Envy of the Gods: Alexander the Great's Ill-Fated Journey Across Asia

This book provides an extensively researched and excellently plotted proof that no man can handle the burden of being a god. The book details the tragic fall of an overly ambitious man whose intense meglomania and his succumbing to flattery led Alexander the Great to cause suffering to many thousands of his own soldiers, to say the least of the native population of the areas he conquered and pillaged and destroyed. The book gives a persuasive and serious knock on those who would idolize Alexander the Great as a hero of the enlightened Greek culture and provides a compelling narrative of a man who tried to gain the whole world and lost his soul (and caused a lot of damage while he was at it), proving himself to be a vain and ugly bully. This book is definitely a good read for those who wish to see the darker side of Alexander the Great's conquests and their repercussions on Central Asia.

While some might tire of reading about Alexander, John Prevas, who clearly admires much about Alexander, also brings out many things about Alexander in Persia and beyond that are not as familiar as they should be to those who peruse the ample ancient accounts. The dark side of Alexander ought to be examined as Prevas has. Diodorus, Quintius Curtius Rufus, Plutarch, Arrian and Diogenes Laertius are among those ancient writers who wrote about Alexander from differing viewpoints and for various reasons, some more credible than others. I'm impressed by how Prevas has mined new insights in light of modern psychological study of megalomania and the manifest deterioration of Alexander's character. For example, Plutarch ends on the possibility of Alexander's death by poison, and while Plutarch tries to reassure his readers this wasn't the case, Prevas is right to historically examine possible motives for poisoning more closely. This very readable book deserves a good read for how it balances the scales by showing Alexander's less glorious moments.

In "Envy of the Gods", John Prevas picks up the story of Alexander the Great with the fall of Persepolis in the spring of 330 B.C.E. and covers it for the final seven years of Alexander's life. It is clear that the author views this period as fall of Alexander. He covers the subject in great detail; bringing a new perspective to the greatest conqueror of the ancient world. As is pointed out in the introduction, the way Alexander is viewed in the West is in many ways a polar opposite as to how he is seen in the East. In the West, he is viewed as a hero; the man who finally destroyed the Persian Empire, forever removing the threat to Europe. In the East, though, Alexander is a man who slaughtered and enslaved men women and children, and destroyed great cities. Mr. Prevas goes so far as to compare his effect on the East to that which Genghis Khan had on the West. John Prevas covers in great detail the atrocities of Alexander, and his movement away from Greek and Macedonian traditions as he adopts more and more traditions from Persia and the East. He does a good job of trying to get into the mind of Alexander and his followers to understand their motivations as their outlooks diverged more and more as the army moved East. He also does a good job of bringing together the histories of Curtius, Arrian, and Plutarch to discuss and reconcile (if possible) their differences. What is missing from this book is the early history of Alexander, which would really help the reader compare and contrast the changes between his rise and fall. Mr. Prevas does occasionally pull an example from earlier in his life, but that is not nearly as effective as a full telling of Alexander's life would be. Since the main text of this book runs only 210 pages, there is certainly room for a more full account of his life. Overall, this is a very good and detailed account of the last seven years of Alexander's life. The narration could be improved, but it is certainly not unreadable. Also, the book forces the reader to use other resources to cover the rest of Alexander's life in order to get the most out of it. Still, this is a valuable source for the period which it does cover.

I found John Prevas' book on Alexander the Great difficult to put down. He seemed to amalgamate various historical sources in a riveting story that defines Alexander the Great after the final defeat of Darius at Persepolis. It is an especially good study on the process of megalomania - how great men become tyrants and tyrants become monsters. Prevas seemed to do well at speaking to the various scholarly theories when an episode with Alexander had multiple or conflicting interpretations. I actually saw Professor Prevas speaking on C-SPAN in early February 2006 on this topic and found his lecture to be so intriguing and his passion so influential that I almost immediately went online to purchase the book. I also highly recommend his two other books, the first on Hannibal crossing the Alps and my favorite of the three about Xenophon's march of the Greek 10,000. Both are great reads.

If absolute power corrupts absolutely, there can be no better demonstration of it than the life of Alexander the Great. Oliver Stone's recent, and failed, film has brought even more attention to the conqueror, who from his lifetime down has been a constant source for academic and archeological research, with supporters and detractors in his own time and into ours. He had a spectacular career, with a very high arc to success; the early part of that career is not the subject of _Envy of the Gods: Alexander the Great's Ill-Fated Journey Across Asia_ (Da Capo Press) by John Prevas. Prevas, an adventuresome classics professor, examines the years of Alexander's decline and fall. You won't find here his taming of the steed Bucephalus at thirteen, his solving of the Gordian Knot, his first war at age sixteen, his assumption of the Macedonian throne at age twenty after the assassination of his father, nor his spectacular conquests of Asia Minor, Egypt, and Babylon. Prevas has instead started his account from 330 BCE, when Alexander was twenty-six, pushing west into Asia and the Indian subcontinent, eventually retreating back to Babylon. It was a seven year circuit, marked by furious conquests, betrayals, orgies, and drunkenness, during which Alexander became increasingly suspicious and erratic. So, was he "Great"? One can't help admiring his degree of ambition, and how far he took it in his thirty-three years, and how well he achieved his aim of immortality. But with its concentration on Alexander's last seven years, Prevas's book can only inspire wonder that Alexander was able to last as long as he did. By the time Alexander had reached the capital of the Persians, Persepolis, now in Iran, he had extracted the vengeance against the Persians that was his assignment from the Greeks. He might have said "Mission accomplished" and headed home a hero, but he had a consuming drive, a pathological compulsion, to push on to the limits of the Earth. The war had changed from Greece's revenge against Persia to Alexander's personal war for his own glory and deification. During the push west toward the Ganges, Alexander's ego found new ways of gratification. He liked the quasi-divine status Persian royalty held over the people, and he started doing things as they did, assuming a loftiness and remove from his men. He took hundreds of concubines and many eunuchs. Drinking and feasting became his standard way of life, and there are accounts here of drunken brawls within the royal chamber, and a drunken Alexander who alienated those closest to him. Promotions became based on sheer loyalty, loyalty that included acceptance of Alexander's divinity. He insisted on the strictest compliance with his orders, and refused to accept resistance; his men's exercise of free speech was curtailed, a tradition of free speech that was widely valued by the Greeks. Those who opposed him (or who he imagined opposed him) were subject to the sort of sadistic torture to deat