The New Criterion

John D. Grainger
Alexander the Great Failure.
Hambledon & London, 245 pages, $24.95

If ancient archetypes still inform our own heroes and villains, then Alexander the Great is the prime case of a young man who, having cultivated immeasurable renown, gave in to the demands of celebrity. His beginnings could not be more auspicious: Philip II, his father, was the most effective ruler of the Macedonian empire, and one of his ancestors, according to Plutarch, was the legendary warrior Hercules. Aristotle himself tutored the young prince, and by sixteen Alexander was conducting military campaigns, eventually expanding his empire from Athens to beyond Kandahar. But he became so enthralled with his own legend that his death, at age thirty-three, may have been a reminder that he, too, was made from the flimsy stuff of mortals.

The conventional view holds Alexander as a brilliant tactician and a capable, if overwhelmed, administrator who facilitated cultural and economic exchange between the Mediterranean and Asia. The excess of his mature years—drinking, pretensions to divinity, louche sexual practices—hardly mars the brilliance of his early campaigns, at least in most evenhanded scholarly estimations. Not so for John D. Grainger, however, who in his punishing new study, Alexander the Great Failure, charges Alexander with wreaking havoc on the classical world and dismantling most of his father’s good work. Unimpressed with his conquests, Grainger portrays Alexander as the Hellenic version of Genghis Khan, shredding through the delicate fabric of civilization.

Grainger constructs his argument around the common knowledge that Alexander suffered from a case of hubris befitting the outsized heroes of his beloved Homeric epics. He inherited the Macedonian throne at twenty, after Philip’s assassination, and efficiently subjugated insurgent Greek cities that had always chafed under his father’s rule, while flushing his court of suspected traitors. Grainger is clearly impressed with “the sheer professionalism and flexibility of the army he had inherited,” whose disciplined infantry and fearsome cavalry were no match for rebellious city-states.

Alexander possessed a restless constitution: control over Greece was hardly the glory he sought. Instead he turned to Persia, his father’s old rival and the largest empire in the world. The campaign is often regarded as a preemptive strike against a foe that had wreaked havoc on Greece in the previous century, but Grainger believes that Alexander launched an unnecessary invasion solely to evade the responsibilities of ruling Macedon. “Alexander’s expedition left Macedon substantially weaker,” he writes, blaming Alexander for “[failure] to give a proper thought to his kingdom.”

One does not need to agree with Grainger’s thesis to realize that beneath any military or political objectives lay Alexander’s desire to become a name for the ages. In 334 B.C. his army of perhaps 80,000 (this is Grainger’s estimate; most other scholars cut that number in about half) crossed the Dardanelles into Turkey, stopping first at the ruins of Troy. There, on the legendary battlefield, Alexander paid tribute to Achilles, running around his grave naked. “I accept Asia from the gods,” he supposedly pronounced as he set out to defeat the Great King Darius III.

It is precisely this arrogance, and the brutal warfare it sanctioned, that leads Grainger to his unequivocal condemnation. Indeed, the Persian campaign confirmed a reputation for ruthless conquest that would remain unequaled until the advent of blitzkrieg. Alexander opened with the Battle of the Granicus, his first major victory against Darius, then outmaneuvered a much larger army at Issus, clearing passage into Palestine. He perfected the art of siegecraft by suffocating Tyre, which languished in his grip for six months, and then moving on to Gaza, where the corpse of the leader of the resistance was dragged naked around the city walls, as Achilles had once done to Hector.

It was in the subsequent push to Egypt that Alexander’s narcissism fully manifested itself. In Alexander the Great: Man and God, a study more nuanced and elegant than Grainger’s, Ian Worthington writes that though Egypt was a Persian territory of some strategic value, Alexander’s primary intention was to pay respects at the ancient oracle of Ammon at Siwa, which could definitively confirm his heavenly pedigree: “Alexander’s visit to this oracle was to be the turning point in his pretensions to personal divinity.” The priest branded him Son of Zeus, and the populace, which had been treated poorly by Persia, readily accepted him as a deity. The king, not yet thirty but already a god, founded Alexandria in 331, the first of many cities to bear his name, before resuming his campaign against Darius.

But there was not much left to Persia by now. Hopes of stopping Alexander’s onslaught were shattered at Gaugamela, where Darius fled ignominiously from the battlefield, only to be killed shortly afterwards by mutinous members of his own staff. Confidently assuming the title Lord of Asia, Alexander proceeded to Persepolis, where he burned the imperial palace to the ground.

His weary troops now figured that they could return home, but Alexander exhorted them to push deeper into the Hindu Kush, towards the last bastions of Persian sympathizers. They assented reluctantly, but Alexander’s popularity began to slip, especially because he began to adopt the mannerisms of his Persian foes. In 327 he wed Roxane, a daughter of the conquered Bactrians whom many considered an inferior bride. He also began to mandate proskynesis, the ritual bowing that, though common in Persia, infuriated his proud Greek compatriots. Grainger notes that as the army consolidated its control of Central Asia, the “disquiet of the Macedonians grew and emerged as plots, drunken brawls and philosophical disputes.”

His next task, the conquest of India, seemed a vanity project from the start, aimed at proving that he was at least the equal of Hercules. Crossing the Punjab proved too much for his increasingly dispirited army. “O Athenians, can you possibly believe what perils I am undergoing to win glory in your eyes?,” Alexander is believed to have said, though it is unlikely that his men found such exhortations inspiring. They were woefully unprepared for the mountains, raging monsoons, and war elephants; the crestfallen troops began partaking in the kind of slaughter that desperate armies resort to, lending weight to Grainger’s assertion that the whole campaign was “a foul record of killing and destruction.”

Frustrated by the aborted campaign and looking to shore up his reputation, Alexander circled back for a conquest of Arabia. But fate finally intervened: on the eve of the invasion, in 323 B.C., he fell ill after a bout of heavy drinking and, descending into a feverish state, died several days later. A conspiracy was possible, but a lack of attention to his own battered body is just as likely.

Grainger grudging acknowledges the immensity of Alexander’s project, but he cannot forgive its attendant bloodlust: “He was good at fighting, and clearly enjoyed it more than anything else, but he used it to evade responsibility. This was a failure to grow up.” But perhaps Alexander’s yearning for greatness stemmed from an ambition that could not sate itself on the achievements of common men. The Greek playwright Menander once wrote that those whom the gods favor die in their youth; could this have been the very confirmation that Alexander had always sought?