The sculpted head of one of the world”™s greatest conquerors sat in a brown paper shopping bag in the office of HV Biz. Ah, to be reduced to a pedestrian carryall. What might poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, author of “Ozymandias,” have made of this?
And yet to have achieved such fame that your deeds, your name, your very likeness still resonate today. Indeed, even without removing the beautiful head from the bag, James Romm could tell by the leonine locks that it was a sculpture of Alexander the Great (356-323 B.C.), the Macedonian conqueror of the Persian Empire. And why not? Romm, the James H. Ottaway Jr. professor of classics at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, is one of a few historians worldwide who can be numbered among the Alexander experts. He is the editor of “The Landmark Arrian: The Campaigns of Alexander,” a juicy guide to the Roman general and historian Arrian”™s account of Alexander, one of the few surviving ancient sources on the subject.
Now Romm has followed this up with “Ghost on the Throne: The Death of Alexander the Great and the War for Crown and Empire,” which charts not only the brutal unraveling of an empire but what happens when there”™s no center that can hold.
Bluntly put, however, why should our Kim Kardashian culture care?
“(Alexander”™s) one of the most world-changing individuals in all of history,” Romm said. “He created a global Greek culture that went from the Adriatic to India.”
In creating a new dynamic in which commerce, culture and power flowed west to east, he also spurred and reflected the tensions between the West and the East that are still with us today. The soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan are walking in his footsteps.
“In Afghanistan especially”¦he fought a bitterly entrenched guerrilla war for two years,” Romm said. It took all of his considerable charisma and tactical brilliance ”“ plus his marriage to the beautiful daughter of an Afghan warlord, Rhoxane ”“ to succeed, “and even then it was hard to hold on.”
That he did so is attributable not only to his dynamic command ”“ he led from the front and was secure enough to surround himself with first-rate generals ”“ but to his autocratic will.
“I don”™t idolize him and I don”™t demonize him,” he said. “Everything he did has to be looked at in terms of cataclysmic transformation. He took extreme measures. But he lived in extreme times.”
So when he burned Persepolis, the ceremonial capital of the Persian Empire, he did so, Romm said, not out of drunken rage or in revenge for Persian atrocities against the Greeks but from the desire to send “a message to the Persian elite that there was no going back and he had to be accepted as the monarch.” It was gesture politics on a grand, terrifying scale.
That brutality ”“ coupled with a capacity for chivalry, mercy and generosity ”“ made Alexander one of history”™s most complex figures and the scorching but indispensible sun around which an empire revolved. His death in Babylon in June of 323 B.C. ”“ just a month shy of his 33rd birthday ”“ left a world suddenly grown cold. Into this frigid void leapt an array of ambitious generals, female relatives and would-be heirs seeking to become new lights by centralizing authority once again or, barring that, carving up pieces of the empire.
Romm likens this to the ungluing of the economically wobbly European Union. Ironically, some of today”™s European tensions stem from Alexander himself. Â The Republic of Macedonia recently erected a statue said to be of Alexander and his famed steed, Bucephalus, in the capital of Skopje ”“ to go along with the nation”™s Alexander the Great Airport. This sparked furor in Greece, where Alexander is a national hero, even though the ancient Greeks despised him and his father, Philip II. (Their kingdom of Macedon, in what is now northern Greece, had a hegemony over the Greek city-states.)
Proving that it is in some ways still Alexander”™s world, and we are merely living in it.
Popularity: 1%
Not surprised…
FYI: He didn’t spread “Greek” culture at all (at least not in the way we know it today…or not know it today – to be exact). The ancient Greek language was (along with Jewish, Latin, and Persian) one of the languages of the time. HE HAS SPREAD THE LANGUAGE – NOT THE GREEK CULTURE.
To illustrate: If I go somewhere TODAY, I’ll probably speak English, and write English, but will NOT be spreading English culture, since I’m not English!
I am writing my answer to you, my uneducated friend – in English, but I am not English at all – I’m a Macedonian!
