" ...he was one of the most extraordinary individuals to have ever walked the earth. He above all others deserves to be called, "the Great'."

Alexander the Great by Paul Cartledge

Cambridge classicist Paul Cartledge has the rarest of talents among professional historians - the ability to write books that simultaneously appeal to academics and popular audiences alike. Alexander the Great has his trademark "concise depth" that Cartledge also brought to bear in The Spartans and later to Thermopylae: The Battle That Changed the World; there is enough historiographic "meat" for the scholar and the casual student of history or of war will enjoy Cartledge's depiction of Alexander as a "ruthless pragmatist", engaging in calculated gestures of epic magnaminity and brutal murder of his closest comrades in arms with equal certitude. One who, despite his mysticism and growing tyranny, had imperial ambitions that "....can symbolize peaceful, multi-ethnic coexistence".



Cartledge, despite the above quotation, is not an Alexander-worshipper but a realist or a mild skeptic, rejecting hyperbole and hidden agendas in the ancient sources, which he discusses in detail, along with the more extreme portraits painted of Alexander by modern historians, such as "...the titantic and Fuhrer-like Alexander of Fritz Schachmeyer". Cartledge's Alexander is a military genius and an inspirational visionary to be sure, but his icy ruthlessness of calculated murder of potential opponents and superannuated followers like Callisthenes or Parmenion is never far away. Cartledge uses the term "purges" several times in the text and it is appropriate; Alexander, with his suspicions aroused, had the same irrevocable instinct for savage reprisal as did Joseph Stalin. Alexander running through Cleitus the Black with a spear in the midst of a banquet, a man who had saved Alexander's life, or who ordered the destruction of Thebes was the same Alexander who honored the religions and customs of his conquered subjects and tried to build his Overlordship of Asia on a fusion of Pan-Hellenism and ancient Persia:

"Alexander's importation and integration of oriental troops into the Macedonian army was a crucial and controversial issue. by the end of 328 he had units of Sogdian and bactrian cavalry, so presumably he was drawing also upon the excellent cavalry of western and central Iran. In 327 he recruited more than thirty thousand young Iranians. Since Greek was to be the lingua franca of the new Empire, replacing the use of the Achaemenids use of Aramaic, he arranged for them to be taught the Greek language as well as the demonstrably supeior Macedonian infantry tactics. when they arrived at Susa in 324, he hailed them as ' successors' - to the Macedonian soldiers understandable consternation" [ 204 ]

Cartledge discusses Alexander's generalship and his abilities as an adaptive military innovator, building on a his father Philip's original military reforms or improvising when faced with unexpected difficulties at river crossing or in siege warfare. He misses though an opportunity to explain the dreadful effectiveness in Alexander's hands of the Macedonian phalanx, a more heavily armed, lightly armored, mobile and deadly version of the original Greek Hoplite formation. While Alexander and his cavalry garnered most of the glory, the ordinary Macedonian phalanx cut through Persian ranks like an implacable meat grinder, mowing down enormous numbers of the enemy and trodding their dead and dying bodies underfoot. Understandably though, this is a biography of Alexander and not a history of his wars but the real scale of the slaughter Alexander inflicted is given far less attention than the skill with which he inflicted it, or his political and religious policies that came in their wake.

Alexander's religious sentiments and his mysticism, which spilled over in to his political vision for Asia and for himself as a semi-divine ruler are given much consideration by Cartledge, ranging from his at a distance dealings with subject state Athens, to his "contracting" a relationship with the Egyptian god Ammon, to his ideation with Achilles as a model for himself. There appears to have been something of a feedback loop between Alexander's military acheivments, which were truly superhuman, and his growing religious superstitions, both of which fed a kind of megalomania according to Cartledge, and led to Alexander's unsuccessful demand that his Greek and Macedonian soldiers adopt proskynesis in the Persian style. A more or less blasphemous act of hubris ( though not quite absolutely, as Cartledge explains, given the precedent of the deification of Lysander) that led to a break between Alexander and his most loyal followers. This craving for divinity later was expanded posthumously to fabulous extremes in the traditions of the Alexander Romance, where Alexander the Great becomes a symbolic and heavily mythologized figure for dozens of peoples and regimes. Alexander himself began cultivating the myths.

