The Iliad, Book 2

School teachers spend their careers warning students against simply summarizing the plot of a book they've been assigned to write about. True enough. You're supposed to reflect on your book, not merely know how it's ordered. But the grandest classics are not like ordinary books. When coping with them, we still have to double check the course of action -- and often we're surprised at what we have already missed -- because to fail to do so is to go on ignorant of their complexities, and so miss the point of age-old reputations and age-old lessons. By the time we soldier through Book 24 of the Iliad ("and so the Trojans buried Hector breaker of horses") we'll hope to have processed the plot accurately enough for all the worthiest personal-and-yet-universal extracts to assert themselves.

So, Book 2.  

Zeus, having promised the sea-goddess Thetis that he would wreak some sort of havoc among the Greek (Achaean) troops outside Troy as vengeance for King Agamemnon having taken Achilles' woman away from him (Achilles is Thetis' son), -- lies awake on Olympus wondering how to accomplish this. He decides to send a dream to the king in the form of the Achaean wise man Nestor. The dream "Nestor" duly urges him to renew the war against Troy, because the gods have finally determined on Greek victory.

After he wakes, Agamemnon calls a council of his chiefs and tells them what has happened. All including Nestor agree that this dream must be trustworthy, and that now is the time for action. However, Agamemnon further decides that "according to time-honored custom" the troops should be tested before battle: he will announce to all of them that the siege of Troy has proved futile and that they should "cut and run."

When the king does this, the soldiers take him at his word and bolt for the ships. The goddess Hera is appalled and sends Athena down to stop the panic. The first man she goes to is Odysseus, who was furious at the panic to begin with. Commanded by Athena to calm the men, he ranges among them, exhorting his equals and lambasting the commoners to order. Last to be controlled is the strange,  deformed, obscenity-spewing Thersites, who finally earns a crack on the head with Odysseus' scepter and a relieved laugh from the armies.

With Athena beside him, Odysseus now speaks to the throngs and to Agamemnon. He acknowledges that the war has been long, but reminds them of the sign given to them at a sacrifice held before they sailed for Troy -- they all witnessed the omen of a snake devouring a nest of eight fledgling birds and their mother, and of the snake then being turned to stone; they all remember the explanation of this portent was that the war against Troy would last nine years, but that the city would in the end fall.

The men are cheered by this, and Nestor echoes Odysseus' encouragement. He seems briefly to allude to Achilles' absence from the scene -- "Let them rot, the one or two who hatch their plans apart from all the troops; what good can they win from that?" -- and he advises the king to marshal the men by tribes and clans so that any cowardice among them will stand out most shamefully. Agamemnon salutes Nestor for his advice,  comments briefly himself on his fight with Achilles ("imagine, I and Achilles wrangling over a girl"), and then the troops disperse to eat and make a sacrifice before battle commences.

The rest of Book 2 is a list of the legions making up the Achaean and then the Trojan army ("who were the captains of the Achaean army? Who were the kings?"). The largest Greek contingent is that from Mycenae, commanded by Agamemnon; his brother, Menelaus, leads the forces from Lacedaemon, "and his own heart blazed the most to avenge the groans and shocks of war they'd borne for Helen." Odysseus hails from Ithaca, Idomeneus from Crete. We get a glimpse of "Nireus the handsomest man who ever came to Troy," but who only commands three ships and is a lightweight. We see Achilles and his fifty ships' worth of men, out of action because of Achilles' rage at losing Briseis.

The goddess Iris now flies down from heaven to the Trojans in their assembly, demanding that the Trojan king Priam open the gates and send the army out to meet the invaders. Despite her disguise, Priam's son Hector recognizes divinity and obeys her instantly. He "breaks up the assembly," and the Trojans pour out onto the plain. They are much more quickly described, their two greatest heroes being Hector and Aeneas.

The Iliad, Book 1

Let's all make a pact, a New Year's resolution maybe, to approach the most gigantic classics a little bit at a time. By the chapter, by the "book." I've often grimly determined to do this with lots of things, with Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire for instance, whose three volumes, I think, could only be managed one paragraph at a time -- but so far I have always lost my nerve. With Gibbon, and with much more. Moby Dick, anyone?  

