The Nature of Alexander (8 page)

History is vague about the degree of Arridaeus’ imbecility. He outlived his brother for some six years as a puppet king, able apparently to speak a few words in public, but taking no decision and never produced in battle. The wife he eventually married was a capable woman who acted for him, but the union was childless and probably unconsummated. It seems incredible that he would ever have been adopted as king by the Macedonian Assembly in preference to Alexander, even if their father in his lifetime had so decreed. Philip owed his own accession to the call for a fighting king; the direct heir, then passed over, was now in his early twenties, the obvious choice if the succession had to be changed. What blinded Alexander to all this?

Intellectually, he was outstandingly flexible and swift in his adjustments. Emotionally it was another matter. His demands on himself were such that though to his life’s end he was equal to any physical hardship, pain or danger,
under extreme psychological stress he would break rather than bend. This pattern appears in his story more than once.

The eagerness with which the satrap jumped at his offer must have opened his eyes; Pixodarus had clearly been promised no heir-apparent. But enlightenment came too late. Philip found out. And here the Plutarch manuscript has a tantalizing short gap. After the break, it says Philip went to Alexander’s room, taking with him Philotas son of Parmenion, one of Alexander’s close friends, and gave him a furious dressing down. He was probably confined to his room under house arrest. The presence of Philotas is unexplained, unless as a neutral witness, his father being Philip’s oldest friend; but the young man’s later record makes it not impossible that, unknown to Alexander, he had betrayed the plot.

Philip upbraided his son for being so unworthy of his rank as to seek an alliance with a mere Carian, the servitor of a barbarian king. In other words, he had been assured of his rank, and his doubts were as insulting as his action had been disastrous. For him the match was out of the question; and after Thettalus’ revelations, Arridaeus was of course turned down. The diplomatic coup was ruined. For a man with Alexander’s grasp of affairs it must have been a bitter moment. But worse was to come. The King, determined to show who was master and break up a subversive clique, banished from Macedon all Alexander’s intimates. The one interesting exception was Hephaestion. There are several feasible reasons, the most obvious being that Philip, like Aristotle, thought him a good influence on Alexander; for whose conduct, too, he might be a useful hostage, especially if Philip knew them to be lovers. He was a shrewd judge of men. As it was, he gave a last crack of the trainer’s whip; he had Thettalus, then in Corinth, arrested and brought to Pella in chains.

His professional status was that of an Irving or a Garrick. Even though only reprimanded—we hear nothing of any punishment beyond the gross humiliation of his fetters—it was an extreme step for Philip with his cultural aspirations. But he could have found no better way of flicking Alexander on the raw. His insistence on sharing every danger to which he exposed his men was almost an obsession. This time it had been impossible. The shame must have bitten deep; the resentment also. It is to his credit that he never pushed it out of his mind together with the friend concerned in it; Thettalus remained throughout his reign a welcome guest and favourite artist.

Meantime, the first phase of the Persian War had started. Parmenion and Attalus had taken an advance force across the Hellespont and secured a bridgehead. King Ochus had been poisoned the year before by his eunuch Grand Vizier, the king-maker Bagoas, whose power he had tried to curb; Arses his son was young and occupied with these internal dangers. The coastal satraps’ resistance seems to have been disorganized and weak. Had Alexander’s friendship with his father lasted, he himself would probably have held a command in the expedition. In his place went the hated Attalus.

Philip had one matter of home defence to see to before setting out himself: the conciliation of Epirus. Perhaps through Eurydice’s persuasions, perhaps because Olympias had made herself intolerable, or because he blamed her for what her son had done, Philip had decided upon divorce. This would naturally affront his brother-in-law, King Alexandros. Evidently, however, the family honour was of more concern to Alexandros than his sister’s feelings; for he readily accepted Philip’s offered amends, the hand of her daughter Cleopatra. That he was her uncle was in those days no impediment.

It would be of great interest to know what plans Philip had made for Alexander in the coming war. He would not now be trusted as Regent. If left behind, he would have had to be imprisoned, and there is no sign at all of any such intention. The alternative would have been taking him along to Asia, and giving him a command under conditions where his pride and ambition would have guaranteed good performance. In the field together, away from Macedon, it is probable that once more the father and son would have become good comrades-in-arms.

