Alexander at the World's End Read online

  Alexander at the World’s End

  Tom Holt

  ‘Here are set forth the histories of Herodotus of Halicarnassus, that men’s actions may not in time be forgotten, nor things great and wonderful accomplished both by Greeks and foreigners...’

  Herodotus

  ‘Let us begin by committing ourselves to the truth, to see it like it is and to tell it like it is, to find the truth, to speak the truth and live with the truth. That’s what we’ll do.’

  Richard M. Nixon

  CHAPTER ONE

  Written in Alexandria-at-the-End-of-the-World in Sogdiana[i] in the twenty-third year after the foundation of the city, the seventy-third year of my life, by Euxenus the son of Eutychides, of the deme of Pallene.

  Consider Alexander, and consider me. Both of us came a long way to die, but my journey wasn’t like his; mine led me out of vast tracts of folly and into a small village on the borders of wisdom.

  Once, when I was young, I believed in democracy. When I was a little older, I believed in oligarchy, government by the enlightened few; after that, in monarchy, the rule of the philosopher-king. Now I believe only in drainage, public sanitation and clean water.

  Oh, yes; I’ve come a lot further than Alexander.

  ‘My father used to say,’ I told you once, ‘that the greatest misfortune a man can know is to bury his own son. Of course, he was quoting from one of those mouldy old tragedians my grandfather Eupolis knocked around with at one time, but the sentiment is commonplace enough. My father, a remarkably fortunate man, never got to put this to the test. The consequences for his sons, all seven of us, were accordingly catastrophic.’

  You looked puzzled, my young friend. ‘Sorry,’ you said, ‘I don’t quite follow.

  How could it have been any better for any of you if some of you had died?’

  You remember the conversation, Phryzeutzis, I’m sure. We were standing in the shade of the gatehouse watching them put up the scaffolding for building the first of the rainwater tanks, which goes to show how long ago it was. As I recall, it was as hot as a smithy that day, even in the shade. I confess I was in one of my more garrulous moods. As usual, I was talking about myself. Most of it was probably going right over your head.

  ‘Over the course of my excessively long life,’ I explained, ‘I’ve made something of a study of luck, in roughly the same way as a three-legged cat studies the habits of mice, and I believe I’ve detected a pattern in the way it operates.

  Take, for example, the history of my family over the past few generations. It’s a wonderful illustration of my theory. You can keep the score if you like.’

  ‘Excuse me?’ you said.

  ‘Keep score. Count up instances of good luck versus instances of bad luck, and tell me who wins in the end.’

  ‘All right,’ you said.

  ‘Here goes, then. Now then, let’s see. My great-grandfather (who died long before I was born) was a nothingish sort of man who lived an uneventful life in Pallene, fairly but not very near the glorious city of Athens —’

  ‘ Athens ,’ you repeated. ‘In Greece , right?’

  ‘In Greece ,’ I confirmed. ‘In his day, Athens was the greatest power in Greece, the only place in the world ruled by a democracy, the home of the finest poets, painters, philosophers, scientists and the like that the world has ever seen.’

  ‘Ah, yes,’ you said. ‘You’ve mentioned it before.’

  Of course, we didn’t know each other so well in those days.

  ‘Anyway,’ I said, ‘he farmed his land, voted in Assembly when he could spare the time, went to the Festivals, raised a family, got on with his life in a reasonably efficient manner and probably went to his grave wondering when the show was going to start. He was neither rich nor poor, famous nor infamous, and though he died on active service in the early stages of the Great Peloponnesian War against Sparta , I don’t suppose he made a big deal about it; I picture him dying unobtrusively somewhere, probably of dysentery after drinking bad water, rather than falling ostentatiously among the clash of arms. He was, by any definition, a lucky man, although his good fortune lay entirely in the fact that he had no luck of any kind, good or bad.’

  ‘You’re losing me again,’ you said.

  ‘Am I? Sorry. You’ll get the hang of it as I go along, I expect. Now then,’ I went on, ‘my grandfather Eupolis, on the other hand, had far more than his share of luck. Having survived the plague that wiped out a large slice of the population of Athens —’

  ‘Good luck,’ you said, folding down a finger on your right hand.

