Before we get to the books, could you tell us about the background of Alexander the Great? what was it that drove him to go out and conquer the known world?
alexander was the son of philip of macedonia and whereas in earlier times macedonia had been on the fringes of the greek world, during alexander’s childhood philip had become the most important power in greece. In the course of his life, he became the dominant figure in the entire Aegean world. I think it is also worth adding, and this is to veer into the controversial, that Macedonia was indeed established as a kingdom at the end of the sixth century BC. C., when the Persians under King Darius I invaded northern Greece. it was established as a monarchy, and with that came the establishment of a royal court and the rituals that went with it. Macedonia in the 5th century BC. c. had a lot of contact with the neighboring kingdom of thrace in the northeast aegean and had a relationship with the persians and the local part of the persian empire in what is now northwestern anatolia in turkey, certainly until the end of xerxes’ campaign against Greece in 480-479 BC, and probably to some extent after that. So the Macedonian monarchy was inspired, to a certain extent, by Persian practices or by the practices of other monarchies that emulated Persia.
You are reading: Best books on alexander the great
that suggests that the stark contrast between greece on the one hand and persia on the other, which is what greek historians tended to focus on, and which modern scholars also often assume to be the case, there was not so much in reality. alexander would have been more familiar with the kinds of things that happened further east.
as soon as philip subdues athens and becomes the dominant figure in greece, he establishes an alliance of almost all the greek cities, a league of which he was the head (called by modern scholars the league of corinth) , and suggests that the first thing this league should do is invade the Persian Empire in revenge for Xerxes’s campaign against Greece. So, Philip sets up this plan for an invasion of the Persian Empire as some kind of Greek versus Persian conflict, “remember the Persian war,” even “remember the Trojan war.” Philip is killed shortly after this, and Alexander takes over, so to some extent he is taking over an existing plan. What Alexander brings to this is military prowess and skill, which his father also had, but which Alexander demonstrates in great abundance.
Let’s see how the books you’ve chosen shed light on this endeavor, starting with Arrian’s Alexander the Great: Anabasis and Indica. I think this was written in the 2nd century AD. what sources did you use and why did you write this book?
arrian kindly tells us who he was getting his data from. It is mainly based on two authors. One is Ptolemy, son of Lagus, who becomes Ptolemy I, the first Ptolemaic ruler of Egypt. the other is a Greek named Aristobulus. both accompanied alexander in his campaigns.
“what alexander brings is military prowess and skill, which he demonstrates in abundance”
Both probably wrote their stories many decades after alexander’s death, possibly 40 or 50 years after alexander’s death, a generation or so later. It’s also worth saying that although Ptolemy was present at all the battles, he probably often didn’t know what was going on. I think there is good reason to suppose that Ptolemy actually used other histories to write his, even though he was an eyewitness. Alexander had an official historian, or someone referred to as an official historian, called Callisthenes, who was later arrested, charged with conspiring against Alexander, and died in captivity. it may be that for the parts Callisthenes got to before he stopped writing, Ptolemy was able to use his account.
so arian is using these two figures. The important thing is that they were Alexander’s contemporaries and they are using their own memory or complementing their memory with what other contemporaries wrote. arian has a bit of an implausible explanation for why you should trust them. he says you should trust ptolemy’s account because ptolemy is a king and kings don’t lie.
“curtius is far below the Greeks. he makes the distinction that the Macedonians are mostly fine, but the Greeks are the real problem”
a third writer on alexander, whom i did not choose, is plutarch, who wrote the life of alexander the great around 100 ad, a little before arian. in one or two places in his book he mentions episodes and lists all the historians who report the event and those who deny that it happened. the most obvious of these is when the queen of the amazons visits alexander. Arian and Ptolemy deny that this happened, but others, including some who were Alexander’s contemporaries, people who were there, are listed as telling this story. So clearly we have people, even in Alexander’s time or in Alexander’s living memory, telling far-fetched stories about him. arian chooses those who don’t do that.
the other thing to say is that arian probably has a particular reader in mind, and that reader is the emperor hadrian. arian knew hadrian. Hadrian was appointed consul and that would have been Hadrian’s decision. Hadrian inherited an empire from his predecessor, Trajan, that reached as far as Mesopotamia, including much of the territory in which Alexander had fought. One of Hadrian’s first acts was to withdraw from the region east of the Euphrates River, thus abandoning the places that Alexander had once controlled.
part of what arian does in his book is to suggest that there were things alexander the great did that were good, but there were also things alexander did that were not necessarily a good idea for a wise ruler to pursue. so arian is using alexander as a model of how to be a king: setting his bad points as things to avoid and his good points as things to follow.
