The New Alexandros
Well, here I am. I've been a longtime lurker on these boards, mostly in the RTW sections, but now I've got the guts to post. I'd like to start by saying I've been a big fan of the "Adventures of Princess Eleanor," and I've gotten the writing bug to do something a little like it. Its taken from my Rome: Total Realism campaign as the Ptolemies...
Introductions
234 B.C. – Alexandria
“Euergenetes!”
I turned around, the bright Alexandrian sun bathing my face with light and warmth. Here in the Imperial Palaces, the smell of lilacs and other beautiful flowers caressed my nose. My big, Auletes nose, which set me apart from the more graceful looks of the locals, or even those of the ‘true Ptolemy blood.’ It certified I would likely never be in line for the Alexandrine throne...
...but it still did me proud.
It has been almost 100 years since the great Alexandros fell ill and died at his tender young age in distant Babylon, and for a dark period, it looked as if all of his work would be undone by petty squabbles and violent wars amongst his successors. Antigonus, Kassander, Seleucus, and others, as my tutors would say.
Yet one of Alexandros’ generals remained loyal to him. It was Ptolemy who properly buried Alexadnros’ body, and kept alive his great dream and thirst for learning in the greatest library in the world, appropriately located in the greatest city in the world, Alexandria, once again, as my tutors would say.
For some 50 years, fighting raged back and forth between the various potenates, until the sons of Ptolemy launched their fateful series of advances, the advances that toppled the Greeks and Macedonians, and now spread the Ptolemy eagle from Utica in the West, to Pasargadae in the East, from the borders of Thrace and Armenia in the North, to the deepest depths of Nubia in the South. All under one King... the Ptolemies of Egypt.
Meyre Ptolemy, named Ptolemy IV, now rules over this vast realm. He is an aged man, in his 54th year of life, ruling from the splendid courts and gardens of Alexandria. How did the Empire expand so quickly, crushing the Antigonids, driving the Seleucids to the farthest corners of Asia, and humbling the upstarts from Carthage?
It spread, it breathed, it grew, on the blood of my fathers, a fact that my dearest mother Satsobek, daughter of Auletes Ptolemy, knows all too well.
“Euergenetes!” she called again, and I smiled. She was a wizened woman, but not yet a crone. She’d spent a little over fifty winters in either balmy Alexandria, or balmy Antioch, the northern capital. Before I could even greet her, her arms were wrapped around me, in a tight hug.
“You take care of yourself! You be careful!” she whispered in my ear, the sound as fierce as a lioness brooding over her cub. Her grip was fierce, and part of me wanted to tell her that she wouldn’t lose me like she lost my father, almost sixteen years before. “And then come back to me!” She pulled back, gripping the side of my head as she looked deep into my eyes, hoping, searching, praying that I wasn’t leaving. “I’ll have a fine marriage arranged for you, Euergentes! A fine one, a beautiful girl with well-placed parents!”
“Mother,” I said, laughing. “You ramble on as if this is the last time you’ll ever see me!” I gently took her hands from my face. “I’m only riding out with father’s old Thessalians to drive off those bandits that Antiochos has had so much trouble catching! Its not as if I’m marching against the great Demetrios of Herat!”
The moment I mentioned that name, I wished I hadn’t. Few sons want to see their mother’s face collapse and break into a thousand pieces. I know I wasn’t one of them. This time, she held herself together rather well... by which I mean she didn’t break into tears like she normally did. Instead, she bit her lower lip, and nodded her head, before gripping me again in another tight hug.
And like all sixteen year olds, I laughed off her concern.
I was born in Antioch sixteen years ago, during the time of our greatest battles and commands, as the Ptolemies fought war on four fronts: to the north, versus the remnants of the Antigonids and the haphazard Greeks, to the east, against the mighty Seleucids, and to the west, against the upstart Phoenicians of Carthage. The time when sarissas held strong, and our cavalry was our hammer.
And to speak the truth, I wished for those days. I wished I had been able to ride at Tarsus at my father’s side, or see the great siege of Babylon. Before he left to take his command at Seleucia, old Parmenios had fondly told me of my father’s deeds.
Deeds that I knew I could outdo.
Then again, I was only sixteen.
“Well, young Euergentes, your father’s armor looks becoming on you!”
“Thank you, Lysandros,” I smiled in reply. The big, burly man aside the horse next to mine flashed a huge grin, one of his immense paws reaching over and slapping me on the back. I like to think of myself as a strong lad, but the blow sent me reeling forward a bit. If I had been back in the palaces, I might have hissed at the sudden blow. But now, at the head of ten squadrons of cavalry, nearly three hundred altogether, I grinned as fiercely as I could.
“I talked with your tutors,” he said in that trumpeting basso of his, “and they said that you were masterful at geometry and rhetoric! I was beginning to think that your father left me to care for a bookworm!” He let out a loud, bawdy laugh, the laugh of someone who was raised in a far different classroom than those of the philosophers and teachers of the great cities; but the blood, sweat, and dust of the battlefield. He looked the part too... he wore a Phygrian cap, dusted leather and bronze cuirass that looked to have come from a museum, save all the dents, nicks, and cuts it sported. He swore it brought him luck. I say it brought him a great deal of intimidation.
“Intelligence helps on the battlefield as well,” I said calmly to him as I let loose a rather wry grin. I wasn’t about to let him mock my education free-handedly. There was sport in sparring with him. “A dullard like yourself wouldn’t have come up with the brilliance that was Gaugamela!”
My father’s best friend and my godfather shot me a grouchy look, a look only the men from Thessaly can create. “There you go again, always speaking of your namesake! Those people that Alexandros fought were numerous, true, but they were barbarians, led my the worst of men!” His face grew fiercer as he talked, the glint of battle coming in his eyes. “Those we face today, they are Hellenes, just like us! Disciplined, proud, and armed to the teeth!”
“Those we face today, dear Lysandros, are rebels that think a bow and a pointed stick make good weapons,” I smirked, to which Lysandros gave another hearty laugh.
“Bookwits might help you out-talk an old devil like me, boy,” he replied, “but let’s see how much they’ll help you when an actual fight arises!”
“If by arises, you mean my opponents run away in fear at seeing your face.” It was a rather smug reply, for Lysandros wasn’t that bad looking; for an man past fifty who had one good eye. He appreciated the swipe, however, and I earned myself another rather painful slap on the back.
Despite this, despite my training, I felt rather homesick once we left the walls of Alexandria, our horses headed into the desert west of the city...
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