Orion and the Conqueror

Author’s Note

While this continuation of the tale of Orion’s struggles with his Creators is of course fiction, the details of fourth-century B.C. history are as accurate as I could make them. Throughout the novel I have used the Greek-style spellings for proper names, a practice that sometimes drives my copyeditors to despair.

Since I first read about Alexander the Great, when I was a child, I have been more interested in his father than in Alexander himself. And I think there are important lessons to be pondered in the story of Philip’s life.

Without Philip there could have been no Alexander the Great. Philip II welded a dispirited and divided Macedonia into the first true nation-state of Europe. By force of arms, at first, but increasingly by diplomacy and clever use of military leverage, Philip made Macedonia supreme among the Greek city-states of the Fourth Century B.C. He was not merely a great general; he became a great statesman. He learned and grew during the course of his relatively short, arduous, painful life.

The struggle between ancient Athens and Philip’s Macedonia has been painted by most historians as a contest between democracy and tyranny. So it was, although Athenian democracy was limited to free males born in the city, and Philip was not a tyrant in the modern, pejorative sense of the word. His authority had its limits.

For us, who have lived through a bitter Cold War and seen the collapse of the superpower that opposed us, it may seem uncomfortable to consider the parallels between fourth-century (B.C.) Athens and twentieth-century (A.D.) America. The city-state of Athens was overflowing with lawyers. Most of the great speeches that have come down to us over the intervening centuries were actually speeches made by lawyers who were trying to sway the Athenian council. In a sense, lawyers such as Demosthenes were the “media stars” of the day. They deliberately used every oratorical trick they knew to sway the crowds who came to listen to them.

Thus Athenian policy was often guided by bursts of emotion rather than carefully-reckoned reality, a danger that lurks in the shadows of every democracy—including our own. Athens was not conquered by Macedonia so much as made trivial by the growth of a new kind of nation-state. Eventually both Macedonia and Athens fell prey to the growing power of the Roman Empire. Could American democracy be cast aside, made trivial by new forms of corporate or governmental power? While our lawyers sue one another, are there Philips and Alexanders and Romans out there in other lands changing the very ground on which we stand?

For his part, Philip was a master of military might and diplomatic skill. Had a man of his caliber been running the Kremlin for the past twenty-some years, the Cold War might very well have been decided against us.

The problem with tyrants, though, even benevolent tyrants, is the problem of succession. Democracies, whatever other faults they may have, almost invariably produce peaceful changes of leadership. With kings and dictators, change usually means bloodshed. It was by no means certain that Alexander would automatically succeed his father to the Macedonian throne. He was young, and known to be impetuous. Philip had started a new family, formally divorcing Olympias and thereby placing Alexander’s legitimacy in some doubt. Philip’s assassination placed Alexander on the throne, and to this day most historians believe that if Alexander took no active part in the murder, he very probably knew of it and took no steps to prevent it.

Olympias stood at the center of these events, working with all her powers to assure that her son would succeed to the throne. That is what primate mothers do, whether they are chimpanzees or goddesses.

As soon as Alexander was accepted as king of the Macedonians, the tribes to the north and west rebelled, as they always did when a new king took the throne. Alexander spent a year quelling their desire for independence. Twenty-three centuries later, those Balkan tribes are still fighting among themselves.

Athens became restive and Thebes openly rebelled. Where his father was lenient, Alexander was genocidal. He stormed Thebes and burned that ancient city to the ground, selling its surviving inhabitants into slavery. The other cities, including Athens, bowed in terror to their new master. Demosthenes fled Athens as Alexander at last launched his full-scale invasion of the rickety Persian Empire. He cracked it open like an overripe melon, besting Darius’ armies every time they met.

The Great King was murdered by his own guards as he tried to flee Alexander’s triumphant march through his empire. Demosthenes committed suicide, literally hounded to death by Alexander’s implacable hatred. Alexander himself was accepted as the new god-king of the Persian Empire, but not even that satisfied him and he pushed across the Indus River into India, seeking to conquer the ends of the earth.

Inevitably he descended into the madness that plagues tyrants, growing suspicious of those closest to him. By his orders Attalus and his entire family were wiped out. Alexander’s fevered paranoia began to fall upon his own Companions, friends since childhood. Torture and murder became his tools until even the army began to grow restive.

They rebelled in a sullen, grumbling refusal to march further into steaming Hindustan. He punished them by marching the army back toward Persia across barren desert wastes where more men died from thirst and heat than had been killed in his battles.

One of the casualties was Alexander himself. He came down with a fever and died in his thirty-third year.

His remaining Companions, including his half-brother Ptolemaios, gathered around his death bed and pressed him to tell them to whom he would leave his empire.

In his final moment Alexander gave his answer:

“To the strongest.”

The surge and flow of ideas and armies between Europe and Asia has been one of the principal features of human history. In this novel, as in the earlier Vengeance of Orion, I made it a major aim of the Creators to fashion an empire that spans East and West. Alexander finally accomplished this, for a century or so. His empire broke apart into the separate kingdoms of his successors. By the time the Romans swallowed Greece, the Persians had reasserted themselves. The Roman Empire never penetrated eastward much beyond Palestine.

What of Orion and Anya and the other Creators? With all of spacetime as their arena, you can be sure that their story is not yet finished.