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