The moment he moved on, rebellion tended to flare up behind him, and when he died-just as he himself predicted-the empire he had carved out at once split into anarchic chaos, while the next 40 years saw an indescribably savage and bloody struggle between his surviving marshals.” What he achieved of lasting value was largely unintentional: In political terms his trail-blazing activities through the Near East had a curiously ephemeral quality about them. “For 25,000 miles, Alexander had carried his trail of rapine, slaughter and subjugation. If a Hellenic Lytton Strachey had set himself to writing a major work of debunking titled “Eminent Macedonians,” this is how it would have come out. As one reads through Peter Green’s enthralling life of Alexander, commonly known as “the Great” or in Greek, Alexandros Megalos, or in some convenient Greek nationalist slang as Megalexandros, one feels every strand of the mythical story coming apart. Robert Graves once wrote a satirical poem about the Battle of Marathon (or was it Salamis?) called “The Persian Version,” in which all the best-known features of the engagement were subtly inverted to give the impression of a victory for Xerxes.
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