[2]

The Gardens of Midas

ON the night of Alexander's birth, tradition alleged, the temple of Artemis was burnt down. The local Persian Magi interpreted this as an omen of further disasters to come. They ‘ran about beating their faces and crying aloud that woe and great calamity for Asia had that day been born’, a firebrand that was destined to destroy the entire East. The night before her wedding, similarly, Olympias dreamed she was penetrated by a thunderbolt, so that fire gushed out of her womb, spreading far and wide before it was extinguished. A month or two later Philip also had a dream: he was sealing up his wife's vagina, and the wax bore the stamped device of a lion. Some of the palace seers took this to mean that Philip should keep a closer watch on his wife. But Aristander of Telmessus — who afterwards accompanied Alexander to Asia (see below, p. 168) — had a more acceptable explanation: Olympias was pregnant, and with a spirited, lion-like son. One did not, he told Philip, put a seal on an empty jar.

It was also rumoured that the king (perhaps taking the other diviners' advice more seriously than he would admit) had one day peered through a crack in his bedroom door and seen Olympias embracing a snake. The obvious explanation, that this was merely one of her Maenadic pets, did not occur to him. Convinced that she was either an enchantress or the inamorata of some god in disguise, he began to avoid conjugal relations with her. So perturbed was he, indeed, that he took his troubles to the Delphic Oracle, and got a very specific response. From henceforth, he was told, he must pay special reverence to Zeus-Ammon, the Hellenized Egyptian deity whose shrine and oracle were at the Siwah oasis, on the borders of Libya. He would also lose that eye with which he had seen ‘the god, in the form of a serpent, sharing the couch of his wife’. For once Delphi could hardly be accused of ambivalence.¹

Legends such as these always tended to accumulate round the birth and childhood of any famous character in antiquity. It was a sine qua non that the first should be accompanied by portents, and the second abound in episodes suggestive of future greatness. If this background material did not exist, it was manufactured. Few people, then as now, possessed that special insight which detects tomorrow's leader in today's schoolboy, and a world without adequate records or archives was even readier to be wise after the event. There were always contemporaries of the great man anxious to prove that they recognized his greatness from the very first, and jealous rivals eager to pay off old scores. For such witnesses truth was an infinitely flexible commodity.

In Alexander's case the unscrupulous propaganda, both favourable and hostile, began very early, before he had even become king. Almost everyone who wrote about him from personal acquaintance — and many who did not² — had some sort of axe to grind. The anecdotes quoted above illustrate this point only too well. Each of them, it is clear, was invented, and for some very specific purpose: to attack or defend Olympias, to impugn or uphold the legitimacy of her son's birth, to give Alexander's conquests, and his supposed divine relationship to Zeus-Ammon, the retrospective endorsement of Fate. The snake story, of course, was a double-edged weapon: it could be used to hint at either divine or else all too human bastardy. The most tell-tale detail is the ‘prediction’ aboutPhilip's eye, which was actually shot out at the siege of Methone in 354, two years after Alexander's birth. This incident provided, long afterwards, the starting-point for a false oracle designed to confirm Alexander's assumptions of godhead. The temple of Artemisat Ephesus was, in fact, burnt down about this time; but the prophecy of a firebrand which would destroy Asia sounds suspiciously like Persian propaganda, put out when the invasion had already taken place.³

The truth of the matter is that we have surprisingly little direct evidence about Alexander's childhood from any source, and what does exist is of very limited historical value.⁴ He is generally represented as a precocious enfant terrible, and this is likely enough. Macedonian court life, with its quarrels and intrigues, its drunken feasts and coarse sexual escapades, was not calculated to encourage innocence in the young. Precocity is just what we might expect from a clever boy brought up in such an environment. It also suggests that special knowingness so often found among the children of public figures, who become accustomed — almost before they can walk — to the company of politicians, artists, ambassadors or generals, imitating their turns of phrase and their conversational gambits with uncomprehending accuracy. When Alexander was only seven, it is said, he entertained a group of Persian envoys during Philip's absence on campaign. (They had come with the Great King's pardon and recall for three rebels who had found refuge with Philip: Menapis the Egyptian, the satrap Artabazus, and the Greek mercenary captain Memnon of Rhodes.) After the usual exchange of courtesies, Alexander proceeded to grill his guests like any intelligence officer. Not for him wide-eyed questions about such marvels as the Hanging Gardens, or the Persian royal regalia, or the Great King's golden vine, with its clusters of jewels. What he wanted to know — or so we are asked to believe — were such things as the size and morale of the Persian army, the length of the journey to Susa, and the condition of the roads that led there.

This anecdote has obviously been touched up for propaganda purposes; but it could just contain an element of truth. The envoys, Plutarch says, were much impressed. Whether they told him what he wanted to know is another matter; but Artabazus andMemnon, at least, are unlikely to have forgotten the incident if it in fact took place. By a curious quirk of fate, the first afterwards became one of Alexander's own Eastern satraps (see below, p. 353), while the second was his most formidable opponent in Asia Minor(see pp. 170 ff.). Memnon, unlike his Persian employers, never made the mistake of underestimating Alexander. It is an intriguing thought that this brilliant commander may have remembered, and taken warning from, the alarming inquisitiveness of a seven-year-old child.⁵ On the other hand, his visit can have left him in no doubt as to the aggressive intentions of the child's father. After an almost unbroken string of successes, in Thrace, Thessaly and elsewhere, Philip had now turned his attention to the Chalcidic peninsula. The reason he could not entertain Persia's envoys in person was that he happened, at the time, to be besieging Olynthus. Another reminder of his ubiquitous interests was a good-looking twelve-year-old, Alexander's namesake from Epirus, now permanently resident at the Macedonian court. This boy was Olympias' young brother; Philip had brought him back, after a whirlwind punitive expedition, as hostage, minion, and — if his uncle Arybbas, Philip's father-in-law, showed any further signs of independence or opposition — as prospective King of Epirus.⁶

Philip's expansionist progress up to 349 is graphically described by Demosthenes, in the first of his speeches urging support for the beleaguered Olynthians: ‘Has any man amongst you,’ he asks his Athenian audience, ‘watched Philip's progress, observed his rise from weakness to strength? First he seizes Amphipolis, next Pydna, then Potidaea. After that it is Methone's turn. Next he invades Thessaly … and then goes off to Thrace, deposing various chieftains and appointing his own nominees in their place. A short interval, while he is sick, and then, the minute he recovers, off he goes to invest Olynthus. All this quite apart from minor campaigns against Illyria and Paeonia and King Arybbas, to name but a few.’⁷ It is all uncomfortably like Churchill or Vansittart recapitulatingHitler's activities before the Munich Agreement.

