HABILIDADE SOCIALES!
XIV: estoy triste
5.4.5. Habilidades de solución de problemas
A
lexander the Great owed a great deal to his father. As king of Macedon, Philip extended the reign south into Greece, west to the Adriatic Sea, east to the Black Sea, and north to the Danube River. When his son needed a tutor, Philip hired Aristotle—yes, that Aristotle—to teach him about philosophy and literature and politics. When Alexander was eighteen, Philip gave him command over the Macedonian cavalry and his first taste of military victory. Two years later, in 340BC, as Philip prepared to invade Persia, he appointed Alexander regent. If Alexander’s conquests—by age 26 he ruled Persia, by age 30 pretty much all of the known world—surpassed Philip’s, they were to a very considerable extent made possible by his father.How did Alexander repay this debt?
According to some historians, ancient and modern, by conspiring to murder his father.
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Philip’s assassination was very much a public event. It took place at Aegae in 336BCat a festival celebrating the marriage of his daughter (and Alexander’s sister) Cleopatra to another Alexander, the king of Epirus. As the king’s entourage moved toward a theater, Philip lagged behind the procession so that he could enter more dramatically. His body-guards fanned out around him. One of them, Pausanias, stepped forward, stabbed the king, and fled. Three others chased Pausanias and killed him.
Alexander moved quickly to secure the throne. At Philip’s funeral, he put to death sev-eral potential rivals. He seized command of the army, subdued rebellions to the south and north, and led his troops into Persia. Clearly, therefore, Philip’s death advanced Alexan-der’s ambitions. But just because Alexander benefited from the murder doesn’t mean he had a part in it. Indeed, according to Aristotle, Pausanias’s actions were the result not of a conspiracy but a personal grudge. “Philip . . . was attacked by Pausanias,” Aristotle wrote in his Politics, “because he permitted him to be insulted by Attalus and his friends.”
Aristotle’s brief mention is the only extant account of the assassination by a contem-porary of Philip and Alexander. Others who were alive then wrote about it, among them Callisthenes, Ptolemy, Nearchus, and Cleitarchus. But none of their works survived, so we’re dependent on later writers who presumably read the original accounts. The main sources are Diodorus Siculus, writing in the first century BC, Quintis Curtius Rufus in the first century AD, Plutarch and Arrian in the second century AD, and Justin in the third century AD.
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These sources offer much more detail than Aristotle. Here’s Diodorus’s version:
Attalus, who was one of Philip’s courtiers and had great influence with the king, invited Pausanias to dinner, and there he poured large quantities of neat wine into him and handed him to his muleteers for them to abuse his body in a drunken orgy. When Pausanias sobered up after the drinking bout he was deeply hurt by the physical outrage and brought a charge against Attalus before the king. Philip was angered by the enormity of the deed, but he was unwilling to show his disap-proval because of his close ties with Attalus and the fact that he needed his ser-vices at that time. Attalus, in fact, was the nephew of the Cleopatra who had become the king’s new wife, and he had been chosen as commander of the force that was being sent ahead into Asia—he was a man of courage in the military sphere. Accordingly, the king preferred to mollify Pausanias’s legitimate anger over what he had suffered, and he bestowed on him substantial gifts and pro-moted him to positions of honor in the bodyguard.
Pausanias was not so easily mollified, and “he passionately longed to take his revenge not only on the perpetrator of the deed but also on the man who would not exact pun-ishment for him.”
Plutarch, while confirming Pausanias’s grudge, introduced the possible involvement of Olympias, Alexander’s mother, and Alexander himself. As Plutarch described it, their motives were hatched at another wedding a year before the murder. This time it was Philip himself who was married. The bride was the niece of Attalus, another woman named Cleopatra. Olympias was understandably unhappy about this; though polygamy was common in Macedonia, a new wife could hardly be considered good news to an old one. Alexander, for his part, feared that a son of Cleopatra might displace him as heir.
Wrote Plutarch: “The troubles . . . began in the women’s chambers . . . spreading, so to say, to the whole kingdom.”
Making matters worse, Plutarch added, was “the violence of Olympias, a woman of a jealous and implacable temper . . . exasperating Alexander against his father.”
Tensions boiled over at the wedding between Philip and Cleopatra. Here’s how Plutarch described it:
Attalus in his drink desired the Macedonians would implore the gods to give them a lawful successor to the kingdom by his niece. This so irritated Alexander, that throw-ing one of the cups at his head, “You villain,” said he, “what, am I then a bastard?”