Further more, there is ABSOLUTELY NO PROOF that today’s Greece derives from ancient Greece, neither is there proof that today’s Greeks are in any way related to the ancient Greeks (in fact there has been a study by a Swiss scientist quite to the contrary – that today’s Greeks are NOT descendants of ancient Greeks, but rather of a Turkish/Mongolic descent, and this was based on a tested DNA proof).
The Greek state of today is a state of fascists and xenophobes – and this is proven by the fact that the MACEDONIAN MINORITY, THAT SPEAKS MACEDONIAN, ISN’T ALLOWED TO DECLARE ITSELF BY THEIR NAME (Macedonian), NOR ARE THEY ALLOWED TO DECLARE THEIR TONGUE AS OFFICIAL IN GREECE! This fact is well recorded by the UN’s commissioner for minorities (in 2010 and 2011!).
So, let’s spread the facts, not the way we see them.
Thanks,
a Macedonian
Writers Note: There is no question that Alexander the Great spread ancient Greek culture: One has only to look at the Hellenistic influence in the Buddhist sculptures of the Gandhara region of Pakistan – to take one minor example – to understand that.
The ancient Greeks loathed Alexander and his father, Philip, because they were forced to be part of the hegemony led by ancient Macedon. The modern Greeks claim Alexander – a success story if there ever was one — as their own, as do the Macedonians who make up the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. All of this is fact and was reported in my story.
The further fact that you are so passionate about this subject proves my larger point that Alexander matters as much today as he did in his own time.
“even though the ancient Greeks despised him and his father, Philip II.”
An urban myth (built out of modern political conveniences). Greek states constantly warred with one another. Rhetoric during such times was normal (e.g. Demosthenes most famously). This should not be confused that they didn’t see themselves as Greeks or that other Greeks didn’t see them as Greeks .
Ancient Macedonians competed for centuries (will prior to Philips conquest of Greece) as self-identifying Greeks at ancient Panhellenic sporting events.(which were exclusively for Greeks and one had to be accepted by other Greeks to compete) As founders of the Hellenistic period and spreader of Koine Greek, that should have been a clue how ancient Macedonians self-identified. Curiously those that referense FYORM as “Macedonia” don’t recognize the self identification of ancient macedonians themselves?
“Men of Athens… In truth I would not tell it to you if I did not care so much for all Hellas (Greece); I myself am by ancient descent a Greek, and I would not willingly see Hellas change her freedom for slavery. ” (Speech of Alexander I of Macedonia upon being admitted to the Olympic games, Herodotus, Histories, 9.45, ed. A. D. Godley)
Furthermore no historian on earth claims they had anything mention able to do with today’s modern Slavic inhabitants of a region known as Paeonia and Dardinia in antiquity (i.e. not even the original ancient Macedonia as is widely misreported)
And if the author wanted to stepping in the name dispute, it could have been more credible if he managed to report a little modern history as well.
….
‘We do not claim to be descendants of Alexander the Great.’ – FYROM’S Ambassador Ljubica Acevshka, speech to US representatives in Washington on January 22 1999
“The whole story about Ancient Macedonia sounds undoubtedly very nice. However, there is a great problem, a huge hole? of about 2,000 years during which we have neither oral nor written tradition, nor a single scientific argument†– former Prime Minister Ljubco Georgievski, FOCUS, 31 March 2008
“We are Slavs who came to this area in the sixth century … We are not descendants of the ancient Macedonians” – Kiro Gligorov, FYROM’s first President, Foreign Information Service Daily Report, Eastern Europe, February 26, 1992
‘We are not related to the northern Greeks who produced leaders like Philip and Alexander the Great. We are a Slav people and our language is closely related to Bulgarian.’ – FYROM´s Ambassador to Canada Gyordan Veselinov, Ottawa Citizen Newspaper, February 24 1999
“The creation of the Macedonian nation, for almost half of a century, was done in a condition of single-party dictatorship. In those times, there was no difference between science and ideology, so the “Macedonian†historiography, unopposed by anybody, comfortably performed a selection of the historic material from which the “Macedonian†identity was created. There is nothing atypical here for the process of the creation of any modern nation, except when falsification from the type of substitution of the word “Bulgarian†with the word “Macedonian†were made.” -former FYROM foreign minister Denko Maleski
http://www.utrinski.com.mk/?ItemID=C7A7DD4ECD45C946BF6573284EC01164
“This (US) Government considers talk of Macedonian “nation”, Macedonian “Fatherland”, or Macedonia “national consciousness” to be unjustified demagoguery representing no ethnic nor political reality, and sees in its present revival a possible cloak for aggressive intentions against Greece” – US State Department Dec, 1944 (Foreign Relations Vol. VIII Washington D.C. Circular Airgram – 868.014/26)
http://tinyurl.com/nel46d
etc.
