01 April 2008 | Alexander the Great: The Hunt for a New Past

Paul Cartledge
Vintage Books, 2004
368 pp.

When I was a promising graduate student—before I descended into alcoholism and endless self-pity—I was trained to think and act like an historian: weighing credible evidence, analyzing interpretation and learning to reject the chaff from the wheat. While my teachers were wary of instilling an unrealistic goal of total objectivity into their pupils, they strove to keep us from imposing modern day value judgements back onto the past, challenging us to use only new evidence in our reappraisal of an established storyline.

I like to think I’ve still kept those lessons in mind when reading any historical treatment, particularly when it comes to long-standing interests like ancient Greece and Rome. Part of the attraction of those two societies is the fact that we are their descendents; so much of our culture derives from their standards that we often try to find mirrors of ourselves when studying them, both for better and for worse. Cultural commentators like to ask if America is the new Rome, when I often believe we’re more like the Greeks at the height of the Athenian Empire. But whatever the difference of opinion, we’re all using the same reference points to help us understand ourselves as well as them.

But increasingly, I’ve become less objective in my assessing the realities of life in ancient Greece. For example, the more I read about the Spartans, the more I just loathe these people. In any space or time, their society—so cruel, viscious and violent—strikes me as fundamentally unjust and primitive. The ironic aspect is, they believed themselves to be extremely just, correct, pious and advanced. They followed their laws because it kept their society together, and to question that went against the very grain of what it meant to be a Spartan. My negative reactions to them are completely biased: I judge them with my modern conceptions of justice and ethics, precisely what my instructors would have disapproved of us.

It’s against this that Paul Cartledge’s book, “Alexander the Great: The Hunt for a New Past,” comes in to relieve that pressure. His well-written and highly readable volume takes the story of Alexander and divides the historical narrative into key sections and searches the evidence for new interpretations of the person almost universally regarded as a military genius. It is an appraisal of particular caliber because Mr. Cartledge manages to take modern conclusions and ideas about Alexander and weigh them against the evidence bequeathed to us to see if there’s not only anything new, but to give more insight on what happened at the time.

I’ve read several books about Alexander, and like my opinion of the Spartans, I was becoming more and more disenchanted. I saw Alexander’s undeniable military achievement less like the example of genius and more like abject, unadulterated warmongering. The son of the talented, and ruthless, Philip II of Macedon, Alexander literally blazed a trail across the known-world, conquering one land after another in his single-minded pursuit of Darius III, the Great King of Persia. For lovers of high adventure, you can’t get more action than following the exploits of Alexander up to the Indus Valley, when it was the revolt of his men who conquered him and forced a return back to Babylon. My own romance about Alexander (remember how we was supposed to have wept because there were no more worlds to conquer?) started to bump against the idea that he was merely a killer of men and a megalomaniac who fancied himself a living god. Really.

Mr. Cartledge takes these multiple, competing facets and presents them to us so that we must drop our modern notions and find out what the evidence says. It’s a cliché to state Alexander was a man of his times, but it’s also true. For that reason, we must dislodge the revulsion we may have over the unjust murder or Cleitus the Black or Alexander’s appointed historian/propagandsit, Callisthenes and write him off as a thug with an army. We have to understand that Alexander was a man of extraordinary ambition and aim, and that means that the complexities of his character are equally difficult to sum up with a word or phrase.

Of course, that doesn’t absolve Alexander of his own terrible actions, nor should we exalt what appears to be the first case of multiculturalism into his personal desire for universal brotherhood. If there’s any one fascinating aspect of Mr. Cartledge’s book, it’s how Alexander seemed to be captivated by the East. While it would become a pattern for conquering armies not to outlaw or even mock the gods of the vanquished (for the most part at least), Alexander seems to have developed a genuine interest in fusing both Greek and Persian cultures. After the overthrow of the Persian Empire was complete (topped off with the burning of Persepolis), Alexander sought to keep the Persian aristocracy and administrative bureaucracy intact, bringing tutors to instruct Persian functionaries and military-age men the Greek language. Rather than disbanding the Persian army, he absorbed them into his own, seeking to create a new army that rankled, worried and agitated his increasingly concerned Greek compatriots. He even went so far as to begin adopting Persian dress and the controversial act of obeisance that so repulsed the Greeks to the point of open revolt.

Mr. Cartledge doesn’t recapitulate events that are well known, but rather uses them to frame his objective of how to view Alexander’s actions, primarily against the sources. And it’s this approach that brings me back to remember the lessons of my instructors and to avoid dismissing Alexander as a pure thug and killer, or the Spartans as proto-Nazis. Even when the sources collide against one another, or contradict themselves, we can arrive at a conclusion that invites more study and investigation, which is precisely the point of historical research.

Alexander the Great was not a man looking to establish the universal brotherhood of man, or just a madman rampaging across the Middle East merely for the sake of plunder. His expansive ambition, hubris and drive are undeniable, which is why we still read about him and study him to this day.