"Take this son of mine away." ' King Philip is made to say to Aristotle in the fictitious Romance of Alexander, '"and teach him the poems of Homer", and sure enough, that son of his went away and studied all day, so that he read through the whole of Homer's Iliadin a single sitting.' In spirit, this charming fiction comes near to life, for the theme of Homer's Iliad,and especially of its hero Achilles, is the link which spans the figures and stories of Alexander's youth. Through his mother Olympias he was a descendant of Achilles; his first tutor Lysimachus owed part of his lifelong favour to giving his pupil the nickname of Achilles; his beloved Hephaistion was compared by contemporaries with Patroclus, the intimate companion of Homer's hero; Aristotle taught him Homer's poems and at his pupil's request, helped to prepare a special text of the Iliadwhich Alexander valued above all his possessions; he used to sleep, said one of his officers, with a dagger and this private Iliadbeneath his head, calling it his journey-book of excellence in war. In the second year of his march, when the Persian king had been routed, 'a casket was brought to him,

which seemed to be the most precious of Darius's treasure-chests, and he asked his friends what they thought was so particularly valuable that it should be stored inside. Many opinions were expressed, but Alexander himself said he would put the Iliadthere and keep it safe.' But the Iliadwas among the oldest Greek poems, at least three hundred years older than Alexander and seemingly as distant as Shakespeare from a modem king.

In deciding how he meant this, there is a danger of taking publicity too seriously or of following a theme of flattery too far. Nicknames from Homer were popular in Greece, Nestor for a wise man, Achilles for a brave one, and the mood of the Iliadwas not an irrelevant revival for Philip's heir. Homer's poems were widely known in Macedonia. One of Antipater's sons could quote Homer fluently, as could subsequent kings; even in Philip's highland Macedonia, pottery has been found painted with scenes of the sack of Troy. Philip had already been compared with King Agamemnon, leader of the Greek allies who fought for ten years round Troy, and the style of his infantry was likened to Agamemnon's; the Trojan War had been cited by Herodotus as the first cause of the ancient enmity between Greece and Asia's monarchies and Philip's pamphleteers continued to draw the parallel between a new Greek invasion of Asia and the expedition described by Homer. Past history bore witness that Agamemnon and the Trojan war were worthwhile themes for a Greek invader of Asia to evoke and imitate. But Alexander was stressing his link with Achilles, a younger and more passionate hero, and hardly a symbol of kingly leadership. There were public overtones here too, for Achilles was a hero of Thessaly, and Philip's heir was ruler of the Thessalians, a people essential for his army and control of southern Greece. Achilles was also a stirring Greek hero, useful for a Macedonian king whose Greek ancestry did not stop Greeks from calling him barbarian; in a similar vein, the great Kolokotronis, hero of Greek freedom, would dress and parade as the new Achilles when ridding Greece of the Turks in the 1820s. But, it was said, 'Alexander was emulous of Achilles, with whom he had had a rivalry since his earliest youth'; publicity and politics do not determine a young boy's heroes, and if Achilles can be proved to belong to Alexander's youth, and not to have been read back into it, then the man himself may still be within reach.

The proof is difficult, but again not impossible: it depends on a famous Athenian joke. In the year after Philip's murder, Alexander was fighting near the Danube, and back in Athens, his political enemy Demosthenes ridiculed him as a mere Margites; this obscure insult reappears in the history book of a Macedonian courtier, and it must have been apt to be remembered and repeated. Now Margites was one of the more extreme figures in Greek poetry. He was the anti-hero of a parody of Homer's Iliad,wrongly believed to be by Homer himself, and he was known as a famous simpleton who could not count further than ten and who was so ignorant of the facts of life that among much else he was only persuaded to make love to a woman when he was told it would cure a wound in her private parts. By calling Alexander the new Margites, Demosthenes meant that so far from being an Achilles, he was nothing but a Homeric buffoon; they had met in Macedonia when Alexander was a boy, and the joke was pointless unless Alexander's Homeric pretensions were known before he ever invaded Asia.

There is every sign, moreover, that others took them seriously, not least Alexander himself. He began his Asian expedition with a pilgrimage to Troy to honour Achilles's grave, and he took sacred armour from Troy's temple to accompany him to India and back again; his own court historian, who wrote to please him, picked up this theme and stressed parallels with Homer's poems in reports of his progress down the Asian coast; in art, the effects were more subtle, for if Alexander's appearance deliberately matched that of a youthful Greek hero, his features also came to influence portraits of Achilles until the two heroes could hardly be distinguished out of their context; the court sculptor Lysippus portrayed Alexander holding a Homeric spear and on the coins of the small Thessalian town which claimed to be Achilles's birthplace the pictures of the young Achilles grew to look like Alexander's own. The comparison mattered, and was known to matter: when the people of Athens wished to plead for the release of Alexander's Athenian prisoners they sent as their ambassador the only man by the name of Achilles known in fourth-century Athens; previous embassies had failed, but one Achilles pleased another, and this time, the Athenian prisoners were released. It is the smallest details which are always most revealing.

The rivalry, then, existed and was thought important, but it is a different question how it was meant to be taken. Whether written, sung or dictated, Homer's poems were at least three hundred years older than Alexander, and their heroic code of conduct, when men strove for personal glory and knew no greater sanction than public shame and disgrace, had probably belonged to a society at least six hundred years older than that. In this world of heroes, whose ultimate ancestors are the ruined palaces of Troy and Mycenae, no figure is more compelling than Alexander's chosen Achilles; like Alexander, Achilles is young and lordly, a man of passion as much as action with a heart which, though often merciless, can still respond to another's evident nobility. In war, he knows no equal, and even when he sulks in his tent, black anger filling his heart, his reputation overshadows the battle he refuses to join. Like his fellow-heroes, he fights in the name of personal glory, whose first ideal is prowess and whose betrayal is shame and dishonour, but success and status are not his only inspirations: respect for an ageing father, blind love for a favourite Companion, and for a mistress removed by his overlord, a regret which is not just the self-pity of a hero deprived of his prize, Homer's Achilles, of all poetic figures, is a man of intelligible emotion. Above all, he is tragic, for as he has been told by his goddess-mother Thetis, who knows his unhappiness long before he tells her and yet has the sense to ask for it to be retold, 'Two fates bear him towards death's end ...; if he stays and fights around the city of the Trojans, Gone are his hopes of return, but his fame will be everlasting. But if he goes home to his own dear land, Gone is his fair fame, but his life will be long. And the end of death will not be swift to find him.' Firmly, Achilles chose fame against return; like Alexander, he died a young man.