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Olympias could change her mind as quickly as she moved her eyes. And since she could not get rid of the Stagyrite philosopher and his academia for the boys, she determined to profit by him. From her spies she learned that Aristotle taught more than medicine and had a flair for politics—that his closest friend was Antipater, the most reliable general on the staff, and that Philip himself often rode in to consult the eccentric philosopher.

In fact Philip had been so eager to get Aristotle near to Pella that he had agreed to pay a great price: to rebuild all the homes of Stagyra which had been devastated by a war. Olympias could appreciate influence.

“You are old enough to have a mind of your own,” she told Alexander. “Don’t waste yourself on medicine. This Stagyrite can reveal the secrets of politics and government to you. You ought to be given some authority of your own—especially when Philip’s away hunting or marching most of the time. You should be regent when he’s away.”

Authority given to Alexander would mean more power in the queen’s deft hands.

Before venturing to visit the new school at Mieza, Olympias, who bothered to read few books, read the tragedies of Euripides carefully, especially the Medea. It seemed to her that Medea had stood, like herself, unaided except by sorcery against the strength of men. And she appeared like a living goddess within the Temple of the Nymphs. When she dismounted from her chariot, her supple body draped in sheer silk, whipped about her by the wind, the boys stared. Few married women ventured out of doors with face and body so exposed. Alexander did not notice but Ptolemy observed that the queen brought with her two handsome slave girls who laughed at the gray stone figures of the nymphs standing along the entrance terrace. To Aristotle, who came out perforce to greet her, she deferred prettily, saying that she was old-fashioned as this deserted shrine, being brought up in the Mysteries, without a notion of science. And she quoted Andromache’s line: “The only joy of a woman’s heart is to have her sorrows ever on her tongue.”

She left behind her at Mieza the impression that this fascinating woman trusted Aristotle with the future of her only son.

To Aristander the diviner she confided that this new-world philosopher named Aristotle lisped and had nothing really to offer in the way of creative ideas. Probably he owed his reputation, such as it was, to being one of Plato’s favored pupils and to his habit of denying the powers of the gods.

The boys at Mieza found the temple and the gardens filled with strange apparata. Piles of variegated rocks, collection boxes of shellfish, stuffed birds, insects, occupied all the corners, along with furnaces, basins of living fish, books of butterflies and pressed leaves—as if specimens of all living and growing things had been gathered in. They began the study of medicine by examining the blood stream in animals and drawing sand charts of human anatomy. Moreover the Stagyrite himself had little to say to them; a staff of assistants worked with them through the endless experimentation that began with the first daylight after Alexander had finished his sacrifice to Zeus.

The assistants explained that Aristotle worked like that. He would not reason—not at first, anyway. He would only examine and experiment to determine natural causes, answering the what before the why and avoiding wondering about the wherefore. In this strange method of taking nothing for granted it was necessary to learn the causes of sickness before being taught the cures. Not until the noble young Macedonians had advanced beyond the study of natural things could they gain knowledge of phenomena, of the Mysteries. Aristotle had a way of dodging talk about the Mysteries by saying that life was enough of a mystery for one man’s mind.

“He’s a phenomenon himself,” Ptolemy complained. “He doesn’t preach, he doesn’t teach, he tells us not to believe what we read but to ask questions. And when we ask questions he says he doesn’t know the answers.”

The assistants said no, Aristotle had plenty of Mysteries tucked away in his head, of which he had worked out the solutions. He simply didn’t believe it to be as important to hit on an answer as to be able to work it out. “It’s like that Gordium knot in the shrine over in Asia. Aristotle would say you couldn’t untie it without knowing how it was tied. After finding that out any galley slave could undo it.”

And did this mean, Ptolemy retorted, that they were expected to work like galley slaves? It seemed so. They might be royal Kinsmen but they were set to sorting out and classifying all the varied species of things, from coral to the constellations of the stars. Until they had finished measuring and identifying things they would not be ready to cope with ideas.

Into this enormous task Alexander threw himself as if it had been a challenge. It seemed to him that the Greek assistants expected him to fail and that Aristotle himself was secretly amused by his pupil’s clumsy efforts. Alexander resented the silence of the philosopher who would never reveal the Mysteries he had ascertained for himself.

Only at the end of the day, in the sunset hour, would the Stagyrite emerge from his study to walk through the gardens with the boys, glancing at the work they were finishing up, his lined head outthrust, his thoughts seemingly off somewhere in the cloudy horizon. And the first direct question he asked them set off Alexander’s quick temper. He wanted to know what they would do if they were caught in a small sailing craft offshore with a storm coming up.

Harpalus, the canny peasant’s son, said he would knot the sail ropes fast and sail before the wind, holding to the steering oar; Ptolemy would make a quick sacrifice of anything valuable he had, to the Powers of the sea, to secure his life; while Nearchus thought he would unship the mast, wrap the sail around it, secured by the ropes, and let the boat ride behind this sea anchor until the sudden storm blew itself out. Aristotle turned last to Alexander.

“How can I tell you?” the boy burst out. “How can I know until the thing happens?”

The Stagyrite eyed him thoughtfully for a moment, as if taking notice of him for the first time. “That is well said. It’s honest, at least.” And he was walking on, dismissing the matter, when Alexander stepped in front of him, angered.

“Well, who is right—Ptolemy or Nearchus?”

“Who?” Aristotle shook his head. “Why, it would depend on the storm, and only a ship’s master could tell you about that.” His eyes narrowed, focusing on something. “I can only tell you it would be wrong for this—this Cretan to pray, and for Ptolemy, son of Lagus, to try his luck with a sea anchor.”

“That’s begging the question. You’re being paid to teach us, not to quibble with words. What is the truth? Does the god Poseidon control the force of the waves or does the wind blow of its own accord? Either one or the other must be the truth. You can’t divide truth, like a number, into smaller parts!”

Without anger Aristotle continued to inspect the sunset. “When you speak of truth you mean an idea. An idea can be divided again and again, and down and down until you reach what is indivisible.”

When you arrived at the indivisible, Aristotle maintained, you knew that you had come face to face with reality. Until then you could not be sure.

Stubbornly Alexander stood his ground, certain that truth couldn’t be divided up like a silver drachma. Instead of arguing, the philosopher reached into the nearest specimen case and took out something that proved to be a dried-up crawfish with a tag on it. “What is this?” he asked.

“A small crawfish.”

“Yes.” Aristotle glanced at the tag. “But it happens to be one of the small varieties from the Cyclades Islands. Yet it may be small only because it is half grown, and it may also be found as far away as the Euxine Sea. It’s a crustacean, and also prototype of land shell animals, a vestige of the earliest life that existed in the waters before land had formed. Then again, it is food for a castaway, a rare seasoned dish for a gourmet, related to a lobster, and in miniature forms the kind of sea life that gave rise to legends of sea serpents and monsters of the deep seas. Still, as you say, it is indeed a smallish crawfish.” He tossed it back and continued his walk along the path in the glow of sunset.