No more quavering. Let us at least get the rough outlines of the plot of the Iliad clear in our heads, so that we may not continue forever ignorant of a founding book of the Western world. Besides, reading it helps us decipher art.

Book one opens with sickness, and a quarrel over women.The Greek (or we should say, Achaean) army is camped outside the walls of Troy, suffering a plague sent by Apollo because the Achaean king Agamemnon has taken as a prize Chryseis, the daughter of one of Apollo's priests, and has refused to free her even for a ransom. A seer, speaking under the protection of the great warrior Achilles, reveals this publicly. Agamemnon is furious. He says that to stay the plague, one of the other captains may have the chore of returning the girl to her father, provided he is given a compensatory prize, that is, one of their women. This in turn outrages Achilles, who shouts that the army has already fought Agamemnon's (endless) war and seen him take extra plunder "whenever we sack some wealthy Trojan stronghold." He seems to loathe Agamemnon personally anyway, apart from any grievance. Agamemnon then declares that he will therefore take Briseis, Achilles' woman, and before Achilles can draw a sword on him, the goddess Athena swoops in from heaven and orders him to stop.

Achilles, though he is called a king, must submit to Agamemnon's authority as a greater one ("no one can match the honors dealt a sceptered king"). Nevertheless, he vows that because of this outrage, and the acquiescence of the army witnessing it,  he will not fight with them any more and that the time will come when they will need him desperately but be slaughtered without him. Nestor attemps to make peace between the two men, but cannot. Agamemnon sends two underlings to take Briseis away, while no less a hero than Odysseus respectfully escorts the priest's daughter back to her father. Achilles, weeping with rage on the beach, prays to his mother, the sea goddess Thetis, to go to Zeus and beg him to harm the Achaeans and to further the Trojan cause. Thetis agrees to try, although she says she can do nothing until Zeus returns from a twelve day feast "at the Ocean River with the Aethiopians, loyal, lordly men."

In twelve days, while Achilles "grinds his heart out" for sorrow at losing Briseis, Thetis goes to Olympus to plead with Zeus. He reluctantly agrees to help "pay her dear son back" for his lost honors, reluctantly because his wife Hera already thinks he favors the Trojans too much over the Achaeans whom she loves. "Even now in the face of all the immortal gods she harries me perpetually," he complains. Thetis, having won his assent, dives back to her ocean home. Hera indeed immediately understands what has just happened, but Zeus tells her she cannot do anything about his decisions and silences her with threats to strangle her. She and all the gods are terrified; her son Hephaestus comes to her with a cup of wine and asks her to remember Zeus' power and have patience, or else all the joys of Olympus will be over. The book ends with laughter, music and feasting in heaven, and then with the picture of all the gods returning to their own houses, and of Zeus and Hera in bed.

(This translation of the Iliad is by Robert Fagles, first published in 1990.)

On Old Age by Cicero

This long letter comes in volume 9 of the Harvard Classics' Five foot shelf of books, first published in 1909. My local public library's own 1965 edition of the collection gets pride of place in an endcap by itself, facing the atrium with its indoor tree and fountain -- very classical -- but alas, somebody long ago absconded with Volume 2 (Plato, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius) and volume 8 (Greek drama). Nobody has bothered absconding with Volume 21, I Promessi Sposi -- remember poor dried-up Cecil quoting it in A Room With a View? -- or Volume 23, Two Years Before the Mast.

Volume 9 includes the letters of Cicero, plus On Friendship and On Old Age, and the letters of Pliny the Younger, nephew of the naturalist Pliny the Elder who died in the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 AD. I skimmed these and liked Pliny's letters about his villa, especially. I followed along as carefully as I could, but lost track, after thirty, of the number of rooms he enjoyed and described. All were situated with regard to the summer sun and the winter winds, to enjoy the warmth of one and avoid the duress of the other; we forget that this was two thousand years ago, when there was no central heating or air conditioning -- no escape from sun except shade, no comfort against the cold except a brazier.

