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8 books match the query 'Alexander'

cover of Alexander The Great: A Novel

Alexander The Great

A Novel

Nikos Kazantzakis

Ohio University Press, 1982

Nikos Kazantzakis is no stranger to the heroes of Greek antiquity. In this historical novel based on the life of Alexander the Great, Kazantzakis has drawn on both the rich tradition of Greek legend and the documented manuscripts from the archives of history to recreate an Alexander in all his many-faceted images—Alexander the god; Alexander the descendant of Heracles performing the twelve labors; Alexander the mystic, the daring visionary destined to carry out a divine mission; Alexander the flesh-and-blood mortal who, on occasion, is not above the common soldier’s brawling and drinking.

The novel, which resists the temptation to portray Alexander in the mantle of purely romantic legend, covers his life from age fifteen to his death at age thirty-two. It opens with Alexander’s first exploit, the taming of the horse, Bucephalas, and is seen in great part through the eyes of his young neighbor who eventually becomes an officer in his army and follows him on his campaign to conquer the world.

The book, which was written primarily as an educational adjunct for young readers, is intended for the adult mind as well, and like the legends of old, is entertaining as well as instructive for readers of all ages. It was originally published in Greece in serial form in 1940, and was republished in a complete volume in 1979.

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cover of Alexander the Great: A Novel

Alexander the Great

A Novel

Nikos Kazantzakis

Ohio University Press, 2025

Newly translated, this classic novel is sure to delight readers of all ages as it explores the legendary conqueror’s life, ambitions, and humanity.

Nikos Kazantzakis’s Alexander the Great is a biographical novel about one of antiquity’s greatest political and military leaders. In Kazantzakis’s story, Alexander of Macedonia does not conquer for conquest’s sake; instead, he seeks to spread the light of Hellenism to the known world, unite humanity through Greek ideals and culture, and bring together East and West.

The story begins in Pella, the lavish capital of Macedonia, in the fourth century BCE. A teenager named Stefanos rushes to the royal stadium for a remarkable event that has drawn every male citizen of this capital city: the taming of a wild and uniquely powerful horse named Bucephalus. Relying on raw strength and force, even seasoned generals fail to subdue Bucephalus; but through skill, kindness, and insight, the fifteen-year-old Alexander is able to befriend the beast. Alexander’s symbolic taming of chaos foretells his rise to power and demonstrates the qualities he will carry with him throughout his lifelong campaign of conquest.

Through the eyes of Stefanos, who becomes Alexander’s personal attendant and most trusted companion, Kazantzakis follows the Macedonian army through triumphant campaigns across Persia, Egypt, and India, greatly expanding the boundaries of the ancient Hellenic world. Kazantzakis presents Alexander not only as an ingenious military strategist but also as a reflective human being. Alexander oscillates between the human and the divine but will ultimately be betrayed by the former. Kazantzakis narrates Alexander’s struggles and conquests all the way to Babylon, where he meets his untimely death at just thirty-three years of age.

This iconic novel also explores Alexander’s profound relationship with his mentor, Aristotle, who instills in him a lifelong thirst for knowledge. Alexander the Great offers a compelling blend of history, myth, and philosophy and will appeal to readers fascinated by ancient Greece, epic heroes, and humanity’s timeless quest for the meaning of life.

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cover of Alexander the Great: The Unique History of Quintus Curtius

Alexander the Great

The Unique History of Quintus Curtius

Elizabeth Baynham

University of Michigan Press, 2004

He was a pupil of Aristotle and conqueror of much of the known world. This handsome commander, leading his army from the lofty perch of the wild steed Bucephalas, looked out with his one dark and one blue eye upon the world he ruled by divine ambition.

The reign and personality of Alexander the Great---one of the most romantic and powerful kings in history---have remained a source of fascination from antiquity to the present. But because the ancient information surrounding the conqueror is rich, contradictory, and complex, every historian of this near-mythical ruler-whether ancient or modern-invariably creates his or her own Alexander.

