Alexander the Great Conquered the World — and Left It in Ruins

‘Alexander: God, King, Man’By Edmund RichardsonSt. Martin’s Press, 480 pagesAlexander III of Macedon can lay claim to being the most accomplished man who ever lived. His empire stretched from the rocky outcrops of Greece in the west, to the Black Sea in the north, to the Indus River Valley in the east, and the coast of Arabia in the south. He never lost a battle, founded some 20 cities, and ruled as Hegemon of the Greeks, Pharaoh of Egypt, Great King of Persia, and, finally, as a god. New civilizations were carved by his sword. The scarcely believable feats of Alexander are among the most widely told in history — they became the first works of fiction to be written in prose in any European language. He appears in sources as far-flung as the pages of the Talmud, the Quran, the writings of Ethiopian monks, and medieval manuscripts. All this surfaces the question of whether, more than two millennia after Alexander’s companions last charged into battle, another life is needed.The historian Edmund Richardson’s “Alexander: God, King, Man” answers that question in the affirmative — resoundingly. Last week it became the first biography of an ancient to win the Baillie Gifford Prize for the “best non-fiction writing in the English language.” Mr. Richardson mines sources in 12 languages and summons insights from hieroglyphics, cuneiform, and computer simulations to paint a man who became a hero and died a god.Mr. Richardson’s account begins with Alexander — “the Great” would come later — as a “slight, wiry young man” of 23 whom “no one had thought much about until he suddenly came to the throne” following the stunning assassination of his father, King Philip II. To Alexander belonged a “tumbledown kingdom, a pile of debts, and an army which answered to nobody.” Athenians scoffed at the Macedonians as ersatz Greeks from a barbaric frontier.Alexander would not be obscure for long. Mr. Richardson writes how the “young man from the hills of Macedon would rule the greatest empire in history, stretching from Athens to the plains of India. His campaign would transform the world: From the stars in the sky to the words on this page, to the dreams in our heads, Alexander reshaped reality more profoundly than almost anyone else in history.”‘Entry of Alexander into Babylon,’ Charles Le Brun, 1665. Via Wikimedia CommonsMr. Richardson, though, resists the siren song of hagiography. He describes how Alexander’s siege of the ancient island stronghold of Tyre ended in a “bloody horror, with burning sand and fantastical. murderous inventions.” He razed Thebes, Gaza, and Persepolis to the ground. Cities whose names have been lost to history were erased in blurs of iron, blood, and bone. Mr. Richardson writes that Alexander’s army “broke the world” and left it “in ruins.”This biography’s mightiest achievement could be Mr. Richardson’s dispatches from the infernos of Alexander’s battles, which read as if he was a war correspondent embedded in the fearsome Macedonian phalanxes. Alexander’s great antagonist was Darius III of Persia, who ruled an empire of 50 million people, land of wonders and wealth that inherited the knowledge of the ancient Mesopotamians stretching back to the dawn of civilization.Alexander broke Babylon and Persian power in a series of battles that have entered into military lore. In 333 before the common era at the Battle of Issus, Alexander sent Darius fleeing, with the Greeks capturing the Great King’s family. Two years later, at Gaugamela in modern day Iraqi Kurdistan, Alexander, in a decisive victory, smashed Darius’s much larger army. Darouis fled again, only to be murdered by one of his own satraps in an ox-cart in the dusty Parthian desert.Even historians of Mr. Richardson’s caliber cannot comprehend why Alexander didn’t stop after Gaugamela. He had gone farther than any Greek before him, and was likely richer than any man had ever been. As pharaoh — Egypt fell without a fight — his throne name was Setepenre-Meryamun, or “Chosen of Re, Beloved of Amun.” He had been proclaimed a deity by the oracle at the Siwa Oasis. His men were eager to return to Macedon as conquering heroes.Alexander, though, pushed beyond military necessity. He marched east through Anatolia, to the boundaries of the known world. And then he went beyond them, deep into India. Mr. Richardson reports that on the march into the subcontinent, the “murder was remorseless, systematic.” He writes that “near a city they called Nysa, the Greeks got drunk and went berserk. They stripped off their clothes” and hailed Dionysus Indoletes,” Dioynus “killer of Indians.”‘Bust of Alexander’ by Leochares, ca. 330 BCE. Via Wikimedia CommonsMr. Richardson writes that Alexander “wiped out entire populations, killing every living person from one end of the horizon to the other.” He was 29, and had “reshaped reality more profoundly than anyone before him in history.” He would win one final outrageous victory — over King Porus and his army of elephants at the Battle of the Hydaspes, in Punjab. An ancient map features the caption “Where will you stop, Alexander?” The army that halted Alexander’s advance was his own. His men refused to follow their king even deeper into India. Three years later, after a hellacious march back, Alexander was dead at Babylon, felled by typhus from contaminated water. He left his conquests “Toi kratistoi” — ‘to the one who will not be broken.” Alexander’s last breath sparked a civil war between his generals that would last decades. His family was slaughtered without ceremony.Mr. Richardson reckons that Alexander’s greatest achievement was Alexandria, Egypt’s “golden city” of Greeks, Egyptians, Indians, and Jews that “would bind the known world together as no other city had ever done before.” While his empire crumbled, his conquests “connected the world in ways which were previously unimaginable.” The king who had been Aristotle’s student and a reader of Homer ended as a monster whose magic still casts a spell.

Alexander the Great Conquered the World — and Left It in Ruins

Alexander the Great Conquered the World — and Left It in Ruins

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