Alexander: Child of a Dream by Valerio Massimo Manfredi Read Free Book Online

subsided into silence. The energies of the little warriors soon dwindled into sleep as the moon made its appearance in the sky.
     
was seven and his uncle, the King of Epirus, was twelve when Philip attacked the city of Olynthus and the Chalcidicean League, the association which controlled the large trident-shaped Chalcidice Peninsula. The Athenians, allies of Olynthus, sought to negotiate, but Philip proved to be quite intractable.
‘Either you leave here or you will have to chase me out of Macedon,’ was his answer, which on the face of it did not leave much room for manoeuvre.
General Antipater tried to make Philip consider other aspects of the problem and as soon as the Athenian envoys, all of them furious, left the council room, he said, ‘This attitude, Sire, will only help your enemies in Athens, especially Demosthenes.’
‘I am not afraid of him,’ said the King, shrugging his shoulders.
‘Yes, but he is an excellent orator as well as a skilful politician. He is the only one to have understood your strategy. He has noticed that you no longer use mercenary troops, that you have created a “national army which is united and motivated, and you have made this the key feature of your reign. He is convinced that this makes you Athens’ most dangerous enemy. An intelligent opponent always merits consideration, Sire.’
Right there and then Philip was lost for words. All he said was, ‘Keep an eye on Demosthenes through some of our men ; in Athens. I want to know everything he says about me.’
‘It shall be done, Sire,’ replied Antipater, and he immediately alerted their informers in Athens, telling them to make sure they sent news of Demosthenes’ activities rapidly and effectively. Every time a text of the great orator’s speeches arrived in Pella, however, there was trouble. The King always asked for the tide first.
‘Against Philip,’ came the inevitable reply.
‘Again?’ he would shout, his temper boiling. These readings would upset him so much that if the bad news arrived just after a meal, it meant instant indigestion. He would stride up and down the room like a caged lion while his secretary read the speech out loud, and every now and then he would interrupt, shouting, “What was that? Damnation! Repeat it … read that bit again!’ His reaction was so fierce that the secretary came to feel that the words he was reading were actually his own.
The thing that drove the King to distraction more than anything else was Demosthenes’ insistence on calling Macedon ‘a barbaric or second-class state’.
‘Barbaric?’ he shouted, sweeping everything off the table onto the floor. ‘Second-class? I’ll show him second-class!’
‘You must bear in mind, Sire,’ the secretary pointed out, trying to calm him, ‘that, as far as we know, the people’s reaction to these diatribes of Demosthenes is rather lukewarm. The people of Athens are more interested in knowing how problems in land ownership and the distribution of lands to the peasants of Attica will be resolved. They could not care less about Demosthenes’ political ambitions.’
The passionate speeches against Philip were followed by others in favour of Olynthus, an attempt to convince the people to vote for military aid for the besieged city, but even this approach brought negligible results.
The city fell the following year and Philip razed it to the ground to provide a clear, unequivocal message for whoever dared challenge him.
‘This really will give Demosthenes good reason to call me a barbarian!’ he shouted, when Antipater invited him to reflect on the consequences, in Athens and in Greece, of such radical action.
     
Indeed, this drastic decision made the conflicts in the Hellenic ; peninsula even more acute: throughout Greece there was no city or village that did not have both a pro-Macedonian and an anti-Macedonian faction.
Philip, for his part, felt ever closer to Zeus, father of all the gods, in terms of glory and of power. He felt