TWO
ALEXANDER THE Great, believed by many to be the mightiest general of antiquity, was born in July, 356 BC, of the marriage between Philip II of Macedon and his third wife, the Albanian princess Olympias. It is unclear exactly how they met or when they married, but it is known that the marriage was a stormy one. Philip was at the peak of his political powers when they married and when Alexander was conceived. The day Alexander was born, his father had just taken the town of Potidaea. Philip received three messages simultaneously—one of his generals had just overthrown the Illyrians, his racehorse had won at the Olympic games, and his wife had given birth to a son. The soothsayers assured him that a child born on the same day as two other such successful events would be invincible.
On her father’s side, Olympias traced her ancestry back to Achilles, and on her mother’s she traced her family to Helen of Troy. She belonged to a strange cult of snake worshippers, and she probably kept and sometimes slept with pet snakes. This snake cult was related to the orgiastic worship of Dionysus and encouraged its devotees to engage in frenzied rituals. The queen would pull large snakes out of ivy or baskets and encourage the other women to coil them around their bodies. The worship of Dionysus had long been wild and uninhibited, involving animal sacrifices and drinking of the blood. In ancient times even human sacrifices took place. Philip seemed to be repelled by the fanatic zeal with which Olympias led other women in this worship, but whatever his reluctance to sanction such a religion, the couple managed to cohabit long enough to produce a son.
Philip had other wives, but for a long time Olympias was his principal one. Wild and unprincipled in many respects, she still managed to take an interest in her child’s education. She brought two tutors, Lysimachus and Leonidas, from her own family to Macedonia to teach and train the young prince. The tie with Lysimachus continued into Alexander’s adulthood; Leonidas, on the other hand, was very austere, forcing Alexander to satisfy himself with nothing luxurious or excessive. His education, which emphasized doing without luxuries, even necessities, stood Alexander well in his later years of deprivation, when he was traveling through the deserts in the East.
In the last three years of Philip’s reign, when Alexander was in his teens, Olympias’s sole ambition was to ensure the throne for her son. Alexander always remained fiercely loyal to his mother, faithfully sending her long letters after his ascension to power, reporting on his journeys and wars. These letters—except for a handful of fragments, possibly forged—have not been found and none of Olympias’s letters back to Alexander have been discovered either, even though Alexander maintained a good secretary who kept a daily royal journal of his activities.
It is curious that in the last year of his life, after he ceased his Asian campaign and reestablished himself in Persia, Alexander did not send for his mother. Indeed, after he crossed the Hellespont into Asia Minor—begining a decade-long separation—mother and son never met face-to-face again. All indications are that Alexander loved his mother deeply but did not want to be in her powerful, demanding presence. Sending letters to Olympias would suffice. Alexander asserted his own identity.
Alexander’s relations with his formidable and successful father were also tense. Philip conquered much of the Greek peninsula but left it to his son to organize. Philip was cautious in dealing with the noisy and resourceful cities of southern Greece. He did not try to conquer them, except for Thebes, which lay halfway down the Greek peninsula and rebelled actively against him.
Justin, a Roman writer of the late second or early third century AD and author of a life of Philip, drew a sharp distinction between Philip and Alexander:
Philip was succeeded by his son Alexander who surpassed his father both in good qualities and bad. Each had his own method of gaining victory, Alexander making war openly and Philip using trickery; the latter took pleasure in duping the enemy, the former in putting them to flight in the open. Philip was the more prudent strategist, Alexander had the greater vision. The father could hide, and sometimes even suppress, his anger; when Alexander’s had flared up, his retaliation could be neither delayed nor kept in check. Both were excessively fond of drink, but intoxication brought out different shortcomings. It was the father’s habit to rush straight at the enemy from the dinner-party, engage him in combat and recklessly expose himself to danger; Alexander’s violence was directed not against the enemy but against his own comrades. As a result Philip was often brought back from his battles wounded while the other often left a dinner with his friends’ blood on his hands. Philip was unwilling to rule along with his friends; Alexander exercised his rule over his. The father preferred to be loved, the son to be feared. They had a comparable interest in literature. The father had greater shrewdness, the son was truer to his word. Philip was more restrained in his language and discourse, Alexander in his actions. When it came to showing mercy to the defeated, the son was temperamentally more amenable and more magnanimous. The father was more disposed to thrift, the son to extravagance. With such qualities did the father lay the basis for a worldwide empire and the son bring to completion the glorious enterprise.1
Philip was satisfied not to try to conquer Athens, Sparta, and Corinth. He formed them into a league with himself as hegemon (similar to today’s chairman of the board or CEO). In Athens the orator Demosthenes so raged against Philip and forecast the threat he posed to the Greek city-states if he was not stopped (like Churchill on Hitler in the 1930s) that his speeches are a synecdoche for opposition to a tyrant. These orations are called philippics, the same term used later for the orations by Cicero against Mark Antony. (The term is still a synonym for speeches of rage and condemnation.) Alexander eventually succeeded in getting Demosthenes exiled from Athens; Mark Antony had Cicero killed.