The composition of Philip's court also caused widespread comment, and with good reason. He had augmented the original Macedonian Companions with distinguished mercenary officers drawn from every part of Greece. Amongst them were Demaratus ofCorinth, and two brothers from Mytilene, Erigyius and Laomedon: all three subsequently served under Alexander. This professional officer-corps numbered about 800, and its members were allocated lands from Philip's frontier conquests: Erigyius and Laomedon, for instance, had estates near Amphipolis. Hostile Greek propaganda drew a lurid picture of these men's morals and social habits. ‘Philip's court in Macedonia,’ wrote Theopompus, ‘was the gathering-place of all the most debauched and brazen-faced characters in Greece or abroad, who were there styled the King's Companions.’ They were, he went on, carefully selected for their prowess at drinking, gambling, or sexual debauchery. ‘Some of them used to shave their bodies and make them smooth although they were men, and others actually practised lewdness with each other though bearded … Nearly every man in the Greek or barbarian world of a lecherous, loathsome, or ruffianly character flocked to Macedonia.’

Demosthenes, while cataloguing much the same faults, admitted (what it would have been hard to deny) that the Companions had a reputation as ‘admirable soldiers, well grounded in the science of war’. In a surviving fragment of Mnesimachus' propaganda play, Philip, one of them speaks for himself:

Have you any idea

What we're like to fight against? Our sort make their dinner
Off honed-up swords, and swallow blazing torches
For a savoury snack. Then, by way of dessert,
They bring us, not nuts, but broken arrow-heads
And splintered spear-shafts. For pillows we make do
With our shields and breastplates; arrows and slings lie strewn
Under our feet, and we wreathe our brows with catapults.

Allowing for obvious exaggeration, the general atmosphere was probably much as these sources describe it. Mercenaries — and Macedonians — were never renowned in antiquity for the austereness of their lives.⁸

This, then, was the society in which the young Alexander grew up: a loud, clamorous male world of rough professional soldiers, who rode or drank or fought or fornicated with the same rude energy and enthusiasm. Though Olympias spoilt her son outrageously, she never set herself to diminish his masculine self-confidence: as we shall see, the reverse seems to have been true. Nor, on the evidence available, did she systematically poison his mind against his father from childhood: this often-repeated story is a modern psychological myth. The split between Philip and Olympias did not take place until 338, when Alexander had turned eighteen, and was in any case primarily due to dynastic politics. Until then they seem to have cooperated amicably enough over their son's upbringing, and indeed to have devoted much thought and care to it.⁹

There can be no doubt, however, that Alexander idolized Olympias. Tarn claims that ‘he never cared for any woman except his terrible mother’,¹⁰ a verdict which it would be hard to refute. His relationship with Philip, which has received less attention, was rather more complex, an ambivalent blend of genuine admiration and underlying competitiveness. If imitation be the sincerest form of flattery, then Alexander's attitude to his father fell little short of hero-worship. But the rivalry was there too: odi et amo, the perennial love — hate relationship. The son followed in his father's footsteps not only to emulate, but also to excel. As a boy he identified himself closely with Achilles, from whom, through the Aeacids, his mother's house claimed descent. On his father's side he could trace his ancestry back to Heracles. It is a great mistake to underestimate the seriousness with which such genealogies were regarded by the ancient world. Heroic myth was, for Greeks and Macedonians alike, a living reality, invoked time and again by politicians or pamphleteers.¹¹ The fact that sophisticated statesmen sometimes used such myths in cynical justification of their policies merely confirms this. What they were exploiting was near-universal faith: otherwise no one would have listened to them.

Alexander's favourite line in the Iliad shows his declared ambition, to be ‘at the same time a good king and a strong spear-fighter’. Yet he must surely have remembered Achilles' other, perhaps more characteristic aim — ‘ever to strive to be best, and outstanding above all others’. As Philip's dazzling career proceeded, with victory succeeding victory, Alexander used to complain to his friends that his father was anticipating him in everything — ‘and for me,’ he said, ‘he will leave no great or brilliant achievement to be displayed to the world with your aid.’ ‘But,’ his friends objected, ‘he is acquiring all this for you.’ Alexander replied: ‘What use are possessions to me if I achieve nothing?’¹²

History tells us something of Alexander's teachers, but remains almost wholly silent as to what they taught him. His nurse's name was Lanice; her brother Cleitus, known as ’the Black’, saved Alexander's life at the Granicus, and was afterwards murdered by him during a drunken quarrel in Samarkand (see below, pp. 178 and 361 ff.). His first tutor was a kinsman of Olympias, a stern and crabbed old disciplinarian called Leonidas, who (like his Spartan namesake) placed great emphasis on feats of physical endurance. Alexander used to say that Leonidas' idea of breakfast was a long night-march — and of supper, a light breakfast. Though the boy chafed under this discipline at the time — Philip said that he was amenable to argument, but not to compulsion — Leonidas' training left its mark on him. His personal powers of endurance, his forced marches through deserts and over mountains became legendary. He never forgot his old bear of a tutor; we find him telling Queen Ada of Caria, with a kind of rueful pride, how Leonidas ‘used to come and open my chests of bedding and clothes, to see that my mother did not hide there for me some luxury or superfluity’. At this level, clearly, the doting Olympias was kept firmly in her place.

But there is one anecdote about Alexander and Leonidas which has never had quite the attention it deserves. Once, when the young prince was offering sacrifice, with would-be royal lavishness he scooped up two whole fistfuls of incense to cast on the altar-fire. This brought down a stinging rebuke on his head from his tutor. ‘When you've conquered the spice-bearing regions,’ Leonidas said, with that elaborate sarcasm characteristic of schoolmasters the world over, ‘you can throw away all the incense you like. Till then, don't waste it.’ Years later, Alexander captured Gaza, the main spice-entrepôt for the whole Middle East. As always, he sent presents home to his mother and sister. But this time there was one for Leonidas as well. A consignment of no less than eighteen tonsof frankincense and myrrh was delivered to the old man (enough to make him rich beyond his wildest dreams on the resale price), ‘in remembrance of the hope with which that teacher had inspired his boyhood’ — together with an admonition to cease being parsimonious towards the gods.¹³

There is something terrifying about this story: the minor slight that rankled for perhaps fifteen years, the crushing generosity, the elaborate and unanswerable réplique. But it affords us a most valuable insight into Alexander's character. Anyone who ever did him a disservice, however trivial, lived to regret it in the end. He never forgot, seldom forgave: ‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay, saith the Lord.’ His implacability was only equalled by his patience. He would nurse a grudge for a decade or more, waiting for the propitious moment; and when that moment came, he struck.

