Alexander the Great

Philip Freeman

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781439193280
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: History

In the first authoritative biography of Alexander the Great written for a general audience in a generation, classicist and historian Philip Freeman tells the remarkable life of the great conqueror. The celebrated Macedonian king has been one of the most enduring figures in history. He was a general of such skill and renown that for two thousand years other great leaders studied his strategy and tactics, from Hannibal to Napoleon, with countless more in between. He flashed across the sky of history like a comet, glowing brightly and burning out quickly: crowned at age nineteen, dead by thirty-two. He established the greatest empire of the ancient world; Greek coins and statues are found as far east as Afghanistan. Our interest in him has never faded. Alexander was born into the royal family of Macedonia, the kingdom that would soon rule over Greece. Tutored as a boy by Aristotle, Alexander had an inquisitive mind that would serve him well when he faced formidable obstacles during his military campaigns. Shortly after taking command of the army, he launched an invasion of the Persian empire, and continued his conquests as far south as the deserts of Egypt and as far east as the mountains of present-day Pakistan and the plains of India. Alexander spent nearly all his adult life away from his homeland, and he and his men helped spread the Greek language throughout western Asia, where it would become the lingua franca of the ancient world. Within a short time after Alexander's death in Baghdad, his empire began to fracture. Best known among his successors are the Ptolemies of Egypt, whose empire lasted until Cleopatra. In his lively and authoritative biography of Alexander, classical scholar and historian Philip Freeman describes Alexander's astonishing achievements and provides insight into the mercurial character of the great conqueror. Alexander could be petty and magnanimous, cruel and merciful, impulsive and farsighted. Above all, he was ferociously, intensely competitive and could not tolerate losing—which he rarely did. As Freeman explains, without Alexander, the influence of Greece on the ancient world would surely not have been as great as it was, even if his motivation was not to spread Greek culture for beneficial purposes but instead to unify his empire. Only a handful of people have influenced history as Alexander did, which is why he continues to fascinate us.

1

MACEDONIA

ALEXANDER WAS BORN ON THE SIXTH DAY OF THE
MONTH CALLED HEKATOMBAION, THOUGH THE
MACEDONIANS CALL IT LOÖS. ON THE SAME DAY
THE TEMPLE OF ARTEMIS AT EPHESUS BURNED TO
THE GROUND.

—PLUTARCH

The solitary messenger rode east from the sanctuary of Zeus at Olympia through the hill country along the Alpheus River. Behind him crowds from all the cities of Greece were pouring out of the stadium after watching the unexpected finish to the horse race at the Olympic games. The rider followed the river until the road split into two paths several miles from town. One branch led south to the land of the Spartans, but his journey lay over the high mountains of Arcadia to the north. Trading for fresh horses and snatching a few hours of sleep whenever he could, the young man flew along steep valleys and beneath lofty peaks. The king awaiting his message would suffer no delays.

Soon the rider descended into the lush valley of Argos, legendary home of Hercules, then north beneath the ancient citadel of Mycenae, where Agamemnon ruled before he led the Greeks to conquer Troy. Onward through the port city of Corinth he raced, then over the narrow isthmus into the land of the Megarians. The road to nearby Athens veered to the east, but his path led ever northward through the city of Thebes, then along the narrow pass at Thermopylae, where over a century earlier three hundred Spartans had stood against the entire Persian army. Mile after mile across the rolling grasslands of Thessaly he rode until at last the towering mass of Mount Olympus rose before him. He skirted the eastern side of the peak through the beautiful Vale of Tempe and then down along the Aegean coast until at last he entered the fertile plains of Macedonia.

The horseman kept the shore to his right as he galloped past the temples at Dion, and into the broad lowlands of Macedonia ringed by mountains on the far horizon. The road to the royal tombs at Vergina lay to the west, but he turned east skirting the capital at Pella and crossed over the Axios River, riding many miles along the coast to the Chalcidice peninsula. Finally he reached the Macedonian army camp beneath the walls of the old Corinthian colony of Potidaea. In recent years the Athenians had taken over the town as part of their long struggle to control the rich timber and mineral resources of Macedonia, but the city was no longer in their hands. Just before the messenger arrived, Philip II, king of Macedonia, had captured the town.