Though Alexander was carefully trained and educated in the humanities and sciences, from the age of five he was meant to be a highly skilled soldier. He had an affinity for diplomacy, and by the time he was fifteen, he was engaging Greek ambassadors in discussions. He had a special inclination to be a horseman and is said to have personally broken in his horse Bucephelus, in whose saddle he rode into battle for the next twenty years until the animal died.
The story goes that in the Balkans King Philip had acquired a very handsome horse of a special, elegant breed, but Philip and his grooms could not break the horse. It stood taller than the common run of runty Macedonian horses, and it boasted a proud mane and shimmering brown coat.
Philip and his grooms were about to give up on the Balkan horse as incapable of ever being broken in when Alexander, who was there, remarked that they were losing a wonderful horse simply because they were too inexperienced and too spineless to handle him. Initially Philip remained silent, but after Alexander repeated his comment and became visibly upset, Philip asked Alexander if his criticism of his elders was due to his knowing more than his elders, to which Alexander replied that he could at least handlethis horse better than they. His father then asked his son what the consequence of his impulsiveness would be, were he to not succeed in handling the horse. His answer, which was the promise to pay the price of the horse, resulted in much laughter. After the financial terms between father and son were settled, Alexander quickly ran toward the horse. He did not immediately mount the horse. Earlier, he had noticed that the horse was greatly bothered by the sight of its own shadow, and so after he took the reins, he turned the horse toward the sun. For a short while, he ran beside it, and patted it in order to calm its panting. Then, after gently setting aside his cloak, he quickly and firmly mounted the horse, using the reins to put pressure on the bit without hurting its mouth. Once Alexander felt comfortable that the horse had dropped its menacing demeanor and was eager to gallop, he gave it some rein and urged it on, using a firmer voice and kick of his foot.
Silence fell over the crowd. But when Alexander returned truly pleased with himself, he was welcomed with cheers and applause. Philip was said to have burst into tears of joy. After Alexander dismounted, Philip kissed his head and said to him, “Son, look for a kingdom that matches your size. Macedonia has not enough space for you.” Alexander was about twelve years old when this occurred.2
So the oft-told story goes. Alexander called the horse Bucephalus, and the two were devoted to each other. He loved that horse and for twenty years, until Bucephalus died on the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, Alexander rode Bucephalus into battle and would ride no other until the aged steed died. For Alexander the horse was much more than an instrument. After Bucephalus’s death, Alexander founded a city on the Hydaspes River and called it Bucephala in honor of his loyal mount.
During the earlier years, Bucephalus accompanied Alexander during many of his ordeals and dangers. Only the king rode Bucephalus, as he refused all others to attempt to mount him. He was a large horse with a noble spirit, and his distinguishing characteristic was the brand of an ox-head, for which he was given the name Bucephalus. Another story claims that, though black, he had on his head a white colored mark that resembled most of all an ox-head.3
The horse never flinched from battle, proudly carrying Alexander into the middle of the fray. There is a contemporary wall painting showing Alexander and Bucephalus encountering the Persian emperor Darius III with his scythed chariot. Alexander on horseback hacks away at the Persian soldiers, and his army prevails over the Persian emperor, who is driven from the field. It is said that Alexander and Darius met face-to-face, and proud Bucephalus helped Alexander to triumph.
When Alexander was a preadolescent, Philip chose the philosopher Aristotle as his tutor. Though Aristotle had not yet entered into his stage of philosophical writings, he was nonetheless interested in a wide variety of subjects. Philip had maintained a long-standing correspondence with Plato, and when he needed a tutor for his son, he turned to Plato for advice. Among Plato’s students, the job of teaching the young Alexander was much coveted—testimony to Philip’s increasing influence—and Aristotle was chosen. It is not known exactly how long the student-teacher relationship lasted or what Aristotle and Alexander discussed, but what is known is that the years they spent together had long-lasting results. Robin Lane Fox gives us some information on this subject:
Whether briefly or not, Alexander spent these school hours with one of the most tireless and wide-ranging minds which has ever lived. Nowadays Aristotle is remembered as a philosopher, but apart from his philosophical works he also wrote books on the constitutions of 158 different states, edited a list of the victors in the games at Delphi, discussed music and medicine, astronomy, magnets, and optics, made notes on Homer, analysed rhetoric, outlined the forms of poetry, considered the irrational sides of man’s nature, set zoology on a properly experimental course in a compendious series of masterpieces whose facts become art through the love of a rare observer of nature; he was intrigued by bees and he began the study of embryology, although the dissection of human corpses was forbidden and his only opportunity was to procure and examine an aborted fetus. The contact between Greece’s greatest brain and her greatest conqueror is irresistible, and their mutual influence has occupied the imagination ever since.4
Aristotle felt that political science was wasted on the young because they had no experience of life and still followed their emotions. This may be a “sour grapes” feeling, since there is very little evidence that Aristotle influenced Alexander’s politics at all. Once the tutoring was accomplished and Alexander was on his own, they met infrequently, if at all. There is some evidence of a correspondence, but there was a falling-out in later years. Alexander had hired Aristotle’s nephew Callisthenes as his court historian. Callisthenes accompanied the king on his conquests and wrote about him in highly flattering terms—a situation that lasted until 327 BC, when Alexander had Callisthenes executed because he had become too open with his criticisms of the king and had joined a conspiracy to unseat Alexander. Even though Aristotle described his nephew as a blockhead to involve himself in such a plot, the execution had a decided dampening effect on Aristotle’s relationship with Alexander.
