
Transcript
Book 1, Chapter Four: The Olympic Games, Pages 71 and 72
“Yesss!
You show that pig-faced bastard!
Yeah! Hahaha!”
Laughing his machine-gun laugh,
he smacks the back of his teenage son’s head.
“Teknon! Are you seeing this?!”
Alexander glares at his father,
rubs the back of his head,
and curls back deep into the corner of his seat,
returning to the poetry that he had been reading, and mumbles
“Ngh. Yeah, yeah, I see it…”
Philip sighs,
“Tsk, tsk. Pity!
Why don’t you do sports more?”
Alexander shrugs.
Philip raises his brow, a curl playing at the edge of his lips, teasing,
“Hmm. Well, that’s alright, teknon.
Can’t be good at everything…
can you?”
Like a goaded lion,
Alexander swerves grumpily at his father,
“That’s not true! I–!”
Unable to defend himself, he looks away. It is true: he has no interest in participating in silly games in which no kings win anything of consequence,
but he cannot prove that it’s due to his lack of ability
(for he has never joined a competition)
unless…
“Ugh. Look, pater.
Will you stop pestering me about sports forever
if I join one game
and prove myself?”
Philip responds with a smirk,
“Only if you win.”
Alexander snarls, standing up,
“Of course I will!
And not just in any game, pater…
The Olympics, hah!
I swear by Zeus. I will win!
You’ll see.”
But far away, a decade and some after,
a voice interrupts them,
“Huh. That’s odd.”
Chapter Four 071-072
Angsty teen energy!!
Footnotes:
Alexander thinking sports is pointless (Plutarch, Lives 4.8)
But while he was still a boy his self-restraint showed itself in the fact that, although he was impetuous and violent in other matters, the pleasures of the body had little hold upon him, and he indulged in them with great moderation, while his ambition kept his spirit serious and lofty in advance of his years. For it was neither every kind of fame nor fame from every source that he courted, as Philip did, who plumed himself like a sophist on the power of his oratory, and took care to have the victories of his chariots at Olympia engraved upon his coins; nay, when those about him inquired whether he would be willing to contend in the foot-race at the Olympic games, since he was swift of foot, “Yes,” said he, “if I could have kings as my contestants.” And in general, too, Alexander appears to have been averse to the whole race of athletes; at any rate, though he instituted very many contests, not only for tragic poets and players on the flute and players on the lyre, but also for rhapsodists, as well as for hunting of every sort and for fighting with staves, he took no interest in offering prizes either for boxing or for the pancratium.
Also in the First Oration on the Fortune of Alexander, Plutarch’s Moralia
“But of the genuine sayings of Alexander we might first review those of his youth. Since he was the swiftest of foot of all the young men of his age, his comrades urged him to enter the Olympic games. He asked if the competitors were kings, and when his friends replied that they were not, he said that the contest was unfair, for it was one in which a victory would be over commoners, but a defeat would be the defeat of a king.”











