The search for Alexander begins darkly but dramatically. When Philip was murdered, the Macedonian court could only expect another of the family struggles which had weakened their kingdom for the past hundred years; such struggles are seldom reported in detail, but clues can be found, often in the most unlikely places, and together they suggest a pattern, misleading perhaps by its thinness but consistent with the way in which Macedonian kings had always had to behave. First, the pattern needs a background.
Set on the northern borders of the Greek-speaking world, adjoining Europe’s tribesmen, Philip’s Macedonia was a broad patchwork of kingdoms, stitched together by conquest, marriage and the bribes and attractions of his rising fortune. At the time of Alexander’s birth, it would have seemed a land of impossible contrasts, and thirteen years of Philip’s energy had not altogether removed the differences of interest which had troubled previous kings. It was still a land of lowlands and highlands, which Philip and his ancestors ruled from the south-east plains, a fenland of the four great rivers which water the crops and the winter pasturage on their rich light loam. Marshy and densely forested, these fens and their bordering hills were a land for pioneers and Philip and his ancestors had attacked them with the necessary spirit. Drainage had channelled the flooding rivers for irrigation; roads had been cut through the dense pine-forests and pitch had been boiled from their logs by a native technique and sold to Greek shipbuilders in the timberless south; old gold mines had been seized on Philip’s eastern border and forced to yield a thousandfold by a mass of new slave labour and Greeks skills of extraction; wild oxen, bears and lions were hunted on horseback for sport and food; Macedonians near the coast had mastered the art of fly-fishing for trout on their rivers and had introduced the fig and olive to lands where they fruited twice yearly. ‘Lovely Emathia’ Homer had called these rolling plains, a fit home for herds of cattle; an old Macedonian dance mimed the life of the cattle-rustler, clearly the trade of many local farmers. Cattle had never abounded in Greece where meat was seldom tasted outside religious sacrifices; Macedon’s more frequent diet of meat may not be irrelevant to her toughness on the battlefield.
These plains would be the envy of any Greek visitor who crossed their southern border by the narrow vale of Tempe and the foot of Mount Olympus. He would pass the frontier post of Heraclion, town of Heracles, and stop at the harbour-town of Dion, named after the Greek god Zeus, ancestor of the Macedonian kings, and site of a yearly nine-day festival of the arts in honour of Zeus and the nine Greek Muses. There he could walk through city gates in a wall of brick, down the paved length of a sacred way, between a theatre, gymnasiums and a temple with Doric pillars; suitably, the nearby villages were linked with the myth of Orpheus, the famous bard of Greek legend. He was still in a world of Greek gods and sacrifices, of Greek plays and Greek language, though the natives might speak Greek with a northern accent which hardened ‘ch’ into ‘g’, ‘th’ into ‘d’ and pronounced King Philip as ‘Bilip’.
Bearing on up the coast, he would find the plain no less abundant and the towns more defiantly Greek. The next two coast-towns on the shore of the Thermaic gulf had originally been settled by Greek emigrants, and ever since they had watched for a chance to cut free of the Macedonian court which had grown to control them. At times they succeeded and amid their vicissitudes, they remained towns of spirit, whose leaders were rich and whose middle class could equip themselves for war; they farmed the lush land around them, and the extra revenues which made them so desirable came from the sea and its traders. A recognized trade route ran west from the coast into Macedonia, and the coast-towns had courts with a system of law under which Greek traders were content to be tried; harbour-taxes were levied on the trade that passed through, and the rich would corner the valuable right to their yearly collection. They were not the last champions of Greek culture on the fringe of a barbarian world: the Macedonian palaces of Pella and Aigai lay close inland, linked to the coast by river, antiquity’s swiftest and cheapest method of heavy transport. They were accessible, therefore, and their patronage of the finest Greek artists had made their externals no less civilized than the coast towns which they coveted.
