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

Because that is how men are.

The old circle gathered by his bedside, and it was telling – I think we all thought it – that there were no Persians at all to attend his last days. He lay, barely able to move or speak.

When he asked for wine, I gave it to him.

With more poison.

Craterus was beside himself – he, alone of us, wanted to conquer more worlds, march farther. He was unchanged. His feelings for the king were unchanged. But he had missed the Gedrosian Desert.

He leaned over the king and asked, ‘Lord – who should inherit your kingdom? To whom should it go?’

There was silence for so long that we all, I think, assumed the king was too far gone to speak.

But he did not speak. He giggled.

His head rose a fraction, and his eyes met mine squarely. As if he knew . . . everything.

‘To the strongest,’ he said.

HISTORICAL NOTE

Writing a novel – several novels, now – about the wars of the Diadochi, or Successors, is a difficult game for an amateur historian to play. There are many, many players, and many sides, and frankly, none of them are ‘good.’ From the first, I had to make certain decisions, and most of them had to do with limiting the cast of characters to a size that the reader could assimilate without insulting anyone’s intelligence. Antigonus One-Eye and his older son Demetrios deserve novels of their own – as do Cassander, Eumenes, Ptolemy, Seleucus, Olympia and the rest. Every one of them could be portrayed as the hero and the others as villains.

If you feel that you need a scorecard, consider visiting my website at www.hippeis.com where you can at least review the biographies of some of the main players. Wikipedia also has full biographies on most of the players in the period.

From a standpoint of purely military history, I’ve made some decisions that knowledgeable readers may find odd. For example, I no longer believe in the linothorax or linen breastplate, and I’ve written it out of the novels. Nor do I believe that the Macedonian pike system – the sarissa armed phalanx – was really any better than the old Greek hoplite system. In fact, I suspect it was worse, as the experience of early modern warfare suggests that the longer your pikes are, the less you trust your troops. Macedonian farm boys were not hoplites – they lacked the whole societal and cultural support system that created the hoplite. They were decisive in their day but as to whether they were ‘better’ than the earlier system . . . well, as with much of military change, it was a cultural change, not really a technological one. Or so it seems to me.

Elephants were not tanks, nor were they a magical victory tool. They could be very effective, or utterly ineffective. I’ve tried to show both situations.

The same can be said of horse-archery. On open ground, with endless remounts and a limitless arrow supply, a horse-archer army must have been a nightmare. But a few hundred horse-archers on the vast expanse of an Alexandrian battlefield might only have been a nuisance.

Ultimately though, I don’t believe in ‘military’ history. War is about economics, religion, art, society – war is inseparable from culture. You could not, in this period, train an Egyptian peasant to be a horse-archer without changing his way of life and his economy, his social status, perhaps his religion. Questions about military technology – ‘Why didn’t Alexander create an army of [insert technological wonder here]?’ – ignore the constraints imposed by the realities of the day – the culture of Macedon, which carried, it seems to me, the seeds of its own destruction from the first.

And then there is the problem of sources. In as much as we know anything about the world of the Diadochi, we owe that knowledge to a few authors, none of whom are actually contemporary. I used Diodorus Siculus throughout the writing of the Tyrant books – in most cases I prefer him to Arrian or Polybius, and in many cases he’s the sole source.

In this book I deal with the life of Alexander in detail. I owe a deep debt to Peter Greene, whose biography of Alexander I followed in many respects. However, I also used sources as widely separated as Arrian (whose hero worship makes him suspect) and the Alexander Romance (mostly fabrication, but with hidden gems), tempered by Plutarch despite his moralizing ways. I suspect that Alexander was the Adolf Hitler of his era, not the golden hero. I suspect that he was both a gifted general and the beneficiary of some unbelievable strokes of luck.

For anyone who wants to get a quick lesson in the difficulties of the sources for the period, I recommend visiting the website www.livius.org. The articles on the sources will, I hope, go a long way to demonstrating how little we know about Alexander and his successors.

Of course, as I’m a novelist and only an historian on weekends, sometimes the loopholes in the evidence – or even the vast gaps – are the very space in which my characters operate. Sometimes, a lack of knowledge is what creates the appeal. Either way, I hope that I have created a believable version of the world of Alexander. I hope that you enjoy this book, and its companions, the Tyrant series.

And as usual, I’m always happy to hear your comments – and even your criticisms – at the Online Agora on www.hippeis.com. See you there, I hope!

Christian Cameron

Toronto, 2011

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I’ve been accused – by friends – of only writing to recruit new people for re-enacting. This is not true. I write because I love it, and because it is the best job in the world – what other job allows me to travel to Greece to do research? Or travel to Finland to become a better long sword fighter – as research?

Besides, I have to write books to earn the money to be able to afford re-enacting.

That said, though, I am always recruiting. Right now, in 2011, we’ve just completed the first recreation of the Battle of Marathon. We had about 100 participants. When we do it again in 2014, I’d like to see five hundred. In 2020, when we go to Thermopylae and Plataea . . . a thousand? Two thousand?

That could be you.

Okay, let me try to convince you, in a roundabout way.

I approach every historical era with a basket full of questions – How did they eat? What did they wear? How does that weapon work? Books are only so useful. That is to say, books and learning are the ultimate resource, and professional historians rank among my favourite people – but there is no substitute for doing it . The world’s Classical re-enactors have been an enormous resource to me while writing, both with details of costume and armour and food, and as a fountain of inspiration. In that regard I’d like to thank Craig Sitch and Cheryl Fuhlbohm of Manning Imperial, who make some of the finest recreations of material culture from Classical antiquity in the world (www.manningimperial.com), as well as Joe Piela of Lonely Mountain Forge for helping recreate equipment on tight schedules. I’d also like to thank Paul McDonnell-Staff, Paul Bardunias, and Giannis Kadoglou for their depth of knowledge and constant willingness to answer questions – as well as the members of various ancient Greek re-enactment societies all over the world, from Spain to Australia. Thanks to the UK Hoplite Association for supporting my book talks in Britain. Thanks most of all to the members of my own group, Hoplologia and the Taxeis Plataea, for being the guinea-pigs on a great deal of material culture and martial-arts experimentation, and to Guy Windsor (who wrote The Swordsman’s Companion and The Duelist’s Companion , and is an actual master swordsman himself ) for advice on martial arts.

Speaking of re-enactors, my friend Steven Sandford draws the maps for these books, and he deserves a special word of thanks, as does my friend Dmitry Bondarenko, who draws the figures and borders on the maps. My friend Rebecca Jordan works tirelessly at the website and the various web spin-offs like the Agora, and deserves a great deal more praise than she receives.