But when politics was not an issue, many of Alexander’s interests during his adult life show a definite effect of the old philosopher:
He [Alexander] prescribed cures for snakebite to his friends; he suggested that a new strain of cattle should be shipped from India to Macedonia; he shared his father’s interest in drainage and irrigation and the reclaiming of waste land; his surveyors paced out the roads in Asia, and his fleet was detailed to explore the Caspian Sea and the Indian ocean; his treasurer experimented with European plants in a Babylonian garden, and thanks to the expedition’s findings, Aristotle’s most intelligent pupil could include the banyan, the cinnamon and a bush of myrrh in books which mark the beginnings of botany. Alexander was more than a man of ambition and toughness; he had the wide armory of interests of a man of curiosity, and in the days at Mieza there had been matter enough to arouse them. “The only philosopher,” a friend referred to him politely, “whom I have ever seen in arms.”5
No description of Alexander’s early life would be complete without some mention of his friend Hephaestion. Likely he was also a student of Aristotle’s in the mini-school Aristotle had established at Mieza. Fox comments:
Hephaistion was the man whom Alexander loved, and for the rest of their lives their relationship remained as intimate as it is now irrecoverable: Alexander was only defeated once, the Cynic philosophers said long after his death, and that was by Hephaistion’s thighs. …Philip had been away on too many campaigns to devote much time in person to his son and it is not always fanciful to explain the homosexuality of Greek young men as a son’s need to replace an absent or indifferent father with an older lover. Hephaistion’s age is not known [but] he may have been the older of the two, like the Homeric hero with whom contemporaries compared him, an older Patroclus to Alexander’s Achilles.6
So it was for most Greeks of the upper classes and many Macedonians, too. It was a homoerotic world wherein gay lovers caught each other’s eyes.
The only anomaly in the case of Alexander and Hephaestion was that the two lovers were of approximately the same age. Most aristocratic Greeks preferred young boys of around eleven or twelve. They adopted and educated these ephebes, training them in music and oratory. Each Greek aristocrat had his favorite boy, but Alexander was different. Though he had plenty of ephebes, Hephaestion was his preferred lover. Hephaestion was a military man and a general of at least the second rank. Alexander often dispatched him to deal with military matters, sometimes far away, but the two lovers always remained loyal to each other. They were bound by more than just sex.
Alexander must have viewed Hephaestion as almost an alter ego. On one occasion in Darius’s court, Darius’s mother confused the two men, and apparently believing that the taller and more aristocratic-looking of the two was Alexander, addressed Hephaestion as Alexander. When her error was pointed out to her, she was extremely embarrassed and apologized profusely. Alexander responded, “Your confusion over the name is unimportant, for this man is also Alexander.”7
When Alexander’s relationship with Hephaestion ended after two decades, owing to the latter’s death, Alexander grieved deeply. Two writers of antiquity describe Alexander’s actions after Hephaestion’s death. Aelian (a Roman author of the late second and early third centuries AD, who wrote in Greek) says that Alexander hurled arms onto the funeral pyre, melting down gold and silver and burning expensive clothing along with the body. He sheared off his hair, emulating Achilles’ grief at the death of his friend Patroclus. According to Arrian (a Greek from Bithynia who became a Roman citizen during the reign of Hadrian), he spent all day and all night prostrate beside the corpse, and others said he hanged the doctor who attended his friend for giving him the wrong medicine.8 Alexander planned to build a huge monument to his friend and lover, a project that was scrapped when he himself died. The violence of his grief over Hephaestion’s death possibly contributed to Alexander’s own premature death.
Why were the Greeks bisexual, with a strong proclivity to homosexuality, preferring usually boys and sometimes cohabiting with other adult males? One could make the argument that homosexuality was a traditional, long-standing condition of human males, practiced in antiquity not only by the Greeks but also by the Romans. There was no social stigma attached to the homosexual relationship. As long as the man did his familial duty and begot children, he was left alone to pursue whatever extramarital relationships he wanted. There was no AIDS in those days, and many Greek men viewed their wives only as breeding sows. It was only around AD 400, with the triumph of the Christian Church, that a revolution in gender relationships occurred.
The Christian bishops and priests wanted to stress the unit of the intergendered family and community. They wanted also to give an enhanced dignity to women, hitherto so badly treated in the Greco-Roman world, because women made up more than half of the membership of the church. Furthermore, at a time of drastically declining population in the early Middle Ages, the bishops and priests sought to foster heterosexual copulation.
Another way of looking at Greek homosexuality is to see it as following from the rigorous training in military life, which in turn fostered gay relationships. As is seen in the populations of jails today, men in close proximity to other men, with little recourse to female company, will frequently seek out homosexual relationships.
The impact of homosexuality on the birthrate in some societies was drastic. In Sparta in the fourth century BC the personnel of the army declined from 10,000 to 1,000 available soldiers. Homosexuality was responsible for at least part of this decline. In sixteenth-century Persia, where homosexuality was also increasingly practiced, there was a sharp decline in population.
