Alexander the Great by Paul Cartledge

Alexander the Great Reviews

• 
  T.R. Preston

  Since Alexander is my favourite historical figure in all of human history, I enjoyed this immensely. I do take issue with the structure of this book however. It goes all over the place. The timeline of events jumps back and forth in a very strange fashion.
  
  I was almost tempted to give this book four stars instead of five due to this feature, but I was convinced to bestow it with five for two reasons. The first is that it is, of course, a book about Alexander, and therefore my personal bias swiftly takes over. The second reason is that this book does not shy away from Alexander's almost absurdly passionate and blatantly beyond the realm of platonic relationship with Hephaestion. Nor does this book neglect to mention the homosexual influence within Greek culture, literature, and art. There is a very annoying trend among modern conservatives where they like to pretend that Ancient Greece was not, in fact, widely accepting of homosexual behavior. Turns out generations of scholars' observations were just mistranslations, and they actually all hated male on male love with a passion. Imagine that. We read the signs all wrong for hundreds of years of in depth study. Whew. We dodged a bullet on that one, eh lads?
  
  Give me a break. The evidence is insurmountable, but faux intellectuals within the modern conservative sphere like to plug their ears and shake their heads like children. The erasure of homosexual culture throughout history has reached the point of becoming worrying to me. Idiocy is rampant.
• 
  Stephanie

  I hate the way this book is organized and I dislike all of the repetition. I blame both of these problems on the fact he reworked and rewrote a bunch of lectures.
  
  There is some very excellent salty commentary, though, and the supplementary materials in the back are A+.
• 
  Fred Klein

  This was my second attempt at a book about ATG. The first was Robin Lane Fox’s, which I found difficult to get into. This one was better, but I am stopping at page 168. It’s time for me to admit that I’m not interested in ATG although I feel like I should be. The sources of information about him are unclear. He lived a short time and won battles and took territories. But it does not appear that he was a great thinker like Napoleon or Caesar. I just can’t get into him and I am not persuaded that he was Great. Oh well. Moving on ...
• 
  Debbi

  I came away learning more about Alexander the Great as well as his father, Phillip but I did not find either one to be particularly heroic. I realize that you do not conquer the world by being likable but the author brings both men's cruelty and vindictiveness front and center. I appreciate pulling aside the curtain and looking at both men with open eyes but there were many times when I wanted to just give up on this book about awful people. It was also annoying that the author kept circling back to the same ideas and information.
• 
  Denise

  A decent enough biography, well written and very readable, though I didn't learn anything new - not surprising, given that this is more of an introduction to the subject and thus somewhat sparse in detail. Due to the author's habit of meandering back and forth through time and venturing off on tangents whenever the mood seems to strike the whole thing seems somewhat disorganized, and frequent repetition of some facts doesn't help.
• 
  Pop

  I bit off a little too much with this one. I finally gave up on it. It was pure torture. I’m sure there are some who would disagree with me, but midway through I was bored and tired with the author and Alexander The Great. I would have been better off by listening to a podcast on Alexander.
• 
  Michael Triozzi

  It's hard to get inside the head of a person who lived 2300 years ago, particularly when that person looms as large as Alexander the Great. And Paul Cartledge's informative overview doesn't really try to do that. I didn't walk away from this book with a great sense of who Alexander was as a person: how he felt after his battles, what he was afraid of, who he trusted with his secrets -- and a lot of that is simply impossible to know. I'd rather have a trusted historian like Cartledge walk me through the evidence than get too deeply entwined with fabulous speculation.
  
  From time to time I was frustrated that the book wasn't always a chronological account. It's more thematically organized, which has its advantages but adds to the feeling that this isn't really a visceral narrative of Alexander's story. But all that being said, it's a good bird's-eye look at the life, campaigns, and character of one of history's most famous young dead people. It's a book written at an arm's length (and 2300 years distance) from its subject.
  
