Alexander the Great Read online

  Perdiccas asked when he wished divine honors paid to him. He replied: “When you yourselves are happy.” It is reported that these were Alexander’s last words.

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  WHAT KILLED THE KING was as uncertain as the future from which he was now excluded. Natural causes were assumed. However, after a while, circumstantial details of a plot to poison him emerged into the light of day. So the real question may have been who killed the king.

  We have two explanations of Alexander’s death, both decorated with data, opaque with cross-my-heart-and-hope-to-die verisimilitude. One gives a verdict of murder, and the other of a complicated natural death. Which are we to believe?

  To tease out the truth, let us begin the story of this brief, incandescent life at the beginning. A little prince arrives at the raucous, dangerous court of Macedonia.

  LIST OF MAPS

  ALEXANDER’S CONQUESTS

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  BATTLE OF THE GRANICUS RIVER

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  BATTLE OF ISSUS

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  BATTLE OF GAUGAMELA

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  BATTLE OF THE HYDASPES RIVER—PRELIMINARIES

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  BATTLE OF THE HYDASPES RIVER

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  CHAPTER 1

  GOAT KINGS

  July 20 in the year 356 B.C. was a great day for Philip, and it marked a high point in his life so far.

  An intelligent and charismatic young man in his midtwenties, he had been king of Macedonia for the past two years. This was no sinecure, for he was surrounded by enemies. On the day in question, he was with his army on campaign; three messengers arrived one after another at his camp, each bearing wonderful news.

  The first rider brought a report from his trusty and talented general Parmenion, who had scored a victory against Macedonia’s hereditary foes, the fierce, wild Illyrians. Then came a dispatch from southern Greece, where the Olympic Games were being held. Philip had entered a horse in one of the equestrian events. Only the very wealthy could afford the training and upkeep of two- or four-horse chariots, but financing a competitor in a four-and-a-half-mile horse race was costly enough. Philip’s investment had paid off, for his mount came in first. The publicity would give a shine to his embattled reputation.

  But the last messenger arrived from Pella, his capital city. His wife Olympias had given birth to a healthy boy. The official seers or soothsayers said that the arrival of a son timed to coincide with these other successes augured well. When he grew up he would surely be invincible. For his father, there was the prospect of continuing the dynasty.

  The infant’s name was to be Alexander.

  The baby crown prince faced the prospect of a daunting inheritance. He soon came to understand the realities of life and death as a member of the royal family. Being a clever and observant child, he remembered what he saw, and early lessons set the pattern of his adult attitudes.

  Here are some of the things he must have learned.

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  THE ROCKY AND VERTIGINOUS geography of Macedon was hostile to good governance. The kingdom lay to the north of Mount Olympus, traditional home of Zeus and the other anthropomorphic divinities of the Hellenic pantheon. Its center was a fertile alluvial plain bordered by the wooded mountains of northern Macedonia. Its coastline was interrupted by the three-fingered peninsula of Chalcidice, which was peppered with Greek trading settlements.

  Macedonia was inhabited by unruly tribes which devoted their time and energy to stock-raising and hunting. They regularly moved sheep to and from grazing grounds—the lowlands in winter and the highlands in summer. They paid as little attention as possible to central authority. There was a myriad of villages and very few settled urban communities.

  The kingdom had one important raw material in almost limitless amounts—high-quality timber. Trade increased around the Aegean Sea, for travel or transport by sea was easier by far than to go by land. There was growing demand for merchant ships and war galleys and, it followed, for planking and oars. The tall trees of Macedonia were ideal for the purpose, unlike the stunted products of the Greek landscape. Pitch was also exported for caulking boats.

  Life, even for despots, was basic. The “father of history,” Herodotus, who flourished in the fifth century B.C., writes of the primitive Macedonian monarchy. His contemporaries would have recognized the simplicity of the royal lifestyle, which had changed little over the centuries. The king lived in a farmhouse with a smoke hole in the roof, and the queen did the cooking. Herodotus, who probably visited Macedonia, commented: “In the old days ruling houses were poor, just like ordinary people.”

  Up to Philip’s day and beyond, the monarch adopted an informal way of life. At home he hunted and drank with his masculine Companions, or hetairoi. In the field he fought at the head of his army and was surrounded by a select bodyguard of seven noblemen, the somatophylaxes. His magnificent armor inevitably attracted enemy attacks.

  He mingled easily with his subjects and eschewed titles, being addressed only by his given name or “King.” He had to put up with impertinence from the rank and file, just as Agamemnon, commander-in-chief at Troy, was obliged to hear out Homer’s Thersites, a bowlegged and lame troublemaker, whose head was filled “with a store of disorderly words.”

  In effect, a king like Philip was not an autocrat but a tribal leader, and his success or failure would largely depend on his performance in war and his magnanimity in peace. It was important that he be generous with personal favors, together with gifts of estates, money, and loot on campaign.

