A tapestry showed two men beside a river; one standing in fine armour and the other dressed in rags and sitting before an overturned wine barrel. Trees loomed behind them, and she had the impression something hid among them.

This Iron Race, book two

Many years ago, when I lived in the city of Bath I was a regular visitor to Dyrham Park. It has a rather fine deer park and a house built in the Georgian style popular in the decades following the Glorious Deliverance and independence from Denmark. It has the curious distinction of having two fronts and no back, much like so many in government, but owing here to the changing fortunes of the region as at one time it faced the village of Dyrham and later faced toward the Bath Road when that city became a fashionable spa town. 

That is not why I mention it here; rather, in one of its rooms is a tapestry of a wooded dell wherein an old man sits inside a wine barrel as soldiers approach. Are his hours numbered? No: for this is the famous encounter between Alexander the Great and the hermit-philosopher, pricker of vanity, and bone-conjuror, Diogenes. The description in MacGregor’s text is unmistakably this famous meeting, and yet the tapestry might show any other scene or not be described at all, and it would make no difference to the narrative. Therefore, we should ask why MacGregor shows us Alexander meeting Diogenes.

For once the dependable, if eccentric, Dr Claude Crabtree is of no use in the matter as he had a particular blind spot regarding Greece and Greek scholarship. Quite why is something of an enigma wrapped in scurrilous gossip. It is a matter of record that during the Great European War the then Lieutenant Crabtree was briefly stationed in Athens—there was a fear Germany would attempt to annexe the oil fields in Bulgaria—and, with little in the way of soldierly duties to attend, he took to wandering the slopes of the Acropolis. At this point in the story gossip takes over for supposedly a patrol of Greek soldiers found him drunk on grappa and in a compromising position with a goat, or possibly a goatherd depending on which version one hears. Ignoring his protestations that he was teaching the goat—or goatherd—to sing, the soldiers beat him soundly and arrested him for indecency. Owing to complicated local politics it was six months before the English authorities managed to extricate him from jail after which he was discharged from the army as morally unfit for duty. His revenge, ineffectual though it was, was to ignore or traduce any supposed assumptions about Greek scholarship and cultural achievement; though I believe he remained fluent in Greek for the rest of his life. I suspect it was this self-induced blind spot that led him to ignore the significance of the tapestry, and so I must speculate without his assistance.

Diogenes is a pauper, albeit self-made since he was certainly the son of a rich man—a coinmaker of Sinope (Sinop in modern-day Turkey)—and a despiser of power, wealth, and fame who even mocked Plato’s claim that man is nought but a featherless biped by plucking a chicken and asking if it was not then a man. Yet Diogenes’ aestheticism drew admirers: it was said that he threw away his only possession, a drinking bowl, after witnessing a man drink from his cupped hands, and he was thought able to see through the material veil to greater truths.

Thus, we understand why Alexander would seek Diogenes’ opinion but alas, we have no definitive account of what was said. In one version Diogenes casts his tell-bones and when Alexander inquires he claims he looked for the bones of Alexander’s father but found only those of a slave. In another account Alexander asks what he might do for Diogenes and the philosopher asks him to stand out of his light. In yet another Alexander offers Diogenes anything he desires and Diogenes asks only for things Alexander cannot possibly give, such as causing the sun to set upon his command.

The subtext is clear: Diogenes requires nothing of Alexander, other than to be left alone, and Alexander has no comprehension of the truths Diogenes could offer him. One is a philosopher-hermit who has nothing and wants for nothing and the other is the conqueror of the known world who laments that there is no more world for him to conquer. And yet, had Alexander the wit to ask Diogenes the right question he might have avoided the heartache of losing his lover, Hephaestion, and an early death. The tapestry therefore represents a famous meeting between exponents of magick and military prowess and while Alexander is blind and deaf to what Diogenes may offer I think MacGregor is suggesting that his failure is one of comprehension, not desire.

The true error, MacGregor hints, would be if those in power were indifferent to magick.