  And it's a good reminder that you can subdue Greece, conquer the world, march into India, cross unfathomable deserts, glimpse the end of the world... and you might still be worried that your dad isn't proud of you
• 
  Sakina

  This book was just amazing! I'm so glad I took a course on Alexander - I've learned so much that I feel like I know Alexander on a personal level! I loved analyzing the different sources and learning military tactics and politics, as well as learning more about Persian and Macedonian history! Highly recommend!
• 
  Melia

  Definitely a great start to breaking down the timelines and facts of Alexander's life, but do be aware that this is closer to a military history than a biography of Alexander himself. Even the chapters "Alexander the Man" and "Alexander the God" talk more about his victories and accomplishments than his personal life. Granted, I am aware that we certainly know MORE about his military successes, so there's more reading material, but it still left me wanting.
  
  Cartledge characterizes Alexander as prudent, strategic, and he explains most of his decisions that might have spoken to eccentricity as having political explanations. He contrasts the noteworthy "Alexander Romance" sharply, giving a fairly objective view.
  
  I will say that I sometimes found his writing Anglo centric, making British monarchs his main point of comparison, characterizing Alexander's forays into Asian and Persian culture as foreign excapades, etc. He also sometimes references to pagan beliefs as surely unfamiliar and strange to readers. He also seems more willing to accept that Alexander had a complexly repressed Oedipus complex and trauma around the female body than to simply suggest that Alexander might have just been gay.
• 
  Rick Davis

  First of all, Paul Cartledge is one of the world’s foremost experts on ancient Greece, and is an extremely careful and scholarly writer. As such, I knew before I even began that this book would be great. This book is not actually a biography of Alexander the Great in the traditional sense of the word. Rather, it is an introduction to the historiography of Alexander the Great. I made sure this summer to read a narrative biography of Alexander so that I would be prepared to read this book, and I’m glad I did. Cartledge assumes that the reader already knows the story of Alexander the Great, and spends his time dealing with the thorny issues that arise from conflicting sources and the seemingly self-contradictory character or many of Alexander’s actions.
  
  Chapters are devoted to Alexander’s interactions with his fellow Macedonians, with the other Greeks, and with the Persians. His relationships, campaigns and policies are dissected in order to understand why he did the things he did. Cartledge always offers the various dominant theories concerning the various subjects and interacts with the scholarship of each. Near the end of the book, Cartledge shifts to the numerous legends that have sprung up around Alexander over the years and even reviews some historical fiction novels about Alexander, giving his take on the accuracy of each one.
  
  One other thing that must be mentioned is that this book has an amazing bibliography. Cartledge lists all of the published primary sources, all of the major overviews of Alexander’s life and career, and the specific sources that relate to each chapter of the book. In addition, he reviews each source individually to give the reader a good idea of what to read or buy in order to systematically conquer the daunting amount of material out there. This is an excellent introduction and resource for further study.
• 
  Illiterate

  Thematically organized, but a bit repetitive. Judicious assessments of evidence, but little historiography.
• 
  Randall Wallace

  Alexander the Great was born in 356 BC and the famed Aristotle became his tutor, teaching him medicine, philosophy, morals, religion, logic, and art. Plato and Demosthenes were contemporaries of Alexander. He was finally empowered at age twenty, when his famous warrior dad (and political and military master of Greece) Philip II of Macedon (who was about to attack Persia) was assassinated. Alexander becomes king and then he forces his father’s League of Corinth to affirm his status. He identified with Achilles. Philip had been well-read and conversed in Greek and knew its literature. The Macedonian monarchy was an autocracy with both Philip and Alexander. “Right down to the end of the fifth century BCE, Macedon had remained something of a backwater – economically, politically, culturally, and so militarily.” Philip and then Alexander changed all that, for a bit.
  
  Thebes had in its army in 378 BC the famed Sacred Band, which consisted of “150 pairs of homosexual lovers.” Not much is said about their fighting ability, but I imagine they had the best decorated tents on the battlefield. Alexander destroys Thebes after it challenges his authority calling him a tyrant and despot. The torching of Thebes in 335 BC (approved by the League of Corinth) was to set an example to other mainland city-states about opposing him. At the time inter-state relations were determined by power and force. Then he went off to fight more battles and by twenty-six he was master of the Persian Empire (defeating Darius III in 331 BC), and dead by age thirty-three after only twelve short years of rule. But by then he had conquered from Greece, Egypt, Babylonia, Iran to Pakistan. Strangely more Greeks had fought against him than for him (before Gaugamela in late 331 BC).
  
