Alexander the great best biography
•
Alexander: How Great?
In 51 BC, Marcus Tullius Cicero, who had reluctantly left his desk in Rome to become military governor of the province of Cilicia in southern Turkey, scored a minor victory against some local insurgents. As we know from his surviving letters, he was conscious that he was treading in the footsteps of a famous predecessor: “For a few days,” he wrote to his friend Atticus, “we were encamped in exactly the same place that Alexander occupied when he was fighting Darius at Issus”—hastily conceding that Alexander was in fact “a rather better general that you or I.”
Whatever the irony in Cicero’s remarks, almost any Roman, given the command of a brigade of troops and a glimpse of lands to the East, would soon dream of becoming Alexander the Great. In their fantasies at least, they stepped into the shoes of the young king of Macedon who, between and BC, had crossed into Asia, conquered the Persian Empire under Darius III
•
The best books on Alexander the Great
Before we get to the books, please could you tell us about Alexander the Great’s background. What was it that led him to go out and conquer the known world?
Alexander was the son of Philip of Macedon and, while in earlier periods, Macedonia had been on the edges of the Greek world, during Alexander’s childhood Philip had made it into the most significant power in Greece. In the course of his lifetime, he became the dominant figure throughout the Aegean world. inom think it’s also worth adding—and this is straying into the controversial—that Macedonia was, effectively, set up as a kingdom in the late sixth century BC, when the Persians under King Darius inom invaded nordlig Greece. It was set up as a monarchy, and with that came the establishment of a royal court and the rituals that went with that. Macedon in the fifth century BC had a lot of contact with the neighbouring kingdom of Thrace in the north-east Aegean and had a relationship with the
•
Alexander the Great
In the first authoritative biography of Alexander the Great written for a general audience in a generation, classicist and historian Philip Freeman tells the remarkable life of the great conqueror.
The celebrated Macedonian king has been one of the most enduring figures in history. He was a general of such skill and renown that for two thousand years other great leaders studied his strategy and tactics, from Hannibal to Napoleon, with countless more in between. He flashed across the sky of history like a comet, glowing brightly and burning out quickly: crowned at age nineteen, dead by thirty-two. He established the greatest empire of the ancient world; Greek coins and statues are found as far east as Afghanistan. Our interest in him has never faded.
Alexander was born into the royal family of Macedonia, the kingdom that would soon rule over Greece. Tutored as a boy by Aristotle, Alexander had an inquisitive mind that would serve him well when he faced form