Category: Alexander the Great
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Alexander, Bucephalus, and Pig’s Ears in Scotland
One of the many legends of Alexander the Great comes his childhood when, at the young age of 13, he made a bet with his father that he could tame Bucephalus, a “very vicious and unmanageable” horse. Plutarch tells us how Alexander whispered to the beast and turned him toward the sun, hiding the horse’s…
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What the Hell is the Nature of Hellenistic Kingship?
Anyone reading about the Hellenistic Period—the 3 centuries between Alexander and Cleopatra’s deaths—will inevitably learn that kings (and generals) gained legitimacy through military victory. That’s just the nature of Hellenistic kingship, or leadership, or generalship. Sometimes a work will provide details, explaining that when Alexander left no heir and his generals fought over the remains of his…
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Bodies Piling up at the Battle of Issus (333 BC)
Inspired by the “Battle of the Bastards” episode from Game of Thrones, we are looking at ancient accounts of bodies piling up during battle. In the search for piles of bodies in ancient battles, the analysis of Diodorus’s account of Leuctra is disappointing for its unreliability. Worse, it likely means Diodorus’s account of Alexander the…
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Guy MacLean Rogers on Studying Alexander the Great
Every historian takes a crack at explaining why their area of expertise is important for today’s world. It is difficult to argue with Guy MacLean Rogers’s take on Alexander the Great from more than a decade ago. In less than a decade Alexander conquered the Persian empire, the largest and most successful empire in the…
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Alexander’s heroic and divine nature on my middle finger
Among the countless tourist shops in Athens, I stumbled across a jeweler who had the perfect decoration for my finger. The jeweler made a replica of a famous coin depicting Alexander the Great on one side, or so I thought. The other side depicts Zeus. After I had time to do some digging, I learned…
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How the Greeks Commemorated the Sesquicentennial of Xerxes’ Invasion
With the sesquicentennial of the American Civil War quickly approaching, it is appropriate to examine how past civilizations commemorated the 150-year anniversaries of their major conflicts. One such group was the Greeks who commemorated the sesquicentennial of Xerxes’ invasion (480 BC) to the exact year (330 BC) by sanctioning Alexander the Great (r. 336-323) to…