ALEXANDER THE GREAT: The Death of a God
by Paul Doherty
Constable £17.99 pp225

ALEXANDER THE GREAT: Murder in Babylon
by Graham Phillips
Virgin £20 pp277

Alexander the Great, the only man in history to have been eulogised by both the Prophet Muhammed and Oliver Stone, is the ancient world’s ultimate pin-up. Not even Colin Farrell’s blond highlights in Stone’s forthcoming film can entirely dim the enduring glow of his charisma. King of Macedon at the age of 20, king of pretty much everywhere a decade later, Alexander then set the seal on his glamour-boy image by dying flamboyantly young, mourning, as he expired, that there were no fresh worlds for him to conquer. How could any biographer go wrong with a subject such as this?

In fact, as the chorus of raspberries that has greeted Stone’s film in America suggests, Alexander’s career is not nearly as simple to popularise as might at first appear. That perennial bugbear of the ancient historian, the inadequacies and ambiguities of the sources, haunts every attempt to resurrect the great conqueror. The earliest surviving biography was not written until some three centuries after the events it describes, with the result that anyone hoping to write a biography today must first negotiate a quagmire of rival traditions and myths. While the basic outline of Alexander’s life may not be in dispute, the interpretation of it certainly is. Was he a visionary multi-culturalist, or a deranged killer — or both? Was he murdered? Was he gay? Rather like the animatronic dinosaurs in the Natural History Museum, any life of Alexander must ultimately depend for its accuracy upon the tireless sifting of fossils and scattered fragments.

Which is why, no doubt, the most readable biographies have invariably been works of great scholarship as well. Robin Lane Fox and Peter Green, both writing in the early 1970s, demonstrated with their lives of Alexander that it was entirely possible for prodigious learning to be couched in a readable and accessible style; and now, with his own biography, Paul Cartledge demonstrates it once again.

Much has happened in the field of Alexander studies since Lane Fox and Green wrote, and Cartledge, as one would expect of the professor of Greek history at Cambridge, has an exemplary grasp of recent developments in the field. Indeed, his subtitle, The Hunt for a New Past, alludes in part to the most dramatic of recent discoveries, the opening, in Macedonia, of two intact royal tombs: since one of these was almost certainly that of Philip, Alexander’s father, it seems likely that the wall painting inside the tomb of a young prince hunting with a king is a portrait of the young Alexander himself. Certainly, it is the hunt that provides Cartledge with the controlling metaphor for his book.

His Alexander is a supreme carnivore: like a tiger or a great white shark, he is deadly, predatory and beautiful. Of course, Cartledge too, in his own way, is a hunter. Wonderful though the dinosaurs at the Natural History Museum are, so is the Darwin Centre, where the public can go behind the scenes, and watch scientists at work: Cartledge’s biography, postmodern in the best sense, provides a similar pleasure. Scholarship, particularly in comparison to world conquest, may not appear the most glamorous of pursuits, yet it too has its thrills, and Cartledge conveys them with wit and passion. Even as we get the high drama of Alexander’s career, all the battles, the bloodshed and the bisexuality, so also are we shown just how we get it, by what strange and tortuous routes. The result is thrilling: a book that combines the excitements of a soaring historical narrative with those of a subtle and deeply intriguing detective tale.

Nor is Cartledge the only sleuth on the conqueror’s trail. Two other historians, Paul Doherty and Graham Phillips, have set out to solve a specific mystery: what — or, since neither has any doubt that poison was to blame — who killed Alexander? The likelihood that the evidence, at this remove, is simply too patchy for anyone to play Hercule Poirot is dismissed out of hand: to have done otherwise, after all, would have been to ruin the premise of what are both, in their different ways, racy and entertaining books. Doherty, despite over-hyping the evidence against his prime suspect, has used his investigation as a peg on which to hang a thoroughly convincing portrait of Alexander as “a ruthless, ambitious, self-centred prig”, and his court as a terrifying snakepit. Phillips, so cavalier with his facts that he can date the building of the Colosseum to the reign of Augustus, is less bound by the tedious details of what actually happened — to the detriment of his credibility as a classicist, perhaps, but to the immense improvement of his plot.

Eight suspects, veering from the possible to the wildly improbable, are presented to us in turn: needless to say, when Phillips does finally finger the murderer, it is, in the best tradition of Agatha Christie, the most implausible of the lot. Interestingly, the man Doherty believes was responsible for killing Alexander does not even make Phillips’s initial list of suspects. Neither does Oliver Stone.

It is, of course, a problem for all these authors that bandwagons can sometimes end up hitched to turkeys. Flop though Stone’s film appears to be, it would be a great shame if these three books were to be dragged down to oblivion as well. Cartledge’s biography deserves to be read by anyone interested in the ancient world, while even Phillips is never less than page-turning. Can Alexander really be dead? Even today, we are told by Cartledge, Greek sailors are sometimes confronted by a sea nymph who will ask them this very question. Only one answer, it appears, is acceptable: “Great Alexander lives and reigns.” We shall have to see.

GAY ICON

Oliver Stone’s film has revived debate about whether Alexander, above on a coin from 323BC, was bisexual. Remarkably, the issue almost ended up in court when a group of Greek lawyers threatened to sue Stone over the suggestion that the ancient leader was less than 100% heterosexual. The subject hasn’t gone down too well in America, either, where Christians considering seeing the film were urged to “speak to your pastors immediately because Satan is attempting to enter your mind”.

Available at the Books First price of £15.19 (Cartledge), £14.39 (Doherty) and £16 plus £2.25 p&p on 0870 165 8585

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