers of fable, history, tradition and emotion—a thing inseparable from him alive and dead—the image of Alexander has come down to us.

A
LEXANDER’S EXISTENCE WAS DETERMINED
in 358
BC
, at a celebration of the Mysteries on Samothrace, where his parents met.

Philip II of Macedon, then about twenty-four, was a legitimate but not quite hereditary king. His elder brother, Perdiccas III, had been killed while his son was still an infant. The Assembly of fighting Macedonians had the traditional right to choose in such circumstances a king from the members of the royal house; a fact of primary importance to the country’s history. It was a time of civil feud and foreign invasion. A fighting regent was essential, and Philip was proven in the field. Not long after, the situation growing still more perilous, he was asked to assume the throne.

His surviving portrait shows a square powerful face, intelligent, ruthless, possibly brutal, but without the viciousness that chills in some of the Caesars. It has humour; looks capable of charm, and of the amatory success for which he was notorious.

A crucial event of his career had happened when he was sixteen. In the complex wars of the royal succession, Perdiccas, making a treaty with Thebes, had had to supply a royal hostage as security. Childless as yet, he had perforce sent his younger brother. Thebes had been then in its full brief blaze of glory after the overthrow of the
Spartan tyranny. Intellectually provincial, in military lustre it was unmatched in Greece. Lately its cult of heroic homosexual love had reached its apogee with Pelopidas’ foundation of its
corps d’élite,
the Sacred Band, made up from pairs of friends who had already taken a traditional vow to stand or fall together. Philip, treated on parole more as guest than prisoner, learned the skills of soldiering from the finest masters. Here too he may have added to his lifelong love of women the taste for young men which was to cause his death.

It is tempting to wonder whether some friendly contrivance of his hosts could have got him, incognito, across the border to Athens. He was a young nonentity and it would have been easy. He was not likely in his days of power to admit having sneaked in under such humiliating conditions; but all his life he showed a deep regard for Athens’ history and culture, however great his contempt for her current leaders. Reared himself in a fifth-century palace at Pella, built by Athenian architects and decorated by her painters of the finest period, he could appreciate her material splendours, still in uncorrupted perfection.

His own inheritance was a highland kingdom of great scenic beauty and tall warlike men, where his capital, Pella, was an island of classicism in an archaic society. At his accession (as Alexander later reminded his men) all that the people owned were the sheep whose skins they wore for want of cloth, and even those were hard to keep, border raids from neighbours being constant. As in Homer’s day, the lords would follow the king to war—unless just then supporting some rival claimant—bringing each his meinie of tough undisciplined followers armed with what came to hand. The loose law of succession had ensured a series of civil wars and a long record of murders. Perdiccas had got his throne by killing a lover of his
mother’s who had usurped it; she was rumoured to have procured the deaths both of her husband and her son. From him Philip inherited five rival pretenders to the throne, some in a state of active hostilities; and two foreign invasions. No account of Alexander’s life can be understood without remembering the record of his forebears which he must have picked up from his earliest years.

Philip killed at once the most dangerous of the claimants, who was his half-brother. The others, with restraint by family standards, he expelled or undermined. His hands thus free, he set about defending his frontiers. At some time during these early campaigns, he sailed to Samothrace.

The Mysteries retain much mystery despite the archaeologists, and it is not clear what benefit he hoped for. Their chief known gift was protection from shipwreck, one of the few perils he seldom met. Their “Great Gods” were pre-Hellenic deities, whose offerings were cast into a deep cleft, and who were somehow associated with dwarfs, perhaps by folk memory of an extinct race. The island is steep and sheer, the sanctuary near the shore; the rites, which involved corybantic dancing and much noise, were performed at night.

Legend was bound to make Philip fall in love with Olympias during the actual celebration; but it may be true. Such things excited her and must have made her striking looks dramatic. The visit would keep the initiates a day or two on the island, giving him a chance to see her by daylight, find out who she was, and most likely meet her. Fatefully, she was a girl who could only be had by marriage.

She was the orphaned daughter of a former King of Epirus, the region of modern Albania. It was more
primitive than Macedon and the hegemony of the kings was even less secure; but it had important possibilities, and Philip, if he had hesitated, did so no longer.

No portrait of Olympias has survived which is not stylized to nullity. Her looks may be suggested by her son’s, which did not come from Philip. Most north Greeks were fair, red-haired or auburn. Otherwise, our one visual glimpse of her dates from just before her death, when she was about sixty. It consists in the single fact that two hundred of Cassander’s soldiers, who had agreed to kill her and broken into her house to do it, looked at her face to face and went away.

Her family claimed descent from Achilles. His son Neoptolemus had fathered their royal line upon Andromache, Hector’s widow, his prize from the sack of Troy. Unaware how momentous this lineage would be for history, Philip married the princess, and, leaving her pregnant, returned to his necessary wars.

The prophetic dreams of Philip and Olympias belong properly to the area of legend. He dreamed he was sealing her womb with the image of a lion; she, that kindled by a thunderbolt a fire spread from her body to the earth’s ends, and was suddenly quenched in darkness. Alexander was in fact born under the sign of Leo, in August 356.

Philip, on campaign in Thrace, got the news along with two other messages. His general, Parmenion, had soundly defeated the Illyrians in the west; and his racehorse had won at the Olympic Games. The right of Olympic entry was a prized inheritance of the kings of Macedon. The Games were only open to Greeks; and Macedonians were not recognized in the south as the offshoots of the original stock which in fact they were. They were regarded as semi-barbarous (the actual term “barbarian” was reserved for Persians) and the royal house had just scraped in on the
strength of a remote Argive ancestry. For Philip, to whom acceptance in the Greek world was a lifelong dream, this news may have been the most welcome item of the three.