Alexander's second tutor, Lysimachus of Acarnania, was a very different character: a shrewd if uncultured old lick-spittle who earned himself some easy popularity by encouraging his royal pupil's fantasies. He used to call Alexander Achilles, Philip Peleus, and himself Phoenix (the name of Achilles' elderly mentor in theIliad). The boy was taught music — he showed a remarkable aptitude for playing the lyre — and reading and writing. Experts instructed him in the arts of sword-play, archery, and javelin-throwing. Like all well-born Macedonian children, he could ride a horse almost before he could walk. But he never, it seems, learnt how to swim; and throughout his life he retained a marked distaste for the sea.

His precocious horsemanship, indeed, gave rise to one of the most famous surviving anecdotes about him. When he was not more than eight or nine — perhaps in 347, on the occasion of Philip's ‘Olympian’ Games at Dium — a Thessalian horsebreeder,Philoneicus, brought the king a pedigree stallion, which he offered to sell him for the vast sum of thirteen talents. (Modern equivalents are misleading: this sum, in the fourth century B.C., would have lasted one man as a living wage for about a hundred years.) The stallion was black, except for a white blaze on its forehead, and branded with an ox-head, the mark of Philoneicus' ranch: hence his name, Bucephalas. To command such a price, Bucephalas must have been in his prime — that is, about seven years old.¹⁴

The story as told by Plutarch abounds in circumstantial detail and dramatic immediacy. Philip, together with his friends and attendants, went down to the open plain to try the horse out. Alexander followed. The king's grooms soon found that Bucephalas was quite unmanageable. They could neither coax nor mount him; he reared and plunged, seemingly deaf to all words of command. Philip lost patience, and told Philoneicus to take his horse away. This was too much for Alexander. ‘What a horse they're losing!’ he exclaimed. ‘And all because they haven't the skill or courage to master him!’ The boy's distress was genuine and obvious; and his father, alert as always, had caught his muttered comment.

‘Oh,’ he said, eyeing his eight-year-old son, ‘so you think you know more about managing horses than your elders, do you?’

‘Well, I could certainly deal with this horse better than they've done.’

Philip's one eye twinkled in his seamed and bearded face. ‘All right, then. Suppose you try, and fail, what forfeit will you pay for your presumption?’

‘The price of the horse,’ Alexander said boldly. A ripple of laughter ran through the group round the king.

‘Done,’ said his father.

Alexander ran across to Bucephalas, took his bridle, and turned him towards the sun. One thing he had noticed was that the horse started and shied at his own shadow fluttering in front of him. He stood there for a little, stroking and patting the great stallion, calming him down, taking the measure of his spirit. Then he threw off his cloak and vaulted lightly on to Bucephalas' back, writh that dynamic agility which was so characteristic of him as a grown man. At first he held the stallion on a tight rein; then, at last, he gave him his head, and the powerful steed went thundering away over the plain. Philip and those round him were ’speechless with anxiety’, Plutarch tells us; but Alexander soon wheeled around and came cantering back to them. There was cheering from the crowd. Philip, half-proud, half-resentful, said jokingly: ‘You'll have to find another kingdom; Macedonia isn't going to be big enough for you.’ Tears in his eyes, he kissed his son. But it was Demaratus of Corinth who brought matters to a triumphant conclusion by buying Bucephalas himself, and giving him to Alexander as a present. Boy and horse became inseparable. Bucephalas carried Alexander into almost every major battle he fought. He died at the ripe old age of thirty, soon after his master's last great victory, over the Indianrajah Porus (Paurava) on the Jhelum River (see below, pp. 389 ff.).¹⁵

I have quoted this anecdote at length partly because it is one of the very few significant exchanges on record between Alexander and his father. The truth is that they seldom met. Philip spent most of his time away on campaign, and when he did return toPella he was fully occupied with diplomatic work — not to mention the uproarious state banquets laid on for visiting ambassadors. Surprisingly enough, Alexander seems to have participated in these junketings from a very early age — which may account for his addiction to them later. Aeschines, one of the ten Athenian envoys at Pella in 346, reported that the ten-year-old prince entertained them on the lyre after dinner, and also gave some sort of recitation packed with pointed personal allusions. It may have been on this occasion that Philip asked his son whether he was not ashamed to play so well, the point being (as Plutarch emphasizes) that ‘for a king it is surely enough if he can find time to hear others play’.¹⁶ Whatever else one can say about Alexander's upbringing, he certainly learnt the facts of life young.

In August 348 Olynthus fell to Philip's siege-engineers, and his two surviving half-brothers were captured and executed. The Athenians, who had dithered in the assembly and sent reinforcements too late to save the city, made a great huff-and-puff about treachery. Aeschines denounced Philip's cruelty and ambition, but when he tried to raise a coalition of Greek states against Macedonia, the result was a total fiasco. Athens salved her conscience by admitting Olynthian refugees, and after long negotiations finally sent a peace-embassy to Pella in March 346.¹⁷ The way Philip handled these wretched envoys forms one of the more hilarious, if regrettable, chapters in the history of diplomacy. Their leader, Philocrates, was his paid agent. Most of the rest he managed to bribe during their visit. Demosthenes proved obdurate, so Philip played him off against his fellow-delegates — an all too easy task. When peace was voted, on the basis of the territorial status quo, Athens' signatories were kept kicking their heels in Pella while Philipcaptured a large slice of Thrace. Then, at last, he ratified the agreement.¹⁸

The Athenian assembly was somehow bamboozled into thinking that Thebes would be neutralized, Oropus recovered, and Euboea horse-traded for Amphipolis, all without any effort on their part. They soon learnt better. The repercussions and recriminations that resulted from this affair kept the Athenian courts busy for years. Charges and counter-charges of bribery and corruption were hurled to and fro like so many custard pies in a farce: most of them contained an uncomfortable amount of truth. Like all people who have been made complete fools of, those responsible nearly burst themselves trying to shift the blame elsewhere. Philocrates was impeached, and fled the country. Demosthenes prosecuted Aeschines, who scraped an acquittal by one bare vote. A splendid amount of political dirty linen was washed in public, the chief beneficiary, of course, being Philip himself. By thus discrediting Athens' leaders, who had been made to look not only underhanded but also inept, he considerably strengthened his bargaining position with rival states such as Thebes. The divide-and-rule policy had once again paid handsome dividends.¹⁹

Meanwhile Philip had been consolidating his position in other quarters. One golden opportunity for him was the so-called ‘Sacred War’. The citizens of Phocis, feeling (reasonably enough) that since Delphi lay in their territory they were entitled to control the shrine, had taken it over by force, and all efforts to dislodge them had failed. Phocis, it is true, was one of the smallest states in Greece; but this hardly mattered, since Apollo's accumulated offerings could support a large mercenary army more or less ad infinitum. The Amphictyonic council, an interstate religious body responsible for administering Delphi, appealed to Philip for help.

