'But where is Alexander, the soldier Alexander?' Neither fame nor legend has helped his history, and the young man who first took power from a murder at Aigai has been lost among varying stories and an array of half-reported histories.

* This legendary narrative took shape in Egypt, mostly some five centuries after Alexander's death. Earlier elements and a few facts survive among its wild fiction.

More than twenty contemporaries wrote of his career, but not one of their books survives in its original and only one extract from a letter of Alexander is genuine beyond dispute. Four hundred years or more after his death, two historians and two abbreviators interwove or cut down his original histories and it is from their long narratives that his life must mostly be recovered. Writing under the Roman empire, they did not understand Alexander's age, and it is as if the history of Tudor England could only be recovered from Macaulay's essays and the histories of Hume the philosopher. And yet by minute comparison, their originals' outline can mostly be mapped out and art and inscriptions can help to discount their prejudices; they yield a picture and by building a frame from each of the societies in which Alexander moved, this picture can often be set in a convincing perspective. Alexander is the subject for a search, not a story, for such was the style and content of his first written histories that any confident narrative can only be disreputable. Still less is he a lesson or a moral warning. To study the past for human folly or popular superstition is only to be patronizing about our own same hopes and fears, expressed in a different society. The merit of ancient Greek history is not as a moral sermon, but as a study that reaches back through a vast passage of time; it is still possible to share what men, even Alexander, experienced at such a distance, and after two thousand years, the search, though never easy, is often vivid, always worthwhile.

CHAPTER TWO

The search for Alexander begins darkly but dramatically. When Philip was murdered, the Macedonian court could only expect another of the family struggles which had weakened their kingdom for the past hundred years; such struggles are seldom reported in detail, but clues can be found, often in the most unlikely places, and together they suggest a pattern, misleading perhaps by its thinness but consistent with the way in which Macedonian kings had always had to behave. First, the pattern needs a background.

Set on the northern borders of the Greek-speaking world, adjoining Europe's tribesmen, Philip's Macedonia was a broad patchwork of kingdoms, stitched together by conquest, marriage and the bribes and attractions of his rising fortune. At the time of Alexander's birth, it would have seemed a land of impossible contrasts, and thirteen years of Philip's energy had not altogether removed the differences of interest which had troubled previous kings. It was still a land of lowlands and highlands, which Philip and his ancestors ruled from the south-east plains, a fenland of the four great rivers which water the crops and the winter pasturage on their rich light loam. Marshy and densely forested, these fens and their bordering hills were a land for pioneers and Philip and his ancestors had attacked them with the necessary spirit. Drainage had channelled the flooding rivers for irrigation; roads had been cut through the dense pine-forests and pitch had been boiled from their logs by a native technique and sold to Greek shipbuilders in the timberless south; old gold mines had been seized on Philip's eastern border and forced to yield a thousandfold by a mass of new slave labour and Greeks skills of extraction; wild oxen, bears and lions were hunted on horseback for sport and food; Macedonians near the coast had mastered the art of fly-fishing for trout on their rivers and had introduced the fig and olive to lands where they fruited twice yearly. 'Lovely Emathia' Homer had called these rolling plains, a fit home for herds of cattle; an old Macedonian dance mimed the life of the cattle-rustler, clearly the trade of many local farmers. Cattle had never abounded in Greece where meat was seldom tasted outside religious sacrifices; Maccdon's more frequent diet of meat may not be irrelevant to her toughness on the battlefield.

GREECE, MACEDONIA & THE AEGEAN

These plains would be the envy of any Greek visitor who crossed their southern border by the narrow vale of Tempe and the foot of Mount Olympus. He would pass the frontier post of Heraclion, town of Heracles, and stop at the harbour-town of Dion, named after the Greek god Zeus, ancestor of the Macedonian kings, and site of a yearly nine-day festival of the arts in honour of Zeus and the nine Greek Muses. There he could walk through city gates in a wall of brick, down the paved length of a sacred way, between a theatre, gymnasiums and a temple with Doric pillars; suitably, the nearby villages were linked with the myth of Orpheus, the famous bard of Greek legend. He was still in a world of Greek gods and sacrifices, of Greek plays and Greek language, though the natives might speak Greek with a northern accent which hardened 'ch' into 'g', 'th' into 'd' and pronounced King Philip as 'Bilip'.