A prominent and pioneering biographer of Alexander, W. W. Tarn, while denying that Alexander was homosexual, said that he loved no woman except his “terrible mother,” Olympias. Alexander’s relationship with his father and mother can be understood only in Freudian terms. Tarn never met Freud or came under his influence; thus he did not have an opportunity to understand the full dimensions of Alexander’s personality. This attitude was, however, very common among British academics during and after World War I: They fled from psychoanalytic models.
Philip trusted Alexander to the extent of making him regent in his absence during the Byzantine campaign. While his father was away, a rebellion broke out in the north, and Alexander (then only sixteen) marched north to Maedi (a wild region of modern-day Bulgaria), conquered the city, and made it into a new place he called Alexandropolis, the first of many cities he would name after himself. Having possession of the Macedonian Great Seal gave him the right to do this, but it also indicates that his burgeoning ambition might pose a threat to his father. Philip was still vigorous and in the prime of his life. Nevertheless, he wrote to Alexander regularly, giving advice and occasional admonitions if he thought his son was doing something wrong.
In the last two years of Philip’s life, however, Alexander, the presumptive heir to the throne, fell out of favor. The causes of this are complicated and open to conjecture. Philip, seeming to give new meaning to the adage “There’s no fool like an old fool,” fell madly in love with a much younger woman, Cleopatra. There had never been any hostilities surrounding his taking of other wives, but this time Philip repudiated Olympias on charges of adultery and implied that Alexander was illegitimate. The wedding feast was not a happy occasion for Alexander and Olympias. Green describes the confrontation:
When Alexander walked in, and took the place of honor which was his by right—opposite his father—he said to Philip: “When my mother remarries I’ll invite you to her wedding,” not a remark calculated to improve anyone’s temper. During the evening, in true Macedonian fashion, a great deal of wine was drunk. At last Attalus rose, swaying, and proposed a toast, in which he “called upon the Macedonians to ask of the gods that from Philip and Cleopatra there might be born a legitimate successor to the kingdom.”The truth was finally out, and made public in a way which no one—least of all Alexander—could ignore.
Infuriated, the crown prince sprang to his feet. Are you calling me a bastard?” he shouted, and flung his goblet in Attalus’ face. Attalus retaliated in kind. Philip, more drunk than either of them, drew his sword and lurched forward, bent on cutting down not Attalus (who had, after all, insulted his son and heir) but Alexander himself—a revealing detail. However, the drink he had taken, combined with his lame leg, made Philip trip over a stool and crash headlong to the floor. “That, gentlemen,” said Alexander, with icy contempt, “is the man who’s been preparing to cross from Europe into Asia—and he can’t even make it from one couch to the next!” Each of them, in that moment of crisis, had revealed what lay uppermost in his mind. Alexander thereupon flung out into the night, and by next morning both he and Olympias were over the frontier.”9
Since Philip had raised Alexander to be his heir, followed his training and education closely, and appointed him regent in his absence, it is curious that he would antagonize Alexander at this point in his life. It has never been proved conclusively that Alexander wanted to usurp his father’s throne, although his mother had always encouraged him to be his own man and had always taken his side in battles between father and son. There was a natural rivalry, and now that Philip was getting ready to invade the Persian Empire, Alexander felt that his father would get the glory that should have been his. After all, he was the reincarnation of Achilles. Perhaps, as with many royal heirs, Alexander was openly showing too much impatience about gaining the throne from the long-lived Philip.
When the new queen, Cleopatra, was delivered of her child some months later, however, it was a girl. Philip must have believed that he could not leave the country without an heir in place and with Alexander dangerous and discontented in exile. On her part Olympias was fomenting rebellion at her brother’s court in Epirus, so Philip, always a pragmatist, recalled Alexander from his exile and reinstated him as his heir, but by then Cleopatra was pregnant a second time.
Receiving the news that his brother-in-law in Epirus was planning an invasion of Macedonia, Philip, in his usual fashion, proposed a marriage between Olympias’s brother and her daughter, also named Cleopatra. Although this was an incestuous relationship, it was approved nevertheless, and the wedding was set to take place in June.
Shortly before the wedding, Philip’s wife, Cleopatra, again gave birth, this time to a son. If Olympias and Alexander were going to do anything about the succession, now was the time.
Philip and his court were celebrating the wedding of one of his daughters when he was attacked with a short sword by a minor courtier. Green describes the assassination:
Philip himself appeared, clad in a white ceremonial cloak, and walking alone between the two Alexanders—his son and his new son-in-law…. Ashe paused by the entrance to the arena a young man—a member of the Bodyguard itself—drew a short broad-bladed …sword from beneath his cloak, darted forward, and thrust it through Philip’s ribs up to the hilt, killing him instantly. He then made off in the direction of the city-gate, where he had horses waiting. There was a second’s stunned silence. Then a group of young Macedonian noblemen hurried after the assassin. He caught his foot in a vine-root, tripped, and fell. As he was scrambling up his pursuers overtook him, and ran him through with their javelins.10
Philip’s assassin was a man named Pausanias, who according to some sources had been Philip’s lover several years before. Philip had broken off the relationship and had turned to another lover. There was a great scandal in the court about this sordid affair, and Attalus, whose niece Philip had married, decided to take matters into his own hands. He invited Pausanias to a banquet, got him drunk, and then he and his guests gang-raped the young man. Pausanias went to Philip asking for his help, but because of the alliance with Attalus, Philip was slow to do anything about it, so the brooding courtier exacted his revenge by killing the king. The other explanation is that the murder was arranged by Philip’s wife—Alexander’s mother, Olympias—and by Alexander himself because they were concerned about whether Alexander would actually gain the throne before Philip disinherited him.
