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

  A man, gray-haired and heavily scarred in his face, finally approached me. Without introducing himself, and listing with drink, he set his feet and pointed an accusing finger at me.

  “I saw you in Boeotia! You held a line of hoplites against three wedges of horse!”

  Not knowing what to say, I shrugged. The drunk then leaned forward, an expression of surprised gratification spreading over him.

  “You know how to fight!”

  He raised his cup, drank to me, and staggered off. Much later, I learned that I had been addressed by Cleitus son of Dropidas, so-called ‘Black Cleitus,’ and that praise from him was a rare honor.

  Alexander returned. Taking his place on the couch again, he resumed our conversation as if there had been no interruption.

  “I already have an historian for the trip to Asia. Have you heard of Callisthenes of Olynthus?”

  “The son of Aristotle?”

  “The nephew.”

  “I know nothing of him except his name.”

  “I will tell you that the Queen Mother doesn’t like him. I will not bore you with the reasons…except to say that he is no soldier…give it here, son!”

  He intercepted a servant with a wine pitcher, taking it from him to fill his cup. As anachronistic as the Macedonian court seemed to Athenian eyes, it was informal enough to obligate the King to chase after his own drinks. By comparison, Darius of Persia probably had three flunkies dedicated to the management of his potations.

  We sat together, watching his officers carouse. Here and there, cups were drained down throats or down chins, and the cithara players swayed in their pleated costumes, and the blouses of the female entertainment were peeled away in happy, innocent debauch. The King tapped my cup with his own, asking “Don’t you feel like a demigod among savages, when you sit with these Macedonians?”

  How could I answer this peculiar question? It sounded like an invitation to insult him. Instead, I kept my silence.

  “So tell me, Machon, if you might join our party.”

  “That is why I was sent.”

  “Not as a commander. I have enough of those! I need officers along who can carry a pack, but who can also marshal ranks and files of a different kind—the kind that goes on scrolls. Do you favor my metaphor?”

  It took me a moment to realize that he was asking this question in all seriousness. I said I admired his metaphor very much, of course, which clearly pleased him.

  “How long a campaign do you envision?”

  “To free the Ionian cities for good, no more than two years. Can you ride a horse? No? Shall we make you an officer of the Shield-bearers? Ptolemy, is he tall enough for First Company?”

  “No!”

  “Then it’s Second Company! Fetch him a helmet!”

  The order was passed from couch to couch and out the door, and drew back a peaked Phrygian helmet from the armory, which was likewise handed toward me from man to man.

  “My lord Alexander, while I appreciate that you want my services, I have seen too much fighting in the ranks to be made a retainer.”

  “Our Shield-bearers are not retainers,” Hephaestion said with some impatience. “In our army, they are the light infantry that keeps the cavalry in touch with the phalanx. You are being honored.”

  Alexander dumped the helmet in my lap and clapped me on the back.

  “Welcome to the king’s Hypaspists, Machon son of Agathon!”

  I sat through the rest of the party with only the helmet for company. It was old, with enough chips and dents to tell the story of Philip’s seventeen years of unrelenting raids, battles, and sieges. And now it seemed the pattern would be repeated with the son. As to many of you, it came as a relief to me that the Macedonian juggernaut would at last be directed east, against the barbarians. Meanwhile, while the post of expedition historian was not the role I came to play, it would give me ample opportunity to observe and report to the Assembly.

  My decision to accept this offer was vindicated when all the Athenians but me were sent home. While he had the greatest esteem for the artists and philosophers of Athens, he held the soldiers of our city to be in a kind of bad odor. Aeschines suggests that he feared betrayal, but I don’t agree: there were contingents from plenty of Greek allies, such as the Thessalians, whom he kept at his back without any such concern. Instead, I think he and his comrades dreaded the air of defeat they perceived around Athenian arms. The Macedonians had known nothing but victory for a good many years, and standing at the opening of a difficult campaign, and of provincial and superstitious minds, they simply wanted nothing but winners around them.