“I think the modern trend of pointing out how bad alexander was probably misunderstands what historians should be doing”
Another important thing about Arrian is that he is of Greek origin. he is from a village in western anatolia, but he is very much a figure of greek literature. 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. this is a “he looks what the Greeks have done for us” type presentation, or “looks how glorious the ancestors of the Greeks were”.
Does he focus entirely on his military conquests, or does he have a broader point to make about Greek culture?
It’s not just about Alexander’s conquests, although his ability as a general is mentioned a lot. There are stories about Alexander’s interest in culture, sometimes suspiciously because, for example, Arrian isn’t particularly interested in suggesting that Alexander adopted Persian clothing, but Alexander did adopt Persian clothing and some Persian court practices. arian is ambivalent about this, so he presents these aspects in a bad way to a certain extent, but at the end he says, “well, I was just doing it to be a better ruler.” Generally speaking, Arrian means to suggest that Alexander is moderate most of the time and only occasionally excessive. at the end there is a kind of obituary of alexander where he sums things up and says, among other things, that according to aristobulus alexander only drank moderately. so arrian was trying to downplay the stories of alexander getting drunk and doing things in a drunken rage, although even he shows that this happened from time to time.
so, it’s an image of alexander as a good character, perhaps more so than alexander as a bearer of greek culture. but that greek character is there in arian, which minimizes the degree to which alexander was working within an achaemenid persian setting.
and is it a good read?
It’s a good read, yes. what my students often find difficult with all these books is getting used to the names. but it tells a good story. It has some interesting and exciting events. There’s a whole series of pretty bloody episodes in between, with Alexander showing his bad side, but generally speaking, it’s a good read.
let’s move on to quintus curtius rufus. this book is a bit earlier, i think, and a bit more negative in its depiction of alexander the great. is that fair?
That’s right. We don’t know for sure when she wrote curtius, or who she was. There are two possibilities: either he wrote under Emperor Vespasian in the 70s, or possibly he wrote earlier under Claudius in the first half of the 1st century AD. he wrote in latin and was probably a senator in rome.
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the other problem we have with curtius is that unfortunately the first two of the ten books of his history are missing. It’s a shame, because it means we don’t have his account of the early stages of Alexander the Great’s career. but, more significantly, it means that we don’t have his introduction and we don’t have his conclusion either because bits later on are also missing. early on, in his foreword, he may well have said something about who his sources were and what his goals were in writing, but we’ve lost that.
you are using a different font than arrian. Scholars generally believe, though Curtius never mentions it, that he is using the work of a man named Cleitarchus who was probably writing in Alexandria in Egypt, probably around the same time as Ptolemy. But Cleitarch was someone who had not campaigned with Alexander. so cleitarchus gets all this information second hand, and cleitarchus is generally thought to be more interested in tall tales than plutarch and aristobulus.
It is worth saying that some of these descriptions of non-Greek activities seem to be more plausible and more accurate than the alternatives. It may well be, for example, that Cleitarchus understood more about Egyptian religious rituals. All historians give a description of Alexander visiting an oracle in the Libyan desert. the process that curtius describes is much more like what actually happened in egypt than, say, the story told by arian, which we know is very close to what callisthenes said, and probably also what ptolemy said, which tends to present the oracle much more like a Greek oracle.
then cleitarchus is probably in some areas, particularly in relation to non-Greek practices, more reliable than others.
but the other thing to say is that curtius is writing like a roman, a roman senator, in a period when the roman senators were still coming to terms with the autocracy. And, if he is writing under Claudius, he is writing in the wake of Caligula’s reign and, if he is writing under Vespasian, then in the wake of Nero’s reign. either way, he is writing shortly after the reign of a particularly unpopular and unsuccessful emperor with a very bad reputation, and he seems to be presenting, in the book, some of the faults of alexander the great as the kind of faults that caligula and accused nero committed from: arrogance, autocracy, tyranny, lack of freedom, lack of respect for the aristocracy.