The two scenarios of Philip’s death—assassination by an aggrieved ex-lover and complicity by Olympias and Alexander in a plot to kill him—are not mutually exclusive. The sexually abused courtier who did the terrible deed could have been put up to it by Olympias and Alexander. The three courtiers who assaulted Pausanias were friends of Alexander’s and could easily have been enticed to kill Philip, through bribes of either money or position in Alexander’s new government. That they were responsible for Pausanias’s death gives credence to the idea that they put him up to the murder and then killed him so that he could not talk.
Alexander’s relationship with his father and mother involved the classic paradigm of an Oedipus complex. His father was a bold, aggressive, successful, and sexy man. His mother was equally bold, aggressive, and sexy, and she doted on her son. Lest it be thought that Freud’s Oedipus complex was unknown in the ancient world, Sophocles sketched the essential Oedipal paradigm in his play Oedipus the King, from which tragedy Freud derived both the paradigm and the appellation.
It is true that Sophocles’ King Oedipus inadvertently and unknowingly killed his father and married his mother. But given the push of unconscious drives, the difference between Alexander and Oedipus is small. It was hubris, in this instance the arrogance of negligence, that, according to Sophocles, drove the king to kill his father and marry his mother.
In Alexander’s case he came to fear and hate his father and possibly became involved in a plot to kill him. He was so sexually attracted to his mother that he fled from her presence. Beneath Sophocles’ depiction of reckless hubris on the part of Oedipus, there lies a sexual triangle embedded in the unconscious, and that is the way the drama is often presented today.
An ambience of thick sexuality, and ultimately of patricide, certainly surrounds this family—Philip, Olympias, and Alexander. It pressed explosively upon them.
We can only imagine the psychological pressures the young Alexander was under. He had a very strong father who raised and educated him to be heir to the throne, then appeared to reject him, at least temporarily. He had a mother who cohabited with snakes and then suffocated her son with love. Killing his father and making love to his mother were probably images that flickered through his conscious mind and were more prevalent deep in his unconscious.
Alexander rid himself of both his father and his mother and thereby resolved his Oedipal problem. Only then was he—independent of his parents’ oppressive shadows—able to indulge his reckless bravery and achieve the satisfactions of world conquest.
Alexander’s sex life and sexual proclivities have always been the subject of much conjecture. From one era to another his homosexual behavior has been alternately ignored and accepted. What should be remembered again is that homosexual liaisons were common, even accepted, in ancient Greece and Rome.
Plutarch relates an interesting anecdote about Alexander’s sexual attitudes:
Philoxenus, governor of the coastal areas, informed Alexander by letter that a certain Theodorus of Tarentum was with him, and that the man had two exceedingly good-looking boys to sell. He asked Alexander if he wanted to buy the boys. This angered the king, who time and again cried out to his friends asking them what moral failing Philoxenus had ever seen in him to make him waste his time procuring such vile creatures. In a letter to Philoxenus he roundly berated him and ordered him to tell Theodorus to go to hell along with his wares. Alexander also came down heavily on Hagnon who, with youthful exuberance, had told him in a letter that he wanted to purchase Crobylus, famed in Corinth for his good looks, and bring him to the king.
When he was apprised that the Macedonians Damon and Timotheus, who were serving under Parmenion, had debauched the women of some mercenaries, the king sent written orders to Parmenion that, if the men were found guilty, he should punish them with execution as being wild animals born to destroy human beings. In this letter he also has this to say about himself (and I quote): “In my case it would be found that, so far from looking upon the wife of Darius or wishing to look upon her, I have not even permitted people to talk of her beauty.” And he would state that his awareness of his mortality arose most from sleeping and the sexual act, as if to say that tiredness and pleasure derived from the same weakness in nature.11
Although the army noticed his sexual preference for males, Alexander was undoubtedly bisexual. He married four or five wives and had several favorite concubines; among these was a certain Greek whore named Thaïs. The prologue to most Greek celebrations was a drunken brawl featuring heavily intoxicated males supplemented by a handful of high-class prostitutes called hetairae. A hetaira had to be young, fifteen to twenty-five years of age, and preferably clever and well educated. She was supposed to be able to recite Homer and some lines from Greek tragedies. These were the circumstances in which Alexander encountered Thaïs, a Greek courtesan. They were attracted to each other when they met in the Persian emperor’s palace in Persepolis, which Alexander had occupied and where he sat on a throne with a diadem on his head.
Late at night in the middle of a drunken brawl, Thaïs grabbed a torch and set fire to the Persian emperor’s palace. It had cedar ceilings, and the fire spread rapidly. Alexander, as usual, was drunk and joined Thaïs in torching the palace, which was totally destroyed. The next morning, when he sobered up, Alexander expressed remorse that the palace was gone, but by then it was too late. The palace at Persepolis was never rebuilt but was left for modern archaeologists to disinter.