It was inevitable that Alexander’s childhood would later be described as precocious and brilliant; he was certainly not a late developer. Plutarch mentions, without quoting it, a long list of the teachers whom Philip imported for him. More to the purpose is what he learned from his parents.

By the time he was in his teens, they were not merely estranged but open enemies. Their one other child, a daughter called Cleopatra, was born not long after him; thereafter it can be assumed that sexual intercourse ceased. Whether Olympias had ever returned Philip’s feeling cannot, of course, be known; like all women of her time she had been “given in marriage.” Her pride ensured that if his infidelities did not torment her with jealousy they would be taken as deadly insults. It seems evident that the violent fracture of their relations must have happened in Alexander’s early childhood, the time when it would give the deepest pain and leave the deepest impression. It is the age at which the child, given ordinary kindness, will identify with the mother. For Alexander, his father’s constant absences on campaign, combined with his mother’s possessive love, made this a certainty.

She was a woman of great ability and intelligence, whose judgment was wholly swayed by her emotions; a visionary and an orgiast, though improbably in any sexual sense; she had the pride which does not stoop to common adulteries. The Dionysiac frenzy was for many women a kind of releasing drug trip, though only wine was used, the rest being auto-suggestion and mass emotion. Olympias brought to it a powerful imagination. To the anger and disgust of Philip with his Hellenic aspirations, she kept
about her the tame snakes of the primitive Thracian cult. She may have had self-induced hallucinations. Alexander was probably still quite young when first she gave him to understand that Philip was not his father.

Daily life in those days, even for the great, had little privacy. That, in spite of the accusations she invited, no man was ever named as her lover, is significant. Hating her husband, she wished wholly to possess her son. Later events show that whatever mystery he believed to surround his birth, it was supernatural.

It cannot have been long, in a free-spoken society, before he learned what the alternative was; while to be Philip’s son may have seemed to him even worse. What hidden agonies he endured remained his secret; suppressed, perhaps, even out of his memory. That he did not emerge a psychopath like Nero is one of history’s miracles.

In calm interludes of this life he was taught, like all high-born children, his ancestry. It went back on both sides to Zeus; on his mother’s, there was the heroic strain of Achilles, but also the royal blood of Troy. He was brought up to honour both sides in that great war; to treat neither with contempt or hate. Whatever harm Olympias did him, for this at least the world was to be her debtor.

As heir of Macedon, he was reared from his cradle in unquestioning acceptance of having been born to the sword, as a farmhand’s son to the plough. Neither to Philip nor Olympias would any other future have been thinkable. It remained only to excel.

Philip had now won the struggle for mere national survival. He began to secure his frontiers by attack. The turning point had been his capture, from the loosely knit tribes of west Thrace, of Mount Pangaeus, with its rich veins of gold and silver. It freed him from dependence on
tribal levies. Henceforth he could pay full-time soldiers, and turn them into professionals.

It was a military revolution. The labour of Helot serfs had given Sparta a citizen force in permanent training; but the Spartan mind was inflexible, and the dinosaur was at the point of death. Regular mercenaries existed in plenty: they might be exiles from other cities in the endless oscillations from democracy to oligarchy and back, when each change of government was accompanied by a vigorous settling of old scores; or younger sons whose portion only ran to a suit of armour; or criminals on the run. They would enlist with a mercenary general in good standing (this was important) and follow him where he was hired. But no Greek city-state would pay taxes for a standing army, which was distrusted, too, as a tool of potential coups. Philip now needed little of this casual labour; he could add to regular discipline the force of native loyalties and racial pride. As a matter of course, lords still officered their own tribesmen; it would take the full force of Alexander’s personality to bring in promotion on merit. But Philip was now permanent commander-in-chief; and he forged a formidable weapon.

Its solid centre was the infantry phalanx, a deep column (phalanx means finger) armed with the giant spear of his devising, the famous sarissa. Of graded length, those of the fourth-rank line being at least 15 feet long, these pikes enabled four ranks at once to take the enemy at spear-point, making them virtually immune from all but missile weapons. This was the holding force. The striking hammers were the flanking cavalry wings. Alexander was to be the virtuoso of this instrument; but Philip was its creator.

He had light-armed skirmishers, archers and slingers; Dionysius of Syracuse had made innovations in siegecraft which were not lost on him. His generalship was equalled
by his political acumen, which enabled him to intervene in neighbouring wars at the request of one or other party (the ancient tragedy of divided Greece) to his own profit. His influence in Thessaly, his steady extension across Thrace towards the vital corn route of the Hellespont, were already alarming Athens.

One can only speculate what would have been the effect on Alexander if Olympias had died in childbirth; if he had kept her genes but escaped her influence. Such a father and son might have added affection to mutual pride. As it was, this towering figure was the enemy and oppressor; the gross lecher from whose loins some god—pray heaven—had saved him from being begotten; above all the rival, at all costs to be surpassed. All Alexander’s story testifies to the effect on natural genius of the deep insecurity felt in these tormenting early years. Compensation for it inspired his greatest achievements; when it took him unawares, it betrayed him into his greatest sins.

That he kept his sanity he must have owed to his capacity for friendship, a solace he turned to while very young. Psychologically his face must have been his fortune; to this attractive boy people were drawn without the pretences of flattery, and his true child’s instincts felt it. He grew up with a religious faith in friendship, making it a cult, publicly staking his life on it. The real loves of his life were friendships, including his sexual loves. Though he had the classic family pattern for homosexuality, it was probably the mere availability of men rather than women for friendship which directed his emotional life. To be loved for himself, as he certainly often was, ministered to his constant need for reassurance, and he returned affection so warmly that it seldom let him down. When it did, it shook him to his roots. He had committed too much, and could not forgive.