Between 404 and 336 BC, ten thousand Greeks escape from Persia, and a Macedonian takes on the task of creating Greek unity
THE WAR BETWEEN Athens and Sparta was over. Athens was desolate: broke, angry, the Long Walls ripped down, and as many as seventy thousand Athenians dead through plague, war, or political purge.1 No one had a plan for the future, and the city was filled with widows and women who would never marry because so many men had died. Aristophanes gives bitter voice to the times in his play The Assemblywomen: “The situation can yet be saved,” a woman of Athens proclaims. “I propose that we hand over the running of Athens to the women!”2 Among their solutions for the city’s troubles is a law proclaiming that any man who wants to sleep with a young woman has to “pleasure an older one first.”3
Sparta, the nominal victor, was little better off. Planting and harvesting had been thrown entirely off schedule. The armies storming through the Peloponnese had crushed vines, flattened olive trees, and killed flocks. More and more Spartans despaired of feeding themselves at home, and became mercenaries instead.
Thousands of these Spartans went to work for the Persian royal family. In 404, Artaxerxes II had inherited the throne from his father, Darius II. But a big fight over the succession was de rigueur in Persia, and Darius’s younger son Cyrus—now serving as satrap in Sardis—was planning to take the crown for himself. He was an ambitious and dashing young man, and Artaxerxes II was not a very imposing figure; he wasn’t much of a horseman,4 and Plutarch, who wrote a life of him, says that he had a “yielding and soft” nature.5
To bolster his support, Cyrus “sent orders to the commanders of his garrisons in the various cities to enroll troops from the Peloponnese, as many as possible and the best available” (this from the account written by Xenophon, a young mercenary who answered the call).6Ostensibly, Cyrus was hiring these soldiers for the defense of the Persian holdings in Asia Minor. But by 401, his force of over ten thousand Greek mercenaries had telegraphed an alarm. The Persian satrap of Lydia, the same Tissaphernes who had negotiated with Alcibiades, rode east in haste to warn the king.
With his cover blown, Cyrus headed towards the Euphrates with his army, crossed over it, and then turned south, marching towards Babylon with the river on his right; presumably he planned to use Babylon as a base for attacking the heart of the Persian empire. Most of the Persian army seems to have been at Ecbatana.7 Artaxerxes II had to get his vast force assembled, provisioned, and on the march, which took him an unexpectedly long time (Plutarch says that he was afflicted with a “natural dilatoriness”).8 So Cyrus got almost all the way to Babylon before the king’s army reached him; the long journey forced him to shell out extra pay for the Greek mercenaries, since they complained loudly about the distance.9
The Persian front line finally came into view as the rebel army approached Cunaxa, a battlefield about forty miles north of Babylon.188 Xenophon, who was marching in full armor in the middle of the Greek ranks, describes their approach:
In the early afternoon dust appeared, like a white cloud, and after some time a sort of blackness extending a long way over the plain. When they got nearer, then suddenly there were flashes of bronze, and the spear points and the enemy formations became visible…cavalry with white armour…soldiers with wicker shields…hoplites with wooden shields reaching to the feet (these were said to be Egyptians)…more cavalry and archers…. In front of them…were what they called the scythed chariots. These had thin scythes extending at an angle from the axles and also under the driver’s seat, turned toward the ground, so as to cut through everything in their way. The idea was to drive them into the Greek ranks and cut through them.10
It was a huge defense force; Cyrus’s army was outnumbered and outarmed.
Despite this, Cyrus was able to plunge forwards through the Persian lines until he met his brother face-to-face and struck him in the chest with a javelin, knocking him off his horse. The king’s bodyguard dragged him away from the front to a little hill, where Ctesias dressed the wound; the javelin had gone through his armor, but had not pierced through to his heart. Cyrus, pushed backwards by the fray, thought he had won; he spurred his horse forwards, shouting victory, when a stray arrow went through his temple.189
The Persian army had managed to keep back the attack, and the would-be usurper was dead. Many of the Greek officers had been captured. Artaxerxes II sent a message to the remaining Greek mercenaries offering to accept their surrender, but they refused. Instead, ten thousand Greeks regrouped and began to retreat from Cunaxa, back in the direction from which they had come. Young Xenophon was elected to be one of their leaders.
