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    The Life of Alexander the Great
    The Life of Alexander the Great
    The Life of Alexander the Great
    Ebook122 pages2 hours

    The Life of Alexander the Great

    By Plutarch, John Dryden, Arthur Hugh Clough and Victor Davis Hanson

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    In 336 b.c. Philip of Macedonia was assassinated and his twenty-year-old son, Alexander, inherited his kingdom. Immediately quelling rebellion, Alexander extended his father’s empire through-out the Middle East and into parts of Asia, fulfilling the soothsayer Aristander’s prediction that the new king “should perform acts so important and glorious as would make the poets and musicians of future ages labour and sweat to describe and celebrate him.”

    The Life of Alexander the Great is one of the first surviving attempts to memorialize the achievements of this legendary king, remembered today as the greatest military genius of all time. This exclusive Modern Library edition, excerpted from Plutarch’s Lives, is a riveting tale of honor, power, scandal, and bravery written by the most eminent biographer of the ancient world.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRandom House Publishing Group
    Release dateApr 13, 2004
    ISBN9781588363473
    The Life of Alexander the Great
    Author

    Plutarch

    Plutarch was a Greek biographer and essayist, known primarily for his Lives and Moralia. He is classified as a Middle Platonist. Plutarch’s surviving works were written in Greek, but intended for both Greek and Roman readers.

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      Book preview

      The Life of Alexander the Great - Plutarch

      PLUTARCH

      THE LIFE

      OF

      ALEXANDER THE GREAT

      Translated by John Dryden

      Edited by Arthur Hugh Clough

      Introduction by Victor Davis Hanson

      THE MODERN LIBRARY

      NEW YORK

      CONTENTS

      TITLE PAGE

      INTRODUCTION by Victor Davis Hanson

      MAP

      THE LIFE OF ALEXANDER THE GREAT

      BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

      BACKADS

      COPYRIGHT

      INTRODUCTION

      Victor Davis Hanson

      We owe to Plutarch the famous stories about Alexander that have done so much to enshrine the myth of the near-divine warrior-humanist on his great quest to bring civilization eastward to the barbarians. The teenaged prince tames the wild Thessalian horse Bucephalus (Ox-head), in between his shady walks and tutorials with Aristotle. On reaching Cilicia in southern Asia Minor, the young Alexander impatiently hacks apart the legendary Gordian knot—all the while sleeping with Homer’s Iliad tucked under the pillow.

      Plutarch was clearly impressed with the philosopher-general who bantered with wise men (If he were not Alexander, he would choose to be Diogenes, Plutarch declares) and saved the descendants of the poet Pindar from the Armageddon he unloosened upon the hallowed Greek city of Thebes. Such anecdotes all reflected Alexander’s romantic verve and professed humanity, in a way that was untrue of later Hellenistic warriors such as Pyrrhus and Demetrius, and perhaps explains why The Life of Alexander the Great is one of Plutarch’s most fascinating, lengthy—and frustrating—biographies.

      Plutarch himself was born into a prosperous family sometime around A.D. 45 in Chaeronea, a small hamlet in central Greece about sixty miles north of Athens. Nearby was the expansive plain of Boeotia, the dancing floor of war where most of the Hellenic world’s greatest battles had been fought and Greek freedom had at times been both won and lost. Although he made frequent trips to both Athens and Rome, Plutarch spent most of his approximately seventy-five years in the backwater where he was raised. Without much of a library, never quite fluent in Latin, and isolated from the Mediterranean intelligentsia of the empire, he exchanged ideas instead in dinner conversations with small-town dignitaries and family members.

      Yet despite his supposed parochialism, Plutarch was a scholar of real erudition and energy, and thus somehow managed to quote more than 150 historians in his Lives—a third of whom wrote in Latin—nearly of all them now lost. Indeed, Plutarch’s Alexander is a careful compilation of anecdotes from at least five critical Greek sources: the now-forgotten historians Callisthenes, Aristobulus, Chares, Onesicritus, and Cleitarchus, all of whose works survive in just a few fragments but seem to have offered widely diverse views of both the achievement and morality of Alexander.

      If, despite his hard work, Plutarch’s biographies neither appeal to sophisticates, then or now, nor offer systematic histories of the times, they nonetheless possess a natural simplicity and timeless charm that have captured millions of readers from Machiavelli and Shakespeare to nineteenth-century Victorian generals and contemporary American college students. And if there is nothing in the Alexander like the discussion of realpolitik in Thucydides’ Melian Dialogue or Polybius’s excursus on the Roman constitution, generations have still found endlessly riveting this ancient Kipling’s stories of outnumbered Macedonian armies victorious on the edge of the Punjab, the swashbuckling and often severely wounded king slashing through hordes of enemies, and Greeks fighting elephants on the Hydaspes River.

      Plutarch, of course, did not invent biography, but he surely enriched the genre that dated back at least five centuries, to Xenophon’s account of the Spartan king Agesilaus, Theophrastus’s moral sketches in his Characters, and the De Viris Illustribus (About Famous Men) of Cornelius Nepos, the Roman biographer who in the first century B.C. wrote in Latin lives of twenty-three famous foreign generals. Yet in comparison to the systematic Plutarch, both earlier and later biographers appear dry and do not to the same effect use their subjects for wider lessons about morality. Thus, general readers today who know nothing of Xenophon or Nepos are nevertheless likely either to have read Plutarch or to know some of his better-known stories through subsequent literature, whether Shakespeare’s burnished love barge of Antony and Cleopatra or a few lines in the most recent spate of Hollywood cinematic renditions of Alexander the Great.

