Read The Nature of Alexander for Free Online Page B

general of antiquity next to Julius Caesar. He was neither a harsh ruler nor, by the time’s standards, superfluously cruel in war. He respected culture, was at ease with statesman or peasant, and could undermine hostility with charm. His good balance is indeed surprising, seeing that his Theban captivity had not been his first: as a very small child he had had the shock of being sent as hostage to the wild Illyrians by the usurper Ptolemy, his mother’s lover, whom his elder brother had to kill before he was ransomed back.
    He could take a joke. After one of his victories he was supervising the routine business of selling his captives to the slave dealers, sprawling in his chair. “Spare me, Philip!” called a resourceful prisoner. “I was your father’s friend!” Asked for details, he said they were confidential. Philip beckoned him up. “Pull down your cloak, sir,” he whispered. “Your crotch is showing.” With a grin Philip told the guards, “Yes, he’s a good friend, let him go.” To him is first credited the classic put-down to a chatty barber: “How do you like your hair cut, sir?” “In silence.”
    This robust humour was not passed on to his son. Alexander’s recorded sayings have pith rather than wit; and the jokes which endeared him to his men were boyishly simple. Having thawed back to life a soldier dazed with cold in his own chair by the campfire, he said, “You’re lucky it’s not Darius’s, he’d have had your head for it.” This is a long way from Philip’s pungent irony; perhaps the boy had felt its bite too young.
    It was liked still less, however, by Philip’s arch-enemy, the Athenian orator Demosthenes; a man entirely humourless, but with a notable gift for vituperation. He was the heir to a great ideal and its last defender. Inevitably, his name is touched with its grandeur, and with the aura of a lost cause. He was without doubt a patriot by belief as well as by profession; his faith in the free city-state was real—so long as the state was Athens. But only with effort does justice to Demosthenes survive a reading of his orations, well polished and published by himself. They were admired in eighteenth-century England when political scurrility was not impeded by libel laws. Their counterparts were the brutal cartoons of Gillray; Hogarth would have been too moral and Rowlandson too jolly. He catches no gleam from the brilliance of Athens’ zenith, gives back no echo of Pericles’ immortal affirmation that man’s individuality is his right and his city’s pride. Page after page is loaded with invective, against political or private enemies as often as against Macedon (“a country from which it was never yet possible to buy a decent slave”). No weapon is too mean for him; he will sneer at the poverty of an opponent’s childhood, and he sticks at no lie he can get away with. He has all the skills of rhetoric; but his popularity is a dark comment on the Athens of his day. One cannot read him without feeling sure he would have spoken for the death of Socrates.
    He led his city to ruin, not through treachery—even hertraitors could have done her better service—but from inveterate hate and spite. No doubt he believed of Philip exactly what he said of him, that he was a power-drunk barbarian whose intent was to sack Athens and set up a slave state there: Demosthenes had the envy which hopes for evil in other men. His belief in the free city did not pass his own city walls. He had no compunction in keeping up secret contacts with Persia, and got from King Ochus huge sums for use in propaganda and bribery against Macedon. Philip, of course, had his own fifth column also; partly composed of merely venal agents, but partly of men not without concern for their own cities, who saw in Macedonian hegemony, as did Isocrates, an end to the constant interstate wars, and a hope for the Greek Asian cities. Philip, an unashamed practitioner of realpolitik, was at least not