The unique work of one such ancient historian, Quintus Curtius, is the subject of Elizabeth Baynham's book. She mines Curtius' study of power for his contemporary perspective, historical methodology, and his portrait of the famous king and presents us with a brilliant, multifaceted study of this unique account regarding one of the most fascinating rulers in history.
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cover of Contested Pasts: A Determinist History of Alexander the Great in the Roman Empire

Contested Pasts

A Determinist History of Alexander the Great in the Roman Empire

Jennifer Finn

University of Michigan Press, 2022

Taking as a key turning point the self-fashioning of the first Roman emperor Augustus, author Jennifer Finn revisits the idea of “universal history” in Polybius, Justin, and Diodorus, combined with the Stoic philosophy of determinism present in authors like Plutarch and Arrian. Finn endeavors to determine the ways in which Roman authors manipulated narratives about Alexander’s campaigns—and even other significant events in Mediterranean history—to artificially construct a past to which the Romans could attach themselves as a natural teleological culmination. In doing so, Contested Pasts uses five case studies to reexamine aspects of Alexander’s campaigns that have received much attention in modern scholarship, providing new interpretations of issues such as: his connections to the Trojan and Persian wars; the Great Weddings at Susa; the battle(s) of Thermopylae in 480 BCE and 191 BCE and Alexander's conflict at the Persian Gates; the context of his “Last Plans”;” the role of his memory in imagining the Roman Civil Wars; and his fictitious visit to the city of Jerusalem. While Finn demonstrates throughout the book that the influence for many of these narratives likely originated in the reign of Alexander or his Successors, nevertheless these retroactive authorial manipulations force us to confront the fact that we may have an even more opaque understanding of Alexander than has previously been acknowledged. Through the application of a mnemohistorical approach, the book seeks to provide a new understanding of the ways in which the Romans—and people in the purview of the Romans—conceptualized their own world with reference to Alexander the Great.
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cover of Death in Babylon: Alexander the Great and Iberian Empire in the Muslim Orient

Death in Babylon

Alexander the Great and Iberian Empire in the Muslim Orient

Vincent Barletta

University of Chicago Press, 2010

Though Alexander the Great lived more than seventeen centuries before the onset of Iberian expansion into Muslim Africa and Asia, he loomed large in the literature of late medieval and early modern Portugal and Spain. Exploring little-studied chronicles, chivalric romances, novels, travelogues, and crypto-Muslim texts, Vincent Barletta shows that the story of Alexander not only sowed the seeds of Iberian empire but foreshadowed the decline of Portuguese and Spanish influence in the centuries to come.

Death in Babylon depicts Alexander as a complex symbol of Western domination, immortality, dissolution, heroism, villainy, and death. But Barletta also shows that texts ostensibly celebrating the conqueror were haunted by failure. Examining literary and historical works in Aljamiado, Castilian, Catalan, Greek, Latin, and Portuguese, Death in Babylon develops a view of empire and modernity informed by the ethical metaphysics of French phenomenologist Emmanuel Levinas. A novel contribution to the literature of empire building, Death in Babylon provides a frame for the deep mortal anxiety that has infused and given shape to the spread of imperial Europe from its very beginning.

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cover of The Complex Friendships of Alexander the Great: Loyalty, Love, Advantage, and Intrigue

The Complex Friendships of Alexander the Great

Loyalty, Love, Advantage, and Intrigue

Joseph Roisman

University of Texas Press, 2026

A first-of-its-kind study of Alexander the Great that examines the diverse manifestations and pivotal role of friendship in his campaigns, decisions, and enduring legacy.

Modern scholarship has illuminated nearly every aspect of Alexander the Great’s life and campaigns––but Joseph Roisman turns to a dimension of Alexander’s world that has yet to receive sustained analysis: the structure and function of friendship in the king’s regime. In this first-of-its-kind study, The Complex Friendships of Alexander the Great explores the central role friendship played in Alexander’s social, political, and cultural world. Moving beyond utilitarian perspectives, Roisman shows that friendship with the king involved affective, noninstrumental bonds that shaped his decisions, successes, and failures.

Using Aristotle’s philosophy of friendship as a starting point, Roisman examines the making, breaking, and remaking of bonds with Macedonian companions, including his closest allies, as well as with foreigners encountered during his campaigns. The book concludes with the first comprehensive list of Alexander’s friends drawn from ancient sources. Combining meticulous scholarship with new interpretive insight, this study reevaluates how we understand Alexander the Great’s leadership, social networks, and legacy.