  Alexander mistrusted Greek loyalty because he was Macedonian. For many Greeks, Persians and even Macedonians were barbarians. He sent back plunder taken by Xerxes to the Greek mainland to curry favor with Greeks. It had taken a long time for Darius III to get his army together because the Persian Empire was “far-flung and so multi-ethnic.” Strangely Darius in the end, fled his own battlefield leaving behind “his own mother, a wife, and two of his unmarried daughters.” In the words of Monty Python, “When danger reared its ugly head, he quickly turned his tail and fled.” The Battle of Gaugamela was Alexander’s greatest battle, and it finishes off the Persian Empire from western Iran westward. Alexander also cuts the famed Gordian knot in 333 BC. He was welcomed in Egypt and Babylonia as a savior because he was religiously tolerant, at least more so than the ruling Achaemenids had been. He “spread Hellenism so far and wide, that he made it virtually irreversible”. He had the Hebrew Bible translated into Greek at Egyptian Alexandria.
  
  Alexander’s greatest asset had been his own men, the Macedonian army he had inherited from Philip. His men’s morale being kept up often determined his actions on the battlefield. But his first defeat came at the hands of his own men, when they decided he had gone too far for them after a decade of fighting and he had to turn around, and so he cut a path to the mouth of the Indus (south of modern-day Karachi, Pakistan). “They in effect, mutinied.” However, while returning and crossing the Gedrosian desert, supplies ran out causing thousands of his troops and their women to die from heat and thirst. When he finally returned to Iran, he found his appointees were corrupt, inefficient and disloyal; soon he died.
  
  He had enjoyed “butchering wild animals” in his spare time, “passionately addicted” to chasing and killing defenseless animals especially Asian lions. He was an early member of PUTA; People for the Unethical Treatment of Animals. Strangely the cities he created all celebrated Greek and not Macedonian culture. Asiatic Greeks venerated Alexander as a God. In 327 BC he recruited more than 30,000 young Iranians to be taught Greek. However, Zoroastrians in Iran still hate Alexander for his torching the main ceremonial place of the Achaemenids in 330 BC. Alexander wasn’t into sex but instead was “monumentally pious, verging on the superstitious.”
  
  In the end, it’s not hard to see Alexander as other historians, like Roderick Beaton, have seen him – as a sociopath. I was glad to finally read about him after a lifetime of shamefully knowing almost nothing about him. This was a good book about the man who conquered more land than anyone else in history, who turned Macedonia from a cultural backwater, into Andy Warhol’s “15 minutes of fame” and then a few centuries later back into a cultural backwater again.
• 
  Zandt McCue

  I hated this book so much. It has ruined my life. This is one of those cases where the quest for knowledge truly hurts someone but not because of anything to do with Alexander the Great but rather the fact that Paul Cartledge 'wrote' a horrible biography.
  
  An example is when Chapter 2 starts with Alexander's birth. Awesome, let's get to it. Then when I end up at Chapter 3....it starts with Alexander's birth. Again. This isn't a biography where you begin and then follow Alexander's life and learn about him and more importantly find out why he's such a legend. I came into this knowing virtually nothing about Alexander and wanting to find out about my namesake. No, I've learned just about nothing from this except the same five or so things repeated over and over again. How many times do I need to read that Alexander killed Cleitus the Black? Fun fact for all of you, I learned more about Alexander killing Cleitus in the two minutes it took me to go to Wikipedia to find out how to spell his name properly than it did at ANY point during the numerous times the event is mentioned in the book. Therein lies the problem. Paul takes a handful of events and keeps bringing them up, but we don't actually experience them. Instead, it's like a list he keeps referring to. And now that I word it that way I realize that the truth is that this is similar to a long High School essay. He's constantly referencing other books and citing past and future chapters. The more I think about what I just read, the more I'm physically in pain.
  
