Alexander the Great
me falni qe nuk kam mundesi ta perkthej kete artikull ne shqip por eshte nje artikull i marr nga Guardian (UK)dhe flet per Aleksandrin e madh te Maqedonis por me nje kendeshtrim krejt dryshe nga ckemi lexuar me pare, eshte teper interesant.
Alexander the bloody brutal
In Alexander the Great: The Hunt for a New Past, Paul Cartledge exposes the Macedonian as an uncultured gangster whose genius lay in luck
Peter Preston
Sunday August 1, 2004
The Observer
Alexander the Great: The Hunt for a New Past
Paul Cartledge
Macmillan £20, pp317
The appeal, of course, is infinitely romantic. An amazingly young, amazingly brilliant warrior king conquers the world and, in myth at least, becomes godlike. Mary Renault and Valerio Massimo Manfredi write bestselling novels about him. Leonardo DiCaprio signs up to play him in yet another screen version. His victories are the serious stuff of military history. But the question lingers, sourly insistent among so much sweet adulation: was he Alexander the Great - or Alexander the Rather Appalling?
Professor Cartledge has not set out to write the companion book of the movie. His hunt for the true Alexander comes in essay form, taking the episodes and liaisons that made one great life and using them to pin down a giant shadow. It's a revealing, often enthralling search. You can't travel the globe much without finding the trail of Alexander: from Macedonia to the Hindu Kush, he went where no Greek had ever gone before and, as Cartledge says, created the Hellenised Middle East that essentially thereafter became the Eastern Roman Empire where Christianity first put down roots.
The ironies and complexities proliferate. But the biggest to emerge from Cartledge's analyses seems almost incidental. The governance of this ancient world was not, in any true sense, ancient: indeed, recognition sparks with every comparison. What else was the Macedonian monarchy - first Philip, then his son - but an autocracy, a dictatorship, a military dictatorship? The 'Companionate' (or inner circle) of the army chose him - its commander-in-chief - in secret, the wider army ran his treason trials and could have their 'justice' swayed by his known desires. Think Halliburton plus Guantánamo Bay. And as for Darius III and the Persian Empire, with an honours system to make Buckingham Palace weep and corrupt satrap states supervising the conquests, then parallels abound. This isn't any sort of past. This is politics as usual - so let's judge Alexander by the usual standards.
He was unnaturally ruthless, even psychotic, from the start. He may well have had his father assassinated. He assuredly bumped off a formidable array of erstwhile friends and possible rivals. Brutality marched with him every step of the journey. He could have saved the glory that was Thebes; instead, he burnt it to the ground and slaughtered its inhabitants. There was no mercy on display when he captured fellow Greeks who had fought against him. The Indus was yet another river of blood.
Alexander ruled by fear and intimidation. He may have left a few quasi-democratic satraps behind on his headlong march, but that was realpolitik not conviction. Left to himself he would always put his foes to the sword. Some of his biographers have seen a touch of Napoleon or Hitler in his make-up, but put that the other way round. Add a spoonful of Saddam, a thimbleful of Milosevic, a pinch of George W; let the rancid stew boil merrily. He was an appalling human being. The lust for conquest seemed insatiable. The art of compromise was lost on him. Diplomacy, at best, involved marrying the daughter of some hapless monarch and adding her to his collection. My old chemistry teacher used to lecture us lads about the virtue of having 31 ties, one for every day of the month, so they never wore out. Alexander kept 365 women in his harem but never stood in any danger of wearing any of them out; he preferred boys anyway.
There is, in short, very little to be said for him. Unreasoning ambition drove him on, but he left nothing by way of philosophy behind him. The spread of the Greek way owed nothing to Alexander. He defeated the Athenians and rolled them into his tatty domain. He was a gangster, a hoodlum, a thug: much less creative than his dad.
Why talk of greatness, then? Because (on the spinmeister front) he had Aristotle for a personal tutor, lustre if not wisdom conferred. And, of course, because he was a military genius. Cartledge is clear-eyed here. It was Philip again, not his son, who built the magnificent Macedonian cavalry which stood at the heart of so many of Alexander's triumphs. Luck, moreover, followed him for 12 of his 13 glory years. To have the world's finest army and finest commanders, with luck holding the line until his own troops themselves grew sated by victory, was a very heaven of generalship. But his energy, his organisation, his resource still invite only awe. Give him a few WMDs and we could all have raised a white flag.
Are there other interpretations to be drawn from this restless, exhilarating book? Naturally. Alexander moves so fast, destroying so much evidence behind him, that you can really build your own biography from these pages. But it's still a gripping performance. Maybe Napoleon got it wrong when he said, of Alexander: 'To conquer is nothing, one must profit from one's success.' Maybe conquest, in itself, was the profit. But the enigma - and the legend - live.
me falni qe nuk kam mundesi ta perkthej kete artikull ne shqip por eshte nje artikull i marr nga Guardian (UK)dhe flet per Aleksandrin e madh te Maqedonis por me nje kendeshtrim krejt dryshe nga ckemi lexuar me pare, eshte teper interesant.