Bearing on up the coast, he would find the plain no less abundant and the towns more defiantly Greek. The next two coast-towns on the shore of the Thermaic gulf had originally been settled by Greek emigrants, and ever since they had watched for a chance to cut free of the Macedonian court which had grown to control them. At times they succeeded and amid their vicissitudes, they remained towns of spirit, whose leaders were rich and whose middle class could equip themselves for war; they fanned the lush land around them, and the extra revenues which made them so desirable came from the sea and its traders. A recognized trade route ran west from the coast into Macedonia, and the coast-towns had courts with a system of law under which Greek traders were content to be tried; harbour-taxes were levied on the trade that passed through, and the rich would corner the valuable right to their yearly collection. They were not the last champions of Greek culture on the fringe of a barbarian world: the Macedonian palaces of Pella and Aigai lay close inland, linked to the coast by river, antiquity's swiftest and cheapest method of heavy transport. They were accessible, therefore, and their patronage of the finest Greek artists had made their externals no less civilized than the coast towns which they coveted.

'Nobody would go to Macedonia to see the king, but many would come far to see his palace ...'; so Socrates was said to have remarked when refusing an invitation to escape from the death-sentence in Athens and retire to Macedonian Pella. At the turn of the century, the king was Archelaus whose patronage for Greek culture even exceeded his ancestors' example and whose energy first moved the kingdom's capital from Aigai north-east to Pella, a site more accessible to the sea and well set on his kingdom's newly built roads. It was a lakeside city in those days, set on the

River Loudias and equipped with a natural harbour where the river spread out into a muddy sheet of water. By the 380s, Pella was acknowledged as the largest town in Macedonia; Philip I of course, improved it, and within twenty years of Alexander's death it would become a boom town on the profits of world-conquest, boasting temples and palaces over a hundred yards long with two or three grand courtyards each, whose colonnades of Greek pillars supported richly-painted friezes and mud-brick walls above marble thresholds and floors of pebble-patterned mosaic It was a place where a man could banquet in surroundings that befitted the richest Greek taste; the large town houses were built round a central courtyard off which the reception-rooms opened, while a second storey housed bedrooms on the north side and cast a welcome shade in summer. These palatial houses are now well known from recent archaeology, and they probably belong soon after Alexander's death, Alexander had been brought up in Archelaus's older palace on the more westerly of Pella's two hills, and its heavy marble pillars were as fashionably Greek as those of the later houses of the lower town. It was a cultured home, probably in the style of the palaces that succeeded it; one of their later mosaic floors probably took its design of centaurs from a painting which Archelaus had commissioned from a Greek master. These famous pebble-mosaics, also the work of Greek artists, were probably laid out soon after Alexander's life at Pella, for one shows a hunting-scene from his career, another the god Dionysus, ancestor of the kings, another a lion-griffin attacking a stag, perhaps the royal seal of the kingdom or at least the emblem of Antipater whom Alexander left as his general in Macedonia. Though much admired, they come close to vulgarity; Archelaus's older palace may well have had mosaics too, for the earliest known mosaics on the Greek mainland are to be found in the northern Greek city of Olynthus which had come within the influence of Macedonia's palace, and their designs were developed from the schools of Greek painters whom Archelaus is known to have patronized. Except for a love of gardens, there is no finer test of a civilized man than his taste for paintings: in Alexander's Macedonia, too often remembered for conquest, the pillared tombs of his nobility bear the first known trompe-l'oeilpaintings in art history on their architectural facades, and in Aigai's palace, the central courtyard may well have been laid out as a secret garden. In the new town of Philippi Philip's Macedonian settlers, the 'dregs of the kingdom' as critics called them, had planted wild roses to soften the bleakness of a home on the distant Thracian coast.