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cover of The Lost Book of Alexander the Great

The Lost Book of Alexander the Great

Andrew Young

Westholme Publishing, 2022

A Reconstruction of Ptolemy I’s History of Alexander’s Conquests, a Primary Source Cited in Later Books That Disappeared More Than One Thousand Years Ago
Alexander the Great is well known as one of the first great empire builders of the ancient world. Among those fellow Macedonian officers who accompanied Alexander in his epic conquests from Greece to India was Ptolemy Lagides. Ptolemy served alongside Alexander from the Persian defeat at the Battle of Issus in modern-day Turkey and the journey to find the oracle that proclaimed Alexander to be Zeus incarnate, to the Battle of the Hydaspes River in 326 BC that opened India to the West. Following Alexander’s death, Ptolemy gained control of Egypt where he founded the dynasty in his name, created the great library of Alexandria, and was patron of the mathematician Euclid. Sometime during his rule in Egypt, Ptolemy wrote a history of Alexander’s conquests. Although it is probable that Ptolemy enhanced his own importance, sources indicate that it was regarded as an accurate and even-handed account of the campaigns of Alexander. However, Ptolemy’s book was lost—perhaps with the destruction of the library he founded—and not even an original fragment has survived. His book, however, was acknowledged as a primary source of information for later Roman historians.
In The Lost Book of Alexander the Great, Andrew Young explores the world of ancient writings about the Macedonian leader in order to determine whether any of Ptolemy’s writings can be recovered. Inspired by Stephen Greenblatt’s distinguished biography of Shakespeare, Will in the World, and written for the general reader, the author uses literary forensics to suggest which parts of later books about Alexander the Great, most notably the account by Arrian of Nicomedia, might be the words of Ptolemy. In addition to separating later Roman sensibilities from the original Greek of Ptolemy, the author re-creates the famous library of Alexandria, and takes the reader along on Alexander’s conquests as closely as we can to how Ptolemy may have recounted them.
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cover of The Siege of Tyre: Alexander the Great and the Gateway to Empire

The Siege of Tyre

Alexander the Great and the Gateway to Empire

David A. Guenther

Westholme Publishing, 2024

The island city of Tyre along the coast of Lebanon was for centuries an impregnable fortress and key to unlocking Phoenician and Persian power in the Near East. Its fall was first prophesied in the Book of Ezekiel; but it would not be Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, who would take the city as the Bible foretold, but a Macedonian warrior king, Alexander. Alexander’s siege of 332 BC was one of the most remarkable events in the classical world. “It was the capture of Tyre that did the most to enhance Alexander's reputation for invincibility,” wrote historian Waldemar Heckel, while classicist Paul Cartledge observed, “If Alexander deserves permanent commemoration as a general, then it is above all in his capacity as a besieger, and of all his sieges Tyre was his masterpiece.” Yet books about Alexander and his conquests often simply retell the story as recorded by ancient authors—even though these accounts often disagree—and ignore competing theories among modern scholars about what may have happened given scientific and textual discoveries.
            The Siege of Tyre: Alexander the Great and the Gateway to Empire by David A. Guenther is the first book-length treatment of this critical and fascinating campaign, featuring catapults, triremes, religious invocations, close combat, and marvels of engineering, including a massive manmade causeway from the mainland to the island. The siege is thoroughly analyzed from the standpoint of what is plausible given the nature of the technology of the time and what we now know of the geology and physical fortifications of ancient Tyre. The book begins with the background leading up to the siege: Alexander’s army, his invasion of Asia Minor, the sieges of Miletus and Halicarnassus, and the battles of the Granicus and Issus. It also describes the culture, people, cities, and economy of ancient Phoenicia to place the story of the siege in a broader context. Critical to the siege were the evolving technologies in the ancient Mediterranean world, including innovations in catapult design, military engineering, and naval architecture. Guenther also takes into account recent scientific discoveries about the geology of the ancient seabed around Tyre and its effect on the siege. Finally, the book points out possible gender-biased views on topics such as sacred temple prostitution among the ancient Phoenicians and the fate of women in besieged cities of the ancient world. An engrossing blend of ancient wonder and historical and technological analysis, The Siege of Tyre is the remarkable story of Alexander the Great’s “masterpiece.”
 
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