Alexander the Great

In this king's world of custom and prowess, where all power was personal and government still took place among Companions, success and achievement were the means to authority, and the restless ideal of a Homeric hero was a very real claim to them both. Throughout the letters of Greek academics to Philip, the theme of personal glory in battle or contest recurs deliberately; such glory is godlike, worthy of royal ancestry and the fit reward of a Macedonian king, and like a new King Agamemnon, Philip should lead the Greeks to plunder and revenge among the barbarians of the east. Such glory had been the mainspring of Homer's kings, but where Philip had been urged to follow Agamemnon. Alexander marked out Achilles for himself, more glorious, more individual, and less of a king and leader. Among his Macedonians, this combative ideal made sense, but Alexander grew to govern more men than his Macedonians; part, therefore, of his career is the story of an Achilles who tried, not always happily, to face the problems of an Agamemnon.

From a new Achilles it would be a mistake to look for peace or a new philosophy. His rivalry was a response to the values of his own society. Fear, profit and glory had been singled out as three basic motives of man by his most percipient Greek observer, and it was to the last of the three that a hero's life was given over; glory won by achievement was agreed to be the straightest path to heaven, and so Alexander's Homeric rivalry led, through prowess, to his free worship by contemporaries as a living god-It was an old ideal, which Aristotle too had shared, but it also had its weaknesses. A hero rules more by reputation than by inherited majesty and ca

It is through Homer that Alexander still comes to life: only one of his dreams is recorded, and it could hardly be more appropriate. In Egypt, as he laid out his new Alexandria, a venerable old man with a look of Homer himself is said to have appeared in his sleep and recited lines from the Odyssey which advised him where to site his city. Even in his dreams, Alexander was later believed to be living out the poems he loved, and to any lover of Homer, his ideal is not, after all, such a strange one. For of all poems, Homer's Iliadis still the most immediate, a world whose reality never falters, not only as seen through the new dimension of its similes, where kings banquet beneath their oak trees, children build castles of sand, mothers keep flies away from their sleeping babies and old women watch from their porches as the wedding processions dance by, but also through the leisurely progress of a narrative rich in ritual and repeated phrases, deceptively simple but infinitely true, where heroes strive for glory, knowing that death is inescapable, where a white-armed lady laughs through her tears and returns to heat the bath-water for a husband who she knows will never return from the battle, where gods and goddesses are no more remote for being powerful, one raining tears of blood for the death of a favourite hero, another making toys, another bribing Sleep with the promise of one of the younger Graces and then making love with Zeus her husband on a carpet of crocus and hyacinth. Homer's only magic is his own, and if he still speaks directly to the heart how much more must his poems have come home to Alexander, who saw their ideals around him and chose to live them, not as a distant reader but more in the spirit of a marcher baron living out the ballads which mirrored his own home world.

Once, men said, when a messenger arrived with news and could barely conceal his delight, Alexander stopped him with a smile: 'What can you possibly tell me that deserves such excitement,' he asked, 'except perhaps that Homer has come back to life?' Alexander could not revive his favourite poet, but there is one last twist to his Homeric rivalry, more extraordinary, perhaps, than he ever knew. In his cavalry, served a regiment of lowlanders, whom his ancestors had a

CHAPTER FOUR

Inside Macedonia Alexander had already shown a speed worthy of his Homeric hero. In mid-autumn it was time to extend his authority abroad, for Philip had left a foreign legacy which stretched from the Danube and the Dalmatian coast to the southern capes of Greece and the islands of the Aegean. The Macedonian throne was secure and it was Greece which first required his heir's attention.

When Alexander was asked how he managed to control the Greeks, he would answer 'by putting oft nothing that ought to be done today until tomorrow'. No sooner were palace affairs settling in his favour than he put this stern but admirable philosophy into practice. Leading the Macedonian soldiers whom he had befriended, he marched south from Aigai to the abutting foothills of mount Olympus, and so towards the border with Greek Thessaly, where his father had long been recognized as ruler. The vale of Tempe was entered by a pass five miles long and so narrow that cavalry could only ride it in single file; local Thessalian tribesmen were guarding it, and if the history of Greek warfare had one lesson to teach, it was that mountain passes were impenetrable for cavalry and infantry in formation and were not to be undertaken confidently even by the fashionable units of light-armed peltasts. Alexander improvised a bold alternative: he ordered steps to be cut in the cliff-face of nearby mount Ossa and he led his Macedonians over its peaks by the methods of a mountaineer. The pass was turned, the nobles of Thessaly welcomed the man they had failed to stop, and Alexander did not forget a stratagem which could serve him again in his career.

Like his father Philip, he was promptly recognized as ruler of the Thessalians, a remarkable honour for an outsider and crucial for the financial dues and disciplined cavalry to which it entitled him. In return, he reminded his subjects of their kinship with him through the hero Heracles, ancestor of the Macedonian kings, and through Achilles, to whom his mother's family traced their descent. Achilles's kingdom had lain in Thessaly, and as a personal tribute Alexander now dedicated the district to his hero. His father's diplomacy had bequeathed him his broad inheritance, but he had interpreted it in his own heroic way; the pattern ran deep in Alexander's early years.