God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great

Athenians, with Antipater and Alcimachus to support him. I was to go with him to Athens – in fact, I was the escort commander for the ashes of the dead Athenians. Kineas was appointed the commander of the Athenian escort – fifty troopers in armour as good as that of Philip’s inner circle.

One of the worst penalties of loving a commoner is that no one expects you to love her. When I returned from burying Nike, Alexander acted as if I should be done with her. She was dead, I had work to do as his escort commander – time to move on. Nearchus and Cleomenes avoided my eye when I showed signs of emotion. As when I discovered that no one had moved any of her things out of my tent – men can be the most thoughtless beasts. I packed her belongings – every chiton, every pin, every present I had given her.

Oh, the pain. Some men and women move in and out of love – it comes and goes. Yes? Not me, lad. I love for ever. I can still feel it – walking into the tent, thinking I was healed, and seeing her things strewn about. Zeus, I was nearly sick.

But royal pages are bred tough, for war. I survived it. I was enraged every time a man threw me a look that indicated that I should ‘get over it’, and I determined – in fact, I swore to Aphrodite – that the next time I knew love, I’d marry her, even if she was a common prostitute. If only so that I could have a year of mourning.

And the Cyprian was listening.

So as I relate the next few months, keep in mind that Nike was never far from my thoughts.

I’ll also note that two men never asked me to get over it. They were Kineas the Athenian and Cleitus the Black. Both of them seemed to understand at some unspoken level. One afternoon, I was helping Myndas make up a fire, and I found that he was using her firebox – a firebox I’d given her. Myndas got the fire started and I just crouched there on my haunches, holding the box in my hand.

Cleitus came to find me for Alexander – crouched by me. Took my hand, and held it for a second or two – pressed it, took the box away and said, ‘Alexander wants you,’ as calmly as if all had been well.

But perhaps it is the greatest tragedy of being a mere mortal – and greater men than I have written poems on the subject, I know – that all things pass. The pangs of love, the roaring fire of hate – even the pain of loss. Even a week after I burned her corpse, I was in Antipater’s tent, proposing to him that we buy a dozen Athenian armourers to have a better product in Pella, and he was agreeing that that was an excellent project. We were both impressed – and a little envious – of Kineas’s troop, in their ornate repousse helmets like lion’s heads, men’s heads, with silver hair and gold cheeks, or with scenes from the Iliad on the cheekpieces – and still superb work that would turn a heavy blow. Not to say we didn’t have good armourers in Pella – but we didn’t have fifty cavalry troopers like that fifty.

Later, in the fullness of adulthood, I realised that they sent their very richest, best men – probably with the picked best armour of the whole city.

Worth noting here that soldiers are popinjays. Beautiful armour is good for morale. When you are shitting your guts out in a three-day freezing rain, waiting to be sabered by some Asiatic auxiliary, it raises your heart to know that you look like a hero, that your gold-figured spear is the best spear for parasanges. Men who look good are tougher and better. Only armchair generals think that you can coat a man in mud and get him to fight well.

At any rate, I started to use Polystratus as my hyperetes, just as Kineas had Niceas, and he was merciless on details of harness and dress. Men had got slack as royal companions – as veteran campaigners, with servants and grooms and leisure time. I wasn’t in a particularly good mood – in fact, I was unrelentingly savage, so much so that Nearchus and Cleomenes found somewhere else to eat for weeks.

But when we marched for Athens, my troop shone like the sun, and if their equipment wasn’t as spectacular as the Athenians’, the way they filed off from the right looked like a trick rider’s performance in the hippodrome, and every spear was held just so.

Polystratus got himself a trumpet. It wasn’t like any other trumpet in the Macedonian army – it must have been Keltoi or Thracian, with a hideous animal’s head and a long mouthpiece. Niceas, the Athenian, made a scabbard for it.

