Empire of Ashes: A Novel of Alexander the Great Read online

  It should be noted that Arrian doesn’t mention this atrocity, and that some modern scholars, such as William Tarn, have questioned Curtius’ accuracy. On the other hand, in the years since Tarn’s two-volume biography was published many have wondered if that scholar was more interested in apologizing for Alexander instead of understanding him. Interestingly, TV documentarian Michael Wood, while he was off following in the footsteps of Alexander the Great, reported evidence of a cult of Apollo of Didyma at the remote mound site of Dilbergin Tepe near the Oxus—including amphorae bearing the stamp of the Branchid clan.

  It is not hard to imagine motives for Alexander’s zeal to avenge Greek honor against the collaborators. It probably weighed heavily on his mind that his remote ancestor on the throne of Macedon, Alexander the First, posed no great obstacle to the invading army of King Xerxes. To put it less charitably, Alexander the Great had inherited a throne of Medizers—a fact that did not accord well with his image as avenger of the Greeks.

  So it seems that even some historians who admired Alexander did not necessarily idealize him. Meanwhile, some of his recent fictional rhapsodes, such as Mary Renault, found it very easy to put the flaws of their hero out of their minds. Reading Renault’s beautifully crafted novels, such as Fire from Heaven, or her non-fiction Nature of Alexander, we are struck by her fervent, almost maternal capacity to defend her subject. It is reminiscent of what our 43rd President said upon meeting Russian President Vladimir Putin, about having looked into the man’s soul and seen a kindred spirit. Renault, whose own pioneering fabulousness has been explored in a recent biography, undoubtedly saw a kindred spirit in the ambisexual warrior-king.

  Unfortunately, this also seems to have driven her to cast Alexander’s adversaries in a correspondingly bad light. We can say what we want about the orator Demosthenes—we may call his rhetoric overrated, his podium style overwrought, his politics paranoid. We might even call him the original exemplar of the Barry Goldwater principle that “extremism in defense of liberty is no vice.” But dumb is not a quality that springs to mind. Yet Demosthenes comes off quite stupid and venal in Renault’s books, the kind of cardboard demagogue we might expect from the pen of a true paleo-monarchist. I have particularly in mind the scene in Fire From Heaven where the boy Alexander outsmarts the politician by leaking the content of his speech to Demosthenes’ rival, leaving the supposedly eloquent Demosthenes nothing to do but lapse into a sputtering incoherence.

  This is the dark side of the idealism de Botton extols: all too often, the impulse to idealize one figure obliges us to denigrate another, equally deserving one. It’s also very curious how so many moderns like Renault, who grew up enjoying the freedoms guaranteed by modern democracy, ended up heroizing Alexander, a king from what was essentially a feudal society, over a tireless defender of democratic values like Demosthenes. This is another example of how victory is the best deodorizer.

  Quite apart from the specifics of Alexander’s case, I suspect that when de Botton praises idealization in “the art and architecture of the early modern period” he’s referring to genres that do not necessarily have clear counterparts today. For instance, is the visual embellishment of “government buildings” and “stately homes” in the past most appropriately compared with what we might call serious art now? Clearly, a statue of an idealized historical figure on a museum façade, such as Teddy Roosevelt on horseback in front of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, is not really meant to be a portrait of the real man, or necessarily to inspire us to emulate Teddy’s manly grandeur. Rather, it is a reference to qualities to which the institution wishes to associate itself. One might therefore argue that the job those statues and landscapes once performed has today been taken over by advertising.

  After all, in advertising idealization is not only alive and well, it is essential to the project of making us desire what must, at root, remain unattainable. Ideal forms have not only become commoditized in our time—they have become trivially routine. This has, almost by default, left to artists the task of puncturing the ideal.

  In this way, in our passion to discover the foibles that both undermine and undergird the virtues of our heroes, we may be said to live still in a baroque era—with the word “baroque” meant in its original, gemological sense, as the term for a pearl of warped or irregular shape. The true measure of heroism in such times isn’t ideality, but the courage to be flawed.