The weary courier dismounted and entered Philip’s tent. The triumphant king was only in his late twenties but well on his way to turning a weak and threatened kingdom on the northern edge of civilization into the mightiest state in the Greek world. Philip, in a jovial mood from his conquest of Potidaea and undoubtedly draining copious amounts of wine, according to Macedonian custom, welcomed the rider but ordered him to wait as another messenger had arrived just before him. This first man announced to the king that his favorite general, Parmenion, had defeated the wild Illyrian tribes in a great battle, securing the western borders of Philip’s rapidly expanding kingdom. Then the rider from Olympia came forward and saluted Philip, proclaiming that the horse the king had sponsored in the Olympic games had won first prize. It was then that the king noticed a third messenger had entered the tent. This courier bowed and declared that Philip’s wife, Olympias, had just given birth to a boy he would name Alexander.

The drunken revelry at the court of the king that night must have been unprecedented even by Macedonian standards. But soon Philip issued a decree to honor the good news he valued above all others—he commanded a special silver coin be struck to celebrate the victory of his horse.

Alexander, son of Philip, was born in the year of the 106th Olympic games, during the leadership of Elpines at Athens, in the third year of the rule of Artaxerxes III, Great King of Persia—or by our reckoning July of the year 356 B.C. Every Greek state had its own calendar based on local festivals. In Athens, the new year had just begun with the rising of the first new moon after the summer solstice and the sacrifice of a hundred animals to the gods. Hundreds of miles north in Macedonia the month bore a different name, but the coastal plains still baked in the summer heat. In winter, when the Athenians enjoyed a mild Mediterranean climate, the Macedonians shivered against the north wind.

The homeland of Alexander lay cut off from Greece by the mountain wall of Olympus and surrounding peaks. Indeed, most Greeks were quite happy with the separation since they considered the Macedonians little more than barbarians. The mountains and plains of the Macedonian north were as foreign to the cultured Greeks of the south as the steppes of Scythia or the dark forests of the Celts.

Viewed from above, the land of Macedonia is a great bowl tipping into the Aegean Sea. On its south, west, and north are towering mountains drained by rivers flowing through plains rich in grains and pasturage. Mount Olympus, almost ten thousand feet in height, dominates the view of the south. To the west and north are mountains almost as high, stretching like a horseshoe from Olympus to beyond the Axios River. To the east the great three-fingered peninsula of Chalcidice reaches into the sea.

But ancient Macedonia was surrounded by more than just difficult mountains. The famed horse warriors of Thessaly to the south cut off Philip’s kingdom from Greece, while to the west the powerful tribes of Illyria were a constant threat. From the north the Paeonians and Agrianians staged devastating raids from the highlands they shared with mountain lions, bears, and wild auroch cattle. To the east along the road to Byzantium beyond the Strymon River was the savage land of Thrace, where tattooed warriors crafted intricate gold jewelry and regarded plundering as the only honorable means of living.

Macedonia itself was divided into two vastly different regions. The mountains of the south, west, and north were the traditional home of fiercely independent pastoralists whose lives revolved around the sheep and goats they raised for meat, milk, and wool. During the summer the highland Macedonians grazed their flocks in the mountain pastures high above the plains, but in the cold winter months they were forced to bring their animals down to the coastal lowlands. In this area lived the Macedonian farmers, who raised crops and tended vineyards. Thus the highlanders by necessity had learned to live alongside their lowland cousins for part of the year, giving them a share of their flocks and fertilizing their fields with animal manure in payment.

