Did Alexander really tame Bucephalus because the horse was afraid of his own shadow?
It is one of the most famous stories about Alexander the Great, and it happened before he was a conqueror at all.
The Story
A Thessalian horse breeder named Philoneicus brought an extraordinary stallion to Philip II of Macedon. The horse was called Bucephalus. He was large, black, and apparently worth a fortune. Philip Freeman gives the asking price as thirteen talents, enough, he says, to support a man for a lifetime.
There was one problem. Nobody could ride him.
Philip's experienced horsemen tried, but Bucephalus reared and refused to cooperate. Eventually Philip decided the horse was useless and ordered him taken away.
Then the young Alexander spoke up.
He thought everyone was giving up on a magnificent horse simply because they didn't understand him. Philip challenged his son to do better. And this is where the story gets interesting.
Alexander had apparently noticed something the experienced horsemen had missed. Bucephalus became frightened when the sun was behind him because his own shadow moved across the ground in front of him.
So Alexander turned the horse toward the sun. No shadow in front of him. He calmed Bucephalus, climbed onto his back, and slowly began riding. Then he let him run.
When Alexander returned, Philip was supposedly so overwhelmed that he kissed his son and told him that Macedonia was too small for him. Freeman tells the story in essentially this form.
It's a great story. Maybe a little too great.
So did it really happen?
Our main source for the full story is Plutarch's Life of Alexander, written centuries after Alexander died. Adrian Goldsworthy also traces the account directly to Plutarch, specifically Alexander 6.1–5.
And when you look at the story as a whole, it almost feels written to explain the man Alexander would later become.
Experienced men see an impossible horse. Alexander notices what they don't. They try to control it. Alexander understands it. They give up. Alexander takes the risk.
Then Philip finishes the scene by effectively predicting that his son will one day need a kingdom larger than Macedonia.
It's almost a miniature version of the Alexander legend. That doesn't mean the story is false.
Bucephalus certainly wasn't just a character in this childhood anecdote. Ancient sources continued to associate the horse with Alexander much later in his life. Freeman cites Plutarch, Diodorus, Arrian, Pliny and Aulus Gellius for traditions surrounding Bucephalus.
What we can't really know is whether the childhood encounter happened exactly as Plutarch tells it.
Perhaps Alexander really did notice that the horse was frightened by his shadow.
Perhaps a real story became better every time it was retold.
And perhaps Philip's perfect prediction about his son's future was remembered because everyone already knew how that future turned out.
Personally, that's what makes stories like this so interesting. Somewhere underneath the legend there was a real boy and a real horse. The difficult part is figuring out where the history ends and the storytelling begins.
I researched this while working on The Horse - Bucephalus, the first episode of Witnesses of History. The podcast tells Alexander's story through fictional first-person witnesses, and for this episode I imagined the scene through a stable apprentice (Nikanor) watching Alexander and Bucephalus. The witness is fictional. The story surrounding Alexander and Bucephalus comes from Plutarch.
What do you think? Do you believe the shadow story probably happened, or does it feel too perfectly written in hindsight?
Sources:
Philip Freeman, Alexander the Great (2011), Chapter 1
Adrian Goldsworthy, Philip and Alexander: Kings and Conquerors (2020), Chapter 9
Plutarch, Life of Alexander, 6