The landscape around him could hardly have been more evocative. At the harbour of the Achaeans, he could see the beach where the ships of the Greek heroes' fleet were believed to have lain when they came, the sons of the Achaeans, to recover fair-haired Helen and sack the citadel of Troy: beyond the beach stretched the dunes and hillocks where Homer's heroes were thought to have been buried and inland lay Troy itself, still set in its windswept plain. Alexander had aimed his landing at the country of his favourite Iliad;with his chosen companions, the new Achilles could go in search of the Homeric world and begin his crusade with nothing less than a pilgrimage.

By the time of his visit, Troy had long decayed to the status of a village, best known for its temple and priests of Athena. Homer's 'holy city of Ilion', Troy VIIA when Schliemann found it, lay buried under the debris of some eight hundred years, and if Troy still mattered to the Greeks whom Alexander led, it was more as the centre of a murderous game of hide-and-seek than as a memorial of the heroic past. The story was a strange one. Because the Thessalian hero Ajax had murdered the prophetess Cassandra at the end of the Trojan war, oracles had ordered the nobles of the Hundred Families of Locri in Thessaly to send two virgins yearly to the Dardanelles and leave them to make their own way through to Troy. By tradition, the natives would come out to catch and kill them, armed with axes and stones, and only if the virgins escaped would they enter Athena's temple by a secret passage and live there in safety, dressed in a slave's robe and shorn of their hair until a replacement managed to relieve them. The rite was to last for a thousand years, but at some point in Alexander's life, it is known to have been interrupted. As ruler of the Thessalians, it was perhaps Alexander who first dispensed his subjects from their duties.

Virgins apart, at every point on his road Alexander attended respectfully to ceremony. Among the Greeks it was commonly believed that if one member of an enterprise were to offend or neglect the appropriate gods, his fellows were all liable for the consequences; as king, allied leader and general Alexander always observed religious custom carefully and suited his sacrifice to his situation. So on his way up to Troy he continued his link with the first Greek invasion in the Homeric past; he paid heroic sacrifice at the graves of Ajax and Achilles and honoured them as worthy predecessors, for on first invading Asia it was the favour of the divine Greek heroes of the Trojan war which he thought most relevant to his campaign.

At Troy itself the citizens were uncertain how to receive him. A king called Alexander, they heard, was approaching, and no doubt, they guessed, he would wish to see the relics of his namesake, Homer's Alexander, better known as Paris of Troy. But when they offered to show him Paris's lyre, 'for that lyre', he is said to have answered, 'I care little, but I have come for the lyre of Achilles with which, as Homer says, he would sing of the prowess and glories of brave men.' Homer's Alexander, keener on women than war, was not to the taste of his Macedonian namesake; Achilles was the hero with whom this Alexander was identified, but unlike Achilles, he had no Homer to immortalize his name. All the more need, therefore, to make his own view of himself explicit, and down to the smallest detail, the visit to Troy was to leave no doubt of his personal preference.

On entering the village, Alexander was crowned with a golden crown by his helmsman, as a tribute, presumably, to his control of the steering in mid-sea. However, the helmsman's name meant more than his crown: he was called Menoitios, and after Troy he never appeared in history again, but from Homer's Iliad,Menoitios was well known as the father of Patroclus, Achilles's closest friend; the man had been chosen, once, for the sake of a name which suited the moment, and after more crowns of gold had been offered by local Greek dignitaries to pledge their submission, Alexander began to show them how deeply he felt for such Homeric niceties.

Anointing himself with oil, he ran naked among his companions to the tombstone of Achilles and honoured it with a garland, while Hephaistion did likewise for the tomb of Patroclus. It was a remarkable tribute, uniquely paid, and it is also Hephaistion's first mention in Alexander's career. Already the two were intimate, Patroclus and Achilles even to those around them; the comparison would remain to the end of their days and is proof of their life as lovers, for by Alexander's time, Achilles and Patroclus were agreed to have enjoyed the relationship which Homer himself had never directly mentioned. Then, at an altar of Zeus, the theme of the new Achilles was stressed again. Alexander sacrificed and prayed to Priam, legendary king of Troy, begging him to stay his anger from this new descendant of his murderer, for Achilles's son had killed old Priam at just such an altar of Zeus.

It remained to honour Athena's temple, and again Alexander's pious rivalry did not desert him. He sacrificed and dedicated his own suit of armour to the goddess; in return, he took from the priests the finest relics of heroic times, a shield and a set of weapons which were thought to date from the days of the Trojan war. No gesture could speak more clearly of his personal ideals. Homer's Achilles, too, had received divine armour of his own before going out to battle, none more famous than his shield 'well worked on every side, edged with a triple rim of gleaming metal and held by a strap of silver; five layers in all, their face worked with many wonders'. Alexander had now equalled his hero, and such was his favour for the Trojan shield and armour that they would accompany him to war as far as India and back, carried before him by his bodyguard-at-arms. The shield's design must have been extremely impressive, and posterity would spend much ingenuity in guessing its probable emblems: dressed in his hallowed armour, Alexander would live out the splendour of another age.

With the receipt of the sacred shield and armour, the Trojan visit came to an end. In all Alexander's career, there is no behaviour more memorable, none more eloquent of his personal ideals. Only in the fictitious Romanceof his exploits is he made to voice disappointment in what he saw: the river Scamander, he was made to say, was so small that he could jump across it, and Ajax's 'sevenfold ox-skin shield' was scarcely more remarkable. Contemporaries had no reservations about their king's keen interest, Troy, in return, was granted handsome privileges, not least a new democracy, and later a pupil of Aristotle, a man, 'with a most inquiring mind', would write a pamphlet entitled The Sacrifice at Iliott.Unfortunately it has not survived, for the tide implies he had realized the visit's importance.

Throughout, Alexander's purpose was written large in his detailed behaviour. It is true that the Persian king Xerxes, for whose wrongs Alexander was taking revenge, had visited Troy 150 years earlier and also paid sacrifice before launching out on the Dardanelles, but Xerxes's offerings had been differently planned and arranged and nothing shows that Alexander had had his enemy's precedent in mind: no Persian king had steered his ship in person or run naked round his hero's tomb. Alexander's visit was Greek and spontaneous; it turned on a link with the Trojan war and, above all, in its every tribute it had evoked the hero Achilles, his fellow seeker for fame and glory. Publicly Achilles had his relevance, not least for the Thessalian troops. Thessalian horsemen, it was later said, had ridden in mock battle round Achilles's tomb and invoked his chariot's horses by their names, calling them to their side for the coming war. But to Alexander, lover of Homer and rival of Achilles, the visit surely appealed more to his personality than his politics. The new Achilles, facing his sternest test, had come first to honour the old, not for motives of power or idle glamour, but because Homer's hero had fired his imagination, and as a Macedonian king he lived by ideals which came close to the old Homeric world. The visit to Troy befitted a true romantic, and the romance was a part of how Alexander wished himself to be seen. The lesson, moreover, would not be forgotten.