But it was the mountain Macedonians—from the upland regions of Pelagonia, Lyncestis, Orestis, Elimiotis, and Pieria around Mount Olympus—who for countless generations had fought against the wolves, bears, and human predators that threatened their flocks. Their whole life was a constant war to keep their animals alive in a harsh and rugged land. For the highlanders, the tribe was everything and everything depended in turn on the bravery, cunning, and diplomacy of their chiefs. If Illyrian raiders stole a tribe’s best rams by night, the chief immediately led his men in a counterstrike to seize the animals and mercilessly kill the thieves. If lowland farmers threatened to withdraw age-old privileges of winter pasturage, the highland chief would invite them to a splendid feast, flatter them endlessly with tales of their grandfather’s generosity, and shamelessly bribe their leaders with promises of fat ewes and warm woolen cloaks. The highland lords were kings of the Macedonian world. The Greeks far to the south might talk of democracy and debate laws in their assemblies, but in the cold northern mountains the Macedonians had for ages lived and died at the word of their chiefs.

The plains of Macedonia were rich in barley and wheat, but the highlands held the resources most coveted by the Greeks. Cities such as Athens had long ago stripped their own hills of timber as their populations grew, but the mountains of Macedonia were still covered with towering forests of pine and oak needed for ships of war and trade. Beneath these forests, especially in the eastern Macedonian mountains, were iron, silver, and gold.

Though the pastoral Macedonians of the mountains differed from the lowland farmers in many ways, they shared a common language that defined them as a single people—and separated them from the Greeks to the south. The Macedonian tongue was so far removed from the Greek of Athens or Sparta that it may as well have been a different language entirely. Years after his birth, when Alexander was in central Asia, he grew so angry at a drinking party one night that he switched from his usual Greek speech to yell at his guards in Macedonian. Later still his soldiers mocked an officer on trial for addressing them in Greek rather than the normal Macedonian of the ranks. Macedonians were known for their odd words and strange pronunciation—they could never quite get Greek sounds right even when they tried. Though their kings bore ancient Greek names, the Macedonian people called Philip Bilippos instead of the normal Greek Philippos. This only served to make them an object of further scorn to their pretentious critics in the Athenian assembly. Language, as well as politics, culture, and so much else, reinforced the opinion of the Greeks that the Macedonians were a separate people, barbarians from beyond Olympus, no matter how hard their kings might try to behave like Greeks. And to most Macedonians, this was just fine. They saw the Greeks as feeble, effeminate, self-important snobs who had long since squandered whatever manliness and courage they had possessed when they had driven back the Persian invaders more than a century earlier. The Macedonian nobility might study Greek philosophy and recite the poetry of Homer, but the common Macedonian soldier was proud not to be Greek.

Alexander was born into a family that traced its royal roots back to the great hero Hercules—at least that was the story the family told visitors to its court. According to the Greek historian Herodotus, who journeyed to Macedonia a century before Alexander and collected every scrap of gossip he could find on the kingdom, the Macedonian royal family began when a Greek refugee named Perdiccas arrived from Argos in southern Greece. A descendant of Temenus of the family of Hercules, Perdiccas was banished from Argos along with his two older brothers. The brothers eventually made their way north to Macedonia. In the mountains of the west they found refuge with a local chieftain and his kindly wife. Times were hard for everyone, so young Perdiccas and his brothers labored as simple farmhands to earn their keep. One day the wife noticed that the loaves she baked every day for Perdiccas grew to twice the size of the others. When she told her husband, the chieftain feared this was an ill omen and ordered the brothers to depart at once. The brothers demanded their wages, but the flustered chief shouted that all they would receive was the ray of sunlight shining into the room. The two older brothers were ready to fight, but young Perdiccas took his knife and calmly traced the outline of the sunbeam on the dirt floor and said they would accept the chief’s offer. He then gathered the sunlight three times onto his tattered garment and left with his brothers. The chief soon realized Perdiccas had performed some sort of magic spell that threatened his own rule and sent warriors to kill the brothers. But a nearby river miraculously rose, cutting off the soldiers and allowing Perdiccas and his brothers to escape to the hills of Pieria north of Mount Olympus. There at a place known as the Gardens of Midas, where young Alexander would one day be tutored by Aristotle, the brothers from Argos established a kingdom that in time spread down from the highlands to the rich farmland along the coast.