  ‘Quite so,’ I said, ‘except that it disfigured him for life.’

  ‘Bad luck,’ you said firmly, folding down a finger on your left hand. ‘Anyway,’

  I continued, ‘because of the plague he inherited substantial amounts of property by virtue of being the only one left —’

  ‘Good luck,’ you said. ‘I guess,’ you added.

  ‘— But found himself bereft of family at an early age —‘

  You frowned sympathetically. Of course, at that time I didn’t know about your family history. ‘Bad luck,’ you said.

  ‘— And went on to contract a disastrously unhappy marriage —‘

  You nodded. ‘More bad luck,’ you said.

  I smiled. ‘Not long after that,’ I said, swatting away an unusually persistent fly, ‘he took part in the ill-fated Athenian invasion of Sicily , where the whole of our army was massacred—’

  ‘Still more bad luck,’ you pointed out. ‘I’ll run out of fingers soon.’

  ‘The whole of our army,’ I repeated, ‘except for him—’

  ‘Ah,’ you said cheerfully. ‘Good luck at last.’

  ‘Him and his deadliest enemy—’

  ‘Oh. Properly speaking, that’s more bad luck, isn’t it?’

  ‘Absolutely,’ I replied. ‘A good man loves his friends and hates his enemies.

  After a series of hair-raising adventures — lots and lots of luck; a jumble of good and bad, like the junk lots at the end of a public auction — he made it back to Athens (good luck) only to be charged with sacrilegious treason and put on trial for his life (bad luck), escaping by a hair’s breadth ‘Good luck?’ you suggested hopefully.

  I nodded. ‘You could say that,’ I replied, ‘though from what I can gather, pure fluke would be nearer the mark. After that,’ I added, ‘he continued the distinguished career as a writer of comic drama that he’d begun before the War interrupted it. He lived to see the fall of the great Athenian democracy (bad luck), which with good reason he detested (so good luck really), survived his shrewish and deceitful wife (good luck), whom he’d been devoted to (bad luck)

  and died at a ripe old age (good luck) after choking on a flshbone (bad luck), survived by one son, my father Eutychides.’

  ‘Sorry,’ you said. ‘I lost count some time back. But I think it was pretty evenly matched.’

  I shrugged. ‘In Greek,’ I explained, ‘Eutychides means “son of a lucky man”.

  Grandfather had his faults, Heaven knows, but you couldn’t fault his keen sense of irony.’

  You smiled, and offered me the pitcher of water. You were laughing.

  ‘What’s the joke?’ I said.

  ‘Nothing,’ you replied. ‘Have a drink. You need to drink more in this hot weather.’

  ‘Never mind that,’ I said. ‘Tell me what I said that was so confoundedly funny.

  Usually when I make a joke you just stare at me with a half-witted expression on your face.’

  ‘All right,’ you said. ‘Though it isn’t funny, just — well, curious. Sounds to me,’ you said, ‘that your grandfather had luck the way we have rats in our barn.’

  While I
think of it, maybe I should just explain at this point why I’m not writing this in Greek. I should be, I know. After all, Greek is now the common language of the known civilised world, whereas this barbarous Scytho-Sogdanian dialect, which is so obscure it hasn’t even got a name, has never previously been used for writing and probably won’t be used again; as witness the fact that I’m having to use the Greek alphabet to write it down in, notwithstanding that there aren’t Greek letters for half the peculiar noises these people (sorry; you people) make with your mouths. If there’s a reason, it’s because I simply don’t want to be an Athenian any more, or even a Greek of any description. In which case, you ask, why are you doing something so absurdly, quintessentially Greek as writing a book — ‘sitting talking to yourself with a stick and a bit of sheepskin,’ as my neighbours call it —which nobody will want or be able to read?

  To which I immediately reply that I wish I knew. I do, honestly. My excuse, however, is that it behoves those of us who have seen momentous events to record them for the benefit of generations yet unborn, so that the deeds of great men shall not be wholly forgotten, and the mistakes of the past shall not unwittingly be repeated in the future. Or something like that.

