Like his father, he was a very handsome young man. His nose, as statues and paintings stress, was straight; his forehead was prominent and his chin short but jutting; his mouth revealed emotion, and the lips were often shown curling. But art could not convey his general manner, and for his subjects that was more important. He walked and spoke fast, and so therefore, did his Successors; by contemporaries, he was believed to be lion-like in appearance and often in temper, and for a young man of streaming hair and penetrating gaze the comparison was apt, the more so as he had been born under the sign of Leo and was best known from the portraits on his coins, which showed him in the lionskin cap of his ancestor Heracles, a headdress he may have worn in everyday life. Later, the comparison was overdone, and his hair would be said to be tawny and even his teeth to be sharp like a lion cub's.

The problem, however, is his height, for no painting betrays it, any more than a Van Dyck reveals the smallness of Charles I. Certainly, he was smaller than Hephaistion, the man he loved, and he may well have been smaller than almost anyone else; when he sat on the throne of the Persian king, he required a table, not a stool, for his feet, and although the throne was designed to be high, this suggests a definite shortness of leg. His only measurement is given in the fictitious Romance of Alexander,where he is said to have been three cubits, or four feet six inches high; this surely cannot be correct, nor can it confirm his historical smallness, although legend liked to play on the theme that the world's great conqueror was reduced to a mere three cubits of earth. Only in German myth was Alexander remembered as king of the dwarfs, and it would perhaps be rash to explain his ambition on the assumption that he was unusually small. Physically, however, Alexander had inherited all of his father's toughness against wounds and climate.

To his Macedonians this new king would have seemed, above all else, young. His long hair, fresh clean-shaven skin and nervous energy belonged to the very essence of youth, and there was little enough in his past to imply that audacity would now be tempered with discretion. Two years before, he had galloped at the head of the cavalry charge which had defeated the army of Philip's Greek enemies, and after the battle he had gone as one of three envoys to Athens, the city which so affected his later politics in Greece. He had served with his father on a march to the Danube and two years before that, at the age of sixteen, he had held the seal of the kingdom while his father was away at Byzantium. Most notably, he had led an army to victory against a turbulent Thracian tribe and founded his first city, Alexandropolis, to commemorate this dashing success. There was decided promise in such behaviour, but more than promise was needed if Philip's inheritance was to be held together.

The tribes of Illyria threatened to north and west; to the east, Philip's many new cities could hardly suffice to hold down Thrace along the banks of the Danube and the shore of the distant Black Sea. The advance army, split by a quarrel, had begun to be hard pressed in Asia; to the south, there were few Greek states who did not see the death of their allied leader as the start of a new independence. Troubles within Macedonia had been settled with such speed and ruthlessness that the highlands had not, after all, deserted and Philip's two most respected generals had ignored their families to pledge support. But Olympias was back, and never peaceable. It may be significant that Alexander's two most trusted Macedonians, Perdiccas and Craterus, came from Orestis, the hill kingdom once closest, politically, to Olympias's own. There is reason to suppose that his intimate friend and future historian, Ptolemy, was born in Orestis too. If so, Alexander's personal clique may have drawn heavily on friendships derived from his mother, and after his mother's possible role in Philip's murder, these allegiances might not be to every courtier's taste. The deeper question of the new king's abilities remained, and an answer could only be gleaned from memories of his earlier years; men would be looking backwards, and in search of Alexander, it is time to turn in that direction too.

CHAPTER THREE

Born in an age when biography had not developed, Alexander is fortunate in the lack of detail for his early years. If children find childhood a time of boredom, the same is seldom true of their biographers, for nowadays, childhood is seen as a source of so much that follows and there may be lasting significance in the experiences of youth. In antiquity there was no psychological theory, and not until Augustine would a man write memoirs which treated the child as father of the man. Life's perspective was reversed, and youth was mostly described through a series of anecdotes which falsely mirrored the feats of the adult future; proven kings or bishops were remembered as kings or bishops when young, and so it was said of the boy Alexander, future conqueror of Persia, that he had once astonished Persian ambassadors to his father's court by precocious questions about their roads and resources. Such stories are no less suspect for being fashionable. At least three of Alexander's historians had grown up with him, and one wrote a book on his upbringing; another may have been connected with his first literary teacher, but none of their works survives, and Alexander's youth is left mostly to romance and fancy, to three famous figures, his mother, his horse and his tutor who have inspired a world of legend of their own.

Alexander was born son of Philip and Olympias in 356 B.C., at a time when his father's expansion to north, south and east was already proving diplomatic and extremely profitable. Three different dates are given for the day of his birth; accurate records for birthdays are a modem addition to history, and indeed it had once seemed strange to the Greeks that the Persians should celebrate their birthdays at all, but in Alexander's case, the disagreement was not only due to ignorance. Of the three dates mid-July, on or near 20 July, is the most plausible; one of his officers later vouched for a date in October, but this may be a confusion with his official birthday, which came to be celebrated, as in Persia, on the date of his accession. The third date, 6 July, reflects a different fashion, for the day was sacred to Artemis, goddess of childbirth and hence especially auspicious. In the same spirit, it could be said that Alexander's birth coincided with the fire that destroyed the goddess's great temple at Ephesus, because she was away supervising Alexander's arrival and had left her temple to chance, a fact which caused her Oriental priests to prophesy the birth of disaster for Asia's peoples.

There was also dispute about his parents. Much of this was posthumous legend; the Persians later fitted Alexander into their own line of kings by a story that Olympias had visited the Persian court, where the king made love to her and then sent her back to Macedonia because her breath smelt appallingly bad. There was more to the argument than nationalist romance. Olympias, it was said, probably by Alexander's own court historian, spread wild stories about the manner of Alexander's birth and referred his origins to a god: this will raise acute problems later in his life, but for the moment it is enough to remember that Olympias was a divorced woman who might well disown the husband who betrayed her. Her past behaviour and her character, itself a problem, make this only too plausible.

Olympias was an orphan under her uncle's guardianship when Philip first met her; they caught each other's eye, so the story went, while they were being initiated into a mystery religion of underworld demons on the island of Samothrace; falling in love, they promptly married. There could be few more dramatic settings for romance than a night-time ceremony by torchlight in the huge triple-doored hall of Samothrace, and certainly, the mystery cult was later favoured conspicuously by Macedonians and their kings, a fashion which Philip himself may have started. Problems of age and dating confuse the story; perhaps Philip and Olympias first saw each other on Samothrace, but others maintained more plausibly that they did not marry until the year before Alexander's birth, when Philip had already stretched his power to the south and north-west of Macedonia and would have welcomed a political marriage with Epirus's princess. But the story of her Samothracian love-affair fitted the popular views of her person, and these are more difficult to judge.