  We should not only avoid condescending to the idealists of the past. We should also avoid oversimplifying their intentions.

  August 18, 2009

  Sonoma, California

  A Note on Units of Measure

  This book includes a mixture of ancient and modern units of measure. For the sake of convenience, modern units are used when they were more or less similar to their ancient counterparts (e.g., feet, hours, months). Verisimilitude has been served by including a number of antique units that are common in the relevant historical sources. Most prominent here are the stade, a Greek unit of distance approximately equivalent to 600 modern feet (and from which our word stadium is derived), and the parasang, a Persian unit equivalent to the distance a person could walk in an hour. On average the latter equaled 30 Greek stadia or three-and-a-quarter modern miles. An army of the time could cover about six parasangs in a day.

  The common monetary unit is the Athenian drachma, which is equivalent in value to six obols. The superordinate units are the mina, worth 100 drachmas, and the talent, equaling 6000 drachmas. The daric is a common non-Greek unit of currency-- a gold coin minted by the Persians worth about 26 drachmas.

  We know that a decent house in a suburb of Athens in the fourth century BC would set the buyer back 500 to 1000 drachmas (or five to ten minas); a gallon of olive oil, more than three drachmas; a good pair of shoes, about ten drachmas; a healthy slave, 300 to 500. Still, for various reasons, expressing the value of a drachma in today’s currency is not as straightforward as finding modern equivalents for, say, distance. According to an oft-cited rule of thumb, the wage for the average laborer in classical Athens was one or two drachmas a day. A talent, therefore, works out to the equivalent of almost twenty years of work, or in modern terms something like a million dollars. The treasury of 120,000 talents Alexander is said to have plundered at Persepolis (cf. Curtius, 5.6.9) was therefore equivalent to some 720 million man-days of labor. This amounts to “real money” even in US government terms.

  As for the calendar, the reader will notice there are no absolute dates given for the events depicted here. This is due to the simple fact that no universal calendar existed until recent times (and arguably, does not exist even today, given that the Chinese, Muslim, and Jewish calendars are still in use). Instead, years were designated either by counting the years since some important event, or on the basis of who held important magistracies at that time (in Athens, years were named for the so-called “eponymous” archons; Alexander, for instance, was born in the year of Elpines’ archonship, known otherwise as July 356-June 355 BCE). The court case described here takes place in the month of Pyanopsion (the Attic equivalent of October), in the year of Kephisodoros (323 BCE); the events recounted in the trial occur in the years immediately before and during the campaign of Alexander, spring 334 through spring 323.

  Prologue

  Olympias examined the face in her bronze mirror. “Such dull features,” she thought, frowning at her saffron-tinted reflection, believing she saw in it the trial of every Epirote winter suffered by her forebears. She narrowed her examination to her eyes, tracing a flicker of interest in them as they regarded themselves. "Yes, those are fine," she said. "But the rest—hopeless!"

  Before her, laid out like military assets on a battlefield, were the tools of a despised but lucrative trade: depilatories, astringents, demulcents, emollients, pomades, perfumes, balms. Next to a jar filled with a Syrian unguent of beef fat, thyme and seagull droppings, she had a flask of Corinthian warming ointment made from sesame oil and turpentine. There was an E
gyptian face powder that smelled of oleander and milled so fine it flowed like liquid between her fingers; though its color was perfectly white, it rouged her cheek when she applied it. She also tried a curious device invented by a Syracusan that, with a single click, cut all the hairs of the eyebrow to a uniform length.

  These were in addition to the usual natron powder, foundation of metallic mercury, kohl for the eyes, chervil for the breath - all the attributes of an expensive courtesan. No respectable woman, installed in domestic glory within her walls, would need to create a seductively wan complexion by daubing her skin with lead, or fake a blush with ochre pencils. Such freedom was the gift of ill-repute.

