Alexander the Great Read online

  ROBIN LANE FOX

  Alexander the Great

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  CONTENTS

  List of Maps 9

  Preface ii

  PART ONE 15

  PART TWO 107

  PART THREE 265

  PART FOUR 373

  Notes 499

  Addenda 551

  Bibliography 555

  Index 561

  PENGUIN HOOKS

  ALEXANDER THE GREAT

  Robin Lane Fox was born in 1946 and educated at Eton and Magdalen College, Oxford. He is a Fellow of New College and University Reader in Ancient History. Since 1970 he has been weekly gardening correspondent of the Financial Times. Alexander the Great won the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the W. H. Heinemann Award on its first publication in 1973. His other books include The Search for Alexander (1981), Better Gardening (Penguin, Pagans and Christians (Penguin, 1988) and The Unauthorized Version (Penguin, 1972).

  TO LOUISA

  LIST OF MAPS

  page

  Greece, Macedonia and the Aegean

  29

  Turkey and the approach to the battle of Issus

  no

  Western Persian Empire 333/330

  179

  Alexander's route, September 330/327

  281

  North-West Frontier 327/326

  332

  Siege of Pir-Sar

  345

  Route to the Hydaspes

  352

  PREFACE

  I first met Homer and Alexander fourteen years ago and for different reasons I have been intrigued by them ever since; if any one reader puts down this book with a wish to read Homer or with a sense of what it might have been like to have followed Alexander, I will not have written to no purpose. I have not aimed at any particular class of reader, because I do not believe that such classes exist; I have written self-indulgently, as I myself like to read about the past. I do not like the proper names of nonentities, numbered dates of unknown years or refutations of other men's views. The past, like the present, is made up of seasons and of faces, feelings, disappointments and things seen. I am bored by institutions and I do not believe in structures. Others may disagree.

  This is not a biography nor does it pretend to certainty in Alexander's name. More than twenty contemporaries wrote books on Alexander and not one of them survives. They are known by quotations from later authors, not one of whom preserved the original wording: these later authors are themselves only known from the manuscripts of even later copyists and in the four main sources these manuscripts are not complete. The most detailed history goes back to only one manuscript, whose text cannot be checked; another, much used, has often been copied illegibly. Alexander left no informal letter which is genuine beyond dispute and the two known extracts from his formal documents both concern points of politics. On the enemy side his name survives in a Lycian grave-inscription, in Babylonian tablets on building work and astronomy and in Egyptian captions to temple dedications. It is a naive belief that the distant past can be recovered from written texts, but even the written evidence for Alexander is scarce and often peculiar. Nonetheless, 1,472 books and articles are known to me on the subject in the past century and a half, many of which adopt a confident tone and can be dismissed for that alone. Augustine, Cicero and perhaps the emperor Julian are the only figures from antiquity whose biography can be attempted, and Alexander is not among them. This book is a search, not a story, and any reader who takes it as a full picture of Alexander's life has begun with the wrong suppositions.

  I have many debts, none more lasting than the generous support and complete freedom from duties which I have enjoyed first as an undergraduate, then as a Fellow at Magdalen College, Oxford. During my time there, Mr C. E. Stevens first showed me that history did not have to be dull to be true. Mr G. E. M. de Sainte Croix revived my interest in Alexander and fed it with many intriguing insights into the classical past. Dr J. K. Davies has been a constant source of suggestion and shrewd comment. Dr A. D. H. Bivar directed me to Iranian problems which have since become a primary enticement. The lectures of the late Stefan Weinstock on Roman religion raised much that I wanted to ask of Alexander and his remarkable book on Caesar would have raised even more if I had been able to take it into full account. But at a time when so much of ancient history is a desert, I have gained most from the lectures and writings of Mr Peter Brown; it is my great regret that there is not the evidence to begin to treat Alexander's age as he has treated late antiquity.

  I am grateful to The Hogarth Press and Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York, for permission to reproduce the poem 'In the Year 200 B.C.' from The Complete Poems of C. P. Cavafy translated by Rac Dalven and to Faber & Faber Ltd and Random House Inc., New York, for permission to quote from W. H. Auden's poem The Shield of Achilles.

  Other debts are more personal. Like Alexander's treasurer, I have been helped through solitary years by a garden and a lady, and in both respects I have been more fortunate. The garden has grown more obligingly and the lady, though not a goddess, is at least my wife.

  When Alexander's sarcophagus was brought from its shrine, Augustus gazed at the body, then laid a crown of gold on its glass case and scattered some flowers to pay his respects. When they asked if he would like to see Ptolemy too, ‘I wished to see a king,' he replied, 'I did not wish to see corpses.'

  Suetonius, Life of Augustus, 18.1

  As for the exact thoughts in Alexander's mind, I am neither able nor concerned to guess them, but this I think I can state, that nothing common or mean would have been his intention; he would not have remained content with any of his conquests, not even if he had added the British Isles to Europe; he would always have searched beyond for something unknown, and if there had been no other competition, he would have competed against himself.