Then Philip, taking Attalus’s part, rose up and would have run his son through; but by good fortune for them both, either his overhasty rage, or the wine he had drunk, made his foot slip, so that he fell down on the floor. At which Alexander reproach-fully insulted over him: “See there,” said he, “the man who makes preparations to pass out of Europe into Asia, overturned in passing from one seat to another.”
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Justin gave a similar account of an outraged Pausanias, a jealous Olympias, and an in-secure Alexander who, after the fight at the wedding of Philip and Cleopatra, left the court along with his mother. Though they publicly reconciled soon after, things were never the same between father and son. “It is thought that Olympias and her son,” Justin wrote, “incited Pausanias to proceed to so heinous a crime, while he was making his complaints about the abuse going unpunished.” Concluded Plutarch: “Most of the re-sponsibility for [the murder] was attributed to Olympias, but aspersions were cast on Alexander, too.”
Arrian, whose portrait of Alexander is by far the most favorable of those in the pri-mary sources, wrote nothing about an incident at the wedding of Philip and Cleopatra, let alone about murder conspiracy. But even Arrian noted that “suspicion existed be-tween Philip and Alexander when Philip married . . . and dishonored Alexander’s mother, Olympias.”
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Arrian provided plenty of other examples of Alexander’s resentment of his father, feelings that continued well after the latter’s death. In 328BC, Cleitus, one of Alexander’s generals, publicly praised Philip in a way that downplayed Alexander’s subsequent achievements. Alexander’s response was to run a spear through Cleitus. In 324, faced with a mutiny near Babylon, Alexander addressed his troops. He began by reviewing Philip’s achievements—this still according to Arrian—but he did so only to show how much greater were his own.
Alexander’s relationship with his mother, in contrast, was a very close one. Indeed, some historians suspected an Oedipus complex. (There has also been plenty of psycholo-gizing about Alexander’s love life, with some suspecting he was gay and others that his only true love was his horse Bucephalus, whose funeral procession he led and after whom he named a city.) Oedipal or not, Alexander loved his mother. It was she who raised him while Philip spent much time away from the palace on various campaigns.
Of course, plenty of sons resent their fathers without conspiring to kill them.
Polygamy was a common practice among Macedonian royalty; patricide was not. In the absence of hard evidence of Alexander’s complicity, therefore, historians have looked to his character. Some, following Arrian, have seen in Alexander the courage of Achilles and the wisdom of Aristotle. This Alexander truly deserved to be called great: he spread Greek culture through the known world, and he sought to unite all people, as he once proclaimed, in a “brotherhood of mankind.” Other historians have followed Diodorus and Justin in portraying him as ruthless and amoral, a drunk, a man whose megalomania ultimately extended to a belief that he was a god. This was the Alexander who would not hesitate to murder his rivals, his enemies, and even his father.
In 1977 the archaeologist Manolis Andronikos uncovered three tombs at Vergina, a village thought to be on the site of ancient Aegae, where Philip was killed. The quality and quantity of artifacts, many of gold and silver, were extraordinary. Andronikos also
found ivory heads with what might have been representations of Philip and Alexander.
The bones and teeth of a male skeleton suggested he was in his forties when he died, as was Philip. Andronikos concluded he had found Philip’s tomb.
Was the splendor of the tomb a sign that Alexander wanted to honor his father? Or was it designed to hide the son’s crime? There was no way to be sure, and indeed there was no way to be sure these were Philip’s bones. His burial place, like his son’s role in put-ting him there, remains a mystery.
To Investigate Further
Aristotle. Politics and Poetics. New York: Viking, 1957.
Translated by Benjamin Jowett.
Heckel, Waldemar, and J. C. Yardley. Alexander the Great. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004.
Excerpts from relevant sources, including Arrian, Diodorus, and Justin.
Fuller, Edmund, ed. Plutarch: Lives of the Noble Greeks. New York: Dell, 1959.
The Dryden translation.
Worthington, Ian, ed. Alexander the Great. New York: Routledge, 2003.
A selection of readings, including some of the fragmentary primary sources as well as essays by modern historians.
Fox, Robin Lane. Alexander the Great. New York: Dial Press, 1974.
Alexander as Homeric hero.
Hammond, Nicholas. The Genius of Alexander the Great. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997.
A genius in statecraft as well as war.
Borza, Eugene. Before Alexander. Claremont, CA: Regina Books, 1999.
A brief guide to Macedonian studies through the reign of Philip.
Worthington, Ian. Alexander the Great. Harlow, England: Pearson Longman, 2004.
Worthington tends to agree with the Persisans who called him Alexander the Accursed.
Cartledge, Paul. Alexander the Great. Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 2004.
A thematic rather than chronological study of Alexander’s life.
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