Such a journey as the cross-country ride to Dodona cannot have been undertaken guarding a woman without some kind of escort. It is likely these intimates provided one. Their allegiance was well known to Philip later.
With what feelings King Alexandros of Epirus, owing his throne to Philip, received his outraged sister is not recorded; nor whether Alexander felt welcome at Dodona, famed for hard winters, and for its oracle, the most ancient in the Greek world. Its centre was an oak of immemorial age housing doves whose murmur was significant, and ringed with bronze vessels which reverberated in wind. Its god was Zeus, who was questioned in writing, on a strip of lead; many examples have survived. The answer was drawn as a lottery by the barefoot priestess. No question from Alexander has rewarded the spade; yet this shrine was linked with that of Zeus-Ammon at Siwah, which later he consulted at the cost of trouble and danger, and with dramatic results. Being the man he was, it is hard to believe that at this crisis of his fortunes he did not visit a great centre of prophecy when he was on its doorstep. If so, he kept the secret of its answer. At Siwah he was to do the same.
Leaving his mother in the house where she was born, he rode north into Illyria. To this warlike land, less than two years before, he had thrust back its defeated army. That he could show himself there, and be received as a guest, speaks volumes for the decency with which his campaign had been waged, and the respect it must have commanded. What he meant to do there remains a mystery. For a time he was his mother’s son, his judgment overwhelmed by his emotions. He may even have considered leading an Illyrian invasion, to seize his heritage by force, till his innate intelligence reasserted itself. He was, however, very capable of playing a war of nerves with Philip, who would certainly be reluctant to set out for Asia, leaving the home garrison depleted, with this dangerous and unpredictable presence in his rear. Never again would Alexander have to hold out in such harsh and humiliating conditions, conciliating uncouth hosts, wary of treachery, dossing down in primitive hill-forts after the grandeurs of Athens and Corinth where he had been fêted as a victor. Among the hardships whose endurance he used later to recall with pride, no word is ever quoted about his sojourn in Illyria. But it worked. A family guest-friend, Demaratus of Corinth, acted as a diplomatic go-between. Whether father or son put the first feeler out remains unknown.
Alexander returned to Macedon, most probably with his mother. The sources disagree, some leaving her in Epirus, but it is unlikely he would have accepted such terms; not only did her own good name hang on her reinstatement, but his legitimacy. Whatever the bargain struck between him and Philip their reconciliation was brittle. Soon it was strained enough to make him doubt his father’s good faith about his succession.
He would not of course have returned without some kind of warranty. But he did not trust it. Most of Philip’s offspring were girls, and the new wife had borne another; no viable heir but Alexander existed; his suspicions seem to have verged on the irrational. But the Attalid faction, the authors of his exile, were high in favour; many Macedonian heirs had been disinherited by treachery in the past; and to all this was added the emotional pressure of his mother, deeply affronted by the favours showered on the bride, which included the honorific royal name of Eurydice. His dependence on his friends’ loyalty and affection increased; and they rallied to him with an openness which Philip began to suspect as treasonable. The atmosphere was explosive, and the first spark ignited it.
Arridaeus, Philip’s retarded bastard, was of age to be betrothed. The father of his affianced, the only important factor, was Pixodarus, satrap of Caria, a powerful semi-independent state in southern Asia Minor, of vital expedience in the coming war. Plutarch’s account of what followed sheds a powerful light on Alexander’s state of mind. His mother (by this account she was obviously in Macedon) and his friends kept bringing him false rumours, “as if Philip, through a brilliant match and a great connection, was trying to settle the kingdom upon Arridaeus.” Alexander actually believed it. Almost crazily—and treasonably by any standards—he sent in secret a rival envoy to Caria, the tragic actor, Thettalus. Leading actors, who travelled widely, were often used in diplomacy; but to take on such a mission, Thettalus must have been a devoted personal friend. He was to dissuade the satrap from giving his daughter to “a fool and bastard,” and offer Alexander’s hand instead.
History is vague about the degree of Arridaeus’ imbecility. He outlived his brother for some six years as a puppet king, able apparently to speak a few words in public, but taking no decision and never produced in battle. The wife he eventually married was a capable woman who acted for him, but the union was childless and probably unconsummated. It seems incredible that he would ever have been adopted as king by the Macedonian Assembly in preference to Alexander, even if their father in his lifetime had so decreed. Philip owed his own accession to the call for a fighting king; the direct heir, then passed over, was now in his early twenties, the obvious choice if the succession had to be changed. What blinded Alexander to all this?
Intellectually, he was outstandingly flexible and swift in his adjustments. Emotionally it was another matter. His demands on himself were such that though to his life’s end he was equal to any physical hardship, pain or danger, under extreme psychological stress he would break rather than bend. This pattern appears in his story more than once.
The eagerness with which the satrap jumped at his offer must have opened his eyes; Pixodarus had clearly been promised no heir-apparent. But enlightenment came too late. Philip found out. And here the Plutarch manuscript has a tantalizing short gap. After the break, it says Philip went to Alexander’s room, taking with him Philotas son of Parmenion, one of Alexander’s close friends, and gave him a furious dressing down. He was probably confined to his room under house arrest. The presence of Philotas is unexplained, unless as a neutral witness, his father being Philip’s oldest friend; but the young man’s later record makes it not impossible that, unknown to Alexander, he had betrayed the plot.
Philip upbraided his son for being so unworthy of his rank as to seek an alliance with a mere Carian, the servitor of a barbarian king. In other words, he had been assured of his rank, and his doubts were as insulting as his action had been disastrous. For him the match was out of the question; and after Thettalus’ revelations, Arridaeus was of course turned down. The diplomatic coup was ruined. For a man with Alexander’s grasp of affairs it must have been a bitter moment. But worse was to come. The King, determined to show who was master and break up a subversive clique, banished from Macedon all Alexander’s intimates. The one interesting exception was Hephaestion. There are several feasible reasons, the most obvious being that Philip, like Aristotle, thought him a good influence on Alexander; for whose conduct, too, he might be a useful hostage, especially if Philip knew them to be lovers. He was a shrewd judge of men. As it was, he gave a last crack of the trainer’s whip; he had Thettalus, then in Corinth, arrested and brought to Pella in chains.
His professional status was that of an Irving or a Garrick. Even though only reprimanded—we hear nothing of any punishment beyond the gross humiliation of his fetters—it was an extreme step for Philip with his cultural aspirations. But he could have found no better way of flicking Alexander on the raw. His insistence on sharing every danger to which he exposed his men was almost an obsession. This time it had been impossible. The shame must have bitten deep; the resentment also. It is to his credit that he never pushed it out of his mind together with the friend concerned in it; Thettalus remained throughout his reign a welcome guest and favourite artist.