Alexander's World
ALEXANDER'S WORLD - BOOK RECOMENDATIONS
Amongst my discoveries in my library quests, I have discovered a really excellent series of books. Essential Histories, published by Osprey, are fantastic. They focus on wars and conflicts, which might initially sound depressing or rather dry, but in fact they are fantastic! They cover everything from the ancient world to the invasion of Iraq, and the ones I’ve read have been clearly written.
Two I’ve read so far are The Greek and Persian Wars and The Peleponnesian War. In both books the author writes in a clear but not dry style and from a perspective that is neutral but not uncritical. Ancient sources such as the work of Herodotus, Xenophon and Thucydides are referred to a great deal along with commentaries on these ancient histories themselves - when they were written and what the authors were trying to achieve. If you’re interested in reading these ancient sources (or Plutarch’s lives for example!) these two books are a great introduction.
One of the things that interested me most from an Alexander perspective was how distorted an impression modern writers - particularly fiction writers, give of relationship between the Persians and the Greeks. Over the years, many Greeks - Athenians, Spartans or others - seemed to seek sanctuary or financial or military support from the Persian king, in spite of the many Persian attacks. And indeed many Greeks worked as mercenaries for the Persians! So the idea that Memnon would be considered at traitor, or that it was shameful to associate with the Persians, would be pretty hypocritical! As usual in history, the lines are far more blurred than we like to think.
But even more surprising, to me at least, was how commonly massacres and mass enslavements of Greeks by Greeks occurred. Alexander’s destruction of Thebes is often used as a fine example of his savagery, but both the Spartans and the Athenians (and Thebans!) committed similar atrocities during the Peleponnesian war - executing the men and enslaving the women and children. When Athens finally lost the war, the Spartans wanted to consign the city to the same fate to which Alexander later consigned Thebes but its allies disagreed. Obviously I wouldn’t dream of excusing Alexander’s behaviour, but it does rather put things in perspective - and it also makes me question our modern western ideas of the Greeks behaving in an any more “civilised” way than the Macedonians or indeed any other ancient culture.
The Athenians are a particularly interesting study - and perhaps a warning from history for the current state of western politics? Their democracy deserves respect, though it wasn’t the only one around at the time - many of the Greek settlements, and indeed a lot of others in other places at the time, despite having a king, did seem to have some form of elections or voting. But like some modern democracies, they didn’t seem to find anything hypocritical in oppressing their neighbours or doing a fair amount of aggressive empire building! And it ultimately brought about their downfall!
The third one I’ve read in the series is The Wars of Alexander the Great - it’s written by Waldemar Heckel, who is of course a leading authority on Alexander… and, yes, a noted critic of Hephaestion! Don’t let that put you off - the book is very readable and a great introduction to the subject, especially the early chapters which concentrate on Macedon’s rise to power and Philip’s reign in the context of Greek politics at the time. Don’t expect a deep character study of Alexander himself - that isn’t what these books are trying to achieve; there are no details of Alexander’s childhood and very little about the friction between his parents. But there are some interesting observations - the fact that there were more Greeks fighting against Alexander than for him, for example. If I have one criticism, it is the author’s tendency to refer to the non-Greeks as “barbarians” without any sense of irony, an attitude which seems rather dated these days!
The most interesting observation, for me at any rate, was the turning back in India. Heckel suggests that Alexander was far too savvy to be taken by surprise by the rebellion of his troops; rather, he himself had had enough of the campaign, or had seen that it was logistically a mistake, and he had information of the plans to press on leaked out to his troops so that they would rebel and “force” him home, thus saving him face.
It doesn’t sound all that farfetched to me - surely by that time he must have known there was no Ocean! The Indians, if not the Persians, must surely have known that there was just more and more land - I don’t know enough about the silk trade at that time, for example, but if the Persians wore it, so far as I know they would have had to have imported it from China - centuries later that was still the place it came from.
(Centuries later, indeed, the Shah of Iran resettled an entire population - thousands of Armenians - in Isfahan, Iran, specifically because they were an important link in the silk trade, and when he took them, he took control of the trade and made Iran rich!)
Whatever, the truth, it inspired a new scene in a story I’m working on!
In all the books there are character studies of particular historical persons which makes the war-stories that much more human - these vary from satraps to soldiers to women like the wife of Alcibiades (who had a very rough time at his hands!) and these give an extra human element to the warfare and politics.