Alexander the bloody brutal
In Alexander the Great: The Hunt for a New Past, Paul Cartledge exposes the Macedonian as an uncultured gangster whose genius lay in luck
Peter Preston
Sunday August 1, 2004
The Observer
Alexander the Great: The Hunt for a New Past
Paul Cartledge
Macmillan £20, pp317
The appeal, of course, is infinitely romantic. An amazingly young, amazingly brilliant warrior king conquers the world and, in myth at least, becomes godlike. Mary Renault and Valerio Massimo Manfredi write bestselling novels about him. Leonardo DiCaprio signs up to play him in yet another screen version. His victories are the serious stuff of military history. But the question lingers, sourly insistent among so much sweet adulation: was he Alexander the Great - or Alexander the Rather Appalling?
Professor Cartledge has not set out to write the companion book of the movie. His hunt for the true Alexander comes in essay form, taking the episodes and liaisons that made one great life and using them to pin down a giant shadow. It's a revealing, often enthralling search. You can't travel the globe much without finding the trail of Alexander: from Macedonia to the Hindu Kush, he went where no Greek had ever gone before and, as Cartledge says, created the Hellenised Middle East that essentially thereafter became the Eastern Roman Empire where Christianity first put down roots.
The ironies and complexities proliferate. But the biggest to emerge from Cartledge's analyses seems almost incidental. The governance of this ancient world was not, in any true sense, ancient: indeed, recognition sparks with every comparison. What else was the Macedonian monarchy - first Philip, then his son - but an autocracy, a dictatorship, a military dictatorship? The 'Companionate' (or inner circle) of the army chose him - its commander-in-chief - in secret, the wider army ran his treason trials and could have their 'justice' swayed by his known desires. Think Halliburton plus Guantánamo Bay. And as for Darius III and the Persian Empire, with an honours system to make Buckingham Palace weep and corrupt satrap states supervising the conquests, then parallels abound. This isn't any sort of past. This is politics as usual - so let's judge Alexander by the usual standards.
He was unnaturally ruthless, even psychotic, from the start. He may well have had his father assassinated. He assuredly bumped off a formidable array of erstwhile friends and possible rivals. Brutality marched with him every step of the journey. He could have saved the glory that was Thebes; instead, he burnt it to the ground and slaughtered its inhabitants. There was no mercy on display when he captured fellow Greeks who had fought against him. The Indus was yet another river of blood.
Alexander ruled by fear and intimidation. He may have left a few quasi-democratic satraps behind on his headlong march, but that was realpolitik not conviction. Left to himself he would always put his foes to the sword. Some of his biographers have seen a touch of Napoleon or Hitler in his make-up, but put that the other way round. Add a spoonful of Saddam, a thimbleful of Milosevic, a pinch of George W; let the rancid stew boil merrily. He was an appalling human being. The lust for conquest seemed insatiable. The art of compromise was lost on him. Diplomacy, at best, involved marrying the daughter of some hapless monarch and adding her to his collection. My old chemistry teacher used to lecture us lads about the virtue of having 31 ties, one for every day of the month, so they never wore out. Alexander kept 365 women in his harem but never stood in any danger of wearing any of them out; he preferred boys anyway.
There is, in short, very little to be said for him. Unreasoning ambition drove him on, but he left nothing by way of philosophy behind him. The spread of the Greek way owed nothing to Alexander. He defeated the Athenians and rolled them into his tatty domain. He was a gangster, a hoodlum, a thug: much less creative than his dad.
Why talk of greatness, then? Because (on the spinmeister front) he had Aristotle for a personal tutor, lustre if not wisdom conferred. And, of course, because he was a military genius. Cartledge is clear-eyed here. It was Philip again, not his son, who built the magnificent Macedonian cavalry which stood at the heart of so many of Alexander's triumphs. Luck, moreover, followed him for 12 of his 13 glory years. To have the world's finest army and finest commanders, with luck holding the line until his own troops themselves grew sated by victory, was a very heaven of generalship. But his energy, his organisation, his resource still invite only awe. Give him a few WMDs and we could all have raised a white flag.
Are there other interpretations to be drawn from this restless, exhilarating book? Naturally. Alexander moves so fast, destroying so much evidence behind him, that you can really build your own biography from these pages. But it's still a gripping performance. Maybe Napoleon got it wrong when he said, of Alexander: 'To conquer is nothing, one must profit from one's success.' Maybe conquest, in itself, was the profit. But the enigma - and the legend - live.