Synopses & Reviews
This book collects together ten contributions by leading scholars in the field of Alexander studies which represent the most advanced scholarship in this area. They span the gamut between historical reconstruction and historiographical research, and, viewed as a whole, represent a wide spectrum of methodology. This first English collection of essays on Alexander includes a comparison of the Spanish conquest of Mexico with the Macedonians in the east which examines the attitudes towards the subject peoples and the justification of conquest, an analysis of the attested conspiracies at the Macedonian and Persian courts, and studies of panhellenic ideology and the concept of kingship. There is a radical new interpretation of the hunting fresco from Tomb II at Vergina, and a new date for the pamphlet on Alexander's death which ends the Alexander Romance. Three chapters on historiography address the problem of interpreting Alexander's attested behavior, the indirect source tradition used by Polybius, and the resonances of contemporary politics in the extant histories.
Table of Contents
Introduction,
Brian BosworthA Tale of Two Empires: Alexander the Great and Hernán Cortés, Brian Bosworth
Conspiracies, Ernst Badian
Alexander the Great and Panhellenism, Michael Flower
Alexander the Great and the Kingdom of Asia, Ernst Fredricksmeyer
Hephaestion's Pyre and Alexander's Royal Hunt, Olga Palagia
Ptolemy and the Will of Alexander, Brian Bosworth
A Baleful Birth in Babylon: The Significance of the Prodigy in the Libre de Morte. An Investigation of Genre, Elizabeth Baynham
Artifice and Alexander History, Elizabeth Carney
Polybius, Alexander the Great and Hieronymous of Cardia, Richard Billows
Originality and its Limits in the Alexander Sources of the Early Empire, John Atkinson