  Where have we got to? Oh, yes, my father, and luck.

  I had another discussion with you about this, Phryzeutzis (if that’s your damn name; it sounds more like a dog being sick than anything I’d call a name, but Phryzeutzis is the nearest I can get to it in Greek letters), a month or so back, if you remember; and since you’re probably going to be the only reader this book ever has, I can’t think why I’m painfully transcribing it here. But I did make some rather brilliant points, as I recall, and I expressed myself with more than usual clarity, succinctness and wit; and anyway, most of the time you were watching a beetle climbing up the doorframe and not paying proper attention, so here it is again, for you to read and digest at your leisure.

  ‘My father,’ I told you, as we watched them digging the big trench for the main drain I was insisting on (very sweetly, they were humouring an old man), ‘was a stolid man; solid bronze all the way through and never claimed to be anything else. He never wore a thin coating of silver and pretended to be a drachma.’

  You turned your head and looked at me. ‘What’s a drachma?’ you asked.

  ‘It’s an Athenian coin,’ I replied. ‘They were always made of pure silver, but at the end of the War we were so poor we took to making them out of bronze and coating them in silver. Didn’t fool anybody.’

  ‘Ah,’ you said. ‘This is money we’re talking about, yes?’

  ‘That’s right,’ I said, nodding.

  ‘The little round metal buttons with a horse on one side and Alexander on the other.’

  (You didn’t say ‘Alexander’, of course; you can’t pronounce Alexander, you poor savage. You said something like Zgunda. But I knew who you meant.)

  ‘Correct,’ I replied, rather grumpily. ‘Except that in those days, they didn’t have Alexander on them anywhere, they had Athena, Goddess of Wisdom, eternal patron of Athens .’

  ‘I see,’ you replied, optimistically in my opinion. ‘Athena is the giver of wisdom, and you Athenians were especially fond of her.’

  ‘That’s it.’

  ‘Why?’

  You have this aggravating habit of asking difficult questions. Not difficult, of course, in the sense that sixteen multiplied by four take away six divided by three is difficult; awkward to explain to one of your limited intelligence is probably a better way of putting it.

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘because we Athenians honour wisdom above all things.’

  ‘Oh.’ You looked puzzled. ‘Strange.’ You didn’t choose to amplify that rather odd remark; instead you asked me whether stolid was a good or a bad thing to be.

  I thought about that for a moment. ‘Neither, really,’ I said. ‘Or both. Of course, he was lucky—’

  You laughed, for some reason. ‘Sorry,’ you said. ‘Please, go on.’

  ‘He was lucky,’ I continued, slightly annoyed at the interruption, ‘to be living during an uncharacteristically peaceful time in Athenian history. Well, I say peaceful; it wasn’t.We were caught up in a series of nasty little wars — us against the Spartans—’

  ‘Just a moment,’ you said. ‘I thought you told me the war was over by his time.

  That’s your trouble, you never pay attention. ‘The War, yes. That finished when Father was seventeen. The wars against Sparta in his day were just wars. We were also fighting the Persians, and with the Persians against the Spartans, and with the Thebans against the Spartans, and with the Spartans against the Thebans—’

  ‘Why?’ you asked.

  ‘What? Because we were at war, of course.’

  ‘Yes, but why? What was the war about?’ You looked so worried it was almost comical. ‘It must have been pretty complicated, if your enemies kept becoming your friends and the other way around.’

  I frowned. ‘I can’t remember,’ I said. ‘Mostly, I think, it was about who owned which cities. The cities of the various empires, I mean.’

  You nodded; then something else bothered you. ‘ Athens had an empire, then?’ you asked.

  ‘Sort of. Well, we were protecting them against the others, you see. Except when they rebelled.’

  ‘And then you protected them against themselves?’

  ‘Pretty much. You see, the Spartans and the Thebans and the Persians were picking on our cities, trying to take away their freedom, so we had to prevent that. And sometimes our cities wanted to go over to the enemy, so we had to prevent that too.’