  
• 
  Dana

  A salty commentary but nonetheless excellent introduction into the exploits of one of the most interesting men this world has ever seen. My only gripe with this is that it addresses the topic of Alexander in the form of themes rather than chronologically and thus suffers from some repetition and is somewhat confusing in the beginning but I got over it. The appendix which addresses most of the sources we have for information about Alexander is excellent and important as we ironically have so little to go on to understand the man that had hellenized the east and quite possibly ruled most of the known world at a time.
  I would call this unbiased because it doesn't attempt to disguise Alexander's frank savagery or mistakes, it attempts to address his achievements in a way that truly displays where he as an individual, a general and a solider succeeded and where a lot of other factors came together and the stars aligned for him. It dissects his frankly patriarchal rule and attempts to understand how and why he chose to undertake a policy of orientalization rather than have everyone follow his pagan Greek religion. And it doesn't attempt to romanticize his clearly politically motivated heterosexual marriages in an attempt to cover up his homosexuality. Great book. very accessible. Highly recommend.
• 
  Jose Marquez

  Excelente libro que documenta diferentes etapas y aspectos de Alejandro, no solo en su época sino la repercusión de su vida y gestas en épocas posteriores.
• 
  Ryan Patterson

  Why you have to go and do Callisthenes like that, bruh?
• 
  Evander

  This book has been sitting on my shelves for years since it was my sister's from her Classics degree. I was pleased it at least mentioned bisexuality on the back so I thought, Oh, it's actually going to cover Alexander's and Hephaestion's relationship properly... Not quite so. I'm guessing it's rather fair to assume that the author is not queer. He at least acknowledges that Alexander and Hephaestion in all likelihood did have a sexual relationship, but limits it somewhat to their adolescence as was not rare in classical Greece. He explains that there wasn't the stigma of more recent eras against queer relationships and mentions the Theban Sacred Band (a military unit of 150 pairs of male lovers) but then goes on to say Hephaestion would hardly have wanted "to boast" that he was Alexander's "catamite". At some point he gives more credence to Freudian rubbish than queerness and says it's "more plausible" that Alexander either had a repressed Oedipal complex or sexual attraction to horses than that he was a "preferred homosexual"! He also validly talks about the likelihood or possibility that some of Alexander's marriages were politically and diplomatically motivated rather than from love and how he seemed to "abjure heterosex" but still will not countenance the possibility that Alexander was queer (possibly bisexual if not gay as we now use the terms)! He talks about how by Alexander's time, Achilles and Patroclus were virtually unanimously regarded as lovers even if Homer wasn't necessarily explicit about it, but makes excuses for Alexander referring to himself and Hephaestion as Achilles and Patroclus and makes it any other reason except them being lovers.
  
  Allocishet authors more generally have this get-out where they say "We can't apply modern labels to historical people" but then they also say "We can't call [historical person] [gay/bi/queer/trans etc.] if they didn't use that word explicitly for themselves". Well, they can't use the terms if the modern terms didn't exist, but that's not to say we haven't always existed. Funnily enough they're happy enough to stick to the idea that these people are all allo, cis and/or het without any evidence in that direction.
  
  Otherwise, I found that the thematic nature of the book worked well for some aspects but it was a bit frustrating to have details repeated over and over in different chapters.
• 
  Fernando Torres

  Definitivamente no es un libro que me haya matado, la traducción estuvo pésima, pero las fuentes bibliográficas estuvieron densas dando a conocer un excelente libro para un historiador en potencia o para alguien que quiera adentrarse al mundo político y humanístico de Alejandro y de la Epoca. Puedo decir después de haberlo terminado que me demore muuuuucho tiempo tratando de terminarlo y es cuando quiero decir que entre menos me guste mas me demorare en leerlo, tengo muchos por leer y ahora es lo que quiero hacer. Este libro me deja gran enseñanza histórica del periodo aquemenida, griego y Macedonio, sus costumbres, organización política, enemigos, neutrales y aliados, es un libro denso y complicado de leer dado a la traducción y a hechos historicos que no los tengo totalmente claros, por esta razón el autor facilita un glosario y indice de personajes al reverso. Mi capitulo favorito fue lo que nos dejo Alejandro y acerca de sus viajes hasta el imperio Indo y es super interesante en algunas partes porque ya hay momentos tediosos y monótonos. De igual manera finalizo diciendo que lo recomiendo para aquellos que quieran adentrarse a este mundo antes de cristo y lo que nos dejo un joven como nosotros un legado tan grande y un cambio de cultura cuando el solo tenia 29 años! y su legado perdura después de 2000 años!! definitivamente aparte de ser de buenas dado a escaparse de la muerte muchas veces, conquisto lo que nadie mas pudo, grande Alejandro.
• 
  Brian Olinger

  Dull and grinding read.....
  
