The Search for Alexander

Více o knize

Alexander the Great inspired a lot of hero worship in his own time & it still goes on. In this companion to an art exhibition containing objects from the period of Alexander's reign as well as from an excavation site believed to have been his father Philip II's tomb, Oxford historian Fox projects the hero-worship backward, arguing that Alexander spent his short life competing against his own hero, Homer's Achilles. So the search here is for clues to Alexander's motivations & personality, along with the general facts of his life. Fox is totally enraptured with his subject, & he delights in the details of his battles, in his bravery & daring (necessary to keep a slew of nasty-tempered Macedonians in train), & especially in the moments when the Achilles competition comes into view--as when Alexander 1st visited Troy & made an offering to Achilles, casting his own close friend Hephaestion in the role of Patroclus. Fox uses what contemporary sources there are in his reconstruction, & also ventures the opinion that Alexander's mother, Olympias, may have created a tomb for Pausanias, the murderer of Philip II, next to Philip's own tomb (Fox is even more adamant than its discoverers that the tomb in question is Philip's). The sad fact is that Alexander's reign marked the end of Greece's great epoch, & his disdain for the creation of new governmental forms led to little directly new. Here, a fascination with Alexander turns the story of the death of Classical Greece's democratic cities into an adventure tale. A common reader's version, in effect, of Fox's monumental 1974 Alexander the Great--also romantic & dogmatic, also vivid & absorbing.--Kirkus