God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great (131 page)

If you feel that you need a scorecard, consider visiting my website at www.hippeis.com where you can at least review the biographies of some of the main players. Wikipedia also has full biographies on most of the players in the period.

From a standpoint of purely military history, I’ve made some decisions that knowledgeable readers may find odd. For example, I no longer believe in the linothorax or linen breastplate, and I’ve written it out of the novels. Nor do I believe that the Macedonian pike system – the sarissa armed phalanx – was really any better than the old Greek hoplite system. In fact, I suspect it was worse, as the experience of early modern warfare suggests that the longer your pikes are, the less you trust your troops. Macedonian farm boys were not hoplites – they lacked the whole societal and cultural support system that created the hoplite. They were decisive in their day but as to whether they were ‘better’ than the earlier system . . . well, as with much of military change, it was a cultural change, not really a technological one. Or so it seems to me.

Elephants were not tanks, nor were they a magical victory tool. They could be very effective, or utterly ineffective. I’ve tried to show both situations.

The same can be said of horse-archery. On open ground, with endless remounts and a limitless arrow supply, a horse-archer army must have been a nightmare. But a few hundred horse-archers on the vast expanse of an Alexandrian battlefield might only have been a nuisance.

Ultimately though, I don’t believe in ‘military’ history. War is about economics, religion, art, society – war is inseparable from culture. You could not, in this period, train an Egyptian peasant to be a horse-archer without changing his way of life and his economy, his social status, perhaps his religion. Questions about military technology – ‘Why didn’t Alexander create an army of [insert technological wonder here]?’ – ignore the constraints imposed by the realities of the day – the culture of Macedon, which carried, it seems to me, the seeds of its own destruction from the first.

And then there is the problem of sources. In as much as we know
anything
about the world of the Diadochi, we owe that knowledge to a few authors, none of whom are actually contemporary. I used Diodorus Siculus throughout the writing of the
Tyrant
books – in most cases I prefer him to Arrian or Polybius, and in many cases he’s the sole source.

In this book I deal with the life of Alexander in detail. I owe a deep debt to Peter Greene, whose biography of Alexander I followed in many respects. However, I also used sources as widely separated as Arrian (whose hero worship makes him suspect) and the Alexander Romance (mostly fabrication, but with hidden gems), tempered by Plutarch despite his moralizing ways. I suspect that Alexander was the Adolf Hitler of his era, not the golden hero. I suspect that he was both a gifted general
and
the beneficiary of some unbelievable strokes of luck.

For anyone who wants to get a quick lesson in the difficulties of the sources for the period, I recommend visiting the website www.livius.org. The articles on the sources will, I hope, go a long way to demonstrating how little we know about Alexander and his successors.

Of course, as I’m a novelist and only an historian on weekends, sometimes the loopholes in the evidence – or even the vast gaps – are the very space in which my characters operate. Sometimes, a lack of knowledge is what creates the appeal. Either way, I hope that I have created a believable version of the world of Alexander. I hope that you enjoy this book, and its companions, the Tyrant series.

And as usual, I’m always happy to hear your comments – and even your criticisms – at the Online Agora on www.hippeis.com. See you there, I hope!

Christian Cameron

Toronto, 2011

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I’ve been accused – by friends – of only writing to recruit new people for re-enacting. This is not true. I write because I love it, and because it is the best job in the world – what other job allows me to travel to Greece to do research? Or travel to Finland to become a better long sword fighter – as research?

Besides, I have to write books to earn the money to be able to
afford
re-enacting.

That said, though, I am always recruiting. Right now, in 2011, we’ve just completed the first recreation of the Battle of Marathon. We had about 100 participants. When we do it again in 2014, I’d like to see five hundred. In 2020, when we go to Thermopylae and Plataea . . . a thousand? Two thousand?

That could be you.

Okay, let me try to convince you, in a roundabout way.

I approach every historical era with a basket full of questions – How did they eat? What did they wear? How does that weapon work? Books are only so useful. That is to say, books and learning are the ultimate resource, and professional historians rank among my favourite people – but there is no substitute for
doing it
. The world’s Classical re-enactors have been an enormous resource to me while writing, both with details of costume and armour and food, and as a fountain of inspiration. In that regard I’d like to thank Craig Sitch and Cheryl Fuhlbohm of Manning Imperial, who make some of the finest recreations of material culture from Classical antiquity in the world (www.manningimperial.com), as well as Joe Piela of Lonely Mountain Forge for helping recreate equipment on tight schedules. I’d also like to thank Paul McDonnell-Staff, Paul Bardunias, and Giannis Kadoglou for their depth of knowledge and constant willingness to answer questions – as well as the members of various ancient Greek re-enactment societies all over the world, from Spain to Australia. Thanks to the UK Hoplite Association for supporting my book talks in Britain. Thanks most of all to the members of my own group, Hoplologia and the Taxeis Plataea, for being the guinea-pigs on a great deal of material culture and martial-arts experimentation, and to Guy Windsor (who wrote
The Swordsman’s Companion
and
The Duelist’s
Companion
, and is an actual master swordsman himself ) for advice on martial arts.

