Alexander the Great: The Hunt for a New Past

Alexander. After 2,328 years who else can be identified by a single name, without a title, and still be almost universally known? Often beloved, or at least highly respected, in the west, almost universally despised in much of the east, very few with knowledge of Alexander have no feelings one way or the other. Over the years I have read almost every book reasonably available about this remarkable man. Some of these books are highly informative but ponderous in the extreme. Some treat Alexander as the untarnished hero, the darling of the west, while others treat him as a villain and a drunk, unworthy of praise. It is up to each person to decide who Alexander was or is, but Mr. Cartledge has produced a well-written book, informative, without bias or agenda. It has excellent detail without dragging the reader into the minutea which is of interest only to the professional historian. His discussion covers the noble and the base about this man, who is, unarguably, one of the most important persons in the history of the western and middle-eastern worlds. Bob

I read this book just before seeing Oliver Stone's film Alexander. This is a highly readable book, as are all of Paul Cartlegde's works. Most of the criticism I've seen of this book is off the mark, I think. What is most valuable about this biography is that the professor is extremely rigorous in sifting the historical record, which is mainly secondary, and the archaeological record in searching for the great Macedonian king. This is neither a hatchet job nor a paean to Alexander's virtues--Cartledge offers a balanced analysis of the source material and an examination of the authors from which they sprang. That is why he does not take a chronological path in this excavation of the historical record; his project is not to tell a story but to examine the record and hypothesize a psychological profile of the conqueror. For rigor alone this book gets five stars. What I find interesting about this series of essays on the king is that Stone's film very much parallels the main theme of Alexander's history. As Professor Cartledge sees it, that theme is the Macedonian King's self-deification. Alexander's self-elevation and exaltation is the common thread through everything we know about him. Stone may err on the side of glorifying Alexander in his movie, but he does not depict Alexander as a saint or a god, as Alexander apparently would have wished. Stone presents a balanced view similar to the one in this book, so I recommend reading this book before watching (or re-viewing) the film. Professor Cartledge describes Alexander's bait-and-switch realpolitik and self-propagandizing to get the Macendonian Army to obey his ambitions for conquest. Both Cartledge and Stone portray that pathology in a way that makes it believable, that the king would have justified in his own mind all the slaughter and pillage and all the individual murders, judicial and not. Stone's movie is in fact an accurate reflection of Alexander's psyche as refracted by Paul Cartledge's exegesis of the record. What I really think is important about Cartledge's study, however, is that it shows how myths are made, how they can even be self-made. After Alexander every Hellenistic monarch had to assume the same pedigree of supernatural birth (even virgin birth), had to be the son of a god, had to have a lineage to ancient kingship and heroes, had to have mystical communes with the immortal; in short, every claim to being king had to be cut in the image of Alexander. The successors to Alexander attempted to emulate him even in this myth-making self-deification. The Romans too adopted this pattern after having conquered the Seleucid and Ptolemaic East left behind in Alexander's wake. It is no accident that Christians today worship what amounts to a reflection of Alexander's impact on Western civilization. The Apostles did the same thing to Jesus that Caligula did for himself in an age when religion and politics were one and the same: deification following the model of Alexander. The king o

Despite some reservations, I'll give this book a top rating based on the quality of the scholarship. The author defines his aims in the preface: to "do full justice" to Alexander's achievements -- but "respecting the limits of the evidence and of the historian's craft." Many of the popular biographers of Alexander have made of him what they wished him to be. Cartledge reminds the reader over and over of the paucity of solid information about Alexander's nature and character. This is not the book to read first if you don't know much about Alexander the Great. The author presumes you are familiar with the outlines of his life and jumps into thematic descriptions. Chapter titles include: Alexander and the Greeks, The Divinity of Alexander, and The Generalship of Alexander. He is conservative with his sources and what emerges is a bare-bones outline of Alexander's life. Speculation is clearly labeled. We have few flights of fancy about Alexander's love life or his supposed aims to create an empire of universal peace and brotherhood. In taking a narrow view of Alexander, what emerges is not overly favorable. That's fine. Alexander is also one of the enigmatic persons of history and he will be seen as a monster by some and as an enlightened idealist by others -- although all those massacres are hard to explain away. Cartledge is probably more reliable than most in writing of Alexander and he attempts to enliven the story with an occasional attempt at humor or frivolity. The maps of Alexander's five great battles are outstanding. Smallchief

From reading this book, I have to say that this book is a pretty good material about Alexander, the world that he lived in, his personal beliefs, how he interacted with diffrent peoples(depending on one's view of him) and how he is remembered today(again, depending on one's view of him). This is a even-handed book, which details the all the things that people have debated about Alexander over the 2 millenia since his time and the research done on this book is excellent. I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to know all these points concerning Alexander The Great.

I think Cartledge's judgment about Alexander is sound and fair overall. On Alexander's sexuality, Cartledge reaches these conclusions, which I also agree with: 1) that Alexander was not an exclusive homosexual; 2) that he found sex generally distasteful - but in this case sex is defined as heterosex only; 3) that Alexander was rather limited in the number of his sexual partners, regardless of gender (at least for a king with absolute power); 4) that he had sex with women for "political or procreative purposes," as opposed to romance or pleasure; 5) the only great love of his life was Hephaeistion, who happened to be another male; 6) and that Alexander's relationship with Hephaeistion included sexual or physical intimacy. It is all too common to point out (as Guy Rogers does) that ancient Greek men were in some ways bisexual, without however noting whether Alexander himself conformed to the traditional pattern. There is every indication that he did not, in so far as his one certain sexual partner was male, and also because he did not seem to have outgrown this relationship (as most normal Greek men did) to prefer marriage with a woman. As far as I can tell, Alexander preferred Bagoas (the Persian eunuch) in bed to a woman, any day or night. One new biography of Alexander claims to be "accurate, balanced, and convincing." I'm not sure that's the case. No biography of such an elusive figure can pretend to such claims, but I think Cartledge's has come closer to most. The thematic structure of the book is refreshing, as Lane Fox and Green and others have written theirs more or less chronologically. This book is user-friendly to the general reader - it has a timeline, battle diagrams, detailed maps, a glossary of terms, dramatis personae, a full annotated bibliography, and an index.