“the Macedonian monarchy was inspired, to a certain extent, by Persian practices or by the practices of other monarchies that emulated Persia”
It’s also worth saying that Curtius is very dismissive of Greeks. he makes a distinction between Macedonians and Greeks and, in general, the Macedonians are fine, but the Greeks are the real problem. the Macedonian soldiers are presented as some kind of proto-Romans and the Greeks are presented as these very troublesome, cunning and unreliable figures. i think for curtius the extent to which alexander is more greek and therefore less macedonian is the root of what makes him wrong. Curtius’s book is not lacking in stories about Alexander, and while Arian talks about Alexander the Great’s self-control, Curtius goes on to talk about how he loses control of his appetites. for example, after alexander’s first battle against darius at issus, alexander captures the followers of the persian camp, including the entire royal house, darius’s wife and daughters, and also darius’s harem of 365 concubines, which gave him a different person to sleep with each day of the year. Curtius implies in his book that Alexander the Great took charge of the harem, but says that perhaps Alexander did not use it as often as Darius. arian doesn’t mention this at all.
He is also very keen to emphasize alexander’s reliance on superstition, again in contrast to arian. arian has alexander trusting a wise greek soothsayer, named aristander. When Alexander begins to trust the Babylonian astrologers/priests who are an important part of Babylonian royal and religious life, Curtius sees this as an indication that Alexander is succumbing to foreign superstition. he is keen to emphasize how often alexander relies on these things and because the romans have a different approach to divination curtius despises all the divinations alexander uses more and is much more prepared to think that it is all a hoax and a forgery.
Was that type of divination being used by contemporary Roman emperors?
Emperor Tiberius famously tried to ban astrologers from Rome, but he had his own astrologer. there was Roman imperial hostility towards astrologers in principle, but the use of them in private. senators like curtius perceived it as a problem.
Now, Pierre Briant’s First European: A Story of Alexander in the Age of Empire. this book is about the reception of alexander the great in enlightenment, isn’t it?
Just to fill the gap, the first two books we were looking at are the oldest, or some of the oldest, surviving accounts of Alexander the Great, even though they were written centuries after his time. in the medieval period people did not read greek texts, greek was not a language used in western europe. Perhaps Curtius read himself a bit, but the dominant stories told about Alexander came from the Alexander Romance. It’s hard to know how to describe this because it’s an ongoing story that begins in Greek in the 3rd century BC, probably. we find it in a manuscript dating from the third century AD in Greek, but it is translated into many other languages, including Latin and Persian. ultimately it continues to spread into the modern period, so you have scottish alexander texts, you even have icelandic stories about alexander. and this is a story full of fantasy, it is an imaginative story and not a strict one.
and then in the period of enlightenment you start to regain interest in greek texts and more scientific historical study of alexander, and this coincides with periods of european expansion abroad. you have people writing about alexander in light of what french kings like louis xiv are doing and other european countries embarked on overseas expansion. develops a series of ideas about alexander. then there’s this big change of direction after the american war of independence, with the british and french focusing more on india and indeed persia and the growth of russian power in the north, leaving persia and afghanistan as the boundaries between Russian interests and British interests.
also, in the early 19th century, napoleon invaded egypt and the french briefly took an interest in egypt before the british moved in. So, in the late 18th and early 19th century, the modern battles of the empire take place in the territories where alexander had fought, and alexander’s empire becomes an interesting model for people who think about his world . alexander the great is interpreted in the light of contemporary imperial and colonial ideas and that is what briant talks about in this book.