  Like Agamemnon, he was wise to consult his senior officers. Philip suited the role very well, ruling with a relaxed sense of humor on the surface and adamantine determination underneath. An anecdote epitomizes his style. At the end of one campaign, he was superintending the sale of prisoners into slavery. His tunic had ridden up, exposing his private parts. One of the prisoners claimed to be a friend of his father and asked for a private word. He was brought forward to the king and whispered in his ear: “Lower your tunic a little, for you are exposing too much of yourself the way you are sitting.” And Philip said, “Let him go free, for I’d forgotten he is a true friend indeed.”

  Little is known about a king’s constitutional rights, but it seems that he was appointed by acclamation, at an assembly of citizens or of the army. Capital punishment of a Macedonian had to be endorsed by an assembly. But even if his powers were limited, a canny ruler could almost invariably get his way. The eldest son usually—but by no means always, as we shall see—inherited the throne.

  The philosopher Aristotle, whose father was official physician at the Macedonian court, was thinking about Philip when he observed that “kingship…is organized on the same basis as aristocracy: [by] merit—either individual virtue, or birth, or distinguished service, or all these together with a capacity for doing things.”

  Successive rulers tried again and again, without conspicuous success, to impose their will on their untamable subjects. Then, toward the end of the sixth century B.C., the outside world intervened in the shape of Darius I, absolute lord of the vast, sprawling Persian empire, which stretched from the shores of the eastern Mediterranean to the gates of India, from Egypt to Anatolia. It has been well described as a desert punctuated by oases. There were well-watered plains, often more abundant than today, and arid wastes. Rugged mountain ranges and broad rivers made travel—and for that matter warfare—complicated and challenging.

  The empire was founded by Cyrus the Great in the middle of the fifth century B.C. The Persians were originally nomads, and even in their heyday as an imperial power, their rulers were always on the move between one or other of their capital cities, Susa, Persepolis, and Ecbatana. Their great throne halls were versions of the royal traveling tent in stone. Like all nomads, they were enthusiastic horsemen and t
heir mounted archers were ferocious in battle.

  It has been estimated that the empire was home to about fifty million inhabitants. They came from a variety of cultures, spoke a medley of languages, and practiced a wide array of religions; wisely, they were governed with a light touch. However, if they rebelled against the central authority, they could only expect fire, rapine, and slaughter. In the last resort, the empire was a military monarchy.

  The Great King, as he was usually called, wanted to secure the northwestern corner of his wide domains by establishing an invulnerable frontier, the river Danube. This would entail subjugating Thrace, the large extent of land between the Balkan mountains, the Black Sea, and the Sea of Marmara. On today’s political map, it includes portions of Greece, Bulgaria, and Turkey.

  About 512 B.C., a vast Persian army invaded Thrace and then marched on beyond the Danube, but here Scythian nomads outplayed Darius by refusing engagement. They knew perfectly well that his forces would run out of time and supplies and would be forced to withdraw.

  The Great King saw that his gains were at risk from the mountain tribes in the west and he decided to annex Macedonia. He commissioned one of his generals to deal with the matter. Envoys were sent to the king of the day, Amyntas I, demanding earth and water, the symbols of submission and allegiance. Amyntas accepted his role as a vassal and married his daughter to a Persian high official, for he saw many advantages in allowing Macedonia to become an imperial province (or, to adopt the Persian word, satrapy). With Darius’s backing he knew he would have a good chance of enlarging his kingdom and beating down his independent-minded subjects.

  His teenaged son, who was to succeed him as Alexander I, saw things differently and, according to Herodotus, took violent measures at a state banquet in honor of the envoys. As the evening wore on, the guests became more and more drunk. Respectable women did not usually attend such events, but were brought in at the Persians’ express request. Amyntas was deeply offended and, doubtless pressed by his furious son, laid a plot. He told the Persians they could have sex with any of the women they liked. He added: “Perhaps you will let me send them away to have a bath. After that they will come back again.”

  The women were exchanged for beardless male teenagers, armed with daggers, who lay down beside the envoys in the dining room and made short work of them. Their retinue, carriages, and so forth were disposed of, and it was as if they had never existed. The Great King tried to have them traced, but without success. Any inquiry was received with a blank face.

  The mature Alexander was probably Herodotus’s source for this story, and it may be a boastful fabrication, but it illustrates the humiliation felt in leading Macedonian circles by the Persian occupation, which was to last thirty years.

  It was this humiliation, though, that laid the foundations of Macedonian power, for it did not prevent Alexander I, once he had succeeded to the throne, from using Persian support to make substantial territorial gains. It is a painful irony that without the Great King’s armed intervention Macedonia would never have become a great power.

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  SOUTH OF MACEDONIA LAY the isles of Greece, populated by small, fierce, ambitious, and inventive republics, chief among them Athens, the ville lumière of the ancient world, and, in the Peloponnese, the military state of Sparta.

  Although the Greeks, or Hellenes as they called themselves, disagreed with one another about almost everything, they were unanimous in the opinion that they were a cut above their foreign neighbors. Anyone who was not Greek was a barbarian, or barbaros: that is, he spoke a strange language which sounded like “bar bar.” He was not to be respected or trusted.

