He hit me across the face with his hand, and ordered me to spend the night standing on my feet.

Which, of course, I did.

A month later Philip was back. Another failed siege in the Chersonese – another Athenian proxy victory, and now the Persian fleet was gathering, or so men said. It had been a summer of manoeuvre and near defeat for Macedon, and the rumour was that Thebes was ready to join Persia and Athens against us. And the western Thracians, unimpressed by Alexander’s near extermination of the Maeti, were threatening to close the passes of the north-east against us. Or perhaps hold them open for Thebes.

Amid all this, Philip came home. He embraced Alexander publicly and praised him to the skies – after all, as Philip was the first to admit, Alexander had won the year’s only victory, and turned a raw phalanx into a veteran one.

Then Philip took the new phalanx and marched it away, and changed Alexandropolis to Philipopolis, and we were left to wonder. And to raise fresh troops.

All winter, Philip marched and counter-marched – he lacked a fleet, and he had to keep the Athenians and their surrogates at arm’s length with his army. He sent letters – brilliant letters, full of advice for his son the regent. Some provoked a smile from the regent – and many a frown.

I read them to the prince, because I was one of the inner circle – my courage undoubted, my place secure, or so I thought. I would read him Philip’s letters while he wrote out his own correspondence – he had secretaries but preferred to write for himself. Philip’s advice, like that of most parents, could be internally contradictory – I recall one letter that admonished the regent for attempting to bribe the magnates of inner Macedon, and then in the next line recommended bribery as the tool to use with Thracians. And every time we managed to raise and equip a new corps of infantry, he’d summon them to his field army, leaving Alexander without the means to march against the renewed threat from the Thracians.

The second time this happened, when we’d stripped the countryside of farm boys to form a fourth taxeis of foot companions only to lose it, Alexander threw his ivory stylus at the wall, and it stuck in the plaster.

‘He wants everything for himself. He will leave nothing for me!’ he shouted.

Certainly Antipater was no longer allowed an army. Even Drako’s Thessalians were called away to the field army.

In the spring, Philip turned without warning and marched on the Thracians – a deeper raid than we had undertaken, and with no traitor to lure them out to easy victory, this time the Thracians stayed in their hill forts and fought for time. Philip captured a few towns and lost some others, and began to move out of the hills in three columns – but the centre column made a mistake, or moved too fast, and was ambushed. Philip got another spear in the thigh – the same thigh – and the line infantry got badly chewed up.

Philip came straight back from defeat to Pella. He hadn’t won a major victory in two years, and the vultures were gathering. Defeat at the hands of the Thracians was unthinkable – it gave his enemies ideas.

But Philip had gone after the Thracians while leaving Parmenio and Attalus, the king’s left-hand man, with his best troops – now he concentrated his armies, and in effect abandoned the campaign in the Chersonese. In later years we never admitted to this, but Athens had beaten us, or rather, Athens backed by the threat of Persia.

On the other hand, although Philip didn’t admit it to us at court, he’d decided to risk his empire on one blow. To go for the jugular, like a hunting dog facing a boar.

The Greeks like to maintain that Macedon was an oppressor, a barbarian force from outside marching through sacred Greece with blood and tyranny, but in truth, they hounded Philip unmercifully and left him little choice. Demosthenes and his renewed Athenian empire insisted on facing Macedon, where in fact we might have been allies. We might have unified against Persia. And we did, in the end. Our way.

In the autumn, when we heard daily rumours of a Persian fleet in the Dardanelles and an Athenian fleet ready for sea, Philip marched – not south and east to the Chersonese, although that’s what he told all the ambassadors gathered like vultures in the capital. He left Alexander to deal with them – and Alexander did. For days, Alexander sat beside his father’s throne and insisted that the army was on manoeuvres in the flat country by Amphilopolis – that his father would hold winter court at Pella, that they intended to dedicate a new set of statues at Delphi together. The statues were shown, the ambassadors sent their dispatches.

It was about this time that the affair of Pausanias came to a head for the first time. Let me say that we were all dissatisfied, as are all young men are who are made to behave as children when they are blooded warriors. We continued to be pages, and the old men at court treated us like pages. In fact, Attalus wanted us all sent back to the Gardens of Midas, even though Aristotle was gone. He said that we were vain, bad for the prince’s morals – he said a great many things. We said that fat old Attalus hated us because his own useless cousin Diomedes had been refused entry – another complex story in the web of intrigue that dominated court. Diomedes was a pretty boy, and events proved him a good enough fighter, but somehow he had a reputation as . . . well, as an effeminate. And the pages refused to have him. Attalus vented his outrage on us every way he could – I took a great deal of it, because Antipater employed me as a staff officer even while I still had to do all my duties as a page.

Young Pausanias had been one of us, and then he joined the royal companions and went off to serve with the men. And he was Philip’s bed-warmer on campaign – this was not held to be dishonourable, although it led to some malicious humour. At any rate, Pausanias was wounded in the fight against the Thracians.

In the same fight, Diomedes supposedly stood his ground over the king after he took a spear and went down – held his ground, saved the king’s life. Mind you, I never heard any man but Attalus tell that story. But however it happened, after the Thracian campaign Diomedes was invited to join the companions, and he replaced Pausanias completely in the king’s affections.

Yes – yes, this really is how Macedon was run. Hard as this may be to believe. Philip had a new favourite every week, sometimes. Men, women – jokes were made about his horses. But he was king, he was in his prime and he had no intention of living anything less than the fullest possible life.

But Pausanias was sent back to the pages. It shouldn’t have been possible. One was promoted to a regular regiment from the schoolroom, but no one could remember a man being sent back to the boys.

And we had Attalus at court, and he was poisonous to me, and meaner to Pausanias – insisted he get all the worst duties, made him cut meat for the cooks. A rumour went round that he had been paid money to service grown men among the companions. Not hard to guess where that rumour started.

I didn’t like Pausanias much. He was, in most ways, the instrument of his own destruction. He was vain, horribly fragile, weak and easily used. But I was one of the captains of the pages by then, and I did my best when drawing up the duty to soften the blows from Attalus, who, despite being the king’s left-hand man, was still nowhere near as big a magnate as my father. I went home for the Festival of Demeter and laid it all before my father, and he must have done something because for the moment, Attalus backed off me and mine.

But the pages hated being treated like boys when we knew we were men, and as we thought, so Alexander thought. Every letter full of advice from his father reminded him that he was regent under Philip’s will – and being stripped of troops seemed to be an insult, although from the distance of years, I wonder if Philip simply needed the troops. Hard to know, now.