Alexander had another relationship with a concubine by whom he had a child, a daughter for whom he took little responsibility. But his generals told him it was time to get married so that he could produce a legitimate son and successor. In 326 BC he married a Bactrian (Uzbekistani) princess, Roxane, reputed to be the most beautiful woman in the empire—but legends always say that about queens. Plutarch describes the episode in this way:
And then there was the matter of Roxane. His actions were motivated by passion—he had noted her beautiful and comely looks when he saw her participating in a dance during the after-dinner drinking—but the situation was not disadvantageous to what he had in prospect. The barbarians were heartened by the partnership this marriage represented, and they were very fond of Alexander because he showed exceptional self-control and would not presume to touch the only woman who captured his heart unless the law permitted it.12
After their marriage Alexander had little to do with Roxane, who did not become pregnant until after the death of Hephaestion. Just one act of copulation was sufficient, since Roxane had been acquired only for her fertility, meant to assure Alexander’s generals of the continuation of his dynasty. When Alexander died in 323, Roxane was pregnant. She then delivered a son who appeared to assure the future of the Macedonian line.
Such was not to be, however. Cassander, who emerged as the strongman in Macedonia after Alexander’s death, had Roxane, her infant son, and for good measure Alexander’s mother, Olympias, all killed. Cassander was not related to Philip; he was, in effect, a usurper. Nonetheless his dynasty lasted until 164 BC, when Macedonia was conquered by the Romans.
Alexander had two other wives: the eldest daughter of the Persian emperor Darius III, and the youngest daughter of Darius’s immediate predecessor. These marriages occurred at Susa near Babylon in 325 BC, when Alexander was trying to persuade his generals to take Persian wives. He set an example for them by marrying the daughters of the late emperors.
Before the weddings Alexander would not let himself gaze upon the wife, daughter, and granddaughter of the emperor. He sent someone else to deal with them and inform them after his second battle with Darius III. When the Persian women were captured, Alexander saw to it that they would be treated with the respect, dignity, and comfort suitable to their rank. Presumably Alexander would not look upon these beautiful women because he could not avoid the temptation to ravish them, more for political than sexual reasons. Whether Alexander’s marriages to the daughters of the Persian emperors were consummated is unknown. He certainly had little enough to do with them after the marriages at Susa. (While Alexander’s treatment of women was not exemplary, it was probably a little better than that of most Greeks of the upper class in his time.)
There is an ancient story that Alexander was visited by the queen of the Amazons (who—if she actually existed at all—seems to have come from the Crimea). She wanted to sleep with the king for thirteen straight nights so that he would impregnate her. Whether she did or not is unknown, but ancient biographers tell stories similar to the following:
On the border of Hyrcania…lived a tribe of Amazons. They inhabited the plains of Themiscyra in the area of the river Thermodon, and their queen, Thalestris, held sway over all those between the Caucasus and the river Phasis. Passionately eager to meet Alexander, she journeyed from her realm and when she was not far off she sent messengers ahead to announce that a queen had come who was longing to see him and make his acquaintance. Granted an immediate audience, she ordered her company to halt while she went forward attended by 300 women: as soon as she caught sight of the king she leaped unaided from her horse, carrying two spears in her right hand. The dress of Amazons does not entirely cover the body: the left side is bare to the breast but clothed beyond that, while the skirt of the garment, which is gathered into a knot, stops short of the knee. One breast is kept whole for feeding children of female sex and the right is cauterized to facilitate bending the bow and handling weapons.
Thalestris looked at the king, no sign of fear on her face. Her eyes surveyed a physique that in no way matched his illustrious record—for all barbarians have respect for physical presence, believing that only those on whom nature has thought fit to confer extraordinary appearance are capable of great achievements. When asked if she had a request to make she unhesitatingly declared that she had come in order to share children with the king, since she was a fitting person on whom to beget heirs for his empire. A child of female sex she would keep, she said, but a male she would give to his father. Alexander asked if Thalestris wished to accompany him on his campaigns, but she declined on the grounds that she had left her kingdom unprotected, and she kept asking him not to let her leave disappointed in her hopes. The woman’s enthusiasm for sex was keener than Alexander’s and she pressed him to stop there for a few days. Thirteen days were devoted to serving her passion, after which Thalestris headed for her kingdom and Alexander for Parthiene.13
Another common belief concerning Alexander’s excesses concerns alcohol. Several sources claim that he was an alcoholic, but whether he drank more than others of his day is uncertain. Alexander was given to drunken brawls while carousing with his generals. In the last two or three years of his life, however, days went by during which he did nothing else but drink. Some writers attribute his death to drinking—indeed, to what today we would call alcohol poisoning. There being no hard liquor in the ancient world, wine was his drink, beer being too plebeian for his tastes. (If he drank the resinated wine common in Greece today, he would be imbibing approximately 10 percent alcohol. It was noted that Alexander did not water his wine as was commonly done in ancient Greece.) According to Aelian, “The greatest drinkers, so they say, were Xenagoras, the Rhodian, whom they called ‘The Jar,’ the boxer Heraclides, and Proteas, son of Lanice, who was brought up with King Alexander. In fact, Alexander himself is said to have exceeded all men in his drinking.”14
Alexander was very pious—or superstitious, depending on one’s point of view. He was forever offering sacrifices to propitiate or thank the gods. To offer a sacrifice meant providing a live lamb or chicken (or goat or cow) to temple officials who would slaughter, roast or barbecue, and eat the animal. This was how priests in temples to the gods received their supply of fresh meat. Of course monetary and other gifts to temples would also be welcome, but offering sacrifice was a religious ritual, and Alexander took pains to observe it.
