But both my horses were done in, and I had to walk back to camp, limping all the way.

As soon as I was back, Alexander sent for me, congratulated me and ordered me to Athens with a small escort of cavalry.

‘Take Thaïs,’ he said. ‘The city likes you, and loves her. I don’t care what you do – see to it that Demosthenes cannot raise an army to break my siege.’

Alexander was never bloodthirsty. Far from it – in his mind of wheels and gears, everyone and everything had a purpose and he could never see why people wasted time on anything so inefficient as hate.

And he said outright that if we had to lay siege to Athens, we’d never conquer Asia. ‘Athens could take us six months,’ he said. ‘Thebes I can surround. Athens – we’d need to go home and build a fleet, contest the seas with Lycurgus – at least a year wasted. Perhaps the whole warwasted.’ He shook his head and drank more wine. ‘I hate fighting Greeks. I’m beginning to hate Greeks.’ He looked into his wine cup.

‘Macedonians are better?’ I asked.

‘Amyntas is dead,’ he said. ‘There will be no more trouble in Macedon.’

I shrugged. ‘Unless Parmenio or Antipater decides to take the throne himself.’

Alexander smiled. ‘If I die. Not until. Or am defeated repeatedly in the field.’ His smile widened. ‘Which is never going to happen. I’m invincible.’

I took my grooms under Polystratus. Thaïs and I had an abbreviated reunion. She did not want to go to Athens.

‘I do not want to be treated as a traitor,’ she said.

‘You have a unique opportunity to save lives in Athens,’ I said.

She hit me. It was the only time she ever struck me, but she did it with venom. She meant to hurt me.

She loved Athens.

But she went.

I went with a letter from Alexander demanding that ten leading men of Athens be surrendered to the judgement of the hegemon. I don’t think Alexander meant to execute them – well, to tell you the truth, I doubt that Demosthenes would have survived an hour, but there were so manyof us out for his blood . . .

Charmeides and Lycurgus were courageous, if wily, opponents. And they’d have made wonderful hostages. You need to remember the origin of the Hetaeroi – originally, the Hetaeroi and the pages were the sons of captured enemy chiefs and princes – hostages for their father’s good behaviour. It was a Macedonian custom to take prisoners and integrate them into our service – and reward them so richly that they became part of us. Charmeides would have done better with us, but he took ship and fled to Darius. Lycurgus lay low. Demosthenes doubtless pissed on his chiton in terror and hid in a basement.

Thaïs was cursed wherever she went. Her house had graffiti scrawled across the beautiful façade, and men yelled obscenities at her in the street.

But Phokion and Eumeles, Diodorus and Kineas and a thousand men like them stood with us, and the Assembly refused to vote for Demosthenes’ resolution to send an army to support Thebes.

I’m not sure I helped by being in Athens – in fact, I was hit with a stone on my first day and had little to say for a week – but Thaïs did. Despite her fears and her anger, she was unmoved by the catcalls and the vulgarity. She opened her house and held court – and men came.

And she told them what would happen if Macedon stormed Athens. And she drew them pictures of our siege machines. Athens had a few on the walls. She told them what Alexander had at Thebes.

But her most impressive speech was about Persia.

‘Just because Thebes – our ancient enemy – is choosing to waste herself against Macedon,’ she said, ‘must we? Thebes bragged – I heard them – that they were once again allies of the Mede. Is that who we are? Demosthenes has taken money from the Great King – would Miltiades approve? What about Pericles? Socrates? Plato? Did Athenians die at Marathon so that we could be slaves of Persia? Allies of Thebes?’ She shrugged. ‘Thebes is not in revolt against the tyrant of Macedon – Thebes has reverted to her truest self, and turned her back on Greece.’

Nice speech. I give it here in full, because I feel she might have been another Pericles, had she been born with a penis and not a vagina.

Her words, in Phokion’s mouth – and that was a matter for bitter mirth in itself, because Phokion and Eumeles hated her – and Demosthenes’ faction was wrecked.

The Athenians voted to send a delegation of ten men to Alexander to crave forgiveness. They sent Phokion to lead it, and Kineas with a squadron of elite Hippeis as an escort.

We arrived to find Thebes a burned-out husk, with her entire population raped and degraded, huddled in pens, awaiting sale. Later I heard Perdiccas, who led the assault, brag that no woman between ten and seventy remained unraped when the town was stormed. Children were butchered wholesale.

The Theban hoplites fought brilliantly, but they were no match for us. I heard later that they were the best fighters, man for man, of any foe most of the hypaspists ever faced. But as a body, they made mistakes, and a major gate was left virtually unguarded, and Alexander led the hypaspitoi through it and the town was stormed. Most of the hoplites died in the streets.

The Military Journal says that thirty thousand Thebans died. As many again were enslaved.

There were exceptions – a widow of one of the Boeotarchs, an aristocrat, was raped by one of our officers – a taxiarch in the pezhetaeroi. She didn’t break or even bend – when he went to take a drink after getting off her, she pushed him into her well and dropped rocks on him until he died. Alexander gave her freedom and all her property.

In fact, he was appalled. His troops had got away from him in the storming, and they were angry. Exhausted. They had marched across the world, in horrible conditions, because of these rebels (as we called them), and they wanted revenge for every boil and every sore, every pulled muscle, every broken bone, every day without food.

I won’t say Alexander wept. Merely that, like his father, he would have preferred other means.

But as I say, by the time the Athenian delegation arrived, there were no other means left. Alexander sat blank-faced on a stool and gave many Thebans their freedom – even their property. Many of the temples were spared. Several public buildings were spared. Slaves collected all the dead Theban hoplites and gave them a monument and a decent burial.

But the rest were sold into slavery en masse, and the town was destroyed. Turned to rubble.

Later – during the Lamian War – I heard Greeks claim that the true resistance to Macedon started there, and that Greek unity began in the ashes of Thebes.

Bullshit, says I. Thebes got what was coming to it. A nation of traitors, served the dish they’d ordered. The women of Thebes have my pity. The men died in harness, as rebels, and stupid rebels at that, and they got precisely what they deserved. And no one in Greece gave an obol. Had we done the same to Athens, it would have been war to the end – even Sparta, or Argos or Megara. But Thebes?

When we marched away, the ruins were still smoking, and Plataeans had come all the way across the plain, thirty stades, just to piss on the rubble. They waved at us and threw flowers.

We waved back.

And finally, we marched back to Pella.

Most of us in that army had been on campaign for more than a year. No one had been home that summer, and from the noble Hetaeroi to the lowliest pezhetaeroi, we had fought in at least five actions per man, marched ten thousand stades, killed enemies without count – fought against odds over and over.

We called it ‘The Year of Miracles’.

We called Alexander . . . king. He wasking. He was king from Thrace to Illyria, from Sparta to Athens and across Thessaly to Pella. Demosthenes and Darius of Persia had tried to unite with Amyntas and the Thebans to make a web of steel to surround and crush our king, and he had beaten every one of them, all at once.