‘Nobody would go to Macedonia to see the king, but many would come far to see his palace…’; so Socrates was said to have remarked when refusing an invitation to escape from the death-sentence in Athens and retire to Macedonian Pella. At the turn of the century, the king was Archelaus whose patronage for Greek culture even exceeded his ancestors’ example and whose energy first moved the kingdom’s capital from Aigai north-east to Pella, a site more accessible to the sea and well set on his kingdom’s newly built roads. It was a lakeside city in those days, set on the River Loudias and equipped with a natural harbour where the river spread out into a muddy sheet of water. By the 380s, Pella was acknowledged as the largest town in Macedonia; Philip; of course, improved it, and within twenty years of Alexander’s death it would become a boom town on the profits of world-conquest, boasting temples and palaces over a hundred yards long with two or three grand courtyards each, whose colonnades of Greek pillars supported richly-painted friezes and mud-brick walls above marble thresholds and floors of pebble-patterned mosaic. It was a place where a man could banquet in surroundings that befitted the richest Greek taste; the large town houses were built round a central courtyard off which the reception-rooms opened, while a second storey housed bedrooms on the north side and cast a welcome shade in summer. These palatial houses are now well known from recent archaeology, and they probably belong soon after Alexander’s death. Alexander had been brought up in Archelaus’s older palace on the more westerly of Pella’s two hills, and its heavy marble pillars were as fashionably Greek as those of the later houses of the lower town. It was a cultured home, probably in the style of the palaces that succeeded it; one of their later mosaic floors probably took its design of centaurs from a painting which Archelaus had commissioned from a Greek master. These famous pebble-mosaics, also the work of Greek artists, were probably laid out soon after Alexander’s life at Pella, for one shows a hunting-scene from his career, another the god Dionysus, ancestor of the kings, another a lion-griffin attacking a stag, perhaps the royal seal of the kingdom or at least the emblem of Antipater whom Alexander left as his general in Macedonia. Though much admired, they come close to vulgarity; Archelaus’s older palace may well have had mosaics too, for the earliest known mosaics on the Greek mainland are to be found in the northern Greek city of Olynthus which had come within the influence of Macedonia’s palace, and their designs were developed from the schools of Greek painters whom Archelaus is known to have patronized. Except for a love of gardens, there is no finer test of a civilized man than his taste for paintings: in Alexander’s Macedonia, too often remembered for conquest, the pillared tombs of his nobility bear the first known trompe-l’oeil paintings in art history on their architectural façades, and in Aigai’s palace, the central courtyard may well have been laid out as a secret garden. In the new town of Philippi Philip’s Macedonian settlers, the ‘dregs of the kingdom’ as critics called them, had planted wild roses to soften the bleakness of a home on the distant Thracian coast.
Beyond these civilized plains of the coast and lowland where the Garden of Midas turned all to green, if not to gold, lay the ridges of Mounts Barnous and Bermion barred with snow and behind, to the west and north-west, a highland world of timbered glens and mountainous lakes which was far removed from the luxuries of coast and palace. Here men had always lived in tribes, not in towns, and their lakeside villages were often built on wooden stilts with only a dry-walled fort on a nearby waterless hilltop for refuge in case of invasion. Among Alexander’s officers and among later Macedonians, the distinction remained in the tribal titles by which they identified their homes; the highlanders were tribesmen, with none of the towns to which lowlanders claimed to belong. Each of their kingdoms was sealed like a capsule by the landscape and behind their cliffs’ defences, the tribal government of village chieftains survived for centuries, long outliving the dynasty of the lowland kings and their attempts to build frontier towns. Their timber, minerals, fisheries and upland grazing supported a dense population whose royal families each claimed descent from a different Greek hero. In the far south-west, adjoining Greek Thessaly, the Tymphiot tribesmen worshipped their own primitive form of Zeus, and until Philip won them over, they had no more belonged among Macedonians than the nearby Orestids who honoured their founder Orestes and had formerly joined with the western tribes of Epirus. Further north, round the lakes of Prespa and Kastoria and astride the main corridor-road from Europe, lived the rich and rebellious kings of Lyncestis who traced their origin to the notorious Bacchiad kings of Greek Corinth, as tight a family clique as any in seventh-century Greek history. These Bacchiads had been expelled from Corinth and fled north to Corfu from where, like the Corinthian trade goods which then appear in north-west Macedonia, they may indeed have found a home in mainland Lyncestis on the edge of Europe’s Illyrian kingdoms. Their self-styled descendants had not disgraced them. Like other highlanders the Lyncestians dressed in the drab woollen cloak of the modern Vlach shepherd and spoke a primitive Greek dialect which southerners could no longer follow. They worked their land with ox-drawn carts and the help of their womenfolk and it is perhaps no coincidence that in the lists of the confiscated property of rich Athenians in the late fifth century far the highest price for a slave was paid for a Macedonian woman. Philip’s mother had been a Lyncestian noblewoman, and she had not learnt to read or write until middle age; her kinsman Leonnatus is one of Alexander’s only two known friends of Lyncestian family, and he was remembered for his bellicosity and such a taste for wrestling that he was said to have taken trainers and camel-loads of sand wherever he went in Asia.