Anyway, when Cicero, circa 50 BC, wrote his friend Atticus on old age, he wrote in the guise of a great figure of Roman history, Marcus Cato (circa 150 BC), as if Cato were speaking to two friends "amazed at how well he carried his years." It would be as if you or I wrote an elegant treatise on some grave subject in the voice of someone living a hundred years ago -- Teddy Roosevelt? Geronimo? -- and sent it as a letter to a friend in the friend's honor. For the few opening paragraphs in which Cicero writes as himself, he hints that this letter or "book" is a kind of substitute for a deeper consolation which he isn't ready to give yet. "I have an idea," he says, "that you are at times stirred to the heart by the same circumstances as myself. To console you for these is a more serious matter, and must be put off to another time." What stirs both men? Towards the end of the treatise, "Cato" speaks of the death of his son; perhaps Cicero and his friend had that loss in common, too.

After a while, our understanding of who these men are and are pretending to be, and who they know, gets a little circular. We can double check Cato's identity by turning to Plutarch (circa 100 AD)-- translated by John Dryden (circa 1690)-- and there indeed he lives, devoting himself to farming and writing in old age, exactly as Cicero presents him. And here too, in On Old Age, is Cato's (or is it Cicero's?) knowledge of Cincinnatus (450 BC), humbly busy at his plow when called to defend Rome as dictator. If one's knowledge of antiquity is foggy, one must ask, is that where the story comes from? Then there is Cato/Cicero's knowledge of lots of other men. Are they famous, or footnotes to history only because they are here? We meet Ambivius Turpio, whose plays (or acting?) give such pleasure at the theater to old men as well as young, and we meet "Marcus Cethegus, whom Ennius justly called 'Persuasion's Marrow' -- with what enthusiasm did we see him exert himself in oratory even when quite old!" Yes of course, him. But then our Cato also seems to be the same personage whom Claudius hates in Robert Graves' novel I, Claudius (circa 1930). "My old bugbear, Cato," Claudius calls him, holding him responsible for nagging the Roman senate into a last needless war with Carthage, and for being just generally a killjoy. We grow confused, and really ought to turn simply back to Cicero's book.

Cicero/Cato speaks. The common horrors charged to old age, he says, are that it bars us from active employments, enfeebles the body, deprives us of physical pleasures, and is horrible in itself because it is the next step to death. To all of these, he has two basic answers. First, bad things can happen to the young as well as the old, enfeebling them, removing them from public life, and killing them, too. Second, most of the miseries of "a stupid old age" are traceable to character, not years in themselves. "Remember that my panegyric applies to an old age that has been established on foundations laid by youth." He offers many anecdotes of vigorous elderly men, though none of vigorous men struck down in old age precisely by old age's problems, and when he comes to inarguable things -- that young men are stronger -- he replies, like a good old Roman, that young men are therefore only stronger for vice and sensuality. The life of the mind, which is more important, is just as open to the old as to the young, if not more so. We should recall that this is the voice of Cato the Censor, famed for exhorting Romans to live simply.

Most striking is his attitude toward the nearness of death. Being more aware of death in old age than in youth is natural, he allows, but anyone can die at any time -- and yet, no man is so old but that he reasons he might live another year. And there are only two alternatives after death, neither of which is horrible when you think carefully about it. Either the dissolution is total, in which case our worries are over, or else the soul passes on to happiness and to a meeting with all sorts of interesting people in the next world. Cato particularly looks forward to meeting his dead son, Cato. "A third alternative cannot possibly be discovered." This remark reminds us that Cato/Cicero is writing before Christianity, to put it bluntly, opened up the third possibility, hell for unbelievers.

The most pleasant and encouraging parts of the book are those anecdotes of vigorous old age. "Gives us all hope," as Sybil Fawlty snorts in Fawlty Towers. I like especially the old man who refuses to dither about his mode of transportation when once he chooses it -- if he starts out walking, he doesn't then take to horseback, and vice versa, regardless of convenience or changing circumstance. (Then again, possibly this made Dad a pill to travel with.) And I like C. Gallus, "intent to the day of his death on mapping out the sky and the land. How often did the light surprise him while still working out a problem begun during the night! How often did night find him busy on what he had begun at dawn!"