This story was told to Herodotus six generations after Perdiccas by King Alexander I, the direct ancestor of Alexander the Great. The elder Alexander began his rule during the Persian Wars against Greece during the early fifth century and, after the victories of Athens and Sparta against Persia, was eager to connect his royal family to the winning side. Thus the foundation story of Macedonia should be taken with a large grain of salt, though it is possible to see a glimmer of history beneath the fairy tale. The divine Greek origins of the Macedonian royal family are fanciful, but the gradual spread of a local highland tribe from the hills near Mount Olympus to the coastal plains beyond the city of Vergina is quite plausible. The takeover of nearby winter grazing lands by a warlike tribe from the highlands would have provided a strong nucleus for a future Macedonian kingdom.

Whatever truth was in the tale, Alexander I was not about to let Herodotus continue on his travels without a few more stories to prove his undying love for the Greeks. According to Alexander, when the Persians invaded nearby Thrace, they sent envoys to the court of his father, Amyntas, requiring him to submit to the Great King by the symbolic act of giving him earth and water. Old Amyntas was terrified and agreed, even inviting them to a feast that evening. During dinner the Persian ambassadors began shamelessly to fondle the wives and daughters of the royal family who were present, but the old king was too afraid to object. Young Alexander was beside himself with anger, though he remained outwardly composed and merely suggested that his father retire for the evening. After the king was gone, his son declared to the Persians that they were most welcome to the company of the Macedonian women for whatever pleasure they might desire. But, with a wink, he suggested the women be allowed to withdraw for a few minutes to freshen up before the orgy began. The eager Persians gladly consented, but while the women were gone Alexander substituted his own warriors, veiled and dressed in women’s clothing, to sit beside the visitors. At his signal, just as the Persians were beginning to untie their garments, the disguised warriors pulled out daggers and cut the Persians’ throats. Macedonian men might treat their women as chattel, but woe to any foreigner who touched them.

And yet, if this story is true, it is remarkable that just a few years later the elder Alexander, now king, gave his own sister to a high-ranking Persian official in marriage and was considered a loyal ally of the Great King. He was even chosen as Persian ambassador to Athens to plead for the city’s submission and fought with his Macedonian troops against the Greeks during the final battle at Plataea in 479—though he claimed secretly to have given the Greeks the Persian plan of attack on the eve of battle. If the Greeks were later willing to forget about the duplicity of the elder Alexander and even honor him as a friend of the Greeks, it can only be that they needed his timber and mineral resources more than they wanted revenge for his treachery.

Alexander I was a master diplomat who played all sides against one another to expand his kingdom. He was a faithful subject of the Persian Empire when it suited him and a Greek patriot when the Great King turned his back. After Alexander was assassinated—a frequent event in Macedonian royal history—his son Perdiccas II continued his father’s policies of international intrigue during the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta. Perdiccas changed sides so many times during the conflict that the Macedonians couldn’t keep track of who they were backing during any given year.

Perdiccas was murdered by his illegitimate son Archelaus who—amid the swirl of treachery, violence, and vicious love triangles, heterosexual and homosexual, that were part of everyday life in the Macedonian court—took the throne and began an intensive program of Hellenization. Earlier kings had long encouraged Greek culture among the nobility, but Archelaus made it a top priority. Though the common people scoffed and continued to live as they had for centuries, the Macedonian court under the new king became a center for Greek artists and scholars. Among the many intellectuals wooed to the palace with lavish gifts was the Athenian playwright Euripides, who visited in his waning years and wrote the Bacchae there—a wild tale of sex, murder, and insanity that surely owes its inspiration to life among the Macedonian nobility.

