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

At any rate, we had to wait for the allied fleet to catch us up, and Alexander had detached Parmenio to pluck the rest of Lydia if the garrisons were weak, so we had time to kill, and Alexander spent his time going to parties and getting his portrait painted by the foremost artist of the day. He was drunk a great deal.

Philotas and I avoided each other.

Memnon was gathering an army at Miletus.

Kineas had an increasing number of crimes to deal with – rapes and thefts by Macedonians. He dealt with them as tactfully as he could, but he was also outraged when he found that any Macedonian he turned over to Philotas was released.

And Alexander spent far too much time ignoring all this and sitting on Bucephalus in a tent by the agora, where Apelles painted him in encaustic, carefully coloured wax. I found the new, imperial Alexander a little grating and I had duties to perform, and frankly, I was besotted with Thaïs and we made love as often as I could catch her and get her clothes off – and the success of taking the city had made her as randy as I. We had a fine time, but Ephesus had a certain aura – it was too sophisticated for my taste, and I suspect it actually frightened some of our Pellan farm boys.

At any rate, Apelles finished his military portrait, and I saw it. It was . . . accurate. It showed the fire in Alexander’s eyes, and the ram’s horns where his unruly blond hair rose in rebellion against the brush when he’d been on campaign a week or more. And there were the lines around his mouth that he got in combat, and there were the knuckles, white against the hilt of his sword – and there was Bucephalus, his deeply swayed, broad back accurate in every detail.

Alexander hated it.

By Apollo, I could have told Apelles if he’d asked me. Kineas and I had a laugh about it, and that was before the king saw it. It was a magnificent portrait of the King of Macedon at war.

But Alexander didn’t see himself as the King of Macedon any more.

I was there when he exploded. I wanted to be there. And besides, had I shown signs of chickening out, Thaïs was going to make me. Everyone in Ephesus knew the king was going to hate it, and everyone wanted to hear what he had to say.

‘It is bad art,’ Alexander said, his arms crossed, an entirely false smile on his face. ‘My dear Apelles – it is trite. You should be ashamed of yourself.’

At the pronouncement, the apprentices at the back of the tent – busy grinding priceless substances to powders so fine they could be used to mix with melted beeswax – guffawed.

Alexander’s ear was always tuned to the sound of derisive laughter. His head came up and he looked around, like a stallion hearing a mare.

‘What was that?’ he asked.

‘My apprentices,’ Apelles said. ‘They are mocking you for pretending to know anything about art.’

Alexander’s face grew red. ‘I studied with Aristotle!’ he said, and Callisthenes nodded.

Apelles shrugged. ‘He didn’t know shit about art, either.’

Callisthenes had a mouth full of wine, and he spurted it all over the ground.

Good times.

‘The likeness to me is good enough, I suppose,’ Alexander said. ‘I know it’s meant to be me.’

Apelles stood stony-faced.

‘But Bucephalus is not a swayback carthorse, and my thorax doesn’t buckle under my right arm.’ Alexander moved around the painting. ‘And the light is odd.’

Apelles laughed, and his laugh was unforced and unconcerned. ‘My lord, you are the greatest warrior in the circle of the world, and may indeed be the child of the gods, but you telling me about art is like me telling Ptolemy there about horses.’

‘Leave me out of it,’ I said.

Apelles smiled a lazy, evil smile. ‘Why don’t you fetch an impartial judge?’ he asked the king. ‘Get your horse and bring him here.’

The great war horse was brought, and as soon as the horse saw the likeness, he raised his head and gave a stallion trumpet call.

He seemed puzzled when the other horse didn’t move. But he looked at the painting for a long time.

‘I rest my case,’ Apelles said.

‘What, your painting is good enough to please a horse?’ Callisthenes asked.

‘The horse recognises the likeness. Animals live in a natural world – art, to be art, must be natural.’

Callisthenes shrugged. ‘Nonsense. Art is always artifice. Any child can copy nature.’

‘It is always easier for a pompous fool to imitate a philosopher than other men,’ Apelles said to Callisthenes.

Apelles ended up executing another painting, this one of Alexander in the guise of Zeus, throwing a thunderbolt. Kineas, for example, found it horrible. Thaïs laughed and laughed.

Alexander loved it. And so did the troops.

Late summer, and we finally moved. Parmenio had done his usual brilliant job cleaning up Phrygia for his brother, and now he was coming to us with the army. The allied fleet – all one hundred and sixty ships – was riding snug in Ephesus’s near-impregnable harbour. But at sea, the Persians had it all their own way, and aside from a few minor ship actions – all won by Athenians – our fleet was too ill trained to risk in a straight-up fight.

We marched to Miletus, and not a moment too soon. Kineas had taken to arresting Macedonians and trying them in military courts without handing them over to Philotas, who was nominally, at least, governor of the city, and the two of them were nearly at war when Kineas executed a pair of pezhetaeroi for rape. Alexander backed him, but Philotas swore to have his head. You can guess whose side I was on . . .

The fleet anchored between the island of Lade and the mainland, virtually under the walls of the city. There was immense historical value in this – the Persians were anchored over by Mycale, and both places were redolent of past conflict. Here, the Ionian rebels and their Athenian allies had lost one of the greatest naval actions of all time – to treason – against the Persians.

‘My ancestor was here,’ Kineas said, pointing across the water. ‘Arimnestos the Plataean.’

And here, on the beaches of Mycale, the Athenians smashed Persian seapower for a hundred years.

‘My ancestor was at Mycale, too,’ Kineas said, with a certain aristocratic insolence. He didn’t actually say ‘while your ancestors were herding sheep and sending tribute to Persia, mine ruled the world’. He didn’t say it, but he thought it.

He was a fine man, nonetheless.

Heh. Your ancestors, too, lad.

Anyway, we beat the Persians to Miletus by days, and that was pretty much the siege. The Persian commander started negotiating as soon as we got there.

The only battle was between Parmenio and Alexander.

Parmenio had been away, marching around, taking the surrender of Phrygia and cleaning up the corners of Lydia. The king had been in Ephesus, surrounded by admirers and flatterers. Collision was imminent.

The first issue was Philotas. Alexander attempted to fob him off with Ephesus to govern. Philotas had no intention of trading command of the Hetaeroi for one city, no matter how mighty. It’s funny, in a way – two years before, when Parmenio took Ephesus the first time, we’d heard rumours that he intended to keep it for his own and make his people into kings there.

But fatter men have greater appetites, or so we say in Macedon. Since Granicus, we’d all begun to raise our eyes to wider horizons. And Parmenio and his family had their eyes on some major prize – although I’m not sure they’d actually named it, even to themselves.

I’ll add that the other poison in the mix was that Philotas never bothered to hide that he felt – rightly or wrongly – that his father was doing all the hard work while Alexander was swanning around and flirting with artists.