the times | Saturday April 9 2022 saturday review 17
handle it. Philip angrily said the horse was
too wild, but his son scoffed and said the
grooms were wimps. The boy had noticed
that Boukephalas was shying at his shad-
ow, so gently turned him round, with
soothing words, before mounting. “My
boy,” his weeping father said. “You must
find a kingdom which is your equal. Mace-
donia is too small for you.” A good story,
invented or not.
What do we know for certain? Philip
was a magnificent general who reformed
the Macedonian army and spent much of
his son’s life away on campaigns. Alexan-
der’s mother, Olympias, was a Molossian
from Epirus in Greece, who claimed de-
scent from Achilles. They met, like many
youths today, while on drugs at a festival,
on the island of Samothrace in 357BC,
three years into Philip’s reign. She was his
fourth or fifth wife, out of seven, and is said
to have had a thing for snakes.
It was later claimed that on the very day
that Alexander was born — but of course
— the wondrous temple of Artemis at
Ephesus, on the coast of Asia Minor, was
consumed by a fire, a portent. He did well
to survive infancy; Rowson notes that
40 per cent of burials in the cemeteries of
Pella, his birthplace, were children. He
was given a wet nurse who was chosen
because she had a larger-than-normal son
and must have produced extremely nutri-
tious milk.
That Alexander was tutored by Aristotle
is well known. As much credit must be
given to Leonidas, another Molossian,
who developed his physical side through
nocturnal marches and strict discipline.
Leonidas used to rifle through Alexander’s
chest to remove treats his mother had
given him and chide him for his love of lux-
ury. “Only when you have conquered the
spice lands can you afford to be so lavish
with your incense,” he told him. Years later,collecting bills faster. The final part looks
at grief and “how should we live, knowing
that we and everyone we love will die?”
Trying asking that on a night out.
And while all this talk of love and loss
and longing can feel earnest, I didn’t mind.
I was moved by the personal passages
about Cain’s difficult relationship with her
mother, who now has dementia, and was
fascinated by the chapter on how we
inherit sadness from our family.
This realisation is sparked when Cain
goes to a grief seminar and finds herself
crying, even though her stories of loss feel
slight compared with those in the room.
The facilitator suggested she was carrying
the pain of her parents, who had lost al-
most all their relatives in the Holocaust.
There are a growing number of studies
that support the idea that the effects of
trauma can be passed down the genera-
tions through epigenetics. Cain suggests
that our pain connects us to our ancestors
but that we can also honour them by living
the lives they couldn’t. I liked that.
After I finished this consoling book, I
checked the headlines from Ukraine.
Then I looked out of the window to see a
blossom tree throwing pink petals on to
the street. The world is beautiful and awful
and this book helps us to accept that this
has always been the case. I think I’ll put on
some Leonard Cohen...
Before Alexander was Great
H
e was the greatest military
commander the world has
known. By his premature
death in 323BC Alexander III
of Macedon’s territory covered
two million square miles, stretching from
northern Greece across what is now
Turkey, Iran and Afghanistan to Kashmir
and down the Nile as far as modern Aswan.
He founded more than 20 cities that bore
his name and created a brand that has
been aspired to for almost 24 centuries.
The Roman general Pompey adopted Al-
exander’s nickname and his trademark leo-
nine quiff; Julius Caesar dedicated a statue
to him but replaced Alexander’s head with
his own; and Augustus visited his tomb and
accidentally snapped off Alexander’s nose.
In the Middle Ages he was celebrated as
one of the Nine Worthies, a sort of medi-
eval Justice League, alongside Caesar, King
Arthur and Charlemagne.
He even inspired the finest moment of
1980s darts commentary. “When Alexan-
der of Macedon was 33, he cried salt tears
because there were no more worlds to
conquer,” sighed Sid Waddell. “Eric Bris-
tow is only 27!”
What, though, of Alexander before he
was Great? When he was merely Alexan-
der the Promising, Alexander the Kid or,
if you believe an anonymous biography
written in the 4th century AD, Alexander
the Glint in the Egyptian Pharaoh’s Eye?
Alex Rowson has produced an absorbing
re-creation of the early years despite the
lack of much reliable source material.
Apart from the aforementioned Alexan-
der Romance — which claims he was really
the son of the last native ruler of Egypt,
Nektanebo II, who seduced the queen of
Philip II of Macedon by disguising himself
as a god and was killed by Alexander after
revealing, Darth Vader-style, that he was
his father — the only lengthy classical
biography was by Plutarch in the 1st
century AD. The writings of the Macedo-
nians, like those of the Spartans and
Carthaginians, are almost non-existent.
Yet Rowson, a producer of Time Team
and Digging for Britain, has been helped by
the ever-growing archaeological record
and he uses this to pad out the gaps with ex-
planations of Macedonian life and customs.