The king responded with alacrity, and small wonder. He could, at one and the same time, pose as the champion of religious orthodoxy, win himself international prestige, and have a perfect excuse for moving troops down into central Greece. Nor would the political support of the oracle itself come amiss during the next few years: Delphi, despite its somewhat chequered history, still carried immense authority and prestige. By late summer 346 Philip had smashed the last remnants of Phocian resistance, and brought his troops as far south as Thermopylae. His reward was the presidency of that year's Pythian Games, and Phocis' two seats on the Amphictyonic council.²⁰

Philip was now unquestionably the most powerful ruler in Greece. Perhaps as early as 352²¹ he had been appointed Archon of Thessaly for life; he now proceeded to organize the country into four tetrarchies, so that it became, to all intents and purposes, aMacedonian out-kingdom. While in Thessaly for this purpose (344) he acquired another mistress, Nicesipolis. Rumours reached Olympias that this woman was using magic spells and potions on the king (Thessalian witches had a notorious reputation throughout antiquity). The queen sent for Nicesipolis, and found her not only beautiful, but also witty and well-bred. ‘Away with these slanders!’ Olympias is said to have exclaimed. ‘You are your own best magic, my dear.’ The two women seem, rather improbably, to have struck up a lasting friendship. When Nicesipolis died, Olympias brought up her daughter by Philip, Thessalonice, who afterwards married Antipater's son Cassander. The episode goes a long way to dispel that modern romantic legend which portrays Olympias as a jealous monogamist. Fierce and murderous she could undoubtedly be; but her morals were those of the clan, and dominated by kinship loyalties. So long as her own and her son's status remained undisturbed, Philip was welcome to as many mistresses as he liked. Indeed, the offspring of such liaisons were entitled to a recognized position within the royal household.²²

It was now, in the autumn of 346, that the veteran Athenian pamphleteer Isocrates published his Address to Philip, calling for a Panhellenic crusade against Persia, under Philip's leadership. The idea of such a crusade was by no means new. Gorgias had propounded it at the Olympic Festival in 408. Lysias brought it up again in 384 — and with good reason. Three years earlier Sparta had forced the Greek states into a humiliating settlement with Persia known as the Peace of Antalcidas. The Hellenic cities of Asia Minor were ceded to the Great King, and the descendants of men who had fought at Salamis or Thermopylae acknowledged his overlordship, his right to arbitrate in Greek disputes, his guardianship of each state's ‘autonomy’.²³ As might be expected, this gave rise to a good deal of wild talk about launching a joint campaign to end so humiliating a state of affairs, and to free the Ionian cities from Persian control.²⁴ But the first serious rational attempt to expound such a programme was Isocrates' own Panegyricus (380), a high-minded monograph which envisaged Athens leading the crusade against barbarian Asia, with a penitent and regenerate Sparta at her side.

Its actual effects were somewhat different. The Athenians found it a splendid justification for attempting to recover their old Aegean sea-empire, and the original plan disappeared in a welter of internecine feuding and bloody-minded intrigue. Isocrates regretfully wrote off Athens as a potential leader for his crusade, and composed an admonitory little tract about irresponsible aggression and the bitter fruits of imperialism.²⁵ But he never abandoned the project, which he regarded as ‘the only war that is better than peace: more like a sacred mission than a military expedition’. About 356 he put the idea up to young Archidamus, the future King of Sparta; he had even toyed with the idea of approaching that formidable tyrant Dionysius of Syracuse.²⁶ This shows very clearly in what direction his ideas were moving. Athens might be the fountain-head of civilization, liberty and democracy; that did not necessarily make her an effective leader, least of all when the cooperation of other Greek cities was essential. The emergence of Philip must have seemed the answer to all Isocrates' prayers. What a crusade needed was a strong leader.

Despite the great difference in tone between the Panegyricus and the Address to Philip (the intervening years had rubbed Isocrates' idealism perilously thin) several of the main arguments are identical. There is the same emphasis on Persian cowardice, effeminacy, and military incompetence. Both pamphlets dilate on the fabulously rich pickings to be had, for little effort, by an invading army: what an intolerable situation, when barbarians were more prosperous than Greeks! Both, too, stress the fact that a crusade of this kind would absorb the dangerously large number of landless and unemployed mercenaries now loose in Greece, a legacy of endless wars and factions. Both, above all, recommend common action, against a common foe, as the best possible antidote to those interminable interstate feuds which continued to tear Greece apart, rendering her incapable of any concerted action. ‘It is much more glorious,’ Isocrates asserted, ‘to fight against the king for his empire than to contend against each other for the hegemony.’ He, like most of his contemporaries, regarded the Persians as ‘both natural enemies and hereditary foes’: the crusade was to be at once ethnic, cultural, and religious.²⁷

The Address to Philip, on the other hand, was designed for a specific audience, and contains certain new features. The glorification of free institutions is discreetly dropped; instead we get a set-piece on the advantages of one-man rule. There are extended parallels with the war conducted by Heracles against Troy, for the general good of mankind: Heracles, of course, was held to be Philip's direct ancestor, and is described as such. ‘It is your privilege,’ Isocrates wrote, working up for his peroration, ‘as one who has been blessed with untrammelled freedom, to consider all Hellas your fatherland’ — rhetorical hyperbole which Philip, in the event, took somewhat more literally than had been intended.²⁸ Indeed, taken as a whole the Address to Philip must have caused its recipient considerable sardonic amusement.