When he was out of hearing Ptolemy laughed. “And for this we work like galley slaves!” He considered his friend speculatively. “What are you, lad? Come now, let’s divide the truth. You’re Alexander certainly, and I think nearly full grown. You’re the only child of Olympias’ womb. Also the only sane and legitimate offspring of Philip. You’re human, judging by the blood that runs out of you—it isn’t ichor by any means—yet you seem to have a divine spark, bequeathed to you by Heracles or Achilles. Or at least that’s what you think. Tell me, do you breathe ordinary air or heavenly ether? Let’s see what else. You’re a barbarian youth trying to master the wisdom of the Greeks——” He broke off quickly, aware that Alexander stood rigid and silent, holding in his anger. Since the day when he had nearly died in the sword fight Ptolemy had been careful not to irritate the single-minded Alexander too far. “Look, if you want to find out what this Stagyrite believes, pin him down to something. Experiment on him: show him a verse about Medea safeguarding her lover Jason by magic.” For a second Ptolemy contemplated Olympias in the role of Medea and added hastily, “You’re quite right about one thing—either the gods exist or they don’t.”

That night Alexander ventured alone into the laboratory, where the students were not allowed after lamp-lighting. Under his arm he carried the roll of a manuscript, worn with much use. And he found Aristotle busied with the assistants over a furnace into which a copper caldron had been set, filled with water. They were observing the hot vapor that rushed from the narrow outlet pipe of the caldron when the water was heated to a high temperature. This vapor jet generated force enough to turn a heavy wooden wheel; yet the philosophers did not concern themselves with the force within the vapor—they watched it fly up against a cold metal plate hung from the roof. On this plate the vapor distilled into drops of water that dripped down like rain. In fact they were making within the laboratory a miniature rainfall.

To the action of this vapor Aristotle paid close attention. He believed, as the boys knew, that beside the four familiar elements—earth, air, fire, and water—there existed a fifth elementary force in vapor.

Aristotle believed that the sun’s heat drew vapor from the bodies of water upon the earth’s surface and that this vapor encountered a cold stratum of upper air and condensed into rain or snow which fell in turn upon mountain summits, feeding the streams that ran into rivers discharging into the smaller, earth-bound seas. From these seas water flowed out through gates like the Pillars of Heracles in the west to the vast enveloping body of water embracing the land mass and known as Ocean. So, as the flow of blood within the arteries sustained life in man, this incessant circulation of water sustained all life throughout the firmament. If this fifth element, vapor, should cease to aid the water flow, rivers and lakes would dry up and life in its manifold forms—insect, plant, animal—would cease, in time.

If rain came in this manner from the circulation of moisture it could not come from the flight of the sons of the North Wind across the sky vault, aided by the Cyclopean giants who struck thunder from the clouds.

For some time the boy watched the drip of artificial rain before Aristotle noticed him. Flushed and holding himself tense against a rebuke, Alexander handed over his manuscript. “Will you note for me,” he asked abruptly, “what is wrong in this?”

Opening it, the philosopher found it to be a much-worn copy of Homer’s Tale of Troy. Without comment the Stagyrite said, “Ask for it again in three days—but not in the night study hour.”

To Alexander’s surprise, when he examined Aristotle’s annotations upon his prized copy of Homer, he found no questioning of the powers of the gods who aided mortals. Only correction of some wording and explanation of many puzzling points, so that the lines were easier to read than before. When the boy demanded why he had merely revised the reading instead of getting at the truth of the Iliad, the Stagyrite explained that it was rhetoric, and not a history such as the books of Herodotus. “It is fine work, as a poem. And that is far from being a history of natural things.”

“If it were that!”

For once a smile crossed the lined face of the philosopher. “That book has not been written yet.”

So at Mieza the boy worked alone, fearful of failing, feeling that the older men had condemned him as stupid. They had no sympathy for his imagining, as he plowed his way through rhetoric, logic, and endless experimentation in their new natural science. He drove himself at this work, determined to find out for himself the truth of the Mysteries in which he believed and concerning which Aristotle would not speak. Apparently Aristotle paid no attention to him and, because he himself worked sixteen hours in the day and night, did not realize that his pupil was overtaxing both eyes and mind.

Carefully Olympias egged him on, saying that Heracles, his ancestor, had achieved greatness by supernatural labors. When she returned from one of her visits to the Delphic shrine she was full of gossip that she had heard at the hostel. “Fancy—the people were saying how fortunate are the Macedonians to have a Philip for their general and Alexander for their king. How strange that they should mention my darling as king—although you are sixteen and past the age when many boys serve as regent. Aristotle must know that. In truth he is doing more for you in teaching you to live wisely than Philip, who has done nothing for you except to claim you as his son, and I doubt if that is a blessing.”

Imperceptibly she changed toward her son. When he rode the black horse Bucephalus into the grounds at Pella, where Olympias had put the finishing touches to the palace buildings, her servants greeted him with ceremony. She made a point of asking his opinion and showing her dependence on him. Then when he stayed the night she took pains to have young, Greek-trained prostitutes display themselves where he could not help but notice them in the halls. Alexander, she thought, was old enough to need such girls, and Olympias much preferred that he should avail himself of the handmaids she could keep under observation. But the girls reported to her that he noticed them no more than other household servants, as if they were merely slaves to do Olympias’s hair or anoint her after a bath.

It troubled Olympias that she could not bind her son closer to her by one of these girls. She scolded them, telling them to use other oils and scents than hers. And then she heard of the fantastic happening with the naiad in the garden.

A gardener’s wife related it, frightened, as she had heard it from her man, who had been at the wheat. It had been unbelievable, as if it were a sending from the Powers.

At the end of the day Alexander had been seen riding headlong as usual from the residence across the gardens toward Mieza. He had leaped the black horse over a stone wall and had almost run down a strange girl who was carrying grapes in a woven basket on her head. She had her skirt wrapped around her waist, leaving her legs bare, and she was singing. With the grapes flying and crushing, the young lord had bent down to pick the falling girl in his arm and had swung her up. Her hair spread over him like spun gold threads, waving in the wind. So had he held fast to her, and she had not cried out.

Out in the mown wheat the young lord had stopped the horse and set this yellow-haired naiad down. But he had got down himself with his arm around her and had stayed there with her, pulling his cloak over them, in the wheat field until the sunset had dimmed, so that the gardener could see no more.

When Alexander had gone off this unknown girl had wandered back to look for her basket. And when the gardener spoke to her to ask her name she had not been able to answer in either Macedonian dialect or Greek. So the gardener believed she had been a naiad of the forest, appearing in that hour of the night’s beginning and then returning to her forest haunt.