      Plutarch is best known for his Parallel Lives. We know these biographies originally in English through Sir Thomas North’s landmark 1579 translation from the French version of Jacques Amyot, who published them in 1559 as Les Vies des hommes illustres Grecs et Romains. While Plutarch left a vast body of work (his Moralia consists of some seventy-eight extant diverse essays), he spent the last twenty years of his life on the Lives, publishing the collection sometime between A.D. 110 and 115. All but two of these fascinating portraits survive (some forty-eight individual lives in all), and the work as a whole centers on twenty-three paired biographies that compare famous Greek and Roman statesmen and generals over some seven centuries of Mediterranean history. Plutarch’s ostensible intent was to remind Greeks, in their third century of relatively humane Roman rule, that even if their once-populated countryside was now deserted and their cities were often in ruins, their own more spirited ancestors of centuries past had matched and indeed often surpassed the achievements of the Roman ruling class.

      Thus, Alexander’s life was matched with that of Julius Caesar, the greatest Roman of them all, and these paired biographies are the longest and most comprehensive of Plutarch’s entire corpus—not surprising given the near-mystical hold that each man exercised on generations of Greeks and Romans. Indeed, unlike many of Plutarch’s other subjects—Pelopidas or Nicias, for example—Alexander the Great simply offered any would-be biographer too many stories and too many achievements to summarize easily, even if the final sketch is one of Plutarch’s longest essays, at well over twenty-five thousand words. Although we lack the short concluding comparison (synkrisis) of the two revolutionaries, to Plutarch both men were ambitious, far-seeing leaders whose generosity and moderation warred with their tempers and similar desire to end consensual government. And perhaps the pairing also served as a reminder to Plutarch’s Greek readers that Alexander’s long-ago Macedonian conquest of Persia and the ensuing creation of the Hellenistic world overshadowed even Caesar’s annexation of Gaul and the transformation from republic to principate.

      Plutarch, of course, wrote almost four hundred years after Alexander’s death, as distant in time from his subject as we are from the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock. Indeed, Plutarch’s contemporary world of Roman Greece during the second century A.D. under the reigns of Trajan and Hadrian was without much civil strife or costly foreign wars—the Golden Age of the Antonines, between 96 and 180, which Gibbon praised as the period in history of the world during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous. Yet if Plutarch appears at times nostalgic in his era of serenity and occasional boredom, he voiced no desire to return to the more dangerous past he wrote about. He seems instead deeply appreciative of the stability and order of the relatively enlightened Roman principate of his own times, which has been enriched by Greek learning—without the license of the old tumultuous and autonomous Greek city-states.

      Plutarch showcased his Alexander—subsequently the most popular of his biographies—for personal reasons as well as those of innate interest. His own schoolhouse on the slopes of Chaeronea overlooked the great killing field of 338 B.C. There, more than four hundred years earlier, Philip II and the eighteen-year-old Alexander had crushed Thebes and Athens, and so ended four centuries of Greek liberty. Indeed, as Plutarch wrote his Parallel Lives he gazed down at Alexander’s oak, the hallowed tree under which the young prince supposedly had once camped, the group burial mound of the Macedonian dead from the battle, and the resting place of the three-hundred-strong Theban sacred band, which had been obliterated by Alexander’s cavalry charge.

      Plutarch’s interests were moral as well as antiquarian, befitting an adherent of Plato who quoted the philosopher some 650 times in his various works, believing that we all have imperishable souls whose fate in the next world is predicated on the lives we craft in the present. Thus, to emphasize the importance of moral character, he often accentuated small and seemingly irrelevant incidents from his subjects’ youth that might offer valuable portents of later success or failure—the practice in all the Lives of more or less telling the great man’s story in chronological anecdotal fashion from youth to death. An early theme of his Alexander is the struggle of the tutor Aristotle to channel the young prince’s youthful exuberance into a regimen of philosophy, medicine, literature, and philosophy that would ensure his emerging talents were guided by reason rather than emotion.

      It must be borne in mind that my design is not to write histories, but lives, Plutarch warns us at the outset of his Alexander. And indeed ancient biography in Plutarch’s hands—itself confined to men who were preeminent in politics or war—seems not just a compilation of facts or even an effort to place the subject in the wide canvas of history, but rather an attempt to ask what sort of man Alexander was in moral terms—and thus what we ourselves can learn from his life. Consequently, one gathers little of battle tactics or any great detail about his four great victories at Granicus, Issus, Gaugamela, and Hydaspes, the horrific sieges of Thebes, Tyre, and Gaza, the messy accounts of his dirty wars in Afghanistan and Bactria, or his disastrous and unnecessary march across the Gedrosian desert. Much less is the Alexander an analytical account of the transformation from Hellenic polis to the Hellenistic kingdom.

      While Plutarch notes the near-pathological nature of Alexander’s anger—to the biographer the most pernicious of all the unchecked emotions—it is more in the context of a world leader with the burdens of empire on his shoulders or a personal flaw that alone has the power to mar Alexander’s otherwise admirable commitment to reason. Crimes are to be understood as the exception rather than condemned as routine, and surely pale in comparison to the achievement of spreading Hellenism beyond the Mediterranean.

      In two auxiliary essays, On the Fortune and Virtue of Alexander the Great, Plutarch argued that Alexander was the greatest of all Greek philosophers, inasmuch as he was no idle theorist, but through his courage, talent, and education saw

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