To begin with, its ethnic conceit was only equalled by its naivety. As everyone knew, Isocrates had only turned to the strong man of Macedonia after canvassing every possible alternative. The flattery was too palpable, the political volte-face too gross. Moreover, it appeared that Philip was to lead this crusade for entirely altruistic motives — was to act, in fact, as the unpaid military leader of a free Greek confederacy, and get nothing for his pains except a little booty and the good opinion of the Greek world. It never seems to have struck Isocrates that Philip might have ideas of his own on the subject. However, the king was by no means ungrateful. It was pleasant — and advantageous — to have his Heraclid descent upheld by so venerable an Athenian pundit. Furthermore, the scheme the pundit advocated was an eminently practical one, and many of his detailed suggestions were subsequently carried out.²⁹ And though Philip did not give a fig for Panhellenism as an idea, he at once saw how it could be turned into highly effective camouflage (a notion which his son subsequently took over ready-made). Isocrates had, unwittingly, supplied him with the propaganda-line he needed. From now on he merely had to clothe his Macedonian ambitions in a suitably Panhellenic dress.

But Philip was not the only interested party who read Isocrates' Address; it clearly came to the attention of the Great King himself. When the complete text reached Susa, late in 346, it must have caused considerable alarm. Many rebels and exiles from Persiaalready saw the powerful young King of Macedonia as their future leader in a crusade against the Achaemenid regime; and Philip, who had given refuge to some of them at Pella, did nothing to discourage such a notion. The possibility that he might act on so tempting a programme could by no means be ruled out.³⁰ Persia at the time was under the rule of Artaxerxes III Ochus, variously described as ‘the last of the great rulers of the ancient Near East’ and ‘the most blood-thirsty of all Achaemenid monarchs’ — not necessarily incompatible statements. The harsh regime he introduced had driven some of his subjects to revolt, and many more to seek asylum abroad. One of Artaxerxes' first acts on accession had been to kill off all his relatives, without distinction of age or sex. He then ordered his satraps in Asia Minor to disband their mercenaries. It was one of these satraps, Artabazus, who ended up at Philip's court (see above, p. 37), after an abortive attempt at rebellion for which he had contrived to secure some support from Athens.

The rebellion fizzled out; the Great King soon bullied Athens into withdrawing her support; and at this point Isocrates began, for a while, to get cold feet about his crusade. These Persians were no longer the cowardly and effeminate cut-out figures of Greek propaganda: they had suddenly turned hostile in earnest. Artaxerxes Ochus was not, it appeared, a man to trifle with (his letters to the Athenian government left little doubt on that score). Rumours filled the air. Ochus had ambitions to be a second Xerxes, and reconquer Greece. Twelve thousand camels were padding down the Royal Road from Susa, laden with gold for the purchase of Greek mercenaries. The Athenian demagogues had a field-day.

In Egypt, too, Artaxerxes acted with disconcerting speed and decisiveness. For some time now this vital province had been lost to Persia, and governed by a rebel nationalist regime. In 345, less than twelve months after the publication of the Address, aPersian army marched from Babylon to the Phoenician coast, and captured Sidon. In 344/3 a general assembly was dispatched to the Greek states, appealing for help in the Great King's forthcoming campaign against Egypt. This was a neat move on Artaxerxes' part. Philip, of course, supported — and was known to support — the Egyptian rebels. Thus Greek reaction to this embassy should, within limits, reveal just how far each city's traditional hostility to Persia had been eclipsed by its more immediate fear of Macedonianexpansion. In the event Thebes and Argos offered assistance, while Athens and Sparta abstained. The line-up was now clear enough. At this point the Athenians — acting, for once, on the dictates of reason rather than emotion — passed a decree calling upon Philip to make common cause with them against Persia. But Philip had no intention of being hustled into premature action. Before he invaded Asia he had to be sure of Greece — and one of the main unknown quantities in Greece was Athens herself. The appeal went unanswered.

Any lingering doubts Philip might have had were removed by the events of the next few months. Artaxerxes had weighed up his chances to a nicety. His troops — strongly reinforced now by Greek mercenaries — smashed their way south through the Negevinto Egypt. By late autumn all resistance was broken. Nectanebo, the native Pharaonic pretender, fled the country (to reappear later, in legend, as Alexander's putative father). Phoenicia and Egypt were once more in Persian hands, and the latter was quickly reorganized as an imperial province. At some time during these operations Artaxerxes sent envoys to Philip and negotiated a non-aggression pact, on terms extremely favourable to the Great King.³¹ His main condition of alliance was very simple: Macedonia must withdraw her backing from all rebels who owed Artaxerxes allegiance. Now Philip had not only harboured any anti-Achaemenid rebel who sought his protection; he had also given private backing, for his own ends, to various would-be independent local rulers inAsia Minor itself. Some of these deals he had kept secret. Others — such as his support for the rebellious local kings of Cyprus — were public knowledge.

Philip was nothing if not a realist; he now cut his losses and repudiated his secret agreements — those, at least, of which the Persians had already been apprised. The Persian — Macedonian alliance went through, and the Cypriot revolt collapsed. Once again, at a slightly stiffer price than usual, Philip had bought himself precious time. He also (taking a calculated risk) kept up his private understanding with Hermeias, the eunuch and ex-slave who ruled over Atarneus in the southern Troad, opposite Mytilene, and whose territory offered a most promising bridgehead for any future invasion.³² Just how long this link could be preserved, however, was another matter. Already Hermeias had come under some suspicion. He controlled too much of the Troad, he was acting too independently, he possessed a formidable army of mercenaries. Sooner or later the Great King must surely close in on him. When that moment came, there was one member of his family whom Philip would much prefer to have safe at Pella — not merely for his own sake (he was a brilliant man) but also on account of the special knowledge he had concerning Philip's invasion plans.

This was the son of old Amyntas' court physician, a boyhood friend some three years older than Philip himself (who in 343 had just turned forty). He had been one of Plato's most distinguished pupils, and just before the master's death, in 348/7, there was a strong likelihood of his being nominated to succeed him as head of the Academy. In the event, however, the dying Plato chose his own nephew, Speusippus: a bitter disappointment. About the same time his home-town was sacked and burnt by Macedonian troops, busy mopping up pockets of resistance in the Chalcidic peninsula. As a Macedonian dependant himself he was by no means popular in Athens, either; and now there was nothing to keep him there any longer.