68.1 The March of the Ten Thousand
The journey, which began sometime in September of 401, dragged on for months. The Greeks plodded along the Tigris, short of food and water, constantly attacked from behind by a Persian detachment which had been assigned to harass them and from the sides and front by hostile residents of the lands through which they passed. They trudged through desert; they climbed through mountains; they marched through winter storms and six-foot snow drifts. They died from hunger and thirst, from cold, and from battle wounds. Their shoes froze onto their feet; men who lost their toes were left behind to die.11 They despaired of ever reaching the coast, from which they could return to Greece.
Almost a year after their journey began, they were struggling up yet another mountain when Xenophon, bringing up the rear, heard the men at the front shouting. He thought that the yells heralded yet another attack. But “the shouting got louder and drew nearer,” he writes, “and those who were going forward started running towards the men in front, who kept on shouting, and the more there were of them, the more shouting there was.”12 At last the words became clear. They were shouting “The sea! The sea!”
The March of the Ten Thousand was an impressive feat of endurance, but not necessarily an extraordinary one. What was extraordinary was that the Persian army, under Artaxerxes, could apparently do little more than pester the retreating Greeks, who managed to escape from the very center of Persian power. “All [Artaxerxes II’s] attempts to capture the Greeks that had come up with Cyrus,” Plutarch concludes, “…proved unsuccessful, and they, though they had lost both Cyrus and their own generals, nevertheless escaped, as it were, out of his very palace.”13
Artaxerxes II’s Persian empire was weak enough to lose its grip on Egypt as well. An Egyptian nobleman from Sais named Amyrtaeus declared himself pharaoh, and the Persian satrap was unable to get enough support from the preoccupied Artaxerxes II to quell the revolt. Amyrtaeus was not the first Egyptian “freedom fighter” to organize a resistance, but he was the first in a long time to gain enough power to title himself as the first pharaoh of a new dynasty: the Twenty-Eighth. (Psammetichus III had been the last ruler of the Twenty-Sixth Dynasty, and Manetho lists the Persians as the Twenty-Seventh.) Amyrtaeus, who lasted four years, turned out to be the only Twenty-Eighth Dynasty pharaoh. We know very little about Egypt under his rule, although Aramaic documents from the time suggest that at least part of the country still considered itself to be under Persian rule. Inscriptions show that after Amyrtaeus died, another rebel took power as Nepherites I and announced himself as the founder of yet another dynasty, the Twenty-Ninth; after six years he was succeeded by a usurper named Achoris.14
Three years after he announced himself to be pharaoh of Egypt, Achoris sent up to Greece and asked Athens for help against Persian attempts to retake his country.
MEANWHILE, the Greeks had gone back to quarrelling with each other. Athens had not managed to get far in the rebuilding of its shattered peace; the city was still suffering from the political divisions caused by the purges of the Thirty. In 399, a year after the successful return of the Ten Thousand, the Athenians had convicted the philosopher Socrates of vague anti-Athenian wrongdoings. Socrates had been friendly both with Alcibiades and with the most ruthless of the Thirty, an aristocrat named Kritias who had died in the fighting that wrapped up the Thirty’s horrendous rule. Sentenced to death, Socrates scorned flight and instead drank down hemlock; his death was recorded by one of his students, a young man named Plato.
Meanwhile Sparta had rethought its deal with Persia. At the end of the Peloponnesian War, the Spartans had promised to give up the Ionian cities to the Persians, in exchange for Persian gold. Now they reneged on the promise, and sent Spartan officials to run the cities instead. This was blatant empire-building, and the other Greek cities were not in the mood to tolerate it. The thirty years of fighting had barely ended when Athens, Thebes, Corinth, and Argos banded together with what was left of their armies to force Sparta to give up its claims.
Fighting in this so-called Corinthian War began in 395. After three years of pointless battling, Sparta backpedaled—not to the Greeks, but to the Persians, offering to give up those Ionian cities after all, if the Persians would come back in on the Spartan side.
Artaxerxes II agreed and sent Persian ships to help out. This made Athens quite willing to help Achoris of Egypt fight off the Persians; an Egyptian-Athenian alliance was a possible counter to a Persian-Spartan alliance.
