{"product_id":"alexander-the-great-isbn-9781400079193","title":"Alexander the Great","description":"\u003cb\u003eThe definitive biography of the towering hero of the classical world: a fearless general, the conqueror of the Persians, and the visionary ruler of a vast empire—from one of the world's foremost scholars of ancient Greece. \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e“An amazingly solid, balanced, and evocative view of the man.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Washington Post Book World\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003ePaul Cartledge gives us the most accessible, reliable, and intimate portrait of Alexander III of Macedon, the man himself, brilliantly evoking his remarkable political and military accomplishments, cutting through the myths to show why he was such a great leader. \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eHe explores our endless obsession with Alexander and gives us insight into both his capacity for brutality and his sensitive grasp of international politics. As he brings Alexander vividly to life, Cartledge also captures his enduring impact on world history and culture.“May be the most accessible introduction in print.... An amazingly solid, balanced,  and evocative view of the man.” \u003cb\u003e—\u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003eThe Washington Post Book World\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“Readable and engrossing....  Immediate, discursive, insightful, and highly engaging.” \u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003ePittsburgh Tribune-Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“Incisive and judicious.... What Cartledge does so well is explain the ancient world  of Greeks and Persians.” \u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003e—The Sunday Seattle Times\/Post-Intelligencer\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/i\u003ePAUL CARTLEDGE, professor of Greek history at the University of Cambridge, is the author of \u003ci\u003eThermopylae: The Battle That Changed the World, The Spartans, \u003c\/i\u003eand \u003ci\u003eThe Greeks: Crucible of Civilization.\u003c\/i\u003e1\u003cbr\u003e      The Fame of Alexander\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e      The world remembers Iskander and his deeds. Macedonia gave him its sceptre. Iskander was the son of Philip. His life was one long dream of glory.  —Abai, ‘Iskander’, trans. Richard McKane\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e     Inheriting at the age of twenty his father Philip’s position as master of the Greek world east of the Adriatic, Alexander had also, by the   ripe old age of twenty-six, made himself master of the once mighty Persian Empire. By the time he was thirty he had taken his victorious   arms to the limits of the known oikoumenê (inhabited world). Yet, before his thirty-third birthday he was dead. Small surprise,   therefore, that he should have become a legend in his own lifetime.   That his legend has spread so far and so wide – from Iceland to China –   since his death in 323 bce is due very largely to the so-called   Alexander Romance. This fabulous fiction took shape in Egypt, mostly   some five or more centuries after Alexander’s death.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Thanks to this, and for other reasons too, of course, Alexander became   in various countries and at various times a hero, a quasi-holy man, a   Christian saint, a new Achilles, a philosopher, a scientist, a prophet   and a visionary. But in antiquity he was most famous of all as a   conqueror. Here is Arrian, writing in the early second century ce under the influence of the Roman emperor Trajan’s recent conquests in Parthia   (in modern Iran); his Anabasis (‘March Up Country’) is our best ancient   historical source on Alexander: ‘For my part I cannot determine with   certainty what sort of plans Alexander had in mind, but none was small   and petty, and he would not have stopped conquering even if he’d added   Europe to Asia and the Britannic Islands to Europe . . .’ Arrian was   quite properly alert to Alexander’s fame. But that comment on his last   plans (see Chapter 10) is just the sort of measured and reflective   remark that commends him to the modern critical historian and   biographer of the world-conqueror. Apart, perhaps, from his casual   remark about ‘the Britannic Islands’ – as if they were not part of   ‘Europe’ . . .\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    A millennium and a half later, Shakespeare’s Hamlet comments rather   irreverently in the graveyard scene on the possible earthly fate of   Alexander’s corpse:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e     Alexander died, Alexander was buried,\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Alexander returneth into dust; the dust\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    is earth; of earth we make loam; and why of\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    that loam, whereto he was converted, might\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    they not stop a beer-barrel?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    This is a chauvinistic English illustration of the fact that Alexander  has featured in the national literatures of some eighty countries,   stretching from our own Britannic islands to the Malay peninsula by way   of Kazakhstan (home of Abai, its national poet). This, in its turn, is   another way of saying that Alexander is probably the most famous of the  few individuals in human history whose bright light has shot across the  firmament to mark the end of one era and the beginning of another. As the novelist Mary Butts put it rather well (in a note to her 1931 fiction, The Macedonian): ‘There are men who sum up an epoch, and men   who begin another. Alexander did both.’ She aptly cited, too, another   passage of Arrian:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    ‘I am persuaded that there is no nation, city or people then in being   where his name did not reach; for which reason, whatever origin he might boast of, or claim to himself, there seems to me to have been   some divine hand presiding over both his birth and his actions,\u003cbr\u003einasmuch as no mortal on earth either excelled or equalled him.’