But Olympias, who did not believe in forest spirits who picked a basket of grapes in the out-gardens, had inquiries made at first among the servants and then in the slaves’ quarters for a barbarian girl with ruddy hair. And a Scythian was brought to her, who had been bought recently in the Delian market and set to picking wine grapes. When Olympias discovered that the girl had a shapely body and nice eyes and hair even seen by daylight, she ordered the slave to be taken from Pella at once and sold in Thebes. She had no intention of sharing Alexander with a mistress who was not one of her own slaves. She was careful to have the Scythian searched before being hurried off. And as she half expected a token was found on the barbarian—a silver belt clasp ornamented with a lion’s head that Olympias herself had given to Alexander. When she threw the clasp into the fire the girl wept.

After the Scythian had been sent off in a closed cart Olympias summoned the gardener and the various slaves who had seen the girl and ordered them to say no word about the presence of the barbarian. If it became known that such a girl had been in Pella even for a night they would all be tied to stones and thrown into the lake. On the other hand, Olympias declared, they need make no secret of the fact that an elfin girl had been seen emerging from the forest the previous evening.

At the end of that day, as she had anticipated, Alexander reappeared with Bucephalus and roamed the outer gardens, going restlessly from wheat field to forest edge. Until full starlight he kept his rendezvous and then sought out the gardeners and slaves, to question them awkwardly about the young Scythian. They all agreed that they had seen only a naiad stealing from the wood to pick grapes.

Alexander asked no more questions. For a while he lingered in the wheat field alone, then instead of entering the palace he rode back toward Mieza. It bothered Olympias that he did not come to her then nor speak to her afterward about the vanished girl.

When he stayed to supper next Olympias was careful to order fruits and whipped milk served, with other delicacies. She dressed with some pains in the loose garment of the threskeuein devotees of the forest gods, twisting some ivy into the dark mass of her hair. Lying so clad across the table from him, seen between gleaming lamps, Olympias appeared lovelier than any priestess. The Greek prostitutes she had sent away. But she arranged for the music of flute and pipes to be heard at the table, although the musicians remained invisible. Upon this stage so set she hoped to draw confidences from the youth who had always confided in her before.

This evening Alexander would not taste the luxurious dishes, saying that Leonidas had long ago accustomed him to a Spartan meal. Nor did he look full into Olympias’s dark eyes. When she questioned him about his studies he said he was working at the shape of the habitable world. At last the queen herself had to mention the servants’ talk about seeing a forest girl in the grounds. A naiad, the servants declared. Olympias was skeptical, quite skeptical, about such appearances of the divine so close to human habitations.

It appeared that Alexander also was skeptical. “Naiads don’t usually have names,” he said curtly.

This startled his mother, who refrained with difficulty from demanding what the girl’s name had been. She wondered how the boy, who spoke no Scythian, had learned it. If he knew the slave’s name he had a tangible clue to her identity. Briefly Olympias pondered the possibility that she might have a child by him.

Carefully she suggested that this half-human sprite of the woods might have an ordinary name. Such as——

“She called herself,” Alexander broke in impatiently, “the daughter of the Sun.”

Again Olympias felt a shock of surprise. The children of the Sun were indeed immortals, easily to be recognized by the brightness of their eyes—evidence of their descent from the God of the Sun who drove his chariot of fire across the vault of the sky. She felt relieved that accident had aided her own deceit. For she had satisfied herself that the Scythian was entirely mortal.

That night Alexander went quickly away from Pella, riding headlong down the road, being careful to avoid the gardens. What hurt he felt at the disappearance of the strange girl he had known for the beginning of a night he concealed. He withdrew into one of his moody silences, working through much of the night at a plan of the star constellations, because he found it hard to sleep.

Then Olympias demonstrated that she was shrewd but not wise. Thinking only of herself, she had a way of acting upon instinct. Now something like fear disturbed her. Deeply superstitious, she wondered if the strange appearance of the barbarian girl had not been, in reality, an omen intended for her. If so, what did the sending portend? Olympias worried about that and also about Alexander. She felt that he was no longer obedient to her will; something had changed him, setting him apart from her.

At that time Olympias had no hatred for Philip; she could not endure him because he seemed to be indifferent to her, only speaking to her when they met after absence, when he saluted her in his clownlike fashion as queen mother, not as his proper wife.

Olympias hardly knew the meaning of fear. Now, undecided and having no one to confide in, she sent for Aristander of Telemess, the diviner who could not be bribed like the Greeks. Olympias understood very well that it would take more than money to enlist Aristander in her service. To him she poured out her troubles.

The soothsayer took his time about answering her. “The stars in their courses,” he muttered absently, “arbitrate human fate. What were the omens at the birth of your son?”

Olympias moved impatiently. Aristander remembered as well as she how the temple at Ephesus in Asia had burned that same night. Still wrapped in thought, Aristander murmured that since then two things had been made clear: certainly she had had no other child, and plainly Alexander was peculiar. “The omen,” he continued, “was one of fire. It descended from the heavens. And does not Philip now call you queen mother?”

Drawing the dark hair like a veil across her mouth, Olympias studied him. Pride stabbed at her like a goad. “And if fire did descend from the sky that night, and if Philip were not the boy’s father?”

“That,” declared Aristander, “is something you would know best.”

When it came to a question of exalting herself Olympias never hesitated. Moreover Aristander had no more than hinted at what was already in her thoughts. Before the diviner left her the priestess of Samothrace had made up her mind.

Only gradually and by the older servants was it spoken about at the palace, and only then during Philip’s absence. It was no more than rumor arising out of the omens at first, whispered in the women’s quarters—that Alexander might not be Philip’s son. That an unknown had impregnated the priestess that night, when a snake had been seen coming from the marriage bed. Some of the servants pointed out that Philip had seen the snake and had become blind in one eye soon thereafter.

Arsinoë, who had belonged to Philip before his marriage, heard the gossip with dread. Now happily installed as mistress of Lagus’s house, she understood the wayward Philip and the explosive Olympias better than they knew each other. In her fright Arsinoë sent word to Mieza, to Ptolemy. Her son’s future was bound up with Philip’s whims. And the astute Ptolemy found food for thought in the message.

“Instead of trying to find out what the morning stars are singing,” he warned Alexander, “you’d better lend an ear to what is said in the market place of Pella.”

“What?” Alexander demanded, surprised.

“Nobody can tell you what. You have to hear things with your own ears and see them with your eyes, personally, before you believe anything. Eh, if the vault of the sky were cracking open you’d go on poring over map projections until it all came down on your head.”

The last thing Alexander cared to do, at that time, was to visit the market where peasants’ wives cackled over their onions and lentils. If he had not kept himself buried in his cell with his drawings and notes he might have been aware of the talk in Macedon, and he might have avoided both humiliation and exile.

