(Peeters 1993)

In this book, Waldemar Heckel traces the rise and eventual fall of one of the most successful military commanders in history. In 325 BCE, Alexander and his conquering army prepared to return home, after overcoming everything in their path: armies, terrain, climate, all invariably hostile. Little did they know that within two years their beloved king would be dead and their labours seemingly wasted. Tracing the rise and eventual fall of one of the most successful military commanders in history, Heckel engagingly and with great detail shows us how Alexander earned his appellation, The Great.

*Includes pictures *Includes excerpts of ancient accounts *Includes a bibliography for further reading Over the last 2,000 years, ambitious men have dreamed of forging vast empires and attaining eternal glory in battle, but of all the conquerors who took steps toward such dreams, none were ever as successful as antiquity's first great conqueror. Leaders of the 20th century hoped to rival Napoleon's accomplishments, while Napoleon aimed to emulate the accomplishments of Julius Caesar. But Caesar himself found inspiration in Alexander the Great (356-323 BCE), the Macedonian king who managed to stretch an empire from Greece to the Himalayas in Asia by the age of 30. It took less than 15 years for Alexander to conquer much of the known world. After he had finished off the Persian Empire, Alexander must have been glad to leave Persia and its adjoining provinces at his back. Alexander was planning to march onwards, into India, and had made overtures to the wild tribesmen that inhabited the region that is now Pakistan, but he had been abruptly refused. The chieftains of the hill clans who guarded the passes of the mighty Hindu Kush mountains were determined to make a fight of it, secure in the knowledge that the high passes of their domains were virtually unconquerable. Alexander, never one to accept defiance, made his preparations and, in midwinter, a season traditionally reserved for rearmament and regrouping, he began his campaign. The Aspasioi, the Guraeans and the Assakenoi, inhabitants of the rocky valleys of north-western Pakistan, all opposed him, so Alexander destroyed their fortresses one by one, determined to extinguish them. The hill clans were fierce fighters, and each fortress, small though they generally were, was only carried by storm after days of vicious fighting which resulted in grievous losses among the Macedonian ranks. To give an idea of the brutality of this conflict, Alexander himself was seriously wounded twice during two separate sieges, taking a javelin through the shoulder fighting the Aspasioi and then a spear-thrust to the ankle in the assault against the Assakenoi fortress of Massaga. His reprisal was fierce: every fortress of the hill clans that did not surrender him was razed to the ground, and its inhabitants put to the sword, to the last man. Despite the war-weariness of his veterans and many of his generals, after having vanquished the hill tribes Alexander pressed south and east into the Punjab. There he clashed with the most powerful enemy he had encountered since he had vanquished Darius at Gaugamela, the great Indian ruler Rajah Porus, whose domains included virtually the whole Punjab and who commanded an army tens of thousands strong. Alexander's force came face to face with Porus's army at the Hydaspes River, in 326 BCE Despite Porus's strong defensive position, Alexander succeeded in forcing a crossing. When Porus threw forward his war elephants, the shock element of his force, Alexander's indomitable phalanx proved equal to the task: his men had faced war elephants before, and instead of bracing to resist their charge they opened their ranks, letting the beasts charge through, then encircled them and brought them and their riders down with their pikes. The phalanx then made short work of the lightly armoured Indian infantry, while Alexander's Companion Cavalry and allied horsemen drove the enemy skirmishers and horsemen from the field. Porus was captured still trying to fight, and Alexander was so impressed with his bravery that he made him governor of his previous kingdom, even going so far as to grant him additional lands. Alexander the Great in India: The History and Legacy of the Macedonian King's Final Campaign chronicles the push east into India, the fighting that took place, and the ramifications of Alexander's last campaign.

This book tells us that Alexander of Macedon was not great. He was not undefeated. He was defeated repeatedly in present-day Afghanistan and Pakistan. He and his mercenaries ran away to save their lives after a series of crushing defeats. These defeats in battles sapped his and his Macedonian army's desire to fight. He came to conquer the lands of present-day Afghanistan, Pakistan and India. His armies were devastated by the independent republican and princely tribes and cities who resisted him. He was unable to advance any further and chose to escape with his life and the lives of the remaining Macedonians who did not wish to die in distant lands. The city of Multan, in present-day southern Punjab, Pakistan, should take pride in the fact that it killed Alexander the Macedonian aka Alexander the Great, who was not able to fight again, after his mortal injury that crippled and ended his fighting career. The Mallis (also called Mullhis) should also take pride in that they were the ones who killed one of the greatest megalomaniacs of history.

Reissued to coincide with the release of Oliver Stone's epic movie on Alexander the Great (slated for fall 2004) and the Summer Olympics in Greece, Lewis Cummings's comprehensive and readable biography of Alexander the Great gives us the full portrait of this brilliant and tyrannical leader. A sagacious ruler and a volatile, often violent commander, a sensuous youth and a paradigm of chastity, Alexander the Great of Macedonia remains one of the most fascinating and contradictory figures in world history. Son of King Philip and the tempestuous Queen Olympia, educated by Aristotle himself, a swift succession of military victories gave him an empire that extended from Greece to India. From his first conquest in northern Greece at the age of sixteen, to a swift succession of victories over Macedonia, Egypt, Persia, and Asia, Alexander possessed almost inhuman energy and hubris that defied Zeus himself, until his death at the age of thirty-two. Alexander the Great is an epic history of a man who became one of the most heralded rulers and despised geniuses of all time.

The Alexander Romance is a difficult text to define and to assess justly. From its earliest days it was an open text, which was adapted into a variety of cultures with meanings that themselves vary, and yet seem to carry a strong undercurrent of homogeneity: Alexander is the hero who cannot become a god, and who encapsulates the desires and strivings of the host cultures. The papers assembled in this volume, which were originally presented at a conference at the University of Wroc?aw, Poland, in October 2015, all face the challenge of defining the Alexander Romance. Some focus on quite specific topics while others address more overarching themes. They form a cohesive set of approaches to the delicate positioning of the text between history and literature. From its earliest elements in Hellenistic Egypt, to its latest reworkings in the Byzantine and Islamic Middle East, the Alexander Romance shows itself to be a work that steadily engages with such questions as kingship, the limits of human (and Greek) nature, and the purpose of history. The Romance began as a history, but only by becoming literature could it achieve such a deep penetration of east and west.