He therefore emigrated, together with his friend Xenocrates, the future head of the Academy. They took up residence at Hermeias' court, and promptly set about the task — so dear to Greek philosophers, so outré by modern standards — of transforming this ex-slave and ex-banker into the ideal philosopher-king. The little group got on famously: treaties with neighbouring cities were made in the name of ‘Hermeias and the Companions’. In due course Hermeias' zealous mentor married his patron's niece; unkind rumour claimed that he had previously been involved with Hermeias himself. Quite apart from his scientific and philosophical activities, he was also acting as a confidential political agent, a link-man between Hermeias and Philip.^{a 33} His personal appearance was foppish, not to say eccentric. He was balding, spindle-shanked, and had small eyes. Perhaps in an effort to compensate for these disadvantages, he wore dandified clothes, cut and curled his hair in an affected manner, and spoke with a lisp. Numerous rings sparkled on his fingers: the overall effect must have been rather like the young Disraeli at his worst.³⁴ His name was Aristotle.

He had realized, sooner than most people, that Artaxerxes' new, dynamic policy might well mean trouble for Hermeias. In 345/4, with canny foresight, he moved across the straits to Mytilene, perhaps at the invitation of a young local botanist namedTheophrastus, who had come to Atarneus to hear him lecture. For a couple of years Aristotle remained on the island, teaching, researching, and keeping an eye on Persian activities in the Troad. It was here, during the winter of 343/2, that Philip's invitation reached him. Would he — in return for a suitably high honorarium — agree to come back to Macedonia, and act as personal tutor to Alexander? The boy was thirteen now, and needed a first-class teacher to supervise his studies. He was, Philip indicated delicately, proving a trifle unmanageable. As an extra inducement, Philip promised to restore Aristotle's birthplace, Stagira, and to recall ‘those of its citizens who were in exile or slavery’.³⁵ This was to be no ordinary tutorship; it would carry very special personal and political responsibilities.

The philosopher's decision was never in doubt.

Alexander had grown into a boy of rather below average height, but very muscular and compact of body. He was already (like his hero Achilles) a remarkably fast runner. His hair, blond and tousled, is traditionally said to have resembled a lion's mane, and he had that high complexion which fair-skinned people so often display. His eyes were odd, one being grey-blue and the other dark brown. His teeth were sharply pointed — ‘like little pegs’, says the Alexander-Romance, an uncharacteristically realistic touch which carries instant conviction. He had a somewhat high-pitched voice, which tended to harshness when he was excited. His gait was fast and nervous, a habit he had picked up from old Leonidas; and he carried his head bent slightly upwards and to the left — whether because of some physical defect, or through mere affectation, cannot now be determined. There is something almost girlish about his earliest portraits (cf. below, p. 66), a hint of leashed hysteria behind the melting charm. Aristotle, one feels, probably had a testing time.³⁶

Philip decided, wisely, that what with political intrigues and the omnipresent influence of Olympias, Pella was no place for the young prince at this stage in his career. Higher education demanded rural solitude. He therefore assigned to Aristotle the so-called Precinct of the Nymphs at Mieza, a village in the eastern foothills of the Bermius range, north of Beroea (Verria). This precinct probably formed part of the famous Gardens of Midas (see above, p. 4), which covered the modern Verria—Naoussa—Vodena area: a district of fine vineyards and orchards (Naoussa still produces an excellent red wine much akin to Burgundy).³⁷ As late as Plutarch's day, in the first century A.D., visitors were still shown the stone benches and shady avenues where Aristotle had conducted his lessons. Nor was Alexander Aristotle's only pupil; and again, this shows good sense on Philip's part. A select group of the young prince's contemporaries joined him at Mieza. They included his lifelong friend Hephaestion; Cassander, son of Antipater, and Ptolemy, son of Lagus, both themselves future kings; and Marsyas of Pella, who afterwards wrote a treatise, now lost, on The Education of Alexander.³⁸

Philip, we are told, enjoined his son to study hard, and to pay close attention to all Aristotle taught him — ‘so that,’ he said, ‘you may not do a great many things of the sort that I am sorry to have done’. At this point Alexander, somewhat pertly, took Philip to task ‘because he was having children by other women beside his wife’. Having children, be it noted, not merely relations: this alone should suffice to dispel the modern notion that Alexander was playing an adolescent Hamlet to Philip's Claudius. What in fact we observe here is an entirely natural anxiety about the succession. After all, Philip had had trouble enough with his illegitimate half-brothers (see above, pp. 22 ff.); why should he, Alexander, be made to go through the whole weary business over again? The king's reply, too, shows that he knew very well what lay at the root of the matter. In answer to his son's criticisms he said: ‘Well then, if you have many competitors for the kingdom [my italics], prove yourself honourable and good, so that you may obtain the kingdom not because of me, but because of yourself.’³⁹

This story does much to discredit that quasi-Freudian element which some modern scholars⁴⁰ have professed to discover in the relationship between Alexander and Olympias. The truth is less romantic, but of considerable significance for future events. Even at this age Alexander's one overriding obsession (and, if it comes to that, his mother's) was with his future status as king. If he had any kind of Oedipus complex it came a very poor second to the burning dynastic ambition which Olympias so sedulously fostered in him: those who insist on his psychological motivation would do better to take Adler as their mentor than Freud.

When it was suggested to him that he was a fast enough sprinter to enter for the Olympic Games, he replied that he would only run if he had kings as his competitors:⁴¹ a revealing remark, and one which agrees well with what we know of his adult character. While pursuing Darius through Asia, he heard that Aristotle had published, as a treatise, the more esoteric material on metaphysics which had hitherto been reserved for verbal discussion with a few select pupils — and had, therefore, formed part of the course atMieza. The king, though occupied with far more pressing matters, still found time to dash off a short and furious note of complaint to his former teacher. ‘In what,’ he asked, ‘shall I surpass other men if those doctrines wherein I have been trained are to be all men's common property?’ Aristotle replied, soothingly, that the treatise would mean nothing to those who had not taken part in his classes, and was, in fact, only published as an aide-mémoire for the initiated⁴² — a somewhat lame réplique, by no means calculated to soothe that inflamed and ultra-royal ego.

Ever to strive to be best: the Homeric ideal forms a recurrent leitmotiv, dominating every branch of Alexander's multifarious activities. Nor indeed (if Book III of the Politics bears any relation to the views expounded at Mieza) were Aristotle's politicalopinions likely to lessen the crown prince's opinion of himself. As a good Greek philosopher, one might have thought, Aristotle was liable to find his royal pupil's status and ambitions more than mildly embarrassing. The whole trend of current political theory, liberal and authoritarian alike, was towards some form of republicanism. ThePolitics suggests how he contrived to circumvent this difficulty. While deploring monarchy in general as an institution, he nevertheless allowed one justification for it, and one alone: outstanding personal areté (achievement, Renaissance virtù). The choice of this peculiarly Homeric criterion was, surely, no accident. Such an individual, ‘a very god among men’, no more amenable than Zeus himself to the rule of his fellows, and above legal sanctions since he embodied the law, could only, said Aristotle, become a king; there was no other course open to him.

