Alexander: God, King, Man

Alexander took the Macedonian throne in 336 BCE, aged twenty, with debts to pay and soldiers he could not rely on. His invasion of Persia began a career of conquest that made him an object of worship before his death in Babylon at thirty two. Edmund Richardson, a professor of classics at Durham, follows that arc from an insecure young ruler whom many Greeks thought a joke, through the conqueror who was pharaoh to the Egyptians and "king of the universe" to the Babylonians, then follows his growing suspicion of those around him and the failures of administration that weakened what he had built.

The book opens on November 5, 333 BCE, with Babylonian astronomers watching the night sky while rumors spread of an army from the west led by a young king, a few hours before Alexander's first battle with the Great King of Persia, at Issus. Richardson draws on languages that Greek and Latin accounts leave out. He reads the Babylonian records of the heavens alongside Egyptian inscriptions, Persian texts and Aramaic records of commerce. He also considers computer modeling of the location of Aornos, where Alexander conducted a celebrated siege. The few women in the record, Barsine, Ada and Roxane, widen the story, and the book does not soften the cost: almost one percent of the world's population, Richardson writes, died as a direct result of the campaign.

Kirkus found that the pages "fly by in riveting anecdotes," and the battles, the phalanx and the Companion cavalry, are written to be felt. Richardson is willing to imagine Alexander's state of mind from the record, which is the book's pleasure and its risk: a review in World Archaeology objects that he gives too much weight to writers of the Roman imperial period who shaped anecdotes to teach moral lessons. Those accounts were written centuries after Alexander lived. The St. Martin's hardcover runs close to five hundred pages. It suits readers who want the whole story told as a story.