But it seems certain that in those years he never freed his mind from study. He had labored through the elementary work, and now he was mastering both politics and cosmography. Now he kept notebooks of his own and raced through all the manuscripts Aristotle would lend him. From this labor in his cell he broke off only to sacrifice and to walk through the hills in the night hours. Although still at odds with Aristotle, he had ceased to rebel at the teaching and was even on the track of a discovery of his own.

Alexander had discovered, to his own satisfaction, the blank space, the unknown terrain, of the east. There had been in his imagination the place of the sun’s rising; now he was learning that there might actually exist unvisited lands at the far end of the terrestrial globe, bordering upon Ocean.

The Stagyrite and his assistant philosophers no longer wasted thought on the early Milesian concept of the cosmos: that of primeval night extending through a void except where the points of light of the sun and moon illumined the earth and the planets revolved around it upon their orbits, harmoniously, creating the music of the spheres.

By now the philosophers had arrived at another concept. The earth they thought to be a sphere hung immovably in the center of the universe. (Aristotle believed this to be proved by the fact that during an eclipse the earth cast a round shadow against either sun or moon. And explorers had testified that in the far north the southernmost constellations of stars were no longer visible.)

About this terrestrial globe revolved the sun and moon, alternating light and darkness on the halves of the globe.

Upon this globe land had risen from the waters throughout the millenniums and this land mass was still extending, still rising, in spite of the corrosive action of the moving waters. But only a portion of this land remained habitable to man. This habitable portion, called the Oikoumene, stretched perceptibly farther along the course of the sun from east to west—in its longitude—than in breadth from north to south—in its latitude.

Above the Oikoumene lay the region of hyperborean cold, of perpetual snow and drifting ice. Aristotle had talked with Cimmerians [inhabitants of what is now Russia] who had ascended frozen rivers to the edge of this polar region. They were hunters, and they reported that there at the borderland of the habitable zone many animals had white pelts—evidence of existence in snow countries.

Below the Oikoumene extended of course the belt of tropical heat where human beings could not survive, and the land tended to become sand, burned by the sun’s concentrated heat. Due south of Pella lay the fertile Libyan coast, whereas travelers who had penetrated inland reported that they had been surrounded by illimitable deserts, hostile to man. In those deserts only thornbush grew in the earth and poisonous vipers crawled upon it, while water dug from the ground had been salty and undrinkable. Evidently at this southern frontier of the Oikoumene existed forces that destroyed human life in the same manner as the bleak cold, the frost-bitten earth, the devastating winds, and the great white monsters of the hyperborean north sapped the life from men.

Certainly it seemed apparent that the north-south limits of the Oikoumene lay at no great distance apart and had already been reached by adventurous men such as the Argonauts—the crew of the ship Argos.

Aristotle, however, raised a question about these limits of latitude. He asked who had been known to visit the sources of the greatest rivers. Such rivers, if the theory of the global circulation of the waters was correct, must take their rise in distant mountains, where a myriad streams formed the watercourses. Where then lay the source of the mighty Nile that appeared in full girth within the otherwise dry valley land of Egypt? And where were the headwaters of the Danube, almost as huge as the Nile, that flowed through the forests north of Macedon, down to the far Euxine Sea [the modern Black Sea]?

Animal and plant life must exist, Aristotle argued, along such water sources. And if so, men could survive there. Yet no Greeks had penetrated to the sources of the Nile or Danube.

Alexander had his mind fixed on the far eastern limit of the Oikoumene. The western limit, whither the sun vanished, offered no attraction. In the Mieza laboratory he could study notes of the voyages of those rival traders, Phoenicians and merchants of Carthage who had seen and even passed through the western water gate of the Interior [Mediterranean] Sea. Between rocky heights called the Pillars of Heracles, or the Mount of the giant Atlas, water flowed out from the Mediterranean to the encircling Ocean. In that strait of water herds of strange dolphins had been encountered that played around the galleys, beyond the thresh of the oars. Farther out stretched the dark surface of the Ocean itself, subjected to the buffeting of the winged sons of the North Wind, and the screaming furies who were emissaries of the God-Father, Zeus.

Thus in the west the limit of human advance was fixed not only by the impassable Ocean but by the hostile leviathans of the deep salt waters, which could crush sailing galleys as easily as a man could break apart a wasp’s nest. So said the venturesome mariners.

Even Aristotle had slight interest in the far western latitudes. He did not believe, as Plato had, that out upon this Atlantic portion of outer Ocean extended islands known in legends as the Blessed Isles, or sometimes as the lost island of Atlantis. He did not believe it for the simple reason that he had come across no evidence of it. Nor would he waste thought upon a lost Atlantic civilization—pointing out that civilization seemed to have advanced from east to west, not the other way around. At least the sciences had been known in Asia before they were known in Crete; apparently the Greeks had learned from Asia also, especially from Egypt.

This only set Alexander more firmly on the path of his discovery.

By now he felt certain—and Aristotle did not deny it—that the eastern limits of the Oikoumene were not known at all. True, the Iliad mentioned the threshold of Asia, the water gate of the Dardanelles where Troy stood. Troy had been there without a doubt. Yet the Argonauts had passed beyond, along the chain of waterways, through the Dardanelles, into the far Euxine. Somewhere around the Euxine factual knowledge ended and myth began. Suppose those voyagers, the Argonauts, had actually been searching for gold washed down from the mountains instead of the legendary golden fleece? Still, they had ventured into the mythical mountains at the end of the farthest sea, those mounts of Caucasus where the Titan Prometheus had been bound, his giant shape rearing within reach of the predatory birds of the upper air. Present-day voyagers to the Greek colonies in the Euxine reported seeing the loom of vast mountains rising into the cloud level where their summits were covered by everlasting snow. Through this mountain barrier of the Caucasus the mariners said a gate gave access to the unknown farther east. Yonder, some Asiatics believed, lay the inland sea called the Caspian, frequented by giant bird life, by Amazons, and by unknown celestial powers.

This Caspian, if it truly existed, might flow northward to the outer Ocean.

By ancient reckoning, or surmise, Greece, and therefore Macedon, lay almost in the center of the Oikoumene. From Athens, for example, it seemed to be about as far to the water gate of Heracles in the west as to the land gate through the Caucasus in the east. But Alexander wanted rather to believe the venturesome thinkers who placed the center of the habitable world much farther to the east.

In this unknown area of the east Alexander believed that the true gods might still exist.

Patiently he gathered together all the threads of evidence he could find, reading through legends and stories of eastern voyagers in the study hours of the night while Aristotle buried himself in the laboratory experiments. He no longer pored over Homer before blowing out the lamps. Still he did not confide much either in his companions or in the scientists.

