Fears for the succession had twice divided Alexander from Philip, but it is one thing to profit as a father's heir, quite another to kill him for the sake of his inheritance. At most Alexander was later suspected by Greek gossip; there was no evidence whatsoever against him, and theories about his presumed ruthlessness can hardly fill such a gap. A ruthless parricide would have done better to encourage a secret coup, so much safer and neater for the seizure of a throne which nearly proved elusive. A wedding festival for foreign guests was an absurdly clumsy moment for Philip's aspiring heir to stage his murder, as its witnesses would quickly spread the news and inflame the many foreign subjects he would have to retain. Alexander's first year as king showed what dangers this could mean. Whether Alexander could ever have brought himself to connive at Philip's murder is a question which only faith or prejudice can pretend to answer; they had quarrelled, certainly, but Alexander had also saved his father's life on a previous occasion, and there is no evidence to prove that he hated Philip's memory, let alone that he claimed credit for his death. Arguments from timing and benefit make Olympias's guilt a probability, Alexander's only a speculation; it is more relevant, as Alexander himself was aware, that they could be applied no less forcefully elsewhere.

'The Persians say that nobody yet has killed his own father or mother, but that whenever such a crime seems to have happened, then it is inevitable that inquiry will prove that the so-called son was either adopted or illegitimate. For they say it is unthinkable that a true parent should ever be killed by his true son.' To the Persians, as seen by a Greek observer, Alexander's complicity would have been unthinkable on a point of human principle; to Alexander it was excluded on stronger grounds. The Persians, he said, had designed the murder themselves. 'My father died from conspirators whom you and your people have organized, as you have boasted in your letters to one and all': so Alexander would write in a published despatch to the Persian king four years later, and the reference to public letters proves that the Persians' boast, at least, was a fact of history. If benefit alone is a proof of guilt, then the Persians had as much reason to murder Philip as did any outraged wife or son, for their empire, an easy eleven days' march from Macedonia, had just been invaded, and if Philip could be killed, his army could be expected to fall apart in the usual family quarrels. Persian boasts, however, are no guarantee of the truth, especially when they could have been made to attract allies against Philip's heir. Of the murder's beneficiaries, at home and abroad, it is Olympias who remains most suspect; her guilt will never be proved, and the role of her son should not be guessed, but it is all too plausible that Philip was murdered by the wife he had tried to discard.

If the murder can be questioned, it is wrong to imply it can ever be solved, for even to contemporaries it remained a famous mystery. Not so its likely effects, for Philip was dead, the 'man whose like had never been seen in Europe', and there was no reason to suppose that his twenty-year-old son would ever claim his inheritance from the feuds of brother against brother, father against son which a change of king had always inspired. But within five years, that same boy would have left his father's extraordinary achievements far behind; he could look back on Philip, fairly, as a lesser man: he had overthrown an empire which had stood for two hundred years; he had become a thousand times richer than any man in the world, and he was ready for a march which seemed superhuman to those who freely worshipped him as a god. History has often seemed the study of facts beyond our control. With Alexander it would come to depend on the whims and choices of a twenty-five-year-old man, who ended by ruling some two million square miles.

If his effects, necessarily, were swift, their consequences would prove more lasting. 'We sit round our sea,' Socrates the philosopher had told his friends, 'like frogs around a frog-pond.' Greek art had already reached to Paris; Greeks had worked as craftsmen near modern Munich or lived in the lagoons of the Adriatic south of Venice, but no Greek from the mainland had ever been east of Susa or visited the steppes of central Asia, and the frog-pond remained the Mediterranean sea. As a result of Alexander, Greek athletics would come to be performed in the burning heat of the Persian gulf; the tale of the Trojan horse would be told on the Oxus and among the natives of the Punjab; far from the frog-pond, Greeks would practise as Buddhists and Homer would be translated into an Indian language; when a north-west Indian city came to be excavated, the love story of Cupid and Psyche was found to have been carved on ivory and left beside the elephant-goads of a local Indian mahout. Alexander's story does not end with warfare or with the problems of his personality; had he chosen differently, the ground would never have been cleared for a whole new strand in Asia to grow from his army's reaping.

Personally, his fascination was more immediate, and least of all did it die with him. His tent, his ring, his cups, his horse or his corpse remained the ambition of successors who even imitated the way he had held his head. One example can serve for them all, for once, on the eve of battle he appeared in a dream to Pyrrhus, boldest of Greek generals, and when Pyrrhus asked what help a ghost could promise, 'I lend you', he answered, 'my name.' True to the story, it was the name which retained a living fascination for two thousand years. It attracted the youthful Pompey, who aspired to it even in his dress; it was toyed with by the young Augustus, and it was used against the emperor Trajan; among poets, Petrarch attacked it, Shakespeare saw through it; Christians resented it, pagans maintained it, but to a Victorian bishop it seemed the most admirable name in the world. Grandeur could not resist it; Louis XIV, when young, danced as Alexander in a ballet; Michelangelo laid out the square on Rome's Capitol in the design of Alexander's shield; Napoleon kept Alexander's history as bedside reading, though it is only a legend that he dressed every morning before a painting of Alexander's grandest victory. As a name, it had the spell of youth and glory: it was Julius Caesar who once looked up from a history of Alexander, thought for a while and then burst into tears 'because Alexander had died at the age of thirty-two, king of so many peoples, and he himself had not yet achieved any brilliant success'.

Alexander, then, is that rare and complex figure, a hero, and in his own lifetime, he wished to be seen as the rival of his society's heroic ideal. Through the continual interest of the educated West in the Greek past and through the spread, mostly in Oriental languages, of a legendary romance of Alexander's exploits, his fame reached from Iceland to China; the Well of Immortality, submarines, the Valley of Diamonds and the invention of a flying machine are only a few of the fictitious adventures which became linked with his name in a process which each age continued according to its preoccupations; when the Three Kings of the Orient came to pay homage to Jesus, Melchior's gold, said Jewish legend, was in fact an offering from Alexander's treasure. Nor has he been forgotten by ordinary men at either end of his empire. Because of the spread of the Romance of Alexander*there are Afghan chieftains who still claim to be descended from his blood. Seventy years ago they would go to war with the red flag they believed to be his banner, while on stormy nights in the Aegean, the island fishermen of Lesbos still shout down the sea with their question, 'Where is Alexander the Great?', and on giving their calming answer, 'Alexander the Great lives and is King', they rest assured that the waves will subside.