  The chronicler’s post turned out to have enormous advantages. Alexander, desperate as he was for acclaim, put few limits on where I could go, or to whom I might talk. By this he did not intend that I would write embarrassing things about him. There would be an official version of every major event on the march. However, the enforcement of his legend was accomplished most through immersing the writer so completely in the affairs of the King, his trials and his joys, the day-to-day substance of his great endeavor, that the historian could not help but sympathize with his subject. There was power in being allowed within the charmed circle of Companions—a power that Alexander used well. As evidence, I point to the manuscripts of Callisthenes that had already appeared at the bookstalls. Yes, even Callisthenes, who was eventually murdered by Alexander, casts his subject as history’s finest hero.

  My first sampling of this privilege came just before the army left for Asia, as I became aware of troubling reports from the inner court. Alexander had only recently finished erecting a splendid tomb for his father, which he accomplished at the cost of much time and money. Though father and son had been estranged in recent years, the young King discharged his duty with great devotion, showing the reverence for custom that marked his conduct in the years to come. I was at the royal cemetery in Aigai before the tomb’s fine painted façade was closed forever and buried under the hill. Having retrieved Philip’s bones from the pyre and bathed them in wine, Alexander installed them in their gold box and sealed the inner chamber. With his own hands, Alexander placed a pair of Philip’s greaves at the door to his resting place, leaning them there as if his father had just stepped inside for a nap.

  Cynics may do their best to impugn his motives. They may say that he made such a lavish dedication to his father’s memory not out of genuine feeling, but to prove to the Macedonian nobles that the estates and privileges they gained under Philip were safe. Yet it still cannot have been easy for any son to face the premature death of his father. Add to this the suspicion that Philip was seeking by the end to delegitimize Alexander’s claim to the throne by marrying again, and we might begin to understand the welter of feelings in the young man. Yet it seems that Olympias only added to his troubles with a solemn announcement: Philip was not Alexander’s father after all!

  Of this scene I have only rumors, but they have the ring of truth. The Queen, who was still beautiful, had claimed for herself a new visibility with the ascension of her son. She was no longer Olympias at all, it seems, but Athena-of-the-flashing-eyes, striding around the palace in boots, perfumed helmet, and a cuirass made of crane feathers. Alexander’s legitimacy, she declared, did not stem from her marriage to Philip, who was just a mortal after all, but from her union with the very King of the Gods. She then attempted to justify her account with inexcusable details. Zeus’s cock, she reported, was as wide around as a man’s forearm, and hung slightly sinister. With mortal women he fucked like Pan, from behind. When he came the oak trees swayed, and thunder rolled along the mountaintops, and a feeling like the touch of lightning struck deep inside her. His mother went on like this until Alexander, covering his ears, ran groaning from the room. He never saw her again, and to my knowledge he spent not a moment regretting that fact.

  No doubt Olympias meant in this way to aggrandize her son on the eve of his expedition. But the woman knew more about the genitals of gods and demons than about the feelin
gs of human beings. Certainly, in the abstract, a god’s paternity might seem flattering. Taken along with the Queen’s taste for Bacchic excess, however, her story seemed nothing more than a euphemism for Alexander’s bastardy. Just as we might soften the death of a loved one by saying “the gods took him,” some women put the best face on illegitimacy by saying “a god fathered him.” I say this without ever speaking with Alexander about it—this was never a matter he would discuss. But if you had seen his face after receiving this news, as I did, you would not say that he seemed gladdened by it.

  This incident is also important because the episode at the Sanctuary of Ammon in Egypt cannot be understood without it. Having clashed with his father, as every adolescent does at some point as he attains his manhood, tales of some true, divine origin must have had some appeal to him. As a man, it is likely that Alexander knew his mother was insane. Yet as he puzzled over why he went from success to success, far exceeding Philip in the range of his conquests, her story ceased to be an embarrassment, and came to make some sense. By ‘sense’ I mean more than propaganda value—I mean relief from the questions that disturbed his sleep. When he went to Siwah, then, he was much gratified, for although the oracle told him exactly what Olympias had, it came without her excess, and her self-absorption—in short, without of the very air of her. Surely it must be more than mere propaganda value that drove him, as his final wish, to want to be buried in Egypt, next to the Oracle, and not delivered home to his mother.

