Alexander the Great Read online

  GREECE, MACEDONIA & THE AEGEAN

  These plains would be the envy of any Greek visitor who crossed their southern border by the narrow vale of Tempe and the foot of Mount Olympus. He would pass the frontier post of Heraclion, town of Heracles, and stop at the harbour-town of Dion, named after the Greek god Zeus, ancestor of the Macedonian kings, and site of a yearly nine-day festival of the arts in honour of Zeus and the nine Greek Muses. There he could walk through city gates in a wall of brick, down the paved length of a sacred way, between a theatre, gymnasiums and a temple with Doric pillars; suitably, the nearby villages were linked with the myth of Orpheus, the famous bard of Greek legend. He was still in a world of Greek gods and sacrifices, of Greek plays and Greek language, though the natives might speak Greek with a northern accent which hardened 'ch' into 'g', 'th' into 'd' and pronounced King Philip as 'Bilip'.

  Bearing on up the coast, he would find the plain no less abundant and the towns more defiantly Greek. The next two coast-towns on the shore of the Thermaic gulf had originally been settled by Greek emigrants, and ever since they had watched for a chance to cut free of the Macedonian court which had grown to control them. At times they succeeded and amid their vicissitudes, they remained towns of spirit, whose leaders were rich and whose middle class could equip themselves for war; they fanned the lush land around them, and the extra revenues which made them so desirable came from the sea and its traders. A recognized trade route ran west from the coast into Macedonia, and the coast-towns had courts with a system of law under which Greek traders were content to be tried; harbour-taxes were levied on the trade that passed through, and the rich would corner the valuable right to their yearly collection. They were not the last champions of Greek culture on the fringe of a barbarian world: the Macedonian palaces of Pella and Aigai lay close inland, linked to the coast by river, antiquity's swiftest and cheapest method of heavy transport. They were accessible, therefore, and their patronage of the finest Greek artists had made their externals no less civilized than the coast towns which they coveted.

  'Nobody would go to Macedonia to see the king, but many would come far to see his palace ...'; so Socrates was said to have remarked when refusing an invitation to escape from the death-sentence in Athens and retire to Macedonian Pella. At the turn of the century, the king was Archelaus whose patronage for Greek culture even exceeded his ancestors' example and whose energy first moved the kingdom's capital from Aigai north-east to Pella, a site more accessible to the sea and well set on his kingdom's newly built roads. It was a lakeside city in those days, set on the

  River Loudias and equipped with a natural harbour where the river spread out into a muddy sheet of water. By the 380s, Pella was acknowledged as the largest town in Macedonia; Philip I of course, improved it, and within twenty years of Alexander's death it would become a boom town on the profits of world-conquest, boasting temples and palaces over a hundred yards long with two or three grand courtyards each, whose colonnades of Greek pillars supported richly-painted friezes and mud-brick walls above marble thresholds and floors of pebble-patterned mosaic It was a place where a man could banquet in surroundings that befitted the richest Greek taste; the large town houses were built round a central courtyard off which the reception-rooms opened, while a second storey housed bedrooms on the north side and cast a welcome shade in summer. These palatial houses are now well known from recent archaeology, and they probably belong soon after Alexander's death, Alexander had been brought up in Archelaus's older palace on the more westerly of Pella's two hills, and its heavy marble pillars were as fashionably Greek as those of the later houses of the lower town. It was a cultured home, probably in the style of the palaces that succeeded it; one of their later mosaic floors probably took its design of centaurs from a painting which Archelaus had commissioned from a Greek master. These famous pebble-mosaics, also the work of Greek artists, were probably laid out soon after Alexander's life at Pella, for one shows a hunting-scene from his career, another the god Dionysus, ancestor of the kings, another a lion-griffin attacking a stag, perhaps the royal seal of the kingdom or at least the emblem of Antipater whom Alexander left as his general in Macedonia. Though much admired, they come close to vulgarity; Archelaus's older palace may well have had mosaics too, for the earliest known mosaics on the Greek mainland are to be found in the northern Greek city of Olynthus which had come within the influence of Macedonia's palace, and their designs were developed from the schools of Greek painters whom Archelaus is known to have patronized. Except for a love of gardens, there is no finer test of a civilized man than his taste for paintings: in Alexander's Macedonia, too often remembered for conquest, the pillared tombs of his nobility bear the first known trompe-l'oeil paintings in art history on their architectural facades, and in Aigai's palace, the central courtyard may well have been laid out as a secret garden. In the new town of Philippi Philip's Macedonian settlers, the 'dregs of the kingdom' as critics called them, had planted wild roses to soften the bleakness of a home on the distant Thracian coast.