  And so that afternoon, Olympias, consort of the King of Macedonia, daughter of the royal house of Epirus, initiate advanced grade in the holy mysteries of Demeter, the Kabeiroi and the Great Mother, painted herself like a cheap flute-girl.

  This wasn’t necessary in past years. From the moment of their first meeting Philip had shown himself vulnerable to her attraction. They had encountered each other on Samothrace, confronting the celebrated Mysteries, but Olympias presented herself to him as a very solvable enigma. When they first married he would interrupt his endless campaigns and sieges to steal nights with her. An heir was anticipated at any time—and yet, strangely, had not come at first.

  This delay she first attributed to her tendency to climax early, often several times before her partner could lumber up his own (and relatively brief) contribution. Her pleasure may have acted to drive off the male humors necessary to the process of conception, her doctors told her. So she held herself back.

  Yet something still seemed to go awry, something that impinged or intruded upon the process. Too often the king left her bed at the earliest courteous instance, lips moving silently, a slash of annoyance across his face. "Too much muttering, not enough mothering," she said as she mixed the kohl with its little spoon. The result was a maddeningly empty cradle.

  Philip came to her just as she finished her preparations. There was a faint look of irritation on his face, the kind he wore when state business pulled him away from dice games and drinking parties. He hardly looked at her until she turned to him, her face glazed dazzling white like a funeral jar, her cheeks like puddles of dried blood.

  "You look like a streetwalker," he said.

  "Shall I take it off?" she asked, rising.

  Not quite by accident, her gown fell open. The look of gray distraction finally left Philip’s face as he eyed what he saw there.

  "No, I suppose not."

  When he touched her, it was always the same, like a traveler taking an identical route through a half-understood country. His first move was to denude her left shoulder and seize the breast. He did so. She kept her eyes on him, shifting her weight precisely in time with the force of his attentions.

  Philip never had trouble spearing generals and envoys with his eyes. When he was alone with Olympias, though, he could never hold her glance. She was never so shy, searching his full, square, deceptively kind face, taking the measure of him. This inevitably distracted him, until she found herself turned around. He was pushing her down from behind.

  “The back is still your best side—and most affordable, I would think.”

  “Three obols a go, if that’s all you’ve got.”

  He yanked up her gown, regarding the cleaved haunch as it swelled down from her hips and rounded off at that swale of lubricious womanhood. A mound of true sweetness, he thought, though with that cloying softness of her sex, that quicksand prospect of letting him sink slickly away until he could go no farther. But this was like sleeping on a too-soft pillow after weeks on campaign—an adjustment he was just too impatient to make. So he took the other road.

  She started at this, turning to face him. Camp-style buggery was not the object of her afternoon’s work.

  “But if you prefer, we might have a special price on the ‘racehorse’...” she said, coaxing him back onto the couch.

  “Now here is something,” he thought, as she settled in jockey position athwart him. The gown had been disposed of, and she was looking down at him through tumbling flutes of sweet-smelling hair, breasts hanging free, that same vaguely appraising look on her face. The latter annoyed him, but not much in that soft vise. She turned away as she commenced to rock, not in passion but to avoid his breath, which stank of sprats and whatever wine painted his throat.

  “Don’t I bounce lightly?” she asked him.

  “Expertly, expertly.”

  It began pleasantly enough. The kind of friction between them, though, was rarely the right kind, and soon both became frustrated. She could easily have come and dared not. He wanted to have done with it but couldn’t. The position was unique, yet impractical for him, since he needed to use his hips.

  At last he half-rose from the cushions, bucking at her from below until he finished. Olympias grasped him with her thighs like a real rider, her body first hardening and then pouring herself out around him. Then she lay to his side, one leg still slung around him.

  Monarchy’s duty done, the king planted a preemptory kiss on the top of her head and moved to slip away. He was restrained by her rigid, cocked leg.

