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Alexander was eight, Philip captured the Greek-colonized Thracian city of Olynthus, an ally of Athens, after an eventful siege. It had harboured his surviving half-brothers, in open revolt; so he killed them both. “Such tragedies,” remarks Grote with irrefutable truth, “were not infrequent in the Macedonian royal family.”
    The chief reason was the polygamy of the kings. With luck, the Queen Consort’s eldest son might hope to inherit; but Macedonian rulers would combine business with pleasure, going through forms of marriage with the daughters of powerful noblemen or new allies to secure the valuable obligations of kinship. All the sons of these alliances were, and had been for generations, potential usurpers. Some had changed the succession. Philip dealt with the problem in the traditional manner. It did not warn him to avoid the cause.
    Being both highly sexed and an expert diplomat, he made full use of his royal prerogative; it was a proverb that he had a new wife with every war. In all he had at least a half dozen of these minor wives, several of whom bore children, one being a boy. All sources agree on Olympias’ bitter resentment. Whether she felt the jealousy of a woman, the affront of a queen, or both, she watched like a nursing tigress for any threat to her son. The bastard boy, Arridaeus, was mentally retarded; and though it seems unlikely that she brought this about with drugs, people thought her capable of it, as in fact she was. There is no uncertainty about the mark she made upon Alexander.
    As a boy, he played and sang to the lyre; for this wehave first-hand evidence from one who heard him. As a man, he was a constant and generous patron of musicians, but we never read of his playing or singing a note. An anecdote of Aelian’s gives the reason. He had a rather high-toned voice, later to be much imitated, like all his other mannerisms; and Greeks preferred a sweet singing tone to a deep one. But one day his father heard him, and told him he should be ashamed to sing so well. Since someone recorded it, there was an audience. The slur of effeminacy must have been intended, and was certainly so received. It was probably not the only time his parents took out on him their hatred of one another.
    The natural watershed between his boyhood and adolescence is the famous episode of his taming Bucephalas. It is a well-worn tale: the fiery charger offered at a high price to Philip, refusing to be mounted, and turned down as useless; the boy insisting that a great horse was being wasted; the father’s challenging him to do better than his elders; their bet on it, the horse to be bought for him if he could manage it, and if not, paid for by him; its instant trust when it felt his hands. But the popular notion is still of high-spirited youngsters meeting; the more interesting truth is that Bucephalas was twelve years old.
    The horse must therefore have been trained, and no doubt for war. What this entailed in ancient Greece is vividly described in Xenophon’s treatise On Horsemanship. Neither saddle nor stirrups were yet known; the rider sat bareback or on a cloth. Thus the spear could not be used for an impact charge as in medieval war, but only for thrusting (Alexander himself favoured the sabre). Even so, the horseman needed a well-disciplined mount if he was to stay on; apart from knee grip, control was by the bit alone, and surviving examples are often horrible. Besides steadiness in battle, the high-class charger was expected to caracole on parade; and here Xenophon, whowas fond of horses, has some revealing “don’ts.” “Some teach the curvetting action either by striking the horse with a rod under the hocks, or by having someone run alongside with a stick and hit him on the quarters.” He also deprecates simultaneously dragging up the head, spurring and whipping. It seems possible that someone, trying by such means to prepare this brave and spirited animal for a royal buyer, had got more than he