Alexander’s reaction was characteristically prompt. Shouting “What about me, you blackguard? A bastard, am I?” he hurled his goblet at Attalus’ head. Noisy chaos broke out. Attalus threw his own goblet back. During the brawl, words passed between father and son which have not come down to us. Alexander’s, whatever they were, caused Philip to draw his sword (he probably wore it for the ancient ritual of cutting the bride loaf) and lurch towards him. Lame from an old wound, and drunk, he fell sprawling. “Look, men,” said Alexander coldly. “He’s getting ready to cross from Europe to Asia, and he falls crossing from couch to couch.” On this he walked out; from the house, and from the kingdom.
Clearly this crisis was unforeseen by all concerned, unless by Attalus. He had played his hand well, and was shrewd enough to count on Alexander’s losing his temper; but even his insult may have been a drunken impulse. Philip cannot have had foreknowledge. He would not have accepted a generous gesture from the son who had shared his victories, to have him so affronted and rouse so predictable a fury. Philip was caught on the wrong foot while fuddled with wine; Alexander acted like Alexander; it was one of those situations where hidden fires, which the protagonists have been containing, are released by shock. Without more ado, Alexander told his mother to pack, and rode off with her over the rugged southwestern frontier to her brother’s capital, Dodona in Epirus.
Nothing between father and son would ever be the same again. Alexander, and his mother, had received the deadliest insult of the ancient world and been offered no redress. What he had said to Philip to bring him to the verge of homicide remains an interesting speculation. It may have released a long-suppressed jealousy of his son’s good looks, intellectual precocity, sensational popularity with his soldiers, and the tight loyal circle of “Alexander’s friends.”
Such a journey as the cross-country ride to Dodona cannot have been undertaken guarding a woman without some kind of escort. It is likely these intimates provided one. Their allegiance was well known to Philip later.
With what feelings King Alexandros of Epirus, owing his throne to Philip, received his outraged sister is not recorded; nor whether Alexander felt welcome at Dodona, famed for hard winters, and for its oracle, the most ancient in the Greek world. Its centre was an oak of immemorial age housing doves whose murmur was significant, and ringed with bronze vessels which reverberated in wind. Its god was Zeus, who was questioned in writing, on a strip of lead; many examples have survived. The answer was drawn as a lottery by the barefoot priestess. No question from Alexander has rewarded the spade; yet this shrine was linked with that of Zeus-Ammon at Siwah, which later he consulted at the cost of trouble and danger, and with dramatic results. Being the man he was, it is hard to believe that at this crisis of his fortunes he did not visit a great centre of prophecy when he was on its doorstep. If so, he kept the secret of its answer. At Siwah he was to do the same.
Leaving his mother in the house where she was born, he rode north into Illyria. To this warlike land, less than two years before, he had thrust back its defeated army. That he could show himself there, and be received as a guest, speaks volumes for the decency with which his campaign had been waged, and the respect it must have commanded. What he meant to do there remains a mystery. For a time he was his mother’s son, his judgment overwhelmed by his emotions. He may even have considered leading an Illyrian invasion, to seize his heritage by force, till his innate intelligence reasserted itself. He was, however, very capable of playing a war of nerves with Philip, who would certainly be reluctant to set out for Asia, leaving the home garrison depleted, with this dangerous and unpredictable presence in his rear. Never again would Alexander have to hold out in such harsh and humiliating conditions, conciliating uncouth hosts, wary of treachery, dossing down in primitive hill-forts after the grandeurs of Athens and Corinth where he had been fêted as a victor. Among the hardships whose endurance he used later to recall with pride, no word is ever quoted about his sojourn in Illyria. But it worked. A family guest-friend, Demaratus of Corinth, acted as a diplomatic go-between. Whether father or son put the first feeler out remains unknown.
Alexander returned to Macedon, most probably with his mother. The sources disagree, some leaving her in Epirus, but it is unlikely he would have accepted such terms; not only did her own good name hang on her reinstatement, but his legitimacy. Whatever the bargain struck between him and Philip their reconciliation was brittle. Soon it was strained enough to make him doubt his father’s good faith about his succession.
