The Nature of Alexander Read Online Free PDF

was undistinguished, and probably less than his father’s, in a society which set great value on stature, must have been bad enough. When later he learned medicine and physiology he may have connected cause and effect. He showed no love for Leonidas after he left his charge, and the only gift he sent him back from Asia was ironical: a sack of incense. As a boy he was offering incense at ashrine, giving extravagantly as he would always do, when Leonidas had told him sharply to be sparing of precious things till he was master of the lands they grew in. He did not take Leonidas along.
    He did take, and once risked his life for, an unimportant court hanger-on called Lysimachus, who styled himself his pedagogue. This was of course a joke, for it was servant’s work; but Lysimachus did take on the humble duties of the man-nanny from whom no teaching was required. Alexander’s gratitude for a personal devotion was always lifelong; but what he got besides is beyond computation, for good or ill. Lysimachus used to amuse the child by calling himself Phoenix, the pedagogue of Achilles. Alexander played his part in the game for life. To the end of his days he kept the Iliad under his pillow, along with the dagger for self-defence which was the commonplace bedroom furniture of a Macedonian king.
    It seems an odd attraction in a man whose own impulses were to prove more generous. Achilles was merciless to the conquered; asserted the captor’s right over royal women; desecrated the body of a noble enemy; sulked in his tent while his friends were falling in battle, a thing rather than which Alexander would have died. But it must be remembered that Achilles was an ancestor, about whom he may have heard many tales not in Homer, embroidering on them in fantasy; the Duke of Wellington in the Brontë children’s romances was not the Duke of history, and Alexander’s Achilles may not have been ours. His interest in Amazons suggests, for instance, that he knew the Epic Cycle story about the romantic duel between the hero and Penthesilea; and the whole Cycle has now been lost. He knew at any rate what Homer says: that Achilles’ mother was a goddess; that he was despoiled and slighted by a king, whom he got the better of;that he had a comrade whom he loved as his own life; and that he was angry.
    Plutarch says that from childhood Alexander had a longing to excel, and philotimia, the love of honour. Despite his childhood traumas, we hear nothing about fits of rage. Had his love of winning made him an unpleasant loser, he would not have been supported in disgrace and exile by his boyhood friends. Yet the enormous anger of Achilles must have touched some chord in him.
    In the year of Philip’s accession, a reign had closed in Persia too. The long-lived, weak Artaxerxes II was succeeded by Artaxerxes Ochus his son. A strong but savage ruler, he began at once to reduce too-powerful satraps and to ban their private armies. Rebellion failed; two fugitives were sheltered by Philip and were at his court some years, one of them the important and aristocratic Artabazus, of whom much more will be heard. He was one of those astonishing old men who seem to survive today only in the Russian Caucasus. Already elderly when he rebelled, and getting old when pardoned and recalled, he was to survive, a vigorous nonagenarian, to campaign successively under Darius and Alexander, whose eager welcome when they met again many years later points to warm childhood memories. He had thus known Persians as long as he could remember, not as propaganda monsters but observable humans and friends; with the boys of Artabazus’ large family he must often have played. Though Macedonian was a broad Doric patois, the court spoke Greek, as did many travelled or well-bred Persians; so there is likelihood in Plutarch’s well-known story that when Persian envoys arrived bringing the exiles’ recall, and Philip happened to be absent, little Alexander took it on himself to welcome