Book Review
A novel and a biography explore Alexander the Great

By William Dietrich
Special to The Seattle Times

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It's time for Alexander the Great's 15 minutes of fame.

The initiator, of course, is Hollywood, which is scheduled to release Oliver Stone's "Alexander" movie Nov. 24 and has tentative plans for a second film in 2005 starring Leonardo DiCaprio. The publishing industry is following suit by issuing or reissuing a number of Alexander books, hoping to tag onto the publicity.

Two stand out.

The first, Steven Pressfield's novel, "The Virtues of War," is simply superb. The second, Paul Cartledge's incisive and judicious history, "Alexander the Great," is a useful corrective to Pressfield's militant whirlwind.

Fascination with the Macedonian prodigy is not new, of course. A hero as a teen, a king at 20, conqueror of Persia at 25 and dead at 32, Alexander is the standard by which all great men are humbled. Julius Caesar reportedly wept when he encountered the soldier's bust and realized that at an age when Alexander was already dead, he, Caesar, had accomplished nothing.

"The Virtues of War" by Steven Pressfield Doubleday, 368 pp., $25 "Alexander the Great" by Paul Cartledge Overlook, 368 pp., $29

Alexander is also daunting: possibly complicit in the assassination of his father, Philip, absorber of his mother's religious mysticism, student of Aristotle, victor, hero, narcissist, demigod, tyrant, butcher, bisexual, possibly alcoholic: how does any author pack it all in?

Mary Renault, in her wonderfully complex psychological novels about Alexander, needed three to fit in his 32 years. Pressfield, after somewhat losing control of the sprawling plots of his last two novels, fits Alexander into one and takes the gamble of making the king his first-person narrator. It shouldn't work, but the result is his best book to date, even eclipsing his best-selling "Gates of Fire."

That earlier novel worked so well because the author focused on a single epic battle, Thermopylae. Here Pressfield succeeds because he strips Alexander's complexities down to how the king saw himself, as Homeric military hero, war lover and glory hound. He keeps us riveted to the great bloody contest with Darius and Persia, focusing on the hunt as Alexander must have focused.

Let's face it, we just don't like Iran much. Reading about Greeks pasting the Persians is a vicarious pleasure.

Historical purists may complain that Pressfield glosses over Alexander's homosexual side and his brutality, and virtually ignores such famous episodes as the Gordion knot, the brilliant siege of Tyre, and the capture of a supposedly impregnable rock spire in Afghanistan, where he won his bride, Roxanne. There are essentially no women in the book, no sex, minimal description of Asian culture, nothing about Alexander's claim he was the son of Zeus, and no mention of his stubborn and unnecessary retreat across waterless desert to punish his own men.

Doesn't matter. "The Virtues of War" is a battle book of camp and march, which Pressfield does better than anyone. The clarity of its explanation of ancient weapons, strategy and tactics could make Tom Clancy envious. Its expert pace, its vivid detail, its bone-crunching action, and its occasional piercing insights of sad eloquence make it an absolutely gripping read. It hurtles you into the fray of Chaeronea with Alexander's cavalry and chokes you with the dust of splintering chariots at Gaugamela: the same battlefield Americans are fighting over now.

The Macedonians are portrayed as the Scots of Greece, ferocious mountain warriors who modify the phalanx and perfect cavalry, sweep the world, and then find themselves corrupted by triumph.

The title is both honest — Pressfield likes the spirit of war — and ironic. Alexander's greatest defeat comes after his smartest victory, when his army refuses to follow him further into India. A nice scene has an Indian wise man refusing to yield the road to Alexander and a soldier declaring, "This man has conquered the world. What have you done?" The philosopher replies, "I have conquered the need to conquer the world."

If Pressfield presents the legend, Paul Cartledge's "Alexander the Great" (who, like Pressfield, has already written wonderfully about the Spartans) dissects it. His book is not a biography so much as a reexamination of Alexander, in themed chapters, for those already familiar with the conqueror's life. The Cambridge history professor puts the novel and movies into context with insight after insight.

Alexander was a brilliant general, a charismatic leader, an admirer of the empire he was toppling and a strategic statesman. He could also turn on friends as brutally as Saddam Hussein, was in love with himself more than either sex, may have had an Oedipal complex toward his father and mother, and was emotional enough to run one companion through with a spear in a drunken rage.

Alexander was loved, feared, worshiped and maybe poisoned. Even today, his career seems unworldly.

What Cartledge does so well is explain the ancient world of Greeks and Persians in which Alexander found himself, helping make clear how the general could conquer so much and yet was conquered by it. He also discusses the Alexander legend, up to today's Iraq War, where both the American blitzkrieg and subsequent quagmire echo earlier times.

In fact the Iraq War, more than the movies, makes these books especially timely. One wishes the civilian chickenhawks mismanaging the conflict from Washington, D.C. (what a contrast to the ancient general who was wounded many times in the very center of battle!) could read the maxims of war Pressfield has Alexander recite, which are actually a compilation from the last 2,000 years of military writing.

And one is sobered by Cartledge's point that it was Alexander who started it all by tying Europe and the Middle East together. This allowed, under Rome and Byzantium, the dissemination of three great religions — Judaism, Christianity and Islam — all originating from the same place from the same Biblical tradition, and all too alike to ever coexist peacefully. We do battle in Gaugamela still.

William Dietrich's latest historical novel is "Hadrian's Wall." He is a writer for Pacific Northwest Magazine.

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company

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