  Arrian (c. A.D, 150), Alexander's Expedition, 7.1

  ONE

  FLUELLEN

  I think it is in Macedon where Alexander is porn. I tell you, captain, if you look in the maps of the 'orld, I warrant you shall find, in the comparisons between Maccdon and Monmouth, that the situations, look you, is both alike. There is a river in Macedon, and there is also moreover a river at Monmouth: it is called Wye at Monmouth; but it is out of my prains what is the name of the other river; but 'tis all one, 'tis alike as my fingers is to my fingers, and there is salmons in both.

  Henry V, IV, vii

  CHAPTER ONE

  Two thousand three hundred years ago, in the autumn of 336 B.C., the king of the Macedonians was celebrating another royal wedding. For King Philip marriage was nothing new, as he had already lived with at least seven wives of varying rank, but he had never been father of the bride before; he was giving away his daughter to the young client king of Epirus who lived beyond the western border of his kingdom. There was no romance about their marriage: the bridegroom was the bride's own uncle. But the Greeks, correctly, saw neither danger nor distaste in a liaison with a niece, and for Philip, who had mostly combined his passions with sound politics, it was a convenient moment to settle a daughter within his own court circle and bind the neighbouring king to a close and approved relationship.

  The occasion was planned for magnificence, and the guests were meant to find it to their liking. The Macedonian kings had long claimed to be of Greek descent, but Greeks had not always been convinced by these northerners’ insistence and to his enemies Philip was no better than a foreign outsider. Two years before, Philip had conquered the last of his Greek opponents and become the first king to control the cities of mainland Greece; these cities, he had arranged, were to be his allies, allies who shared in a common peace and acknowledged him as Leader, a novel title which confi
rmed that his conquest was incidental to a grander ambition. As a Leader of Greek allies, Philip did not mean to stay and oppress the cities he occupied, but to march with Greeks against an enemy abroad. In the spring before the wedding he had lived up to his title and sent an advance army eastwards to fight with the Persian Empire in Asia. Now, in high summer, the full invasion awaited him, his allied Greek council had elected him to its supreme command, and his daughter's wedding was his chance for a splendid farewell. Foreign friends had been invited from conquests which stretched from the Black Sea to the coast of the Adriatic, from the Danube to the southern tip of Greece: Greek guests were coming north to see inside the Macedonian kingdom, and this wedding of niece and uncle might help to persuade them that their Macedonian Leader was less of a tyrant than they had so far protested.

  But Greeks and Greek opinion were not Philip's only concern. Uneasy memories stirred nearer home, recalling his own last wedding in Macedonia more than a year ago and how it had split the royal family by its sudden implications. On the verge of middle age, Philip had fallen in love with Eurydice, a girl from a noble Macedonian family, and had decided to marry her, perhaps because she was found to be bearing his child, perhaps, too, because her relations were powerful in the court and army. His five other wives had watched the affair with indifference, but his queen Olympias could not dismiss it as another triviality among the many of the past. As mother of Alexander, Philip's only competent son, and as princess of neighbouring Epirus, she had deserved her recognition as queen of Macedonia for the past twenty years. But Eurydice was a Macedonian, and an affair of the heart; children from a Macedonian girl, not a foreign Epirote princess, could upset Olympias's plans for her own son's succession, and as soon as the two wives' families had met for the wedding banquet, that very suggestion had been voiced by Eurydice's uncle. A brawl had begun, and Alexander had drawn his sword on Philip; he and Olympias had fled the court, and although he had soon returned, she had gone to her native Epirus, and stayed there. Eurydice, meanwhile, had borne a daughter whom Philip had given the name of Europe; in the autumn, she had conceived again. Now, days before Philip's farewell for Asia, she had delivered him a son, and as Philip's foreign guests arrived for his wedding celebrations, the court and royal family were alive to a shift in the balance of favour. The baby had capped it all: it seemed impossible now for Olympias to return to her old authority.

  Even in her absence Olympias had retained two claims on Philip's respect; her son Alexander and her kinship with neighbouring Epirus, One, her son, was no longer unique, and the other, her Epirote kinship, was about to be confounded by Philip's farewell wedding. It was a neat but complicated matter. Olympias was mother of the bride and elder sister to the bridegroom, but their marriage went flatly against her interests; that was why Philip had promoted it. Her brother, the bridegroom, was also the king of Epirus to whom she had fled for revenge on Philip's remarriage; she found no help, for he had spent his youth at the Macedonian court, where gossip suggested that Philip had once been his lover, and he owed his kingdom to Philip's intrigues only five years before. By agreeing to marry his niece and become Philip's son-in-law, he had compounded Olympias's injury. Political custom required that Philip should be linked by marriage to his neighbouring subjects in Epirus and Olympias had met this need for the past twenty years as an Epirote princess. But if her brother, the King of Epirus, were to marry into Philip's family she would not be required for Philip's politics or private life. At the celebrations in Macedonia's old royal capital, the wedding guests were to witness more than their Leader's farewell. They were assisting at the last rejection of his queen Olympias, planned to settle his home kingdom and its borders before he left for Asia.