Yet even so, only in one case was monarchy right (that is, morally justified): ‘when the areté of the king or of his family is so preeminent that it outclasses the areté of all the citizens put together’. It would have been tactless, to say the least, had Philip'semployee not made it clear that the Argead royal house fell squarely into this category. Such a doctrine may not have encouraged Alexander to claim divinity in after years (even this has been seriously suggested) but it certainly did nothing to diminish his royal self-assurance.⁴³ Nor was Aristotle slow to find intellectual arguments in support of Alexander's passionate longing to win glory at the expense of the Barbarian. Indeed, his attitude to Persia was uncompromisingly ethnocentric. He believed slavery to be a natural institution, and equally that all ‘barbarians’ (i.e. non-Greeks) were slaves by nature. It was therefore right and fitting for Greeks to rule over barbarians, but not for barbarians to rule over Greeks. Like many intellectuals with a racialist axe to grind, Aristotle found support for his thesis in facts drawn from geopolitics or ‘natural law’. Greek superiority had to be proved demonstrably innate, a gift of nature. In one celebrated fragment he counsels Alexander to be ‘a hegemon [leader] to the Greeks and a despot to the barbarians, to look after the former as after friends and relatives, and to deal with the latter as with beasts or plants’.⁴⁴

There were good personal reasons for him to feel as he did. In 341 Hermeias' private dealings with Philip became known at Susa. The Great King sent Mentor, his Greek mercenary general, to deal with the philosopher-eunuch of Atarneus. Mentor tricked Hermeias into attending a conference, and promptly placed him under arrest. In Athens, Demosthenes gloated rather unpleasantly over the top-secret Macedonian plans Hermeias was bound to reveal under torture. But he misjudged his man. Mutilated, impaled, and dying, Hermeias nevertheless managed to get one final message out to his former friends. He had done nothing, he said, unworthy of a scholar and a gentleman. Philip's secrets went to the grave with him, and Aristotle, from his comfortable retreat in Mieza, wrote a glowing ode to his memory.⁴⁵

It is most often assumed that Alexander was fundamentally at odds with his tutor's xenophobia: that already the embryo world-conqueror looked to wider political horizons than those of the polis. One scholar even goes so far as to claim that ‘the meeting of genius with genius … remained without a deeper meaning and without effect.’⁴⁶ But even supposing Alexander later adopted, in some form or other, a policy of racial fusion — in itself a highly debatable point — there is no reason to suppose he did not wholeheartedly share Aristotle's views to begin with. Even his most idealistic champion concedes as much. ‘The primary reason why Alexander invaded Persia,’ says Tarn, ‘was, no doubt, that he never thought of not doing it; it was his inheritance.’⁴⁷

Besides, he had the whole body of Greek civilized opinion behind him. Euripides held that it was proper (eikos) for ‘barbarians’ to be subject to Greeks. Plato and Isocrates both thought of all non-Hellenes as natural enemies who could be enslaved or exterminated at will. Aristotle himself regarded a war against barbarians as essentially just.⁴⁸ Such theories may well be dismissed as grotesque; but they are no more grotesque than de Gobineau's concept of the Aryan superman. And grotesque or not, they have the power to compel belief, and thus to affect men's lives in the most fundamental way. When Hitler exterminated the European Jews, he based his actions, precisely, on the belief that certain categories of mankind could be dismissed as sub-human — that is, like Aristotle, he equated them with beasts or plants.

For Aristotle, however, the brute or vegetable nature of barbarians had a special quality, which must have struck a responsive chord in his pupil. ‘No one,’ he wrote, ‘would value existence for the pleasure of eating alone, or that of sex … unless he were utterly servile’ (i.e. slave or barbarian). To such a person, on the other hand, it would make no difference whether he were beast or man. The key example he cites is the Assyrian voluptuary Sardanapalus (Assurbanipal): barbarians, it is clear, are to be despised above all because they live exclusively through and for the senses.⁴⁹ The purely hedonistic life, in fact, was something which Aristotle taught his pupil to regard as beneath contempt. Such a doctrine must have had a strong appeal for Alexander, who always placed a premium on self-control and self-denial (at least during the earlier stages of his career), and whose enthusiastic, impressionable nature reveals a strong hero-worshipping streak. (It made no odds to him whether his hero was mythical or contemporary: he may have modelled himself on Achilles, but he was equally ready to adopt the quick-stepping gait of his old tutor Leonidas.) The Alexander who ate so sparingly, who gave away the spoils of war with such contemptuous generosity, keeping little for himself, and who said he was never more conscious of his own mortality than ‘during the time he lay with a woman or slept’⁵⁰ — this, surely, was a man whose debt to Aristotle's teaching and influence was fundamental. For good or ill, the years at Mieza left a permanent mark on him.

Aristotle's advice on the respective treatment of Greeks and barbarians is, of course, capable of a more mundane interpretation: that in order to get the best out of those whom one intends to exploit, one must humour them far enough to win their cooperation.Greeks required to be treated as equals, to have their sense of independence — however illusory — fostered with the greatest care. Asiatics, on the other hand, would only respond to, or respect, a show of rigorous authoritarianism — the Victorian district officer's creed. Whether Aristotle intended this lesson or not, it was one that Alexander learnt all too well. As we shall see, he applied it to every individual or group with whom he subsequently came in contact.

He also absorbed a great deal of his tutor's own omnivorous scientific curiosity, and the sharply empirical cast of mind that went with it. Once, on being asked, as a schoolroom test, what he would do in certain circumstances, he replied that he could not tell until the circumstances arose — an answer which must surely have won Aristotle's approval. Like his great predecessor Hippocrates, Aristotle believed that experiment and observation formed the only proper basis for scientific advance, an axiom on which modern science still largely rests. When Alexander launched his Asiatic invasion, he took with him a whole host of zoologists, botanists and surveyors; the material and information they collected laid the foundations for several epoch-making scientific works, including Aristotle's own Historia Animalium. Again, there can be little doubt as to the source of this unprecedented undertaking.

