Such was Alexander's hero, and if he indeed took this rivalry literally, aspiring to what he had read, then his ambitions and character can still be brought to life. At first sight it seems so implausible, the emulation of a poem which looked back to an age of kings and prowess a thousand years before. But rivalry with Homer's world was not irrelevant romance; Homer's poems were still regarded by many Greeks as a source of ethical teaching, and from what is known of political life in Alexander's Athens, the combative code of the Iliadhad in no way been outgrown. It was a fiercely self-assertive society and what was still implicit in democratic Athens was written larger in the north. In aristocratic Thessaly, on the borders of the Macedonian kings, the bodies of murderers would still be dragged behind a chariot round their victim's tomb, just as Homer's Achilles had once dragged the dead Hector through the dust in memory of his victim Patroclus. But Homer's ethic belongs in an even longer tradition. For Homer's heroes, life was not so much a stage as a competition, and the word for this outward striving for honour, to philotimo,is still fundamental to the modern Greeks' way of life; it is an extrovert ideal, not a moral one, and it owes more to emotions and quarrels than to reason and punishment; it belongs with an open-air style of living where fame is the surest way to immortality; it is an attitude that has deep roots in Greece, and it is this word 'philotimo'which was used to describe Alexander's Homeric ambitions. Homer's Achilles sums up the doubts and conflicts of to philotimo,a hero's emulous struggle for glory; the ideal is a lasting one, and against the perspective of Macedonia it would have made living sense.

Through Aristotle and the fine Greek art at Pella, it is easy to overstress one side of the contrast in Alexander's Macedonian background. Pella was also a palace society, and kings and palaces had vanished for some three hundred years from the Greek world; it was the centre of a tribal aristocracy, to which the highland chieftains had come down from their townless world, and on both accounts, it was more archaic than its patronage of Greek art and intellect suggested. 'Idomeneus,' Homer's Agamemnon had said, judging a hero in terms of the old heroic age, 'I honour you above all the swift-horsed Greeks, whether in war or any other work or at the feast when the heroes mix the gleaming wine.' Horses and hunting, feasts and fighting, these were a hero's fields of prowess, but in Macedonia kings and barons continued them each in their distinctive way. Once, according to an old Macedonian custom, a Macedonian could not have worn a proper belt until he had killed a man in battle, and in Alexander's day single combat not only belonged to the ceremony of a royal funeral but was the recurrent business of his officers, who wrestled, jousted and speared in duels worthy of any Homeric hero. Hunting promised similar glory, and was given free rein by Alexander from the Lebanon to the hills of Afghanistan; according to custom, a Macedonian could not recline at dinner until he had killed a wild boar, another link with the world of Homer's poems, for only in Homer's society, not in contemporary Greece, did Greeks ever dine without reclining.

At dinners, the king entertained his nobles and personal guest friends in a ceremonial style which recalled the great banquets of Homeric life. Gossip maintained that Macedonians would be drunk before they reached the first course, but such drinking was more a challenge than an indiscriminate debauch. Successes in battle were toasted formally and one noble pledged another to a cup which had to be equalled on pain of honour. These royal feasts were a vital part of the loose weave of the kingdom. They brought king and nobles together in a formal relationship, just as feasts in the palace halls had daily confronted Homer's kings with their counsellors and neighbouring aristocrats. It was a personal relationship, governed by favour and friendship; the old Homeric traditions of kingly presents, of generosity and pious respect for ancestral friends still lived on in Alexander, who always respected past ties with the Macedonian kings, whether of long-dead Greek poets, an Athenian general or kinsmen of his mythical ancestors, even after an interval of more than a hundred years.

This honour for guest friends had been central to the personal links which patterned the life of Homer's kings; others, the links of family and blood feuds, also found their parallel in Alexander's Macedonian home. But the nobles themselves shared a different and no less evocative honour, for at the court of their lowland king they served as his Companions, and to any lover of Homer, Companions are an unforgettable part of heroic life. Loosely, Companions may be partners in any common enterprise, fellow-oarsmen rowing with Odysseus or kings fighting with Agamemnon before Troy, but they also serve in a stricter sense. In Homer's Iliad,each king or hero has his own personal group of Companions, bound by respect, not kinship. Busy and steadfast, they dine in his tent or listen as he plays the lyre; they tend his bronze-rimmed chariot and drive his hoofed horses into battle, they fight by his side, hand him his spear and carry him, wounded, back to their camp. They are the men a hero loves and grieves to lose, Patroclus to the brooding Achilles or Polydamas to Hector rampant. With the collapse of kings and heroes, it is as if the Companions withdraw to the north, surviving only in Macedonia on the fringe of Europe. Driven thence when Alexander's conquests bring the Macedonians up to date, they retreat still further from a changing world and dodge into the swamps and forests of the Germans, only to reappear as the squires of early German kings and the retinues of counts in the tough beginnings of knighthood and chivalry.

In Alexander's Macedonia, selected Companions still attended the king in battle, but their ranks had been expanded to include the nobles of highland and lowland, while foreign friends from Greece and elsewhere had increased their number to almost a hundred. Not every Companion was the king's friend; they dined with him and advised him, and they had lost none of their aristocratic pride; a festival was held yearly in their honour, and when they died they were buried in vaulted underground tombs behind a facade of tapering Greek columns and double doors studded with bronze. It was a grand style, and they took it with them to the East. Its roots were older and more in keeping with the Companions' name, for the vaulted tombs of Macedonia recall the mounded burials of royal Mycenae, ancestor of Homer's heroic world.

It was among these Companions, turbulent and nobly born, that the Macedonian king had to force respect for his will, and his methods again picked up the style of Homeric kingship. Custom and tradition supported what no law existed to define, and as in Homer's poems, superlative prowess could justify a man in going beyond convention: the kings began with the asset of noble birth, and like Homer's kings, they could claim descent from Zeus, a point of the first importance both for Alexander and his father. Noble birth needed to be buttressed by solid achievement. No rights or constitution protected the king; his government was personal, his authority as absolute as he could make it; he issued his own coins, bound his people to his treaties, led their charges into battle, dispensed the plunder and attended to suitable sacrifices and yearly rituals of purification, hoping to 'rule by might', in a favourite Homeric phrase, and meet his duties with the proper energy of a king among lesser kings. It was a demanding position, and if age or achievement was against him, he was deposed or murdered. None of Alexander's ancestors had died in their beds. The common people, most of them wild tribesmen, respected his birth and were consulted, mostly, as a counter to turbulent nobles: if their will was displeasing, a strong king would defy it. Like Homer's King Agamemnon, Alexander twice ignored the opinions of his assembled soldiers. Agamemnon's reward was a nine days' plague from heaven; once, Alexander failed, but once he scared his men into agreement within three days.