  Beyond these civilized plains of the coast and lowland where the Garden of Midas turned all to green, if not to gold, lay the ridges of Mounts Barnous and Bermion barred with snow and behind, to the west and north-west, a highland world of timbered glens and mountainous lakes which was far removed from the luxuries of coast and palace. Here men had always lived in tribes, not in towns, and their lakeside villages were often built on wooden stilts with only a dry-walled fort on a nearby waterless hilltop for refuge in case of invasion. Among Alexander's officers and among later Macedonians, the distinction remained in the tribal titles by which they identified their homes; the highlanders were tribesmen, with none of the towns to which lowlanders claimed to belong. Each of their kingdoms was sealed like a capsule by the landscape and behind their cliffs' defences, the tribal government of village chieftains survived for centuries, long outliving the dynasty of the lowland kings and their attempts to build frontier towns. Their timber, minerals, fisheries and upland grazing supported a dense population whose royal families each claimed descent from a different Greek hero. In the far south-west, adjoining Greek Thessaly, the Tymphiot tribesmen worshipped their own primitive form of Zeus, and until Philip won them over, they had no more belonged among Macedonians than the nearby Orestids who honoured their founder Orestes and had formerly joined with the western tribes of Epirus. Further north, round the lakes of Prespa and Kastoria and astride the main corridor-road from Europe, lived the rich and rebellious kings of Lyncestis who traced their origin to the notorious Bacchiad kings of Greek Corinth, as tight a family clique as any in seventh-century Greek history. These Bacchiads had been expelled from Corinth and fled north to Corfu from where, like the Corinthian trade goods which then appear in north-west Macedonia, they may indeed have found a home in mainland Lyncestis on the edge of Europe's Illyrian kingdoms. Their self-styled descendants had not disgraced them. Like other highlanders the Lyncestians dressed in the drab woollen cloak of the modern Vlach shepherd and spoke a primitive Greek dialect which southerners could no longer follow. They worked their land with ox-drawn carts and the help of their womenfolk and it is perhaps no coincidence that in the lists of the confiscated property of rich Athenians in the late fifth century far the highest price for a slave was paid for a Macedonian woman. Philip's mother had been a Lyncestian noblewoman, and she had not learnt to read or write until middle age; her kinsman Leonnatus is one of Alexander's only two known friends of Lyncestian family, and he was remembered for his bellicosity and such a taste for wrestling that he was said to have taken trainers and camel-loads of sand wherever he went in Asia.

  For at least a hundred years most of these highland tribes had been formally known as Upper Macedonia, but their sympathies with lowland kings were superficial and nowhere ancient. Lyncestis, for example, was harder pressed by her Illyrian neighbours to the north than by Philip's ancestors in the plain, and her chieftains had often preferred Illyrian interests to those of the court at Aigai. A
balance, though, could be worked out. The lowlanders needed the highlands' loyalties, for their tribes controlled the passes and river beds down which the European barbarians of the north and north-west had tried to invade the plains by the sea. The highlanders also needed the lowlands for the more mundane reason of their sheep. Flocks of sheep were the lasting bond of the inland landscapes of antiquity. In summer the highlanders grazed them on their glens and spurs, but in winter they drove them down to the plains for pasture, arid so the moving life of the herdsman was also a life of ceaseless dispute. In spring his sheep were trampling the plainsman's crops and in summer he was herding them through the mountains, caring little for the property of this temporary home; from Orestis there has come an inscription ordering the rights of farmers against the summer grazers and setting limits on summer shepherds' cutting of wood. Probably to help his lowland farmers Philip had tried to discourage the herding of sheep and to spread the settled crop-growing which suited the plains. If he succeeded, he would have broken the one natural bond between highland and plain; he had therefore tried more official means to unite the two worlds round him.