\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Another local testimony – and testament – to Alexander’s fame is as   British in its way as can be. To celebrate the 250th anniversary of the   founding of the British Museum in 1753, the Royal Mail devised a set of   special stamps illustrating just six objects out of the BM’s collection  of over seven million artifacts spanning some two million years of the   human past. One of these six represents a stone bust of Alexander  carved in the Hellenistic era (about 200 bce): Alexander, ‘who’,   according to the promotional material, ‘after his death, was worshipped   as a god’.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    That is not quite accurate; he was also, crucially, worshipped as a   living god. But one ancient figure who certainly was worshipped as\u003cbr\u003e a god only after his death was the proto-Roman emperor Julius Caesar, in whose life Plutarch (as Shakespeare well knew) found a parallel to that of Alexander. Reasonably enough, since in some respects Caesar did come quite close to equalling Alexander – though only after many more   years of trying – and he did give his name to a type of autocratic ruler (Kaiser, Czar). When Julius was on an early tour of imperial duty in Spain, Plutarch relates, he is said to have gazed at a statue of   Alexander (perhaps like the one now in the Museum at Seville, which came from the Roman colony of Italica that produced two later Roman   emperors). And he wept because, whereas Alexander had died at thirty-two, king of so many peoples, he himself at that same age had not yet achieved any brilliant success. I am no Julius Caesar. But I am fifty-six at the time of writing this – so you can, I hope, imagine how I feel.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Many many more illustrations of Alexander’s fame could be given. St   Augustine wasn’t hugely impressed: he considered him (in Frank Holt’s   paraphrase of the City of God passage) ‘a rogue with a global appetite   for plunder’ – a rather startlingly modern image. St John Chrysostom,   patriarch of Constantinople, objected to the way that coins bearing   Alexander’s image were often bound to people’s heads and feet as   apotropaic talismans. The modern equivalent of this is perhaps to be found on the tennis court: the Australian player Mark   Philippoussis, whose father is Greek, carries an Alexander tattoo.   Presumably Chrysostom would have been more in sympathy with Dante, who   consigned Alexander to the seventh circle of his Inferno, along with   (other?) thieves, murderers and tyrants. Even in Greece today sailors   in distress are said to be confronted by a water-nymph who demands to   know ‘Where is the great Alexander?’ To which the only satisfactory   response is: ‘Great Alexander lives and reigns.’ Indeed.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Such in fact is his continuing fame even in today’s very differently   structured global world that business journalists write management   books purporting to derive and to convey ‘lessons from the great empire   builder’. And American film-makers and their financial backers are   prepared to commit millions of dollars to exploring, recreating and   perhaps even, they hope, enhancing the fame of the original. But was   fame or glory, as  Abai would have it, the spur for Alexander – the   holy grail that drove him to achieve what he did? And, though without question incomparably famous both now and in his lifetime, was he, is   he, also ‘great’, let alone ‘the Great’? These are just some of the   major questions that we shall seek to answer in the course of our hunt   for a new interpretation of Alexander’s peculiar genius.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    My answers, any answers, must necessarily be provisional, tentative and  more or less speculative. For Alexander has been handed down to us  ultimately as an enigma, thanks above all to the inadequate nature of   our sources of evidence. Though the extant evidence is very far from   slight in quantity, it is in several respects seriously deficient in   quality. It is mainly non-contemporary, it is partisan (con as well as   pro), and it tends to be sensationalist. Whichever of the major aspects   of Alexander’s career we study, therefore, we are usually unable to   reach anything firmer than a high probability in explanation, and even   that degree of probability is a rarity. The very facts themselves –   what actually happened – are often unclear. Like that of the ancient Roman historian Tacitus, therefore, our prime watchword as historians of   Alexander must be distrust of what we are told.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Some students of Alexander, indeed, believe that the best that can be  done in the way of historical retrieval is to focus on the various   images of the man that the different kinds and media of evidence provide, without hoping or expecting to be able to proceed further to   uncover anything like the – or any sort of – truth about Alexander. The present book will indeed pay due attention to the image, or rather   images, of Alexander, and to the abundant mythistorical tradition that   sprang up around him in his own lifetime and has continued vigorously to our own day. But it will also argue that a careful reading of the   most reliable ancient sources, both written texts and broadly   archaeological data, can reveal something substantial about what made Alexander tick, and how and why he was able to achieve what he did.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I shall begin by tracing in outline Alexander’s career from his birth   at Pella in Macedonia in summer 356 to the beginning of his campaign of   conquest against the Persian Empire in 334. This will be only an   outline account, but it will provide a geographical and chronological backdrop and framework for the subsequent thematic chapters; and, as I   go through, I shall indicate those points at which the key themes   singled out for detailed discussion are engaged. The purely   geographical frame of Alexander’s achievements will constantly be referred to. Polybius (a major Greek historian of the second century   bce) believed that a proper history couldn’t be written except by   someone who’d inspected all the scenes of historical action in person.   