Every time he crossed a large river on rafts, he offered sacrifice on reaching the other shore. Since the gods were an ever-expanding pantheon, he offered sacrifice at the shrines of Persian and Egyptian gods as well as Greek ones. Perhaps doing so was an exercise in hedging all bets: He wanted to be sure that he didn’t offend any powerful deity that might come back to haunt him. It was commonplace to find a temple to an unknown god, just in case one had been inadvertently forgotten. There was nothing chauvinistic or nationalistic about Alexander’s view of divinity. He sought the assistance of foreign gods, or at least he asked that they not interfere with his ambitions.
Alexander also took seriously oracles, temples run by priests who could foretell—cryptically—the future. On his return to Babylon after fighting for eight years in the East, the king would not enter the city because the oracles told him not to. How the priests arrived at their oracular forecasts was a well-kept secret, but it was usually by consulting the livers of dead chickens or watching the flights of birds. These soothsayers or prophets were very common in the ancient world; indeed, stories abound of famous encounters with the prophets. The death of Julius Caesar was foretold by both the interpretation of his wife’s dream the night before his assassination and the words of the soothsayer who attempted to warn him on the day of his death. Philip was told on the night Alexander was born that his son was destined for greatness.
Another famous story concerns the untying of the Gordian knot. Shortly after one of Alexander’s first victories, the Battle of Granicus, he learned that a few miles away a certain King Gordias had left as a legacy a very difficult knot to untie. It was said (probably by Alexander’s propagandists) that whoever untied the knot would conquer all of Asia. Sources disagree about what happened. Some say that Alexander cleverly untied the knot, others that he simply unsheathed his sword and cut it. But one way or another he untied or “cut the Gordian knot.” Fox relates the tale this way:
On the day before leaving Gordium he went up to the acropolis meaning to try the chariot which he had saved for his farewell; friends gathered round to watch him, but hard though he pulled, the knot round the yoke remained stubbornly tight. When no end could be found, Alexander began to lose patience, for failure would not go down well with his men. Drawing his sword, he slashed the knot in half, producing the necessary end and correctly claiming that the knot was loosed, if not untied. The aged Aristobulus (one of Alexander’s early historians)…later claimed that Alexander had pulled a pin out of the chariot-link and drawn the yoke out sideways through the knot, but the sword-cut has the weight of authority behind it and is preferable to an eighty-year-old historian’s apology; either way, Alexander outmaneuvered, rather than unravelled, his problem. He also managed to arouse an interest in what he had done. “There were thunderclaps and flashes of lightning that very night,” conveniently signifying that Zeus approved, so Alexander offered sacrifice to the “gods who had sent the signs and ratified his loosing of the knot.” As a king under Zeus’s protection, he then encouraged gossip and flattery to elaborate on his efforts.15
Alexander believed that untying (or cutting) the Gordian knot would enable him to become “lord of Asia.” This was obviously an indulgence on his part in wish fulfillment, but he would not stop until he reached the Indus River in northern India.
Before he set out to the East, Alexander consulted the oracle at Delphi in Greece, by far the most famous of the Greek oracles. According to a common story, the oracle was closed from mid-November until mid-February—the oracle would not speak during those months. When Alexander called for the priestess Pythia to come out, she said she could not—it would be unlawful. Impatiently, Alexander proceeded to drag the priestess to the place where she usually prophesied, when she yelled out, “My son, you are invincible!” This was enough to gratify Alexander, and soon thereafter he left for the East.
When Alexander reached the Egyptian capital of Memphis on the Nile, he discovered that two hundred miles out in the Libyan Desert there was another famous oracle at Siwah. He immediately took a bodyguard and went there, being guided to the shrine, we are told, by crows. Once he had made sacrifice at Siwah—the priests did not taste meat often, the place being so isolated—he consulted the oracle there in a small room. Alexander never revealed what took place at Siwah’s oracle, but he was satisfied and emboldened. He decided that the Egyptian supergod Ammon was the same as Zeus and thereafter usually prayed to Ammon Zeus. Plutarch tells us:
When Alexander reached the oasis, after the desert crossing, the prophet of Ammon addressed him with greetings from the god, who he implied was Alexander’s father. Alexander then asked if any of his father’s assassins had escaped him. The prophet told him not to blaspheme, for he had no mortal father, at which point Alexander reworded the question, asking if he had succeeded in punishing all Philip’s assassins. He then asked about his own empire and inquired whether the god granted him mastery over all men. The god replied that he was granting him this and the revenge of Philip was now complete. Alexander presented the god with spectacular offerings, and his human assistants with money.