I am sure most nights and most dawns found Marcus Tullius Cicero busy on something. The Oxford Companion to Classical Literature (1937, paperback 1986) gives him a massive entry of five double-columned, thickly printed pages, more than any other entry except "Athens" and "Rome." Orator, statesman, lawyer, and writer, the Companion credits him with developing Latin prose to such heights that he essentially invented the sentence structure of modern European languages. How odd to think, if this is true, that "subordinate clauses, balanced antitheses, the rhythm and cadence" we strive for are not our own achievements, but are merely patterned after a sensibility or a gift that Cicero had naturally in his mind.

He lived a terribly active life, throwing himself into the public arena with frightening men like Caesar, Mark Antony, and Augustus. He was murdered in his early sixties, with the "reluctant" approval of Augustus, and his head and hands cut off and displayed on the rostra in the Forum, where orators made speeches.



He lives: Cicero Ave (at 95th St., Oak Lawn, IL).

Pagans and Christians by Robin Lane Fox

I think three months -- or was it four? -- to slog through a 681-page book on antiquity's epochal change from paganism to Christianity, which has sat on my shelves for twenty years and whose author may have long since died for all I know, is all right, isn't it? And did I say that right?

Robin Lane Fox's aims in Pagans and Christians are staggeringly ambitious, and are set out right there on the dust jacket for all to see and cope with, or flee as the case may be. I salute whatever book designer it was who composed this summary and squeezed it below a large illustration, but above the (large-print) title and (small-print) author's name. The summary announces sternly, RELIGION AND THE RELIGIOUS LIFE FROM THE SECOND TO THE FOURTH CENTURY A.D., WHEN THE GODS OF OLYMPUS LOST THEIR DOMINION AND CHRISTIANITY, WITH THE CONVERSION OF CONSTANTINE, TRIUMPHED IN THE MEDITERRANEAN WORLD.

Oh, that.

I write in some exasperation only because the author annoyed me just a tad, on page 662, as I finished the book this morning. In one paragraph on this page it seemed to me that he negated two major theses for his entire book, and took his reader right back to the standard arguments for this epochal change, encapsulations of which you could probably find on Wikipedia this minute: that ancient paganism died because pagans were tired of its hopelessness, tired of not knowing whether to fear or not fear their goofy little statue-gods.

But that was just one paragraph, on page 662. Perhaps I missed some nuance in the previous 661 pages which would have proved to me that it all fit right in and that Mr. Fox had not thereby contradicted himself wholesale at all.

If I am confused I can't blame his writing style, which is excellent throughout. It is plain, elegant, respectful of the reader's intelligence, but blessedly un-academic. I find it curious, though, that after six hundred-odd pages of it, interspersed with lots of deeply careful tracings and retracings of this source or that, this letter, that inscription, this translation of that reference only known in Eusebius until a fragment of a papyri turned up in Egypt in 1980 -- dear me, you shouldn't dismiss with mimicry historians' tremendous hard work, but sometimes it just seems you have to -- I find it curious that what he ends up saying is simply that Christianity "triumphed" because, after a while, more people liked Christianity than liked paganism.

Of course that's not the only reason for the collapse of the old gods' dominion. I would say the fundamental story Mr. Fox is telling in the book is that, circa 300 A.D., an ageless pagan religious worldview in which communities of people from time to time sought the help or knowledge or mercy of the gods through the interpretation of dreams, or through civic celebrations and attendance at professionally staffed (but still genuinely eerie or "uncanny") oracles, gave way to a new Christian worldview in which individuals, possibly saved for heaven by Christ's sacrifice but also uniquely commanded to moral behavior, suddenly admitted the authority of a holy scripture into their private lives. Sin therefore as a daily worry, including sin in thought, and eternal life as a daily hope, were new. When enough people adopted this worldview, contributed money to it, lived by it, and caused it to shape society -- in other words, when "Christian business became public business" -- it rose to govern not only private lives, but the formerly pagan Roman state.

