The Nature of Alexander Read Online Free
Author: Mary Renault
projected on him their horror of modern atrocities (perpetrated after two millennia of Christianity) which this fourth-century pagan would scarcely have credited to savages.
Filtered and refracted by these layers of fable, history, tradition and emotion—a thing inseparable from him alive and dead—the image of Alexander has come down to us.
Macedon
A LEXANDER’S EXISTENCE WAS DETERMINED in 358 BC , at a celebration of the Mysteries on Samothrace, where his parents met.
Philip II of Macedon, then about twenty-four, was a legitimate but not quite hereditary king. His elder brother, Perdiccas III, had been killed while his son was still an infant. The Assembly of fighting Macedonians had the traditional right to choose in such circumstances a king from the members of the royal house; a fact of primary importance to the country’s history. It was a time of civil feud and foreign invasion. A fighting regent was essential, and Philip was proven in the field. Not long after, the situation growing still more perilous, he was asked to assume the throne.
His surviving portrait shows a square powerful face, intelligent, ruthless, possibly brutal, but without the viciousness that chills in some of the Caesars. It has humour; looks capable of charm, and of the amatory success for which he was notorious.
A crucial event of his career had happened when he was sixteen. In the complex wars of the royal succession, Perdiccas, making a treaty with Thebes, had had to supply a royal hostage as security. Childless as yet, he had perforce sent his younger brother. Thebes had been then in its full brief blaze of glory after the overthrow of theSpartan tyranny. Intellectually provincial, in military lustre it was unmatched in Greece. Lately its cult of heroic homosexual love had reached its apogee with Pelopidas’ foundation of its corps d’élite, the Sacred Band, made up from pairs of friends who had already taken a traditional vow to stand or fall together. Philip, treated on parole more as guest than prisoner, learned the skills of soldiering from the finest masters. Here too he may have added to his lifelong love of women the taste for young men which was to cause his death.
It is tempting to wonder whether some friendly contrivance of his hosts could have got him, incognito, across the border to Athens. He was a young nonentity and it would have been easy. He was not likely in his days of power to admit having sneaked in under such humiliating conditions; but all his life he showed a deep regard for Athens’ history and culture, however great his contempt for her current leaders. Reared himself in a fifth-century palace at Pella, built by Athenian architects and decorated by her painters of the finest period, he could appreciate her material splendours, still in uncorrupted perfection.
His own inheritance was a highland kingdom of great scenic beauty and tall warlike men, where his capital, Pella, was an island of classicism in an archaic society. At his accession (as Alexander later reminded his men) all that the people owned were the sheep whose skins they wore for want of cloth, and even those were hard to keep, border raids from neighbours being constant. As in Homer’s day, the lords would follow the king to war—unless just then supporting some rival claimant—bringing each his meinie of tough undisciplined followers armed with what came to hand. The loose law of succession had ensured a series of civil wars and a long record of murders. Perdiccas had got his throne by killing a lover of hismother’s who had usurped it; she was rumoured to have procured the deaths both of her husband and her son. From him Philip inherited five rival pretenders to the throne, some in a state of active hostilities; and two foreign invasions. No account of Alexander’s life can be understood without remembering the record of his forebears which he must have picked up from his earliest years.
Philip killed at once the most dangerous of
Filtered and refracted by these layers of fable, history, tradition and emotion—a thing inseparable from him alive and dead—the image of Alexander has come down to us.
Macedon
A LEXANDER’S EXISTENCE WAS DETERMINED in 358 BC , at a celebration of the Mysteries on Samothrace, where his parents met.
Philip II of Macedon, then about twenty-four, was a legitimate but not quite hereditary king. His elder brother, Perdiccas III, had been killed while his son was still an infant. The Assembly of fighting Macedonians had the traditional right to choose in such circumstances a king from the members of the royal house; a fact of primary importance to the country’s history. It was a time of civil feud and foreign invasion. A fighting regent was essential, and Philip was proven in the field. Not long after, the situation growing still more perilous, he was asked to assume the throne.
His surviving portrait shows a square powerful face, intelligent, ruthless, possibly brutal, but without the viciousness that chills in some of the Caesars. It has humour; looks capable of charm, and of the amatory success for which he was notorious.
A crucial event of his career had happened when he was sixteen. In the complex wars of the royal succession, Perdiccas, making a treaty with Thebes, had had to supply a royal hostage as security. Childless as yet, he had perforce sent his younger brother. Thebes had been then in its full brief blaze of glory after the overthrow of theSpartan tyranny. Intellectually provincial, in military lustre it was unmatched in Greece. Lately its cult of heroic homosexual love had reached its apogee with Pelopidas’ foundation of its corps d’élite, the Sacred Band, made up from pairs of friends who had already taken a traditional vow to stand or fall together. Philip, treated on parole more as guest than prisoner, learned the skills of soldiering from the finest masters. Here too he may have added to his lifelong love of women the taste for young men which was to cause his death.
It is tempting to wonder whether some friendly contrivance of his hosts could have got him, incognito, across the border to Athens. He was a young nonentity and it would have been easy. He was not likely in his days of power to admit having sneaked in under such humiliating conditions; but all his life he showed a deep regard for Athens’ history and culture, however great his contempt for her current leaders. Reared himself in a fifth-century palace at Pella, built by Athenian architects and decorated by her painters of the finest period, he could appreciate her material splendours, still in uncorrupted perfection.
His own inheritance was a highland kingdom of great scenic beauty and tall warlike men, where his capital, Pella, was an island of classicism in an archaic society. At his accession (as Alexander later reminded his men) all that the people owned were the sheep whose skins they wore for want of cloth, and even those were hard to keep, border raids from neighbours being constant. As in Homer’s day, the lords would follow the king to war—unless just then supporting some rival claimant—bringing each his meinie of tough undisciplined followers armed with what came to hand. The loose law of succession had ensured a series of civil wars and a long record of murders. Perdiccas had got his throne by killing a lover of hismother’s who had usurped it; she was rumoured to have procured the deaths both of her husband and her son. From him Philip inherited five rival pretenders to the throne, some in a state of active hostilities; and two foreign invasions. No account of Alexander’s life can be understood without remembering the record of his forebears which he must have picked up from his earliest years.
Philip killed at once the most dangerous of
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