Unfortunately, Athenian soldiers were too thin on the ground to keep it up, and the Spartans soon found that their soldiers were exhausted too. In 387, Artaxerxes II (happy to see that his potential enemies had once again worn themselves out against each other) decreed that unless the two cities agreed to a peace, the Persians would step in: “Should any of the parties concerned not accept this peace,” he announced (according to Xenophon, who preserved the actual treaty in his Hellenica), “I, Artaxerxes, will war against him…by land and by sea, with ships and with money.”15
Athens backed, regretfully, out of its Egyptian alliance, leaving Achoris to fight his anti-Persian war alone; Sparta disarmed; and for a little while everyone went back to rebuilding their cities. The so-called King’s Peace was in full effect. “So it was,” Xenophon writes, “that the Spartans and Athenians, with their allies, found themselves in the enjoyment of peace for the first time since…the demolition of the walls of Athens.”16
The reclaiming of Asia Minor was the high point of Artaxerxes II’s otherwise undistinguished reign. Egyptian inscriptions show that he did eventually sent a halfhearted party of soldiers down to brace Achoris in his den, but when Achoris (who had managed to talk a few Greek mercenaries into becoming a part of the regular Egyptian navy) fought back, the Persians retreated.
When Achoris died and a new Egyptian seized command—an unknown soldier named Nectanebo I, founder of the Thirtieth Dynasty—Artaxerxes II made one more stab at getting Egypt back. This time he tried to turn the tables on Egypt by hiring Athenian mercenaries of his own and sailing down to the attack, entering the Delta on its western side rather than by the fortress of Pelusium on the east, in the usual way.17 Nectanebo fought off this combined force, which was stronger than his own, with a brilliant bit of strategy. He made a stand at each stream in the Delta, fighting for a while before retreating a little bit farther south, pulling the invaders in further and further. He knew—as the Athenians and Persians did not—exactly when the flooding of the Nile was about to occur, and he managed to hold the combined invasion force off until the waters began to rise rapidly around him. At that he beat a quick retreat south; startled and overwhelmed by the flooding, the Persians and Athenians retreated back out of the Delta.18 Nectanebo held onto his throne for eighteen prosperous years, and Artaxerxes II did not try again.190
THE RUIN OF GREECE had convinced at least one Athenian that the cities of Greece would only survive if they could manage to pull themselves together under one banner of Greek identity. Pan-Hellenism, not empire-building by force, was the only hope for the Greek world.
This Athenian was Isocrates, an orator and teacher of rhetoric who had been born before the Peloponnesian War began and had watched his city fall into tatters. In 380, seven years after the King’s Peace, he published Panegyricus, a written speech begging for all Greek cities to recognize their common heritage.191Athens must be the leader in such an attempt, Isocrates writes, because “the city has made the name ‘Greek’ seem to be not that of a people but of a way of thinking; and people are called Greeks because they share in our education rather than in our birth.”19
This was a resurrection of that call for willing identification with an idea that Pericles had first made in the throes of war, reshaped to bind Athens and Sparta together as Greeks against a non-Greek world. The Panegyricus is first a summons to pan-Hellenic unity, but it is also a call for the Hellenes to join willingly against those who have not been educated as Greeks: against the Persians and their king Artaxerxes II, who rules “not by consent” of the parts of his empire, but rather “by having a greater army.”20
This call for pan-Hellenism was answered from a slightly unexpected source.
In the year 359, two thrones were passed along at the same time. Artaxerxes II’s oldest son, Darius, planned to kill his father, suspecting that Artaxerxes might be leaning towards declaring his younger son Ochus the heir. Artaxerxes got wind of the plot and sat up in bed on the night of the planned assassination, waiting. When Darius arrived, he called for his bodyguard. Darius was arrested, convicted, and put to death by having his throat cut.
Artaxerxes died of old age not long after; Ochus poisoned his other brothers and, his throne secure, became Artaxerxes III.
Over in Macedonia another king came to the throne in the same year. His name was Philip II; and he was the thirteenth king since Amyntas I had surrendered to Darius the Great, a hundred years before. Thirteen kings in a century works out to an average of less than eight years apiece; to be king of Macedonia was not a safe job.
Philip’s elderly father, Amyntas IV, had married a much younger wife late in life, in order to get himself a legitimate heir for the throne (he had already fathered at least three illegitimate children who had their eye on it).21 This woman, Eurydice, gave birth to the required heirs: three sons, Alexander II, Perdikkas, and Philip. She then started carrying on a blatant affair with a Macedonian courtier named Ptolemy; according to Macedonian accounts, the old king actually caught the two of them in bed at one point, but at nearly eighty decided not to make a fuss about it.