“alexander is linked to ideas related to the great game, the world of espionage between the British empire and Russia in the 19th century”
The book was originally written in French and published in France, and has a strong French focus, although when the English translation was prepared, it was balanced slightly differently. you have an emphasis on alexander as a kind of learned king, alexander as an advocate of commerce and the creation of a commercial empire. you’re also interested in afghanistan like this border area between british india on one side and russia on the other, and people are fascinated by what alexander did in afghanistan: where he went and finding the places he went. alexander is linked 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 by talking about the german interest in alexander the great. this is interesting, because at the time that the reunification of germany under bismarck was happening, you have johann droysen writing a history of philip and then alexander. Droysen sees Philip as a Bismarck-like figure, uniting the Greeks in the same way that Bismarck united the Germans, so these multiple small states are united into a useful empire in preparation for Alexander’s imperial achievements. /p>
much of modern scholarship has tended to go back to droysen, and what briant does is tell the story before droysen. If you read any modern book on Alexander the Great, even though they’ll say they go back to Arian and Curtius and the other two or three ancient narratives, their focus is shaped by this tradition of how you write about Alexander that comes to us from Droysen. but before that 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 all who write biography of alexander has tended to look.
Louis XIV and Napoleon, to some extent, were consciously inspired by Alexander, but was there hostility towards him at the time, with the widespread reluctance in the Enlightenment to glorify war?
yes, absolutely. alexander as a tyrant and therefore a bad thing is also one of the models briant discusses, especially in the period after the french revolution. There are multiple ways Alexander can be a role model and this includes the idea of the absolute monarch being a bad thing. so while louis xiv or napoleon may see alexander as a good role model others see napoleon and the absolutist monarchy as bad and for those writers alexander is a role model in a negative sense.
Tell Us About Amélie Kuhrt’s Persian Empire: A Collection of Sources from the Achaemenid Period. Are any of the sources gathered in this book closer in time to Alexander the Great than to Arian or Curtius?
The first thing to say is that if we want to move away from the tradition of writing about alexander the great that briant describes in his book, we need to take the persian evidence seriously and better understand the empire in which he worked. And recognize that, going back to what I said at the beginning, it’s not just that Alexander’s west conquers Persia’s east. he is alexander coming from a monarchical tradition that has been influenced by persia. he moves in and essentially takes control of the Persian Achaemenid empire and adapts it to his purposes. The other thing to mention is the myth—and again ancient writers like Arian, Curtius, and others are to some extent the source of this—that Persia was weak, divided, fragile, and ripe for conquest. but if we look at the Persian evidence it is much less clear that it is as simple as that.
so the point about kuhrt’s very, very big book is that it gives us a better idea of what persia was like. i must say i was torn between suggesting this and suggesting pierre briant from cyrus to alexander: a history of the persian empire, but i thought i had already picked briant the first european and actually going back to ancient evidence is important.
“in the period of the enlightenment, you begin to regain interest in Greek texts and in a more scientific historical study of alexander”
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The problem we have is that the evidence for the Persian empire actually comes mainly from the sixth and the first half of the fifth century BC. The main surviving buildings, inscriptions and other documents, of which there are quite a few, are mostly from the early period, particularly from the time of Darius and Xerxes. by the time you get to the alexander period, for whatever reason, there are fewer inscriptions, or at least fewer survivors. there is less information about what is going on. we have some documents written on leather in the aramaic language of bactria, the area of modern afghanistan, that date to the alexander period and that dovetail with other things that are in kuhrt, but we have relatively little specifically about the empire under alexander.
what kuhrt gives us is a clear idea of how the empire worked because, broadly speaking, it continued in the same way throughout the fifth and fourth centuries. Some of the material Kurt includes are Greek reports from Persia, so they are not all Persian documents. includes contemporary Greek sources. Thus, we depend to some extent, even when we go back to the sources, on Greek perceptions of Persia. but the whole allows us to see the Persian empire as an efficient and well-run state with considerable resources and a highly developed organization. It’s something that, by defeating Darius, Alexander can adopt and take over. and what allows him to rule persia for the short time that he does before his death is his maintenance of persian governmental structures and, what was controversial to people like arian and curtius, his adoption of some of the practices of how to be a Achaemenid king and how he related to the Persian hierarchy by adopting these practices.
some of the extreme practices that greek authors described alexandre, for example making people prostrate in front of him, are clearly a misunderstanding of persian practice. so again, it’s helpful to have documentation on the persian empire from earlier periods, pictures of what proskynesis, which according to arian means prostration, actually entails. Herodotus’ descriptions of the practice, written in the fifth century, show that proskynesis was not prostration as far as he was concerned. So we have these sources that help us get a more accurate idea of what the empire that Alexander conquered was like, written by people who weren’t eager to sell a particular image of Alexander.