He would not of course have returned without some kind of warranty. But he did not trust it. Most of Philip’s offspring were girls, and the new wife had borne another; no viable heir but Alexander existed; his suspicions seem to have verged on the irrational. But the Attalid faction, the authors of his exile, were high in favour; many Macedonian heirs had been disinherited by treachery in the past; and to all this was added the emotional pressure of his mother, deeply affronted by the favours showered on the bride, which included the honorific royal name of Eurydice. His dependence on his friends’ loyalty and affection increased; and they rallied to him with an openness which Philip began to suspect as treasonable. The atmosphere was explosive, and the first spark ignited it.
Arridaeus, Philip’s retarded bastard, was of age to be betrothed. The father of his affianced, the only important factor, was Pixodarus, satrap of Caria, a powerful semi-independent state in southern Asia Minor, of vital expedience in the coming war. Plutarch’s account of what followed sheds a powerful light on Alexander’s state of mind. His mother (by this account she was obviously in Macedon) and his friends kept bringing him false rumours, “as if Philip, through a brilliant match and a great connection, was trying to settle the kingdom upon Arridaeus.” Alexander actually believed it. Almost crazily—and treasonably by any standards—he sent in secret a rival envoy to Caria, the tragic actor, Thettalus. Leading actors, who travelled widely, were often used in diplomacy; but to take on such a mission, Thettalus must have been a devoted personal friend. He was to dissuade the satrap from giving his daughter to “a fool and bastard,” and offer Alexander’s hand instead.
History is vague about the degree of Arridaeus’ imbecility. He outlived his brother for some six years as a puppet king, able apparently to speak a few words in public, but taking no decision and never produced in battle. The wife he eventually married was a capable woman who acted for him, but the union was childless and probably unconsummated. It seems incredible that he would ever have been adopted as king by the Macedonian Assembly in preference to Alexander, even if their father in his lifetime had so decreed. Philip owed his own accession to the call for a fighting king; the direct heir, then passed over, was now in his early twenties, the obvious choice if the succession had to be changed. What blinded Alexander to all this?
Intellectually, he was outstandingly flexible and swift in his adjustments. Emotionally it was another matter. His demands on himself were such that though to his life’s end he was equal to any physical hardship, pain or danger, under extreme psychological stress he would break rather than bend. This pattern appears in his story more than once.
The eagerness with which the satrap jumped at his offer must have opened his eyes; Pixodarus had clearly been promised no heir-apparent. But enlightenment came too late. Philip found out. And here the Plutarch manuscript has a tantalizing short gap. After the break, it says Philip went to Alexander’s room, taking with him Philotas son of Parmenion, one of Alexander’s close friends, and gave him a furious dressing down. He was probably confined to his room under house arrest. The presence of Philotas is unexplained, unless as a neutral witness, his father being Philip’s oldest friend; but the young man’s later record makes it not impossible that, unknown to Alexander, he had betrayed the plot.
Philip upbraided his son for being so unworthy of his rank as to seek an alliance with a mere Carian, the servitor of a barbarian king. In other words, he had been assured of his rank, and his doubts were as insulting
as his action had been disastrous. For him the match was out of the question; and after Thettalus’ revelations, Arridaeus was of course turned down. The diplomatic coup was ruined. For a man with Alexander’s grasp of affairs it must have been a bitter moment. But worse was to come. The King, determined to show who was master and break up a subversive clique, banished from Macedon all Alexander’s intimates. The one interesting exception was Hephaestion. There are several feasible reasons, the most obvious being that Philip, like Aristotle, thought him a good influence on Alexander; for whose conduct, too, he might be a useful hostage, especially if Philip knew them to be lovers. He was a shrewd judge of men. As it was, he gave a last crack of the trainer’s whip; he had Thettalus, then in Corinth, arrested and brought to Pella in chains.