We went up over the passes, and came down the other side into Attika, the richest province in the Greek world. I couldn’t believe how thickly settled it was. There was a farm at every turn of the road, and it was a struggle every night after we came down the passes to find a campsite large enough for two hundred horse and their mounts and servants. We camped in farm fields, we camped on somebody’s recently cut oat stubble – gods, Attika is rich.

It was our third day. On the second, priests came out and blessed us, blessed the road, and welcomed the ashes of their dead home. But on the third, we met the families of the dead men.

Some of them were men I’d killed myself – panicked men who did me no harm, killed in the rout like cattle or sheep in a pen. It is one thing to kill them, and another to be blessed by their priests, and then to have to meet their wives, their sons and daughters – their parents.

They bore us no love, either. It was the mothers, I think, who got to me most. Their eyes would caress me with a kind of ecstatic hate – in my fine armour and on my mighty Poseidon, I was the Macedonian. Alexander looked young and innocent – and beautiful (unless you looked deep into his eyes). I looked young and hard and had a big, ugly nose.

Most of the time, it is human to react to hate with hate. Or love with love. But there was something in the hate of those Athenian women that made me feel only pity, anger, shame. Pity for them. Anger at the fools who had led them to fight us. Shame at what I had done in the pursuit.

Perhaps I was insufficiently brutalised as a page. Maybe if I’d been raped by one of the older pages – it happened all the time, as a punishment – I’d have been the sort of murderous bastard who likes a good rout.

But I looked at all those mothers, and I saw my own mother, I saw Nike . . .

Well. I went on killing men, so it didn’t change me for ever.

Alexander saw none of this. I know, because our first night in Athens, at Kineas’s father’s house, Cleitus the Black and I had a halting conversation about the mothers, and Alexander looked at both of us as if we were giggling girls.

‘War kills,’ he said. He shrugged. ‘Women weep. Men fight.’ He turned back to our host, Kineas’s father, Eumenes, and his admiration of Phokion.

The Athenians dedicated a statue to Philip. Demosthenes was exiled – not for ever, but for a while. We got to meet Isocrates, who somewhat sycophantically suggested that the whole Panhellenic crusade had been Philip’s notion and not his own – and his speeches in praise of Philip were deeply flattering. Alexander was made a citizen of Athens.

I spent evening after evening sitting with Eumenes. I missed my own father, and Eumenes was a good man – deeply conservative, well read, equally interested in Plato and in the breeding of dogs. He bore us no rancour – he was sure that fighting Macedon had been a mistake from the first.

Altogether, our reception in Athens was a masterpiece of diplomacy. There were people who hated and feared us – and no one tried to hide that from us. There were people who had always wanted our alliance. There were men like Kineas who wanted our alliance but had fought hard at Chaeronea to stop us.

Every day I learned more about democracy. Democracy isn’t a theory of government – it is a code of behaviour that allows a lower-class man to call me a murderer in the street, if he wants to. His neighbour may call me the saviour of Greece. They may share a cup of wine in a wine shop, still arguing.

Not like home. Interesting. It didn’t seem to work very well – but the dignity of the commons was amazing, vital and not like anything you’d see at home, where a twenty-year veteran of the king’s army would stand in the mud to let a thirteen-year-old aristocrat go by with his feet dry. That just didn’t happen in Athens.

Kineas and his friends were very much like us – we shared so many things that it was difficult, sometimes, to comprehend how deeply they were not like us. They had a respect for their commons – an acceptance of their power, their needs – that seemed at once weak and noble.

Athens had a great deal to offer, and I drank it in as I recovered from my loss. I had no duties, so I arranged to go to the theatre and to the assembly – sometimes with Eumenes, sometimes with Kineas, sometimes with Diodorus, who turned out to be the political member of Kineas’s band. He was an aristocrat – but politically he was a radical democrat and an enemy of Macedon.

‘You watch,’ he said one day over a cup of bad wine. ‘Your Philip is going to demand that Athens send soldiers to support his crusade in Persia. And they’ll send the Hippeis – we’re all oligarchs, to the mob. And I’ll spend my youth fighting for Philip.’ He laughed.