  They had come to Aigai, the oldest palace in Macedon and a site which has long eluded its modem searchers. The palace, in fact, has long been discovered and only the name has been misapplied. Aigai is not to be found on the steep green hillside of modern Edessa beside the mountain ranges of Bermion and Bamous, where the waterfalls plunge far into the orchards below and where no archaeologist has found any more proof than a city wall of the Aigai placed there by modern Greek maps; it is the long-known palace of Vergina away to the south, where the Macedonian tombs begin a thousand years before Philip and the northern foothills of mount Olympus still turn back the clouds from the brown plain of lower Macedonia, a trick of the weather which a Greek visitor to Philip's Aigai observed as a local peculiarity. Vergina's palace now shows the mosaics and ground plan of later kings, but Philip's ancestral palace must have lain beside it, easily reached from the Greek frontier to which his wedding guests had travelled by boat and horse; a brief ride inland would have brought them to the edge of Macedonia's first flat plain, and they would have seen no further into this land which they knew for its silver-fir forests, free-ranging horses and kings who broke their word and never died a peaceful death.

  The wedding that brought them was planned, they found, in their own Greek style. There were banquets and athletic games, prizes for artists of all kinds and recitations by famous Athenian actors who had long been favoured as guests and envoys at Philip's court. For several days the Macedonians' strong red wine flowed freely, and golden crowns were paid to Philip by allied Greek cities who knew where their advantage lay. They were rewarded with happy news from home and abroad. In Greece, the Delphic oracle had long pressed Philip's cause and its prophecy for his invasion seemed all the more favourable in the light of eastern despatches. His expeditionary force had been welcomed by the Persians' Greek subjects far down the coast of Asia Minor; there were native upheavals in Egypt, and it was rumoured that away in the Persians' palace of Susa, a royal eunuch had poisoned the former king of the Persians, whereupon he had offered the throne first to a prince, whom he also poisoned, and then to a lesser courtier, now acknowledged as King Darius HI. The ending of the old royal line by a double poisoning would not encourage Persian governors to defend their empire's western fringes, and further success in Asia was likely. It was a pleasing prospect, and when the wedding ceremony was over, Philip, Leader of the Greeks, announced a show of his own; tomorrow, in Aigai's theatre, the games would begin with a solemn procession, and seats must be taken by sunrise.

  At dawn the images of the twelve Greek gods of Olympus, worked by the finest Greek craftsmen, would be escorted before the audience; in the city life of the classical world, few occasions would prove more lasting than the long slow procession in honour of the gods, and it was only natural that Philip remained true to this deep tradition. But he had added a less familiar feature, for a statue of himself was to be enthroned among those of the immortals: it was a bold comparison, and it would not have seemed odious to his chosen guests. Greeks had received honours equal to those of the gods before and already in Greek cities there were hints that Philip would be worshipped in his lifetime for his powers of benefaction. Grateful subjects believed him to be specially protected by Zeus, ancestor of the Macedonian kings, and it was easy to liken his black-bearded portrait to that of the king of the gods or to display it prominently in local temples. The sacred enthronement of his statute may have been Philip's own innovation, but his explicit aim was to please his Greek guests, not to shock them by any impiety. He succeeded, for his example at Aigai became a custom, passing to the Macedonian kings who were later worshipped in Greek Asia, from them to Julius Caesar and so to the emperors of Rome.

  As the images were carried into the arena, Philip ordered his bodyguards to leave him, for it would not be proper to appear in public among armed men, the mark of a tyrant, not an allied leader. Only two young princes were to accompany him, Alexander his son by Olympias and Alexander king of Epirus, whose wedding had just been celebrated: between his son and son-in-law, King Philip began to walk forwards, settling his white cloak about a body which showed the many wounds of twenty years' fighting, one-eyed, black-bearded, a man whom Greek visitors had praised for his beauty scarcely ten years before.

  He was never to reach his
audience. By the theatre entrance, a young bodyguard had disobeyed his orders and lingered, unnoticed, behind his fellow officers; as Philip approached, the man moved to seize him, stabbing him and driving a short Celtic dagger into his ribs. Then he ran, using the start which utter surprise had given him; those royal bodyguards who did not race in pursuit hurried to where Philip lay. But there was no hope, for Philip was dead and Pausanias the bodyguard from the westerly hill kingdom of Orestis had taken his revenge.

  At the town gates, horses and helpers were waiting by arrangement, and Pausanias seemed certain to escape. Only a few strides more and he would have been among them, but he overreached in his haste to jump astride; tripping, he fell, for his boot had caught in the trailing stem of a vine. At once three of his pursuers were on him, all of them highland nobles, one from his own kingdom. But familiarity meant nothing and they killed him, some said, then and there; others claimed more plausibly that they dragged him back to the theatre where he could be questioned for accomplices and then condemned to death. By a usual Greek punishment for robbers and murderers, five iron clamps were fixed to a wooden board round his neck, arms and legs and he was left to starve in public before his corpse was taken down for burial.