For at least a hundred years most of these highland tribes had been formally known as Upper Macedonia, but their sympathies with lowland kings were superficial and nowhere ancient. Lyncestis, for example, was harder pressed by her Illyrian neighbours to the north than by Philip’s ancestors in the plain, and her chieftains had often preferred Illyrian interests to those of the court at Aigai. A balance, though, could be worked out. The lowlanders needed the highlands’ loyalties, for their tribes controlled the passes and river beds down which the European barbarians of the north and north-west had tried to invade the plains by the sea. The highlanders also needed the lowlands for the more mundane reason of their sheep. Flocks of sheep were the lasting bond of the inland landscapes of antiquity. In summer the highlanders grazed them on their glens and spurs, but in winter they drove them down to the plains for pasture, and so the moving life of the herdsman was also a life of ceaseless dispute. In spring his sheep were trampling the plainsman’s crops and in summer he was herding them through the mountains, caring little for the property of this temporary home; from Orestis there has come an inscription ordering the rights of farmers against the summer grazers and setting limits on summer shepherds’ cutting of wood. Probably to help his lowland farmers Philip had tried to discourage the herding of sheep and to spread the settled crop-growing which suited the plains. If he succeeded, he would have broken the one natural bond between highland and plain; he had therefore tried more official means to unite the two worlds round him.
Where possible, his lowland ancestors had driven out hill tribes altogether, from Pieria around Dion, or from Eordaia, for example, ‘walled in on east, west and north by cliffs like the keep of a castle’. Elsewhere they had taken political wives, from nowhere more often than from Elimea to the south-west where noblemen were rich and tribesmen hardy in battle. Philip too had kept an Elimiot mistress, and he had also founded towns on his highland frontiers and forcibly moved a lowland population to guard them. He needed this new strength on the borders, for at the same time he was drawing the old power of the highland nobility and their young sons down to his court at Pella, where he bribed them to settle on lush estates from his conquests of grassland to the east and southeast. Highland chieftains had thus been tied more closely to a court and a king whom they served as feudal lords on conquered estates; Alexander’s first months are a study in a new Macedonian society which had been slowly torn from its old ties of kinship and local territory to be grouped more tightly round its king. Part of their interest is to watch how far these old traditions still worked on a man’s allegiance.