By following the track of his idea, as if tracing a way through a Cretan labyrinth, he made certain of some points.

In the histories of Herodotus facts began to give way to fables about as far east as the Caucasus. The farthest great city to be fully described by this Herodotus was Babylon, whose lofty terraced gardens and sky-scraping towers were a wonder of the habitable world. Yet one Phoenician related that the name Babylon meant actually Bab-il, the Gate of God. Alexander knew nothing about the Phoenician language, but he caught at the mention of a gateway. For Babylon lay, it seemed, at about the same longitude as the Caucasus mountain barrier which also had a gateway opening to the east. What lay beyond?

Then, following out Aristotle’s method of tracing land shapes by the course and size of rivers, Alexander satisfied himself that two such rivers flowed by Babylon, the twin Tigris and Euphrates. In what area, then, did they have their source? In the heights of the Caucasus or in unknown heights farther east? These twin rivers emptied, without doubt, to the south, into the stream of outer Ocean. But where did they take their rise?

What if the greatest mass of mountains lay beyond the known limits, rising far above the earth’s atmosphere into the heavenly ether? What if the twin Tigris and Euphrates flowed out of this immense height beyond which the sun rose out of Ocean itself? What if this elevation far above earth’s surface were the abode of the Powers, whether men called it Parnassus or Olympus, or Paradise, as the Asiatics did?

Most legends, he discovered, originated in the far-distant east. There, men said, the very Waters of Life flowed out of the ground—the waters that preserved life forever in those who drank of them. There, too, was situated, by all accounts, the Tree of Life, the fruit of which imparted celestial knowledge to humans.

Surely the traces of the gods all led toward this unknown side of the earth. The older shrines stood toward the point of the sun’s rising. In every case this was true. Delphi, down in Greece, was younger than Eleusis on Asia’s shore; Apollo’s temple in Athens had been built long after the sanctuary of Apollo Ammon in Egypt, and that in turn had not existed—so Alexander conceived—when the Chaldeans and Magians of Babylon first worshiped their sun god.

Very soon Alexander discovered that Mieza possessed a drawing of the image of the world by Hecataeus that actually set in place the lands and rivers and seas as if the Oikoumene were visible in its entirety, seen from a vast height.

This he copied painstakingly, adding to it his notes upon the shrines, the routes of the legendary voyagers, and the gates opening into the goal of his imagination, the unknown east.

Unfortunately he could not resist tracing along the eastern border a vast height that dwarfed all other mountain ranges. Upon this he wrote a name Parapanisades—the Greatest Wall—as being the only proper name for the homeland of the gods.

Inevitably other eyes saw his world picture, and whispers about the Parapanisades began to be heard in the halls of Mieza. Harpalus, who followed the prevailing fashions, posed on the roof looking through the tubular height finder zealously, explaining that he had dreamed that the summit of the Mightiest Wall that pent in gods and demons had appeared to his sight above the clouds.

Some of the assistants argued with Alexander about the folly of sketching distances on a chart until the distances were paced off by surveyors on foot, in stadia, or steps. Only the seacoasts, they said, could be sketched in, since these were fairly well determined by the transits of ships which, driven by the winds, sailed at a uniform speed.

The Parapanisades talk must have reached Aristotle’s ears. Instead of arguing directly with his rebellious pupil he contented himself with pointing out one evening in the garden that the frontier of knowledge was being pushed back steadily, so that more of the habitable world was known with the passing of each century. And in his dry lisping voice he added that, in the time before Homer, Mount Olympus, which they could all see from southern Macedon, had been thought to be the home of the gods. Until, after sufficient explorers had climbed it, this mount was seen to be quite ordinary bare rocks. Then the mythical Mount Olympus was placed, in men’s imagination, east of Troy, where some high summits pierced the cloud level. This in turn became known. Now it seemed that men imagined Olympus to lie within the far-off Caucasus. And exploration there, in turn, might reveal only another natural even if lofty mountain chain. He did not mention the word “Parapanisades.”

He simply pointed at the garden in which they sat. “Here also are the gods. The impulse of life is here, as it is elsewhere.”

But when they were alone he did say something more. The unknown, he explained, always seemed mysterious, and on that account both fearful and wonderful. Then he added thoughtfully: “And when men are most alone they hold most closely to myth.”

As soon as he could get back to his cell Alexander took a knife and cut his drawing of the world image into ribbons, ripping them apart in a paroxysm of anger at himself. His labored reasoning, his reaching out toward the unknown, had been no more than a child’s citadel of sand built in front of the incoming seas. Aristotle had dismissed his Parapanisades as myth, and the others in Mieza were laughing at his stupidity, as so often happened. The fury of his self-accusation left him silent and shaken.

After that no one spoke again of the ill-fated Parapanisades. And the assistants explained that Aristotle wished his eccentric pupil to concentrate upon politics rather than on cosmography. Alexander did that without protest.

There was no meeting ground between the mind of the middle-aged scientist, intent on his tabulation of natural causes, and the young daydreamer, stubbornly determined to track down Mysteries. Yet pupil and master had mutual respect for the other’s capacity to work. Neither one cared to waste time in argument.

Four centuries later matter-of-fact Roman historians mentioned the violence of Alexander’s passion for learning. Yet even under Aristotle’s guidance he showed no ability to master a single science. He merely gave to his books the same devotion he had given to the shrine at Pella. Left to himself, he might have become a hermit of the academy, following out a labyrinth of thought. If so, he would have lived longer.

Or he might have become a physician, as Philip had intended. It is clear that Philip tried at first to safeguard his visionary son through Aristotle’s guidance and the protection of the great commanders of the army. But Philip by then had heard the gossip of Pella, and Philip also had a temper not to be trifled with.

Perhaps because of his loneliness and introspection, perhaps because of his stubbornness at that time, Alexander never forgot and never gave up what affected him closely. Trifles that others passed over stuck in his memory. He kept the annotated copy of Homer close by him; he fed and groomed the black horse Bucephalus, now full grown; he practiced the medicine he had learned. And along with the poems he had memorized, he kept the riddle of the mountains that fed the river Nile, and his mythical Parapanisades.

He was sixteen years old when he plunged into the examination of politics, or city rule—his last work under Aristotle’s tutoring.

The philosophers from Anaxagoras to Plato had concentrated upon the problem of designing a perfect state in theory. And that in turn meant to them an ideal city government. Plato had gone so far in his Republic as to develop a perfect model, wherein aristocratic thinkers could exist with slave laborers to their mutual benefit.

At Mieza the experimenters pointed out that Plato’s city plan was the finest of the Greek attempts to meet the problems of reality by an ideal solution.

