The Rise of Rome: The Making of the World's Greatest Empire (26 page)

A fierce culture of self-sacrifice developed, at least in the ruling class, illustrated not only by such legends as Brutus’s execution of his delinquent sons but also by the (apparently historical) deaths of Decius Mus
père et fils
—suicide for the greater good, negation of the individual for the deliverance of the collective.

Two factors kept the Roman’s instinct for aggression under control: religion and the law. Both were systems of regulation. Spiritual experience was regarded with deep suspicion; what was required was a ritual formula for ascertaining the will of the gods and averting their displeasure. Likewise, the Twelve Tables set out in grinding detail rules for managing relations between citizens.

These two systems helped to ensure good behavior, dutifulness, trust,
fides
. Bad faith brought with it divine disappproval and legal sanctions. But the Roman was crafty and, while very free with his condemnation of others, was willing enough to favor the letter rather than the spirit of the law in his own affairs; on occasion, he might even rewrite the letter.

Prescription is insufficient by itself; goodwill has to be added to the mixture. The remarkable story of how Rome’s class struggle was resolved is evidence that generation after generation of pragmatists were willing to compromise, to make do and mend, to strike deals with their political opponents.

THESE WERE THE
people who were about to encounter, for the first time, the armed might of Greece.

10

The Adventurer

A
YOUNG KING LAY DYING ON HIS BED IN BABYLON
. On 29 May, he had given a splendid banquet in honor of one of his commanders and taken a bath, as he was accustomed to do. Then, uncharacteristically, for he enjoyed late-night drinking sessions, he wanted to go to bed. Perhaps he was feeling out of sorts. However, a friend of his invited him to a party and he changed his mind. He went on drinking all through the next day, at the end of which he felt feverish.

That night he slept in the palace bathhouse, for its coolness. The following morning, he returned to his bedroom and spent the day playing dice. By the night of 1 June, he was back in the bathhouse, and the following morning he discussed a projected military expedition with his senior officers. The fever intensified, and two days later it became clear that he was seriously ill.
What, exactly, was the matter is unknown, but he had recently returned from a boating trip on the river Euphrates and may have contracted malaria; also, he had not fully recovered from a serious battle wound to his chest.

The king continued to fulfill his royal duties, leading the daily sacrifice, but by 5 June he was forced to recognize the gravity of his condition and issued orders for high officials to stay within reach of
his bedside. Not many hours passed before he began to lose the power of speech and, in a bleak symbolic gesture, he handed his signet ring to his senior marshal. Authority was transferred.

The city was seething with rumors, and anxious soldiers gathered outside the palace, threatening to break down the doors. Eventually, they were allowed in and passed in an endless file one by one through the king’s bedroom. The king could not say a word and, as the men took their leave, he sometimes painfully raised his head a little and gestured to them with his right hand. Otherwise, only his eyes expressed awareness.

At some point during his illness, while he was still able to converse, the king was asked to whom he left his kingdom. He gasped, “To the strongest.” His last words reveal a cynical prediction that his generals would soon be at one another’s throats as they fought for their share of his empire. He added, “
There will be funeral ‘games’ in good earnest when I have gone.”

So died Alexander the Great on 10 or 11 June 334, at the early age of thirty-two. While Rome was engaged in its long, slow struggle with the Samnites for control of central Italy, this boyking of Macedon had spent ten years in a whirlwind of triumphant campaigning against the vast Persian Empire; although he claimed to be leading a Hellenic crusade, he expropriated it for himself. One of the world’s great field commanders, he seems to have seen war as an end in itself. Homer’s
Iliad
was his bible, and he agreed with the indomitable warrior Achilles that the only reasonable purpose of life was the pursuit of personal glory. The cost in lives was of little concern to Alexander and hecatombs of men, women, and children were sacrificed to his vaulting ambition.

In his final months, he was planning new campaigns. According to his biographer Arrian, there were reports that he meant to make for Sicily and southern Italy in order to check the Romans, whose growing reputation was already causing him concern.

He would never have remained idle in the enjoyment of any of his conquests, even had he extended his empire from Asia to Europe
and from Europe to the British Isles. On the contrary, he would have continued to seek beyond them for unknown lands, as it was ever his nature, if he had no rival, to strive to better his own best.

Alexander personified a human type, the legendary seeker for the world’s end, whose purpose, in Tennyson’s unforgettable phrase, is always “
to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”

The Macedonian king’s cynical view of a future without him was more than justified by the event. His empire was divided up among his generals and members of his family. Nicknamed the
Diadochoi
, or Successors, they immediately started squabbling among themselves and war succeeded war. Like players in a murderous game of musical chairs, almost every one of them came to a violent end. Alexander’s half-witted half brother and nominal successor as king; his formidable mother, Olympias; his wife, Roxana, and their posthumous son—all were eventually executed as the wheel of fortune whirled round.

THE GLAMOUR OF
Alexander’s personality and the blinding afterglow of his achievements caught the imagination of many ambitious young men of the time and, indeed, later throughout the classical period. His example energized famous Greeks and Romans in their own pursuit of glory. (Not everyone was an admirer, it is worth noting. Cicero saw Alexander as a global menace and told of his encounter with a captured pirate. The king asked the man what wickedness drove him to terrorize the seas. He replied, “
The same wickedness that drives you to terrorize the entire world.”)

