Book Review: Alexander

Title: Alexander

Author: Theodore Ayrault Dodge

Publisher: Da Capo (Perseus)

Date: 1890 (reprint)

ISBN: 0-306-8161-0

Length: 684 pages plus maps and index

Quote: “The basis of this history is the Anabasis of Alexander by Arrian of Nicomedia…There were numberless historians of Alexander.”

Whenever and wherever men have admired warlords, they admired Alexander “the Great” of Macedon, who lived between 356-323 B.C.E. He was the quintessential War Chief. In his time it was possible for one really determined warlord to get himself crowned king of the entire known world. Alexander, the son of the vassal king Philip, rebelled against their mutual overlord Darius the Mede, inherited most of the then-civilized world, and proceeded to accept the rulers of the rest of the then-known world as his subjects. He travelled as far as India and Afghanistan. China and America remained unknown to him.

Biographies and histories B.C.E., other than the Hebrew Bible, tended to be lists of battles. Alexander’s is no exception. His travels made an interesting story, even so. Little is known about any of the characters in that story, even Alexander, except where they went and whom they defeated in battle, but legends about Alexander have caught people’s imagination for hundreds of years. Dodge considers a few of the best known questions:

After his last battle, did Alexander really sit down and cry because there were (so far as he knew) no more nations to conquer? Dodge finds it more likely that Alexander sat down, or lay down, because he’d been wounded. Though he generally wanted unity with his Asian subjects, historians record that he was treated by a Greek doctor. He died anyway.

Why did he die so young? Was it just a natural fever, or poison?

When and of whom did he say, “Whatever he wants/needs/deserves, this is what it suits my image to give him”? Alexander was a very rich king. Generosity is not a modern idea. Dodge accepts the version of the story in which Alexander was awarding pensions to his retiring veterans. This would not necessarily have kept Alexander from using similar lines when making extravagant gifts to other people. In the ancient world, being extravagantly generous seems to have been the whole point of being rich.

After defeating Darius, while showing all due respect to Darius’s Queen Statira, did he really pick up and cuddle their infant son? Alexander knew what sons of vassal kings were likely to think and do, if anyone ever did. If he did cuddle Darius’s baby, he was the original baby-kissing politician. (But it worked. Alexander cultivated a reputation for being nice to rulers who acknowledged him as the top king. By and large, the traditional rule of torturing or killing his enemies and selling their wives and children as slaves was not for him, though he made a few exceptions when enemies really seemed to deserve it.)

Was he Jewish? Absolutely not. “Alexander” became accepted as a Jewish name because many Jews appreciated his defeating Darius. Though the Bible says he respected Daniel during Daniel’s last years, otherwise historians seem to think Darius was a more oppressive monarch than average. Forbidding people to pray to any god but Darius was the kind of thing Darius did. 

Was he homosexual? Alexander claimed paternity of his wife’s children, but he certainly spent more time with his army than he did with his family. He left home early, was offered an officer’s position in the army because he was the prince, and was leading troops to victory at eighteen. He spent most time of all with his best friend Hephaestion. He mourned immoderately when Hephaestion died. We don’t know how he would have mourned other close friends, even his Queen Roxana and Queen Mother Olympias, because they outlived him.

Not that Dodge, a Victorian, used a word like “homosexual” in this book. Dodge was a veteran and describes Alexander’s battles with attention to the strategies used. After shaking off the Medo-Persian yoke, Alexander’s preferred method was to send messengers to foreign kings inviting them to surrender and pay tribute without a battle. Several actually did. If they didn’t, Dodge sketches maps of routes taken, places attacked, and (where possible) formations in which the troops entered hand-to-hand combat. He neither denies nor wallows in the bloodshed. The Greeks left a good deal of written information about how many troops with which kind of weapons fought in each battle. Dodge’s intended audience, who had deadlier weapons than the ancient Greeks but were still prepared to fight with swords, wanted this information; though Dodge wanted his book to hold the interest of the casual reader, he seems to have intended it to be studied in military training programs.