Ian Worthington (1)

In this survey account of the rise and fall of the Macedonian Empire under Philip II & Alexander the Great, Worthington sets himself the problem of considering who was the superior statesman. Was it Philip, who turned a cultural & political backwater into a military powerhouse & hegemon of the Greek world. Or was it Alexander, who took the finely honed instrument that Philip had created and attempted to build an empire. Worthington tends to credit Philip with the greater achievement, in that show more whatever Alexander's exploits as a military leader he did not have the abilities as a political & diplomatic player to convert military victory into a lasting achievement.

Then again, it should be remembered that Philip was basically perfecting what it meant to be sovereign in one culture, whereas Alexander was essentially trying to transcend this. The question then becomes whether trying to become a proto-Augustus was even possible for Alexander, considering the cultural limitations that constrained a Macedonian monarch. At the very least Worthington concludes that Alexander's great mistake was learning to play the game of dynastic politics too late in the day. show less

I have yet to read the bulk of this, having started with the appendices. (Method and some issues of detail interest me more in this case.) Worthington is an impeccable scholar, of course. His review of the sources is quite good.

For what it's worth, however, I object to his short essay on the ethnicity of the Macedonians. It's not that he isn't right in at least the way he intends to mean it, but that, like many, he takes a naive approach to what "right" means. That the ancient Macedonians show more spoke Greek and were ethnically ancient Greeks—to the extent that statements like that can have meaning—is well established. But we don't have an accurate picture of what ancient ethnicity translates into on a biological level, and less as to what that means 2,400 years later. Any intelligent person would suspect it means nothing at all.

But these aren't questions of biology. Ethnic politics in the Balkans is a dangerous, high-stakes affair. Greece and its neighbors have frequently sought to deport or strip the culture from citizens who don't fit the official ideology of a ethnically and linguistically pure state. Wars have been fought over this stuff, always with high levels of historical justification in the rhetoric that leads to and sustains the war. Balkan nationalism loves "Who is an X?" questions, and not because they're intellectually stimulating. Worthington and other classics scholars who think it's just a scholarly game, and they are defending accuracy on a scholarly topic, should step back and think about how their scholarly conclusions about people 2,400 years ago will be used in the streets, at the tip of an official's pen—or at the end of a gun. show less

Was looking for a book on Phillip as it always seemed to me that what he accomplished was in many ways more impressive and complex than his more famous son. This book does a great job of telling that story in an easy to read narrative form, while giving you a great understanding of the source material.

A well-researched work of narrative history about Ptolemy I, the founder of the most long-lasting and successful of the successor kingdoms carved out of the Macedonian empire founded by Alexander. The book does an excellent job of teasing out the surprisingly scant amounts of information about Ptolemy and fleshing it out to bring the man to life. The research is top-notch, although the writing can be a bit pedestrian at times. It's well worth reading if you're at all interested in the show more aftermath of Alexander the Great's conquests. show less