Envy Of The Gods: Alexander The GreatÂ’s Ill-fated Journey Across Asia

Rating:
Summary: Great history, well referenced, poorly written
Review: I was looking for a light history read on this era and I found it. I also learned that even I could write a book. Much of "Envy of the Gods" is repetetive and I kept getting the feeling that the author was trying to stretch 50 pages of information into 200 pages of text. This was unfortunate, as the extensive references suggest that there was a lot more useful information to be had.

Rating:
Summary: Not a Great Book
Review: I was looking forward to this book to help shed some new light and ideas into the last few years of Alexander's short life but after reading it I was still very much in the dark. I enjoyed Prevas's book on Hannibal so I was expecting the same in this book. I was wrong. His story seemed to be a bit stretched and I think it could have been much shorter than as printed. Reliable sources for the life/times of Alexander are few and far between and one must read a variety of the texts that survive to get any form of picture into his life. Judgements made today on a king that seized a huge chunk of the known world over 2300 years ago are speculative at best, especially when they bring up possible psychological faults that have only been discovered in the past 100 years. It seems that a very pessimistic view of Alexander the Great has become popular today- a politically correct way of seeing the Ancient World. . Revisionists can/will try to topple the great depending on which way the winds of morality are blowing, even if incorrect. Prevas had some interesting facts in his book about Alexander's jouney into the East but I sensed an "Anti-Macedonian" sentiment after the first few pages that carried through the whole book. It seemed almost judgemental and negative towards the West ie. America. So Alexander was possibly and alcoholic, an unstable character that grew darker and more evil with age, a bad person. What does it matter? Alexander is long dead and his real inner self/motivations/faults are lost forever. Accept him for what he was- a fascinating historical figure that did more in his time than anyone has ever accomplished. This book will be going to the used book store instead of making into my ever growing library of Antiquity.

Rating:
Summary: Alexander the Not-So-Great
Review: If absolute power corrupts absolutely, there can be no better demonstration of it than the life of Alexander the Great. Oliver Stone's recent, and failed, film has brought even more attention to the conqueror, who from his lifetime down has been a constant source for academic and archeological research, with supporters and detractors in his own time and into ours. He had a spectacular career, with a very high arc to success; the early part of that career is not the subject of _Envy of the Gods: Alexander the Great's Ill-Fated Journey Across Asia_ (Da Capo Press) by John Prevas. Prevas, an adventuresome classics professor, examines the years of Alexander's decline and fall. You won't find here his taming of the steed Bucephalus at thirteen, his solving of the Gordian Knot, his first war at age sixteen, his assumption of the Macedonian throne at age twenty after the assassination of his father, nor his spectacular conquests of Asia Minor, Egypt, and Babylon. Prevas has instead started his account from 330 BCE, when Alexander was twenty-six, pushing west into Asia and the Indian subcontinent, eventually retreating back to Babylon. It was a seven year circuit, marked by furious conquests, betrayals, orgies, and drunkenness, during which Alexander became increasingly suspicious and erratic. So, was he "Great"? One can't help admiring his degree of ambition, and how far he took it in his thirty-three years, and how well he achieved his aim of immortality. But with its concentration on Alexander's last seven years, Prevas's book can only inspire wonder that Alexander was able to last as long as he did.

By the time Alexander had reached the capital of the Persians, Persepolis, now in Iran, he had extracted the vengeance against the Persians that was his assignment from the Greeks. He might have said "Mission accomplished" and headed home a hero, but he had a consuming drive, a pathological compulsion, to push on to the limits of the Earth. The war had changed from Greece's revenge against Persia to Alexander's personal war for his own glory and deification. During the push west toward the Ganges, Alexander's ego found new ways of gratification. He liked the quasi-divine status Persian royalty held over the people, and he started doing things as they did, assuming a loftiness and remove from his men. He took hundreds of concubines and many eunuchs. Drinking and feasting became his standard way of life, and there are accounts here of drunken brawls within the royal chamber, and a drunken Alexander who alienated those closest to him. Promotions became based on sheer loyalty, loyalty that included acceptance of Alexander's divinity. He insisted on the strictest compliance with his orders, and refused to accept resistance; his men's exercise of free speech was curtailed, a tradition of free speech that was widely valued by the Greeks. Those who opposed him (or who he imagined opposed him) were subject to the sort of sadistic torture to death that the Greeks viewed as a particularly Persian atrocity.

It is astonishing that Alexander could have pushed his soldiers so far. He must have had spectacular rhetorical powers, and he never lost his physical courage, often unnecessarily putting himself at the advance of any fighting. He pushed eastward as far as what is now India, but could not push his men to the sea he sought. His troops finally were fed up with his personal wars, and natural forces like weather had sapped their interest in continuing. A sulking Alexander called for sacrifices and reading of entrails as omens; when the entrails forecast doom for further advancement, Alexander could save face by following the gods' will, not his men's demands, to begin the return trip, which held more brutal combat and a vicious passage through the desert. It may well be that he was deliberately inflicting injury on the army that had refused to continue on his eastward conquests. He reached Babylon again, only to die shortly after by (the speculations are vigorously argued) typhoid, virus, or poison. He was possibly the greatest conqueror in the world, but Prevas's spellbinding account shows little to admire. Remember that Dante placed Alexander in the seventh circle of Hell. This vivid picture of a brutal, drunken, and erratic dictator shows he deserved it, despite all his greatness in battle.