The wedding plans were resplendent. High-ranking guests and state envoys were invited from all over Greece, as befitted Philip’s status of pan-Hellenic war leader. Festival games in honour of the twelve Olympian gods were to be dedicated at a ceremony in the theatre at Aegae, near modern Edessa, the ancient capital. Their wooden images were paraded in gilded cars, to be set up in the round “orchestra” below the stage; each god with the lifelike colouring applied to all Greek sculpture, including its greatest marbles, bleached today only by time. A similar statue of Philip ended the pageant—making thirteen, a number already significant before the night of the Last Supper.

Ensured of publicity through the whole Greek world, Philip thought the time ideal for refuting Athenian propaganda about his “tyranny.” Greek despots had traditionally gone about hedged with bodyguards. In planning the procession he arranged that, after all the notables had gone into the theatre (this must have included Alexander), his personal guard should be halted in the road outside, for him to make his entrance alone. The Captain of the Bodyguard, whom he thus instructed, was none other than Pausanias, promoted to this rank over the years.

The King’s throne at such a ceremony would be on the
stage. He would enter through the
parodos,
the imposing side entrance to a Greek theatre’s open wings. That the Captain of the Bodyguard should be standing there awaiting him must have seemed correct, or at any rate unsuspicious. As he came through the gateway, Pausanias thrust a dagger into his heart.

According to Diodorus, the only source to describe the scene in detail, the killer then ran away across a vineyard behind the theatre, towards horses standing by for his escape. He was ahead of his pursuers, when he caught his foot in a vine root. Before he could rise, he was cut down by the first men to overtake him.

The chiefs and nobles crowded to Alexander, unarmed at this sacred ceremony, and formed a bodyguard to take him to the citadel. His accession was not disputed. No other claimant was so much as named. He was King of Macedon.

The trial-by-historians of Alexander for his father’s murder, more or less closed since Plutarch’s day, has in modern times been reopened, despite a total lack of evidence for the prosecution. It would otherwise be a waste of space to re-examine it.

That he may have wished his father dead is neither here nor there. He had probably done so for at least a year. The world has been, and is, full of people visited by such wishes, who would be appalled at the thought of implementing them. Parricide was the most dreadful crime in Greek thought and religion, cursed by all the gods. That Alexander with his beliefs and temperament could not have borne this weight without going mad is obvious. However, this must not be taken as a decisive answer, in view of the possibility that Olympias had persuaded him he was not Philip’s son.

The mating of gods in physical shape with mortals was
as sincere a belief with Greeks as is the Immaculate Conception to Catholics, with the difference that the former was not a unique event. Unlike the latter, it had never been attacked by science; Aristotle’s genetic studies steered well clear of such hemlock-worthy blasphemies. Olympias in a Dionysiac trance may genuinely have imagined almost anything. The issue of parricide being inconclusive, we must proceed to more practical considerations of motive. Assuming Alexander morally prepared to kill, why do it now?

He was on display at a pan-Hellenic festival, with the precedence due to his rank; presented before the state envoys as heir apparent. The worst of his disgrace had blown over; ahead was the war with its great opportunities. He had lived under Philip’s roof, and could surely have compassed his death when the incentive was far greater; for instance, just after the wedding speech of Attalus. It is true that Olympias’ position had worsened as Alexander’s had improved; but he did not later kill people at her demand, refusing even to remove a Regent she detested. There always remain, as credible human motives, sheer hate, and revenge; these must indeed have impelled the actual killer. But to Alexander the coming war would have offered many occasions of passing off a death as due to enemy action; this would surely have been the course of an intelligent man with devoted partisans. Why the public drama? Of all possible suspects, Alexander had least to gain by it.