  Every so often I go to the library and randomly pull a book from the shelf. I have had mostly great success with this in the past, learning about people and things I would have never previously read.
  
  Unfortunately, my luck crashed into a wall at full speed. This book was the pits. Even though relatively short, it was work to get through. I learned almost nothing about Alexander, the time or the place.
  
  Great writers bring history alive. Mr. Cartledge buries history. It felt as unfamiliar as something from thousands of years ago would be.
  
  If you see this book, run in the other direction shrieking and flailing your arms!
• 
  Pritam Chattopadhyay

  Part of the impenetrability in assessing Alexander has always been the nature of the existing sources. Given that he was even in his lifetime almost a mythic figure, it is both weird and exasperating that no current narratives of his life have survived. These had been written by his generals and confidants, by his admiral, and a court supervisor. Alexander even had a court historian, Callisthenes.
  
  Nor is this shortage corrected by a profusion of surviving documents. The inscriptional evidence is barely extensive.
  
  Despite Alexander’s epithet, “the Great”—a title likely given to him soon after his death, even though our first surviving reference comes from the Roman comedic playwright Plautus — his continuing eminence, his conquests spread over two million square miles, his victories in every battle where he was present, and his responsibility in creating the Hellenistic Age, his magnitude has been much challenged in current scholarly literature.
  
  While some might still call Alexander “the Pretty Good,” many more would hail him as “the-downright-awful.”
  
  The likely invented declaration by the Delphic Oracle that Alexander was unconquerable was in fact proven correct as he went from one victory to another. Where his father had complicatedness besieging rather small cities, Alexander, in 335, captured the city of Thebes within days of his entrance on the scene, and, later, fell the cities of Miletus and Halicarnasus in 334, and Tyre and Gaza in 332.
  
  An army assembled from the forces of the Persian satraps in Asia Minor was vanquished at the Granicus River in 334; at Issus in Cilicia, where, although greatly outnumbered, Alexander defeated the Great King of Persia himself in battle in 333, and again with a measure of conclusiveness at Gaugamela in 331.
  
  He marched unopposed into Egypt in 332, into Babylonia in 331, and was welcomed enthusiastically by both the Egyptians and the Babylonians as a liberator. Indeed, his entrance into Babylon was likely, looking at Alexander’s expedition as a whole, his acme.
  
  The present book is vaguely based on lecture courses, the author has given at Cambridge during the past decades, aimed predominantly at undergraduate students reading for either the Classical or the Historical Tripos.
  
  At the very outset the author observes: ‘There is really no need for any special justification, let alone apology, for a new history of Alexander. He is one of those very few genuinely iconic figures, who have both remade the world they knew and constantly inspire us to remake our own worlds, both personal and more global. What is needed, then, and I have aimed to provide, is a book that does full justice to Alexander’s extraordinary achievement, while at the same time respecting the limits of the evidence and of the historian’s craft. I have attempted to address that achievement both in its own terms (including some tentative probing into Alexander’s deep psyche) and in terms of its subsequent impact – which continues to this day, when Alexander is still prayed in aid by fishermen in Greece, cursed as a ‘thief’ in Iran, and worshipped as a saint in the Coptic Church of Egypt.
  
  It must also be a book with a distinctive interpretative approach, and mine is indicated in the book’s subtitle: ‘The Hunt for a New Past’….’
  
  After the two preliminary chapters, the author has aimed to merge sequential chronological narration with comprehensively systematic surveys of a number of major themes of Alexander’s career.
  
  A detailed Timeline right at the start of the book is intended to assist convey the flow of events. All dates are BCE (Before the Common Era), unless otherwise specified.
  
  The closing chapter explores Alexander’s manifold legacies, from antiquity through the Middle Ages to the present day.
  
  An Appendix discovers the limits set by the obtainable source materials to any attempted rebuilding of how it in fact was in Alexander’s day.
  
  The Appendix also explores in greater detail than usual two vital questions:
  
  1) How exactly did Callisthenes, Alexander’s official historial, die in 327, and,
  
  2) What did actually happen at the oracle at Siwah in 332.
  
  The modern-day narrative sources, as ever, do not survive as such, and the available reports of at least the main authors all tell different stories. This actually does matter, because these were issues over which Alexander himself quite surely took great care to control the flow of information, and one of the many paradoxes of his career is that, despite or because of that concern, the facts are so often murky and controversial.
  