In 399, the same year Socrates was forced to drink hemlock in Athens, Archelaus was murdered during a hunting expedition by his friend and lover Craterus. Macedonia was soon plunged into bloody dynastic struggles and debilitating frontier wars. Kings quickly rose and fell, sometimes several in a single year, until at last Amyntas III, grandfather of Alexander the Great, clawed his way to the top and seized the throne in 393. His long reign, however, brought little stability to the kingdom and palace intrigues raged unchecked, including an unsuccessful plot by his wife, Eurydice, and her young paramour to murder him. When Amyntas died, surprisingly of old age, in 370, his son Alexander II succeeded him, only to be murdered by his cousin Ptolemy the following year. Ptolemy in turn was slain by Perdiccas III two years later. Perdiccas himself soon died fighting against the resurgent Illyrians, leaving the last surviving son of Amyntas to take the deeply troubled throne. The untested young man faced an almost hopeless situation. Macedonia was in chaos with the nobility pitted against each other in civil war, barbarians invading on all sides, and the Greeks, especially the Athenians, working tirelessly to weaken, divide, and dominate the beleaguered kingdom. No one believed the new king, Philip, stood any chance of saving Macedonia.

Years later in Asia, Alexander and his men were feasting one night after their hard-won victories. As the wine flowed freely, some of Alexander’s dinner companions began to belittle the achievements of his father, Philip. Alexander joined in, boasting that his own victories from the Danube to the borders of India rivaled those of the god Hercules and were not to be compared with the petty conquests of his father. It was then that one of Philip’s old generals rose and called the drunken king an ungrateful lout. You would be nothing, he declared, without the achievements of your father—a far greater man than you will ever be.

Alexander personally ran the man through with a spear for his insolence, though he knew there was truth in the soldier’s final words. History has been so fascinated with Alexander the Great that it has overlooked the genius of his father. But by his supreme skill at diplomacy, his mastery of intrigue, and his revolutionary innovations in warfare, Philip laid the foundation for everything his son achieved.

Yet when young Philip came to the Macedonian throne after the death of his brother, few would have wagered the new ruler or his kingdom would survive. At first glance Philip was a typical Macedonian nobleman—fiery in temperament, excessive in drink, and exceedingly fond of war, horses, beautiful women, and handsome young boys. But he possessed a keen understanding of the hearts of men and a boundless vision for Macedonia.

Philip also knew exactly how he could change Macedonia’s dismal fortunes. When he was only fifteen, he had been sent as a hostage to the Greek city of Thebes by his brother the king. The ancient city of Thebes had lacked the influence of Athens and Sparta, but at the beginning of the fourth century it had taken advantage of the power vacuum created by the end of the Peloponnesian War to build its army into the most powerful force in Greece. In 371, the Thebans crushed Sparta’s finest warriors at the battle of Leuctra and ended forever the myth of Spartan invulnerability. The Macedonians immediately negotiated an alliance with Thebes and sent hostages to guarantee their good intentions. If Macedonia behaved itself, the hostages would be treated as honored guests. If not, they would be tortured and killed.

Philip was fortunate to be assigned to the household of the Theban general Pammenes, who was a great friend of Epaminondas, the victor of Leuctra. While the other Macedonian hostages feasted and chased local girls, Philip spent every moment learning the latest techniques in warfare from the Theban generals. The Macedonian army before Philip’s time consisted of a peasant infantry led by undisciplined nobles on horseback. Like their counterparts in the Middle Ages, these Macedonian knights saw themselves as the epitome of heroic warfare and treated the lowly farmers and shepherds in the infantry as so much fodder for enemy spears. But Philip discovered a very different kind of army at Thebes.

The Thebans had perfected the art of hoplite warfare. Each hoplite was a proud citizen who could afford to equip himself with a bronze helmet, a thick breastplate, greaves to protect the legs, and an iron-tipped spear eight to ten feet long used for thrusting, not throwing. In addition, each man carried a razor-sharp iron sword and heavy shield (hoplon) almost three feet wide on the left arm. As each hoplite was unshielded on his right side, he relied on the man next to him for protection, encouraging by necessity a strong sense of unity in battle. When a hoplite line advanced shoulder to shoulder against the enemy, it was a wall of death.

The Theban hoplites drilled endlessly and, whether common soldier or wealthy cavalryman, were ruled by iron discipline. The very best of the Theban warriors were chosen for membership in the Sacred Band, an elite corps of infantry consisting...