Alexander the Great in Fact and Fiction

by Bosworth, A. B.; Baynham, E. J.

• ISBN13: 9780199252756
• ISBN10: 0199252750
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2002-07-11
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

This book collects together ten contributions by leading experts in the field of Alexander studies which represent the most advanced scholarship in this area. They span the gamut between historical reconstruction and historiographical research, and viewed as a whole represent a wide spectrumof methodology. This first English collection of essays on Alexander includes a comparison of the Spanish conquest of Mexico with the Macedonians in the east which examines the attitudes towards the subject peoples and the justification of conquest, an analysis of the attested conspiracies at theMacedonian and Persian courts, and studies of panhellenic ideology and the concept of kingship. There is a radical new interpretation of the hunting fresco from Tomb II at Vergina, a new date for the pamphlet on Alexander's last days which ends the Alexander romance, and a re-interpretation of thebizarre portents of his death. Three chapters on historiography address the problem of interpreting Alexander's attested behaviour, the indirect source tradition used by Polybius, and the resonances of contemporary politics in the extant histories.

Table of Contents

Introduction

A Tale of Two Empires: Alexander the Great and Hernan Cortes

Conspiracies

Alexander the Great and Panhellenism

Alexander the Great and the Kingdom of Asia

Hephaestion's Pyre and Alexander's Royal Hunt

Ptolemy and the Will of Alexander

A Baleful Birth in Babylon: The Significance of the Prodigy in the Libre de Morte. An Investigation of Genre

Artifice and Alexander History

Polybius Alexander the Great and Hieronymous of Cardia

Originality and its Limits in the Alexander Sources of the Early Empire

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