  Where possible, his lowland ancestors had driven out hill tribes altogether, from Pieria around Dion, or from Eordaia, for example, 'walled in on east, west and north by cliffs like the keep of a castle'. Elsewhere they had taken political wives, from nowhere more often than from Elimea to the south-west where noblemen were rich and tribesmen hardy in battle. Philip too had kept an Elimiot mistress, and he had also founded towns on his highland frontiers and forcibly moved a lowland population to guard them. He needed this new strength on the borders, for at the same time he was drawing the old power of the highland nobility and their young sons down to his court at Pella, where he bribed them to settle on lush estates from his conquests of grassland to the east and southeast. Highland chieftains had thus been tied more closely to a court and a king whom they served as feudal lords on conquered estates; Alexander's first months are a study in a new Macedonian society which had been slowly torn from its old ties of kinship and local territory to be grouped more tightly round its king. Part of their interest is to watch how far these old traditions still worked on a man's allegiance.

  This breaking of old roots had long been a necessity for the survival of the lowland kings. Among Illyrians beyond the northern border, as in modern Albania, nobles would still go to war with their cliques of retainers and relations, but in the army which Philip inherited, the highlanders had already been brigaded by the loose geography of tribes, not the narrow allegiance of clans. Local barons and royalty still led these tribal brigades, but they had already been weaned from their private retinues and gathered over the past two hundred years as a retinue to the king himself, whom they served as honoured Companions, or even, in eight or so esteemed cases, as Bodyguards about his person. So, at his accession, Alexander was facing more than sixty Companion nobles, some of them elderly, all of them inheriting their rank from his father's reign: they were there, nominally, to assist and advise him, but if it was perhaps coincidental that the Macedonian word for a counsellor could also be derived from the word for a grey-haired man, it was certainly relevant that the kings had long extended their titles of royal honour to the thousands of lesser dependants whom they wished to befriend. The name of King's Bodyguard now also applied to 3000 lesser Shield Bearers, new king's men; the name of Companion extended to the units of small farmers who served as the royal cavalry. Once there had been a special Royal Squadron of horse, but just as the King's Own regiments in the British army grew to be recruited from Scotsmen, so all the cavalry were now called the King's Own and even the highland infantry of tribesmen were known as the King's Foot Companions in order to bind new friends to the crown. Only the former Companion nobles had lost by this spreading of their title, because the spreading had been aimed against them. As these new circles of king's men warned, it was among the nobles that Alexander's enemies were most to be feared.

  Because power in Macedonia was personal, the nobles had wielded it through the tentacular links of their families. Their justice, presumably, had been the system of the blood feud which set family against family. The old kingdoms knew no courts or written law code; they relied on vengeance, tempered by a fixed price for blood. To a nobility concerned with this family power and property, marriage was not romantic but an expression of goodwill between the households of two great families. Neither the age of the brides nor their degree of affinity was any more of an obstacle than among other upper classes in Greece; the Bacchiad kings, from whom the nobles of Lyncestis claimed descent, had been famously intermarried and an element of inbreeding should be allowed for among Philip's highland Companions. This maze of marriages and blood relationships could impose rigid duties of help and revenge, as it still does among the shepherds of north-west Greece, and these duties are not always obvious to outsiders. Alexander was heir to a bevy of barons to whom the mood of a Mafia member would seem more natural than that of a moralist. Again, the lowland kings had long tried to replace these local loyalties by their own central authority. For crimes which could cost a suspect his life, their justice was not a blood feud but a public hearing before the people. Only if the audience agreed would the king and his agents punish. Their methods, of course, were still rough, killing both a suspect and his kinsmen. Urgent murders were still conducted privately, and even a public hearing was not democratic. The audience expressed their will by clashing their spears, not raising their hands for their votes to be counted. It was the king who decided for which verdict they had clashed the louder. As for marriage, he could take wives himself from rival families and marry loyalists to women of the wide family household which he headed. He could also promote marriages between his courtiers and if he seemed to offer a strong future, his suggested wives were not likely to be refused. It was the king's business to stand as a rival centre of power, outside the links of tribe and family. Philip and his ancestors had weakened these links until they could no longer dictate a man's behaviour; at Alexander's accession they were pressed by a broader issue, the promise, quite simply, of Alexander himself.

