Alexander the Great

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More than two millennia have elapsed, but Alexander the Great is still a household name. His life was an adventure story and took him to every corner of the known world. Good looks burnished his image. His memory and his glamour persist.

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MODERN SCHOLARS HAVE TRIED their best to tell the truth about the young Macedonian, but their accounts reflect the concerns of their own age as much as they do of his. In the first half of the twentieth century, he was the model of an English gentleman and an idealistic believer in the unity of mankind. After the Second World War, he became for many a prototype of the totalitarian dictator, a classical Hitler or Stalin.

It is time for a new look. Naturally this biography reflects our own twenty-first-century hopes and fears, most particularly about the nature of power and the fascination—and impermanence—of military success. It could hardly do otherwise. But I aim to evoke the realities of life in the ancient world, the beliefs Alexander might have held. In many ways, he was a typical Macedonian king and was nothing like a modern statesman. He deserves to be measured against the values of his own time and not of ours.

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