Alexander came to rest at Phaselis, a coastal city which was later renowned for the possession of Achilles's original spear. The citizens were friendly, golden crowns of submission were offered and native guides were promised to lead the army eastwards along the seaboard. In such genial company, Alexander relaxed, finding time for an after-dinner revel in the course of which he threw garlands on to a statue of Theodectas, a citizen who had been well known in his lifetime as an orator in Greece and whose writings were familiar to at least one officer on Alexander's staff. Flushed with wine, the king joked and remarked that he owed Theodectas a gesture of honour 'as they both had associated with Aristotle and philosophy in their time'. More serious business, however, was soon forthcoming. From Parmenion's base in Phrygia, there arrived an Oriental called Sisines, bearing information of extreme urgency. The king took council with his Companion nobles; as a result, a trusted Orestid officer was disguised in native dress and despatched northwards with a verbal message for Parmenion's benefit. Local guides were to see him through the mountains: 'it was not thought fit to commit anything to writing in such a matter.' It is a separate question just what this matter was.

According to Alexander's friend Ptolemy, Sisines the Oriental had been sent by Darius to make contact with Alexander of Lyncestis, brother of the two highland princes who had been involved in the- killing of King Philip. Hitherto, this other Alexander, had prospered in the Macedonian army, holding one high command after another until he had been appointed general of the Thessalian cavalry, an esteemed position. Sisines had set out 'on a pretence of visiting the satrap of Phrygia', whereas 'in fact', he was under orders to meet the Lyncestian in Parmenion's camp, offer him 1,000 talents of gold and the kingship of Macedonia, and persuade him to murder his namesake the king. Letters, it was believed, had already passed from Lyncestian Alexander to a Lyncestian relation who had deserted to the Persian side. Sisines had fallen into Parmenion's hands and revealed the true purpose of his mission, and Parmenion had hurried him southwards through enemy territory so that the king could hear the truth for himself. Alexander, supported by his Companions, sent back orders that the suspect Lyncestian should be arrested; only a few weeks before, at Halicarnassus, a swallow had been seen twittering above the king's head, and the prophets had taken it as a warning against treachery by a close friend. Through the Lyncestian the omen had come true.

That was only Ptolemy's opinion, and it bristles with unlikelihood for anyone who is prepared to doubt the word of Alexander's friend; Ptolemy liked to include good omens in his history, but the sign of the swallow is perhaps too subtle not to rouse suspicion. Why had Parmenion risked sending such a valuable captive as Sisines through miles of enemy territory? Alexander's own precautions in reply, the native guides, the disguise, the verbal message, show the journey could not be undertaken lightly even without a prisoner and his guard in tow. Why was the official arrest of the Lyncestian so important that it could not be entrusted to writing for fear of enemy interception? Even if the enemy captured such written news, how could they exploit it? Parmenion had heard Sisines's story and was surely shrewd enough to keep a serious suspect under arrest until his king, some 200 miles and a frozen mountain barrier distant, could come to a decision. Why did Sisines ever reveal the 'true cause' of his mission rather than the 'pretext' that he was visiting his satrap in Phrygia, a plausible story which Parmenion could hardly have disbelieved? It is all most implausible, and it deserves to be suspected, for Alexander the Lyncestian was an officer of considerable mystery and embarrassment.

It was not just that his brothers had been killed on a charge of murdering Philip; in Seistan, four years later, he was to be brought out of close arrest and accused before the soldiery at a time of purge and crisis in the high command. Denounced as guilty, he was promptly speared to death, an awkward fact which Alexander's officers omitted from their histories. Ptolemy, it seems, never mentioned the Lyncestian again, content with his story of the arrest for treachery; Aristobulus, who wrote in his eighties and elaborately defended Alexander, seems to have taken an even more extreme stand. Most probably, he implied that the Lyncestian had been killed by an enemy before he ever reached Asia. During the siege of Thebes, he wrote, a Macedonian called Alexander who was leading a squadron of Thracians broke into a noble lady's house and demanded her money. He was a 'stupid and insolent man, of the same name as the King but in no way like him', and, proud daughter of a Greek general, she showed him to a well in the garden and pushed him down it, dropping boulders in afterwards to make sure that she killed him. For this act of defiance, Alexander spared her from slavery, a pardon which illustrated his chivalry. However, Alexander the Lyncestian was the commanding general of Thrace at the time and known to be present with an army of Thracians at Thebes; it is most unlikely that there were two Macedonians called Alexander in command of Thracians at the same time, and indeed the tone of Aristobulus's story suggests that he was disposing of the Lyncestian, whose true fate he omitted, as an unprincipled plunderer who went to a deserving death. As a contemporary and an eye-witness, Aristobulus has been used as an authority for Alexander's history, but on the subject of an officer, well known as a cavalry commander in Asia and as a victim of Seistan's purge, he could construct a monstrously apologetic falsehood. His history does not seem to be notable for accurate detail or for lists of high officers, except those reported already by Callisthenes who would anyway omit the Lyncestian's arrest from his panegyric. It is as if Aristobulus felt bound to conceal the truth, and he does not deserve to be trusted elsewhere.

Against Alexander's friends, there is once again a rival story, written up from soldiers' reminiscences, but its view of Sisines and the Lyncestian is very different. Sisines, it alleged, was an Oriental who had fled from Egypt to Philip's court and followed Alexander in a position of trust; during the winter in Lycia, he cannot, therefore, have been arrested as a spy from the Persian army. Not until the following autumn is anything said of his fate, for shortly before the battle of Issus, when Persians were threatening everywhere, he was suspected of receiving a letter from the Persian Vizier asking him to kill Alexander, but was himself killed by the Cretan archers 'doubtless on Alexander's orders'. The suspicion may have been true, his murder may only have been a security precaution but the fact that he was one of Alexander 's own courtiers puts Ptolemy's story of the Lycian affair in a very different light. If Sisines was a friend and a courtier, at once the implausibilities disappear. Some two hundred miles north of Phaselis, Parmenion must have been anxious about communications with his king; anxious, moreover, with good reason as Alexander himself had skirmished in the Lycian highlands to clear the one main road to his absent generals. Perhaps Parmenion wanted to check the plans and timing: perhaps news of a Persian threat had suddenly been intercepted. One, and only one, officer could be sure of passing unnoticed down a road flanked by the enemy and through a satrapy still in the Persians' hands: Sisines, the loyal Oriental, inconspicuous master of the necessary languages. Sisines, then, slipped southwards with a secret message; Alexander sent back one of his friends in native disguise, as a sign that the trusted messenger had fulfilled his mission and the accompanying orders were genuine. It was a dramatic piece of intelligence work, but it concerned strategy; it had nothing to do with the Lyncestian, let alone with his treachery, and here too an alternative story survived.