  At this time Alexander gave every indication to me that the war on Persia had been his own idea. But this pretense rang hollow. He had, in fact, inherited this war from Philip, who had already landed troops in Asia some time before, under the command of Attalus son of Cleochares. Attalus had lately been suffering defeats at the hands of the Great King’s Greek hireling, Memnon. The Macedonians were on the edge of being driven into the sea. Alexander’s expedition was therefore something of a rescue operation.

  The Macedonians made a virtue of necessity by turning Alexander’s arrival on Asian soil into a theatrical event. While the real army crossed elsewhere under Parmenion’s command, the King sailed to the shores of Ilion in a party boat hung with garlands and groaning with the weight of officers and allied dignitaries. The historians were given a privileged place in the bows so they might witness the climax of the day’s program: Alexander’s landing. This was, incidentally, the first time I met Callisthenes. He had styled himself, it seemed, as a miniature version of his uncle, Aristotle, right down to the curly beard. I would have liked to speak with him, but the presence of what he took to be a rival historian seemed to have stopped his tongue. I will say more about him later, and about Aeschines’s accusations that I was responsible for his sad fate. For now let it be said that I had nothing but comradely feelings for him, as a devotee of our mutual muse, Clio. Any resentment between us was entirely on his side.

  The plan was for the vessel to come into water shallow enough for the King to wade ashore. Just before he hit the water he would hurl his javelin onto the beach, whereupon the entire Asian landmass was supposed to become his spear-won territory. When we reached the spot that had been scouted out for the landing, Alexander stood ready with his spotless leather cuirass and his repoussed bronze greaves, hair blowing out long and thin in the spring breeze. At the captain’s nod, the King lofted his spear, which arced ashore and stood up perfectly in the sand. As he dropped into the surf, however, he stumbled, dousing his hair. As no one had imagined he would take possession of his continent wet-headed, he climbed back on the ship for another attempt.

  After taking some time to dry himself, he stood at the bows as the ship came into position. The captain nodded, and Alexander threw again. This time he didn’t need to go into the water, because his spear did not stick in the sand. The collected officers and emissaries grumbled; the King gave a sharp look at the two historians, who turned away from the fallen spear as if they’d never seen it thrown. I cannot speak for Callisthenes, but I had the uncomfortable feeling that all this effort was being mounted for the benefit of the two of us, as the eyes and ears of future generations.

  The third try did the trick. The javelin flew truly and stuck perfectly, and Alexander kept his balance despite the loose footing in the surf. Climbing out of the water, he strode manfully to the spear, and pulled it out with a confident, purposive expression on his face. Hephaestion shouted to him that all was well, and Alexander relaxed, sitting in the sand to wait for his crew to debark.

  Ptolemy son of Lagus then appeared behind Callisthenes and me. Upon my first glimpse of this beetle-browed, block-chinned character, I didn’t trust him. Even today, as he styles himself for the throne of Egypt, he has all the charm of a jackal, and fewer manners. He seemed to have a similar effect on Callisthenes, who stood up awkwardly, then sat down, not knowing what he should do. Ptolemy smiled.

  “What an event for our two little scribblers to witness! And for it to go so perfectly on the very first try!”

  “Yes, remarkable,” said Callisthenes.

  I said nothing. He stared at me hard, perhaps not knowing that a man who had faced enemy spears in battle would never wither at a sharp glance. Yet I also knew that my silence had already earned Ptolemy’s undying enmity--

  The last drop of water ran out of the clock.

  “The defendant has run out of time,” declared Polycleitus.

  “So I have. According to the usual custom, I request the favor of an extension.”

