Fire from Heaven

"There are quite a lot of novels about Alexander and I think that, of them all, Mary Renault’s is the most readable and the most entertaining. It’s the first of what’s called the Alexander Trilogy , although it’s a slightly odd trilogy and the third volume, Funeral Games takes place after Alexander’s death. Mary Renault really knew her sources. She really understands the material. She has another particular interest and that’s in homosexuality. So, both in Fire from Heaven and in the second volume The Persian Boy , there’s quite a lot of focus on Alexander and male lovers. In Fire from Heaven , this is Hephaestion who, historically, probably wasn’t significant in Alexander’s life until much later, but who was at the Macedonian court. So what Renault is doing is plausible. The reason I chose Fire from Heaven rather than The Persian Boy was partly because this is the only book I’ve chosen that depicts Alexander’s childhood. One of the other ancient sources, Plutarch, does have accounts of it and, to a significant extent, this is based on that, although Renault does much more with the material. There’s a wonderful episode when Athenian ambassadors come to Macedon and she presents a negative picture of Demosthenes, who in subsequent periods became that last hero of Greek freedom, a symbol of democracy fighting monarchy. Mary Renault’s Demosthenes is this rather unpleasant, badly spoken Greek and his rival, Aeschines, comes across as a much nicer figure and I think this is a more realistic reading of the two historical figures. The other thing I’d say—and this sort of takes us back to Arrian—is that what authors in antiquity were doing when they wrote about Alexander was essentially telling a good story. This would include writing speeches for figures in their histories. They would base it as much as possible on the evidence. So Arrian uses Ptolemy and Aristobulus, but they would want to make it more readable and in a higher style, more impressive altogether. And that’s essentially what historical novelists do. So, although this is presented as a novel, it is, in a sense, as useful as Arrian in terms of it being a way of getting us to think about Alexander. Arrian has an agenda and Mary Renault has an agenda. Arrian is using sources and Mary Renault is using sources. Mary Renault is more similar to Arrian than most of the history books written about Alexander. They’ve both got this same interest in telling a good story and getting you to react to Alexander in a particular way. She is giving us a picture of his relationship with his parents, the extent to which from an early age, he is engaged in Macedonian politics, but also—and this is where she is her most inventive—this particular interest in his relationships with his young companions, his friends and, in particular, this love story between him and Hephaestion with whom he grew up and for whom, when he died, Alexander is said to have organised extremely lavish funeral celebrations. So, it’s about his development as a character and he comes across as an attractive figure, clever and interesting, again, in contrast to a lot of a lot of modern scholarship. Modern accounts of Alexander tend to be rather negative about him, to emphasise his cruelty and tyranny. These days Curtius, with his emphasis on Alexander’s negative aspects, is a lot more fashionable than Arrian. Mary Renault is much more positive. I think that the modern tendency to point out how bad Alexander was probably misses the point of what historians should be doing. I think it presents a way of looking at Alexander that is unhelpful. Mary Renault’s novel is possibly slightly innocent, but overall presents him as this loveable figure, I suppose, but in a serious way. Well, he died young, from a fever while still planning his next campaign. But, I think he would have seen himself as successful. He won every battle he fought, he had successfully taken over the entire Persian Empire. Again, to be controversial, there is the story that when he reached the river Hyphasis his troops forced him to turn back and prevented him from conquering India. I share the view of those scholars who think that this is probably a myth, that Alexander never really intended to go further. He probably did want to cross the Hyphasis but was prevented by bad omens, but he would not have travelled far to the east of the river. He did march down the eastern side of the Indus when he marched down the Indus Valley and that was effectively the boundary of the Achaemenid Empire. He did get the rulers on the far side of the Indus to support him. So, I think his eastern campaign was an unmitigated success, apart from his own injuries. He had to deal with a certain amount of insurrection when he got back, but basically if his target was to take territory from the Persian king, he ended up taking the whole of the empire of the Persians and replacing the Achaemenid dynasty; so that, I think, was a success and he would have recognised it as a success. He was probably planning to move into Arabia next. He might, had he lived longer, have campaigned further west, but essentially, I think he would have seen himself as having been successful. At the end of the Indus campaign, he has some medals struck in silver, large coins which are called decadrachms, 10 drachma pieces, and they show, on one side, Alexander on horseback fighting a man on an elephant, which is a depiction of one of his battles in India. And, on the other side, Alexander holding a thunderbolt and being crowned by a flying figure of Victory, holding a wreath over his head. So that’s a symbol of Alexander: victorious, unconquered—a word that sources often use about him. And not only unconquered but, by holding a thunderbolt, equivalent to a god. That image presented of him as the unconquered god was not megalomaniacal, not thinking that he is immortal or anything, but recognising that he has these achievements which are huge, and that only gods and heroes, like Heracles, have ever approached. I think that image is probably how he would have thought about himself at the end of his reign."