We arrived within an hour of his return to his base camp from the bloody pursuit. He embraced his son – as the victor in a recent battle, he was all love – and he reviewed us the next morning, pronounced us fit to be royal companions and confirmed all of Antipater and Alexander’s promotions, including mine.
And then we were off like hounds from a leash – all the cavalry under Alexander, racing down the newly captured passes and into the plains of Boeotia, turning the flanks of the whole alliance and leaving them with nowhere to go but back, abandoning Delphi to us and all the mountain states. With no further fighting, we were in behind them.
Chares, the Athenian strategos, had received a great deal of wine-inspired criticism for his campaign, but in fact he did a brilliant job with the tools he had. The Athenians needed only to endure – their fleet was out on the seas, busy wrecking our commerce. And we could endure only so long, while Athens gathered momentum and threatened to do things like take Amphilopolis behind us.
So Chares held his line of mountains, and when he was turned out of them, he had a plan for that, too, and both armies – Thebans and Athenians – retired in good order. My first taste of combat with professional opponents was in late spring – all Boeotia was a garden and a farm, already tawny with grain, and we came cantering down the passes. Our greatest advantage besides sheer training was that every one of us had three remounts, and we could move for days, changing horses as we went. So we did.
The Thebans had little cavalry to speak of, but the Athenian Hippeis were good – not as good as we, but too good to trifle with. They bloodied our noses in our first skirmish – Philotas charged them as if they were Thracians, and they scattered down a Boeotian road, and Philotas pelted after them, and it was a trap – we lost six men.
But after that, we had their measure, and we’d unfold from our road column into a fighting line at the gallop, racing for the flanks the moment the Athenians were spotted, and after that we flushed their roadside ambushes the way a hunter flushes birds from hedgerows.
And so started the most glorious of summers. The sun was warm, Greece was beautiful and kind, the peasants and free farmers mostly welcomed us as liberators because Thebes is hard to love. We marched to the gates of Thebes and drove in their pickets, then turned and went for the passes to Athens – but Chares, as I say, was no fool, and he took ground at Chaeronea like a dozen strategoi before him.
And there our lightning offensive stopped. Chaeronea has been the scene of a dozen battles for a reason. And it is not for nothing we call that area ‘The dance floor of Ares’. It is flat, good going, for stades in every direction. The ground rose towards the Athenian position. They had an excellent view of our camp night and day, without even sending their horse out as scouts. Their backs were to the passes over Parnassus to Athens, and yet they had three roads into the countryside around Thebes, so that we were hard put to watch them all, and in fact, contingent after contingent joined their army without our being able to stop them.
We were in the saddle for days at a time.
I loved it. I had a great deal to learn, and I learned it – I fought skirmishes where I might have gathered information, I ignored heavensent opportunities to grab enemy supplies, or I grabbed supplies that didn’t matter . . .
I got to visit Plataea, and was received as a hero. They hate Thebes, even the shepherds. Probably even the sheep. Philip was already declaring his policy of dismembering the Theban League, and towns that had known independence, such as Plataea, were already ours.
The main army camped opposite the allies at Chaeronea, and Philip made peace offers. He meant them, too. He had the plain of Boeotia and that’s all he needed to negotiate – time was now on no one’s side, and as long as he could absorb the farm produce of the great plain, Thebes was the city that was in the most trouble.
But Thebes had delusions of grandeur, and so did Athens. They were perfect reflections of each other – living in past glories, even past glories where they’d been enemies. Philip told us one night at dinner that they were like two people who are each spurned by a third and use that as a basis for marriage.
I remember it as a golden summer. Alexander was happy – he led us on raids and long tours in person, and he was brilliant at such stuff – always a step ahead of the Thebans and the Athenians – and then back to camp, tired but happy after three days on the road, to the unstinting praise of his father.
We were shutting the enemy cavalry in a box and dominating the countryside. The Athenian Hippeis had done well against Macedonians in the past – we’d got our fingers nipped by Phokion a few times. It was heady to be better than they in every skirmish. And the Theban cavalry were a sorry lot, and we bullied them. The Athenians never got bullied.
After one encounter, where we chased the Thebans twenty stades and captured a Boeotarch, Philip allowed that, in his son, he might have discovered a second Macedonian general after Parmenio.
Now that’s flattery. And Alexander loved him for it, gave him a leg-up when he went for a ride, held his horse when he dismounted, waited on him with a cup in his hand, and was the dutiful son that he secretly longed to be.
Both of them were better men when they were successful, together.
And all the plots fell to pieces. No one at court was going to plot against rampant success. Philip, the best general in Greek history, had a son who bid fair to be his equal. We were headed for glory. Attalus took a fraction of the army and marched off to reduce Naupactus, just to keep Athens at the bargaining table, and after he left, the camp was like paradise.
Sophists and priests like to tell people that war is a terrible thing, and indeed, it can be – dead babes, children starving, horses screaming for a man to come and put them down. Horrible. But war in the summer in Boeotia, between Greeks, men of education, courage and principle, was merely the greatest sport man could invent, or the gods. Those who died, died in the flower of youth and vigour, and we feasted every shade. And those that lived were better for having eaten at danger’s table and survived. And that is the other face of war – the contest of the worthy.
It went on for months, and while we faced the allies across the dance floor of Ares, we skirmished with their cavalry every day, we rode in races, we wrestled, we ate well and every night Nike took me in her arms. And Alexander ate with our mess once a week, when he wasn’t in the field. And Nike began to organise the camp girls – not that she was one of them, but neither did she put on airs.
Good times. I never tired of her. I captured a beauty one day – captured is too strong, but my patrol snapped up a dozen boys and a girl headed into the enemy camp, and the girl was my share. Hair like honey, big tits and a tiny waist – I sent her home. I had what I wanted. And I did it as a sacrifice to Aphrodite.
The wheat was ripening in the fields and the barley was golden when it became plain that no matter what we offered, Athens intended to fight. The last straw was Naupactus, a vital Athenian naval base. Attalus took it – he was a good soldier, despite being a total shit of a man – and at that point, Athens shouldhave wanted peace. Instead, they marched their ephebes over the mountains, brought up four hundred more Hippeis, and the cavalry war heated up.
The new Athenian cavalry were better – the best we’d faced, with excellent horses and better discipline. Of course, they were the real aristocrats, most of whom were politically in favour of Philip – members of Phokion’s party to a man. Whatever their ethics, they had superb horses and they were crafty devils.
That’s the first time I saw your pater, sprig. He was a troop leader, like me, and we tangled twice in a row, honours even. His troop was excellent – not as rock hard as my boys, but better mounted. He caught me flat-footed at the edge of the hills over towards the Kerata Pass, and I caught him the next day, his troop tired and too strung out on the road – but while the men were tired, the mounts were fine, and I got one prisoner, a scruffy peasant boy named Niceas – he was allowed as he was a hyperetes, which with us is a servant, and I slapped his arse and told him to stay out of the fighting. More fool I. Among Athenians, that made him an under-officer, the troop leaders’ right hand.