Travels with Alexander the Great

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In this groundbreaking work, Elizabeth Donnelly Carney examines the role of royal women in the Macedonian Argead dynasty from the sixth century BC. to 168 BC. Women were excluded from the exercise of power in most of the Hellenic world. However, Carney shows that the wives, mothers, and daughters of kings played important roles in Macedonian public life and occasionally determined the course of national events.

Carney assembles an exhaustive array of evidence on the political role of Argead royal women. She also presents a series of biographical sketches describing the public careers of all the royal women — including Olympias, mother of Alexander the Great, and the warrior Cynnane, his half-sister — whose names are preserved in ancient sources. Women and Monarchy in Macedonia corrects previously held assumptions and offers a fresh interpretation of the status, function, influence, and authority of women in the ancient world.

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Ivory head of Olympias found in the tombs at Vergina.

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Alexander, fate and freewill

Gottfried Liebniz

In On Interpretation Aristotle defends a view about fate, free will, necessity, and contingency that is at once logical, metaphysical, and naval:

“A sea battle must either take place tomorrow or not, but it is not necessary that it should take place tomorrow, neither is it necessary that it should not take place, yet it is necessary that it either should or should not take place tomorrow.”

This seems clear enough, and is. Nothing in Aristotle’s example is necessary except that something take place or not take place; a sea battle, after all, cannot both happen and not happen. But what of the metaphysical implications of this logical necessity? How should we speak of contingency and potentiality, if such things truly exist? Is the general free to give the order for battle, or is all foreordained to happen, fixed in future place by natural law and supernatural will?

When the philosopher Leibniz took up the same question two millennia later, he asked whether Aristotle’s pupil, Alexander the Great, was fated to command, live, and die as he did.

“When we carefully consider the connection of things, we see the possibility of saying that there was always in the soul of Alexander marks of all that had happened to him and evidences of all that would happen to him and traces even of everything which occurs in the universe, although God alone could recognize them all.”

- Leland de la Durantaye

http://bostonreview.net/BR36.2/leland_de_la_durantaye_david_foster_wallace.php

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Two great historians (and Oliver Stone) discuss Megalexandros

The conversation concludes here:

"I think he’s Columbus, Julius Caesar, and George Washington in one — explorer, conquerer, establisher.
I would include Cortés, but Alexander was far less bloodthirsty." - Oliver Stone

http://blogs.forbes.com/booked/2011/03/21/oliver-stone-talks-alexander-the-great-part-2-video/

http://blogs.forbes.com/booked/2011/03/22/oliver-stone-talks-alexander-the-great-part-3-video/

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When Alexander, at the age of thirty-two, lay dying in Babylon, he was asked to whom his vast empire should pass. Legend has it he replied, “To the strongest.” The consequence of those words led to three decades of global upheaval.

James Romm, brilliant classicist and storyteller, tells the galvanizing saga of the men who followed Alexander and found themselves incapable of holding his empire together. We see the struggle involving his royal family; there were no heirs or successors except for a posthumously born child and a mentally defective half brother—each was made king. His six top generals, each a brilliant tactician, each a master of war-making, turned on one another. The result was the undoing of a world, formally united in a single empire, now ripped apart into a nightmare of warring nation-states struggling for domination, the template of our own times.

“For too long, the immense spreading shadow of Alexander himself has eclipsed the careers of those around him: Romm's new account now alters that balance, providing unforgettable, darkly-glinting cameos of the dead conqueror's generals, friends, and relatives—most of them grasping, some memorably hapless—among whom figure a startling array of remarkable female players in this 'Macbeth'-like drama. - Daniel Mendelsohn, contributor, The New York Review of Books

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The Tapestry of Alexander the Great

Take a close up view of the tapestry depicting scenes from the life of Alexander that Charles V donated to Andrea Doria for the Villa del Principe. These two incredible artworks are of immense proportions able to cover entire walls of the villa.

http://www.dopart.it/genova/en/the-tapestry/the-tapestry-of-alexander-the-great/

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"Alexander the Great to the Granico passage", Aubusson, 17th century, Wool and silk tapestry

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La Battaglia del Granico, Carlo Amadori, 1996

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Fresco portrait of Alessandro Magno from the Spada Palace

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While on the march with his army one winter, Alexander the Great was sitting by a campfire, watching the army as it marched by. He noticed an old warrior shivering from the cold, trying to find a place near the fire. Alexander bade the man sit in his own chair, saying, "If you had been born a Persian, it would cost you your head to sit in the king's chair, but you are a Macedonian, not a Persian. Sit."
- Plutarch

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Alexander and Hephaistion by Louis Gauffier

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The wedding of Alexander and Roxanne Mulinari Stefano (1741-1804)

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Ancient Macedonian murder mystery

Archaeologists uncovered a graveyard from the time of Alexander's father, Philip II, and found the body of savagely stabbed man known as T38. Who is he and why did he die? Upload the Discovery Science documentary Mummy Autopsy here.

http://rapidok.com/list/Discovery.Channel.Mummy.Autopsy.Who.Killed.T38.PDTV.XviD-HEH

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Did Alexander suffer from Post-Traumatic
Stress Disorder (PTSD)?