Aristotle on the contrary refused to speculate upon what might be the best form of government. He limited his effort to an attempt to determine what had worked out best, and when and how and why. So his assistants were at work examining the constitutions and histories of all governments of record—and they had singled out more than one hundred and fifty. These included the various Greek cities, from the Athenian democracy, or rule by the people, to the Spartan military communistic state, or rule by a select warrior group. Among the examples also appeared the tyranny of Crete, or rule by one head, and such oddities as the priesthood rule of the celebrated Delphic oracle which supported itself by payments from visitors.

Going far afield from the Greek cities, Aristotle was also examining the tribal communities across the great river Danube. He compared such rule by the leading family in the tribes to the reign of the Pharaohs in Egypt. The first, he believed, was a primitive form of the second. The barbarian tribes maintained themselves by an economy of war, raid, and some trade. So they were still devoted to the leadership of individual warriors, while the Egyptians sustained themselves by long-established agriculture and handwork, reaching a much higher intellectual level.

Midway between these Danubian tribesmen, with their herds and huts, and the great metropolitan centers of Egypt, Aristotle placed his own people, the Macedonians.

The Macedonians were still young, still barbaric. Only yesterday, in historic time, had they migrated down with their herds out of the northern forest and river lands to these hills at the edge of the sea. They still retained the rude independence of a hunting people. By constant struggle against the invading Scythian tribes and the highly equipped armies of the Greek cities, they had kept freedom, in the sense that they had not been made slaves. Yet they were still subservient mentally to the educated Greeks, and actually inferior to the more sophisticated Cretans, Egyptians, and Phoenicians.

The Macedonians still retained traces of tribal life; the Kinsmen were no more than blood kin of the royal Amyntas family; the Companions or individual nobles consisted of the great landowning and cattle-breeding families. Any important question had to be decided by the meeting of the commanders of the army, just as generations ago the leading warriors had assembled in council to decide what was best to do for the tribe.

And Aristotle’s examination had raised some startling questions. It seemed as if different peoples had been shaped not so much by their governments as by their physical surroundings. Going back to the history of natural things, the assistants at Mieza pointed out, as a shore was eaten away or built up, fertilized or made barren by the action of water upon it, so animals evolved according to the sources of food or conditions of safety or peril around them. Certainly forest animals differed from those of the grass plains; while they in turn developed differently from the beasts of desert regions.

So in the case of men. Herdsmen on half-barren hills did not develop as the dwellers within a fertile river valley. Apparently a human group domiciled upon a natural stronghold evolved different ways of protecting, feeding, and sheltering themselves from those of a similar group settled upon an open shore. Had not the different Greeks all sprung from a common stock, in tribal times? Had they not, thereupon, built many small cities separately, because the peninsula of Hellas offered them only small and isolated valleys?

For protection’s sake these Greeks had each built their separate stronghold or polis—city. They had done so out of necessity, and not because in that pioneering stage they had believed the single city-state to be the ideal state. Moreover, developing in different ways, the cities facing upon the coast tended to rely on sea-borne trade and to hold most firmly to democracy because the building and handling of ships required the co-operation of the community—on shipboard were not all men equal, like the ancient Argonauts, except that they chose someone for leader?—while the land-bound cities tended toward aristocracy or leadership by the elite few who commanded or planned for the armies.

These questions seemed small and irritating beside the grandeur of Plato’s ideal city. Moreover, they hinted that the fortunes of a people did not depend upon fate alone.

As to the Macedonians, it was apparent that they had developed no such elaborate city-state, since Aegae and Pella were no more than poorly sited towns without trade, dignity, or the great academies of the more advanced Greek centers. The Macedonians had been confined to peasant life and animal breeding because they had been cut off from the trade routes and even from the coast itself. There seemed, according to Aristotle’s reasoning, no possibility of making Pella into such a city as Athens.

In fact he laid down no rules by which a people could progress or a city be well governed. While he pointed out that the environing country influenced a city’s growth, and the energy of its inhabitants its welfare, he left unanswered the question, toward what should it progress. Nor would he admit that its future was predetermined by fate or the will of the gods.

Yet Alexander sensed the answer toward which the Stagyrite was working with infinite patience. If human beings could be shaped by their environment they could change themselves in equal measure by their own efforts. If so, they would not be dependent on fate.

Aristotle was working with reality, divided down to its smallest atom. And he—Alexander—had evoked a dream world, real only to his imagination, and then only because it lay out of human sight.

Among the hundred and fifty cases Aristotle made a notation upon Thebes: that the city had been raised above others in the last generation by the supreme ability of one man—Epaminondas—who had created a victorious army and had known how to gather in the fruits of victory—For the organization of a peace after war is more difficult than the winning of a war.

And in discussing city rule (politics) he made a further note: If there exists in a state a person so far above others in virtue that neither the virtue nor the political ability of any other citizen is comparable with his ... he will be wronged if treated as their equal. Such a man should be held to be as a god among men.

In reading this, it seemed to Alexander that the Stagyrite believed the spark of divinity lay still within human beings.

He was deep in a study of the influence of sea power upon the overseas expansion of the Athenian state when a rider from the Companions appeared at Mieza and entered his cell. The horseman said that Alexander would join the main army on its march along the Nearer Sea. Engrossed as he was in making notes, Alexander replied that he would be ready to leave at the end of the month.

“You are leaving with me today,” the rider informed him. “This is an order.”

Instead of making preparations to depart Alexander, exasperated, threw away his notes, caught up his sleeping robe, his copy of Homer, and his knife, and started out to get the black horse, saying in that case he was ready now.

He never returned to Mieza as a student.

If Philip had brought his son from Pella to remove Alexander from Olympias’s influence, he did not say so. The one-eyed leader of the Macedonians never spoke about his wife nor did he mention Cleopatra to his son. This gulf of silence between them Philip might have bridged, but Alexander could not.

Nor did Philip himself try to instruct the student from Mieza how to behave when he joined the Macedonian field army. The Macedonians marched. They marched in drifting dust along the coastal King’s Way and over goat paths; twenty miles and sometimes twenty-three they covered between the dawn trumpet and the sunset meal. With full equipment and five days’ rations they marched faster than any Greek phalanx, outdistancing the news of their coming. And no distance covered seemed to satisfy the impatient Philip. When his Macedonians were on the march Philip circulated through the columns, as he had limped around his building projects in Pella, having apparently neither tent nor headquarters of his own. At night he could be found guzzling by a teamsters’ fire or gossiping with the advanced cavalry patrol.

If Alexander had fancied that he would be given a white mantle and the gold-adorned chest armor of an Achilles to wear, riding Bucephalus with the elite Companion cavalry, he was rudely enlightened. He marched with the transport wagons, clear of their dust, carrying his pack and shouldering the responsibility of men and animals and loads. Sweating and swearing, he fought against time to gain distance, struggling with the strange circumstance that a company could not or would not move as fast as one man, and that a line of carts could be held up by one broken wheel. He discovered that horses did not haul their weight unless fed and cared for in legs, hoofs, and guts. Luckily he was a hardened walker, and stubborn.