Speaking of re-enactors, my friend Steven Sandford draws the maps for these books, and he deserves a special word of thanks, as does my friend Dmitry Bondarenko, who draws the figures and borders on the maps. My friend Rebecca Jordan works tirelessly at the website and the various web spin-offs like the Agora, and deserves a great deal more praise than she receives.

Speaking of friends, I owe a debt or gratitude to Christine Szego, who provides daily criticisms and support from her store, Bakka Phoenix, in Toronto. Thanks Christine!

My interpretation of Alexander and his world – which is also Kineas’s world, and Philokles’s world, and Thais’s world, and Ptolemy’s world – began with my desire to write a book that would allow me to discuss the serious issues of war and politics that are around all of us today. I was returning to school and returning to my first love – Classical history. I am also an unashamed fan of Patrick O’Brian, and I wanted to write a series with depth and length that would allow me to explore the whole period, with the relationships that define men, and women, in war and peace – not just one snippet. The combination – Classical history, the philosophy of war, and the ethics of the world of arête – gave rise to the volume you hold in your hand.

Along the way, I met Professor Wallace and Professor Young, both very learned men with long association to the University of Toronto. Professor Wallace answered any question that I asked him, providing me with sources and sources and sources, introducing me to the labyrinthine wonders of Diodorus Siculus, and finally, to T. Cuyler Young. Cuyler was kind enough to start my education on the Persian Empire of Alexander’s day, and to discuss the possibility that Alexander was not infallible, or even close to it. I wish to give my profoundest thanks and gratitude to these two men for their help in recreating the world of fourth century BC Greece, and the theory of Alexander’s campaigns that underpins this series of novels. Any brilliant scholarship is theirs, and any errors of scholarship are certainly mine. I will never forget the pleasure of sitting in Professor Wallace’s office, nor in Cuyler’s living room, eating chocolate cake and debating the myth of Alexander’s invincibility. Both men have passed on now, since this book was written, but none of the Tyrant books would have been the same without them. They were great men, and great academics – the kind of scholars who keep civilization alive.

I’d also like to thank the staff of the University of Toronto’s Classics department for their support, and for reviving my dormant interest in Classical Greek, as well as the staffs of the University of Toronto Library and the Toronto Metro Reference Library for their dedication and interest. Libraries matter!

I couldn’t have approached so many Greek texts without the Perseus Project. This online resource, sponsored by Tufts University, gives online access to almost all classical texts in Greek and in English. Without it I would still be working on the second line of
Medea
, never mind the
Iliad
or the
Hymn to Demeter
.

I owe a debt of thanks to my excellent editor, Bill Massey at Orion, for giving these books constant attention and a great deal of much needed flattery, for his good humour in the face of authorial dicta, and for his support at every stage. I’d also like to thank Shelley Power, my agent, for her unflagging efforts on my behalf, and for many excellent dinners, the most recent of which, at the world’s only Ancient Greek restaurant, Archeon Gefsis in Athens, resulted in some hasty culinary rewriting. Thanks Shelley!

Finally, I would like to thank the muses of the Luna Café, who serve both coffee and good humour, and without whom there would certainly not have been a book. And all my thanks – a lifetime of them – for my wife Sarah.

If you have any questions, wish to see more or participate (ah, we’re back to that . . . want to be a hoplite? A Persian Immortal?) please come and visit www.hippeis.com. Go to the ‘Agora’ (that’s Greek for forum, folks,) sign in and post to the welcome board. And let me recruit you for re-enacting. We call it living history. It makes history come to life.

And history matters.

Christian Cameron

Toronto, 2011

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Christian Cameron is a writer and military historian. He is a veteran of the United States Navy, where he served as both an aviator and an intelligence officer. He lives in Toronto where he is currently writing his next novel while working on a Masters in Classics.

Also by Christian Cameron

THE TYRANT SERIES

Tyrant

Tyrant: Storm of Arrows

Tyrant: Funeral Games

Tyrant: King of the Bosporus

THE KILLER OF MEN SERIES

Killer of Men

Marathon

OTHER NOVELS

Washington and Caesar

First published in Great Britain in 2012 by Orion Books,
an imprint of The Orion Publishing Group Ltd
Orion House, 5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane
London WC2H 9EA

An Hachette UK Company

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Copyright © Christian Cameron 2012

The moral right of Christian Cameron to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Except for those already in the public domain, all the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN (Hardback) 978 1 4091 3267 7
ISBN (Export Trade Paperback) 978 1 4091 3268 4
ISBN (Ebook) 978 1 4091 3269 1

Typeset by Deltatype Ltd, Birkenhead, Merseyside