This study in the December 2008 issue of Military Medicine reviews the evidence:

"Although until that time [his conquest of western India] he had been a peerless leader, brave, adventurous, adaptable, ingenious, and considerate of those who served under him, Alexander began to exhibit disturbing changes in his character during the return from India. First, he drove his exhausted army through the Gadrosian Desert, where two-thirds perished from dehydration, starvation, and hyperthermia. Then, he began executing the lieutenants and satraps who had served him as middle managers of the empire during his conquests to the east. By the time he reached Babylon, he was drinking heavily and had become so pathologically suspicious and easily alarmed that he regarded the "least unusual or extraordinary thing as a prodigy or a presage."

The researchers do admit Alexander's behavior could be attributed to other causes.
 
"Diagnosing PTSD in historical figures is considerably more challenging than diagnosing PTSD in living subjects, because the instruments currently used to establish the diagnosis cannot be administered in traditional fashion. …

“For all four subjects [in the study] depression was a prominent feature of their post-traumatic psychological states and might well have been their principal disorder. In Alexander's case, because of his nearly constant inebriation for at least 7 months before he died, alcohol dependence rather than PTSD has to be considered as the principal diagnosis. It is also possible that, after more than a decade of fighting, scheming, and murdering in pursuit of absolute power, Alexander changed because he came to realize that absolute power demanded eternal vigilance.

“Alexander was a warrior king whose psychological reaction to an accumulation of potentially traumatizing events (PTEs) was dictated and then judged by the warrior society over which he presided as supreme ruler. Of these four individuals, he was endowed with perhaps the greatest resilience, which for a time seemed to inure him to the adverse psychological effects of the PTEs of conquest. Eventually, however, even for him, there was a limit to the intensity and duration of PTEs that could be tolerated before he was broken psychologically."

See the full study and conclusions here:

http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Post-Traumatic+Stress+Reactions+before+the+Advent+of+Post-Traumatic...-a01611750280



Annabel Lyon, author of the historical novel The Golden Mean which explores Alexander’s relationship with his tutor Aristotle certainly believes Alexander suffered from PTSD. In a recent interview she observes:

“I imagine Aristotle suffering from what we call bipolar disorder and in young Alexander I see someone with the beginnings of what we call post-traumatic stress disorder. But I didn’t start the novel planning to impose these disorders. There’s strong evidence for both cases. Alexander was the most difficult character to write. It took me seven years to complete the book and the last six months was spent nailing down his character. I wanted him to be a bratty kid, not the archetypes history has made of him. But I couldn’t square the adult Alexander with the teenager I created. Then I read a New Yorker article about an Iraq War veteran suffering from PTSD. All of the symptoms he had — alcoholism, headaches, blackouts, nightmares — Alexander had too. In Aristotle’s case, he himself writes about the link between melancholy and the creative temperament. When he says that the best form of human behavior is the mean between two extremes, that sounded to me like someone who suffers those extremes and is desperate to find that mean."

Read the full interview here:

http://www.boston.com/ae/books/articles/2010/10/03/when_aristotle_taught_alexander/?rss_id=Boston+Globe+--+Book+reviews


A soldier’s heart?

In her review of the Golden Mean Mary Harrsch disagrees with Lyon's diagnosis of Alexander. She writes:

“A plot development that Lyon did introduce and that I found highly unlikely was Alexander's development of "soldier's heart" after his first major military engagement. … The term soldier's heart is a poetic sounding euphemism for what we today would call post traumatic stress syndrome, sometimes referred to as Da Costa's syndrome.  The term is thought to have been coined by physicians during the American Civil War to describe the physical manifestations of stress caused by exposure to combat including left-sided chest pains, heart palpitations, breathlessness, and fatigue in response to exertion.

“I personally find it hard to believe that Alexander could have been suffering from what technically would be called acute stress disorder (as it apparently first occurred during or immediately following combat), at least this early in his military career.  I don't think Alexander would have been able to astutely assess enemy battle formations and fluidly alter his own offensive strategy to capitalize on his enemies weaknesses in major battles time after time as he historically demonstrated if he had suffered from the disorder.   Not only would a condition like "soldier's heart" impair his command decisions, but being in such a trance-like state as Lyon describes, unaware of his real surroundings, would most certainly have proved eventually fatal to not only himself but those under his command as well.

“Some scholars believe Alexander and many of his men exhibited the classic symptoms of post traumatic stress syndrome after the battle of Hydaspes, mostly based on the reports of high alcohol consumption which varied significantly between the accounts of Curtius Rufus and Lucius Flavius Arrianus.  (Rufus, who reported extremely heavy drinking, is considered the most suspect source as he was was unfavorably disposed towards Alexander).  Classicist William Woodthrope Tarn also pointed to the particularly brutal conquest of southern India that followed the defeat of Porus as possible evidence Alexander and his men suffered from high levels of frustration and exhaustion.

“In the ancient world, though, it was not unusual for commanders to allow their troops to violently sack cities after particularly difficult battles or sieges.  This practice not only served to generate part of the soldier's payment from the loot that could be collected, it also gave exhausted and traumatized soldiers the opportunity to exact "pay-back" and relieve their psychological stress from the brutality of combat, especially the up close and personal variety of ancient hand-to-hand warfare.  Whether Alexander recognized the need for this in India as 'treatment' for his troops following their refusal to proceed any farther east after Hydaspes or Alexander simply had become so demoralized by his previously unquestioning troops' unprecedented opposition to his plans that he simply allowed it to occur, we don't really know.”

http://ancientbooks.blogspot.com/2010/11/review-golden-mean-by-annabel-lyon.html

Here is another review:

http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/%E2%80%9Csomeone-new-to-love%E2%80%9D/