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

this way even : though the continuous conflicts into which he threw himself ‘like an angry ram’, to use his own words, were beginning to take their toll. He drank heavily during the intervals between one campaign and the next and he let himself go in excesses of all kinds during binges that lasted from dusk to dawn.
Queen Olympias, however, was becoming increasingly withdrawn, dedicating herself to caring for her children and to religious worship. Philip came to her bed rarely now and when he did there was no satisfaction for either of them. She was cold and distant and he would leave humiliated by the meetings, realizing that his desperate and hurried passion left the Queen unmoved and numbed.
Olympias was a woman whose character was no weaker than her husband’s, and she guarded her own dignity jealously. In her brother, and in her son especially, she saw the young men who one day would be the true custodians of that dignity, restoring to her the prestige and the power that were hers by right and which Philip’s arrogance stripped from her, day by day throughout his reign.
Official religious functions constituted an obligation for the Queen, but they were clearly lacking in any real meaning for her. She was sure that the gods of Olympus, if they had ever existed, had no interest in human affairs at all. She was more intrigued by other cults, especially that of Dionysus, a mysterious god capable of taking hold of the human mind and transforming it, dragging it into a vortex of violent emotion and atavistic feeling.
Word was that she had been secretly initiated and that by night she took part in the god’s orgies which involved drinking wine mixed with potent drugs and dancing to the point of exhaustion and hallucination, all this to the rhythm of primitive musical instruments. In this state she felt as though she were running through the woods at night, her fine royal vestments left torn to rags on the branches as she chased wild beasts, caught them and ate their still-throbbing flesh. Then she would fall exhausted, succumbing to a leaden sleepiness, on what seemed to be a blanket of fragrant moss.
And in this state of semi-consciousness she saw the divinities and the creatures of the woods come timidly out of their dens: the nymphs with their skin as green as the leaves of the trees, the satyrs with their bristly coats, half-men and half-goats, approaching a simulacrum of the god’s gigantic phallus, crowning it with ivy and vine-leaves, soaking it with wine. And then the orgy exploded, all of them drinking undiluted wine and throwing themselves into feral couplings that would lead them into direct contact, in that frenetic ecstasy, with Dionysus himself, possessed by his spirit.
Others came closer furtively, their phalluses enormously erect, avidly ogling Olympias’ nudity, eager to satisfy their animalistic lust…
And so the Queen, in secluded places known only to the initiates, abandoned herself to the depths of her wildest and most barbaric nature, to the rites that liberated the most aggressive and violent elements in her soul and body. Apart from these more extreme manifestations her life in truth consisted of all the usual things expected of any woman and spouse, and she was able to return to that life as though closing a solid interior door that cut out all memory and all feeling.
In the quiet of her rooms she taught Alexander all that a young boy could possibly learn of those cults; she told him of the adventures and journeys of the god Dionysus who had travelled together
with his cortege of satyrs and sileni wearing crowns of vine-leaves as
far as the land of tigers and panthers, as far as India.
     
But if his mother’s influence was important in moulding Alexander’s spirit, even more so was the daunting education administered according to his father’s will and wishes.
Philip had ordered Leomdas, official director of the boy’s schooling, to organize his son’s learning without neglecting anything