  For reasons given here, too, various sorts of material objects lie at the very kernel of this historical enterprise. The illustrations of these objects are thus not simply an optional extra but a key component of the history – any history – of Alexander. They have been selected with a view to combining the familiar with the unfamiliar, the spectacular with the ordinary, the decorative with the documentary.
  
  The book concludes with a series of technical aids: a Table of Achaemenid Kings, a Dramatis Personae (register of prominent individuals), a Glossary (including place names, and a Bibliography).
  
  The authors and works referred to in the text can typically be found listed in the relevant chapter’s suggestions for further reading in the Bibliography.
  
  Some of the suggestions are aimed more particularly at the scholar than the general reader but general readers, too, will confidently find abundance here to encourage them further.
  
  Grab a copy if you choose.
  
• 
  Colin Baumgartner

  This book was poorly structured and so repetitive as to make it hard to read. The book is not chronological and the strange sections (Alexander in Persia, Alexander the General, Alexander and Greece) don’t even necessarily stay true to the headers. I often had the strange feeling I’d already looked at a sentence before (because I actually had in three previous chapters).
  
  All of this aside, there clearly is a great deal of scholarly knowledge behind the book. If only the book had been approached as a book and not simply transcribed from old lecture notes...
• 
  Harry

  The author is obviously very knowledgeable on Alexander the Great, and the book is very well researched. However, the manner in which the author chose to organize it was quite frustrating to me. The chapters are laid out by topic rather than chronological order. While this is appropriate for some subjects, I personally found it irritating, as it leads to a lot of meandering and repetition. This made it difficult for me to immerse myself in the story the way I have with other books of this genre (Scipio Africanus by Liddell Hart comes to mind). I won’t be reading anything else by this author.
• 
  Ken Ryu

  Cartledge takes a scholarly aim to this biography. He is careful to separate the myth from the man. Alexander's life was short but eventful. His father, Philip of Macedon, was a great leader. Philip's death is shroud in mystery with many believing Alexander had a hand in his assassination. After Philip's murder, Alexander took over the leadership of Macedon at the precocious age of 20. He wasted no time in establishing his authority and credentials. He was unsqueamish and ruthless in eliminated any potential opponents. Many of his father's trusted advisors and generals suffered during this purge.
  
  Alexander would die at the age of 33. In his 13 years as the ruler of Macedon he would engage in numerous military campaigns and venture as far as India in his conquests. His greatest military achievement was the defeat of the Persian leader Darius III. Persian territories were among the many that would be added to his expanding realm.
  
  Cartledge carefully looks at the more controversial aspects of Alexander's biography.
  
  Was Alexander a homosexual?
  
  Cartledge acknowledges that Alexander had sexual affairs with men. This was not consider devious nor abnormal for this period. Alexander also had wives and sex with women. Cartledge leans towards the notion that Alexander was more interested in war than sex and than his bisexual affairs were limited affairs that rarely consumed the focus of the ambition man and were within the societal norms of the period.
  
  Was Alexander an alcoholic?
  
  Alexander often compared himself to Bacchus. There are many reports of his excessive drinking and Cartledge has little to refute these charges.
  
  Was Alexander prone to cronyism?
  
  Alexander was quick to sentence to death those that were not obsequious and obedient. He filled the many vacancies after the purge of his father's advisors with his close circle of friends.
  
  Did Alexander consider himself a living god?
  
  Cartledge is equivocal on this question. There are incidents and actions that suggest that Alexander did consider himself a god on earth but that the evidence is not conclusive in the matter.
  
  Was Alexander Asiatic or Hellenistic?
  
  Cartledge finds that though the Greeks are quick to claim Alexander as one of their own, that he had one foot in Asian and one in Greece. The majority of Alexander's time and battles were fought in Asia. Cartledge finds that Alexander was more concerned with strengthening his Asian ties than holding onto his Hellenic ones.
  
  Was the Gordian knot real or myth?
  
  There are many convincing references to Alexander solving the Gordian knot. Cartledge concedes this is likely to be based on a true event.
  
  Was Alexander murdered?
  