He has a real enthusiasm for excavation —
his description of the discovery in 1977 of
what is believed to be the tomb of Philip is
especially thrilling. Although he can be a
little too keen sometimes to see his subject
in every artefact from around that time —
“One can easily imagine it to be a little Al-
exander,” he says of a figurine of a Macedo-
nian child in the British Museum — he has
pieced together a convincing narrative.
Like the Roman historian Suetonius, or in-
deed this newspaper diarist, the rule that “if
it’s good enough, it’s true enough” applies.
Take the story of how Alexander met his
famous steed, Boukephalas, which he rode
across the known world. When he was 11, a
Thessalian horse dealer brought a stallion
to court. An exceptional physical speci-
men — expensive too — it was skittish and
aggressive when the royal grooms tried toyoung conqueror Alexander the Great depicted at the Battle of Issus against the Achaemenid Empire, 333BCALAMYThe early years of the
conquering hero are
recreated in this
lively history. Review
by Patrick Kidd
and was a member of Mme de Duras’s
salon and Watson quotes her disturbing
epigram: “If you have never been pretty,
you have never been young.”
The great chain of salons reaches
through the revolution of 1789. One sec-
tion heading is Revolution, Robespierre,
Regicide, Recovery, Restoration. But Robe-
spierre did not have much time for salons,
and he has only nine entries in the index,
as opposed to more than 80 for the philos-
opher Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
Beyond the revolution and throughout
the 19th century, Watson shows salons
becoming more political. Yet the import-
ance of witty repartee was never lost. He
describes a young woman arriving late at
Mme Aubernon’s salon, whose members
included Tolstoy, Turgenev, Hugo and
Maupassant. She was asked to contribute
immediately to a discussion on adultery
and responded: “I’m so sorry, tonight I
have only prepared incest.”
Watson dates the end of salon culture
to 1991 with the death of the Duchesse
Edmée de La Rochefoucauld and the
establishment of a literary prize for first
novels in her name. Her salon, like many
before it, was known as “the antechamber
of the Académie Française”, a body to
which she was never herself elected. Her
book Femmes d’hier et d’aujourd’hui (1969)
sought to rescue from obscurity female
writers, and she campaigned for the en-
franchisement of women in France.
The end of salons by no means signals the
end of the perception of French exception-
alism. Watson describes President Macron
at a G20 summit in Buenos Aires in 2018,
finding time to meet a group of Argentine
writers and promising to help to publish the
diary of Jorge Luis Borges in France. “Once
I will be done with all that [he meant his day
job], I will come back to the truth,” the presi-
dent told the writers as he left. Wherever he
goes, Macron takes a copy of Stendhal’s Le
Rouge et le Noir with him.
Ultimately, Watson sits on the fence
over the question of French exceptional-
ism. Describing the powerful scene of
Notre Dame in flames on April 15, 2019,
with Parisians young and old falling to
their knees in the streets to pray, he com-
ments: “We are reminded once again how
France is — and is not — exceptional.”
His parents
met, like many
youths today,
while on drugs
at a festival,
on the island
of Samothrace
in 357BC
having done so, Alexander sent his old
tutor 16 tonnes of frankincense and myrrh
and told him he could now “stop dealing
parsimoniously with the gods”.
He was also taught to play the kithara, a
kind of lyre, by a tutor called Leukippos
and was so talented that his performance
aged nine at a diplomatic dinner in Mace-
donia was written about by a guest, the
Athenian statesman Aeschines. Philip was
less impressed. “Are you not ashamed to
play as well as that?” he asked. Alexander’s
sexuality has been speculated about. His
father was so concerned at his lack of sex
drive that he hired a prostitute to stir him.
Alexander is said to have remarked that
the needs for sleep and sexual intercourse
were weaknesses that reminded him he
was mortal.
Denied his music, Alexander became
fascinated by military strategy. When
envoys came from Persia, rather than ask
them about their palaces he asked in great
detail about things like the dimensions of
their roads and how their armies were
organised. He first commanded men in
battle at Chaeronea in 338BC, aged 18,
where he was placed on the left flank of his
father’s army against the Theban Sacred
Band, an elite army made up of 150 pairs of
male lovers, most of whom were killed.
Three years later, now king after his
father was murdered, Alexander returned
to fight the rebellious Thebans. His
revenge was brutal. Their city was razed,
the men all killed and the women and
children sold into slavery. Only one prop-
erty was spared, the family home of a
famous poet, outside which he placed a
sign: “Set not on fire the roof of Pindar,
maker of song.” Perhaps it was in affection-
ate memory for his old days plucking the
kithara. What a musician Macedonia may
have lost when Alexander swapped the
strings for the sword.The Young
Alexander
The Making of
Alexander the Great
by Alex RowsonWilliam Collins, 494pp; £25