There are any number of serious and worthy reasons to write a book on Alexander the Great, and author and historian Rachel Kousser gives several—including that Alexander’s world was more “globally connected” and “integrated” than our own and how “Alexander’s story does not just give us a different perspective on the past; it also helps us to imagine the future”—but one suspects that in the end it’s that Alexander’s is a ferociously good story. Kousser can be forgiven for that: Alexander has been considered the best of stories going on for 24 centuries. And she tells it well.
Kousser starts Alexander at the End of the World not at the beginning but with the sack of Persepolis and the subsequent chase across Persia for the fugitive Persian King Darius, a hunt that was successful but frustrating, for when Alexander caught up with Darius, his nemesis was already dead, murdered by his own side.
Alexander had won, unexpectedly and definitively. What would he do next? His soldiers, who cheered and cried at the news of Darius’s death, hoped it meant their king would lead them home. Ancient biographers, and many modern scholars, have concluded that he should have. But Alexander made a different choice: instead of a triumphant return to Macedonia, he kept going east. He wanted to reach the literal ends of the earth, to see the Ocean that he believed encircled them. He wanted to conquer the known world.
No Gordian knot, in other words, no being pronounced the son of a god at the Siwa oasis in the Egyptian desert, no siege of Tyre, no Battle of Gaugamela, or at least only in passing. But Kousser makes a good case that these latter years—as Alexander fights his way through Persia, Bactria and Sogdiana, making allies, appointing governors, cutting deals, putting down rebellions, crossing the Indus only to have his army refuse to go any further, the long march back across the desert, the unexpected return to Babylon, the forced marital integration of Greeks and Persians, Alexander’s premature death—are the more interesting.
As he struggled eastward, Alexander was transformed from the invincible young conqueror of popular legend. He became instead a pragmatic, opportunistic, mature man—frequently unorthodox, and at times unheroic… The last years of Alexander were not just the sordid aftermath of a once impressive career; they were in fact what made him “Great.”
It’s a ripping good yarn.
Kousser has subtitled her book “The Forgotten Final Years of Alexander the Great” and writes that “Historians pass over these years quickly, or highlight only a few lurid incidents”, that these final years of Alexander are “neglected”. That seems overstated: I remember them from my 1963 Ladybird book. The outlines, at least, of the story are surely pretty well-known as are the basic moral, political and military dilemmas that Alexander faced.
But Alexander’s is a story that bears retelling and Kousser is a masterful storyteller, managing the complexity of the large cast of characters—Greek, Macedonian, Persian, Indian—and parallel political and military developments while maintaining a clear narrative throughline. She has a way with with words; the book often reads more like a historical novel than a history:
The fire’s haze still lingered as Alexander left Persepolis. Beyond the city it dissipated, and the countryside was blanketed with the bright green leaves and pale blossoms of spring. There were apple, mulberry, pear, quince, olive, date, and pomegranate trees; the plains around the city were like an immense orchard. Spring rain and melting snow fed them with a crisscrossing network of irrigation canals, dams, and ditches, organized by the Persian kings to keep the heartland of their empire fertile and well watered. On the plains, cattle and horses nib bled tender new grass, while along the rivers, a rich variety of aquatic birds taught their hatchlings to swim and fly. Through it all marched Alexander, and with him some seventeen thousand armed men.
It’s a ripping good yarn.
It is Alexander’s contradictions and the epic they engendered that Kousser captures so well.
Those of a strictly historical bent might have wished more about how we exactly know any given detail. Kousser note that “recent discoveries”—“cuneiform tablets”, “inscriptions in Aramaic”, “a tremendous amount of evidence available from archaeology—have allowed a fuller picture, yet she doesn’t elaborate as to how this picture differs from previous ones. Kousser is telling history as a story—fair enough: it’s a good story, after all—but some of the historical process would have helped the reader evaluate how much is known and much is inference. She, for example, states as fact that Alexander “encountered” Chandragupta, the founder of the Mauryan dynasty.
Kousser ends by trying to place Alexander in a context relevant to present-day debates, that Alexander’s “broad-minded and wide-ranging adoption of Persian ways offers a contrast to the behavior of later European imperialists.” This seems an apples and oranges comparison; more relevant might be to place him in the context of, on the one hand, the Mongols (who lacking an imperial infrastructure of their own, tended to adopt the administration and culture of the conquered settled peoples) and the Romans, who had a well-developed political system into which new territories could be integrated.
Alexander continues to fascinate because his contradictions as a man and leader played out on an epic scale. It is these contradictions and the epic they engendered that Kousser captures so well.