His words sent a shock through me. Somehow I knew he was right, and I wondered how he knew so much about the gods. Yet, at the same instant, I knew he was also wrong. The gods’ principal interest is to meddle in human affairs.
I had been recalled to barracks because I was assigned to duty that evening. Most of the royal guard had gone off to their homes scattered through the city, so the handful of us who lived in the barracks got the chore of standing like statues through the king’s long, loud, wine-soaked dinners.
Pausanias was one of the few Macedonian nobles who actually did his guard duty that night. Sour-faced and grumbling, he complained that he should be reclining on a dinner couch with the others rather than standing around in armor and helmet while his fellow nobles drank themselves into a stupor.
“I’m as good as they are,” I heard him growl as he inspected my uniform. We were all decked out as if we were marching into battle. We even carried our shields with us.
My post was by the main entrance to the dining hall. It was a big room with a huge fireplace at one end of it, roaring hot although no cooking was done on it. Even in summer the Macedonian nights could be chill. The food was brought in on long trays by sweating servants and set down on the dinner tables, while the dogs, lolling by the fireplace, watched silently with hungry eyes that caught the flickering of the flames.
Philip reclined on a couch at the front of the hall, raised up on a two-step dais, beneath a strikingly vivid mosaic of a roaring lion done in colored pebbles. Flanking him along the table were his generals Parmenio and Antipatros, and Antigonos, gray and lean as an old wolf. Like Philip, Antigonos had lost an eye in battle long ago.
The dinner guests sitting below them were all male, of course. At first. There were plenty of women servants, most of them young and slim and smiling as the men ogled and pawed at them. The boys among the servants were treated much the same. Even Philip pinched buttocks without regard to gender. Wine was poured liberally, and the laughter and rowdiness rose with each gulp.
I saw that Alexandros was not present, nor any of his young Companions. This was a dinner for the king’s friends and companions-in-arms. And for relatives, close and distant, such as Attalos, a fat and beady-eyed clan leader who owned, it was said, the biggest house in Pella and the richest horse ranch in Macedonia.
Attalos also had a fourteen-year-old niece who was being dangled as bait before Philip’s eyes, according to the barracks gossip.
“Philip likes ’em young,” one of my barracks mates had told me while we were suiting up for duty. “Girls, boys, makes no difference.”
“How old was Olympias when he married her?” I had asked.
“Ahh, that was different. That was a state marriage. Brought the Molossians and all of Epeiros over to Philip’s side with that marriage.”
“He was mad about her, though,” said one of the other men.
“Bewitched by her, you mean.”
“Well, whatever it was, it wore off as soon as she bore him Alexandros.”
“Doesn’t matter; the old fox casts his one good eye on anything with smooth skin.”
They all laughed approvingly, wishing they had the kingly prerogatives of Philip.
As the dinner stretched into a long drinking bout I wondered if I would be able to keep my midnight appointment with the queen. Philip looked half-unconscious from the wine he had drunk, yet he had a boy of ten or so pouring still more into his gold goblet. Some of the dinner guests were drowsing on their couches; those who weren’t were fondling the prettier servants.
Then the hetairai were admitted into the dining hall and the servants scampered away, many of them looking grateful. These professional women were older and looked quite sure of themselves. It seemed to me that they picked out the men they wished to be with. No one argued with their choices. And the men’s behavior actually improved. The lewd jokes and roaring laughter quieted down as one of the courtesans pointed to the musicians who had been sitting idly in a corner. They struck up their lyres and flutes and lovely soft music filled the dining hall. The stench of spilled wine and vomit still hung in the air. But now the perfumes of distant lands began to make the room more pleasant.