  “Let me go,” he said. “I have business.”

  “Tossing dice no doubt.”

  “The worth of my pursuits is not for you to judge. Let me up.”

  “And what about this business?”

  He opened his mouth to reply, but was distracted by the peculiar sight of her rubbing her cheek against the royal tool. Pulling back, she revealed a coat of white lead transferred from her face to the bulb. She was smiling with childish delight at this. Her cheek now covered with a pink impasto of ochre, metal, and spunk.

  “Damn you woman, what are you doing to me?”

  She used her fingers to smear the rest of him with her paint. “So squeamish! See—I’ve made a statue of your best feature…”

  “Chamberlain! Pheredeipnos! Fetch water!” he cried.

  She propped herself up on an elbow, like a drinker at a party. “Oh Philip, why do you have such contempt for me?”

  The chamberlain opened the door and entered—but was frozen in his tracks by Olympias’ withering stare. Then he retreated.

  She turned back to Philip. “You are too proud, sir. Your serpent is pretty, but so is mine…”

  He felt her root beneath his head and pull something from under the pillow. She was now dangling a long, colorful object in front of his face. Looking closely, he met the beaded eyes of a small snake.

  “Sisyphus, salute your king,” she addressed the snake.

  Sisyphus opened his mouth, revealing a blue interior and a pair of needle-thin fangs.

  Philip shot to his feet, dumping Olympias on the floor. “By the gods, you should live in a cage! I should send you back to that tree in Dodona you fell from!”

  “My love, wait…” she laughed. “He’s harmless, just a little baby…”

  He slammed the bedroom door behind him.

  An hour later, Philip was slouching beside his general Parmenion on a drinking couch. The room was small and deliberately hard to find, adjoining the back of the portico that overlooked the flats of the king’s burgeoning capital. Now deep in his cups, Philip was imagining what it would take to fill Pella’s lagoon with his very own navy.

  “The Athenian contractors pay a talent and a half for each vessel, not counting pay and supplies,” Parmenion told him.

  “Perhaps we might shave a little off the pay…” The prospect of cheap, boundless military capability made Philip’s eyes shine like an impatient bridegroom’s.

  “Dangerous. The Athenians have motivated men at the oars, even citizens…”

  Parmenion broke off. Lowering his cup, Philip saw why: Olympias had found them.

  His wife was standing there clearly and unabashedly naked. She had done nothing to clean herself after their labors, her eyes caked with mineral black, her cheek still smeared with the royal seed. Philip glanced a
t Parmenion—the officer’s eyes were prudently lowered, but a smile played on his lips.

  Philip could think of nothing to say, until he finally sighed, “Woman, you are an affliction.”

  Olympias was looking up and away from them, her arms raised.

  “Rejoice, O Macedon!” she cried.

  The king opened his mouth to call the chamberlain, but the words died in his throat. Small objects were cascading down from between Olympias’s thighs. They were hard, round. Each was propelled from her in force, bouncing and rolling on the tiles.

  “I am an oak! I have conceived in Zeus!”

  Stunned, Philip could only watch as the shining, growing heap of acorns collected at the feet of his Queen.

  I.

  What soon gets old? Gratitude.

  --Aristotle

  The day broke cold on the empty square. Lying in the shadow of Hymettus, Swallow watched the autumn sun rise over the ridge. A shining wedge descended to light the plumes of stoking smoke from the factories, then the bronzed encrustations of the Acropolis. As the market stalls opened, a mantle of haze kicked up by thousands of feet settled over the town, warming him with its familiarity. Filing past him on their way into the market, his fellow Athenians (bless them!) looked down with contempt upon his prone body.

  He got up when the first beams reached the pavement. Shucking his blanket, he rose to empty his bladder through his morning semi-rigidity. The market girls grimaced, turning away from his baggy, tufted nakedness, but he was long past caring if he impressed those snoots.