In ancient Greece moderate homosexuality was an accepted companion of sex with wives and prostitutes. It was a fashion, not a perversion, and the Persians were openly said by Herodotus to have learnt it from the Greeks, just as émigré Englishmen have made it fashionable in smart Australian society. Extreme, promiscuous homosexual desire and male prostitution were as absurd or abhorrent as they often seem nowadays, but between two young men or a young and an older man affairs were not unusual; homosexuality, so Xenophon had recently written, was also a part of education, whereby a young man leamt from an older lover. Such affairs could be expensive, but if they could be romanticized, they were unobjectionable.

The Macedonian nobility may have been more extreme: there was a belief among Greeks that homosexuality had been introduced by the Dorian invaders who were thought to have swept down from Europe around 1000 B.C. and settled the states of Crete and Sparta. It is irrelevant that this belief was probably false. Educated Greeks accepted it because of what they saw around them and they acted according to what they believed; descendants of the Dorians were considered and even expected to be openly homosexual, especially among their ruling class, and the Macedonian kings had long insisted on their pure Dorian ancestry. They were credited with the usual boy-lovers by Greek gossip, and king Archelaus was said to have kissed the poet Euripidts. When Theopompus the Greek pamphleteer returned from a visit to Philip's court, he enlarged most virulently on the homosexuality of its noblemen, dismissing them as hetairainot hetairoi,prostitutes not companions. He was mistrusted for his wild abuse but he is more likely to have overstated his case than invented it entirely; if so, Alexander may have grown up in a court where the conventions of age were less respected and homosexuality was practised with the added determination of men of Dorian ancestry. At the age of thirty Alexander was still Hephaistion's lover although most young Greeks would usually have grown out of the fashion by then and an older man would have given up or turned to a young attraction. Their affair was a strong one; Hephaistion grew to lead Alexander's cavalry most ably and to become his Vizier before dying a divine hero, worthy of posthumous worship.

'Sex and sleep,' Alexander is said to have remarked, 'alone make me conscious that I am mortal'; his impatience with sleep was shared by his tutor, and many stories came to be told to illustrate his continence and his consideration for women, Alexander losing his temper with a man who offered to procure him small boys, Alexander punishing Companions for rape or agreeing to help a soldier's courtship provided it was pressed by means appropriate to a free-born woman. The theme may be near the truth, but philosophers liked to spread it, and no more can be said with certainty than that Alexander respected women rather than abused them. He was neither chaste nor prudish. According to Theophrastus, pupil of Aristotle, Philip and Olympias had once been worried by their son's lack of interest in sex, so they hired an expensive whore from Thessaly and told her to liven him up, but Alexander refused her advances in a mulish way, as if he were impotent. If his parents had tried to force a girl on him, he could hardly be blamed for refusing her; however, Theophrastus is known to have been thoroughly prejudiced against Alexander and Olympias, and his charge of impotence is a slander, not least because of Alexander's fathering of three or four children. Other stories are more to the point; when Alexander heard that his sister was having an affair, he is said to have commented that he did not see why she should not enjoy herself just because she was a princess. From a man who was to sleep with at least one man, four mistresses, three wives, a eunuch and, so gossip believed, an Amazon, the comment was honest enough.

Not that the years of Aristotle's stay were only memorable for first loves and physical pleasure. There is a curious sidelight on Alexander's progress, a letter to him from the elderly Athenian Isocrates, who had corresponded with Philip and had hoped that the tutorship would be given to one of his pupils. ‘I hear everybody saying', he wrote soon after Aristotle's arrival, 'that you are fond of your fellow men, of Athens and of philosophy, in a sensible, not a thoughtless, sort of way', and he followed these politenesses with the sound advice to eschew academic quibbling and devote the time to the art of practical argument. The advice was a sly insult against Aristotle, whose school of philosophy gave time to such dry debating, but the politenesses which introduced it had a certain relevance; the widening of interests which is so noticeable among Alexander's friends was itself a widening through Greek culture, and here Aristotle stands as symbol of a process which bore Alexander the most valuable fruit. Again, the sons of highland nobles had come into contact with a civilized world of thought which had been denied to their fathers; Ptolemy, a nobleman from Eordaea, was said to blush if he was asked the name of his grandmother, but he died the pharaoh of Egypt, presiding over a bureaucratic kingdom and a system of state monopolies which needed skills that owed nothing to highland tribal life. The same could be said of Perdiccas, Seleucus and the other giants of the Age of the Successors; the young nobility were learning a little of what it meant to adapt; and in explaining Alexander's extraordinary successes, a high place must go to his officers, the widening of whose early days can only have broadened their contribution to Alexander's career. Alexander's own generation grew to share and support his ambitions with a new self-confidence which could be alarming and an intelligence which often went further than mere war. Aptly, the one Macedonian who adjusted to a Persian way of life was also a man from Mieza.

But if Aristotle stands as a symbol of new horizons, he has added more to legend than to the facts of Alexander's life; to the east, especially the Arab east, the pair of them were a fascination, and their exploits as endless as the world itself, Aristotle and the Valley of Diamonds, the Wonder Stone or the Well of Immortality, Aristotle as Alexander's Vizier or as his magician, who gave him a box of wax models of his enemies and so ensured his success. In his own writings, he has left nothing to bring Alexander within reach, while the details of Pella and Olympias, Hephaistion and Bucephalas are a study in themselves but too disjointed to frame his personality. It seems as if a search for the young Alexander is bound to fail, and yet this personal issue cannot be avoided, for Alexander's personality is probably his most unusual contribution to history. As a conqueror he came less to change than to inherit and restore; but as a man he inspired and demanded what few leaders since have dared to consider possible. From his childhood there are only stories, of Alexander complaining that Philip would leave him nothing glorious to achieve, of Alexander snubbing an impossibly general question from Aristotle with a sensibly practical answer, or of Alexander refusing to compete in races unless his opponents were all of them kings; these stories are colourful, but they are mostly invented and the problem of his personality owes nothing to their perspective.

Among the scattered ruins that survive from his childhood, a personal search might well seem an impossibility, and indeed it has often been said that personal judgements on Alexander owe more to their judge's psychology than to his own. There is, however, one delicate thread to explore. It begins among the stories of his youth and it leads, through his own publicity and popular image, to the way in which he wished himself to be seen; in the search for Alexander it is wrong to suggest that the man must be disentangled from the myth, for the myth is sometimes of his own making, and then it is the most direct clue to his mind. In this case contemporary hints support it and flattery helps to give it body; there are reasons, many of them within Macedonia, for assuming that Alexander meant its pattern to be taken seriously. It is on any view unusual, for it turns, not on power or profit, but on the poet Homer.