Life of Alexander

Plutarch says at the outset that he is writing a life and not a history, hunting for the marks of a character in a saying or a gesture rather than in a battle count. That is the only honest way to read this: it is a moral study of one man's rise and deterioration, not a manual for conquest, and Plutarch himself keeps score against Alexander as often as for him. The rules below take the habits that transfer, refuse the ones that were crimes when he committed them, and leave the largest part of the book where it belongs, as a standing warning about what winning does to a person.

Do

• Find the cause of the balk before you force the animal. Nobody could mount Bucephalas until Alexander noticed the horse was frightened by its own shadow and turned it to face the sun before quietly getting on. Everyone else in the story was applying more force to a problem that was not about force. [Source: "Birth, Boyhood, and the Taming of Bucephalus"]

• Ask the substantive question when you are given the room. Left to entertain Persian ambassadors in his father's absence as a boy, Alexander skipped the pleasantries and asked about travel distances, the character of the Persian king, and the size of his forces, which is what impressed them. He kept the same habit as an adult, carrying Aristotle's annotated Iliad and learning enough medicine to prescribe for sick friends. [Source: "Birth, Boyhood, and the Taming of Bucephalus"]

• Pay the people coming with you before you have anything. Before crossing to Asia with an underfunded army, as little as seventy talents and barely a month's provisions, he gave away nearly his whole royal estate to his friends, farms, villages, and harbor revenues. Asked what he had kept for himself, he said his hopes, and Perdiccas refused his own share on the grounds that he would rather share the hope. [Source: "Crossing to Asia and the Battle of Granicus"]

• Show the trust at the moment it costs you something. Warned by Parmenio's letter that his physician Philip had been bribed to poison him, Alexander drank the medicine while handing Philip the letter to read. The gesture was deliberate and public, and it nearly killed him, and it is the reason the physician's loyalty was never a question again. [Source: "The Gordian Knot and the Battle of Issus"]

• Refuse the win that lets the loser dispute the result. Urged to attack Darius at night to conceal his numerical disadvantage, Alexander answered that he would not steal a victory, reasoning that a night win would let Darius blame the darkness rather than concede outright defeat. He then slept so soundly before the battle that Parmenio had to wake him. [Source: "Darius's Overtures and the Battle of Gaugamela"]

• Do not take the comfort your people cannot have. Pursuing Darius across three thousand furlongs in eleven days, Alexander was offered a helmet of water by thirsty soldiers and refused to drink while they could not. The same instinct shows up in his rebuke of favorites who had taken to silver-studded shoes and imported wrestling powder, that dependency on servants was the exact slavishness they had come to conquer. [Source: "Persepolis, the King's Household, and the Death of Darius"]

• Burn your own baggage first. Noticing the army was slowed by accumulated plunder, Alexander had his own wagons burned at dawn, then his friends', and only then ordered the rest. The soldiers cheered and destroyed their own excess rather than resenting it, because the order arrived in the only sequence that would have made it bearable. [Source: "Into India: Taxiles and the Battle of the Hydaspes"]

• Cap your own consumption while your means are still growing. Alexander held dinner to a fixed ceiling of ten thousand drachmas regardless of how rich he became, and told Ada, who kept sending delicacies and cooks, that his tutor had already given him the best seasoning: a hard night march to sharpen the appetite for breakfast, and a light breakfast to sharpen it for supper. Plutarch notes he was also a slower drinker than his reputation, since what people took for heavy drinking was really long conversation over one cup. [Source: "After Issus: Darius's Captured Family"]

• Answer the person who came to talk rather than to fight. Taxiles met him by asking why they should fight at all if Alexander had not come to take water or food, the only things worth a real war. Alexander embraced him, returned his gifts many times over including a thousand talents, and got a large territory and a great deal of local goodwill for a conversation. [Source: "Into India: Taxiles and the Battle of the Hydaspes"]

Don't

• Don't settle an argument while you are drinking. The killing of Clitus began at a drunken supper with mocking verses about defeated officers, escalated when Clitus reminded Alexander whose sword arm had saved his life at the Granicus, and ended with Alexander running him through with a spear. He then had to be physically restrained from turning the weapon on himself and lay a full day and night refusing food or speech. [Source: "The Conspiracies: Philotas, Parmenio, and Clitus"]

• Don't destroy on a night's impulse what you will want back in the morning. Urged on at a drinking party by the courtesan Thais, Alexander took a torch himself and joined the procession that burned Xerxes's palace at Persepolis. Accounts differ over whether it was impulse or plan, but every account agrees he regretted it quickly and ordered the fire put out too late. [Source: "Persepolis, the King's Household, and the Death of Darius"]

• Don't break the terms you offered to obtain a surrender. Indian mercenaries defending several cities negotiated terms and marched away under them, and Alexander fell on them and killed them all. Plutarch flags this specifically as a stain, a breach of the just conduct Alexander otherwise observed, and puts it alongside his hanging of Indian philosophers who had urged free cities to resist. [Source: "Into India: Taxiles and the Battle of the Hydaspes"]

