Christian Cameron - God of War - The Epic Story of Alexander the Great

We arrived to find Thebes a burned-out husk, with her entire population raped and degraded, huddled in pens, awaiting sale. Later I heard Perdiccas, who led the assault, brag that no woman between ten and seventy remained unraped when the town was stormed. Children were butchered wholesale.

The Theban hoplites fought brilliantly, but they were no match for us. I heard later that they were the best fighters, man for man, of any foe most of the hypaspists ever faced. But as a body, they made mistakes, and a major gate was left virtually unguarded, and Alexander led the hypaspitoi through it and the town was stormed. Most of the hoplites died in the streets.

The Military Journal says that thirty thousand Thebans died. As many again were enslaved.

There were exceptions – a widow of one of the Boeotarchs, an aristocrat, was raped by one of our officers – a taxiarch in the pezhetaeroi. She didn’t break or even bend – when he went to take a drink after getting off her, she pushed him into her well and dropped rocks on him until he died. Alexander gave her freedom and all her property.

In fact, he was appalled. His troops had got away from him in the storming, and they were angry. Exhausted. They had marched across the world, in horrible conditions, because of these rebels (as we called them), and they wanted revenge for every boil and every sore, every pulled muscle, every broken bone, every day without food.

I won’t say Alexander wept. Merely that, like his father, he would have preferred other means.

But as I say, by the time the Athenian delegation arrived, there were no other means left. Alexander sat blank-faced on a stool and gave many Thebans their freedom – even their property. Many of the temples were spared. Several public buildings were spared. Slaves collected all the dead Theban hoplites and gave them a monument and a decent burial.

But the rest were sold into slavery en masse, and the town was destroyed. Turned to rubble.

Later – during the Lamian War – I heard Greeks claim that the true resistance to Macedon started there, and that Greek unity began in the ashes of Thebes.

Bullshit, says I. Thebes got what was coming to it. A nation of traitors, served the dish they’d ordered. The women of Thebes have my pity. The men died in harness, as rebels, and stupid rebels at that, and they got precisely what they deserved. And no one in Greece gave an obol. Had we done the same to Athens, it would have been war to the end – even Sparta, or Argos or Megara. But Thebes?

When we marched away, the ruins were still smoking, and Plataeans had come all the way across the plain, thirty stades, just to piss on the rubble. They waved at us and threw flowers.

We waved back.

And finally, we marched back to Pella.

Most of us in that army had been on campaign for more than a year. No one had been home that summer, and from the noble Hetaeroi to the lowliest pezhetaeroi, we had fought in at least five actions per man, marched ten thousand stades, killed enemies without count – fought against odds over and over.

We called it ‘The Year of Miracles’.

We called Alexander . . . king. He was king. He was king from Thrace to Illyria, from Sparta to Athens and across Thessaly to Pella. Demosthenes and Darius of Persia had tried to unite with Amyntas and the Thebans to make a web of steel to surround and crush our king, and he had beaten every one of them, all at once.

From the Shipka Pass to Pellium and down to Thebes, no enemy wanted to face Macedon in the field, ever again. And the smoke rising from the yawning basements of Thebes warned potential rebels of the consequences of foolishness.

Tribute flowed from the ‘allies’. Everyone in the empire paid their taxes that winter.

As the leaves reddened on the trees, we rode back to Pella. The last morning, Alexander was nearly giddy with excitement at returning victorious, and I suggested we put on our best armour and ride our best horses and make a fine show, and he laughed and agreed.

We spent the morning preparing. Veterans among the pezhetaeroi mounted their horsehair plumes, or their ostrich feathers. I’d gone back to the same smith in Athens and got another helmet – this one covered in gold. He’d delivered it with ill grace – but he’d done a magnificent job, and my helmet had a distinctive shape, with a brim over the eyes and a forged iron crest over the bronze bowl, and a tall ruff of horsehair. It was the kind of helmet men called ‘Attic’. It had less face protection, but I could hear and see and, most importantly, it was magnificent, and every man who could see it would know where I was. And the iron crest meant I would never be killed by a blow to the head.

Tirseas of Athens. Best armourer of his day. Hated Macedonians.

We put all our best on – clean chitons, full armour, polished by the slaves with ash and tallow. Swords shining, spears sparkling. Shaved. We were wearing a fortune in armour – brilliant horsehair plumes, Aegyptian ostrich feathers, solid-gold eagles’ wings, panther skins, leopard skins, bronze armour polished like the disc of the sun and decorated in silver and gold, tin-plated bronze buckles and solid-silver buckles in our horse tack, crimson leather strapping on every mount, tall Persian bloodstock horses with pale coats and dark legs and faces. Alexander was the richest and the best-armoured – unlike his father, he looked like a god. No one could doubt that he was in command.

At noon, the Hetaeroi entered Pella, and the crowds cheered us, I suppose, but what I remember is riding with the somatophylakes into the courtyard of the palace. Olympias was there, of course – best pass over her – and even the slaves were cheering us.

When we reined up in the courtyard, there was a moment – no longer than the thickness of a hair, so to speak – when none of us moved. We sat on our horses and looked around.

I looked up, to where I could see the marble rail of the exedra, and the double arch of the window of Alexander’s childhood nursery. I thought I saw a pair of small heads there, and I wondered if, despite Heraclitus, I could put my toe back in the same part of the river. If I could reach across time to those boys – if they were right there.

Those boys being us – me and Cleitus and Alexander. And tell them – some day, we will do it. We will be heroes. Fear nothing. We will win. We will do what Philip did.

But better. And the best was yet to come.

PART III

Asia

FIFTEEN

Pella, 335 BC

We had no money.

Of course, that’s not true. The sale of all the Thebans, plus the loot from Thrace and Illyria, paid the crown of Macedon a little less than eight hundred talents of gold, which didn’t quite cover the arrears of pay to the army. Philip had died leaving the crown five hundred talents of gold in debt – in fact, like many an unlucky son, we had new creditors appearing every day, and Philip probably left Alexander more like a thousand talents in debt. A thousand talents. In gold. Remember that the King of Kings tried to buy Athens for three hundred talents . . .

We’d been home from our year of miracles for three days when I saw Alexander throw one of the worst temper tantrums of his life. It was horrible. It started badly and grew steadily worse.

I had the duty. There was a rumour – one of Thaïs’s sources – that Darius had put out money to arrange Alexander’ s murder, and the Hetaeroi were on high alert. In fact, I had Ochrid – now a freeman – tasting the king’s food because we’d been away from Pella a year and none of us trusted anyone in the palace.

So I was in armour, and I had just walked the corridors of the palace with Seleucus and Nearchus as my lieutenants, checking every post. I had almost sixty men on duty, and two more shifts ready to take over in turn. Alexander had just promoted almost a hundred men to the Hetaeroi – some from the Prodromoi, some from the grooms and some from other units, or straight from civilian life. They were a mixed bag. Perdiccas and I had shared them out like boys choosing sides for a game of hockey.