Unfortunately, this has not been possible for me, not by a long chalk,   but what I shall try to do is bring out the salient features of terrain   and climate in every relevant case, beginning with Alexander’s own home   territory of Macedonia (Upper and Lower). I shall then dog Alexander’s   footsteps for well over twenty thousand miles (30,000 kilometres) as he   led victorious armies, first north towards the Danube then south into   central Greece, before finally setting off for Asia, never to return to   Europe, in 334.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Between 334 and 331 he defeated the Persian Great King’s Mediterranean   navy – paradoxically, unpredictably and perhaps undeservedly – by land.   That is, he captured its bases one by one, especially in the Levant,   where the siege of Tyre in 332 was crucial. This meant that, with   mainland Greece under the firm control of Regent Antipater, Alexander   could for the most part concentrate unswervingly on winning a series of   major set-piece battles against Darius III. Of these there were three:   the Granicus river in western Anatolia in 334, Issus in southern   Anatolia in 333, and Gaugamela in Mesopotamia in 331. Much more, and   very hazardous, fighting lay ahead. But to all intents and purposes   from the middle of 329, when a kinsman and would-be successor of the dead Darius was   executed, Alexander had no rival as ruler of a new, massively enlarged   empire. Eventually, this would stretch from Greece to Pakistan, taking   in on the way – among other countries or regions – Egypt, Syria and   Babylonia, as well as, of course, the old Persian heartland of Iran.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The hardest fighting, and in its way the most admirable of Alexander’s   military successes, occurred in the uplands of central Asia between 329   and 327. This was episodic and irregular guerrilla fighting against   tribal warrior bands, not a series of formal, traditional encounters   with national or civic armies in open field of battle. Alexander’s   father Philip had, it was neatly said by a later biographer, ‘fought   his wars by marriages’: that is to say, he had combined straightforward   fighting and conquest with marital diplomacy and bridge-building,   either to lessen his enemies’ resistance, or to ensure their quiescence after defeat; and he had done so no fewer than seven times. Alexander imitated his father only twice, in Sogdia in 327 and in Iran in 324, and each was a sign not of power and success but rather of the   difficulty with which the victory had been won, and the complexity of  any subsequent maintenance of his authority. Later writers talked these marriages up in romantic terms, especially his first with Roxane, but the truth was surely more pragmatically prosaic.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Once he had Iran and its environs more or less securely under his   control, by the summer of 327, it is arguable that Alexander did not   need to embark on further conquest. He did not need, for example, to   reconquer the land beyond the Hindu Kush mountains, in modern Pakistan,  that had once belonged to the Persian Empire but long since been lost   and abandoned. Yet not only did Alexander inspire, cajole or drive his men (and their sexual partners) across and into Pakistan and India, but   he made as if to press on ever further eastwards, to the very edge of   the world (as that was then generally conceived), to where the   furthermost landmass was lapped by the engirdling Ocean. As the Roman  author Quintus Curtius Rufus put it: ‘The fates waited for him to   complete the subjugation of the Orient and reach Ocean, achieving all that a mortal man was capable of.’\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    A tremendous and astounding victory was gained in 326 over the Paurava   Rajah (his name was Hellenized as ‘Porus’), elephants and all, at the   River Hydaspes (modern Jhelum; see further Chapter 7). But when the men, the Macedonian core, reached the River Hyphasis (the modern Beas),   their sufferings from long years of campaigning exacerbated by   unheard-of natural torments like the monsoon, they delivered their –   literal – ultimatum to Alexander, who was forced to concede his first   defeat: at the hands of his own men. With ill grace and unappealing  savagery Alexander cut a path to the mouth of the Indus, dispatching  many Indians, on the one hand – and in another sense, on the other, a   part of his troops back to Iran by sea. Perhaps recklessly he took the  remainder in person through the gruelling Makran desert of Baluchistan.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    This near-final – as it was to prove – major military effort took some   of the gloss off Alexander’s previous astonishing military   achievements. His return to Iran, to the centre of his new empire,   forced upon his immediate practical consciousness for the first time   the nature and urgency of the problem of managing and administering   this vast new entity. Not surprisingly, he did not always get it right.   Not only did his Asiatic appointees as governors prove corrupt,   inefficient or disloyal, or all three. Also, his childhood chum and now   Imperial High Chancellor, Harpalus, decided in 324 to defect (for the   second time) to mainland Greece, adding injury to insult by taking with   him a vast sum of what should have been Alexander’s treasure.   Alexander’s difficulties were compounded by the loss, this time merely   to death from disease, of another intimate friend since childhood, his   Grand Vizier Hephaestion. Rumour had it – and rumour was for once   surely correct – that he and Alexander had once been more than just   good friends. At any rate, Alexander’s grief was truly Homeric, as if   Achilles were grieving for Patroclus over again. And perhaps he never   quite recovered the balance of his mind before he too died – of a   fever, probably, though inevitably it was rumoured that he had been   assassinated, like his father before him – at Babylon in June 323.","brand":"Vintage","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46304592527589,"sku":"NP9781400079193","price":25.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781400079193.jpg?v=1767721209","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/alexander-the-great-isbn-9781400079193","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}