I’m sure we’d both like me better if, at this point, I offered him some more home truths, but sadly, I didn’t. I went off to make a show of tending to my advance guard.
Two days later, we arrived at Memphis. The king announced that he would take the elites upriver, and the rest of us could sit at Memphis for a month-long rest and sacrifice to Amon and Apis. He purchased every sacrificial animal in the city and gave them to the army, as well as a ‘donation’ that amounted to a little less than three months’ pay per man.
His status with the army changed overnight. Every wine shop and brothel in Memphis was packed to the rafters. The women of Aegypt were short, with short legs and heavy breasts and tawny skin, and they did not age well at all – peasant girls were young at twelve and old at twenty-four. But they were plentiful and warm and very alive – they could dance and sing, and a third of the men in the army acquired a wife, many through actual services conducted by the priests of Hathor. For we had seldom been welcomed as heroes before, but in Aegypt, among the common people, we were their liberators. Greeks had a fearsome, but in the main wholesome and heroic, reputation here as preservers of the people’s liberties, and we benefited from years of Athenian meddling.
That’s a convoluted way of saying that the women welcomed us with open legs. It is possible that some men were pleased, as well, but none of my soldiers was paying any attention whatsoever.
Thais and I wandered around the palaces. Alexander went to sacrifice to Apis as king, and we were invited to attend – women have greater participation in Aegypt than elsewhere, and Thais could attend as herself and without prejudice.
I’m a pious man, as soldiers go. I worship the gods, and I have learned to respect the gods other men worship, as well. As an Indian once told me, there is more than just one truth.
But at Memphis, I experienced the divine.
Oh, Aegypt, the land of gods.
We entered the temple of Osiris, which was old when Heraklitus taught, and old when Homer wrote, old when Troy fell, old when Herakles walked the earth. It chilled me – chilled us all, even in the blinding heat of Aegyptian summer – to feel the sheer age of the temple, and see the stains on the warm red-brown stone where thousands upon thousands of feet had trod the surface to perfect smoothness – a rippled effect that said more about worship than all the images of men and gods with the heads of animals around me.
The gods of Aegypt have the heads of animals – I expect you know that by now. Seen safely from a distance, this can be ugly or merely disconcerting – alien. But seen in rows, hundreds upon hundreds, or seen in colossal repetition, as in the great temple complex at Memphis – it forces you to ask the obvious question.
Why not the faces of men?
Or rather, are men any the less animals, when compared to the gods?
Apis is different. Apis has many statues, but all of them are men. Or many are men, and some are bulls. Some are bulls that walk on all fours, and some are bulls that walk erect like the Minotaur, and some are bull- headed men. And some are men. Those are the kings of Aegypt, who, through the mystical powers of Ptah and Osiris, rise again as gods – in Memphis they say Osiris-Apis, or Oserapis, as we say in Alexandria.
Thais was walking from statue to statue, touching every one in reverence, and the priests gathered around her – she was an acknowledged priestess of Aphrodite, which can be a joke among Greeks but gave her a very serious status in Memphis.
A senior priest walked beside Alexander, answering his questions.
His questions were concerned with exactly how reincarnation and rebirth worked.
‘Why only kings?’ he asked.
The priest shrugged. ‘Kings are part god from the first,’ he said.
I was leaning on the plinth of a statue, and when Alexander passed me to lean over an incised decoration on a tomb, I stumbled – sheer farm-boy clumsiness – and put my hand on the gold-encrusted hide of a mummified Apis bull.
Without warning
I awoke with my head on Thais’s lap, and Alexander massaging my wrists. I was embarrassed, as any man is who shows weakness, and perhaps most remarkable, it was some time before I remembered what I had seen and heard, so that at first I imagined I’d just passed out.
Looking back, I have a difficult time recalling the dream, but no trouble at all recalling the deep confusion it engendered in me. Although I worship the gods, no god had ever spoken to me so directly. Indeed, when I saw Alexander sacrifice his chariot on the morning before Issus, I thought of
And now, an alien, foreign god had reached out and touched me.
I stumbled along through the rest of the tour.
The Apis bull is chosen from a herd of very ordinary black and white cattle. They’d look odd in Macedon, but not so odd that they wouldn’t fetch a decent price at market. However, it is different in Aegypt, where from the whole herd, one bull is chosen and taken to the temple, where he becomes
Pardon me for this Platonic lesson in cosmology, but what happened cannot be understood unless you know what Apis is.
When we had toured, and sacrificed, a Greek priest of Zeus was introduced to us – a pilgrim, come from the shrine of Zeus at Lampsacus to visit the shrines of Aegypt.
He bowed deeply. ‘Great King of Asia, I am Anaximenes of Lampsacus!’ he said with a flourish.
It is not often a man can combine the pomposity of a horse’s arse with the false humility of a false priest, but Anaximenes did both at the same time, to which he added a brilliant mind, a wit razor-sharp in the service of flattery and an actor’s ability to be all things to all men.
Hush, let me tell you how I really felt about him, the shite.
Alexander loved him.
And well he might. Anaximenes it was who knew that the Apis bull was due to be slaughtered – that, in fact, it was but two weeks until the ceremony was due. Anaximenes knew that Darius had forbidden the ceremony.
In hours, we were preparing to take part, and Alexander spent money like water to have his vestments and crown as the Great King of Aegypt prepared. The priests leaped to serve him, eager, I think, to have a king who might be their ally instead of their enemy, as the kings of Persia had been. He invited me to participate, and I was drawn to it, and I noticed that one of the priests – not the Greek, but one of the smooth-headed Aegyptian priests – seemed to follow me with his eyes.
While the details of the ceremony were discussed, a priest came to Thais, and after a brief conversation, she squeezed my hand and vanished. What followed was a secret – I will not tell you, even now, although if you, in your turn, should by the will of gods be a king, I cannot recommend to you too highly the worship of Apis – and we spent a long evening learning our roles.
Later, unfed, I fretted alone in the palace. I had sumptuous rooms, and they had the most remarkable furnishings – Aegypt was, and remains, the richest country I had ever seen, and even the palace guest rooms to house a foreign, barbarian general were superb. I summoned slaves and ate in solitary splendour, missing anyone – Marsyas, Cleitus – who might share the tolerable beer.
Unsummoned, a pair of attendants came and took me to a bath – a remarkably ugly bath, but enormous. It was as if someone had heard of a Greek bath but knew none of the details, and used sandstone rather than marble for the fittings. On the positive side, I emerged clean and fresh, and the towels were superb. On the negative side, I was not oiled, and so left the bath chamber feeling dry and scratchy.
I walked back along the corridors of the palace to my rooms, flanked by four bath attendants, and it was curious that there were no other men or women in the corridors. It gave the experience a slightly dreamlike air.
