Dear Commons Community,

I have just finished reading a new book by Rachel Kousser entitled, Alexander at the End of the World:  The Forgotten Final Years of Alexander the Great. Kousser is a professor of ancient history at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center.

Anyone interested in ancient Middle Eastern history will find this book filled with interesting stories and background on Alexander’s quest to conquer the known world in the 4th century BC.  A good deal of the book is devoted to Alexander’s knowledge of military strategy.  However, it is one of the only books I have ever read which devotes an entire chapter describing the thousands of non-military people who traveled with an army – the philosophers, musicians, women and children. Kousser makes clear the difficult logistics of moving the entire entourage over difficult terrain such as deserts, mountains and flooded rivers.  Kousser also provides provocative insights into Alexander such as the possibility of his complicitness in his father’s (Philip of Macedon) death.  The author also makes clear that Alexander’s admiration of Persian culture was a major source of friction with his Macedonian friends and generals.

In sum, I found this an informative read.  I highly recommend it if you have any interest in Alexander.

Below is a review published in The New York Times.

Tony

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The New York Times

Think Our Political Leaders Are Selfish? Imagine Working for Alexander the Great.

 By Justin Marozzi

Justin Marozzi is the author of “Tamerlane: Sword of Islam, Conqueror of the World” and the editor of “A Thousand Golden Cities: 2,500 Years of Writing From Afghanistan and Its People.”

July 14, 2024

ALEXANDER AT THE END OF THE WORLD: The Forgotten Final Years of Alexander the Great, by Rachel Kousser

It is difficult to reach the end of the world when you don’t know where it is. That was the recurrent, ultimately insurmountable, challenge faced by the empire-building Macedonian king Alexander the Great during the last seven years of his life, a tumultuous period now under review in “Alexander at the End of the World,” by the classicist Rachel Kousser.

Her story begins in 330 B.C. just before the assassination of the Persian king Darius III, whom Alexander defeated at the Battle of Gaugamela the previous year, and concludes with Alexander’s death at Babylon in 323 B.C. Between those dates Alexander led an increasingly cosmopolitan army across much of what was, to Mediterranean people, the known world, rampaging through Iran and into Central Asia, over the Hindu Kush mountains and into the Indian subcontinent, subduing everyone and everything before him and picking up local warriors to fight for him along the way.

Unable to stand still, the 32-year-old conqueror was on the cusp of invading Arabia when death intervened. It was this final stage of his military career — teeming with brutality, conspiracies, compromises, failures, reversals and near mutinies — that, Kousser argues, made him great.

Her prose is bracing and her descriptive powers rise admirably to the task of portraying the world in which Alexander operated. Fresh from razing the Persian capital of Persepolis in 330 B.C., the Macedonian led an army of 17,000 toward the city of Ecbatana in northwestern Iran. The beginning of his journey was bucolic, the countryside “blanketed with the bright green leaves and pale blossoms of spring,” a vista of apple, mulberry, pear, quince and pomegranate trees. “On the plains,” she writes, “cattle and horses nibbled tender new grass, while along the rivers, a rich variety of aquatic birds taught their hatchlings to swim and fly.”

Kousser summons new archaeological evidence, some of which is persuasive, to support her argument that Alexander was more of an integrationist than is generally recognized. Cultural assimilation could go both ways, too. South Asian representations of Buddhas and bodhisattvas, to give one example, testify to the widespread emulation of Alexander’s signature hairstyle.

The author’s characterization of the relationship between the king and his men as the campaign wore on — mutual adoration shot through with flashes of bitter recrimination — is especially convincing. Tensions quickly flared as Alexander attempted to meld his newly acquired Persian soldiers (soon to be joined in an ever-expanding army by Scythians, Bactrians, Sogdians and Indians) to his Macedonian military core. The Macedonians resented their king’s quick-fire embrace of Persian dress, customs and a wife, Roxane, along with his appointment of Persians to senior political and military commands.

Cultural fluidity aside, one sympathizes with Alexander’s mostly loyal, long-suffering and battle-weary Macedonian warriors. Alexander was a difficult, often reckless leader who at times needed saving from himself. On a hunt in 328 B.C., their glory-seeking king insisted on killing a lion single-handed. After he had shoved aside his bodyguard and killed the beast with a single throw of his spear, the Macedonians decreed that he was no longer allowed to hunt on foot and must always be accompanied by officers. Fat chance. “They were trying to bottle lightning,” Kousser writes.

At the heart of this book lies the defining question asked both by Alexander’s soldiers and by generations of historians ever since: Why did he keep campaigning so relentlessly, ever farther east? Why, for instance, did he seek to conquer India in 327 B.C.?

In seeking to answer this, Kousser faces the same difficulties encountered by Alexander’s earliest biographers, none of whose works survive in their entirety. In the fullest account, left by the Greek historian Arrian half a millennium after Alexander’s death, the Indian campaign was fueled by the king’s pothos (Greek for “a strong desire”) to have what he did not possess. He may have been equally driven by the fabulous riches India offered, as well as by simple curiosity. Heading south through the Indus Valley from pacified Afghanistan might also have appeared a sensible way to reach the elusive, encircling “Ocean,” which Aristotle, Alexander’s childhood tutor, considered to be the end of the world — the natural limit for conquests, mortal or divine.

In the final analysis, conquerors need to conquer and Alexander’s appetite, as Kousser makes clear, was insatiable. In Arrian’s words, “it seemed to him that there was no end to the war while an enemy remained” — a forerunner, perhaps, of the 21st-century, U.S.-led war on terror, once called the “Forever War.”

The costs of this obsession became clearer after his death. Had Alexander spent more time administering his empire, and less on its never-ending expansion, it might have been set on firmer foundations and not disintegrated almost immediately. Kousser does not press the comparison, but both the Mongol conqueror Genghis Khan and his Turkic successor Timur, better known in the West as Tamerlane, emulated Alexander’s epic feats of arms, but added longer-lasting imperial legacies to their astonishing achievements.