Accomplices favoured by the prosecution are the three young men who struck down the murderer, allegedly to silence him; this on the grounds that two, Perdiccas and Leonnatus, later held commands under Alexander and were among his friends. The objection here is glaring. When Philip fell, says Diodorus, “immediately one group of the bodyguards hurried to the body of the King, while
the rest poured out in pursuit of the assassin.” Naturally they would. How could Alexander possibly have determined who would get there first? As our own age should know, no explanation is needed for their killing their man, beyond the violence engendered by a violent scene. Pausanias was making good his escape till the vine root tripped him, which does not suggest efficient pre-arrangements. Soldiers with quick reactions in a crisis do tend to get promoted; and had Alexander been cold to those who so zealously avenged his father, he would have been highly suspect to his own contemporaries.

Pausanias’ accomplice with the horses must be borne in mind. That these were known to have been meant for the getaway suggests he was caught and interrogated. His evidence may have been of much importance in the subsequent trials.

The one item of “evidence” against Alexander in any ancient writer, indeed the only opinion, even, of the kind, occurs in Plutarch, that anecdotal holdall.

… most of the blame was laid on Olympias, because she had added her exhortations to the young man’s anger and urged him to the deed. But some slander [the Greek
diabole
means a false accusation] fell also on Alexander. For it is said that when Pausanias met him after the outrage and complained of it, Alexander quoted him the iambics from the
Medea
[Medea’s revenge wiped out most of the other characters]: “The bride, the groom and the bride-giver.”

It is perhaps sufficient to say that the last Illyrian frontier war at which Philip is known to have taken the field, and where his young friend presumably died, occurred when Alexander was twelve years old, and the “bride” about nine or ten.

Throughout his reign, Alexander never stands suspect of a surreptitious killing. When his power was vast, and
he could have had anyone he chose put quietly out of the way, he suffered annoyance, frustration and downright insult from men he heartily disliked or distrusted; nothing happened to these people till he was ready to proceed against them openly. Whether on principle or from pride, he found furtiveness impossibly repugnant. Another constant trait was loyalty to his friends, and gratitude carried to extravagance towards those who had supported him when in disgrace with Philip. To believe he could have used Pausanias, sworn to protect him (which Pausanias as Captain of the Bodyguard would have known he could not do) and then shopped him with less compunction than a Mafia boss, calls for as much credulity as anything in the Romances.

As against all this, the incident is immemorially typical of a Greek blood-feud killing, where honour demands that revenge be taken, and be
seen
to be taken, by the wronged man himself or his next of kin. (The two such killings carried out in Athens while the present writer happened to be there were both public; one in front of a Plaka taverna, one in Omonia Square.) One editor of Diodorus notes with apparent scepticism that “Pausanias waited a long time for his revenge”; a startling observation in the context of ancient or, for that matter, modern Greece. It also ignores the recent rise of his enemy Attalus to high military rank and the status of royal father-in-law; favours which may well have seemed like rewards for the injury on which Pausanias had brooded for long obsessive years. He may even have been told so. That he was used, though not by Alexander, there is no need to doubt.

This was a time when most Athenian politicians were men on whose unsupported word one would not convict a dog. When, however, they remind their public of public events, we may start to listen. Some years after the
murder, Aeschines accused his enemy Demosthenes of having ruined Athens through his blind hatred of Macedon. The speech goes on:

Now this was the man, fellow-citizens … who when informed through Charidemus’ spies that Philip was dead, before anyone else had been told, made up a vision for himself and lied about the gods, pretending he had had the news not from Charidemus but from Zeus and Athene … who he says converse with him in the night and tell him of things to come.

The most authoritative comment on this “vision” remains that of the historian John Williams, written a century and a half ago.

The event was public and could not be concealed. The deputies of all Greece were assembled there, and no message from Charidemus to Demosthenes could have outstripped the speed with which the news of such an event passes from mouth to mouth in a populous country. Not to mention that Charidemus would not have been the only deputy likely to despatch a messenger on such an occasion. Yet Demosthenes announced the death of Philip long before the news reached Athens from any other quarter… The accuracy of his information, and the falsehood respecting the alleged sources of his intelligence, almost indisputably prove that he was an accessory before the fact, and that he had previous notification of the very day on which the conspirators were to act.