Philip, buying him the horse as agreed, showed great pride in his son’s achievement. Unluckily for their improved relations, at about the same time the King involved himself in the most unpleasant of the scandals his way of life invited. From Diodorus’ account of it, it seems that his homosexual love life had retained the pattern of Thebes only in that his favourites were socially presentable; he lacked the constancy of the Sacred Band. A certain Pausanias had been discarded for a new fancy; furiously resentful, at some drinking party he called his young rival a paid whore. Had he been right it would have altered history. He was wrong. With fierce Macedonian pride, the youth threw away his life to reject the insult. In the next Illyrian border war, having left a message to explain his action, he ran ahead of the King to certain death among the enemy.
A noble called Attalus, a friend of Philip, perhaps the dead man’s kinsman or tribal chief, devised a black farce by way of retribution. He got Pausanias dead drunk at his house, threw him out in the stable yard and invited the slaves to rape him.
Unable to kill Attalus in the midst of his retainers, Pausanias went to the King demanding vengeance. Since Attalus could not legally be executed without a public trial even had Philip wished it, he naturally refused; but, Pausanias being an Orestid of almost royal family, offered him some kind of compensation in land or rank. He accepted it and the affair seemed closed. It is unlikely that Alexander, by now twelve or thirteen, missed hearing the sordid tale; No doubt he suffered what was natural to his age, his nature and the event.
However, it was to set him upon the throne.
Soon after, Philip extended his power decisively southward. By invitation, he became Archon of Thessaly: leading chieftain, judge, war leader, virtual king. It genuinely benefitted the country with its long history of oppressive and warring barons; neither he nor his son ever had trouble in recruiting cavalry among the famed Thessalian horsemen. But Athens, with its democratic commitment and traditional hatred of monarchy, thought only of the growing menace from the north.
In fact, the last thing Philip wanted was war with Athens. He had larger and better plans. After the disastrous Peloponnesian War, the Spartans had propped their hated tyranny in south Greece by ceding to Persia the Greek colonies in Asia Minor, in return for Persian support. It had killed their prestige before their power declined. Since then all the city-states had agreed, in principle, that they had a sacred duty to liberate their Hellene kinsmen. Only, enmeshed in feuds many generations old, they could never combine to do it. To achieve it was Philip’s dream.
Objective minds had long seen the necessity of a single high command. The nonagenarian political philosopher Isocrates, who remembered Socrates as a contemporary, had been urging it for decades, sometimes on rather unsuitable leaders; now he saw in Philip a really promising candidate, and wrote at some length to tell him so. Philip was indeed well qualified for the task. Had he not sired a genius, he would be remembered as the most brilliant general of antiquity next to Julius Caesar. He was neither a harsh ruler nor, by the time’s standards, superfluously cruel in war. He respected culture, was at ease with statesman or peasant, and could undermine hostility with charm. His good balance is indeed surprising, seeing that his Theban captivity had not been his first: as a very small child he had had the shock of being sent as hostage to the wild Illyrians by the usurper Ptolemy, his mother’s lover, whom his elder brother had to kill before he was ransomed back.
He could take a joke. After one of his victories he was supervising the routine business of selling his captives to the slave dealers, sprawling in his chair. “Spare me, Philip!” called a resourceful prisoner. “I was your father’s friend!” Asked for details, he said they were confidential. Philip beckoned him up. “Pull down your cloak, sir,” he whispered. “Your crotch is showing.” With a grin Philip told the guards, “Yes, he’s a good friend, let him go.” To him is first credited the classic put-down to a chatty barber: “How do you like your hair cut, sir?” “In silence.”
This robust humour was not passed on to his son. Alexander’s recorded sayings have pith rather than wit; and the jokes which endeared him to his men were boyishly simple. Having thawed back to life a soldier dazed with cold in his own chair by the campfire, he said, “You’re lucky it’s not Darius’s, he’d have had your head for it.” This is a long way from Philip’s pungent irony; perhaps the boy had felt its bite too young.
It was liked still less, however, by Philip’s arch-enemy, the Athenian orator Demosthenes; a man entirely humourless, but with a notable gift for vituperation. He was the heir to a great ideal and its last defender. Inevitably, his name is touched with its grandeur, and with the aura of a lost cause. He was without doubt a patriot by belief as well as by profession; his faith in the free city-state was real—so long as the state was Athens. But only with effort does justice to Demosthenes survive a reading of his orations, well polished and published by himself. They were admired in eighteenth-century England when political scurrility was not impeded by libel laws. Their counterparts were the brutal cartoons of Gillray; Hogarth would have been too moral and Rowlandson too jolly. He catches no gleam from the brilliance of Athens’ zenith, gives back no echo of Pericles’ immortal affirmation that man’s individuality is his right and his city’s pride. Page after page is loaded with invective, against political or private enemies as often as against Macedon (“a country from which it was never yet possible to buy a decent slave”). No weapon is too mean for him; he will sneer at the poverty of an opponent’s childhood, and he sticks at no lie he can get away with. He has all the skills of rhetoric; but his popularity is a dark comment on the Athens of his day. One cannot read him without feeling sure he would have spoken for the death of Socrates.
He led his city to ruin, not through treachery—even her traitors could have done her better service—but from inveterate hate and spite. No doubt he believed of Philip exactly what he said of him, that he was a power-drunk barbarian whose intent was to sack Athens and set up a slave state there: Demosthenes had the envy which hopes for evil in other men. His belief in the free city did not pass his own city walls. He had no compunction in keeping up secret contacts with Persia, and got from King Ochus huge sums for use in propaganda and bribery against Macedon. Philip, of course, had his own fifth column also; partly composed of merely venal agents, but partly of men not without concern for their own cities, who saw in Macedonian hegemony, as did Isocrates, an end to the constant interstate wars, and a hope for the Greek Asian cities. Philip, an unashamed practitioner of realpolitik, was at least not sanctimonious.
The antagonists had met when Athens sent envoys to Pella. (Alexander would have been about eight years old.) Demosthenes, the star, had saved himself till the last; but, face to face with Philip’s formidable personality, the orator “dried.” Indulgently the King invited him to start again from the beginning; but his nerve was gone. He learned his speeches by heart, and now had lost the thread. He could only stammer and sit down; and his rivals, to whom he had boasted that he would leave Philip without a word to say for himself, took care it was not forgotten. By such events the fate of nations can be determined, as well as by the price of corn.
At the state dinner which followed, young Alexander, still doing his music lessons, sang part songs with a friend. Demosthenes on his return is said to have jeered at this performance, and made some obscene pun or other. He had had a hard youth, orphaned early and defrauded by his trustees, and he shouldered the chip for life. In his way he was as insecure as the boy whose lyre was soon to be laid aside. But the metals behaved differently in the fire.