In addition, Alexander developed a strong interest in medicine and biology — two more of Aristotle's own favourite subjects. Throughout his life he was, Plutarch says, ‘not only fond of the theory of medicine, but actually came to the aid of his friends when they were sick, and prescribed for them certain treatments and regimens’.⁵¹ Perhaps what benefited him most in this scientific training was the observant flexibility of mind it produced, the ability to deal with any problem as it arose, on its own merits and without preconceptions. Here, indeed, we touch on his most characteristic quality as a field-commander.

At a more formal level, the course of studies he followed was that prescribed by Plato and current among all Academics of the day. He read and discussed poetry, above all Homer: we have already seen how great an enthusiasm he had for the Iliad. He was given a grounding in geometry, astronomy, and rhetoric — particularly in that branch of rhetoric known as eristics, which meant arguing a point from either side with equal facility. Alexander developed a great taste for eristics: this was one sphere in which Aristotle's training had disastrous consequences later, and it is not hard to see why. To ordinary unsophisticated Macedonians, ‘a man ready to speak pro and con was clearly a false person who proved that he was a good liar’.⁵² Old Isocrates, understandably piqued that Alexander's education had not been entrusted to himself, or at least to a member of his own rhetorical school, regarded the entire Academic discipline as worse than useless. We have a letter he wrote Alexander about 342, warning the young prince, in veiled diplomatic language, against these hair-splitting sophists who will never teach him how to cope with the harsh realities of politics. A prince's part, he implies, is not to persuade, but to command: Alexander should avoid eristics. This, as things turned out, was a shrewd piece of advice, even if given for parti pris motives. Needless to say, it was ignored.⁵³

Alexander's sojourn in the Gardens of Midas lasted for three years, during which time relations between Macedonia and the Greek states, Athens in particular, grew steadily worse. While the young prince and his tutor paced the shady walks of Mieza, Philiphad more immediate and practical affairs to deal with. He spent most of 342 in Thrace, where his frontiers were weakest, planting military colonies along the Hebrus Valley. The colonists were the scum of Macedonia — jailbirds, unemployed mercenaries, troublemakers of every sort. One such settlement acquired the nickname of Poneropolis, or ‘Thugsville’: Philip, it is clear, was economically solving two problems at once. It was now, too, that (in accordance with his usual dynastic policy: see above, p. 27) he married his fourth wife — Meda, the daughter of a Thracian prince name Cothelas. She brought him a handsome dowry and a valuable alliance. Olympias, as far as we know, raised no objections.⁵⁴

Demosthenes had no illusions about Philip's ultimate goal. The king, he said, was not wintering ‘in that purgatory for the sake of the rye and millet of the Thracian store-pits’, but as part of a long-term scheme for taking over ‘the Athenian harbours and dockyards and war-galleys and silver-mines’.⁵⁵ This prospect was alarming enough to make the Athenians send out a condottiere called Diopeithes to the Thracian Chersonese (Gallipoli Peninsula), with the task of ‘safeguarding Athenian interests’ there — a classic euphemism. Diopeithes took some so-called ‘colonists’ with him, who seem to have been the same sort of riff-raff as Philip was establishing along the Hebrus. He himself was little more than a government-sponsored pirate, who lived by extorting protection money.Isocrates, made somewhat nervous by these aggressive tactics, sent an open letter to Philip, suggesting a Macedonian — Athenian entente, and renewing his proposals for a joint expedition against Persia.⁵⁶

Philip sent a formal protest about Diopeithes' activities, which was debated in the Athenian assembly. At the same time he began gathering a large army in Thrace, with reinforcements from Thessaly and Macedonia. Demosthenes made two fighting speeches against Diopeithes' recall, emphasizing the urgency of not letting Philip get the upper hand in the Dardanelles or the Bosporus. He also pointed out what an advantage Macedonia's standing army enjoyed over the conscript levies of a democratic citystate. Philip's men were far better trained; Philip himself ‘makes no difference between summer and winter and has no season set apart for inaction’; Athens might not be at war with Philip, but Philip was already at war with Athens.⁵⁷ Demosthenes also saw, more clearly than anyone, just how Philip could apply pressure to Athens most effectively. Already the Macedonian was ‘laying down warships and building docks’, nor could there be much doubt as to their purpose. If Philip captured Byzantium, Athenian grain-supplies would be seriously imperilled. Years later, when recapitulating Philip's career, Demosthenes put the matter in a nutshell: ‘Observing that we consume more imported corn than any other nation, he proposed to get control of the carrying trade in corn.’ Behind all the complex political manoeuvres of the years between 342 and 338 looms the ever-present — and highly effective — threat of economic blackmail.⁵⁸

Demosthenes' positive recommendations were uncompromising. Diopeithes must be kept in place. More important, an embassy should be sent to Susa: the time had come for a rapprochement with the Great King. The Greek states must sink their differences and form a new Panhellenic League. In particular, Byzantium must be persuaded to renew her ancient friendship with Athens.⁵⁹ These recommendations were, for the most part, carried out. Byzantium and Abydos joined the Athenian alliance. Diopeithes remained in his command, and a league of Greek states was formed against Macedonia. When Philip expelled Olympias' uncle Arybbas from the throne of Epirus, and replaced him with young Alexander the Molossian, Athens pointedly offered Arybbas political asylum. The naval building programme was stepped up. Friendly towns in the Thracian Chersonese were voted special honours by the Athenian assembly, and in March 340 Demosthenes was voted a gold crown, which he received at the Greater Dionysia.⁶⁰

Most important of all, a secret embassy was dispatched from Athens to Susa, with highly successful results. The Great King was at last persuaded to make an open declaration of hostility to Macedonia. The psychological effect of this move on the city-statesmust have been considerable. He also provided the envoys with a lavish contingency fund, for the express purpose of bribing Greek politicians to stir up war against Philip (Demosthenes alone was later accused of pocketing no less than 3,000 gold darics from this source). Philip, finding himself up against the most serious crisis of his career, acted with characteristic promptness and vigour.⁶¹ As a test case, he called on Byzantium and Perinthus (a key port in the Propontis) to honour their agreements with Macedonia by supporting him in his campaign against Diopeithes. Both were still — nominally at least — his allies; and both refused point-blank. Philip, without further argument, mobilized his new fleet, bent on whipping these recalcitrant allies back into line before the rotcould spread. Since he meant to command this expedition in person, he summoned the sixteen-year-old Alexander home to Pella, where he formally appointed him Regent of Macedonia and Master of the Royal Seal, with the experienced Antipater as his adviser.