Podcast with Rachel Kousser, author of “Alexander at the End of the World: The Forgotten Final Years of Alexander the Great”

In 330 BC, Alexander the Great conquers the city of Persepolis, the ceremonial capital of the Persian Empire. His troops later burn it to the ground, capping centuries of tensions between the Hellenistic Greeks and Macedonians and the Persians.

 

 

Alexander at the End of the World: The Forgotten Final Years of Alexander the Great, Rachel Kousser (Mariner Books, July 2024)
Alexander at the End of the World: The Forgotten Final Years of Alexander the Great, Rachel Kousser (Mariner Books, July 2024)

That event kicks off Rachel Kousser’s book Alexander at the End of the World: The Forgotten Final Years of Alexander the Great, which tells the story of how Alexander—the unbeaten military genius and the most powerful man in that part of the world—decided to keep going, chasing rebellious ex-Persians and launching an unprecedented invasion of India.

But what drove Alexander to keep marching? What was the kind of empire Alexander wanted to build? And why did he eventually turn back at the Indus River, his soldiers begging for him to return home?

Rachel Kousser is the chair of the Classics department at the Graduate Center, City University of New York and a professor of ancient art and archaeology at Brooklyn College. She is also the author of The Afterlives of Greek Sculpture: Interaction, Transformation, Destruction (Cambridge University Press,2017) and Hellenistic and Roman Ideal Sculpture: The Allure of the Classical (Cambridge University Press, 2008).


Nicholas Gordon has an MPhil from Oxford in International Relations and a BA from Harvard. He is a writer, editor and occasional radio host based in Hong Kong.