You say he took over the machinery of the Persian empire. Was he accepted by the Persians after he defeated them in battle? I mean, did the elite accept him as their monarch, or did he face perpetual problems on that front?
‘both’ is the answer. there was a lot of acceptance, but there was also resistance. After the Battle of Gaugamela, which was Darius’s second and final defeat by Alexander, Darius fled to Afghanistan to regroup. there he was assassinated by one of his generals, who later ascended the throne as Artaxerxes, until he himself was later captured by other Persians. later, after campaigning in the indus valley, alexander returns to find that in one or two places the people he appointed as provincial governors have been replaced and that some of the people who have replaced them are setting themselves up as kings Persians. . So clearly there was resistance, but this is from members of the elite trying to restore or increase their own status, rather than general unpopularity. it probably mattered relatively little to most people in the empire who was king.
in other parts of their empire, egypt for example, there seems to be no evidence of any problem with having a non-egyptian king. they had had that before. alexander is portrayed in egyptian temple sculptures looking like a traditional egyptian pharaoh. Similarly, in Babylon, the learned priests begin to operate their system to work for Alexander. so, generally speaking, it was possible for him to fit into this new role. inevitably there were ambitious Persians who didn’t accept it and wanted to take power for themselves, but I think it’s better to see it as a matter of individuals rather than a groundswell of opposition to it.
You mentioned that the sources directly related to Alexander the Great are quite scarce, but is the picture that the Persian sources paint of him in this book reasonably consistent with what we learn from the Greek and Latin sources? Is there something that is radically different?
We have no real Persian information on him. we have some Babylonian evidence.
there is a reasonable amount of material and it presents him as a typical king of babylon. so, he is supposed to do the rituals and they take care of him the same way they would take care of any other king. i think the answer is that where we have indigenous sources, which is babylon and egypt in particular, it very much resembles the mold of how an egyptian or babylonian king should behave. in that sense, there is a difference because this – as I suggested before – is something that the Greek and Roman sources tend to minimize. For example, there are some stories of Persians or Babylonians behaving strangely when Alexander does something, which are probably accidental or deliberate misunderstandings of more typical Persian or Babylonian practices.
to give an example, towards the end of his reign a story is told about how alexander is exercising and has taken off his royal clothes and put them on his throne, which is nearby. and a madman or a prisoner puts them on and sits on the throne and everyone is very upset about this, and the madman is dragged off and executed, but actually it’s almost certainly a version of a standard ritual of the nearby surrogate king east where, when eclipses and other astronomical events portend danger to the king, the king temporarily abdicates and a madman or prisoner is put on the throne so that the risk falls on him. then, when the period of danger has passed, they are executed. Thus, this appears to be a Greek reinterpretation of a Babylonian or Near Eastern standard practice and suggests that Alexander was quite happy to follow the lead of the locals and work with the local way of doing things. arrian and curtius are a bit suspicious of this and think it was people trying to trick alexander.
let’s move on to the final book, which is fire from heaven by mary renault: a novel by alexander the great. she is a 20th century novelist. tell us a little why she chose this.
there are quite a few novels about alexander and I think that of all of them, the one by mary renault is the most readable and the most entertaining. it is the first of what is called the alexander trilogy, although it is a bit of a strange trilogy and the third volume, funeral games takes place after alexander’s death.
mary renault really knew her sources. she really understands the material. she has another particular interest and that is in homosexuality. so in both fire from heaven and the second volume the persian boy there is a lot of focus on alexander and the male lovers. in fire from heaven, this is hephaestion who, historically, was probably not significant in alexander’s life until much later, but was at the macedonian court. so what renault is doing is plausible.
the reason i chose fire from heaven instead of persian boy was partly because this is the only book i have chosen that depicts alexander’s childhood. One of the other ancient sources, Plutarch, does have accounts of it and largely this builds on that, although Renault does a lot more with the material. there is a wonderful episode when athenian ambassadors come to macedonia and it presents a negative image of demosthenes, who in later periods became the last hero of greek freedom, a symbol of democracy fighting monarchy. mary renault’s demosthenes is this rather nasty and foul-mouthed greek and his rival aeschines comes off as a much nicer figure and i think this is a more realistic reading of the two historical figures.
