Philip and Alexander: Kings and Conquerors
By Adrian Goldsworthy
Basic Books, 2020

The contrast between King Philip of Macedon - big, grizzled, burly, one-eyed, battle-scarred, and most importantly middle-aged - and his son Alexander the Great - young, aromatic, intuitive, quick, and most of all dreamy - has always been so pointed, so perfect, as to be intensely suspicious. As historian Adrian Goldsworthy points out in his new book Philip and Alexander: Kings and Conquerors, Alexander wasn’t formally or informally titled “the Great” until much later in Roman times, and it would be easy to go further: given the hand-me-down nature of our five principal sources for Alexander, there’s an open question as to whether much of anything we think we know about Alexander is verifiably true. 

Given how seldom those biographers resist the call of a rattling good yarn, given the temptations of neatened mythological narratives, anything even remotely resembling dramatic artistry should probably be rejected out of hand. This was true even in Alexander’s own lifetime (his treasured stories about being divinely born), and it’s even more intensely true when subjected to the storytelling pressures of ensuing centuries. 

The foundational example is that too-good-to-be-true contrast between father and son. Philip came to power in a Macedonian royal arena awash in internecine bloodletting, and largely through force of personality he re-fashioned the local armies into a remarkably disciplined fighting force just waiting to be unleashed on an unsuspecting world. By the time his son (by his charismatic, demanding wife Olympias) Alexander had reached young adulthood, Philip had paid the price for his warlike years: he was older, slower, scarred, and one-eyed, the perfect visual counterpart to his gorgeous son. 

Goldsworthy notes the contrast right away in his book:

Alexander has done much to shape the Western image of the youthful hero: small, fair-haired, pale-eyed, and boyish, he was unconventional, impatient, swaggeringly confident, always proven right when he defied the wisdom of his elders, and a man who fought in a way that was as clever as it was ferocious. Leading from the front, he won more victories than any fictional hero, in a spectacular “live fast, die young” career that briefly made him master of much of the known world.

“When Philip is remembered,” he goes on, “it is as part of Alexander’s story, the old man too drunk to cross the floor when he lost his temper with his son. One-eyed and limping from his many wounds, he can seem worn out and little more than an obstacle to his dazzlingly talented child.”

He can certainly seem that way when he’s portrayed that way by biographers. Goldsworthy is a first-rate popular historian of the ancient world - his 2006 biography of Julius Caesar could scarcely be improved as a general-purpose introduction to the subject - but he’s only as good as his primary sources, and in this case that’s a significant limitation. Even in the last twenty years alone, a score of conscientious and sometimes crusading biographies of Philip have appeared, each one attempting to rescue him and his accomplishments from the glare of his son’s renown. 

They’re doomed to failure, of course, because we’re dealing with stories here, and Alexander has by far the better story. Goldsworthy’s book is nearly 600 pages long, and Philip takes a knife between his ribs before page 200. 

The two narratives here - Philip’s, full of wives, concubines (of both genders), and militaristic bluster, and Alexander’s, full of dramatic leadership, epic set-piece battles, and a wide swath of the ancient world - can never be made to mesh well, since Alexander’s doesn’t properly start until Philip’s ends. Goldsworthy does as good a job as can be done, although he’s curiously ineffective at one of his main stated aims: the book very memorably belongs to Alexander. As an Alexander biography, it’s lean and very good; as a study of Philip, it feels as strained and perfunctory as all those other studies of Philip. Studies of careful preparation can be interesting, but when the end sequel to that careful preparation is Alexander the Great, even a saint is going to be impatiently fidgeting for the conquest of Persia to begin. 

And then there’s the hand-off of those two narratives. Philip came of age in a world where fratricide, matricide, and especially patricide were as common as wine at breakfast, and yet it’s remarkable how many historians over the centuries have simply walked away from the very idea that Alexander may have come of age in the same world. Instead, his brutish, sybaritic father is killed by a spurned lover and Alexander, wide-eyed and smelling of hyacinth, steps gently into his kingship. 

Goldsworthy is gentlemanly when it comes to contemplating the obvious alternate narrative. In this case, counterintuitively, he faults an abundance of documentation:

If our sources for this were as meager as those for the violent deaths of earlier Argead kings, then Olympias as a woman would probably not be mentioned at all, and historians would simply assume that as the beneficiary, Alexander or those close to him were responsible. Having more information robs us of such simple — and justified — certainty, but denies us any clear answer. Alexander may have been involved in Philp’s murder, or he have have been wholly innocent. 

The king-father of a militarily capable and impatient young prince is assassinated by an eminently buyable nobody who’s then immediately killed at the scene, leaving the prince to inherit kingdom, treasury, and army without any opposition (and then, in a detail most historians downplay, conducts a fairly thorough culling of all other likely claimants to the throne) - if that prince was “wholly innocent,” he’d have been the only such prince in the whole sorry history of humanity to be so. Any book called Philip and Alexander will always more accurately be called Philip vs Alexander.

Goldsworthy’s book is inescapably that book, but he brings a careful, often insightful balance to the familiar stories. His Alexander is far more compelling than his Philip, and though the one-eyed old ghost may rage at that, there’s no helping it. 

—Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The American Conservative. He writes regularly for The National, The Vineyard Gazette, and The Christian Science Monitor. His website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.