I vaguely remembered one of the Creators, the Golden One, telling me arrogantly that he had designed me to be a warrior; me, and the other creatures he had sent into the time of the Neanderthals.
Aristotle mistook my silence for puzzlement. He took my arm in one of his thin-fingered hands and pulled me to the ant colony.
“Do you see them, Orion? I put two queen ants in there, one in this corner and the other on the farther side. They had plenty of room and I saw to it that they had plenty of food.”
The ants all looked exactly alike to me: tiny and black and terribly busy, scampering every which way across the sandy soil that filled the box.
“Yet look there,” Aristotle pointed. Battalions of ants were fighting each other, rending one another apart with fierce mandibles.
“They could live in peace, yet they fight. Each group wants to be master of the other. It is in their nature.”
“But men are not ants,” I said.
“No, they are like ravening dogs.” With real anger in his voice, Aristotle told me, “They see a neighbor who has something they do not, or a neighbor who appears too weak to defend himself, and they want to steal what that neighbor has. War is theft, Orion, thievery on a grand scale. Murder and rape and plunder, that is why men fight wars.”
“Does Philip intend to rape and plunder Athens and Thebes?”
“No, but they would do it to us.”
“Really?”
“That is what we fear.”
“But those cities lie far to the south. Why are we preparing to make war on them? Why do they want to make war against us?”
“Ah, your questions grow more specific. Good.”
“Well?”
Aristotle got down off his stool and clasped his hands behind his back. He had to look up to see into my face.
“Are you prepared to listen to a lecture on history, Orion?”
I knew from his tone that this would be a long lecture. I nodded. He began to pace. And speak.
The Greeks have never been able to unite themselves, Aristotle said. That is their glory and their weakness. Not since Agamemnon led the Achaians against Troy, countless ages ago, have the Greek cities been able to stand together for more than a few years at a time.
They united briefly, a century and a half ago, when the Persians under the old Dareios invaded Greece as punishment for Athenian support of a rebellion against Persia by the Greek cities on the Ionian coast, across the Aegean from Athens. The Persians were driven off after the Athenians stopped them at Marathon. Ten years later, Dareios’ son Xerxes invaded Greece again with an army that blackened the land with their numbers. Again the Persians were beaten off, even though they sacked Athens itself, because the cities of the south—principally Athens and Sparta—fought side by side against the invaders.
“Both times the Macedonians allowed the Persians to pass through their territory without a fight. They even sold the Persians horses for their cavalry and timber for their ships. Athens has never forgotten that.”
“But that was more than a century ago,” I said.
“Yes, and the Macedonians were little more than a bundle of cattlemen,” said Aristotle. “No match for the power of the Persian Empire. They did not even consider themselves to be Greeks, in the sense that the Athenians did.”
“The Athenians still call the Macedonians barbarians,” I recalled.
Aristotle nodded. “To this day.”
After their second defeat in Greece the Persians decided that these rugged fighters living at the edge of their empire were not worth the trouble to conquer them. But the Great King wanted to keep the rich Ionian cities on the Aegean coast, despite the fact that those cities were as Greek as Athens or Sparta or Thebes.
“Ever since then,” Aristotle continued, “the Persians have meddled in Greek politics. At one time they supported Sparta against Athens. At another, Athens against Corinth. Persian gold has been spent to keep the cities from uniting. Thus the Great King keeps us weak and no danger to his empire.”
“And Philip wants to change that?”