This breaking of old roots had long been a necessity for the survival of the lowland kings. Among Illyrians beyond the northern border, as in modern Albania, nobles would still go to war with their cliques of retainers and relations, but in the army which Philip inherited, the highlanders had already been brigaded by the loose geography of tribes, not the narrow allegiance of clans. Local barons and royalty still led these tribal brigades, but they had already been weaned from their private retinues and gathered over the past two hundred years as a retinue to the king himself, whom they served as honoured Companions, or even, in eight or so esteemed cases, as Bodyguards about his person. So, at his accession, Alexander was facing more than sixty Companion nobles, some of them elderly, all of them inheriting their rank from his father’s reign: they were there, nominally, to assist and advise him, but if it was perhaps coincidental that the Macedonian word for a counsellor could also be derived from the word for a grey-haired man, it was certainly relevant that the kings had long extended their titles of royal honour to the thousands of lesser dependants whom they wished to befriend. The name of King’s Bodyguard now also applied to 3000 lesser Shield Bearers, new king’s men; the name of Companion extended to the units of small farmers who served as the royal cavalry. Once there had been a special Royal Squadron of horse, but just as the King’s Own regiments in the British army grew to be recruited from Scotsmen, so all the cavalry were now called the King’s Own and even the highland infantry of tribesmen were known as the King’s Foot Companions in order to bind new friends to the crown. Only the former Companion nobles had lost by this spreading of their title, because the spreading had been aimed against them. As these new circles of king’s men warned, it was among the nobles that Alexander’s enemies were most to be feared.
Because power in Macedonia was personal, the nobles had wielded it through the tentacular links of their families. Their justice, presumably, had been the system of the blood feud which set family against family. The old kingdoms knew no courts or written law code; they relied on vengeance, tempered by a fixed price for blood. To a nobility concerned with this family power and property, marriage was not romantic but an expression of goodwill between the households of two great families. Neither the age of the brides nor their degree of affinity was any more of an obstacle than among other upper classes in Greece; the Bacchiad kings, from whom the nobles of Lyncestis claimed descent, had been famously intermarried and an element of inbreeding should be allowed for among Philip’s highland Companions. This maze of marriages and blood relationships could impose rigid duties of help and revenge, as it still does among the shepherds of north-west Greece, and these duties are not always obvious to outsiders. Alexander was heir to a bevy of barons to whom the mood of a Mafia member would seem more natural than that of a moralist.
Again, the lowland kings had long tried to replace these local loyalties by their own central authority. For crimes which could cost a suspect his life, their justice was not a blood feud but a public hearing before the people. Only if the audience agreed would the king and his agents punish. Their methods, of course, were still rough, killing both a suspect and his kinsmen. Urgent murders were still conducted privately, and even a public hearing was not democratic. The audience expressed their will by clashing their spears, not raising their hands for their votes to be counted. It was the king who decided for which verdict they had clashed the louder. As for marriage, he could take wives himself from rival families and marry loyalists to women of the wide family household which he headed. He could also promote marriages between his courtiers and if he seemed to offer a strong future, his suggested wives were not likely to be refused. It was the king’s business to stand as a rival centre of power, outside the links of tribe and family. Philip and his ancestors had weakened these links until they could no longer dictate a man’s behaviour; at Alexander’s accession they were pressed by a broader issue, the promise, quite simply, of Alexander himself.
Alexander’s royal blood commanded respect but he was not the only prince to enjoy it. In practice the throne had not always passed to the eldest son and the custom that the king should be of royal blood was a hollow one, for barons could hail a royal infant and then rule through him, while many barons could themselves claim the blood of their local royalty. Philip’s baby son by Eurydice was one such danger, for barons like his great-uncle Attalus would hope to rule in his name. Although a regency was possible, it was unlikely while other princes of suitable age were alive. Here Alexander’s main rival was his cousin Amyntas who had actually been a child heir to the kingdom twenty-three years before. His uncle Philip had been appointed regent and continued to rule as king when he proved his extraordinary powers of conquest and diplomacy, but Amyntas had survived, a man of twenty-five or so when Philip died, and as a sign of continuing favour, he had been married recently to Philip’s daughter by an Illyrian mistress. Against Alexander, he had the vital advantage of age and, in so far as rights mattered, a claim to return to the kingship which he had once been too young to inherit. Besides Amyntas there were the highland princes who might lead their tribes to independence; there was, in the last resort, Arrhidaeus, Philip’s son by a mistress from Thessaly whom gossip described as a dancing-girl. Clearly, his mother was not royal, and her low birth would diminish his status: he was also half-witted, and yet it is a fine proof of Alexander’s nervousness that several months before Philip’s death he feared displacement by this last resort.