  Cartledge demurs to confirm that Alexander was murdered but does lean towards the theory that he was poisoned.
  
  Cartledge concludes this short biography by citing his methodology. He explains how he evaluated the primary sources and determined the credibility of these works. He is careful with what he includes in the text. With this caution he leaves out some of the more fantastical legends including Alexander talking with two snakes in the desert. The famous anecdote that "he wept, for there were no more worlds to conquer" also misses the cut.
  
  Alexander was ruthless, ambitious, a great military tactician, a hard-charging leader of armies, a fearless warrior and a man who believed in his near godlike ability to unite Asia and Greece. With Cartledge treatment, Alexander comes out as a great, but deeply flawed tyrant.
• 
  Sean Wylie

  A deep dive into one of the most fascinating figures in human history. This is a book for people who already know a lot about Alexander the Great. From page one there seems to be an assumption by the author has made about the reader -- that you know a lot about Alexander and already have a strong opinion about him. And the author is going to correct that opinion.
  
  The story of Alexander is so interesting, weird, fun, cruel and chaotic. It is hard to make this material dry, but Mr. Cartledge managed it. I consume pretty much anything Alexander as I find the extremes of history very interesting. This was boring, but very in-depth. I learned a lot that I did not know, but after I learned it... it did not add much. Example would be the amount of time Mr. Cartledge spent droning on about the Athenian Navy's capabilities, history, and why didn't Alexander bring that force with him. Alexander did not trust Athens, so did not bring their powerful navy to be 'protecting' his flank. This 'why' question covered page upon page and was brought up in multiple chapters. Meanwhile the entire Battle of Gaugamela in modern-day Iraq (perhaps the most interesting set piece battle in history, one that set the tone for all future warfare), was given about 2 pages of text. What is going on?
  
  The best part of this box was the appendix! Where the author described all the primary sources of the Alexander story. That was super interesting to learn about and I had not heard that covered in-depth before. Wish the whole book had been about the source material! As the whole narrative seems based any a limited and very contradictory set of sources.
• 
  Christopher

  Beware of unsupervised children and their toys. How do you write a biography of a God?
  
  It's sometimes hard to remember how much Alexander the Great accomplished in his short 32 year life -- conquering Greece, Persia, much of Asia, and being worshipped as divine being among the highlights. Cartledge's 2005 biography of Alexander (subtitled: "The Hunt for a New Past") eschews the hagiography and presents a lively, reasoned, and well written look at one of history's most influential, fascinating, and admittedly mysterious figures.
  
  Cartledge tries to cut through the fog of god-worship and shows Alexander for what he most likely was, a passionate, motivated, charismatic, but somewhat chaotic young man -- who just happened to have an army at his disposal. Remove Alexander's access to tens of thousands of spears. Would we know his name? Almost certainly not. Or if Alexander didn't come to power until mid to late 20s, would he have been as aggressively expansionist? Would he do so with such a quasi-religious zeal and the certitude of youth in his pursuit of "Pan-Hellenism," which Cartledge largely finds as a pretext for more mundane logistical and strategic goals?
  
  While this is as much a biography of Alexander the Great, it's also gives a glimpse into Alexander the Petty, Alexander the Tyrannical, and Alexander the Paranoid as his efforts to maintain his grip on power and rapid expansion leads to mutinies, reigns of terror/purges, and assassination plots (both real and invented).
  
  Overall, an eminently readable and insightful look into one of history's most fascinating characters.
• 
  Chase Dunn

  This was a good book in as far as we are referring to the historical context and content of Alexander the Great. Although, I will say, the book undercuts the historical sources used to know the details of Alexander the Great’s life. The author admits the historical accounts were biased, controlled, far after Alexander’s life, and few in number. Essentially, one gets the impression that nothing can truly be known for certain apart from broad military achievements. As far as details go, every single detail is historically fuzzy.
  
  The author also takes a middle ground or variety view on pretty much anywhere that a firm stance might be called for. Whether it be Alexander’s megalomania, homosexuality, domineering authority, or drive and ambition. On each of these he gives Other authors views and then takes the, “It’s likely a mix of these reasons…” approach. This is likely due to the scant sources available and in a sense, is respectable that the author won’t just throw out an unsupportable conclusion.
  
  All in all, this is worth a read and clears up much confusion about this “great” man.