  Alexander's royal blood commanded respect but he was not the only prince to enjoy it. In practice the throne had not always passed to the eldest son and the custom that the king should be of royal blood was a hollow one, for barons could hail a royal infant and then rule through him, while many barons could themselves claim the blood of their local royalty. Philip's baby son by Eurydice was one such danger, for barons like his great-uncle Attalus would hope to rule in his name. Although a regency was possible, it was unlikely while other princes of suitable age were alive. Here Alexander's main rival was his cousin Amyntas who had actually been a child heir to the kingdom twenty-three years before. His uncle Philip had been appointed regent and continued to rule as king when he proved his extraordinary powers of conquest and diplomacy, but Amyntas had survived, a man of twenty-five or so when Philip died, and as a sign of continuing favour, he had been married recently to Philip's daughter by an Illyrian mistress. Against Alexander, he had the vital advantage of age and, in so far as rights mattered, a claim to return to the kingship which he had once been too young to inherit. Besides Amyntas there were the highland princes who might lead their tribes to independence; there was, in the last resort, Arrhidaeus, Philip's son by a mistress from Thessaly whom gossip described as a dancing-girl. Clearly, his mother was not royal, and her low birth would diminish his status: he was also halfwitted, and yet it is a fine proof of Alexander's nervousness that several months before Philip's death he feared displacement by this last resort.

  As a prelude to his Asian invasion Philip had been approached by the native ruler of Caria, a country far south on the western coast of the Persian empire and invaluable to an invader with a fleet as weak as Philip's. Diplomacy, as usual, was to be sealed by marriage, and Philip had decided to offer his Arrhidaeus to the Carian's daughter: it was as delicate a bargain as all his others, for a half-witted son was a ligh
t price for such an alliance, but without Alexander, it would have worked. Just back from his months in voluntary exile, Alexander had not adjusted to the fact of Olympias's divorce. Seeing Arrhidacus's honour as another threat to his inheritance, he had drawn his own friends around him and despatched his friend Thettalus, the famous Greek actor, to plead his cause at the Carian's court; he was no illegitimate idiot, he was a rightful son and heir, so the Carian should accept him in marriage instead. The man had been delighted beyond what he had dared to hope, but news of the offer had reached Philip first, and he had marched into Alexander's quarters, accused him of meddling and exiled the friends who had helped his interference; sensing trouble, the Carian ruler at once took fright and gave his daughter to a Persian aristocrat. A brilliant coup was ruined, because Alexander was nervous and could not understand that his father would never have wasted his heir on a passing Oriental marriage.

  The Carian affair showed up Alexander's youth and sounded the first note for the grim discordance that would follow Philip's murder. The sequence of events was familiar enough. Philip and every other Macedonian king had begun their reigns with a family purge of rivals, a customary necessity in any ancient monarchy, whether Persian, Greek, Roman or Egyptian, and one which Alexander would certainly not neglect. Once these palace affairs began to seem settled, the heir would appeal to such commoners and soldiers as were near him; their support was usually a matter of course, and could be used to round off the purging of rivals. No Macedonian king was ever created by the lone fact of his commoners' support; it was worth having, but family and nobles counted for far more. They were never easily won by a younger man.