They had not seen his likeness; though he would have conformed well with their standards of beauty, he is given a conventional face in a conventional helmet, distinguished only by the elegance of his armour. He adventures to Darius’ camp, disguised as his own herald, wins Roxane’s heart, and escapes across a frozen river, later avenging his foully murdered foe. He flies in a chariot drawn by eagles, and views the monsters of the deep in a glass bell. Seeking the Water of Life once more through forests perilous, he consults the prophetic trees of the Sun and Moon, and with calm courage hears them foretell his end. Warned by an oracle that a close friend will kill him, and urged to purge those nearest him, he protests that he will die by the single traitor rather than wrong the innocent. (Cassander would have learned with some astonishment that he was a dear and trusted comrade.) He is poisoned, and the Seven Sages moralize over his grave.
Constantinople was sacked, its refugee scholars brought westward their salvaged books; the learned world of Italy rediscovered Greek literature and history. It was in the fifteenth century that the scholar Vasco of Lucena, writing to the Emperor Sigismund, told him that Arrian was more to be trusted than the Latin writers upon Alexander.
With the Renaissance, therefore, the Romances were consigned to children and the ignorant; the historical Alexander reappeared. But his image was still conditioned by the legends, and by an age without archaeology which, busily excavating all over Italy Roman copies of such Greek originals as had appealed to Romans, admired like them the soft, late style for its virtuosity, preferring the sentimental contortions of the Laocoön to the most majestic classical Apollo. In this spirit, for a century or two Alexander supplied the painters with subjects for great setpieces, defeating Darius, protecting the royal ladies, marrying Roxane. His eager profile is trimmed down to insipid perfection; his correctly rounded elbow sketches a stock art-school gesture; a resplendent waxwork in an impracticable helmet cascading ostrich plumes, he is the apotheosis of a tinsel-armoured male soprano in Baroque opera, the vacuous imperial puppet of Dryden’s Alexander’s Feast.
Serious scholars, of course, were meantime reading the sources and critical appraisal had begun, when in the mid-nineteenth century the most formidable of them, George Grote, amid many valuable services to history, disastrously revived the Ideological Alexander. Grote never set foot in Greece, then without tourist accommodation and much beset with bandits; a dedicated radical, he had the fatal commitment which vitiates conscientious fact with anachronistic morality. His whole capital of belief being invested in the Athenian democracy, he was resolute in attributing its fall to external villainy rather than internal collapse. Demosthenes could do no wrong, Philip and Alexander no right. For all practical purposes, Grote’s Alexander is back with the Lyceum; a natural tyrant, forsaking the wholesome Greek virtues at the first taste of Oriental sycophancy and despotic power.
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.
Macedon
ALEXANDER’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.