In Fox's telling, pagans seem to have adopted Christianity piecemeal, for a variety of reasons some of which remain mysterious. One of his major themes is "overachievement." Especially in its very early days when Christ's second coming was believed to be imminent and the faithful postponed baptism until they had reached an absolutely perfect sinless state worthy of it, the new religion held up standards of interior moral scrutiny and vivid spiritual achievement that appealed, and will always appeal, to certain personality types. (Christianity also eventually introduced to the world, he thinks, a commensurate phenomenon, the slacker majority.) The "years of instruction and preparation" for that baptism also appealed, making people feel "they were exploring a deep mystery, step by step." Christian belief in the power of the holy Spirit as a link between God and man, "the source of man's knowledge of himself, a power of conscience which pagan teaching had not recognized," was also new and led, for believers, to a "new and immediate miracle: a potential change in human nature itself" (pp. 314-316).

Persecution and martyrdom, when they happened, could impress witnesses, and sometimes prompted more conversions. After the passing of a few centuries, pagans in the ancient world, still very much the multitude -- the vitality of pagan worship and culture throughout this period is another major theme -- nevertheless noticed that Christians took care of their sick, widowed, orphaned, and elderly in organized ways that pagans did not necessarily do. They noticed also that Christians, along with Jews, held to indubitably higher standards on what we might tactfully call social issues. They "vigorously attacked" infanticide, the exposure of children, and abortion and, when they attained real power, they outlawed violent gladitorial shows.

What did early Christianity lack? After all, many pagans were never interested in it. Many witnesses of martyrdom did not watch in respectful awe, but blanched at what seemed Christians' grotesque zeal, and tried to reason eager victims out of their immolatory frenzy by pointing out the lovely earth and lovely weather, and asking whether it wasn't good to be alive, even if it did mean paying lip service to some Olympian formula for a minute. And Christianity stubbed its toe against a number of empirical problems. The decades and centuries passed, and Christ did not return, nor did the world end. Hope of eternal life with Jesus ("the wholly new idea of man's Redemption") was a beautiful thing, but the actual resurrection of the body seemed to most people a demonstrably foolish idea. Open any grave and see what's left of the human body after a little while -- and besides, if everybody comes back, how is all our property to be divided? Christian refusal to participate in "Romanity" (merely saying prayers for the safety of the Emperor, for instance), their concern to police each other's beliefs -- as the Church grew, "heresy" grew -- and what seemed their sterile glorification of celibacy, virginity, and chaste widowhood all struck pagans as hard and atheistical refutations of the human project. A project which could be summed up, I suppose, in the word civilian.

Civilian, in the sense of being civil? Not exactly. But the word isn't chosen at random. Very early in Pagans and Christians, Fox explains that the word pagan is an ancient Christian slang term, applied in the sense of "civilian," non-combatant, to people who were not yet soldiers in the army of Christ, enlisted to fight Satan.

The book closes with Christianity's triumph under the Emperor Constantine, who converted and then really made things happen. Lone, powerful men can do that. Among other acts he built churches, ended persecutions, and decreed that any party in any lawsuit could appeal to that new authority figure, the Christian bishop, for judgment -- and the bishop's decision then bound any other judge (p. 667). With the passage of time, Constantine gained to his side the most powerful argument of all, that the sky had not fallen with Christianity's usurping of the ancient gods' powers, and therefore they obviously had none and perhaps never did. "The lack of divine reprisals," it seemed, "did show that the 'anger' of the gods was no match for Christ" (p. 672). And in time, Fox argues, Christian worship fell into the patterns familiar to pagan life, patterns which he seems to think are natural to the human mind: long-dead saints began to "appear" to believers, as protecting gods did to Homer's heroes, and artists began to paint and make mosaics of Jesus' face, whose true lineaments no one knew.