  “I see no reason for a substantial grant of time,” the king archon said with his eyes shut, “if you go on about matters that have little to do with your defense.”

  “It was not my doing, your honor, that the entire course of my career with Alexander has been placed in evidence against me. I am obligated to refute the prosecution’s version of these events.”

  “Your obligations are not material here…” said Polycleitus, his eyes again flitting toward the two Macedonian spectators. Very clearly, Swallow saw the shorter of the two give a discreet toss of his head. Polycleitus continued, “…and the court will not be bound by them. You have a single measure of time to wrap up your statement.”

  “Your honor, I really must protest!”

  “Fill the clock. Proceed with the defense.”

  Machon was about to resume his objection when Swallow gave a single, loud clap of his hands, and then another a few seconds later. Deuteros joined in, and then all of those around them.

  “Men of the jury will be silent.”

  At that, all five hundred men in the jury gave the judge a slow ovation. He stared out at them all for a moment, as if thinking of some way to punish them all, but decided to scream instead.

  “Stop that clapping! My decision is final! STOP THAT CLAPPING!”

  Finally the king archon looked back at the Macedonians. Both of them shrugged, turning their faces to the floor.

  “Very well, then,” Polycleitus relented. “As it is customary to be liberal in these cases, you have the same amount of time the prosecution had…but not one second more!”

  “For your fairness, I thank you,” said Machon with a tight smile. His eyes rested on Swallow, who took his meaning and waved his hand, is if to decline any credit.

  VII.

  As the Macedonian army formed up and began the march upcountry, I was puzzled by the lack of organized resistance to the invasion. The Persian navy, after all, was made up of very capable Phoenician and Sidonese levies, at twice the numbers Alexander could gather. It should have been a straightforward matter for this force to bottle up the Hellespont, intercept the Macedonian troop carriers, or execute whatever plan the enemy would have conceived. Or at least that’s how it seemed to an Athenian used to thinking in terms of sea power.

  No satrap was waiting on the shore for us with his hooded troops and mailed cavalry. Nor were the farms and towns of this rich country burned in our path, to prevent stores from falling into our hands; the granaries, instead, were bursting with last year’s
harvest. To the young Macedonian grunts, the invasion went as easily as their childish dreams made it. But to anybody who knew anything, the stillness suggested there was something very deeply wrong.

  It was only much later, upon speaking with Persian courtiers who had been at Susa at that time, that I learned the truth: though the Persian Empire was vast, it was riddled with problems. The Great King, Artashata, otherwise known as Daryavaush III, or ‘Darius,’ was a weakling who had alienated most of the nobility by poisoning his competitors for the throne. Egypt was in the midst of a revolt that had only just been put down by the Persian fleet when Alexander tossed his spear on the beach at Ilion. We might therefore say that Alexander had been lucky to arrive when he did, or cunning, in that he landed with most of Persia looking the other way. We cannot say, however, that his mere arrival represented much of a victory.

  I might as well take the opportunity now, as I have Alexander on his way toward the Granicus, to correct an impression you might have gotten from our friend Aeschines. Judging from his account, only Alexander, along with a few other minor players and a faceless army, were present at his battles. But it takes more than one extraordinary man to make an army. Some of the others who went with Alexander had a lot to do with his victories.

  I’m thinking of Parmenion, the old stalwart who served Philip too. True, he was not the kind of flashy performer who plays to the gallery by taking foolish risks. He was, in fact, too fat to mount a horse. But he knew how to hold a line against superior foe, which is something Alexander never had to accomplish. I’ve already mentioned Ptolemy, and Cleitus. These are unsavory characters, thugs really, but they were loyal and ruthless, and such men can accomplish a lot. I would count in their company Peithon son of Crateuas, though to look at him you would say he seemed more scholar than warrior. His area of knowledge, I came to learn, was the infliction of lethal force on those too weak to defend themselves. I will describe some of his notable works as the occasion arises.