Pretty accurate, as it turned out.
So I wasn’t going to run my estates myself.
Menander and all the ‘New Comedy’ is filled with bad stewards and rapacious managers stealing from lord and peasant alike. Those stereotypes exist for a reason. Heron didn’t want my unlimited trust. He wanted a system of checks and balances to keep him honest. He was a fair man, and he knew that if I rode away and ignored him – well, he’d be under strain.
So for two weeks we hammered out a new administration of my estates, with what was, in effect, a regency council. Heron ran the council, and I got his oldest son, Laodekes, a vacancy as a page. In effect, I ennobled Heron, and his son became my hostage.
That’s Macedon, friend.
At some point in my time at home, I met Nike. She was a house servant – by no means a slave, but rather the daughter of one of Heron’s closest friends, brought in to learn the management of a house before she had her own. She was fifteen, with Aphrodite’s figure and a nose that aimed at the outright conquest of her face. She was pretty sharp – she knew exactly the border between humour and disrespect to her lord, and she walked it carefully, teasing me a little, trying to get me to smile.
I was not doing very well, those weeks after Pater died.
But I liked her for trying, and all of a sudden, in less than a week, I was following her around the house while she did her work. She was the only person I really wanted to see. I’d never been in love before, so the whole thing rather took me by surprise.
I don’t remember how long into the week it was, but I remember standing on the terrace behind the kitchen. She had on a good chiton – good linen – with a zone of braided silk. She always looked like a lady – but the lines were not as clear, then, and her people were not peasants.
She had an apron on, and a scarf in her hair, and a heavy bronze knife in her fist. And what I remember is the moment she turned on me, knife in hand. ‘Shouldn’t you be working?’ she asked. ‘Your father worked all day on these estates.’
I didn’t know what to say, and so, in the best tradition of seventeen-year-old boys, I stammered a great deal.
She laughed – I remember watching her laugh, and there and then, I understood. I wantedher. Up to that moment, somehow I had thought I wanted us to be friends. Or just sought her good opinion.
‘I’ll go and work,’ I muttered – or something like it.
‘Good.’ She nodded. Then, almost sly, out of the corner of her mouth, with the slightest glance out of the corner of her eye – ‘I like to ride – when the work is done.’
A woman who liked to ride? Clearly the gods had made her for me.
We rode out every evening until I left for Pella. I was no blushing virgin, and she burned hot enough that I assume she was not, either. But we had more than lust. The son of Lagus was not going to marry a servant girl, but I went to her father, paid her bride price and when I left for Pella, she and a slave-maid rode with me. And Nike she surely was.
Somehow, I also found time to read Isocrates end to end. It was, after all, a royal command. I read it, and I caught fire. We could do this thing. It was the Thracian campaign writ large – the biggest challenge of men and logistics since the dawn of the world. I read and reread the philosopher’s words, and began to dream of a new world, where we younger men conquered Persia. I could see it.
The first night back in Pella, Alexander came to my rooms unannounced. This required explanation, too. In the last year, as we were promoted – first by experience, and then by decree – to the ranks of manhood and made royal companions rather than just pages, some of us received apartments in the palace. Other men stayed in the pages’ barracks, and others still bought houses in Pella or rented rooms – remember, some of our number were as poor as peasants.
I had two rooms in the palace. I kept them – they were close to the king and very useful when I was on duty, or when we were awake all night.
But after Pater died and I had Nike, I bought a house in town. I bought a big house – in fact, I bought the house that Aristotle vacated. I moved Nike in as my mistress – in effect, as my wife – and I enlarged the stables to hold twenty horses and invited Cleitus, Philip and my two other best friends among the pages – Nearchus and young Cleomenes – to come and live with me. None of them had any money, and all of them were, in effect, my men. Oh, that’s not fair – Cleitus had his own relationship with Alexander, and Philip the Red was never really mine, but we were all close, we shared loyalties, tastes and friends.
I set up housekeeping in a few hours, or, rather, my new chief of staff, Nike, did – she bought furniture, won over my useless slaves, bought food, bought a cook, found all my friends and moved all their kit into our house, assigned them rooms – all while I was on duty with Antipater.
We were deeply in love, but that love was aided by events and by the fact that we were good allies, too – she wanted to run a household, and I needed a household manager. And by the will of the gods, I got one. A brilliant one. She could find chicken stock in a desert – enough for as many guests as she wanted to have. She was delighted by my body every hour I wanted her – scars and all. She was happy enough to occupy herself when I was busy. She never fawned, and she could read.
I still don’t know what she saw in me.
I get ahead of myself. I was in my rooms at the palace, unbuckling my breastplate and contemplating the short walk ‘home’. In fact, I’d been there once and expected a shambles.
Alexander walked in without warning and started helping me with the buckles under my arms.
‘Did you read Isocrates?’ he asked. As if he’d been waiting for three weeks just to hear my opinion. Which, in a way, was probably true.
‘Every word,’ I said. ‘Let’s do it.’
He stopped fumbling with my buckles. ‘You mean it?’
I remember that moment. It was a week of changes for me, and any astrologer would have been able to tell me, I suspect. ‘We can conquer Asia,’ I said. ‘Your friends. Your team, if you like.’
He kissed me – he never kissed anyone, our golden-haired boy, but he kissed my cheek and pressed me to his chest. ‘Yes!’ he breathed in my ear. ‘I knew you would understand.’
I got out of my armour, stripped, wiped myself down and put on an old chiton and a warm chlamys for the walk home, while he babbled plans. Good plans – it wasn’t that he was babbling nonsense, but that human speech was too slow for the efficient transfer of everything he had to say.
But I hadread Isocrates, so I could keep up with him, and nod or cut him short. I won’t bore you with this, but conversation often sounded like this, to an outsider:
Alexander: We need a navy.
Me (or Hephaestion or Philotas or anyone in the inner circle who could keep up): Ports. We have the wood.
Alexander: Oarsmen.
Me: Amphilopolis. But Athens!
Alexander (sometimes with a chorus of all of us together): It all comes down to Athens.
Me: Isocrates might help.
Alexander: A gift. But we can’t be seen—
Me: We need to find a way to bribe from strength.
Alexander: Good phrase. (So in the next conversation, we’d say ‘Bribe from strength’ without explanation – just as we didn’t need an explanation for the words ‘oarsmen’ because everyone in the inner circle knew that was a code for our complete lack of trained sailors, oarsmen, shipwrights – you get the picture.)
On that day, though, we weren’t with the others. Hephaestion – who knew where he was? He was always Alexander’s right hand, but he had begun to branch out himself – serving maids, boys with nice hair – basically anyone who was alive and wanted to fuck. Alexander was tolerant – amused. And not very interested.