In the name of his Greek allies, Alexander thus destroyed one of the three great powers in Greece that had threatened him. Men remembered, it was said, how Thebes had once abetted Persia in the distant days of the Persian invasion, and the memory was a cunning one to revive at a moment when Alexander was about to invade the Persian empire as if to avenge their ancient insults against the Greeks. If his allied council did not vote at once for Thebes's ruin, they would naturally have decreed their approval of an act which they were too frightened to condemn; only the Arcadians had moved to help Thebes, but they promptly sentenced their own leaders to death, relieved that their troops had not crossed the isthmus. Others did likewise, but there remained the power centre of Athens, and here Alexander intervened.

Despite rumours, witnesses even, of Alexander's 'death' on the Danube, Athens had not sent troops to the Thebans' cause. Alexander still controlled the ports of the Dardanelles through his fleet and his advance force, and possibly his ships were already detaining the corn fleet from the Black Sea, on which Athens depended for her food supply. Open assistance to Thebes would have been repaid by more rigorous blocking of this lifeline, so she had stayed neutral, even if Demosthenes had sent money and weapons from the presents given him by the Persian king. Besides, Athenians had hated Thebes for almost two hundred years and their rapprochement was only a thing of the past four years, whereas Thebes herself had voted to destroy a helpless Athens only seventy years before, a memory which had not died easily. At the time of the sack the city was celebrating a religious festival and no Greek army would disrupt honours to the gods for the sake of a march to war. Fresh from his Theban terrorism, Alexander was nonetheless keen to teach Athens a lesson. He could not easily risk a siege of her long walls and he was unwilling to outrage a city whose fleet and reputation he needed to use against Persia, so he merely ordered the surrender of the generals and politicians most patently opposed to him. The list of his victims was disputed, but a pleading embassy from Athens persuaded him to moderate his terms and he was content that Charidemus alone should leave Athens. This revision was perhaps true to legal propriety, for alone of his enemies Charidemus had not been born an Athenian and may not have been made a full honorary citizen, so he could be forced into exile without infringing the city's laws. In practice it was a bad mistake, for Athens's most seasoned general thus fled into service with the Persian king, and two other of Alexander's suspects, both of them citizens, followed of their own accord. He should have seized them, citizens or not, while he could; a year later, they were rousing Asian resistance, and their escape, more than any ruin of Thebes, must have seemed regrettable to the Macedonian camp.

On this high note of terror, Alexander returned to Macedonia in late October, secure on all four frontiers and able to plan for a full-scale invasion of Asia. Like his father, he prefaced his march with pomp. The annual festival of Zeus and the Muses was due to be celebrated in the border town of Dion, and this year he invited friends, officers and even ambassadors from his allied Greek cities to share it. An enormous tent was put up to hold a hundred sofas, and for nine days the court caroused and enjoyed the arts, properly careless of a treasury whose monetary debt had almost been paid off by booty from Thebes and the Danube. The entire army were given presents and animals for sacrifice, which they ate after they had offered a part to the gods. The officers received presents according to their influence and more estates as a bribe for their loyalties.

It was also a time for marriages between the noble families of highland and lowland. Both Parmenion and Antipater had eligible daughters, and they suggested to Alexander that he too should marry and father a son and heir before invading Asia; Alexander refused, perhaps because he was wary of his father's matrimonial muddle, perhaps because he did not wish to risk an heir through whom his elderly generals might try and rule. Antipater's daughter he gave to one of his Bodyguards, Parmenion's to an Elimiot baron whose brothers mattered in his army commands. A host of other marriages followed, some to heal old wounds, others to produce the

officer-class of the future, but Parmenion and Antipater did not go unrewarded.

Antipater, nearing sixty, was to stay as general over the Balkans and Europe; Parmenion, already sixty-five years old, was to be deputy-commander of the army with authority over the whole left wing in the line of battle. One of his sons, Philotas, was to command the Companion Cavalry, another son the Shield Bearers; a nephew, or cousin, led half of the Mounted Scouts, and the leader of the Elimiot foot-brigade was now his son-in-law. Three other infantry officers and a prominent cavalry colonel may already have been his close friends, and yet there is nothing to prove that Alexander had been compelled to promote Parmenion's friends and family against his own wishes. The high command reflected Parmenion's influence, but it was hardly in his grip, and nothing suggests that king and deputy were already at odds with each other.

If anything, the opposite was true. There were many among the Companion nobles who opposed an Asian invasion, but Parmenion alone urged Alexander on, perhaps because he had already seen the country for himself. There was, however, an alternative, far away in the west; Alexander answered it by making plans for war on two fronts at once. While his main army crossed the Dardanelles into Asia, a transport fleet and twelve warships were to sail with cavalry and infantry to southern Italy under the command of his brother-in-law King Alexander of Epirus, brother of Olympias, who thus left his wife with a baby daughter and a son after only two years of marriage. Through Greek Companions, Alexander knew the political balance of the Greek west; the Greek colony of Tar-entum had invited his help against the neighbouring tribesmen and he had ordered his brodier-in-law to intervene in the interests of Greek settlements in Italy. The problems of piracy in the Adriatic had already attracted his attention, and he had corresponded with Rome on the clearing of the seas; within three years, Rome, which Aristotle's pupils described as a Greek city, would have sworn an alliance with his brother-in-law's invasion and the Macedonian cause in Italy seemed to be established.

It was a brave moment, the spreading of Macedonia's armies through the Greek cities and against barbarians at either edge of the Mediterranean world, and of course there were courtiers who mistrusted it. As Alexander completed his gifts of land and money to friends, his faithful Perdiccas, leader of one of the two Orestid brigades, felt bound to question him: 'And for yourself, my lord,' he is said to have asked, 'what are you leaving?' 'My hopes,' replied Alexander. It is worth considering how those hopes deserved to be rated.

CHAPTER SIX

As an idea, a Greek campaign against Persia was nothing new. For more than sixty years it had featured as a theme for professional orators and pamphleteers and it had been repeatedly urged on Philip and other outsiders by the eloquent letters of the ageing Athenian Isocrates, who on his own admission wrote for display and was not taken seriously. These paper expeditions ignored the balance of power in a divided Greece, and they did not reconcile the claims and rewards of an outside leader with the hopes of Greek allies who were bound to be fighting as subordinates; their advice was academic, and as Catherine the Great once told Diderot, the advice of academics 'existe seulement sur le papier qui souffre tout'. Reality would prove very different; the Greeks would have recognized it only too clearly as Alexander prepared to set out.