As a prelude to his Asian invasion Philip had been approached by the native ruler of Caria, a country far south on the western coast of the Persian empire and invaluable to an invader with a fleet as weak as Philip’s. Diplomacy, as usual, was to be sealed by marriage, and Philip had decided to offer his Arrhidaeus to the Carian’s daughter: it was as delicate a bargain as all his others, for a half-witted son was a light price for such an alliance, but without Alexander, it would have worked. Just back from his months in voluntary exile, Alexander had not adjusted to the fact of Olympias’s divorce. Seeing Arrhidaeus’s honour as another threat to his inheritance, he had drawn his own friends around him and despatched his friend Thettalus, the famous Greek actor, to plead his cause at the Carian’s court; he was no illegitimate idiot, he was a rightful son and heir, so the Carian should accept him in marriage instead. The man had been delighted beyond what he had dared to hope, but news of the offer had reached Philip first, and he had marched into Alexander’s quarters, accused him of meddling and exiled the friends who had helped his interference; sensing trouble, the Carian ruler at once took fright and gave his daughter to a Persian aristocrat. A brilliant coup was ruined, because Alexander was nervous and could not understand that his father would never have wasted his heir on a passing Oriental marriage.
The Carian affair showed up Alexander’s youth and sounded the first note for the grim discordance that would follow Philip’s murder. The sequence of events was familiar enough. Philip and every other Macedonian king had begun their reigns with a family purge of rivals, a customary necessity in any ancient monarchy, whether Persian, Greek, Roman or Egyptian, and one which Alexander would certainly not neglect. Once these palace affairs began to seem settled, the heir would appeal to such commoners and soldiers as were near him; their support was usually a matter of course, and could be used to round off the purging of rivals. No Macedonian king was ever created by the lone fact of his commoners’ support; it was worth having, but family and nobles counted for far more. They were never easily won by a younger man.
At the age of twenty, with his young friends in exile, Alexander had shown how he needed more practised support for his inheritance, and at once in the theatre at Aigai it had become clear where it might be found. As his father lay dead, first to declare for him was his namesake Alexander, a prince of highland Lyncestis, who put on his breastplate and followed his chosen king into the palace: here was more than the first sign of highland loyalty, for this Alexander was son-in-law of the elderly Antipater, one of Philip’s two most respected officers and enough of a baron to create the new king. Such immediate homage was itself suspicious, and the Lyncestian’s link by marriage foundered on other doubts; the sequence of events cannot be dated, but soon after Alexander had been welcomed his two brothers were killed on a charge of sharing in Philip’s murder.
Round Lyncestian Alexander, not for the last time, the ties of two Macedonian families seem to have conflicted, until he had to choose between his brothers and his marriage; possibly, his homage was swift because he knew of his brothers’ plottings, and yet his link with Antipater’s family sufficed to keep him straight. All three brothers were sons of a man with the Lyncestian name of Aeropus, and nearly two years earlier an Aeropus is known to have clashed with Philip and been sent into exile for the trivial offence, it was said, of dallying with a flute-girl instead of appearing on parade. Possibly, two of his sons had sworn revenge for their father but failed to enlist a brother who had married away from them. Instead they may have joined in Pausanias’s plot where they perhaps were the men who had waited with his horses: perhaps, but enemies’ accusations are never proof of guilt, and the two Lyncestian brothers may have been rivals rather than murderers. To Alexander’s supporters the distinction was hardly important; a faint trail of friends and relations suggests that their arrests were as justified as past Macedonian history made them seem.