The author of the article states Greeks “despised” Alexander and Philip but its precisely because he hegemony over Greece…where Athens and Sparta had failed.
He also seems to have had great trouble finding historians that tell a different narrative than his own.
“On November 4, 2004, two days after the re-election of President George W. Bush, his administration unilaterally recognized the “Republic of Macedonia.†This action not only abrogated geographic and historic fact, but it also has unleashed a dangerous epidemic of historical revisionism, of which the most obvious symptom is the misappropriation by the government in Skopje of the most famous of Macedonians, Alexander the Great.”
http://macedonia-evidence.org/obama-letter.html
It’s amazing how these sorts of facts always go missing by those that referencre the former Yugoslav region of Vardar as “Republic of Macedonia”. Is identity theft a human right in the country of whomever wrote this article? One wonders how he would like it if a neighboring state tried to take his own identity away while others looked the other way.
—
‘The idea that Alexander the Great belongs to us was at the mind of some outsider groups only. These groups were insignificant in the first years of our independence. But the big problem is that the old Balkan nations have been learned to legitimize themselves through their history. In the Balkans to be recognized as a nation you need to have history of 2,000 to 3,000 years old. Since you (Greece ) forced us to invent a history, we did invent it.’
(former FYROM Foreign Minister Denko Maleski)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dlDLmufGHqQ&feature=related
World renown British historian Robin Fox Lane (expert on ancient Macedonians) commenting on the name dispute (footage from the travelling ancient Macedonian exhibit)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y4usu3ovzBM
@Writers
The government of the former Yugoslav republic was officially claiming only a few short years NOT to be related to be related to ancient Macedonians. Why did you forget to mention that?
Why didn’t you mention that today’s FYROM nationalists have essentially nothing to do with ancient Macedonians? (they hide and oppress their own Bulgarian ethnic roots)
Why did you omit mention that the American government itself not only used to claim there was no such thing as an “ethnic Macedonian” but supplied Greeks the weapons the weapons to expel IMRO communist terrorists promoting these name games. (presumably the US not complicit in an attempted genocide)
Reporting by omission isn’t much better than lying. I don’t think you are a conscious liar but I do think those that referenced the former Yugoslav republic as “Macedonia” harbour prejudices against Greeks. (and by pretending to not notice their changing ethnic narrative only illustrates that further)
Blame Greece for its fiances but FYROM is entirely the fault of those that encouraged their behavior by patronizingly disregarding legitimate Greek concerns and referencing FYROM as “Macedonia”.
The irony of this situation is by now claiming themselves as related to ancient macedonains, FYROM nationalists are effectively claiming to be Greeks. Identity theft is not a human right.
@FYROM nationalist
While fanatics like you demonize Greeks for not recognizing you, shamefully oppress your own ethnic Bulgarian roots. and claim there exists some absolute right to national recognition (gibberish there is no such right in international law)… I would note the FYROM government quietly withdrew recognition of the Republic of China a few years ago? Apparently your government doesn’t believe int he right to self-determination when it comes to the people of Taiwan?
“The Macedonian side stated once again that it will not establish official ties of any form or conduct official exchanges with Taiwan, and that it opposes Taiwan’s accession to any international organization whose membership requires statehood”
http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/90001/90776/90883/6315770.html