Alexander the Great and the Hellenistic Age: A Short History

The book begins with the personality and achievements of Alexander the Great, and continues with the military and political violence of the successor-kingdoms that fought over his inheritance. This era saw many important developments: a shift from the oral to the written; a move from the public to the private and a new individualist ethos; a huge growth in slavery, and therefore a glut of slave-labour which destroyed the incentive to innovate; a growing gap between rich and poor; a growing taste for luxury. Praise for Peter Green's ALEXANDER OF MACEDON: "As one reads through Peter Green's enthralling life of Alexander…one feels every strand of the mythical story coming apart" (Christopher Hitchens, Los Angeles Times) "A superb character study…Like Robert Graves, Green can make the ancient world and its people come alive…The scale of Alexander's life is marvellously conveyed" (Kirkus Reviews)

He left neither structure nor formal successors. Like a glorious comet, Alexander the Great (356-323BC) crossed the sky - and died. Here, in a book for which a more fitting title would be After Alexander, Green examines his legacy. The 300 years that followed Alexander, until the battle of Actium in 31BC gave Rome world dominion, are known as the Hellenistic Age. The received view that they pall before the prior paradigm of Periclean Athens is, Green proves, a superficial and simplistic one.

Like Norman Stone among modern historians, Green is wonderfully rebarbative. This professor of classics is not afraid to take a view. He may be wrong at times, but my goodness he makes you think. “In 169 [BC] the [Roman] Senate was investigating the tax-farmers; by the end of the century, it was hand in glove with them.” And if he is iconoclastic, he is delightfully droll. Of Aristotle's hugely influential Poetics, for example, he says that although it is “no parody, at times one wishes it were”.

The prose has its moments of pretension. Never before have I seen the adjective “banausic” (meaning commonplace or artisanal) in a book. Not only does Green use it twice, he even manages “antibanausic”. Such quirks do not undo this considerable and challenging contribution to our understanding of Alexander's legacy. Evident in, among other things, the Turkish state and in hero worship, that comet burns on today.