His professional status was that of an Irving or a Garrick. Even though only reprimanded—we hear nothing of any punishment beyond the gross humiliation of his fetters—it was an extreme step for Philip with his cultural aspirations. But he could have found no better way of flicking Alexander on the raw. His insistence on sharing every danger to which he exposed his men was almost an obsession. This time it had been impossible. The shame must have bitten deep; the resentment also. It is to his credit that he never pushed it out of his mind together with the friend concerned in it; Thettalus remained throughout his reign a welcome guest and favourite artist.
Meantime, the first phase of the Persian War had started. Parmenion and Attalus had taken an advance force across the Hellespont and secured a bridgehead. King Ochus had been poisoned the year before by his eunuch Grand Vizier, the king-maker Bagoas, whose power he had tried to curb; Arses his son was young and occupied with these internal dangers. The coastal satraps’ resistance seems to have been disorganized and weak. Had Alexander’s friendship with his father lasted, he himself would probably have held a command in the expedition. In his place went the hated Attalus.
Philip had one matter of home defence to see to before setting out himself: the conciliation of Epirus. Perhaps through Eurydice’s persuasions, perhaps because Olympias had made herself intolerable, or because he blamed her for what her son had done, Philip had decided upon divorce. This would naturally affront his brother-in-law, King Alexandros. Evidently, however, the family honour was of more concern to Alexandros than his sister’s feelings; for he readily accepted Philip’s offered amends, the hand of her daughter Cleopatra. That he was her uncle was in those days no impediment.
It would be of great interest to know what plans Philip had made for Alexander in the coming war. He would not now be trusted as Regent. If left behind, he would have had to be imprisoned, and there is no sign at all of any such intention. The alternative would have been taking him along to Asia, and giving him a command under conditions where his pride and ambition would have guaranteed good performance. In the field together, away from Macedon, it is probable that once more the father and son would have become good comrades-in-arms.
The wedding plans were resplendent. High-ranking guests and state envoys were invited from all over Greece, as befitted Philip’s status of pan-Hellenic war leader. Festival games in honour of the twelve Olympian gods were to be dedicated at a ceremony in the theatre at Aegae, near modern Edessa, the ancient capital. Their wooden images were paraded in gilded cars, to be set up in the round “orchestra” below the stage; each god with the lifelike colouring applied to all Greek sculpture, including its greatest marbles, bleached today only by time. A similar statue of Philip ended the pageant—making thirteen, a number already significant before the night of the Last Supper.
Ensured of publicity through the whole Greek world, Philip thought the time ideal for refuting Athenian propaganda about his “tyranny.” Greek despots had traditionally gone about hedged with bodyguards. In planning the procession he arranged that, after all the notables had gone into the theatre (this must have included Alexander), his personal guard should be halted in the road outside, for him to make his entrance alone. The Captain of the Bodyguard, whom he thus instructed, was none other than Pausanias, promoted to this rank over the years.
The King’s throne at such a ceremony would be on the stage. He would enter through the parodos, the imposing side entrance to a Greek theatre’s open wings. That the Captain of the Bodyguard should be standing there awaiting him must have seemed correct, or at any rate unsuspicious. As he came through the gateway, Pausanias thrust a dagger into his heart.
According to Diodorus, the only source to describe the scene in detail, the killer then ran away across a vineyard behind the theatre, towards horses standing by for his escape. He was ahead of his pursuers, when he caught his foot in a vine root. Before he could rise, he was cut down by the first men to overtake him.
The chiefs and nobles crowded to Alexander, unarmed at this sacred ceremony, and formed a bodyguard to take him to the citadel. His accession was not disputed. No other claimant was so much as named. He was King of Macedon.
The trial-by-historians of Alexander for his father’s murder, more or less closed since Plutarch’s day, has in modern times been reopened, despite a total lack of evidence for the prosecution. It would otherwise be a waste of space to re-examine it.
