Alexander the Great: What to Read

Alexander is famous. That does not mean we know him particularly well.

When Alexander became king of Macedon in 336 BCE, he was only twenty years old. Less than thirteen years later he was dead, having overthrown the Achaemenid Persian monarchy, campaigned through Egypt, Mesopotamia, Iran and Central Asia, crossed the Indus and carried his rule into the north-western Indian subcontinent.

That is the Alexander most of us meet first. The harder part is working out who the man behind that story actually was.

Alexander left us no autobiography, and none of the full accounts written by people who actually travelled with him has survived. The major histories we still have were written later, sometimes centuries later, by authors drawing on earlier works that are now largely lost. So there is no single ancient book we can open and say: here is Alexander exactly as he was.

That's part of what makes him so interesting.

For a first book, I would start with Hugh Bowden’s Alexander the Great: A Very Short Introduction. It's short enough to give you the shape of the story without burying you in detail, but it also does something important: Alexander does not simply appear as a brilliant young general who suddenly decides to conquer the world.

Bowden puts him back into the worlds that made him — Macedonian kingship, Greek politics, the Persian Empire, religion, court life and the ancient sources through which we know him. That is a much better foundation for everything that follows.

Before Alexander, there was Philip

Alexander inherited a very powerful kingdom.

His father, Philip II, had spent years strengthening Macedon, expanding its territory, reshaping its army and forcing himself into the centre of Greek politics. In 338 BCE he defeated Athens and Thebes at Chaeronea and became the dominant power in Greece.

Philip was already preparing the war against Persia when he was assassinated in 336 BCE.

So Alexander did not inherit a weak kingdom and somehow build a world-conquering army from scratch. He inherited an experienced army, senior commanders who had already served his father, a strong monarchy and a political position Philip had spent years creating. That does not make Alexander's achievements less impressive. It makes them easier to understand.

This is also where Demosthenes’ Selected Speeches becomes useful. Demosthenes was one of Philip's fiercest Athenian opponents, and his speeches let us hear what Macedonian expansion sounded like to somebody watching it happen from Athens.

He was trying to persuade people, so we shouldn't treat him as an impartial observer. But that is exactly what makes him worth reading. Before Alexander became the great conqueror of later history, Macedonian power was already changing the Greek world — and Greeks were arguing bitterly about what that change meant.

Then follow Alexander east

Once you have that background, Robin Lane Fox’s Alexander the Great is where I would go for the full journey.

This is where you can really follow the campaign: the crossing into Asia in 334 BCE, the Granicus, Issus, Tyre, Egypt, Gaugamela and the collapse of Darius III's position.

Lane Fox gives the story enough room to breathe. You start to appreciate the distances involved, the logistics, Alexander's relationship with his army and just how quickly the political map was changing.

It is also the point where the story can become almost too impressive. Victory follows victory and Alexander keeps moving east. If you're not careful, Persia can start to feel like an empire simply waiting for him to arrive.

It wasn't. The Achaemenid Empire was already one of the great imperial systems of the ancient world. It had ruled enormous and culturally diverse territories for generations. Alexander did not march into an empty space. He defeated an existing monarchy — and then inherited many of the problems that came with ruling it.

I would put Paul Cartledge’s Alexander the Great: The Truth Behind the Myth alongside Lane Fox rather than treating one as a replacement for the other.

You don't need two historians to give you exactly the same Alexander. In fact, it's better when they don't.

Winning Persia was one thing. Ruling it was another.

The more territory Alexander conquered, the harder the question of how to rule it became.

Persian nobles began serving under him, Iranian troops were brought into his forces, and Alexander increasingly adopted parts of the Persian court tradition he had inherited. Some of the Macedonians around him were deeply uncomfortable with that.

They had followed a Macedonian king into Asia. Increasingly, they found themselves serving a ruler whose court, ambitions and claims to authority looked very different from what they had known at home.

Episodes such as the killing of Cleitus the Black, the downfall of Philotas and Parmenion, and Alexander's attempt to introduce proskynesis — a Persian court gesture of deference that Greeks and Macedonians could understand very differently — become more than dramatic stories about his personality.

They point to a bigger question:

What kind of king was Alexander becoming?

It's tempting to choose a simple answer. Alexander was either a visionary trying to bring different peoples together, or a conqueror becoming corrupted by power.

Neither really explains enough on its own.

Alexander was trying to rule an enormous empire while still remaining king of the Macedonians who had helped him conquer it. Those two things did not always sit comfortably together.

Central Asia is where the simple conquest story starts to fall apart

Bactria and Sogdiana are easy to hurry through because they come after the famous victories over Darius and before the march into India.

They shouldn't be. The war became much harder there. Alexander faced difficult terrain, resistance that could not simply be ended by one decisive battle, and local political networks that had to be fought, negotiated with and eventually brought into his rule.

This is where Frank L. Holt’s Alexander the Great and Bactria becomes especially useful.

Holt takes us into a world of invasion, revolt, military settlement and accommodation. Central Asia stops looking like somewhere Alexander merely passed through and starts looking like one of the places where we can really see how difficult it was to turn conquest into government.

Alexander's marriage to Roxana belongs in this part of the story as well, as do the settlements and garrisons that helped strengthen a Greek and Macedonian presence in Central Asia that would outlast Alexander himself.

