A bold, brilliant study of Alexander the Great’s early life
THE YOUNG ALEXANDER
by Alex Rowson
512pp, William Collins, £25, ebook £14.99
★★★★★
Some of the stories about the early life of Alexander the Great are wonderful. At a young age, he questioned ambassadors from Persia not about childish things, like the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, but about the state of the empire’s armies and roads. After a dinner party his father reprimanded him for playing the kithara with greater proficiency than was fitting for a prince; he then broke in Bucephalus, his famous Thessalian charger, a horse no one else could ride.
Aged about 14, he was sent to the town of Mieza to be tutored by Aristotle. When he was 16, and his father was away on campaign, Alexander, as Regent of Macedonia, defeated a barbarian tribe and founded the first city named after him. At 18, he commanded the left wing of the Macedonian army at the battle of Chaeronea, which ended Greek freedom, and afterwards went on an embassy to Athens. A drunken and violent argument with his father at a wedding party led him to withdraw into self-imposed exile. Having returned, he fell out with his father again over a proposed diplomatic marriage with the family of Pixodarus, a Persian governor in modern-day Turkey.
Yet these stories are really all our sources tell us about Alexander before he came to the throne. And can we believe a word of them? Two of them – the Persian ambassadors and the kithara playing – are usually seen as later inventions, and the historicity of a third – the Pixodarus incident – is also doubted.
Given this paucity of material, and in the face of the often repeated claim that a biography can be attempted of only two men from antiquity – Cicero and St Augustine – it seems a bold move for Alex Rowson, a successful producer of historical documentaries such as Richard III: The King in the Car Park and Time Team, to have written the life of the young Alexander.
Yet Rowson rises to the challenge magnificently, wisely ignoring the defeatists. His book, The Young Alexander, presses everything that can be got out of the stories of the youthful Macedonian, and sets them against the actions of better recorded individuals, principally Alexander’s father Philip and his enemy the Athenian orator Demosthenes. Generalities are deployed to add depth, such as ancient Macedonian customs, and the norms of Greek education. Finally, the whole is placed in its physical context: Rowson has a real gift for evoking locations, enlivened by his acute eyewitness observations.
Scholars can be sniffy about books written by non-academics for a general readership. This is not always just touchy professional gatekeeping. Many popular works fail to engage deeply with the ancient evidence or modern scholarship, and peddle theories that are either outmoded or eccentric. That is certainly not the case here. Rowson reads the classical sources with a critical and informed eye, and his mastery of recent studies is profoundly impressive.
Scholars can be sniffy about books written by non-academics, but this is really impressive
A key strength of this book is its up-to-date archaeology: Rowson not only conveys the hard work of digging and the thrill of discovery, but gives good accounts of the developments of archaeological debates.
Not all students of Alexander will agree with everything in this book. Sometimes Rowson seems a little over-trusting of late literary sources. To take one example: did Alexander really join his father besieging Perinthus, and then accompany him on campaigns along the Danube? This original theory is based on one sentence in Justin, who claims Philip summoned his son, who was 18, to receive his initial training in the field. But Justin, who was writing in the third century AD, is notoriously unreliable, and appears to be contradicted by the more generally trustworthy Arrian (admittedly writing only a century earlier), who has Alexander remaining in Macedonia. Alexander was 16 at the time of the siege of Perinthus. That Justin gives Alexander’s age as 18 seems to point to a misplaced reference to him serving under his father at Chaeronea. In this case, possibly Rowson has been influenced by Mary Renault’s novel Fire From Heaven, which gives Alexander some superb scenes at the siege of Perinthus.
The Young Alexander is popular history at its very best, thoughtprovoking and accessible. Underpinned by serious research, and written with panache, it summons up a vanished world: “the sound of hammer and saw emanating from the ship sheds, piles of Macedonian timber stacked high along its length; fishermen setting out onto the lake with their flat-bottomed boats, casting nets for the daily catch, perhaps tossing a morsel or two to the pelicans that also called Pella home”.