Keeping Up With a Conqueror

“Alexander

 

By Edmund Richardson

 

St. Martin's, 480 pages, $33

 

The ancient world had many kings and conquerors, but there was no one like Alexander the Great. None rose so quickly, journeyed so widely or left his mark so deeply. There are any number of studies of Alexander's family, military career, final years and cross-cultural legacy. Yet where most versions of Alexander have their particular emphasis, Edmund Richardson's outstanding "Alexander: God, King, Man" embraces his complexity.

 

Alexander -- the "great" came posthumously -- was born in the Macedonian capital of Pella in 356 B.C. Macedon was, in Mr. Richardson's words, "a tumbledown, isolated" Greek state. Outshone by Athens and Thebes to the south, it was ruled by one of antiquity's rankest opportunists, Alexander's father, Philip II, who seized regional power with little concern for how he might sustain or pay for it. Philip was assassinated by his bodyguard at his daughter's wedding in 336 B.C. before the bill came due. Alexander reacted, Mr. Richardson writes, as any Macedonian claimant might: He buried his father, shored up his popular support by canceling all taxes and killed off his rivals, including his stepmother and half-sister.

 

He inherited the largest standing army in Europe but, Mr. Richardson notes, without tax revenues he would need to "beg, borrow and loot, just to keep his soldiers fed and paid." His martial instinct was further encouraged by his tutor Aristotle's regard for Homer's epics.

 

From these doubtful foundations emerged one of the greatest war machines the world had ever known, smashing its way from modern-day Turkey through the Levant and down to Egypt before crossing to Babylon, Persia and India. Alexander directed his early campaigns with astonishing abandon. At the Battle of Issus (333 B.C.), he defeated the Persian king Darius III for the first time. "From the first charge to Darius's escape," Mr. Richardson marvels, "no more than two hours had passed. But in that time the world had changed." Another king might have stopped at Issus. Alexander was only beginning.

 

There are two tracks to Mr. Richardson's biography, his triple subtitle notwithstanding: the hero -- molded by Alexander's "childhood obsession with Homer" -- and the man. Initially the two personas were separate; Alexander's shocking success blurred their distinctions. In time, Alexander would exceed all who came before, drawing him deeper into an identity rooted in and measured against figures of myth.

 

A professor of classics at Durham University, Mr. Richardson never forgets the romance of the events he recounts, or the horror -- from severed penises (the Egyptian pharaoh Merneptah boasted of the 6,111 enemy penises his troops had severed in one day) to Alexander's enslavement of thousands of fellow Greeks in the name of Greek freedom.

 

Mr. Richardson treats legends with similar care. In Gordion (central Turkey), Alexander encountered an old wagon said to be endowed with mysterious powers: Anyone able to untie the cord that held the yoke to the wagon would be "destined to rule Asia," an invitation he could hardly refuse. Like Indiana Jones unsportingly drawing his pistol to shoot the Cairene swordsman in "Raiders of the Lost Ark" (1981), Alexander fulfilled the curiously relevant prophecy by simply slashing the cord after failing to loosen it. "The legend, allegedly dating back centuries," Mr. Richardson concludes, "appears to have been cooked up upon Alexander's arrival in the city. . . . The real trick of the Gordian Knot was not the tightly wound cords around the yoke of the wagon. It was the story itself."

 

For Alexander's soldiers, horror gradually eclipsed romance. Victory over the hated Persians was thrilling. Sacking antiquity's great capitals must have seemed extraordinary. But unreality and dread pervaded the forced march to India (327-325 B.C.), for Greek knowledge of -- and strategic interest in -- the subcontinent was practically nonexistent.

 

When Alexander, not yet 30 years old, crossed the Hindu Kush, his conquest tipped from plunder, expansion and avenging Persian invasions into an epic and increasingly confused fantasy. As Richard Stoneman suggests in "The Greek Experience of India" (2019), the natives played along: "The ready submission of so many of these people may be explained not only by the ferocity meted out to those who resisted, but also to the sense they must have had that Alexander would not be staying long. A lightning visit to install a garrison was not going to be a long-term problem."

 

Plutarch claimed that Alexander slept with Aristotle's personally annotated "Iliad" under his pillow. Alexander's relentless, scarcely human drive is, in any case, unimaginable without Homer's moral distinction between pleasure and often terrible glory. And so it is in Mr. Richardson's profound and gripping narrative. Homer's climactic duel between Hector and Achilles is affecting precisely because the tender entreaties of Hector's wife, sister-in-law and mother cannot keep him from combat and almost certain death -- and because we know Achilles' victory will be fleeting, for he, like Alexander, has chosen eternal renown over an obscure and peaceful life.

 

Jasper Griffin's slender masterpiece "Homer on Life and Death" (1980) describes the burden of Homeric glory: "It is not unreflective or unselfconscious heroism that drives these men on. Facing death, they see both the obligation and the terror." An epic hero does not scorn death; he appreciates its gravity and confronts it anyway. Alexander's record and regal image are godlike, but as Griffin observes, "an unkillable warrior would be an absurdity; every man must face death."

 

To follow Alexander was, Mr. Richardson relates, for all but his luckiest generals, ultimately to sacrifice oneself "for another man's dreams," namely and tragically, to "break the limits of his humanity." Alexander would die far from home in the palace at Babylon -- Mr. Richardson infers typhoid -- in 323 B.C. Those he left behind might have quoted, as Mr. Richardson does, the Babylonian epic of Gilgamesh: "The dream was glorious, / Yet the nightmare came true. / But however deep the darkness, / We must hold on to the dream."

 

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Mr. Carter is the global chairman of 20th- and 21st-century art at Christie's.” [1]

 

1. REVIEW --- Books: Keeping Up With a Conqueror. Carter, Max.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 03 Oct 2026: C9.