The book is so rich in scholarship that anyone could pick out a different handful of themes and write a completely different review which would still be an accurate summation and yet not do the author justice. I'm sure I've overlooked topics or arguments which anyone else would consider major. Monasticism, the role of the wealthy urban religious patron, confession and confessors; and I've overlooked the little anecdotes from the modern day that Fox sprinkles throughout the book, and that help prove his point that "the transition from paganism to Christianity is where the ancient world still touches ours." He was writing in the 1980s, when Yugoslavia was on the brink of falling apart -- not that anyone knew it -- and little girls in Medjugorje were seeing visions exactly as had the martyrs of two millenia before, and the Homeric heroes of two millenia before that. What did they see, and why? "No generation," he says in his preface, "can afford to ignore whether Christianity is true and, if it is not, why it has spread and persisted."

For a Christian reader, this last statement will exemplify a great flaw in the book. Obviously the author is not a believing Christian, and so is cut off from simple truths. He nowhere quotes "For God so loved the world ...." For my part, I found the ending puzzling. He seems to try very hard, and to want to, but to actually tie nothing up. When it grew strong enough, yes, the Christian church eventually stamped out Mediterranean paganism. After Constantine made them safe, individual Christians could pull down pagan shrines without fear of reprisals, and the church could and did torture into silence the staff at pagan oracles. The official Christian view became that paganism had at best only prophesied the coming of Christ and Christianity, and had done nothing else on a day to day basis for the people living by it. By about the year 500 A.D., the pagan story was over.

Fair enough, and fairly clear. But Fox concludes with a short ramble concerning the Sibyl, prophecy, a church built over a Sibylline oracle at Rome, and then a vague worried hint that if Christianity in turn collapses, all religious experience must cease. Why? (This is a pretty large claim with which to end a book.) Because "yet 'not to everyone do the gods appear ...' " So ... some human beings will always receive some kind of epiphany, -- yet not?

At this point, one is tempted to take a break, turn to a google search, and see just for curiosity's sake whether the old fellow is still alive. Why, my goodness, yes he is! And who am I calling old? Just in his sixties. And even got a cameo in a movie he consulted for. Well, well. I must rearrange my ideas, and stop picturing a white-haired soul in a Bath chair, lap robe, and slippers, sitting by a fire in Oxford and scribbling notes in Latin. And no mistake: it's a great, great book.

Plutarch: The Life of Alexander

The Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans is one of those gigantic classics that you fear to approach. Who is this author, and what is he about? His book was the foundation of upper-class education from at least the Renaissance forward, it seems; I have elusive memories of reading that this queen or that, this general or that one, found his ambitions stirred by an adolescence spent with a solitary burning candle and, simply, the Lives.

Yet to turn to more modern appreciations is to learn that, according to our correct worldview and our standards of scholarship, Plutarch had this fault or that, or was secretly laboring under this agenda or another. My Modern Library reprint of the standard 1864 (!) edition warns, loftily as up-to-date scholarship always does, "in reading Plutarch, the following points should be remembered ...." "Not a historian, etc. ... not interested in politics ... careless about numbers ... passion for anecdote ... unsatisfactory and imperfect." I daresay the queens and generals who found inspiration in him simply lit the candle, sat down, and began reading, skipping any Renaissance introductions that warned them what to think.

Plutarch beats his modern critics to the punch anyway, giving them the authority to tell us what they tell us in their prefaces, in the opening paragraph of the Life of Alexander. "It must be borne in mind," he says, "that my design is not to write histories, but lives. And the most glorious exploits do not always furnish us with the clearest discoveries of virtue or vice in men." (His redactor and reviser of 1864, Arthur Hugh Clough, agrees: Plutarch is a moralist, not a historian.)

Very well. The moral tale that Plutarch tells through episodes in the life of the great king, one of the three or four greatest figures in Western history, seems to be one of the youthful, civilized prince wrestling with the corruptions and jealousies stirred up during his spectacular march of conquest against a once-dreaded and still oppressively powerful foe, Persia. Persia was the rich, the decadent, the hateful barbarian east. Alexander of Macedon -- Macedon being, to good Greeks, the rude barbarian north -- lived one hundred and fifty years after Greece's glory days, when Athenians and Spartans and all together fought off Persia's terrifying embrace in battles at Salamis, Thermopylae, and Marathon (think 300). Judging from Plutarch's story, however, there does not seem to have been any immediately pressing reason why Alexander, at the head of a Greek and Macedonian army circa 330 BC, should have ventured forth just now to invade the haunts of long-dead Xerxes. No reason outside the personal, which seems to have suited as the political.

