Alexander was born into the royal family of Macedonia, the kingdom that would soon rule over Greece. Tutored as a boy by Aristotle, Alexander had an inquisitive mind that would serve him well when he faced formidable obstacles during his military campaigns. Shortly after taking command of the army, he launched an invasion of the Persian empire, and continued his conquests as far south as the deserts of Egypt and as far east as the mountains of present-day Pakistan and the plains of India.
Alexander spent nearly all his adult life away from his homeland, and he and his men helped spread the Greek language throughout western Asia, where it would become the lingua franca of the ancient world. Best known among his successors are the Ptolemies of Egypt, whose empire lasted until Cleopatra.
Alexander could be petty and magnanimous, cruel and merciful, impulsive and farsighted. Above all, he was ferociously, intensely competitive and could not tolerate losing—which he rarely did. As Freeman explains, without Alexander, the influence of Greece on the ancient world would surely not have been as great as it was, even if his motivation was not to spread Greek culture for beneficial purposes but instead to unify his empire.
Only a handful of people have influenced history as Alexander did, which is why he continues to fascinate us. He was selected as a visiting fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton for January The author of several previous books including Alexander the Great , St. Visit him at PhilipFreemanBooks. Readers will appreciate this fine account of a man truly deserving of the title 'Great.
Tell us what you like and we'll recommend books you'll love. He relies principally on two authors. The other is a Greek called Aristobulus. Both of them accompanied Alexander on his campaigns. Alexander had an official historian, or someone who is referred to as an official historian, called Callisthenes, who was later arrested, accused of plotting against Alexander and died in captivity. It may be that for the bits where Callisthenes got to before he stopped writing Ptolemy was able to use his account.
So Arrian is using these two figures. Arrian has slightly implausible explanations as to why you should trust them. In one or two places in his book, he mentions episodes, and lists all the historians who report the event and those who denied it happened.
The most obvious one of these is when the queen of the Amazons visits Alexander. Arrian and Ptolemy both deny this happened, but others, including some who were contemporaries of Alexander, people who were there, are listed as having told this story.
The other thing to say is that Arrian has probably got a particular reader in mind, and that reader is the Emperor Hadrian. Arrian knew Hadrian. Arrian was made a consul and that would have been a decision of Hadrian.
Hadrian inherited an empire from his predecessor, Trajan, that reached into Mesopotamia, that included a lot the territory in which Alexander had fought. So Arrian is using Alexander as a model for how to be a king: setting up his bad points as things to avoid and his good points as things to follow. He sat at the feet of a famous philosopher, Epictetus, and recorded his work.
He wants to present Alexander in a positive light as a Greek, as a sign of how great the Greeks were in the past. Is he focused entirely on their military conquests or does he have a broader point to make about Greek culture? So Arrian was trying to play down the stories of Alexander getting drunk and doing things in a drunken fury, although even he shows that this happened from time to time.
But that Greekness is there in Arrian, minimising the extent to which Alexander was working within an Achaemenid Persian set up. It is a good read, yes. The thing that my students tend to find difficult with all these books is getting used to the names. But it tells a good story. This book was a bit earlier, I think, and a bit more negative in its picture of Alexander the Great.
Is that fair? There are two possibilities: either he wrote under the emperor Vespasian in the 70s or, possibly, he wrote earlier under Claudius in the first half of the first century AD. He wrote in Latin and he was probably a senator in Rome. The other problem we have with Curtius is that, unfortunately, the first two of the ten books of his history are missing. Scholars generally believe, although Curtius never mentions it, that he is using the work of a man called Cleitarchus who was probably writing in Alexandria in Egypt, probably about the same time as Ptolemy.
But Cleitarchus was someone who had not campaigned with Alexander. Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount. It may well be, for example, that Cleitarchus understood more about Egyptian religious rituals. All the historians give a description of Alexander visiting an oracle in the Libyan desert. The process Curtius describes sounds much more like what actually happened in Egypt than, for example, the story Arrian relates, which we know is very close to what Callisthenes said, and which is probably also what Ptolemy said, which tends to present the oracle much more like a Greek oracle.
So Cleitarchus is probably in some areas, particularly in relation to non-Greek practices, more reliable than the others. But the other thing to say is that Curtius is writing as a Roman, a Roman senator, in a period when Roman senators were still coming to terms with autocracy.
He makes a distinction between Macedonians and Greeks and on the whole the Macedonians are mostly okay, but the Greeks are the real trouble. The Macedonian soldiery come across as sort of proto-Romans and the Greeks come across as these very problematic, wily, untrustworthy figures. I think, for Curtius, the extent to which Alexander is more Greek, and therefore less Macedonian, lies at the root of what causes him to go wrong. Arrian has Alexander trusting a wise Greek soothsayer, called Aristander.
