It is perhaps sufficient to say that the last Illyrian frontier war at which Philip is known to have taken the field, and where his young friend presumably died, occurred when Alexander was twelve years old, and the “bride” about nine or ten.
Throughout his reign, Alexander never stands suspect of a surreptitious killing. When his power was vast, and he could have had anyone he chose put quietly out of the way, he suffered annoyance, frustration and downright insult from men he heartily disliked or distrusted; nothing happened to these people till he was ready to proceed against them openly. Whether on principle or from pride, he found furtiveness impossibly repugnant. Another constant trait was loyalty to his friends, and gratitude carried to extravagance towards those who had supported him when in disgrace with Philip. To believe he could have used Pausanias, sworn to protect him (which Pausanias as Captain of the Bodyguard would have known he could not do) and then shopped him with less compunction than a Mafia boss, calls for as much credulity as anything in the Romances.
As against all this, the incident is immemorially typical of a Greek blood-feud killing, where honour demands that revenge be taken, and be seen to be taken, by the wronged man himself or his next of kin. (The two such killings carried out in Athens while the present writer happened to be there were both public; one in front of a Plaka taverna, one in Omonia Square.) One editor of Diodorus notes with apparent scepticism that “Pausanias waited a long time for his revenge”; a startling observation in the context of ancient or, for that matter, modern Greece. It also ignores the recent rise of his enemy Attalus to high military rank and the status of royal father-in-law; favours which may well have seemed like rewards for the injury on which Pausanias had brooded for long obsessive years. He may even have been told so. That he was used, though not by Alexander, there is no need to doubt.
This was a time when most Athenian politicians were men on whose unsupported word one would not convict a dog. When, however, they remind their public of public events, we may start to listen. Some years after the murder, Aeschines accused his enemy Demosthenes of having ruined Athens through his blind hatred of Macedon. The speech goes on:
Now this was the man, fellow-citizens … who when informed through Charidemus’ spies that Philip was dead, before anyone else had been told, made up a vision for himself and lied about the gods, pretending he had had the news not from Charidemus but from Zeus and Athene … who he says converse with him in the night and tell him of things to come.
The most authoritative comment on this “vision” remains that of the historian John Williams, written a century and a half ago.
The event was public and could not be concealed. The deputies of all Greece were assembled there, and no message from Charidemus to Demosthenes could have outstripped the speed with which the news of such an event passes from mouth to mouth in a populous country. Not to mention that Charidemus would not have been the only deputy likely to despatch a messenger on such an occasion. Yet Demosthenes announced the death of Philip long before the news reached Athens from any other quarter… The accuracy of his information, and the falsehood respecting the alleged sources of his intelligence, almost indisputably prove that he was an accessory before the fact, and that he had previous notification of the very day on which the conspirators were to act.
The value of John Williams’s comment rests not on his erudition but his personal experience. He published his life of Alexander in 1829, just after the Napoleonic Wars; and his words about the flight of important news through populous countries, written before telecommunications, have the ring of certainty. The ancient world used for long-distance signalling both the heliograph and the beacon (the latter, in the Agamemnon, announces the fall of Troy). But since either called for a prearranged chain of signallers, their use would still be proof of complicity; for no verbal codes existed, and such signs could only confirm an expected fact.
Pausanias, the Captain of the Bodyguard, knew just where his men would be. He had had to form them up there. He can never have rated his chance of escape at more than even. However, he had horses ready, probably a ship too, and must have had some offered refuge. Demosthenes’ speeches show again and again how utterly he had failed to take Alexander’s measure. Even after the lightning victories which followed his accession, Demosthenes was mocking him as “Margites,” the anti-hero of a burlesque epic. For him, in the “vision” of the demagogue, there had certainly been a role: the theatrical young paladin, the inept untried king who, his formidable father gone, could be swept aside without trouble.
Demosthenes’ Persian paymaster had lately changed. The Vizier Bagoas, finding King Arses intractable, had poisoned him in turn, replacing him by a royal collateral, Darius III; one of whose first actions was to hand the Vizier a dose of his own medicine. The new Great King must have leaned greatly for the Greek intelligence on Demosthenes, who could have done him vital service in return for favours received, had he not been blinded by ingrained prejudice. Darius rested in false security; while Demosthenes broke off his mourning for his daughter’s death, put on a festal wreath, and proposed a posthumous vote of thanks to Pausanias.
If the role he had promised himself was to emerge, as soon as it was absolutely safe to do so, and proclaim himself the author of the enterprise, to defer this moment was the wisest act of his life.
Troy
ALEXANDER’S REIGN BEGAN IN 336 BC. He was a little over twenty.
“His physical looks are best portrayed in the statues Lysippus made of him. [Plutarch does not divulge which of Alexander’s own contemporaries, if any, expressed this view.] And he approved being sculpted by him alone. [But he must have licensed a number of others.] For this artist has caught exactly those idiosyncrasies which many of his successors and friends later tried to imitate—the poise of his neck, tilted a little leftward, and his liquid eyes. Apelles’ painting, ‘The Thunder-Wielder,’ did not get his complexion right, but made it too dark and tanned; for he was blond, they say, shading to ruddy on the breast and face.”
His liquid eyes were grey. Their expressiveness altered Greek artistic convention. All important portrait heads feature a heavy bulge of the forehead above the brows (allowing for idealization, probably even more marked in life), caused perhaps by a development of the frontal lobes of the brain; and the loosely waving, heavy mane of hair, springing from a peak, its individual cut sloped down to the base of the neck when in south Greece the short curly crop was in fashion. Arrian, both of whose main sources were men who saw him often, says that he was very handsome.
Clean shaving, long general among young men in the south, did not reach Macedon till he introduced it. His looks must have been admired in childhood and boyhood; it was perhaps a sign of his ambisexual nature that he did not want to alter them with a beard. Once he had set the fashion, it was so widely followed that later legend had him ordering the whole Macedonian army to shave. He was quoted as saying that a beard gives the enemy a handhold in close combat. He may really have offered this reason to himself.
“In Aristoxenus’ memoirs it is said that a very pleasant scent came from his skin, and that there was a fragrance in his breath and all his body which permeated the clothes he wore.” His fondness for a daily bath, when he could get it, is evident from all the sources; but on campaign he must often have been unwashed, which makes the observation interesting. When not struck down by occasional local fevers, he was a very healthy man. In days before dentistry, a sweet breath testified to a good set of teeth, as well as a good digestion. He loved violently active exercise, hunting, running, ball games; but despised professional athletics, which in his century had grown degenerate, producing ugly specialized physiques, instead of the balanced beauty of classical sculpture. He was himself considered a runner of Olympic standard, but declined to enter for the Games “unless I had kings to run against.” His pride would not tolerate even a suspicion that he had been given the race.