These Macedonians marched, but not in any apparent direction, or for any discernible purpose; at times they loitered on the open coast, swimming and doctoring the horses; at other times they kept on without stopping for a day and a night. They encircled a seaport and made all preparations for a siege, only to march away when a fleet appeared at the anchorage. By night they moved into a city, only to give it up and start off elsewhere. Seldom did the teamsters of the transport get up close enough to see what the head of the column might be doing.

On the day that Cleopatra visited the column they halted and held races, horse and foot, and wrestling bouts with wine served after. The teamsters swore that Cleopatra was a fortunate girl. Alexander saw her at the games, wearing a half veil over the loose knot of her curled brown hair, close-wrapped in a single peplos without a cloak, swaying as she walked—a girl of fourteen at the heels of her uncle Attalus, who pushed arrogantly ahead of other men. Still, Cleopatra kept her eyes half closed, demurely. In passing Alexander she glanced up, as if measuring his strength, then gave a skip, hurrying after Attalus. Small and weak she might be, yet Cleopatra, the niece of Attalus, had the look of Olympias about her.

That night she poured wine for Philip, and the soldiers wagered whether she would go into bed with him. They offered tetradrachmas against drachmas she would not, estimating that she was an ambitious virgin, holding herself for a great price. Then they offered Alexander fruit, which he took, and wine, which he disliked, because they were vaguely aware that Philip’s son should have been invited to the feast instead of being left to mess with them.

These soldiers, as Alexander discovered, knew much about the whims, habits, and abilities of the commanders, discussing them without mercy, calling Philip the one-eyed Fox and the lame Goat. At all times, whether foraging or fighting or bathing, they grumbled. Mostly they complained of short rations, scant pay, prohibition against looting the coast towns, and the state of the roads which they had to repair as they advanced eastward toward the Dardanelles. Of Philip they complained that he kept them in the field during harvest and planting time, and expected them to carry the loads of mules.

Yet they seemed to find sense in the twisting and turning of the marching. Philip, they argued, was trying to get hold of the coast ports for Macedon, which had been cut off from the sea by these Greek trading settlements. When the Spartan fleet put in, and the army marched away, they had an explanation. The Fox didn’t want to waste men in a hot siege now that the city was reinforced. No, he would take another city someplace else and trade it with the Spartans for that one. The Fox always had a new trick to play, and he would waste gold bullion rather than loss of life—which the army thought a most important matter—and he would use up his new machines before he would send men into battle. They explained this, taking care that Alexander understood, since he might command a regiment before long.

They were resting on the path above the gray water of the Dardanelles, trying to make out the round hills of Troy in Asia across the way, when an officer of the Agema—the favored companies that served as guard for the king-commander—laid odds against Alexander’s chances of commanding the army itself. The gambler, Hephaestion by name, was young and reckless with the fine manner of an Athenian—he said trade had been the ruin of his family, so he had sold his sword into service. He had a way of mocking at sacred things. Even money he offered that Alexander would never be king, not realizing that he spoke of a man who stood beside him. “For it all depends on Philip’s whim, and the Fox is not pleased with his girlish, bookish offspring and may get him another one. What do you say?”

The men said nothing, waiting to hear how Alexander might break out at Hephaestion. They knew that the carefree captain of the Agema was blood kin to the king’s son.

“Moreover,” Hephaestion pointed out, “our Kinsmen, except that tutor-milk-sucker Leonidas, have a feeling against the son of the woman they think to be a witch, and counting Philip out, this army isn’t minded to obey anyone except the generals. Those are my points. Who of you teamsters has hard money to lay against me?”

Alexander was looking through the haze over the gray water, seeing red creep into the haze as blood pounded through his veins, when a runner came down the column and stopped before him, saying that the king-commander had been hurt. Philip had sent for his son. Hephaestion looked once carefully at Alexander, hesitated, and drew his short sword, balancing it on the palm of his hand. “It was one chance in ten thousand I should pick you to wager with. But—I lose, and here it is.” He smiled, his dark eyes mocking. “Don’t make me wait while you make formal complaint of my insubordination. I don’t want a hearing—eh, Alexander?”

He could not have thought out a better way to save his life. Alexander sensed the recklessness of the captain and felt that Hephaestion had appealed to him. He touched the sword hilt awkwardly. “I don’t want a burial here,” he said, “because of a few words.”

Philip’s hip had been broken in a skirmish up the road and he lay on a stretcher where water flowed from a shrine’s font, with his leg stretched out, tied to a javelin; nor would he let Alexander feel around the broken bones.

“More delay,” he grumbled, wiping the sweat from his eyes. “We won’t see Pella before snow comes. I’m not going back like this.” His glance leveled on his son’s face. “What’s this new rumor that you’re wishful to rule in Pella while I manage the army? Would that be to your liking?”

Parmenio, chief of the staff, and the silent Antipater were listening. If Philip had called them in, it meant that he was having his son judged upon some doubtful point.

Head tilted, his blue eyes troubled, Alexander explained that he would like best to go back to the studies from which he had been taken. As to the talk in Pella, he knew nothing of it.

“It’s all through the camp—down to the ranks. Doing as much harm as a plague.” As always, Philip’s staccato speech followed the swift current of his thoughts. “The pezetairi—the phalanxmen—like you, and they are hard as devils to please. Did you know that?”

“No sir.”

A side glance toward the two silent commanders assured Philip that Parmenio did not believe Alexander, while the matter-of-fact Antipater did. “I’ve been away too long from Pella,” he muttered, easing his leg. “Can’t be helped. But it can be helped. That gossip has sense in it, after all. Yes, you can go back instead of me.” Abruptly the wounded Macedonian chuckled. “I’m serious, boy. Don’t bury yourself in a doctor’s den”—he still thought of his son as a medical student—“but go back and do the honors for me at Pella. In my name, of course.”

As if pleased with his new thought, Philip explained to the commanders that from this moment the seventeen-year-old Alexander was appointed regent, during his absence from the city.

Alexander started to object and thought better of it. “Just what authority are you giving me? And what do you expect me to do?”

Impatiently, because the broken bones in his hip tormented him, Philip handed his son the small royal seal with the lion’s image on it. “Full authority. Make payments, sign letters. But be careful about making promises. Don’t ask me what to do—find out for yourself what you can do. Didn’t I lay out a cartload of gold so that Aristotle might teach you? Consult with him about politics. Take along a military adviser too—take Antipater here. You’ll need an escort, now, so pick a company of the foot Agema. Neither Aristotle nor Antipater will sell you out, boy, and the army will see you don’t get in a scrape over a girl.” And he added thoughtfully, “You’ll have to strike some more coins from the mine bullion, for cash.”

