The once and future king
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.