He is keen to emphasise how often Alexander relies on these things and, because the Romans have a different approach to divination, Curtius is more scornful of all the divination Alexander uses and much more prepared to think that it is all trickery and fakery. Famously, the emperor Tiberius tried to ban astrologers from Rome, but had his own astrologer.
There was Roman imperial hostility to astrologers in principle but the use of them in private. It was perceived to be a problem by senators like Curtius.
Just to join the gap, the first two books we were looking at are the earliest surviving, or some of the earliest surviving, narratives about Alexander the Great, even though they were written centuries after his time. Maybe Curtius was read a bit, but the dominant stories told about Alexander came from The Alexander Romance.
Ultimately it goes on spreading into the modern period, so you have Scottish Alexander texts, you even have Icelandic stories about Alexander. And then in the Enlightenment period you start to get a return to interest in the Greek texts and in a more scientifically historical study of Alexander and this coincides with the periods of European overseas expansion. You have people writing about Alexander in the light of what French Kings like Louis XIV are doing and other European countries embarked on overseas expansion.
A series of ideas about Alexander develops. You have emphases on Alexander as a kind of scholar-King, Alexander as an advocate of trade and the creation of a commercial empire. You also have an interest in Afghanistan as this borderland between British India on the one hand and Russia on the other, and people becoming fascinated by what Alexander did in Afghanistan—where he went, and finding the places that he went to. Alexander gets tied to ideas related to the Great Game, the world of espionage between the British Empire and Russia in the second half of the 19th century.
Briant chooses to end the book talking about German interest in Alexander the Great. This is interesting, because at the time when the reunification of Germany was happening under Bismarck, you have Johann Droysen writing a history of Philip and then of Alexander.
A lot of modern scholarship has tended to go back to Droysen, and what Briant does is tell the story before Droysen. But before then you have all these other writers—French, English, Scottish—who start to create in their books this 18th- and 19th-century version of Alexander the Great that is, in many ways, the lens through which everyone who writes a biography of Alexander has tended to look.
He quickly garnered the support of the Macedonian army, including the general and troops he had had fought with at Chaeronea. The army proclaimed Alexander the feudal king and proceeded to help him murder other potential heirs to the throne. Ever a loyal mother, Olympia further ensured her son's claim to the throne by slaughtering the daughter of King Philip II and Cleopatra and driving Cleopatra herself to suicide.
Even though Alexander was the feudal king of Macedonia, he didn't obtain automatic control of the Corinthian League. In fact, the southern states of Greece were celebrating Philip II's death and expressed divided interests.
Athens had its own agenda: Under the leadership of democratic Demosthenes, the state hoped to take charge of the league. As they launched independence movements, Alexander sent his army south and coerced the region of Thessaly into acknowledging him as the leader of the Corinthian League. Then during a meeting of league members at Thermopylae, Alexander elicited their acceptance of his leadership. By the fall of , he reissued treaties with the Greek city-states that belonged to the Corinthian League — with Athens still refusing membership — and was granted full military power in the campaign against the Persian Empire.
But, before preparing for war with Persia, Alexander first conquered the Thracian Triballians in , securing Macedonia's northern borders. As Alexander was nearing the end of his northern campaign, he was delivered the news that Thebes, a Greek city-state, had forced out the Macedonian troops that were garrisoned there.
Fearing a revolt among the other city-states, Alexander leapt into action, marching his massive army—consisting of 3, cavalry and 30, infantry—southward all the way to the tip of the Greek peninsula. Meanwhile, Alexander's general, Parmenion, had already made his way to Asia Minor. Alexander and his forces arrived in Thebes so quickly that the city-state didn't have a chance to pull together allies for its defense. Three days after his arrival, Alexander led the massacre of Thebes.
It was Alexander's hope that the destruction of Thebes would serve as a warning to city-states contemplating revolt. His intimidation tactic proved effective; the other Greek city-states, including Athens, chose to pledge their alliance to the Macedonian Empire or opted to remain neutral. In , Alexander embarked on his Asiatic expedition, arriving in Troy that spring. By fall, Alexander and his army had made it across the southern coast of Asia Minor to Gordium, where they took the winter to rest.
In the summer of , the troops of Alexander and Darius once again went head to head in battle at Issus. Although Alexander's army was outnumbered, he used his flair for military strategy to create formations that defeated the Persians again and caused Darius to flee. In November of , Alexander declared himself the king of Persia after capturing Darius and making him a fugitive. Next up on Alexander's agenda was his campaign to conquer Egypt. After besieging Gaza on his way to Egypt, Alexander easily achieved his conquest; Egypt fell without resistance.
In , he created the city of Alexandria, designed as a hub for Greek culture and commerce. Later that year, Alexander defeated the Persians at the Battle of Gaugamela.
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