The Book of Ancient Bastards (7 page)

Bastard as Exemplar for an Age

(356–323 B.C.)

Alexander ordered all but those who had fled to the temples to be put to death and the buildings to be set on fire. . . . 6,000 fighting-men were slaughtered within the city’s fortifications. It was a sad spectacle that the furious king then provided for the victors: 2,000 Tyrians, who had survived the rage of the tiring Macedonians, now hung nailed to crosses all along the huge expanse of the beach.
—Quintus Curtius Rufus, Roman historian

Held up throughout the ages as a shining example of both the great conqueror and the philosopher-king, Alexander III of Macedonia was considered by many to be the greatest monarch of the ancient world.

He was also a homicidal megalomaniac who developed a god complex to go with a drinking problem, likely had a hand in killing his own father, murdered one of his own generals in a drunken rage, conquered the Persian Empire, and unleashed the Macedonian war machine on an unprepared world, resulting in the deaths of untold numbers of people.

Born to parents who could barely stand the sight of each other by the time he came along, Alexander was in his teens and already trained as a cavalry officer and a leader of men when his father, Macedonian king and bastard Philip II, took a new, young wife, whom he immediately got pregnant. When the girl delivered a boy whom Philip promptly designated his heir, Alexander and his crazy snake-cult-priestess mother Olympias fled Macedonia for her native country of Epirus (modern Albania), where they cooled their heels until Philip was assassinated later that same year. Alexander and his mother probably had a little something to do with that. Within weeks, Philip’s new wife, her opportunistic nobleman father, and her infant son had all been quietly put to death. And then Alexander was on to Asia, leading an army that Philip had built, conquering territories left and right.

When he entered Egypt, the priests of Amun there hailed him as a god himself and the son of their god, a connection that played to both his vanity and his political need to lend legitimacy to his conquests (after all, who can argue with the reasons of a god-on-earth for anything he does?).

The further he got from Macedonia, the more binge drinking he and his senior officers did, and the worse Alexander’s god complex became. One evening, he got into a drunken brawl with one of his generals, a veteran named Cleitus, who had saved Alexander’s life in battle. In the heat of the moment, Alexander killed him on the spot.

Overcome with remorse once he sobered up, Alexander contemplated suicide but was talked out of it by his entourage, who convinced him that Cleitus was disloyal and since Alexander was a god, he was therefore infallible.

When he finally died of a combination of malaria and exhaustion at the age of thirty-three, Alexander left a changed world behind him. Whether or not it was for the better is up for debate.

Tyrian Bastard

Alexander and his army found the Phoenician port city of Tyre an island and left it a peninsula. Unwilling to bypass the city and allow its Persian-allied navy to harass his supply lines while he pushed into Mesopotamia and onward to Persia, Alexander had his engineers spend nearly a year building a causeway, then a road, in order to take the city. The Tyrians fought back ingeniously and heroically. Alexander responded with the actions quoted at the start of this chapter: thousands killed outright, over 13,000 taken as slaves—the mailed fist in the not-so-velvet glove of a conqueror.

Sometimes the Bastard Doesn’t Fall Far from the Tree, Redux

(CA. 375–316 B.C.)

The night before the consummation of their marriage, Olympias dreamed that a thunderbolt fell upon her body, which kindled a great fire, whose divided flames dispersed themselves all about, and then were extinguished. And Philip, some time after he was married, dreamt that he sealed up his wife’s body with a seal, whose impression, as be fancied, was the figure of a lion.
—Plutarch, Greek historian

Olympias was a princess of Epirus (modern Albania) whose father married her off young to Philip of Macedonia around the time Philip seized the throne. While it may not have been a love match, it was definitely a union between two extremely gifted, ambitious, and passionate people.

Doting on the son who ensured her power base at the Macedonian court (Alexander), Olympias grew cold toward her husband once it became clear that he had not the slightest interest in remaining faithful to her.

For her part, Olympias could be hard to take: tall, imposing, a force of nature with her temper and her strong will, she also made a point of creeping out the Macedonians with whom she came into contact, especially by playing up her status as a high priestess of an Epirot snake-worshipping cult. Soon she and Philip were barely speaking to each other, and Alexander, along with his younger sister Cleopatra (no, not that Cleopatra), was tugged back and forth between two very strong parental personalities.

Finally tiring of Olympias, Philip married a girl scarcely older than his own son, and soon got her pregnant with his child. When this new wife produced a baby boy, Olympias, Alexander, and many of their followers fled to her brother’s kingdom of Epirus, lying low there for nearly a year before Philip was assassinated in 336 B.C. With so much to gain from her husband’s death, and given her reputation for ruthlessness, it is beyond likely that Olympias had a hand in the plot that killed Philip.

What’s in a Bastard’s Name?

