Alexander the Great in Fact and Fiction. - Review - book review

Contemporary Review, Feb, 2001

Alexander the Great in Fact and Fiction. A. B. Bosworth and E. J. Baynham, editors. Oxford University Press. [pound]35.00. 370 pages. ISBN 0-19-815287-6. This collection of eleven essays (if one includes the introduction) originated in a symposium on Alexander the Great held in Australia in 1997 and paid for by the Australian Research Council.

(This is a wonderful and heart-warming testimony to Australians' love of Classical Greece.) The popularity of the great Macedonian has never flagged and this collection of essays seeks to analyse the myth of Alexander and to answer why his enduring fascination shows no sign of waning. There are essays on conspiracies, Alexander and Panhellenism, Alexander's influence in Asia, Ptolemy, 'artifice and Alexander history', on Alexander in historical writing and on 'originality and its limits in the Alexander sources of the early empire'. There is also a fascinating essay by Prof Bosworth in which he compares Alexander to Cortes, and Alexander's conquests to those of the Span iard in South America. For those whose interest in Alexander have been stirred, as well as for students of the period, this collection must become compulsory reading.