Alexander the Great, the Greek prince who became king at 20 and built one of the largest empires in the world over the next 12 years, has inspired many films and works of fiction and non-fiction. Now, Durham University Professor of Classics Edmund Richardson, a historian of ancient Greek and its afterlives, adds another biography, Alexander: God, King, Man, to this oeuvre, this one based on new information gleaned from diaries of Babylonian astronomers, tombs of his ancestors, and other relics and documents from the era.
Spanning 480 pages, the book has an extensive collection of notes and references (something publishers should have been better putting online and cut book prices), but to the author’s credit, it is still not academically dry as one might fear. Richardson’s fluent narration, packed with dramatic touches, gives it an almost cinematic feel, with battles, main characters, cities and cultures described in detail.
Of course, Alexander goes on to win the Battle of Issus, and many more as he takes an army that had initially been raised just to defeat Persia, all the way to India, conquering Persia and Egypt along the way. Richardson takes the readers with Alexander on this spectacular military adventure, whose extent even Alexander seems to have been unaware of when he started out. He would never return to Greece after starting out in 334 BC, breathing his last in Babylon eleven years later. We see the young, uncertain king who took counsel from others, developing into an insecure, near-despotic autocrat, suspicious of everyone around him, torturing and killing those he suspected of disloyalty, and then often mourning them elaborately (he kills one of his friends after an argument and then refuses to eat for days, sleeping on the floor of his tent and weeping).
It is likely many readers will feel tempted to remove the “Great” from his name midway through the book. This is because Richardson tends to highlight Alexander’s moments of frailty and cruelty in much greater detail than those of his nobility and generosity (he captures his enemy’s wife but treats her with respect, calling her “mother”). Sequences of destruction such as the burning of the city of Tyre and the slaughter of its citizenry, and elaborate descriptions of the methods of torture by his army, make for extremely disturbing reading.
Even some of his achievements seem to have been cunningly engineered — the incident of cutting the Gordian knot in Persia seems to have been planned in advance, and so do many of the “signs” that foretold Alexander’s victory or signalled his greatness. Richardson points out how Alexander changed his appearance after reading the Iliad, modelling himself on Achilles and wearing his hair long, and tried to project himself as the son of the Egyptian god Amun.
But while Richardson thoroughly knocks Alexander off his pedestal, he never explains how he got there in the first place. There is no convincing reason for how an insecure, vain, and often cruel person was respected and even revered by many of those he conquered, and commanded the loyalty of an army of which he was one of the youngest members. He was 22 years old when he started his campaign against Persia. Eight years later, he was in India, a campaign that Richardson describes brilliantly, complete with Porus’s epic answer to how he would like to be treated after he was captured — “Like a king.”
Although he ultimately had to turn back from India, after his troops almost mutinied (another wonderfully written chapter), the fact is that thousands of soldiers followed him across a continent for close to a decade, risking their lives against enemies that often outnumbered them, staying away from their families for years — rather surprising for someone who was young, inexperienced, and, as per Richardson, not particularly charismatic or even wealthy.
When asked by a general what he has left for himself after giving away almost everything he has to his friends while starting out on his campaign to conquer the world, Alexander replies, “My hopes.” Richardson points towards fear and superstition as being key factors, both of which Alexander nurtured carefully, but these are not very convincing reasons to us.
While we get to read about Alexander’s military and political skills (or lack of them) in great detail (without ever being dull), we do not get to know as much about his romantic life (he clearly was bisexual and had multiple lovers) apart from rather brief paragraphs in different places, mostly of Hephaestion (perhaps the person he loved most) and his childhood friend and later lover, Barsine.
Despite these shortcomings, Alexander: God, King, Man is perhaps the most human portrayal of the Greek king in a non-fiction work. The book is one of those rare biographies that qualify as a page-turner, because Richardson keeps the narrative moving at a rapid pace. Even when he digresses into giving long descriptions of other cultures, cities and people in the book, as well as quoting verses that often are not directly related to Alexander, he keeps the reader engrossed.
Hardcore history fans might hem and haw at the dramatic narration, but we think this is one of the most readable biographies of not just Alexander, but any ancient historical figure.
Alexander: God, King, Man by Edmund Richardson Bloomsbury Publishing 480 pp Rs 799