Originally named Myrtale, she took the regnal name of Olympias when her new husband’s chariot won an event at that year’s Olympic Games. Taking the name ensured that the honor of a Macedonian victory at the games would be celebrated for as long as people spoke her name.

The first thing Olympias did upon returning to the Macedonian capital of Pella was to have her rival and Philip’s new son killed, along with the girl’s father, a Macedonian nobleman who had set up the match hoping to inch closer to the throne and power himself. That wasn’t the end. Anyone who posed a threat to her son’s claim to the throne met with a quick and ruthless demise.

Within two years, the son on whom she so doted had gone to conquer Persia, never to return. Olympias was left at the Macedonian court, along with the general charged to run things in Alexander’s absence, Antipater. The two quickly grew to hate each other.

Once Alexander was dead, Olympias strove mightily to get his wife, his mistress, and both of the sons they had borne him (Olympias’s grandsons) safely home to Macedonia, where she could protect them and the dynasty. Olympias died for her cause, at one point invading Thrace (in the European part of Turkey) at the head of an army to try to free her captured grandchildren. When she lost in battle and fell into the hands of old Antipater’s son, she got what she had doled out to so many others: execution. She was killed in 316 B.C., and with this formidable barbarian queen out of the way, Alexander’s wife, mistress, and sons didn’t stand a chance. They were each in their turn quietly murdered.

Sage Old Bastard Who Died in His Bed

(CA. 367–ca. 283 B.C.)

[Ptolemy] built a temple in honour of Alexander, in greatness and stateliness of structure becoming the glory and majesty of that king; and in this repository he laid the body, and honoured the exequies [funeral ceremonies] of the dead with sacrifices and magnificent shows, agreeable to the dignity of a demigod. Upon which account [Ptolemy] was deservedly honoured, not only by men, but by the gods themselves . . . . And the gods themselves, for his virtue, and kind obliging temper towards all, rescued him out of all his hazards and difficulties, which seemed insuperable.
—Diodorus Siculus, Sicilian Greek geographer and historian

The most successful of Alexander the Great’s successor-generals, Ptolemy I Soter (“Father”) succeeded because he was shrewd, calculating, and able to control the political narrative in an age when spin-doctoring was first coming into its own. We’re talking, of course, about the Hellenistic Age, the period that began with the death of Alexander the Great in Babylon (323 B.C.) and ended with the suicide of the last Hellenistic ruler, Cleopatra VII of Egypt, in 30 B.C.

During the three hundred years that make up the Hellenistic Age, a whole lot of ambitious and unscrupulous people (all of them related by blood in one way or another, frequently several times over) did a whole lot of awful things to each other, and all in the name of furthering their own political aims.

The seemingly inevitable wars that followed Alexander’s death are known collectively as the Wars of the Diadochoi (“Successors”). In dizzying progression, this ruthless pack of scoundrels picked each other off, the survivors of each round of violence circling each other, looking for an advantage, making and breaking alliances as it suited them.

That’s why the phrase “Hellenistic monarch” tends to be basically interchangeable with the word “bastard” for scholars who study the period.

Bastard Son, Bastard Brother?

Ptolemy is listed all over the historical narrative of the period as “Ptolemy, Son of Lagus.” No further mention is made of Lagus anywhere except this brief mention as Ptolemy’s father. His mother was a distant relative of the Macedonian royal house and the rumored one-time mistress of Philip, father of Alexander the Great. It is possible (perhaps even likely) that Ptolemy’s actual father was Philip himself, making Ptolemy Alexander’s bastard half-brother. This would help explain why a boy eleven years older than the young prince was listed as one of his childhood companions, and even went into exile with Alexander when the prince fled to Epirus shortly before the murder of his (their?) father.

When Ptolemy, childhood companion and advisor to the young Alexander, was offered a command as a royal governor in the aftermath of Alexander’s death, he chose Egypt: rich, fertile, both a breadbasket and a gold mine, easily defended because the deserts that surround it made travel across them by large military forces nearly impossible. From there, he ventured out to steal Alexander’s body from the caravan taking it home to Macedonia. This was a real political coup: control of Alexander’s body, to which he publicly paid every possible honor, gave Ptolemy the opportunity to set himself up as Alexander’s most legitimate successor. And this is what he did, for the most part settling back and allowing the successors to kill each other off for the next four decades.

Ptolemy’s greatest accomplishment wasn’t founding a dynasty that lasted for three centuries in Egypt, though. And it wasn’t writing a history of his famous king, used by countless historians during the next millennium (thereby allowing Ptolemy to by and large set the narrative of not just Alexander’s life story, but his own). His greatest accomplishment lay in doing what no other Diadochus managed to do: he died in bed, of old age. Truly a coup for a bastard in an age of bastardry!