When Philip died, wrote a biographer four hundred years after the event, ‘Macedonia was scarred and looking to the sons of Aeropus together with Amyntas’, and Amyntas’s past suggests this informed guess may be correct. Amyntas, former child-heir to the kingdom, had recently been married by Philip to a wife who was half Illyrian. This may have helped to link him with the north-western tribe of Lyncestians and like Alexander he could point to a grandmother of Lyncestian blood. Only two more facts can be ascribed to him, both of them tantalizing; at some date, possibly in his early youth, he had probably travelled in central Greece and visited the famous cave of Trophonius, where he would have gone through an elaborate ceremonial before braving the descent to question its oracle and offering a gift, as an inscription suggests, on his own behalf. Remarkably, he was recorded as ‘king of the Macedonians’, possibly because he had retained his title when Philip supplanted him, possibly because his visit had occurred when Philip was still his regent. He reappears as Macedonian representative for a disputed frontier town, also in Boeotia; this honour was shared by another Macedonian who defected to Persia at Alexander’s accession. This coincidence is probably irrelevant to their loyalties in 336 as their joint honour was granted at least two, maybe ten, years earlier. But another dedication from the shrine of the same frontier town names a Greek contemporary, most probably a general from Thessaly who is known to have fought in Philip’s advance force before he too defected to Persia. It is unsound to use these local inscriptions to link the two defectors with ‘king’ Amyntas. Maybe his friends were the two Lyncestian brothers who championed him, perhaps, as a king more suited to their tribe. But the defectors may have been dislodged differently, perhaps by the next coup, directed against the advance force in which one, maybe two, served. However, another Lyncestian defected too, perhaps the son of one of the suspect brothers. The links, therefore, between Amyntas, the Lyncestians and defection remain unclear, though these Macedonians’ willingness to fight against their countrymen is proof of the affair’s gravity.
Against Amyntas, Alexander took the traditional action, but it is not known exactly when he took it; Philip’s death cannot be dated to any one summer month, although July is a sound guess, and Alexander’s accession is only known to have been settled before October. Throughout those three months his baronial enemies may well have been turbulent; as quickly as possible he had the two Lyncestians executed; and, presumably soon afterwards, he had his rival Amyntas killed too, although his death cannot be dated more closely than within ten months of Philip’s murder. There may have been a chase, there must have been drama, and these three deaths were only one side to the story.
Even without this ‘king’ Amyntas, Alexander was still exposed on two different fronts and required to appeal to three separate groups; the army and commoners in Macedonia, the palace nobles, and the advance force of some ten thousand men away in Asia. The main lines of opposition all now met in the three high commanders cut off in Asia, a convenience if Alexander acted swiftly in their absence. One was the baron Attalus, whose interest in palace intrigue was directed through his niece Eurydice and her infant son. Another was also an Amyntas, probably son of one of the offending Lyncestians; the third was Parmenion, over sixty years old and the most respected general in the kingdom. ‘The Athenians elect ten generals every year,’ Philip was once rumoured to have said, ‘but I have only ever found one: Parmenion.’ With Antipater already on his side, Alexander only needed one of the other two marshals, and as there could be no dealings with Attalus, committed to the family of Philip’s second wife and loathed for his past remarks that Alexander was no longer a proper heir, he would have to turn hopefully to Parmenion. But two family ties were pulling the elderly general away from Alexander’s ambitions; his daughter was married to Attalus, and his son Philotas was known for his friendship with ‘king’ Amyntas, one reason perhaps why he had stood at the edge, not the centre, of Alexander’s young circle of friends.
Alexander had one advantage, and he used it decisively: unlike his main enemies, he was at home in Macedonia with the court and the troops. Before Attalus could upset him, he gave orders for the execution of his stepbrother, Eurydice’s infant son; he spared the women and the half-witted Arrhidaeus, because nobody would ever rule through them, and thereupon he presented himself to the army as the one determined heir. The government, he told them, was changing only in name and Philip’s example would remain in all things; there would, however, be a brief cut in taxation, and so his father’s army accepted him despite their doubts. He was secure at home, and could organize Philip’s funeral to please Philip’s men. Philip would lie in state behind the bronze studded doors and pillared façade of a Macedonian mausoleum near the ancient palace of Aigai, home of the royal dynasty. By tradition, his funeral games would include armed duels among warriors and perhaps the killing of the nobles accused as his murderers; then, the army would be purified by ancient ritual, being led by Alexander between two halves of a dog’s corpse. The ritual would bind them to him, and if ‘king’ Amyntas had not yet been seized it was becoming plain that his hopes were unfounded. One of Philip’s most practised diplomats was also put to death, perhaps for their sake; the army were indifferent to the family murders which marked the start of every reign.