• Don't destroy the one person willing to say the thing plainly. Callisthenes refused the Persian prostration when nearly everyone else complied, which Plutarch credits with sparing the Macedonians a lasting disgrace, and it made him the court's target. Courtiers spread the story that he boasted of his resistance, he was implicated in a page's conspiracy on contested evidence, and he died in captivity, with Alexander's own letters giving flatly contradictory accounts of his guilt. [Source: "Callisthenes and the Proskynesis Controversy"]

• Don't treat suspicion as evidence once you are the one who cannot be contradicted. Philotas was tortured for a confession while Alexander listened from behind a tapestry, and then Parmenio was killed in Media, the same counselor who had urged the invasion of Asia in the first place and had already lost two other sons to the campaign. The charge against Philotas rested on drunken boasting and a failure to pass along a warning, not on anything he was shown to have done. [Source: "The Conspiracies: Philotas, Parmenio, and Clitus"]

• Don't let grief take command. When Hephaestion died after ignoring his physician's diet, Alexander cut the manes and tails of every horse and mule in the army, tore down city battlements, crucified the physician, and then fell on the Cossaean nation and put them to the sword in what Plutarch calls plainly a sacrifice to Hephaestion's ghost. The mourning was the reason a whole people was destroyed. [Source: "Hephaestion's Death, Omens, and the Death of Alexander"]

• Don't mistake your people's endurance for their consent. At the Hyphasis they refused to cross toward armies reported at hundreds of thousands, and Plutarch notes the reports were not exaggerated. Alexander shut himself in his tent in a rage and only turned back after his soldiers wept at the entrance, and at Opis the veterans erupted again when Persian-trained troops appeared to replace them. Both times the limit was reached long before he was told about it. [Source: "Turning Back: the Mutiny and the Wound Among the Mallians"]

• Don't route people through ground you have not provisioned. Sending the fleet around the coast, Alexander marched the army home through the Gedrosian desert and brought back barely a quarter of the roughly 120,000 infantry and 15,000 cavalry that had gone into India, lost mostly to disease, bad diet, heat, and famine in a barren country. The reputational disasters that followed, revolts and corrupt governors, all trace back to that march. [Source: "The Long Road Home: Gedrosia, Susa Weddings, and the Mutiny at Opis"]

Hold

• Suspicion arrives with the power, not with the enemies. The conspiracies section makes the sequence explicit: as Alexander's authority became absolute, he grew quicker to suspect betrayal and quicker to answer it with violence against the men closest to him. Held, you can watch for the change in yourself as your position hardens. Not held, every new suspicion reads as evidence that you were right to be watchful, which is the shape the corrosion actually takes. [Source: "The Conspiracies: Philotas, Parmenio, and Clitus"]

• Flattery is the specific tax on winning. After Clitus, the gentler Callisthenes offered comfort and the philosopher Anaxarchus offered flattery instead, telling Alexander that as supreme conqueror his actions were automatically just, like Jupiter's. Plutarch's verdict is exact: it calmed the king and corrupted his character. What is available to a person at the top is not honest counsel but the argument they would most like to hear. [Source: "The Conspiracies: Philotas, Parmenio, and Clitus"]

• The dead of your successes stay on the account. Alexander offered Thebes lenient terms, was refused, and destroyed the city, killing roughly six thousand and selling some thirty thousand into slavery. Plutarch records that he later regretted it and blamed his own misfortunes on the wrath of the city's patron god, and also records that the regret changed nothing about what happened. Held, achievement stays legible as something with a cost that other people paid. [Source: "Accession: Thebes Destroyed, Athens Spared"]

• The story about you outgrows anything you claimed. The sea was said to have retreated to let his army pass, and Plutarch pointedly notes that Alexander's own letters describe nothing miraculous, just an ordinary route through a pass. Alexander himself punctured it twice, telling friends as he bled that this was real flowing blood and not the ichor of a god, and laughing off the suggestion that Jupiter's son should be able to produce thunder. He played the god-descended king for barbarians and not for Greeks. [Source: "Tyre, Gaza, Alexandria, and the Oracle of Ammon"]

• Nothing you accumulate stays in your hands. Finding the tomb of Cyrus robbed, Alexander executed the culprit and had the inscription recut in Greek, an address from Cyrus asking whoever found it not to grudge him the little earth that covered his body. Plutarch says the words visibly moved him with the instability of human fortune, and places the scene right before the mass weddings and the debt payoffs meant to make the empire permanent. [Source: "The Long Road Home: Gedrosia, Susa Weddings, and the Mutiny at Opis"]

• What one person holds together does not survive them. The Life ends in the flat dated entries of the royal diary, fever from the eighteenth, speech gone by the twenty-sixth, soldiers filing silently past the bed, dead on the evening of the twenty-eighth. Immediately after, Roxana lured Statira with a forged letter pretending Alexander still lived, murdered her and her sister, and hid the bodies in a well, with Perdiccas seizing real power behind a nominal king. Held, this is an argument for building things that do not require you. [Source: "Hephaestion's Death, Omens, and the Death of Alexander"]

The one line

Copy the self-denial, the speed, and the refusal to steal a result, and read the rest as the record of what unchecked success did to a man who had no one left able to contradict him.