Alexander the Great

570 Pages·2008·4.9 MB·English

by  Robin Lane Fox

PENGUIN BOOKS
ALEXANDER THE GREAT
Robin Lane Fox was born in 1946 and educated at Eton and Magdalen College, Oxford. He is a Fellow of
New College and University Reader in Ancient History. Since 1970 he has been weekly gardening
correspondent of the Financial Times. Alexander the Great won the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize, the James
Tait Black Memorial Prize and the W. H. Heinemann Award on its first publication in 1973. His other books
include The Search for Alexander (1981), Better Gardening (Penguin, 1985), Pagans and Christians
(Penguin, 1988) and The Unauthorized Version (Penguin, 1972).
ROBIN LANE FOX
ALEXANDER THE GREAT
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
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First published by Allen Lane 1973
Published in paperback by Futura 1975
Published in Penguin Books 1986
Reissued with updates in Penguin Books 2004
13
Copyright © Robin Lane Fox, 1973, 2004
All rights reserved
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of
trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent
in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition
including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
ISBN: 9780141925981
CONTENTS
List of Maps
Preface
PART ONE
PART TWO
PART THREE
PART FOUR
Notes
Addenda
Bibliography
Index
TO LOUISA
ἂτλητα τλᾰσᾳ
LIST OF MAPS
Greece, Macedonia and the Aegean
Turkey and the approach to the battle of Issus
Western Persian Empire 333/330
Alexander’s route, September 330/327
North-West Frontier 327/326
Siege of Pir-Sar
Route to the Hydaspes
PREFACE
I first met Homer and Alexander fourteen years ago and for different reasons I
have been intrigued by them ever since; if any one reader puts down this book
with a wish to read Homer or with a sense of what it might have been like to
have followed Alexander, I will not have written to no purpose. I have not aimed
at any particular class of reader, because I do not believe that such classes exist; I
have written self-indulgently, as I myself like to read about the past. I do not like
the proper names of nonentities, numbered dates of unknown years or refutations
of other men’s views. The past, like the present, is made up of seasons and of
faces, feelings, disappointments and things seen. I am bored by institutions and I
do not believe in structures. Others may disagree.
This is not a biography nor does it pretend to certainty in Alexander’s name.
More than twenty contemporaries wrote books on Alexander and not one of
them survives. They are known by quotations from later authors, not one of
whom preserved the original wording: these later authors are themselves only
known from the manuscripts of even later copyists and in the four main sources
these manuscripts are not complete. The most detailed history goes back to only
one manuscript, whose text cannot be checked; another, much used, has often
been copied illegibly. Alexander left no informal letter which is genuine beyond
dispute and the two known extracts from his formal documents both concern
points of politics. On the enemy side his name survives in a Lycian grave-
inscription, in Babylonian tablets on building work and astronomy and in
Egyptian captions to temple dedications. It is a naive belief that the distant past
can be recovered from written texts, but even the written evidence for Alexander
is scarce and often peculiar. Nonetheless, 1,472 books and articles are known to
me on the subject in the past century and a half, many of which adopt a
confident tone and can be dismissed for that alone. Augustine, Cicero and
perhaps the emperor Julian are the only figures from antiquity whose biography
can be attempted, and Alexander is not among them. This book is a search, not a
story, and any reader who takes it as a full picture of Alexander’s life has begun
with the wrong suppositions.
I have many debts, none more lasting than the generous support and complete
freedom from duties which I have enjoyed first as an undergraduate, then as a
Fellow at Magdalen College, Oxford. During my time there, Mr C. E. Stevens
first showed me that history did not have to be dull to be true. Mr G. E. M. de
Sainte Croix revived my interest in Alexander and fed it with many intriguing
insights into the classical past. Dr J. K. Davies has been a constant source of
suggestion and shrewd comment. Dr A. D. H. Bivar directed me to Iranian
problems which have since become a primary enticement. The lectures of the
late Stefan Weinstock on Roman religion raised much that I wanted to ask of
Alexander and his remarkable book on Caesar would have raised even more if I
had been able to take it into full account. But at a time when so much of ancient
history is a desert, I have gained most from the lectures and writings of Mr Peter
Brown; it is my great regret that there is not the evidence to begin to treat
Alexander’s age as he has treated late antiquity.
I am grateful to The Hogarth Press and Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New
York, for permission to reproduce the poem ‘In the Year 200 ’ from The
B.C.
Complete Poems of C. P. Cavafy translated by Rae Dalven and to Faber & Faber
Ltd and Random House Inc., New York, for permission to quote from W. H.
Auden’s poem The Shield of Achilles.
Other debts are more personal. Like Alexander’s treasurer, I have been helped
through solitary years by a garden and a lady, and in both respects I have been
more fortunate. The garden has grown more obligingly and the lady, though not
a goddess, is at least my wife.