If you want to understand the difference between winning an empire and actually trying to hold it together, slow down here.

India reminds us that Alexander had limits

Alexander kept moving east. He crossed the Indus and defeated King Porus at the Hydaspes in 326 BCE. Then his soldiers refused to go any farther.

At the Hyphasis, the men who had followed him across Asia finally refused to keep marching east.

It is easy to tell Alexander's career as if nothing could stop him.

The Hyphasis puts a limit on that story.

He had defeated kings, armies and fortified cities and pushed his forces across extraordinary distances. But he could not simply keep commanding forever without the cooperation of the army that had made those victories possible.

Eventually he turned back, and the journey west was hardly easy either. The march through Gedrosia was punishing and costly.

If you only remember Alexander as the man who kept winning, you miss something important. The farther east he went, the harder his empire became to manage.

Alexander died before anyone knew what his empire was going to become

Alexander reached Babylon in 323 BCE and died there at only thirty-two.

There was no adult heir ready to take over, and the empire did not simply pass neatly to a new ruler. Alexander's half-brother Philip III Arrhidaeus and his posthumous son Alexander IV became kings, but real power increasingly sat with the commanders and governors around them.

What followed was decades of war.

The Wars of Alexander’s Successors, 323–281 BC: Volume 1 — Commanders and Campaigns is a useful way into that story. Then I would widen the picture with The Oxford History of Greece & the Hellenistic World.

After Alexander, the political map of the eastern Mediterranean and Near East looked very different. But the kingdoms that followed were not simply pieces of “Alexander's empire” carrying on without him. His successors fought one another, made their own alliances and built new monarchies of their own.

Alexander's conquests helped create the conditions for the Hellenistic world.

He never lived long enough to see what that world would actually become.

Then go back to the people who wrote about him

Once you know the basic story, the ancient writers become much more interesting.

I would start with Arrian’s Anabasis of Alexander. It belongs on any serious Alexander reading list.

Arrian was writing centuries after Alexander, but he had access to earlier accounts that no longer survive, especially Ptolemy and Aristobulus, both of whom had actually taken part in Alexander's expedition.

That is one reason historians take him so seriously. But taking Arrian seriously does not mean accepting everything he says without question.

Ask which earlier accounts he trusted, which stories he rejected and what kind of Alexander he admired.

Then go to Plutarch’s Life of Alexander, included in Hellenistic Lives.

Plutarch tells us openly that he is interested in character. A small action or anecdote can matter to him because he thinks it reveals something about the person. That is why so many unforgettable Alexander stories come through Plutarch, and it is also why we should not expect him to behave like a modern military historian.

Read him for the Alexander he is trying to understand: ambitious, generous, angry, competitive, self-controlled in one moment and dangerously impulsive in another.

Then add Diodorus Siculus, Book 17 of the Library of History. It is one of our major surviving accounts of Alexander, although part of the book has been lost. Diodorus sometimes preserves versions of events that sit differently from Arrian's, which is exactly why he is worth reading beside him.

After that, read Quintus Curtius Rufus’ History of Alexander. The work survives with gaps, but much of Alexander's campaign is still there. Curtius is a more dramatic storyteller, fascinated by character, fortune and what enormous power might do to a man.

That does not make him useless. It gives us another Alexander.

You may eventually want to add Justin’s epitome of Pompeius Trogus as well. It is much more compressed, but it preserves another strand of the tradition.

None of these writers gives us Alexander exactly as he was.

That Alexander is out of reach.

What we have instead are several ancient attempts to remember him, explain him, praise him and sometimes criticise him.

The interesting part begins when you stop asking “Which one is the true Alexander?” and start asking “Why are they showing me different Alexanders?”

Alexander kept changing after he was dead

There's one more Alexander worth following: the Alexander people created afterwards.

Later kings claimed connections with him. Artists developed recognisable ways of showing him. Stories about him travelled far beyond the lands he had actually ruled, and the historical king gradually became a legendary figure as well.

John Boardman’s Alexander the Great: From His Death to the Present Day follows that long afterlife.

I like it especially after the ancient writers, because by then you have already seen Alexander being reconstructed once. Boardman lets you watch that process continue for centuries.

For a much deeper specialist study, Andrew Stewart’s Faces of Power: Alexander’s Image and Hellenistic Politics looks at Alexander through portraiture and political imagery.

A portrait is not simply a photograph made in stone.

How Alexander was shown could say something about kingship, legitimacy and power. Later rulers could borrow that image because Alexander's appearance itself had become politically useful.

By that point, you are no longer just asking what Alexander looked like. You are asking what it meant to look like Alexander.

Alexander's real achievements are remarkable enough without turning him into a myth.

He inherited a formidable Macedonian kingdom, defeated one of the great empires of the ancient world and carried his army across distances that still make the story difficult to believe.

But every conquest gave him another problem to solve. He had to rule Persians as well as Macedonians, hold territories thousands of kilometres from home, deal with resistance, keep his commanders and soldiers with him and work out what kind of monarchy could govern everything he had taken.

Then he died before anyone knew where any of it was heading.

What we know about Alexander comes through the people who tried to make sense of him afterwards.

The best way to read Alexander is not to choose between the man and the legend. It is to follow how the two became tangled together — and gradually learn where one ends and the other begins.