When ancient Amyntas died, Alexander II became king. He had troubles to his northwest, where the Illyrian tribes were threatening to invade. The Macedonian alliance with Persia had given Macedonia some protection from its enemies to the north and south, but by Alexander II’s reign, the Persians were no longer casting such a long shadow. The third-century historian Justin tells us that Alexander II had to avoid conquest by paying the Illyrians off and sending his younger brother Philip (only ten years old) to live in Illyria as a hostage.
Eventually Philip was allowed to return home, but his older brother was doomed. Eurydice, Alexander’s own mother, had arranged to have him murdered so that her lover Ptolemy could seize power. As soon as Alexander II was dead, Ptolemy announced himself to be regent on behalf of the legitimate heir, the second son Perdikkas. Philip, now fifteen, was sent off again as a hostage; this time he ended up in the southern Greek city of Thebes, which had been threatening to invade Macedonia.
Perdikkas, who was no fool, waited until he had reached the age of accession and then, with the support of the Macedonian noblemen who disliked Ptolemy, had his mother’s lover dragged off and executed. (What happened to Eurydice is not recorded.) He then took the throne himself and did what he could to restore the royal family: he negotiated Philip’s release from Thebes, married, and fathered a baby son. He then turned to face the Illyrians, who were once more threatening invasion.
In the sixth year of his reign, he made his younger brother Philip regent for his son and led the Macedonian army into war against the Illyrians. The battle was a disaster. Perdikkas was killed, along with four thousand Macedonian soldiers.22 Philip, at twenty-four, was left to defend the kingdom against this northwestern threat.
He took command of the army as regent for the baby, but (Justin says) “dangerous wars threatened, and it was too long to wait for the cooperation of a prince who was yet so young, [so] he was forced by the people to take the government himself.”23 This may be accurate, or it may shield a more ominous appropriation of power. In any case, Philip’s leadership was much needed. The Illyrians were not the only threat on the horizon; the Athenians were now making an attempt to put a candidate of their own on the Macedonian throne so that they could add Macedonia to the territory ruled by Athens.
Philip, unable to take on both Illyria and Athens, put off the Athenian threat by surrendering a border city to Athenian control. He then reorganized the Macedonian army by teaching the wild semi-savage Macedonian soldiers how to fight in a Greek phalanx, something he had learned during his years in Thebes.24 The following year, the Macedonian army triumphed against the Illyrians.
By this point, the Macedonians were clearly too strong for Athenian invasion. Rather than fighting defensive wars, Philip was able to begin empire-building on his own account. He fought, and married (five different times), his way into alliance or dominance with the territories along the Thermaic Gulf, the border between Macedonia and Thrace, and the north and northwest borders of Macedonia. His third wife, the seventeen-year-old Olympias, was the daughter of the king of Epirus. Olympias, according to ancient accounts, was startlingly beautiful, but prone to frightening storms of temper and eccentric in her habits; she kept large snakes as pets and allowed them to crawl all over her bedchamber. Her father thought that he was protecting Epirus with the match; when he died, Philip simply annexed it.
In 356, Olympias gave birth to Philip’s first son and heir. The baby was named Alexander, after Philip’s dead brother.
68.1. Philip of Macedonia. This marble head of Philip II shows his drooping eye, the result of an arrow wound. Photo credit Gianni Dagli Orti/CORBIS
Now Philip began to look south. When the ruler of the Greek city of Pherae was assassinated, Philip went down, restored order, and then kept control of the city. He campaigned into Thrace and seized the gold and silver mines around Mount Pangaeus, which would allow him to finance more campaigns. He took back the city he had yielded to Athens at his accession, and fought his way still farther south and east. During one of these campaigns an arrow went through his right eye; the missing eye can be seen in his statues.
There was, to all this, no organized Greek response. Sparta was too far south to be troubled, and Athens, which protested, was suffering from severe famine and could not mount another war. Philip went right on swallowing bits of Greece. His push southwards was not so much against a Greece that he wanted to conquer, as a Greece that he wanted to absorb.
His infantry, his cavalry, his very court were salted with Greeks.
It was a Greek horse—a stallion from Thessaly named Bucephalas—that brought his son Alexander’s precocious intelligence into public view. Plutarch says that Philip had paid a tremendous amount of money for this horse but found it to be completely unmanageable. He ordered it sent back, but Alexander protested; Philip told him to back up the protest by showing that he could ride the horse himself: “Alexander ran over to the horse,” Plutarch writes, “took hold of the reins and turned him to face the sun—apparently because he had noticed that the horse was made jittery by the sight of his shadow stretching out and jerking about in front of him.”25 This allowed him to mount the horse, an incident which became famous throughout Macedonia (and, later, Greece). Even so early, Alexander was a strategist.