Such is the account of the oracles that most authors give, but Alexander himself in a letter to his mother says that a number of secret responses were given to him, which he would tell her on his return, but in the strictest confidence. Some say the prophet, to be friendly, wanted to address him in Greek as “O paidion” (“Oh, my son”) but because of his foreign accent he lapsed into a sigma at the end of the phrase, and said “O paidios” using the sigma instead of a nu. Alexander, they say, was pleased with this slip of the tongue and the story got around that the god had addressed him as the son of Zeus (pai Dios).16
After this encounter Alexander went further than worship of and sacrifice to Zeus. He decided that Zeus had copulated directly with his mother—a common occurrence between gods and humans—and entered her womb. Henceforth he sometimes referred to his father, Philip III, as my “so-called father.” Ammon Zeus was his real father, he implied. It is likely that this fatherhood by Ammon Zeus was not just propaganda but something he sincerely believed.
Nonetheless, it is uncertain whether Alexander considered himself a god. He was encouraged to do so by his world conquest. In later times the Romans’ recognition of Alexander as divine fit in with their own deification of emperors. From Claudius on, Roman emperors, notably Nero, Caligula, and Caracalla (all tyrants in their own right), considered themselves divine and emulated Alexander in dress and ceremony.
After Alexander had defeated Darius and assumed the throne of Persia as a direct heir, in recognition of the Persian ruler’s divinity, he adopted both the Persian custom of wearing a diadem and the act of proskynesis, whereby everyone had to approach the king groveling on hands and knees to kiss his feet. (See the story of Esther in the Old Testament of the Bible.) Most of the Macedonians in his army refused to make proskynesis to him as a god; therefore, in deference to their Greek sensibilities, Alexander did not mandate this ceremony for his army, but he expected his Persian subjects to observe it.
Alexander could be said to have assumed divinity in the East, but was cautious about doing so in the West. Demosthenes, the Greek orator who had no love for the royal Macedonians, said Alexander could be a god for all he cared, as long as he left Athens alone. After his death Alexander was widely recognized as divine. During his lifetime he was careful about proclaiming categorically that he was a god, but he probably thought that he was one.
Very few portraits of Alexander have survived the ages. We have a few coins with his image, the famous picture of Alexander on Bucephalus, and some physical descriptions of him. He was fair-skinned yet ruddy; he had an agreeable odor yet was hot and fiery; he was short yet not that short. One ridiculous story is told about his height when he met King Porus in India. Porus agreed to fight a duel with Alexander because he knew that he could win. The story gives Porus’s height at five cubits, Alexander’s at not even three. In translation, with a Latin cubit roughly eighteen inches, this would have meant that Porus was seven and a half feet tall and Alexander a mere four feet six inches tall. More than likely he was about the height of Napoleon, or about five feet six inches.
Aelian remarks, “They say that Alexander, son of Philip, enjoyed natural good looks, with curly, fair hair, but they add that there was something in his appearance that aroused fear.”17
Alexander assumed his father’s throne at the age of twenty and immediately began a life of conquest. His career took him to Persia and ultimately to India, where he was stopped. His death in Babylon in 323 BC occurred after several successive days and nights of drinking, but by this time his health was marginal. His death has been attributed to any number of sources—acute alcoholism, malaria, typhoid, and poisoning. He had been suffering from a fever for three or four days, yet he continued with his routine of giving orders to his men and making his usual sacrifices to the gods. Diodorus Siculus gives one account of his actual death:
The seers instructed Alexander to make lavish sacrifices to the gods, and meanwhile he received an extremely importunate invitation to a drinking party in the quarters of one of his friends, the Thessalian Medius. There he consumed large quantities of neat wine, eventually filling, and draining, the great “cup of Heracles.” All of a sudden he let out a loud cry of pain, as if he had been struck a severe blow, at which his friends took him by the hand and escorted him out. His personal attendants took charge of him, immediately putting him to bed and keeping a careful watch over him, but his distress worsened and the doctors were summoned. None of them could help him, and he was continually wracked with multiple pains and excruciating suffering.
Losing all hope of surviving, Alexander removed his ring and gave it to Perdiccas. His friends asked: “To whom do you leave the throne?” and he answered “To the strongest,” adding to this what were to be his final words that the foremost of his friends would all organize a great funerary contest in his honour.
So Alexander died, in the manner described above, after a rule of twelve years and seven months, and after accomplishing the greatest of feats, greater than those not only of the rulers that preceded him, but of those who were to come after him, right down to our day.18
The main story about poisoning comes from Quintus Curtius Rufus. He states that the king had been dead for six days, lying in a coffin. Everybody was involved in forming a new government. When his friends finally found time to attend the corpse, they saw that there had been no decomposition of the body. In the heat of Mesopotamia, this was completely unheard of. A golden sarcophagus was filled with perfumes and his body was taken to Memphis by Ptolemy, who had received the power of Egypt. Some time later, the coffin was transferred to Alexandria.
The man who gained the most from Alexander’s death was Antipater, who usurped the power in Macedon and Greece afterward. Alexander himself believed that Antipater had regal aspirations and was conceited enough to claim that any honors Alexander bestowed on him were nothing more than his due. One of Antipater’s sons was an attendant to the king; another was Cassander, who ultimately murdered Olympias, Roxane, and Roxane’s newborn child.19
The conqueror of the world was dead at the age of thirty-three.