Overview

Alexander the Great changed the world that he knew--but how he did it, and how much of his story is truth and how much is invented, is hard to tell. One of our most important sources for his achievements and personality is Plutarch's Life of Alexander, and this is the first detailed commentary in English for over fifty years, along with a thorough introduction and translation. It is a sister volume to the author's 2011 edition (also in the Clarendon Ancient History Series) of Plutarch's Caesar, the Life paired with Alexander in Plutarch's series of Parallel Lives. The life of Alexander the Great was clouded in legend from his own lifetime, not least because Alexander himself curated his image with such care. Disentangling the truth is not an easy task, especially because our surviving narratives, including Plutarch's, all date from centuries later under the Roman empire. Plutarch's Life of Alexander is especially important for Alexander's early years, but for his later achievements too it often supplements or corrects our other accounts; it is also a considerable literary achievement, as Plutarch produces a memorable picture of a brilliant soldier, full of spirit and ambition, gradually coarsened by his own successes and his suspicions of his friends until his final months at Babylon in a court full of superstition, terror, and dread. Plutarch had to navigate his way through an unusually vast stock of material to produce this portrait. This commentary discusses those literary techniques in detail as well as providing a thorough investigation of the historical issues that Plutarch's narrative raises.

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9780192865182

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Reviews

P.'s book is a tremendous achievement of deep scholarship. Serious students of Alexander will find themselves constantly referring to it. In repeatedly bringing out the possibilities open to Plutarch as he made his compositional choices, P. leaves this reader more aware than ever that the study of Alexander scarcely counts as historiography in the modern sense. It is literary history in all its baffling, and often insoluble, complexity. * Antony Spawforth, Classics for All *

Author Information

Christopher Pelling was Regius Professor of Greek at the University of Oxford and Student of Christ Church from 2003 to 2015; before that he was Fellow and Praelector in Classics at University College, Oxford from 1975 to 2003. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, a Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales, and an Honorary Fellow of University College, Oxford.

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