Alexander at the End of the World by Rachel Kousser
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Alexander at the End of the World:
The Forgotten Final Years of Alexander the Great
By Rachel Kousser
Mariner Books 2024
As Rachel Kousser makes clear right from the outset of her fascinating new book, Alexander the Great was a battlefield warrior for the whole of his life, from his early teenage years to his death in 323 BC at the age of 32. The concentration of Kousser’s book, Alexander at the End of the World: The Forgotten Final Years of Alexander the Great, is the end of that long fighting life, the seven years between the young warlord’s conquest of Persia and his death in Babylon. We must not snicker at the subtitle, since authors sometimes don’t write them; there’s nothing ‘forgotten’ here, since every single bowl of gheymeh Alexander ever slurped during those years has been the subject of multi-volume studies over the last 2000 years. Rather, the point should be this book itself, which is the liveliest and most richly researched study of this period of Alexander’s life to hit the mainstream market in well over a generation.
Kousser is the Chair of the Classics Department at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center and also a professor of ancient art and archeology at Brooklyn College, and her book has over 60 pages of End Notes, over 20 pages of Bibliography, and all the ancient-source translations in the book are the author’s own. It’s certainly a kind of comment on the 21st century that very, very few books with this kind of critical apparatus manage to sluice their way to the mainstream press, but it’s nonetheless a cause for celebration that this one appeared.
Certainly these years are not the ones that typically come to mind when Alexander’s story is told. Far more cinematically satisfying is his meteoric, dismantling drive across the sprawling Persian empire of Darius III. This later story gives us a crucially different Alexander, a young man who’s become cosmopolitan enough to be increasingly alien to his own people, a young general increasingly leading a polyglot army of Macedonians, Greeks, Scythians, Batrians, and a loose coalition of South Asians who’d been mostly fighting each other for centuries before they stood in harness together for Alexander. Levies from home had been thinning for years, and the conqueror’s oldest veterans were seeing more and more clearly that he had no real intention ever to return to his provincial roots, arguing over farm fences in Pella after he’d seen the splendors of Babylon.
Kousser is consistently sensitive to this state of uneasy flux in the piecemeal army and its leader. “Alexander’s story is not, as so often, one about a charismatic leader changing the course of empire and history. Instead, it is about how the empire changed him,” she writes. “As he faced external rebellions, internal conspiracies, protests, and a brutal, unforgiving landscape, Alexander learned to think, fight, and love differently.”
In these pages, readers see that brutal, unforgiving landscape, the battles against kings and petty despots, the heavy sweep of disease and demoralization, all leading to a famous confrontation at the Beas River between Alexander and his men, who’d chosen an old Macedonian veteran named Koinos as their spokesman. They presented Alexander with an ultimatum at last: they were sick of constant warmaking and wanted to go home. Alexander raged and fulminated, pouted in his own tents, and very likely contemplated making some lightning arrests before he acknowledged the flat realities. His veterans were more than just the heart of his army; they were the core of an identity he must have worried he was losing. He eventually agreed to the demands of his men.
Historians, biographers, and even novelists tend to fall under the spell of Alexander’s charisma even after all these centuries, and there are times in Alexander at the End of the World when Kousser likewise indulges herself:
Some historians have seen Alexander’s capitulation at the Beas as an enormous setback: for the ever-victorious commander, an unquestionable, stinging defeat. Certainly it rankled. As later events would show, Alexander remembered the incident, and took care that it would not happen again. But while he was alienated from his soldiers and made an initial insensitive speech to them, the Macedonian king also managed to formulate a flexible, nonviolent response to Koinos. In an unusual, uncelebrated fashion, he showed greatness here.
This is the crucial moment in the book, and of course there’s no greatness in it. Alexander’s core of unbeatable Macedonian veterans were presenting him with a unified refusal to keep pushing east; there were too many of them for him to bully or arrest, and no way he could send them home or leave them in his rear as he pushed on with the rest of his army. “Alexander’s veterans were aging, disapproving, and insubordinate,” Kousser flatly states. “Particularly after their protest on the Beas, he knew he could not entirely trust them.”
So the conquest of the world was called off, and his veterans got their wish of turning back toward home. Some of them would make it, but of course Alexander himself wouldn’t: he’d die at Babylon.
Kousser chronicles all this so engagingly, and with such sweeping, comprehensive authority, that it not only becomes a gripping melodrama but also a thready little morality play about Alexander the Great’s most personal defeat.
Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News