Alexander the Great

A romantic must not be romanticized, for he is seldom compassionate, always distant, but in Alexander it is tempting to see the romantic's complex nature for the first time in Greek history. There are the small details, his sudden response to a show of nobility, his respect for women, his appreciation of eastern customs, his extreme fondness for his dog and especially his horse; deliberately his court artists created a romantic style for his portrait and it was perhaps characteristic that from the sack of Thebes the one painting which he took for himself was of a captive woman, painted in the intensely emotional style which only a romantic would have appreciated. He had the romantic's sharpness and cruel indifference to life; he was also a man of passionate ambitions, who saw the intense adventure of the unknown. He did not believe in impossibility; man could do anything, and he nearly proved it. Born in a half-world between Greece and Europe, he lived above all for the ideal of a distant past, striving to realize an age which he had been too late to share;

'My friend, if by deserting from the war before us

You and I would be destined to live for ever, knowing no old age,

"We would do it; I would not fight among the first,

I would not send you to the battle which brings glory to men.

But now as things are, when the ministers of death stand by us

In their thousands, which no man born to die can escape or even evade,

Let us go.'

No man ever went as far as Alexander on those terms again. The rivalry of Homer's hero Achilles was revived by his successor, King Pyrrhus, but he lacked the talent for outright victories against Rome and in Sicily and he died in failure, struck down by a woman. The rivalry then faded only to the tombstones of late Roman gladiators, who called themselves by names from Homer, last heroic champions in an age when a hero's prospect had narrowed from the world to the arena and the circus.

Within five years of Alexander's death his Asian Successors gathered near Persia as if to discuss their differences; they could not be brought so much as to sit together, until the suggestion was made of Alexander's royal tent, where they could talk as equals before Alexander's sceptre, his royal robes and his empty throne. These men had been his officers, but they would not take common counsel without his unseen presence. A mood had gone out of the court with his death, and they knew it. Only a lover of Homer can sense what that mood must have been.

NOTES

general note on sources

For convenience throughout the book, ‘I cite many quotations or opinions in the name of Alexander's original historians, Callischenes, Ptolemy, Aristobulus, Nearchus and Onesicritus. I ca

A brief introduction to the names behind the quotations: Callisthenes was born in Olynthus in north-east Greece, a town wrecked by Philip, and was a kinsman, probably a cousin, of Alexander's tutor Aristotle. He was employed as an already proven historian to write up Alexander's exploits in Asia, if not before. Ptolemy the Macedonian was Alexander's friend from boyhood and served as his officer. He wrote a history after Alexander's death, whose date of publication is unknown. He ruled Egypt after Alexander's death and founded the dynasty of the Ptolemies. Nearchus was a Cretan by birth who resided in the Greek town of Amphipolis which Philip had conquered and added to Macedonia; he too was a friend from boyhood and ended as Alexander's admiral, publishing a memoir of his service, again after Alexander's death. Onesicritus, from Astypalaea on the island of Cos, had studied under the philosopher Diogenes and ended by serving as a high officer in Alexander's fleet; his fanciful work was probably the first to appear after Alexander's death. Aristobulus is of unknown origin, though the name is known at Olynthus, home town of Callisthenes and close to his eventual residence in Cassandreia; he served Alexander, his only known task being to repair Cyrus's tomb at Pasargadac. Perhaps he was an architect and in view of the apologetic tone of his history, it is tempting to call him the Albert Speer of the Alexanderreich. He began writing at the age of eighty-four, at least twenty-three years after Alexander's death. One other historian matters: the little-known Cleitarchus, whose father had written a colourful history on Persia and who began life, probably, in the Ionian town of Colophon, a place with a long tradition of poets. He wrote in a lofty rhetorical style and was considered untrustworthy, though skilful. He is not known to have followed Alexander or witnessed his career, but he wrote by 310 b.c., within thirteen years of Alexander's death, and he read the published

work of Callisthenes, Onesicritus and Nearchus. He is said to have settled in Egypt's Alexandria where he may have talked to Maccedonian officers and veterans, for his work ran into more than ten books and had access to accurate detail. The main secondary authors are Arrian, a Greek from Bithynia (north-west Turkey) who rose to be a Roman consul under the emperor Hadrian and wrote his Expedition of Alexander,probably in later middle age, c.a.d. 150. He had read widely, but composed mainly from Ptolemy, Aristobulus and, for the last three books, Nearchus. Diodorus of Sicily lived perhaps c. 20b.c. and produced a universal history by abbreviating original histories as casually as possible, confusing their datings and choosing incidents as much for their moral content and their proof of fortune's vicissitudes as for their historical value; in his Book 17, he dealt with Alexander simply by cutting down the work of Cleitarchus and adding a few of his own comments. Justin lived perhaps c.a.d. 150 and is a third-hand source, abbreviating the work of Trogus, an educated Gaul probably from the Augustan age (c. 10 b.c.) whose book has not survived ; his sources often show traces of Cleitarchus, also of Aristobulus and Callisthenes, but as cut down by Justin, his narrative is very wild and ca