  ‘I see,’ you said, though I think you were probably lying. ‘And you were protecting them because you were a democracy.

  ‘That’s it.We believed that no man should be superior to another.’

  ‘Right. And that’s why you had an empire. I think I get the idea. But all these wars,’ you went on, ‘they must have made life terribly difficult for you and your family, when you were growing up.’

  I smiled and shook my head. ‘Oh, no,’ I said, ‘it wasn’t anything like the War.

  Actually, it was a fairly good time to be an Athenian. We had the democracy back again — the Spartans abolished it at the end of the War, but when we threw out the Thirty Tyrants—’

  ‘They were Spartans, then.’

  ‘No,’ I said patiently, ‘they were Athenians. Anyway, after we’d got rid of them, and when we’d started rebuilding the empire and tribute-money was coming in from the cities of the empire, it was almost like it had been back in Grandfather’s day.’

  You closed your eyes for a moment. ‘You mean, during the War?’

  ‘Well, yes. But the War wasn’t all fighting, there were big gaps in it when life wasn’t too bad. And in Father’s time, too, we were really quite prosperous, thanks to the state-owned silver mines. In fact, a few years before I was born we were able to pay people just to sit in Assembly and listen to the debates.’

  You were suitably impressed by that; or so I thought. ‘You mean, people wouldn’t go to the debates unless they were paid? I thought Assembly was where you did the democracy.

  I sighed. ‘This is why it’s so hard for me to teach you anything,’ I said. ‘You keep wandering off the point. And the point is, life wasn’t so bad after the War, in my father’s day. Nothing much was going on; not like it was during the War.’

  You gave me an odd look when I said that, presumably because you still hadn’t grasped what I was trying to tell you. Maybe it’s just as well I’m writing all this down for you. You’ll be able to read it through slowly and carefully and finally get it all straight in your mind.

  ‘You were telling me about your father,’ you said.

  ‘Yes indeed.’ I smiled fondly. ‘He was a man for his time, really. He cared about his property and his family and that was about it. And he had seven sons.’

  ‘Ah,’ you said, ‘I think you said something about that once before, when we were talking about luck that time.You s
eemed to think that was bad luck.’

  ‘No,’ I answered slowly, so you’d be able to follow, ‘that was good luck. Well, his good luck, anyway. A large family is a sign of the gods’ blessing. No, we were the ones who had the bad luck, after he died. You see, back home, when a man dies all his property doesn’t just go to his eldest son, it’s divided equally between all his sons, because that’s much fairer, you see.’

  ‘Ah,’ you said. ‘Democracy.’

  I laughed. ‘You could call it that, I suppose. But the upshot of it was that Father’s property, divided seven ways, didn’t come to very much for each of us.

  In fact, it wasn’t enough to keep a pig alive. Now do you see the point I was making? Father had good luck, pretty well all his life; but as soon as he died, the bad luck started for us. None of us could make a living, so we had to give up farming and find something else to do. And that, basically, is how I ended up in Macedonia , with King Philip and Prince Alexander.’

  The plain truth of the matter is that my childhood was far too pleasant to be memorable. Not, of course, that I thought it was pleasant at the time. I seemed to spend most of my time hiding from people; my six elder brothers, all trying to palm their chores off on me, or my father, or the latest in a long succession of teachers and tutors. I got to be quite good at hiding, but not nearly good enough. I learned a lot of basic strategy that way — never hide in a tree, because once they spot you there’s nowhere else to run to; the last place they’ll think of looking is the place where they’ve just looked, and so on —and I got plenty of fresh air and exercise. But the lesson I never did learn was that it’s stupid to waste a whole day hiding rather than do a morning’s work.

  That’s simple commercial good sense, not spending a day to earn a morning; but in all the courses of tuition my father arranged for me (and he was fanatical about education, for reasons I’ll explain in a moment), simple good sense was never part of the curriculum. Like so many things in my life, I never got around to learning that until I was far too old for it to be of any use to me.