A Young Macedonian in the Army of Alexander the Great. Alfred John Church
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do anything to satisfy you!’ ‘Ah! I see,’ said the king; ‘anything but what I want. But hearken: I have thought the matter over, and have come to this conclusion: I won’t ask your people to give anybody up. It is a thing that has an evil look; and, upon my word, I think the better of them for refusing. At the same time, I can’t have my enemies plotting against me when my back is turned. You may keep your speakers, and they may talk against me as much as they please. They did not hurt my father much, and I do not suppose that they will hurt me. But as to the soldiers, that is another matter. They must go. I don’t want to have them myself; but they must not stop at Athens. If you can promise so much for those who sent you, then I shall be satisfied.’ ‘You are as moderate,’ said Phocion, ‘as I always expected you would be. I can promise what you demand. Indeed, the two soldiers are gone already.’[9] ‘That is well,’ said the king. ‘Perhaps it is all that I ought to have asked for at the first. Yes; tell your countrymen that I honour them for their courage, and that I don’t forget what they have done for Greece. If it had not been for them we should be slaves beneath the heel of the Persian this day. And tell them that if anything happens to me, it is they who are to take my place, and be the leaders of Greece. They were so once, and it may be the pleasure of the gods that they should be so again.’ ”
“Ah!” interrupted Charondas, smiling, “your king knows how to use his tongue as well as he knows how to use his sword. That will flatter the Athenians to the top of their bent. After that they are Alexander’s firm friends for ever. But to take his place—what an idea! If they only knew it, it was the cruellest satire. They have orators, I allow. I heard two of them when I was a boy. I thought that nothing could beat the first—Æschines, I think they called him—till the second got up. Good gods! that man could have persuaded me of anything. Demosthenes, they told me, was his name. But as for a general, they haven’t such a thing, except it be this same Phocion, and he must be close upon seventy.[10] They have no soldiers even, except such as they hire. They used to be able to fight, though they were never a match for us. You shrug your shoulders, I see, but it is a fact; but now they can do nothing but quarrel. But I am interrupting you. Go on.”
“Well,” continued Charidemus, “from Megara we went on to Corinth. There the king held a great reception of envoys from all the states. I acted, you must know, as one of his secretaries, and had to listen to the eloquence of all these gentlemen. How they prevaricated, and lied, and flattered! and the king listening all the while with a gentle smile, as if he were taking it all in, but now and then throwing in a word or putting a question that struck them dumb. These were the public audiences. And then there were the private interviews, when the envoys came one by one to see what they could get for themselves. What a set of greedy, cringing beggars they were, to be sure. Some put a better face on it than others; but it was the same with all—gold; gold, or office, which of course, means gold sooner or later. I used to want to be thought a Greek, but I never——”
He stopped abruptly, for he had forgotten to whom he was talking. Charondas smiled. “Speak your mind,” he said, “you will not offend me.”
“Well,” continued the Macedonian, “there was at least one man at Corinth whom I could honestly admire. I had gone with the king and Hephaestion to dine with a rich Corinthian. What a splendid banquet it was! The king has no gold and silver plate to match what Xeniades—for that was our host’s name—produced. The conversation happened to turn on the sights of Corinth, and Xeniades said that, after all, there was not one of them could match what he had to show. ‘Can we see it?’ asked Alexander. ‘Not to-day, I am afraid,’ said our host, ‘but come to-morrow about noon, and I can promise you a good view.’ Accordingly the next day we went. Xeniades took us into the open court inside his house, and showed us a curious little figure of a man asleep in the sunshine. ‘That,’ said he, ‘is the one man I know, or ever have known, who never wanted anything more than what he had. Let me tell you how I came to know him. About thirty years ago I was travelling in Crete, and happened to stroll into the slave-market at Gnossus. There was a lot of prisoners on sale who had been taken by pirates out of an Athenian ship. Every man had a little paper hanging round his neck, on which were written his age, height, and accomplishments. There were cooks, tailors, tent-makers, cobblers, and half-a-dozen other trades, one poor wretch who called himself a sculptor, the raggedest of the lot, and another, who looked deplorably ill, by the way, who called himself a physician. They were poor creatures, all of them. Indeed, the only one that struck my fancy was a man of about fifty—too old, of course, in a general way, for a slave that one is going to buy. He certainly was not strong or handsome, but he looked clever. I noticed that no occupation was mentioned in his description; so I asked him what he could do. “I can rule men,” he said. That seemed such a whimsical answer, for certainly such a thing was never said in the slave-market before, that I could do nothing less than buy the man. “You are just what I have been wanting,” I said. Well, to make a long story short, I brought him home and made him tutor to my children, for I found that he was a learned man. He did his work admirably. But of late he has grown very odd. He might have any room in my house, but you see the place in which he prefers to live,’ and he pointed to a huge earthenware vat that had been rolled up against the side of the house. ‘But let us go and hear what he has to say.’ Well, we went, and our coming woke the old man. He was a curious, withered, bent creature, nearly eighty years old, our host said, with matted white hair, eyes as keen as a hawk’s, and the queerest wrinkles round his mouth. ‘Who are you?’ he said. ‘I am Alexander, King of Macedonia,’ said the king. ‘I am Diogenes the Cynic,’ said the old man. ‘Is there anything that I can do for you?’ asked the king. ‘Yes; you can stand out of the sunshine.’ So the king stood aside, whereupon the old man curled himself up and went to sleep again. ‘Well,’ said the king, ‘if I were not Alexander, I would gladly be Diogenes.’ ‘You may well say so, my lord,’ said Xeniades; ‘that strange old creature has been a good genius in my house.’ ”
“And what became of you after the king came back to Pella?” asked Charondas.
“I stayed behind to do some business which he put into my hands. Most of the time I spent in Argos, where I was brought up, and where I have many friends, but I paid visits to every town of importance in the Peloponnesus. I may say so much without breaking any confidence, that it was my business to commend the Macedonian alliance to any people of note that I might come into contact with. I was very well received everywhere except in Sparta. The Spartans were as sulky as possible; in fact, I was told to leave the city within a day.”
Alexander and Diogenes.
At this point the conversation of the two friends was interrupted by the entrance of one of Alexander’s pages. The lad—he was about sixteen years of age,[11]—saluted, and said “a message from the king.” The two friends rose from their seats and stood “at attention” to receive the communication. “The king commands your attendance to-morrow at sunrise, when he goes to Troy.” His errand done, the lad relaxed the extreme dignity of his manner, and greeted the two young men in a very friendly way. “Have you heard the news,” he asked, “that has set all the world wondering? The statue of Orpheus that stands in Pieria has taken to sweating incessantly. The priest thought it important enough to send a special messenger announcing the prodigy. Some of the old generals were very much troubled at the affair,” went on the young man, who was by way of being an esprit fort, “but luckily the soothsayer[12] was equal to the occasion. ‘Let no one be troubled,’ he said, ‘it is an omen of the very best. Much labour is in store for the poets, who will have to celebrate the labours of our king.”
“Well,” said Charidemus, who was a well-educated young man, and had a certain taste in verse, “our friend Chœrilus,[13] with all that I have seen of him and his works, will have to sweat very hard before he can produce a decent verse.”
“Very true,” said the page, “but why Orpheus should trouble himself about such a fool as Chœrilus passes my comprehension. Now, if you want a really good omen, my dear Charidemus, you have one in the king’s sending for you. That means good luck if anything does. There are very few going. Perdiccas, Hephaestion, half-a-dozen of us pages (of whom I have