That he may have wished his father dead is neither here nor there. He had probably done so for at least a year. The world has been, and is, full of people visited by such wishes, who would be appalled at the thought of implementing them. Parricide was the most dreadful crime in Greek thought and religion, cursed by all the gods. That Alexander with his beliefs and temperament could not have borne this weight without going mad is obvious. However, this must not be taken as a decisive answer, in view of the possibility that Olympias had persuaded him he was not Philip’s son.
The mating of gods in physical shape with mortals was as sincere a belief with Greeks as is the Immaculate Conception to Catholics, with the difference that the former was not a unique event. Unlike the latter, it had never been attacked by science; Aristotle’s genetic studies steered well clear of such hemlock-worthy blasphemies. Olympias in a Dionysiac trance may genuinely have imagined almost anything. The issue of parricide being inconclusive, we must proceed to more practical considerations of motive. Assuming Alexander morally prepared to kill, why do it now?
He was on display at a pan-Hellenic festival, with the precedence due to his rank; presented before the state envoys as heir apparent. The worst of his disgrace had blown over; ahead was the war with its great opportunities. He had lived under Philip’s roof, and could surely have compassed his death when the incentive was far greater; for instance, just after the wedding speech of Attalus. It is true that Olympias’ position had worsened as Alexander’s had improved; but he did not later kill people at her demand, refusing even to remove a Regent she detested. There always remain, as credible human motives, sheer hate, and revenge; these must indeed have impelled the actual killer. But to Alexander the coming war would have offered many occasions of passing off a death as due to enemy action; this would surely have been the course of an intelligent man with devoted partisans. Why the public drama? Of all possible suspects, Alexander had least to gain by it.
Accomplices favoured by the prosecution are the three young men who struck down the murderer, allegedly to silence him; this on the grounds that two, Perdiccas and Leonnatus, later held commands under Alexander and were among his friends. The objection here is glaring. When Philip fell, says Diodorus, “immediately one group of the bodyguards hurried to the body of the King, while the rest poured out in pursuit of the assassin.” Naturally they would. How could Alexander possibly have determined who would get there first? As our own age should know, no explanation is needed for their killing their man, beyond the violence engendered by a violent scene. Pausanias was making good his escape till the vine root tripped him, which does not suggest efficient pre-arrangements. Soldiers with quick reactions in a crisis do tend to get promoted; and had Alexander been cold to those who so zealously avenged his father, he would have been highly suspect
to his own contemporaries.
Pausanias’ accomplice with the horses must be borne in mind. That these were known to have been meant for the getaway suggests he was caught and interrogated. His evidence may have been of much importance in the subsequent trials.
The one item of “evidence” against Alexander in any ancient writer, indeed the only opinion, even, of the kind, occurs in Plutarch, that anecdotal holdall.
… most of the blame was laid on Olympias, because she had added her exhortations to the young man’s anger and urged him to the deed. But some slander [the Greek diabole means a false accusation] fell also on Alexander. For it is said that when Pausanias met him after the outrage and complained of it, Alexander quoted him the iambics from the Medea [Medea’s revenge wiped out most of the other characters]: “The bride, the groom and the bride-giver.”
It is perhaps sufficient to say that the last Illyrian frontier war at which Philip is known to have taken the field, and where his young friend presumably died, occurred when Alexander was twelve years old, and the “bride” about nine or ten.
Throughout his reign, Alexander never stands suspect of a surreptitious killing. When his power was vast, and he could have had anyone he chose put quietly out of the way, he suffered annoyance, frustration and downright insult from men he heartily disliked or distrusted; nothing happened to these people till he was ready to proceed against them openly. Whether on principle or from pride, he found furtiveness impossibly repugnant. Another constant trait was loyalty to his friends, and gratitude carried to extravagance towards those who had supported him when in disgrace with Philip. To believe he could have used Pausanias, sworn to protect him (which Pausanias as Captain of the Bodyguard would have known he could not do) and then shopped him with less compunction than a Mafia boss, calls for as much credulity as anything in the Romances.