One of the earliest emulators was Pyrrhus, king of the disputed throne of the Molossians. The Molossians were one of the tribes that made up the federation of Epirus (a territory in what is today northern Greece and southern Albania, which looks across a narrow stretch of the Ionian Sea to the island of Corfu); their monarch was the federation’s hereditary
hegemon
, or leader.

A rugged and mountainous region, Epirus is dominated by the high Pindus range and lay on the edge of the Hellenic world. The Greeks looked down on its inhabitants, as they did on the Macedonians, as being semi-barbarous. Epirotes spoke a sort of Greek but lived in scattered villages rather than cities, or
poleis
, like Athens, Thebes, and Sparta. Of course, after Alexander, northern outlanders were no longer beyond the pale.

Pyrrhus boasted a remarkable pedigree, for he was believed to be a descendant of Achilles, and bore the name of the hero’s son. As so often in this story, the elaborate tapestry of the Trojan War forms the backdrop of contemporary events and personalities. To us it may be legend, but to the Greeks and Romans it was reality. Achilles had been the invincible fighter on the Greek side (and, as a point of interest, had defeated Rome’s originator, Aeneas, in single combat), but in the last year of the war he fell victim to an arrow shot by Paris, whose love for Helen had set in motion the whole long, tragic saga. The original Pyrrhus (he was also known as Neoptolemus) was one of the stowaways in the wooden horse. He led the charge during the fall of the city and
killed its aged king, Priam. On his return to Greece, he settled in Epirus and founded the Molossian dynasty.

The infancy of his descendant and namesake was disturbed. Born in 319, Pyrrhus was a baby when his father was forcibly removed from the throne and replaced by a relative, and he had a hair-raising escape from pursuers. He was in the care of three sturdy young men and a nurse. They had nearly reached a place of safety, but just as the sun was setting they came to a river swollen by rains. They could not cross it in the dark without help. They saw some local people standing on the far bank and shouted for help, but the noise of the torrent made them inaudible.

One of the youths had the bright idea to strip some bark from a tree and scratch a message on it with a buckle pin. He wrapped the bark around a stone and flung it across the river. Those on the other
side read the message and quickly cut down some trees, lashed them together, and improvized a rough-and-ready rail that Pyrrhus’s party could grasp as they crossed the turbulent water.

The child’s final destination was a tribe in Illyria, to the north. This was a lawless land, and the Illyrians had a deserved reputation for sea piracy. The tribe’s ruler, a certain Glaucias, gave him asylum and resisted large bribes to hand him over to his enemies. This was where Pyrrhus grew up—in a wild world of heroic bandits who set a premium on physical bravery and personal honor.

He was only thirteen when he was restored to the Molossian throne under a regency, but a few years later he was ousted once again, this time by the ruthless and ambitious king of Macedonia, Cassander, who was one of the Diadochoi and had cast a covetous eye on northwestern Greece.

Now adult, Pyrrhus dreamed of winning or creating an empire somewhere in the world, but he had no choice but to lead the life of an adventurer. He served in the army of one of the Successors and received his first taste of large-scale warfare at the Battle of Ipsus, where his patron lost his life at the hands of a grand coalition. One more athlete in Alexander’s funeral games was removed from competition.

The only Successor to die comfortably in his bed after many years in power and to found a long-lived dynasty was Ptolemy, who had known Alexander as a boy and had been one of his most trusted companions. He seized Egypt and made himself pharaoh. Less ambitious than his rivals, he contented himself with this corner of the empire and aimed for no more than dominance of the Aegean. Pyrrhus spent some time in Egypt and so impressed Ptolemy that he married the young man to his stepdaughter (a political polygamist, he collected five wives during his career). The pharaoh also gave him substantial military and financial support, which enabled Pyrrhus once more to regain the Molossian throne.

The charms of his small kingdom soon palled. Pyrrhus devoted
time and energy to expanding the territory he controlled, but he was a marginal player in the great game of international politics. He nursed his hopes. A second cousin of Alexander the Great through Olympias, who had been a Molossian princess, he went so far as to claim a special relationship with the dead conqueror. He once reported that
Alexander called to him in a dream. He answered the summons and found the king lying on a couch. Alexander promised him his help. “But your majesty,” said Pyrrhus, never backward in coming forward, “how will you be able to help me, seeing that you are unwell?” The king replied, “My name will be enough,” and, mounting a pedigree horse, led the way into the future.

And so it was. Pyrrhus did not hesitate to use Alexander’s name, and he made the most of the family connection when, in 287, he persuaded the Macedonian army to proclaim him king of Macedon. However, a rival pretender soon drove him out, and back into his Molossian backwater.

Pyrrhus was a chivalrous and charismatic figure, although Plutarch writes that
his appearance “conveyed terror rather than majesty.” As with the King’s Evil, practiced by medieval and early modern European monarchs,
sufferers from depression believed the king could cure their condition by pressing his right foot against their spleen. No beauty, Pyrrhus had few teeth and, oddly, it is said that his upper jaw was a continuous line of bone on which the usual intervals between the teeth were indicated by slight depressions. (There is no plausible condition known to modern dentists that matches this description; the most likely explanation is that
the king wore a bone or ivory denture.) He was discreet and polite in his personal life, but tended to be aloof with social inferiors. He was widely acknowledged to be
naturally brilliant, well-educated, and experienced in public affairs—an opinion of himself that he shared.