Athens and Macedon were well matched. Athens was past her prime, but I didn’t need old Aristotle to tell me that Athens always bounces back – her prime is whenever she has a fleet. And Macedon was one generation from being a collection of mud huts in the wilderness, or like enough. In that one generation, Philip had pushed out borders in every direction, built an army as good as Sparta’s, built roads and supply centres, fortresses and alliances. But he didn’t have a fleet, and Athens could strip Macedon of her overseas possessions a few heartbeats after she acquired them. Macedon’s army was the better – but not really very much better, as the Athenians taught us in the Lamian War.

Everything that happened while Alexander and I were growing to manhood was the petting and kissing part, on the way to real war between Athens and Macedon. I can’t even remember all the convolutions. The truth is, I didn’t pay that close a heed – I wasn’t a statesman, I was a boy.

But even a very young man in Pella knew who Demosthenes was – knew that he rose every day in the assembly in Athens to denounce our king and our state and our way of life. Now – you’re an Athenian citizen, aren’t you, boy? I thought as much. So you probably know that we all admired Athens in every way – despite their prating against us, we all wanted to grow up to be Athenian gentlemen. We read their plays and their poetry and spoke their dialect and aped their manners and practised serving wine their way. But when it came to war, we were determined to beat them.

And we knew who Phokion was – their best general, the one even Philip feared, and we knew that headmired us.Your father’s tutor, if I remember rightly. Yes.

All by way of saying, in the spring when Philip came back from fighting Thracians, wounded – we were locked in a state of near war with Athens, and we were having the worst of it. Philip had seized a bunch of Athenian merchants – oh, he had provocation, but I remember old Aristotle saying it was the stupidest thing he’d ever done, and Aristotle was an admirer of wily Philip. At any rate, Athens declared war – a formal declaration, like going from kissing to intercourse. And Philip responded by marching an army into the Chersonese, laying siege to the major Athenian base at Perinthus – and failing.

Then he descended on Byzantium, their most important base – a surprise attack after a fast march, his favourite ploy.

And failed. Phokion outmarched him.

So the defeat by the Thracians, even though it was against only a tithe of our armies, was a bad blow. The Illyrians, always willing to raid us, began to agitate on the borders, and the Athenian privateers preyed on our shipping, and Athens put a vicious bastard into the Chersonese, a pirate called Diopeithes. His son, Manes, is there yet. And he’s a vicious bastard, too.

But the worst of it was that Athens had joined hands with Persia. That’s what Alexander and I were talking about, in the woods, over a trout dinner.

It’s a funny thing – Persia was always the enemy of my youth. We didn’t play ‘Macedonians and Athenians’ in the corridors of Pella or the Gardens of Midas. We didn’t play Macedonians and Thracians, or Macedonians and Illyrians. We played Athenians and Persians, and it was always the day of Marathon, with us. Or we played Achaeans and Trojans. And the Trojans were just Persians.

Macedon had been a Persian ally. It shamed us all, that during the wars of Salamis and Plataea, our forefathers had given earth and water to the Great King. Mind you, Alexander – the old one, from those days – did his bit for the Hellenes, and our boys turned on the retreating Persians and routed them at Hennia Hodoi.

And Sparta had a turn as a Persian ally, too. Mighty Sparta, but when the chips were down and Sparta was losing the Thirty Years’ War on the peninsula, she turned to Persia, took gold and ships in exchange for promises to remain aloof from Persia’s rebuilding of her empire.

Not that the Spartans kept their word. Agisalaos struck – and failed.

My point is that one of the constants of the diplomacy of the day was that Athens did not make deals with Persia. We did – there were almost always Persian envoys at Pella, even though we spoke openly of invading them after we’d subjugated Thessaly. And Philip took a stipend from them for a while, and threatened them at other times. He wanted to own both sides of the Bosporus. And the rest of the world, too.

I’m like a drunken carter roiling farther and farther from the track. My point is that the last thing we ever expected – even in the event of war with Athens – was for Athens to make common cause with Persia. Athenians did not love Persia, and even a rumour of ‘Persian gold’ was usually enough to send a politician into exile.

Philip’s speciality was to divide his opponents – split their alliances – and move on them one by one. He did it as automatically as a good swordsman makes a counter-cut. Wherever he saw a stable alliance, he sought to undermine it. He wasn’t above faked correspondence and he had a widespread intelligence net, assassins, bandits in his pay – we knew all this, because all the pages at one time or another were present for his diplomatic correspondence, which he read aloud when the foreigners were forbidden the court, such was his contempt for all the other nations of the earth.

Except Athens.

It had never occurred to him that he might be outplayed at his own game, but on the morning after Philip returned to Pella wounded and defeated, he discovered that Athens and Persia, his two mightiest opponents, had united; that they had added Thebes to the mix, with the best-trained infantry in Greece; and that his own allies were deserting in droves.

Later, Parmenio said that if the Athenians had put their fleet to sea and started plucking our colonies with Persian troops while the Thebans covered the passes into Greece, we’d have been wrecked by summer’s end.

But all too often – here’s the moral of my tale, lad, and no mistake – men carry the seeds of their own ruin in their own greatness. Demosthenes’ hatred of Macedon was rooted in a conservative, backward-looking idealism. He thought he was a democrat, but the men he idolised were the Athenians of Marathon. And although he was personally a very poor soldier, he – like many men – idolised what he was not – the hoplite. Demosthenes did not want to war Macedon down in an inglorious and efficient campaign of commerce-raiding and colony-snatching. That’s what Phokion or Philip or Parmenion, the great generals, would have done.

Demosthenes wanted us humbled the old way, man to man on the battlefield, our hoplites and theirs spear to spear, and may the better men teach the lesser what democracy really was.

Demosthenes was more than a hundred years out of date. But his foolish idealism saved Macedon.

At any rate, that early summer we knew that Athens had made a deal with Artaxerxes, and we were, in effect, surrounded. We waited – rebuilding forces as quickly as we could – for Athens and Thebes to invade. Sparta sat it out – but Sparta was a nonentity by then, more a fearsome name than a real power.

And around midsummer, after Olympias danced naked for Dionysus, after Philip discovered that his new bride Meda was pregnant, he gathered the main army – including all the royal companions, all the pezhetaeroi, all the mercenaries on whom he could lay hands and cash – and marched away like lightning, bound for the Chersonese.

He left Alexander, just seventeen years old, as regent. Antipater stood by him, with a regiment of cavalry and a regiment of Macedonian foot, a full taxeis – enough force to use on any rival baron or upstart noble who made trouble.

To our immense delight, as soon as the sound of Philip’s hobnailed sandals faded away into the south, the Thracians struck again – this time the Maedi, from up by Paeonia. Antipater concurred that a counter-attack was required, and the pages packed their war cloaks and gathered their horses.