Ghost on the Throne : The Death of Alexander the Great and the War for Crown and Empire

by Romm, James

• ISBN13: 9780307271648
• ISBN10: 0307271641
• eBook ISBN(s): 9780307701503
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-10-11
• Publisher: Knopf

Summary

The story of Alexander’s conquest of the Persian Empire is known to readers, but the dramatic and consequential saga of the empire’s collapse is virtually untold-until now. When Alexander, at the age of thirty-two, lay dying in Babylon, he was asked to whom his vast empire should pass. Legend has it he replied, “To the strongest.” The consequence of those words led to three decades of global upheaval. James Romm, brilliant classicist and storyteller, tells the galvanizing saga of the men who followed Alexander and found themselves incapable of holding his empire together. We see the struggle involving his royal family; there were no heirs or successors except for a posthumously born child and a mentally defective half brother-each was made king. His six top generals, each a brilliant tactician, each a master of war-making, turned on one another. The result was the undoing of a world, formally united in a single empire, now ripped apart into a nightmare of warring nation-states struggling for domination, the template of our own times.