He continued to be Philip’s only legitimate son. One of Philip’s mistresses had given birth to a son a little younger than Alexander, also named Philip; but the unfortunate child was feebleminded. (Plutarch says that Olympias was responsible for this, having given the child a drug to damage his mind; but there is no other proof to support this.)
The Macedonian court was hazardous enough to suggest that Philip would have done well to produce a backup heir, but apparently he had started to avoid Olympias at all costs (local rumor said that the snakes in her bed had something to do with this: “A snake was once seen stretched out alongside Olympias’s body while she was asleep,” Plutarch writes, “and they say that it was this incident more than anything that cooled Philip’s passion and affection”).26 He was pinning his hopes for an heir on Alexander. In 343, he invited the Greek philosopher Aristotle to come north into Macedonia to act as Alexander’s tutor, a well-paid post which Aristotle accepted.
By 340, Philip was strong enough to declare war on Athens.
His invasion of Greece was made easier by the fact that more than one Greek city felt ambivalent about fighting back. The Greek philosopher Isocrates, now ninety, had given up on his hopes for willing Greek cooperation; he had followed up his Panegyricus with a speech called To Philip, asking the Macedonian king to take the lead. “You have obtained wealth and power such as no other Greek has,” he announced, “and these alone are naturally suited both for persuading and for compelling. What I am about to suggest will require, I believe, both of these, for I am about to advise you to stand at the head of a Greek alliance and lead a Greek campaign against the barbarians.”27
The association of Greek cities that looked after the shrine of Delphi followed Isocrates’s advice, and invited Philip into Greece. Athens asked Sparta for help against the invasion, but Sparta declined to have anything to do with its old enemy. So when Philip’s army finally marched down from the north, Athens had managed to round up only a few allied troops, mainly from Thebes and from the cities in Boeotia.
The armies met, in the hot summer of 338, on the plain of Chaeronea. The most complete account of the battle that remains is preserved in Diodorus Siculus’s history:
Both armies were now ready to engage; they were equal indeed in courage and personal valor, but in numbers and military experience a great advantage lay with [Philip]. For he had fought many battles, gained most of them, and so learned much about war, but the best Athenian generals were now dead…. About sunrise the two armies arrayed themselves for battle. The king ordered his son Alexander, who had just become of age…to lead one wing, though joined to him were some of the best of his generals. Philip himself, with a picked corps, led the other wing, and arranged the various brigades at such posts as the occasion demanded. The Athenians drew up their army…. At length the hosts engaged, and the battle was fierce and bloody. It continued long with fearful slaughter, but victory was uncertain, until Alexander, anxious to give his father proof of his valor—and followed by a courageous band—was the first to break through the main body of the enemy, directly opposing him, slaying many; and bore down all before him. His men, pressing on closely, cut to pieces the lines of the enemy; and after the ground had been piled with the dead, put the wing resisting him in flight.28
The Battle of Chaeronea, with relatively few casualties (a thousand Athenians dead, a large number for a single battle but minor compared to the toll of the war years), was remarkable for two things: this was Alexander’s first try at major military command, and it marked the end of an era. The Greek city-states would never again be free from the bonds of empire.
Philip, who undoubtedly realized that he could not fight his way into the allegiance of the rest of the Greek cities, now switched ground. He treated Athens with great respect, releasing his prisoners and even putting together an honor guard to accompany the Athenian dead back to the city.29 The Athenians, making the best of a bad situation, chose to pretend that Philip was now the friend of Athens.
The following year, Philip made a speech at Corinth, suggesting that Greek submission to his kingship would be good for Greece.30 Sparta still refused to have anything to do with Philip’s plans. But the rest of the Greek cities agreed (with Philip’s army standing nearby, naturally) to join together in yet another Greek league. This was called the Corinthian League, and like the old Delian League of Athens, it was formed with the intent of attacking the Persians. Unlike the Delian League, it had the king of Macedonia as its supreme commander.
Persia was vulnerable, right in the middle of yet another chaotic change of command. Artaxerxes III had been on the throne for nineteen years; the greatest achievement of his reign was the retaking of Egypt, which he had done in 343 (six years earlier) by defeating the last native pharaoh of Egypt, Nectanebo II. Now Egypt was again under the control of a Persian satrap, and was ruled by the Persian king (Manetho calls this Dynasty Thirty-One).
