The tale of his arrival is irresistible, and it was probably told by Alexander's future master of ceremonies, a man inclined to romance but none-the-less present at royal dinner-parties where he would often have heard the story. Demaratus the Corinthian, most valued of Philip's Greek friends, had bought the horse from his Thessalian breeder for a price said to be as high as thirteen talents, more than three times higher than any paid for other known horses in antiquity, and having bought it, he gave it as a present to Philip; Bucephalas must have been youthful to be so expensive, and the date of the gift is a nice point. Later, Alexander's officers believed Bucephalas to have been born in the same year as his master, but by then the horse was ageing and their dates can only have been a guess; it is an important fact that the Greeks never knew how to tell an adult horse's age from its teeth. Bucephalas's arrival can be dated better from the giver than the horse, for when Alexander was twelve, Demaratus had sailed to Sicily as a general, where he stayed to fight for some four or five years; probably, he had given Bucephalas before he left, and so Alexander was still a boy, a probability which makes the story more remarkable.

On arrival in Macedonia, Bucephalas was led out into the plain for Philip's inspection, but he bucked and reared and refused to heed any word of command, and Philip ordered him to be taken away. Alexander had seen differently. Promising to master the animal, he ran towards him, took him by the halter and turned him towards the sun; by a plausible trick of horsemanship, he had noticed that Bucephalas was shying at his own shadow, so he patted, stroked and soothed, leapt astride and finally cantered round to shouts of applause from the courtiers and tears of joy from Philip, who is said to have predicted that Macedonia would never contain such a prince. Bucephalas was Alexander's for the keeping, and he loved the horse for the next twenty years; he even taught him to kneel in full harness before him, so that he could mount him more easily in armour, a trick which the Greeks first learnt from the Persians.

Already a horseman and a musician, Alexander passed his early years at Pella, and the contrasts in Macedonian life were all the sharper for being met at Pella's court. The Macedonian kings, who maintained that their Greek ancestry traced back to Zeus, had long given homes and patronage to Greece's most distinguished artists; Pindar and Bacchylides the two lyric poets, Hippocrates the father of medicine, Timotheus composer of choral verse and music. Zeuxis the painter, Choerilus the epic poet, Agathon the dramatist had all written or worked for Macedonian kings of the previous century. Most memorable of all, there had been Euripides the playwright who had left his Athens on the verge of old age and come to live at King Archelaus's Pella, where he was made an honorary Companion; he died, it was said, from a pack of wild dogs, owned by a Lyncestian nobleman. 'Loudias', he wrote of Pella's main river, 'generous giver and father of men's prosperity, whose lovely waters wash a land so rich in horses.' Alexander could quote Euripides's plays by heart and would send for his plays, together with those of Sophocles and his greater predecessor Aeschylus, as his leisure reading in outer Iran. It was Macedonia, perhaps, which left the deeper mark on its visitor, for it was probably there that Euripides wrote his Bacchae,the most disturbing and powerful play in Greek literature; its theme was the worship of Dionysus, and the Macedonians' wild cult of the god, which Olympias later upheld, may have worked on his imagination no less than the lush green landscape, which moved him to some of the few lines in Greek poetry with a romantic feeling for nature.

The entertainment of these artists was only part of a wider encouragement of Greek settlers. The kings had given homes to many Greek refugees, once to a whole Greek town; they had welcomed exiled politicians from cities like Athens who could be usefully bribed with lowland farms.

At the end of the fifth century Macedonian noblemen had fled for refuge to Athens. Some thirty years before Alexander's birth Pella was overrun by Greek neighbours, and in Philip's youth more than fifty Companions went as hostages to Thebes. These interludes among Greek culture must each have left their mark, even if other contacts were less of an enhancement: 'While we were in Macedonia,' the Athenian Demosthenes told his audience, back from his embassy to Philip's Pella, 'we were invited to another party, at the house of Xenophron, son of Phaidimus who had been one of the Thirty: naturally, I did not attend.' The orator was playing on every prejudice in his democratic public; Macedonia, a party, and worse, a son of the Thirty, for the Thirty were the toughest junta in Athenian history, having briefly tyrannized Athens at the turn of the century. 'He brought in a captive lady from Greek Olynthus, attractive, but free-born and modest, as events proved. At first, they forced her to drink quietly, but when they warmed up - or so Iatrocles told me the next morning - they made her lie down and sing them a song'; the wine took hold, butlers raced to fetch whips, the lady lost her dress, and ended up with a lashing. 'The affair was the talk of all Thessaly, and of Arcadia too.' Demosthenes Had made his point; the Pella at which Alexander grew up was a congenial home for a junta member, and the court which patronized Greek art also received Persian aristocrats in exile and invited the philosopher Socrates, although under sentence in democratic Athens because of his excessively right-wing circle of gentlemen pupils.

Men who have to import all their art never lose a streak of brashness. 'They gamble, drink and squander money', wrote one visiting pamphleteer about Philip's Companions, 'more savage than the half-bestial Centaurs, they are not restrained from buggery by the fact that they have beards.' Theopompus, the author, was a man who wrote slander, not history, and his judgement is certainly exaggerated. Philip he called 'the man without precedent in Europe', a comment that referred more to his alleged vices than to his energy and diplomatic skills. But he had a certain truth, for Macedonians, especially highlanders, were indeed a rough company, as barbarous as the crude styles of their native pottery which persisted, of no artistic merit, long after Alexander's conquests. Young Alexander would have to fend for himself among them, but friends and stories show that the Greek civility at court already attracted him more. His reign and patronage saw a golden age of Greek painting, many of whose masters were drawn from cities governed by his friends, and from an early age, there are stories to show that he knew how to treat them. Once, when he arranged for his favourite painter Apelles to sketch a nude of his first Greek mistress

Campaspe, Apelles fell in love, so he found, with the girl whom he was painting. So Alexander gave him Campaspe as a present, the most generous gift of any patron and one which would remain a model for patronage and painters on through the Renaissance and so to the Venice of Tiepolo.

As Philip's fortunes rose, the court at Pella became increasingly cosmopolitan, a change that goes far to explain his son's sudden success. From the newly conquered gold mines on his eastern border, there was a sudden flood of gold to attract Greek artists, secretaries, doctors of the Hippocratic school, philosophers, musicians and engineers in the best tradition of the Macedonian monarchy. They came from all over the Aegean world, a secretary from the Hellespont, painters from Asia Minor, a prophet, even, from distant Lycia, who wrote a book on the proper interpretation of omens; there were also, as befitted him, the court fools, those 'necessary adjuncts of absolute monarchy', and the flatterers who wrote for pay. As Alexander grew up, he could talk with a man who had lived in Egypt or with a sophist and a secretary from Greek towns on the Dardanelles: in the late 350s, the exiled Persian satrap Artabazus brought his family to Pella from Hellespontine Asia and here Alexander would have met his beautiful daughter Barsine for the first time. Some ten years older than Alexander she could never have guessed that after two marriages to Greek brothers in Persian service, she would return to this boy among the spoils of a Persian victory and be honoured as his mistress, while her father Artabazus would later surrender near the Caspian Sea and be rewarded with Iranian satrapies in Alexander's empire. Barsine's visit had started a very strange trail for the future. No contact was more useful than this bilingual family of Persian generals whom Alexander finally took back on to his staff in Asia.