From Asia, the outlook seemed far less fair than before. Attalus had lost his niece’s baby, the only prince in his family; the elder statesmen were in peril, Olympias was returning and the troops had been wooed away by Alexander’s promises. Attalus was popular with his own men, and cut off in Asia, he could only wait. It is uncertain how many months he waited, but soon, said his enemies, he received a letter from Athens, suggesting a common rebellion; he turned the letter in to Alexander, too glib a proof of his innocence, and Alexander seized his chance. Persuading a party of his newly won soldiery that Attalus was dangerous, he gave them a Greek friend as leader and ordered them to go east and arrest him, or kill him if he struggled. This Greek, Hecataeus, was a crucial supporter; later a friend of Antipater, he may have been the elderly marshal’s first contribution to Alexander’s reign. He led the way to the Hellespont where he ruled as local tyrant, crossed into Asia, and when Attalus struggled, put him to death. The one man who still mattered watched the coup with most welcome indifference; Parmenion allowed his son-in-law Attalus to go to his death, preferring the cause of his own three sons who were trapped at a court secured against him. Others fled to the Persian high command, but a Greek, a Lyncestian and a senior Macedonian were no loss beside the gain of Parmenion.
With the death of Attalus, the first phase of Alexander’s accession ended. His mother and his close friends could return, and with the highland tribes, he could compromise through his new clique of courtiers; the Lyncestians saw their Alexander favoured: the Orestids could look to a link with Epirote Olympias and the honour of three Orestid nobles as Alexander’s intimate Companions; from Eordaea came two boyhood friends and future bodyguards; Elimea saw her nobility rise with Attalus’s fall and an Elimiot, perhaps, favoured as one of Alexander’s returning friends: the elderly king of the Tymphiots pledged support, helped by young Tymphiot nobles whom Parmenion would soon befriend. Each hill kingdom had its representative for the future, and over them all Parmenion and Antipater were wielding the same influence as before. And yet, on considering their king, there were those in the army who doubted him.
It is hard not to form a picture of Alexander; Alexander marching through the Libyan desert to put his mysterious questions to the oracle at Siwah, Alexander receiving the captive Persian queen and her daughters, or Alexander drunk, spearing an insolent Companion in a moment of blind passion. It is harder to be certain what he looked like, for the only descriptions are posthumous, and either designed to suit a view of his character or else derived from his many statues and portraits. Officially, Alexander liked to control these, and as an adult he would only sit to be painted by Apelles, sculpted by Lysippus or carved on gems by Pyrgoteles; some originals survive, and others can be recovered from copies, but all are stylized when they are not official, and as Napoleon once remarked ‘certes, Alexandre n’a jamais posé devant Apelles’. There is none which shows him warts and all.
There are features, however, which are either too unusual or too commonplace to be artists’ fictions. His skin was white on his body, a weathered red on his face; unlike his father and all previous Macedonian kings, he kept his beard clean-shaven, a fashion which enemies called effeminate but which was common among Philip’s courtiers and became a precedent for all Alexander’s successors. His hair stood up off his brow and fell into a central parting; it framed his face, and grew long and low on his neck, a style which was in sharp contrast to the close-cropped haircut of athletes and soldiers and was already insulted in antiquity as a sign of moral laxity. In Pella’s mosaic of a lion hunt he is shown with fair hair and dark eyes and in an early copy of a contemporary painting made for a Roman owner, his dark brown eyes are suitably Latin, while his dark brown hair shows a lighter streak which was more true to life. There is nothing to challenge their evidence although legend later claimed that his left eye was black, his right one blue-green, a double colouring which was meant to suggest a magical power of bewitchment. The liquid intensity of his gaze was famous and undisputed, not least because he believed in it himself; Lysippus the sculptor caught it best, and his Successors would imitate it, not only in their own bearing but also in their portraits of Alexander which exaggerated the eyes and showed them gazing upwards to suggest his acknowledged divinity; with this famous gaze went the turning of the neck and head to one side, stressed in art but also in life, and again, an example for his Successors; it is wrong to explain this as due to a wound, for official artists would not then have emphasized it. As for his body, a pupil of Aristotle said that he was particularly sweet-smelling, so much so that his clothes were scented; this may be a compliment to his divinity, for sweet scent was the mark of a god, but more probably, the comment referred to his suspect liking for ointments and sweet spices.