Cartledge has done an excellent job demystifying one of the archetypal figures of Western history, the man whom other would-be world conquerors had to measure themselves against - reportedly, Julius Caesar wept in despair because Alexander's glory was beyond his reach. He has also brought out the extent to which Alexander saw himself not as a Westerner, or a Hellene, but as a bridge to the East, a synthesizer of civilizations.

Labels: Academic history, Alexander the Great, books, History, Intellectuals, military history, Popular history

Via Ralph Luker, I note a new effort to clarify the liberating role of history, and the importance, conversely, of liberating history from legislated truths. The new appeal says, in part [emphasis added]:

History must not be a slave to contemporary politics nor can it be written on the command of competing memories. In a free state, no political authority has the right to define historical truth and to restrain the freedom of the historian with the threat of penal sanctions.
...

We ask government authorities to recognize that, while they are responsible for the maintenance of the collective memory, they must not establish, by law and for the past, an official truth whose legal application can carry serious consequences for the profession of history and for intellectual liberty in general.
In a democracy, liberty for history is liberty for all.

I would add, in the list of dangers to history from state attention, the creation of national curriculums of such detail and narrow conception as to force primary and secondary school history into memorization exercises, stripping them of the inquisitive and argumentative joy that real history offers.

Labels: Academic history, Ahistoricality, Education, freedom of speech

Previously, Jeremy Young, our primus inter pares, called for a symposium on the question of what is a historian:

The argument we're (not quite) having here -- and to which Adam
Hochschild in Historically Speaking makes another important
contribution -- concerns a series of rich and timeless questions: what exactly is a historian? Should the term be applied only to those who possess doctoral degrees and publishing histories, or are historians a more broad and multifaceted group? Is everyone a historian, as Carl Becker famously argued? And assuming we can define the "wheat" and the "chaff," what separates the two? What does the "trained" historian have to offer that the "amateur" does not, or vice versa?

Good questions all. Let me start with what historians are not.

Historians are not theorists, though they may entertain certain theories in the course of interpreting an event they do not begin with answers as does a theorist but with questions. Questions they try to answer with research and evidence because history, while not a science, is an empirical discipline. Historians are not poets, they do not aim to create sweeping, romantic, myths, though like anyone else, historians admire mythic ideals but their task is to reveal where reality may have fallen short. Historians are not social scientists, though they sometimes borrow their tools; nor are they economists constructing abstract models hoping to predict events. A historian who tries to predict what will happen based upon the past is engaging in futurism, a very different and more difficult art.

None of this is meant to disparage political scientists, poets, economists, sociologists, anthropologists, authors of historical fiction or futurists. They all do worthy and interesting things, it's just that their work cannot properly be called "history". A historian is someone who tries to cogently explain what really happened, based upon the best evidence available; amateur or professional status matters less than skill, persistence and intellectual integrity in pursuing this task.


Historians have a varied set of skills. They are researchers, at times, detectives. They must consume and accurately recall vast amounts of historigraphical literature. Historians must think analytically foremost but also intuitively and sometimes, toward a synthesis. They must communicate clearly with the spoken and written word; and they must be teachers, literally in a classroom or in the larger sense of writing history to educate society. Few historians excel equally well at all of these different aspects but most good historians are strong or even exemplary in many of them.

In regard to the respective virtues of professional vs. "amateur" or "popular" historians ( many popular historians are or were also academics - Howard Zinn, Stephen Ambrose, Niall Ferguson and so on) it is important to recognize that they write for different audiences. Popular or amateur historians write for the intelligent reading public while academic historians write primarily for other academic historians. This is not a slam on profesional scholars but a recognition of differences in scope, scale and level of historical knowledge between the two groups of readers.

The public is not well prepared to handle or comment upon historical monographs of an esoteric or technical nature, only other specialists can do that. Nor are historians who have spent most of their career in a very rarefied subfield - say researching currency fluctuations in the Spanish Netherlands during the early modern period or Women's social status in the Caribbean during the late Colonial era - well positioned to write a panoramic history of Western civilization, of the history of technology or similarly big picture subjects desired by the layman who wants to "read some history". At least not without a major time investment.

The relationship between academic and popular/amateur historians is an interdependent one; the former are usually creating the monographic bricks with which the latter build their sweeping and entertaining literary edifices while popular historians "hook" readers into studying history more deeply - perhaps deeply enough to become a professional historian! One is not "better" than the other, simply different with distinct objectives.

The door of history is open to anyone - you simply need to walk through it.

Labels: Academic history, History, Jeremy Young, Mark Safranski, Popular history, Symposium