Alexander the Great's Legacy

"The depictions of the battles represent the best parts of the book, as the author succeeds in making the dynamic and intensity of the fighting tangible." -Bryn Mawr Classical Review Why was it that 2400 years ago the people who had recently conquered the world were unable to stop barbarian Galatians from looting the tombs of their revered royal line? Why was it that the Macedonian state virtually created by Philip II and taken to the heights of epochal triumph by his son Alexander the Great had, hardly two generations after his death, became a weaker entity than it had been when the young conqueror had crossed the Hellespont? This was a period during which Cassander and Lysimachus had seemed about to construct durable Europe-based polities and had seen the likes of Demetrius Poliorcetes and Pyrrhus of Epirus battling and besieging across Macedonia, Thrace and Greece. The story that unfolds here explores how both the unique character and the particular legacy left when Alexander died at Babylon in 323, at the romantically youthful age of thirty-two, ensured that his homeland failed to gain the kind of imperial dividend that accrued to others of the world's great Empires. For Macedon there was not the thousand years of glory that was the extraordinary destiny of the Romans, nor even the two hundred years of Persian primacy, only fifty or so years of strife and trauma ending in a Galatian deluge that threatened the sacred site at Delphi and had remarkable parallels to the earlier Persian invasions of the Greek world that Alexander had claimed to avenge.