predators, kept warm – amid a constant stream of whiney abuse. Once, in the Trans-Oxiana, I wanted to kill them all myself, but that’s another story. Alexander was using them to make him famous. What they actually accomplished was, and is, so much more than any of us ever expected – well, that’ll come in time. But for the moment – in a way, they all helped me keep the Journal. Callisthenes began a
Later, let me add, the corps of scribes, as we called them, or the Philosophoi, filled up with two-obol hacks and con artists out to take Alexander, but at the start, the men who joined us were adventurers as much as we were, and the army had some respect for them. Later – well, later was later. Everything was different later, as you’ll see.
In early March, Alexander ordered me – and Perdiccas, Cleitus the Black and Marsyas – to organise a set of games to rival those of Nemea or Olympus. We were given thirty talents of gold to spend.
Perdiccas and I could take a hint – we each added ten more talents, and our games were as lavish as any ever given. We put them on down country at Aegae, and we rebuilt Philip’s stadium. We added a triumphal arch, we paid poets and actors from all over Greece – well, to be honest, mostly from Athens – acrobats, dancers – and athletes. The rest of the competitors came from inside the army.
Kineas, for instance, won a crown of gold laurel leaves boxing. He was superb. No one could touch him. He defeated two Olympic champions and all the Macedonian contenders.
We had horse races, foot races, races in armour, javelin throws ahorse and afoot, swordsmanship, spear- fighting and all the usual sports – pankration, boxing, wrestling, throwing the shield. And noble prizes for every one, crowns for the victors, handed out by Alexander himself.
The Homeric imagery was relentless. Alexander was Achilles, Hephaestion was Patroclus and every one of the somatophylakes had a Homeric name. We wore Homeric costumes, and the performers performed scenes from the
Thais, to be honest, planned most of it. She was brilliant at this sort of thing, and it allowed her to bring in all of her friends from Athens and other cities – performers, some free, some slaves. Scene painters – fantastic chaps, men who could make a piece of flat hide look like a mountain.
Her seamstresses made the king his purple tent, large enough to allow a hundred guests to recline in comfort.
She planned the themes, and she watched the rehearsals. Alexander lost interest, sometimes – when the real war in Asia took over his head – but she stayed on target. She would come to meals with a stack of scrolls.
I remember one night, I went to dinner with Antipater. We were working together on the logistics for Asia, and for the games, and sometimes we shared a meal. We went to his house, where he ate in splendour, served by twenty slaves. His wife came through once, heavily veiled, to check on us.
I laughed. I was so used to my establishment, with a woman who had her own work and yet shared all of my life, that the glimpse of a ‘real’ Macedonian wife made me laugh.
I won’t say I hated the work, either. I’ll just mention that in many ways I was relieved when the opening ceremonies went off, and I’ll note that much of the conquest of Asia was easier. Destruction is much easier than creation. Eh?
And yet, we had fun. I remember a wild party at my house in Aegae, with Kineas and his friends and a crowd of Thais’s demi-monde friends – slaves and free, dancers, hetaerae, the scene painters, a sculptor and a crowd of actors. Altogether, there must have been fifty of us crowded into my andron.
The laughter went on and on, and Thais led them in an indecent retelling of the
Kineas, always a man of immense personal dignity, laughed until wine and snot blew out of his nose.
Diodorus declaimed a long speech with an arm around one of Thais’s dancer friends. He was playing the part of Achilles, dying in his mother’s arms, but he managed to claim, in between stanzas, that as long as she would pillow his head on her breasts, he’d keep declaiming. This reached surprising heights of comedy – he was quite inventive – and every time he looked to expire, she rolled one breast or the other under his eyes, and he’d splutter and go on again, and we’d all laugh – oh, I remember that laughter as well as I remember anything in the whole crusade. I had thought Diodorus merely acerbic before that, but after that night, he and I were friends. We shared some love of laughter that transcended his dislike of Macedon and ‘my kind’. It went well for him – look at him now!
And when we had all laughed and laughed, Kineas threw a grape at Diodorus, who was running his tongue along the young lady’s flank, and yelled, ‘Get a room’ and she rose, took Diodorus by the hand and led him away. He looked back at us from the doorway.
‘Better a fiery death in glory than a long life and a dull end,’ he declaimed as she led him through the curtain.
Damn, that was the best exit line I’ve ever heard, and I still laugh to think of it.
And when most of the actors were gone, or asleep in the corners, and it was just Kineas and Thais and Diodorus and Niceas and, of all people, my Polystratus, sitting over a last cup of wine, Kineas got up (unsteadily) and raised his cup.
‘Let’s drink together – an oath to the gods, to remain friends always. We will conquer Asia together. Let’s drink on it.’
We all rose – no one mocked the notion – and we all drank, even Thais. Nearchus was there, and young Cleomenes, and Heron, and Laodon. The cup passed – we all drank.
‘I can feel the gods,’ Kineas said, in a strange voice – but no one laughed because, as Thais said afterwards, we could all feel them.
And indeed, I sometimes think that the gods are as drawn to laughter and happy drunkenness as they are to battlefields and childbirth – and if that is true, we must have had all Olympus by us that night.
The night before we were due to march, Olympias summoned Alexander to her. I was there when the summons came, and despite his love for her and his endless patience with her, he rolled his eyes like any teenage boy summoned by his mother. He was in a state of exaltation that was nearly dangerous – he was about to achieve the entire ambition of his life.
We shouted for him to go and come back, and he waved a hand, pressed Hephaestion to stay and keep the couch warm, and left us. I remember because I passed the time of the king’s absence by playing Polis with Cleitus, and I won, and Cleitus, who was drunk and in a mood, punched me, meaning only to give me a tap, but he hit me so hard that I had a bruise for a week, and only Nearchus kept me from hitting him back, or worse.
Alexander came back into the ruckus, and he was white, his lips were almost indistinct and he didn’t notice the tension – which dissipated instantly, because no little quarrel was as important as the king’s anger. He was angry – or worse.
In fact, he looked terrified.
Hephaestion took a look at him and ordered us all to bed. And we went – Alexander in one of his moods could be deadly.
Of course, nowadays, everyone knows what his mother told him – that he was not the son of Philip, but the son of Zeus Ammon, and that she had been made pregnant by the god.
It’s easy to be incredulous and cynical. But in Macedon, we take gods seriously. We’re not like fucking Athenians, who think the gods are so far away that they don’t exist. In Macedon, we credulous barbarians always believe that the gods are present in daily affairs. And every noble in Macedon is the direct descendant of one of the gods.
And Olympias was no madwoman. Say what you will of her – her only addiction was power, and she played the game better than almost anyone in her generation. She was brilliant, cunning and beautiful, and utterly without scruple, except when it came to defending her son. She used murder, the army and her body with equal facility. She could reason, cajole, threaten, seduce or eliminate. But she was not mad, and if she told Alexander that he was born of a god, it’s best not to dismiss the idea out of hand. Certainly Thais – a cynical Athenian hetaera – accepted
