Books: Alexander’s Band

FIRE FROM HEAVEN by Mary Renault. 375 pages. Pantheon. $7.95.

“I only say, ask yourself who gains most. Olympias gains everything, because this match will lose her everything, if the King outlives it. Demosthenes gains the blood of the man he hates worse than death; the Athenians gain a civil war in Macedon, if we play our part, with the kingship in doubt, or passed to a boy they make light of, the more so since he’s in disfavor. Darius, whose gold you want to keep even if it hangs you, gains even more . . .

After a while, the battle-wan reader may feel he has little to gain by following the fortunes of the local satraps up and down the Peloponnesus in this flagrantly detailed novel about Alexander the Great’s first 20 years. Not only is the cast large and devious, but the archaeological displays are as plentiful as prize vegetable exhibits at a fair.

Author Renault, whose specialty is Hellenic myth and culture, has written better disciplined, more absorbing books (The Last of the Wine, The King Must Die). Here she appears to be limited by her slightly blinkered view of Alexander. Granting him his historic virtues—precocity, courage, leadership and tactical genius—she dissembles on the crucial matter of his sexuality. After Achilles and Patroclus, Alexander and Hephaistion (one of his generals) were the best-known best friends of the ancient world. In the novel, however, though the author surrounds her hero with Hephaistion, an overt invert, and a band of other young men, Alexander himself remains pure, sublimated and inevitably prissy. He not only has no faults; he has no appetites, an odd condition for a young hero who, according to popular legend, later wept because he had no more worlds to conquer.* The result is an important vacuum at the book’s center that is methodically filled by a lot of learning—which can be a dangerous thing too.

*In fact, according to Plutarch, who started the legend, Alexander wept because, with an infinity of worlds, he had not yet fully conquered even one.