Auspicious Beginnings

In July 356 bc, a horse owned by Philip of Macedonia won its race at the Olympic Games. When the good news reached the monarch, it was just one element in a trifecta of glad tidings that arrived that day. Philip had also learned that his able commander Parmenio had triumphed in a great battle against the Illyrians, and that Olympias had finally borne him a son. This especially pleased him because his favorite soothsayer, Aristander of Telmessos, had earlier told him that the child within the womb of Olympias was a son who would be as bold as a lion.

Philip, who had just defeated the city of Potidaea, celebrated the good news that he had received, noting it was auspicious that there were three. "These things delighted him, of course," writes the Greek historian Plutarch in his Lives of Noble Greeks and Romans. "The seers raised his hopes still higher by declaring that the son whose birth coincided with three victories [including Potidaea] would be always victorious."

By the Athenian, or Attic, calendar, Philip's son, named Alexander, was born on the sixth day of the month Hekatombaion, or Hecatombaeon, which corresponds to July 21 on the modern calendar.

As Plutarch writes, Alexander was born "on the day the temple of Ephesian Artemis was burned." This particular temple of Artemis, the goddess known to the Romans as Diana, was located at Ephesus— near Selçuk in modern Turkey—and was no obscure religious site. It was one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. The fire certainly got the attention of all present on that dark July 21. Plutarch writes that "all the Magi who were then at Ephesus, looking upon the temple's disaster as a sign of further disaster, ran about beating their faces and crying aloud that woe and great calamity for Asia had that day been born."

Writing with twenty-twenty hindsight, Plutarch certainly saw the boy child of Olympias as the future manifestation of "woe and great calamity" for the Persian Empire in Asia.

Hindsight colors much of what has been written about Alexander's youth. The stories that were handed down orally, and later penned by his biographers, tend to seem more like allegories that support the better-documented facts of his later life. They paint a portrait of a smart, skillful boy, the kind of person that we would expect to grow into the man that Alexander became. Conversely, one can conclude that many of the stories must have a basis in fact because Alexander did indeed become that sort of man.

Some stories show a boy so sure of himself that his confidence borders on arrogance. For instance, when invited to run in the Olympic Games as a teenager, he replied that he would do so only if the other runners on the track were kings.

To educate the young prince, Philip hired some of the best minds in Greece. The Macedonians had defeated Athens militarily, but remained in awe of Athenian arts and sciences. In 343, Philip brought Aristotle to Macedonia from Athens to educate Alexander. Philip was so pleased with the results of Aristotle's tutoring that, as part of his tuition payment, he restored the city of Stagira—Aristotle's hometown—which he had destroyed during one of his campaigns.

The distinguished philosopher instilled a love of learning and literature in the boy, instructing him in science and healing arts. He also gave Alexander a copy of Homer's Iliad, which he kept with him through his travels as an adult. Some claim that Alexander loved Aristotle more than he loved his father. Philip had given him life, but Aristotle "taught him a noble life."

One of the best-known anecdotes of Alexander as a boy, and one that is considered to have a basis in fact, concerns the horse Bucephalas. This animal, who would be Alexander's favorite for most of his adult life, was brought to the court of King Philip when Alexander was about ten years old by a Thessalian named Philoneicus. Plutarch describes Bucephalas as "savage and altogether intractable, neither allowing any one to mount him, nor heeding the voice of any of Philip's attendants, but rearing up against all of them."

Considering the colt too wild to be of any use, Philip dismissed Philoneicus and told him to take Bucephalas away. According to Plutarch, at this point, Alexander piped up, observing "What a horse they are losing, because, for lack of skill and courage, they cannot manage him!"

Philip was naturally skeptical of the boy's impertinence, but Alexander proceeded to bet his father the sale price of the horse that he could ride him. Naturally, the story would not have been memorialized as part of the Alexander legend if Bucephalas had bucked him off. When Alexander dismounted after a successful ride, Plutarch tells that Philip told him "My son, seek thee out a kingdom equal to thyself; Macedonia has not room for thee."

As with the wails of the magi at Ephesus ten years earlier, it is a prophetic statement that may or may not have been spoken, but that illustrates the direction that young Alexander was headed.

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Whatever notional kingdom Philip may have imagined for Alexander on that day in 346 BC, it is certainly true that Philip was still imagining a bigger kingdom for himself. It was in the same year that he successfully subdued the Phocians and that Athens finally succumbed to Philip. He was also consolidating his control over the regions to the north from Illyria to Thrace, planning attacks still farther afield against the ancient Greek city of Byzantium, and dreaming of eventually attacking the Persian Empire.

Later the center of the great Byzantine Empire, Byzantium, now Istanbul, is located on the Bosporus, which, along with the Dardanelles (known as the Hellespont in the ancient world), is one of the crossing points between Europe and Asia Minor, and a gateway on the water route between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. As Justinus writes in his Epitoma Historiarum Philippicarum, or Epitome of Philippic History, this "noble city and seaport ... would be a station for his forces by land and sea."

In the same paragraph, Justinus adds that the ambitious Philip "made an expedition, too, into Scythia, to get plunder, that, after the practice of traders, he might make up for the expenses of one war by the profits of another." Scythia was the umbrella term used by the Greeks...