And then, in the same year as the Battle of Chaeronea, Artaxerxes died. Details were sketchy, but although the king had been sick for a little while before his death, it seems almost certain that he did not die from illness but from poison, given to him under the pretext of medication by a eunuch named Bagoas. Bagoas had been one of Artaxerxes III’s commanders in the victory over Egypt, and had grown pleased with his power.
With Artaxerxes III dead, Bagoas began running the kingdom himself as vizier. Two of the young princes also died, unexpectedly, from stomach troubles (Bagoas had been busy with his cups). Only one prince survived, a young man named Arses. Likely Bagoas planned to make him the puppet-king; when Arses showed signs of independence, Bagoas poisoned him too.
PHILIP was plotting his attack on the eunuch-led empire when catastrophe overtook him.
The catastrophe was mostly of his own making. Right after the Corinthian League meeting of 337, Philip decided to get married again. This had absolutely no political advantage for him, and was apparently impelled by lust; the girl was a native Macedonian, the beautiful niece of a courtier named Attalus. At the wedding feast, all of the Macedonians got staggering drunk (a tradition at Macedonian festivities) and Attalus proposed a toast: he waved his cup in the air and announced that the gods could now send Macedonia a legitimate heir to the throne.
Alexander was, of course, technically legitimate, but since his mother Olympias was Greek, he was only half Macedonian. Attalus’s toast was a direct challenge to his position as crown prince, a suggestion that Macedonia’s throne should only belong to full-blooded Macedonians (and a clear indication that Philip’s love for all things Greek was not shared by all Macedonians).
Alexander, who was also drunk, threw a cup at Attalus and called him scum. Philip, probably the drunkest of all, drew his sword to attack Alexander and then fell flat on his face. “Gentlemen,” Alexander said, standing over his father in scorn, “there lies the man who was getting ready to cross over from Europe to Asia, but who trips up on his way over to one couch from another!”31
Worse was about to come, and Attalus too was in this up to his neck. According to Diodorus, Philip had picked as his lover, some time before, a beautiful young man who was also a friend of Attalus. (Macedonians, like Greeks, tended to pay more attention to the mechanics of the sex act than to the gender of the partner involved; whether you were the penetrated or the penetrator was important, but who was on the other end was less relevant.) This beautiful young man unfortunately displaced Philip’s previous lover, a member of his bodyguard named Pausanias. Pausanias, lovesick, insulted his replacement in public by calling him a “hermaphrodite,” no true man. Shamed, the young man threw himself in front of Philip during a battle, intending to be killed, and died on an enemy sword.
Attalus, in revenge for his friend’s suicide, invited Pausanias to dinner, got him thoroughly drunk, and then handed him over to be gang-raped by a group of cooperative friends, a punishment which fit the crime; to be penetrated was submissive, femalelike, the very qualities that Pausanias had used to slander his rival. Pausanias, when he sobered up, went to Philip in furious humiliation and complained, but Philip declined to punish Attalus, who was a trusted and valuable general. Instead he tried to pacify Pausanias by promoting him and giving him presents.
But he refused to love him again, and Pausanias nursed his rejection and humiliation until 336. Philip had organized a huge festival to celebrate the beginning of his attack on Persia; it was to begin with an opening parade, led by Philip, into a theater filled with cheering Macedonians. As Philip stepped over the threshold of the theater, Pausanias came up from behind him and put a knife into his ribs.
Pausanias ran for his horse. He tripped and fell, and was immediately stabbed multiple times by the rest of the bodyguard.32 But Philip was already dead.
There were plenty of people who suspected that Alexander, who despised his father, had somehow been involved: “Alexander did not come out of the affair spotless,” Plutarch says, although he gives no damning details.33 But with Pausanias murdered and no proof of any treason, no one dared make any accusation. In any case Alexander was popular with the army, which acclaimed him as king the very next day.
He inherited, Plutarch says, a kingdom “surrounded on all sides by bitter resentment, deep hatred, and danger.” The conquered territories to the north were unhappy under Macedonian rule; the Greeks, to the south, were not so fully resigned to their Corinthian League membership that Alexander could afford to rely on them; and the Persians were waiting for the Macedonians to attack.
But Alexander had one piece of business to take care of. Attalus had been sent on ahead into Asia Minor, to prepare the route that the Macedonian invasion force would follow into Persia. Alexander never forgot an insult; he sent an assassin after Attalus, and had him murdered.