  If the Greeks were members of an exclusive club, in other respects they were energetically outgoing. They were traveling traders and from the eighth century onward their ships sailed up and down the Mediterranean. They founded permanent settlements along the coasts and islands of the Aegean Sea as well as in Sicily and southern Italy. These were partly designed to protect and develop mercantile routes and partly to absorb excess citizens in an age when a rising population outstripped local food production.

  As Plato put it, these new communities sat like “frogs around a pond” and greatly expanded the influence of the Hellenic world. They were proudly independent. Unluckily, many of them, the city-states of Ionia, lined the littoral of Anatolia. This marked the western edge of the Persian empire and, unsurprisingly, the Ionian city-states fell under the Great King’s control.

  Few mainland Greeks were bothered by the annexation of Macedonia, but many deeply resented the fate of their counterparts across the Aegean. In 499 B.C. the Ionians raised the standard of revolt, throwing out the despots whom the Great King had appointed to govern them. Democratic Athens incautiously dispatched a small flotilla to assist the rebels. They helped burn down the great and wealthy city of Sardis, capital of Lydia, although they soon afterward sailed home. By 493 the rebels threw in the towel.

  Darius was unused to opposition. According to Herodotus, “He strung an arrow and shot it in the air, shouting: ‘Lord God, grant me vengeance on the Athenians!’ Then he ordered one of his attendants to say to him three times whenever he sat down to dinner: ‘Sire, remember the Athenians.’ ”

  In 490, after an abortive attempt two years previously, the Great King sent a fleet directly across the Aegean on a punitive mission. It landed at the bay of Marathon in Attica, the territory of Athens, where it was surprisingly but decisively defeated by an Athenian army. This was only a minor setback, but the Persians sailed home smarting, and Darius vowed a return match. However, other business, not to mention his own death in 486, led to a ten-year delay.

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  HIS SON XERXES PICKED up the baton. He assembled an army of more than 200,000 men and about six hundred triremes, or war galleys. He marched along the Thracian coastline, shadowed at sea by the fleet, and in 480 came to Macedonia and northern Greece.

  Since his accession, the new Great King had great expectations of Alexander I, whom circumstances had trained into a practiced dissembler. The historian Justin observed:

  When that monarch overspread Greece like a thunderstorm, he presented Alexander with the sovereignty of the whole region between Mount Olympus and the Haemus mountain range in the north. Alexander enlarged his dominions not so much by his own aggressiveness as through the generosity of the Persians.

  The Macedonian acted as the Great King’s emissary to Athens and we may surmise that, like the rest of the ancient world, he assumed that Xerxes would be victorious. And indeed that appeared to be the case. The population of Athens was evacuated en masse to a nearby island and the Persians took the empty city without difficulty and sacked it. They burnt its temples, the same fate that had been meted out to the citizens of Sardis. Athens was devastated, its broken columns smeared black with smoke. Modern archaeologists have found clear evidence of the flames. Darius’s revenge, if delayed, was complete.

  However, the allied Greek fleet, dominated by Athenian triremes, defeated the armada of Xerxes at the island of Salamis, to everyone’s astonishment. The Great King withdrew hastily to his own realm, leaving a large army in central Greece to turn his fortunes around.

  Alexander read the writing on the wall and his latent philhellenism began to revive. He was obliged to take part in the military campaign. He and a contingent of Macedonian cavalry stood loyally, it would seem, in the Persian ranks and faced a disputatious allied force on the field of Plataea in Boeotia.

  The king decided to hedge his bets. During the middle of the night before the battle, when both armies were deeply asleep, he rode up to a Greek guard post and asked to speak to the allied commanders. Herodotus gives the details:

  The greater part of the sentries remained where they were, but the rest ran to their generals and told them that a horseman had ridden in from the Persian camp, refusing
to say anything except that he wanted to speak to the generals and identified them by their names. Hearing that, the generals straightaway went with the men to the outposts. When they had come, Alexander said to them: “Men of Athens, I give you this message in trust as a secret which you must reveal to no one but Pausanias, the supreme commander, or you will ruin me.”

  He went on to advise the Greeks to expect the enemy, who had been inactive for some days, to attack on the morrow. This was invaluable information, and the Macedonian added: “Should you bring this war to a successful conclusion, remember me and help me to freedom. I have taken a huge risk for the sake of Hellas by revealing the Persian plans and preserving you from a surprise attack. I am Alexander of Macedonia.”

  We may forgive the king a touch of exaggeration. He had simply bought an insurance policy: however the day went, he would be on the winning side. As we shall see, this double game of treachery and shifting loyalties was played by a long line of Macedonian kings. They had little alternative to deceit when trying to make the most of a weak hand.

  The following day, as forecast, the Persians attacked, and were routed. Their commander was killed. Xerxes’ great invasion was over. Alexander did not wait long to turn his coat. We know that he attacked some Persian contingents on their gloomy way home, to considerable effect, for he dedicated gold statues of himself at the oracle of Delphi and at Olympia, headquarters of the Olympic Games, as a “first fruit of spoils from captive Medes.” A little later he grabbed land in western Thrace. Overall, Macedonia had quadrupled in size. The king was entitled to be pleased with himself.