Alexander's Bottom

Alexander III of Macedonia was powerless over alcohol, but try get him to admit it. Whenever the subject of life and manageability was broached, he would have a ready reply: “Tell that to the Persians.” On Drunkenness, a treatise long labored over by his tutor, Aristotle, is known to history but has never been found: the circumstances of its theft or destruction remain a mystery, but who more than Alexander had motive and opportunity to steal or shred it? He grew to rival all peers in consuming large quantities of undiluted wine; his drinking bouts became legendary; and no one, but no one, pulled a geographic like Alexander the Great.

In part, at least, Alexander’s behavior with the bottle was attributable to his genes. The value of abstinence was recognized, but rarely practiced, by the Greeks, and Athenaeus and Aelian include the Macedonians among those peoples identified as being inclined to drink with “heroic intensity.” But Alexander was more Macedonian than most, and proud to outdrink the competition. Not long after the defeat of the Greeks at Chaeronea, following a complicated bout of drunken banter (Attalus urging the Macedonians to pray for a lawful heir to a kingdom now ruled by Philip II and his new wife Cleopatra, Attalus’ niece; Alexander, the heir apparent, taking understandable offense – “You villain: what, am I then a bastard?”), Philip rose up with his sword to run Alexander through, but slipped and fell on his face in a drunken stupor, at which Alexander shouted: “See there the man who makes preparations to pass out of Europe into Asia, overturned in passing from one seat to another.” This to his father, who also happened to be king.

Alexander has few defenders among the historians when it comes to drinking. Plutarch, single-handedly, makes up for that. Citing no fewer than twenty-four sources for his ‘Life,’ he draws a conclusion opposite to each and every one, electing to present Alexander essentially as a man of self-control (enkrateia). (What was Plutarch drinking?) While he couldn’t deny Alexander’s reputation for heavy drinking, he could deny the truth of it: it was Alexander’s “love of talking [that] made him delight to sit long at his wine.”

Alexander’s contemporaries were equally (and less culpably) indulgent, mindful as they were of his temper and impulsive nature. Alexander, as even Plutarch concedes, would “fall into a temper of ostentation and soldierly boasting, which gave his flatterers a great advantage to ride him, and made his better friends very uneasy. For though they thought it too base to strive who should flatter him most, yet they found it hazardous not to do it; so that between the shame and the danger, they were in a great strait how to behave themselves.”

Pity poor Clitus, then. “The Black Clitus” had only saved Alexander’s life, goring Spithridates with a spear as the Persian commander, who had given Alexander such a blow with his battle-axe as to cut through his helmet and touch the hair of his head, was about to deliver a second blow. Clitus was apparently as drunk as Alexander when, on a later occasion (the last, for Clitus) he objected to songs sung to disgrace and ridicule several Macedonian captains “worsted by the barbarians.” Alexander accused Clitus of pleading his own cowardice - “giving cowardice the name of misfortune” - at which point push came to shove and Alexander ran his friend (home? No) through with a spear. (There was a lot of running through with spears in those days, but this was a big one.)





Plutarch reports that Alexander’s anger vanished immediately, “and when he saw his friends about him all in a profound silence, he pulled the spear out of the dead body, and would have thrust it into his own throat, if the guards had not held his hands, and by main force carried him away into his chamber, where all that night and the next day he wept bitterly, till being quite spent with lamenting and exclaiming, he lay as it were speechless, only fetching deep sighs.”

Alexander mourned (as did everyone else, for obvious reasons) for three days, refusing food, attentions to his bodily needs, and promising to give up wine forever. What changed his mind were the words of Callisthenes, a philosopher friend of Aristotle (although let’s be fair to Aristotle here: he considered Callisthenes a powerful speaker and a man of “no judgment whatever;” and let’s be fair to Callisthenes, too: he was probably only as terrified as any one else that night, and said what all the others to a man would have said): “Is this the Alexander whom the whole world looks to, lying here weeping like a slave, for fear of the censure and reproach of men, to whom he himself ought to be a law and measure of equity, if he would use the right his conquests have given him as supreme lord and governor of all, and not be the victim of a vain and idle opinion. Do you not know that Jupiter is represented to have Justice and Law on each hand of him, to signify that all the actions of a conqueror are lawful and just?”

It is unlikely that Alexander ever again considered abstinence, and thus a bottom was missed. Nor is he likely to have given serious consideration from that time forth of making amends to anyone he had wronged, or praying to know the will of a higher power (as he understood it). What higher power? The man was a God. Naturally, therefore, he would became “more audacious and lawless” than ever. That night, he consulted his Homer, gave orders for the funeral of Clitus to mirror the funeral of Patroclus, and, as Clitus’ remains burned on the pyre and the bowls of wine were passed, drank until he passed out, and was then very carefully put to bed by very fearful men.