Like his father, he was a very handsome young man. His nose, as statues and paintings stress, was straight; his forehead was prominent and his chin short but jutting; his mouth revealed emotion, and the lips were often shown curling. But art could not convey his general manner, and for his subjects that was more important. He walked and spoke fast, and so therefore, did his Successors; by contemporaries, he was believed to be lion-like in appearance and often in temper, and for a young man of streaming hair and penetrating gaze the comparison was apt, the more so as he had been born under the sign of Leo and was best known from the portraits on his coins, which showed him in the lionskin cap of his ancestor Heracles, a headdress he may have worn in everyday life. Later, the comparison was overdone, and his hair would be said to be tawny and even his teeth to be sharp like a lion cub’s.
The problem, however, is his height, for no painting betrays it, any more than a Van Dyck reveals the smallness of Charles I. Certainly, he was smaller than Hephaistion, the man he loved, and he may well have been smaller than almost anyone else; when he sat on the throne of the Persian king, he required a table, not a stool, for his feet, and although the throne was designed to be high, this suggests a definite shortness of leg. His only measurement is given in the fictitious Romance of Alexander, where he is said to have been three cubits, or four feet six inches high; this surely cannot be correct, nor can it confirm his historical smallness, although legend liked to play on the theme that the world’s great conqueror was reduced to a mere three cubits of earth. Only in German myth was Alexander remembered as king of the dwarfs, and it would perhaps be rash to explain his ambition on the assumption that he was unusually small. Physically, however, Alexander had inherited all of his father’s toughness against wounds and climate.
To his Macedonians this new king would have seemed, above all else, young. His long hair, fresh clean-shaven skin and nervous energy belonged to the very essence of youth, and there was little enough in his past to imply that audacity would now be tempered with discretion. Two years before, he had galloped at the head of the cavalry charge which had defeated the army of Philip’s Greek enemies, and after the battle he had gone as one of three envoys to Athens, the city which so affected his later politics in Greece. He had served with his father on a march to the Danube and two years before that, at the age of sixteen, he had held the seal of the kingdom while his father was away at Byzantium. Most notably, he had led an army to victory against a turbulent Thracian tribe and founded his first city, Alexandropolis, to commemorate this dashing success. There was decided promise in such behaviour, but more than promise was needed if Philip’s inheritance was to be held together.
The tribes of Illyria threatened to north and west; to the east, Philip’s many new cities could hardly suffice to hold down Thrace along the banks of the Danube and the shore of the distant Black Sea. The advance army, split by a quarrel, had begun to be hard pressed in Asia; to the south, there were few Greek states who did not see the death of their allied leader as the start of a new independence. Troubles within Macedonia had been settled with such speed and ruthlessness that the highlands had not, after all, deserted and Philip’s two most respected generals had ignored their families to pledge support. But Olympias was back, and never peaceable. It may be significant that Alexander’s two most trusted Macedonians, Perdiccas and Crateras, came from Orestis, the hill kingdom once closest, politically, to Olympias’s own. There is reason to suppose that his intimate friend and future historian, Ptolemy, was born in Orestis too. If so, Alexander’s personal clique may have drawn heavily on friendships derived from his mother, and after his mother’s possible role in Philip’s murder, these allegiances might not be to every courtier’s taste. The deeper question of the new king’s abilities remained, and an answer could only be gleaned from memories of his earlier years; men would be looking backwards, and in search of Alexander, it is time to turn in that direction too.