With his orders given, Philip hesitated, not knowing how to show personal feeling to his son. At that moment Alexander would have chosen to stay with the wounded man and the troops.

“Kiss me, and farewell,” Philip muttered. His dry lips touched his son’s cheek, and Antipater motioned the boy to leave.

Tucking the seal absently into his girdle, Alexander wondered if he had been dismissed because he had failed at soldiering or whether Philip actually wanted him at Pella. He felt a surge of gratitude, realizing his father had defied gossip by honoring him openly. But he had no illusions about his ability to manage affairs at Pella. (Later Olympias declared that Philip, who was infatuated with the girl Cleopatra, had wanted to be rid of his son, especially when he found that Alexander was becoming a favorite with the troops.)

When he started the journey home with Antipater the following sunrise he remembered Hephaestion and named that reckless individual to be his guard officer.

Hephaestion towered above Alexander, who was tall enough. This young aristocrat had the strength of a Heracles and the easy laughter of a Dionysos, whether drunk or sober. In most respects he was the very opposite of the single-minded student—relishing fights more than sports, and the wine cup best of all. Where Alexander worried himself into black depression over difficulties Hephaestion took no thought of them, preferring to play the flute instead. Philosophy he dismissed with a grin, quoting Euripides: “We are slaves of the gods, whate’er they be.” In proof he cited his own elevation from culprit to commander of the prince’s guard within half an hour. “If that isn’t a miracle, show me a better one.”

His easy good nature delighted Alexander, who kept Hephaestion close to him, having found at last a friend. Ptolemy said spitefully of the pair that Hephaestion was the man of the two.

As Antipater looked after the policing of Macedon, and Olympias immediately assumed the direction of the palace, Alexander was free to spend most of his time in the olive groves of Mieza’s gardens, where the Stagyrite worked at his problems.

Still the philosopher would lay down no axioms to his pupil. Greek philosophy, he thought, had stagnated because it had become too abstract in its search after values. Socrates had turned it aside from its quest after pure reason, by his rough questioning. Until Socrates, too many Greeks had limited their efforts to the past—to the how of creation, and the nature of the divine powers. Almost for the first time this stubborn Athenian questioner had refused to wonder how human life had come to be, and had asked instead what it might make of itself. His objective had been to find the purpose for which the world existed, not the source from which it came. And in his lone quest of this objective he had been forced to commit suicide.

Aristotle, with his hard peasant’s head and his work-stained fingers, was following out this quest. In his reasoning the mystery of the world soul might be impenetrable; but human evolution could be measured and directed, like that of animals—of which he was compiling his history. Men, whole peoples, had developed from something and were changing continually into something else. That process of change could be measured and directed. It seemed as if this process were for the sake of the thing evolved—for the end result, not for the automatic process itself. And if this were true men might be freed forever from the fear of a predetermined fate. Men might be free to shape their own evolution. If they could understand the process ...

So the Stagyrite discussed with his pupil the first of the Mysteries that he had kept secret until then in his mind. And Alexander, understanding little as yet, was fired by the purpose that lay behind the endless experimentation.

It was Olympias who insisted that he should lead an expedition against the tribes beyond the frontier, who had become troublesome in the absence of the field army. “The people like to see you as a leader, not to hear that you are reading books.”

Antipater made the preparations, and Alexander went without enthusiasm. But his mother made the departure a parade, closing the shops for that day and riding at his side in her light chariot—having sent Antipater ahead with the foot soldiers. Bareheaded, on the great horse Bucephalus, Alexander drew enthusiastic shouts from the watchers.

When they were alone, beyond the streets, Olympias drew him close beside her, whispering as she kissed him that she knew he was not as other men. It had been her secret, she confided, but now he had the right to share it.

She had always been devoted to the shrine at Samothrace, where the gods appeared to mortals. And on the night before her marriage she had dreamed that the night wind of the island rushed by her room; the light of the stars had been dimmed and sudden thunder had shaken the house—until light flashed down upon her and spread, kindling flames along the room, until she waked. Upon that night she had been impregnated, and not in Philip’s bed.

“Certain it is, Aristander the diviner tells me, that you are a child of the gods.”

So Olympias left him, crying to him to bear himself as became his birth. Sighting Hephaestion behind them, she paused fleetingly at the Companion’s side, whispering, “That boy! Protect him, but tell him he must stop slandering me to Zeus’s wife!” And off she went, waving back, fair to behold as Nausicaa in her chariot.

And so Alexander rode on his first expedition, silent and afraid. He dreaded ridicule, and he felt coldness settle on him like a garment when they began to climb the hills. But he found that he had to do nothing more than ride in the center of his small force, for Hephaestion, who looked on this as no greater matter than a chase after deer, was ready with a word or a jest to help him out of any hesitation, and the veteran Macedonian commander gave all orders.

The highlanders—the Maeti tribe—withdrew to the heights, only annoying the Macedonians with arrows, while they tried to save their herds. On Antipater’s advice Alexander did not destroy the deserted town of the Maeti but brought in settlers from the nearest farmlands and built defense towers for them. Hephaestion suggested naming the place Alexandria—Alexander’s City—as Philip had recently christened a captured city Philippi. It was a quiet spot in the mountains, where wood smoke drifted through the trees. Alexander reflected that by the Stagyrite’s reasoning he and his Macedonians had been like these cattle-breeding Maeti, a few centuries before.

As soon as he returned to Pella he searched for the diviner Aristander and questioned him about Olympias’s dream. The man from Telemess did not seem surprised, pointing out that other omens confirmed his mother’s belief and that even Philip had a portent in a dream—that he had sealed up Olympias’s body when he slept with her, and the seal had borne the impress of a lion’s head on it. This portent Aristander had interpreted to Philip as meaning not that he must look closely after his erotic wife but that he must know his son would have more than mortal courage. “These are portents,” declared the soothsayer, “that, taken together, may not be questioned. Philip is not your father.”

In some fashion word of the diviner’s announcement spread through the market place and hostels of Pella. People questioned the priest of the Delphic oracle who was also waiting in Pella at that time. This agent of the Greek oracle would neither confirm nor deny the statement of Olympias and Aristander. Now when Alexander made the dawn sacrifice at the altar facing the east he had to push through a crowd of servitors and slaves who waited in reverent silence for a sight of the golden-haired prince as he made sacrifice to his father, Zeus.

Before one moon had waxed and waned Antipater brought Alexander a message, delivering it himself because it came from Philip.

“Philip, King-Commander of the Macedonians,” he said without emotion, “divorces Olympias, Princess of Epirus, daughter of Neoptolemus. He has taken to wife Cleopatra, niece of Attalus.”