Best alexander the great biography

Before we get to the books, please could you tell us about Alexander the Great’s background. What was it that led him to go out and conquer the known world?

Alexander was the son of Philip of Macedon and, while in earlier periods, Macedonia had been on the edges of the Greek world, during Alexander’s childhood Philip had made it into the most significant power in Greece. In the course of his lifetime, he became the dominant figure throughout the Aegean world. I think it’s also worth adding—and this is straying into the controversial—that Macedonia was, effectively, set up as a kingdom in the late sixth century BC, when the Persians under King Darius I invaded northern Greece. It was set up as a monarchy, and with that came the establishment of a royal court and the rituals that went with that. Macedon in the fifth century BC had a lot of contact with the neighbouring kingdom of Thrace in the north-east Aegean and had a relationship with the Persians and the local part of the Persian Empire in what’s now north-west Anatolia in Turkey, certainly until the end of Xerxes’ campaign against Greece in BC, and probably to some extent after that. So, the Macedonian monarchy was modelled, to some extent, on Persian practices or the practices of other monarchies that emulated Persia.

That suggests that the huge contrast between Greece on one hand and Persia on the other, which is what Greek historians tended to focus on, and which modern scholars also often assume to be the case, wasn’t there quite so much in reality. Alexander would have been more familiar with the kind of things that went on further east.

As soon as Philip subdues Athens and becomes the dominant figure in Greece, he sets up an alliance of almost all the Greek cities, a league of which he was the head (called by modern scholars the League of Corinth), and suggests that the first thing this league should do is invade the Persian Empire in revenge for Xerxes’ ca

In 51 BC, Marcus Tullius Cicero, who had reluctantly left his desk in Rome to become military governor of the province of Cilicia in southern Turkey, scored a minor victory against some local insurgents. As we know from his surviving letters, he was conscious that he was treading in the footsteps of a famous predecessor: “For a few days,” he wrote to his friend Atticus, “we were encamped in exactly the same place that Alexander occupied when he was fighting Darius at Issus”—hastily conceding that Alexander was in fact “a rather better general that you or I.”

Whatever the irony in Cicero’s remarks, almost any Roman, given the command of a brigade of troops and a glimpse of lands to the East, would soon dream of becoming Alexander the Great. In their fantasies at least, they stepped into the shoes of the young king of Macedon who, between and BC, had crossed into Asia, conquered the Persian Empire under Darius III, and taken his army as far as the Punjab, some three thousand miles from home—before dying, on the return journey, in the city of Babylon, at the age of thirty-two, whether (as the official version had it) from a deadly fever or (as others insinuated) from poisoning or some alcohol-related condition.

Other Romans had a much better claim to be “new Alexanders” than the normally desk-bound Cicero; and they made even more of the connection, with less sense of irony. Cicero’s contemporary Cnaeus Pompeius has been eclipsed in the modern imagination by his rival Julius Caesar, but as a young man he had achieved even more decisive victories over even more glamorous enemies than Caesar ever did. After conquests in Africa in the 80s BC, he returned to Rome to be hailed “Magnus” (or “Pompey the Great,” as he is still known), in direct imitation of Alexander. And as if to drive the point home, in his most famous surviving portrait statue (now in t

There are numerous surviving ancient Greek and Latin sources on Alexander the Great, king of Macedon, as well as some Asian texts. The five main surviving accounts are by Arrian, Plutarch, Diodorus Siculus, Quintus Curtius Rufus, and Justin. In addition to these five main sources, there is the Metz Epitome, an anonymous late Latin work that narrates Alexander's campaigns from Hyrcania to India. Much is also recounted incidentally by other authors, including Strabo, Athenaeus, Polyaenus, Aelian, and others. Strabo, who gives a summary of Callisthenes, is an important source for Alexander's journey to Siwah.

Contemporary sources

Most primary sources written by people who actually knew Alexander or who gathered information from men who served with Alexander are lost, but a few inscriptions and fragments survive. Contemporaries who wrote accounts of his life include Alexander's campaign historian Callisthenes; Alexander's generals Ptolemy and Nearchus; Aristobulus, a junior officer on the campaigns; and Onesicritus, Alexander's chief helmsman. Finally, there is the very influential account of Cleitarchus who, while not a direct witness of Alexander's expedition, used sources which had just been published. His work was to be the backbone of that of Timagenes, who heavily influenced many historians whose work still survives. None of his works survived, but we do have later works based on these primary sources.

The five main sources

Arrian

• Anabasis Alexandri (The Campaigns of Alexander in Greek) by the Greek historian Arrian of Nicomedia, writing in the 2nd century AD, and based largely on Ptolemy and, to a lesser extent, Aristobulus and Nearchus. It is generally considered one of the best sources on the campaigns of Alexander as well as one of the founders of a primarily military-based focus on history. Arrian cites his source by na