The other thing I would say, and this brings us back to Arian, is that what authors in ancient times were doing when they were writing about Alexander was essentially telling a good story. this would include writing speeches for figures in your stories. they would base it as much as possible on the evidence. so arian uses ptolemy and aristobulus, but they would like to make it more readable and in a higher style, more impressive altogether. and that is essentially what historical novelists do. So even though this is presented as a novel, it is, in a sense, just as useful as Arian in terms of being a way of making us think of Alexander. arian has an agenda and mary renault has an agenda. arrian is using fonts and mary renault is using fonts. Mary Renault is more like Arian than most history books written about Alexander. they both have the same interest in telling a good story and getting you to react to alexander in a particular way.
what is the story that the book tells about the youth of alexander the great? What does it tell us about his formation?
she is giving us a picture of the relationship with her parents, the extent to which, from a young age, she becomes involved in Macedonian politics, but also, and this is where she is most inventive, this particular interest in her relations with his young companions, his friends, and in particular this love story between him and Hephaestion with whom he grew up and for whom, when he died, Alexander is said to have arranged lavish funerals. so, it’s about the development of him as a character and he comes across as an attractive, intelligent and interesting figure, again, in contrast to many modern studies. Modern accounts of Alexander tend to be quite negative about him, to emphasize his cruelty and tyranny. these days curtius, with his emphasis on alexander’s negatives, is much more fashionable than arrian. mary renault is much more positive.
“some of the extreme practices that greek authors described as alexander engaged in, for example making people prostrate before him, are clearly a misunderstanding of persian practice”
i think the modern trend of pointing out how bad alexander was probably misses what historians should be doing. i think it presents a way of looking at alexander that doesn’t help. mary renault’s novel is arguably a bit innocent, but overall it presents him as a lovable figure, i guess, but in a serious way.
one final question, which brings us to that. do you think alexander would have seen himself as a success or did he die a disappointed man?
Well, he died young, of a fever while still planning his next campaign. but, I think he would have seen himself as successful. he won all the battles he fought, he had successfully taken over the entire Persian empire. again, to be controversial, there is a story that when he reached the hyphasis river his troops forced him back and prevented him from conquering india. i share the view of those academics who think this is probably a myth, that alexander never intended to go any further. he probably wanted to cross the hyphasis, but bad omens prevented him, but he would not have traveled far east of the river. he marched down the east side of the indus when he marched down the indus valley and that was effectively the boundary of the achaemenid empire. he got the rulers across the indus to support him. So, I think his eastern campaign was an absolute success, apart from his own injuries. he had to deal with a certain amount of insurrection when he came back, but basically if his goal was to take territory from the Persian king, he ended up taking the entire empire from the Persians and replacing the Achaemenid dynasty; so I think it was a success and he would have recognized it as a success.
he was probably planning to move to arabia next. he might, had he lived longer, have campaigned farther west, but essentially, I think he would have seen himself as successful. at the end of the indus campaign, it has some silver minted medals, large coins called decadracmas, pieces of 10 drachmas, and they show, on the one hand, alexander on horseback fighting a man on an elephant, which is a representation from one of his battles in India. and, on the other side, Alexander holding a thunderbolt and being crowned by a flying figure of victory, holding a crown above his head.
so that’s a symbol of alexander: victorious, undefeated, a word sources often use about him. and not only undefeated but, when holding lightning, equivalent to a god. that presented image of him as the undefeated god was not megalomaniac, not thinking that he is immortal or anything, but acknowledging that he has these achievements that are huge, and that only gods and heroes, like herakles, have ever come close. I think that image is probably the way he would have thought of himself at the end of his reign.
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