So we begin with Alexander's lineage and birth ("on the sixth of Hecatombaeon, the month the Macedonians call Lous, on the same day that the temple of Diana at Ephesus was burnt"), and his parents' domestic problems. Rumor had it that early on his father Philip, king of Macedon, espied his wife, Alexander's mother Olympia, sleeping beside a huge serpent. This "abated his passion for her." This was a world in which weird things happened and the young grew up fast. Alexander was taming the wild horse Bucephalus, receiving ambassadors, and flinging wine cups at grown men at wedding banquets -- his father married a new wife while Olympia was still around -- when still in his teens.

At twenty, he became king upon his father's murder. The empire that Philip had conquered for Macedon, from the country of barbarian tribes on the Danube to the once-free cities of Greece, saw the chance and revolted. And Alexander, in bringing them all to heel, began the military career that ended only with his death in distant Babylon little more than ten years later.

He moved north first, to give the king of the Triballians "an entire overthrow," and then he moved south and sacked Thebes, killing six thousand and selling a further 30,000 citizens into slavery ("in aftertime he often repented of his severity to the Thebans"). Upon this, Athens and "the Grecians" thought better of any further remonstrances with the young warlord, and agreed instead to join him in his war against the Persians. He ventured east, with an army of at most 43,000 "foot" and three or four thousand "horse," not considered much with which to face great Darius, descendant of Xerxes, king of kings.

The battles between the two civilizations raged at various points in modern day Turkey and Syria. Alexander captured Darius' family, and treated them well. In mid-campaign he felt free enough to venture down the Phoenician coast to Gaza and then into Egypt, where he ordered the founding of the city of Alexandria after dreaming that a Homer-quoting old man told him he should. Returning to the business of battling Persia, he marched east again, rejected a peace offer from Darius, and finally fought things out at Gaugamela. Plutarch records that the Persian forces came down from the Euphrates a million strong. They lost, Darius once again escaping, but only briefly, with his life.

Alexander was now king of Asia. Ancient Persian cities with mellifluous-sounding names, Babylon, Susa, Ecbatana, were his. Plutarch writes of the king gazing at a statue of Xerxes, toppled in the chaos of occupation, and asking himself whether it should be left in the dust as punishment for that monarch having once invaded Greece, or put back "in consideration of the greatness of thy mind and other virtues." He left it.

But then he and his soldiers got rich, proud, and bored. Much of the rest of the Life is a tale of court intrigue, drink, traitorous ambition, and increasingly harsh and unreasonable punishments handed down from an increasingly godlike throne. All those good rough-limbed Macedonians resented witnessing Alexander's gradual adoption of barbarian eastern clothes, and resented also his promotion of young Persian men to high responsibility. At his nadir the king speared a friend to death during a drunken quarrel, and then nearly committed suicide on the spot. There was little remedy for the emotional mess except further marches, always further east, always more activity and more war.

He marched against Parthia, against the Scythians, and finally turned his eyes toward India. When he determined to cross the Ganges, his men refused to follow him any farther. He raged, sulked, and then accepted fate. Now he became a tourist; he traveled only very slowly back west, disputing with captured Indian philosophers, taking months to sail down rivers and visit the ocean, and then proceeding back by land while his fleet hugged the Indian shore. He lost, Plutarch says, three-fourths of his 120,000 man army in India to disease, heat, and famine.

When he reached Persia, he became a kind of celebratory divine tourist. Now it was time to hold banquets for nine thousand guests at a time, to marry Darius' daughter -- although, like father like son, he already had a wife in the mysterious Roxana -- and as usual to break up fights between Macedonian troops and the Persian "dancing boys" who worshiped him as a god. Warned by an augur not to go to Babylon, he went, and there contracted a fever and died after ten days' illness. Plutarch's spinning down of the story is abrupt, professorial, cool. Roxana killed the other wife and threw her body down a well.

The reader is left with the impression that after all Alexander's gigantic, violent life, there would not have been much else for him to do but die young. We can look at him on his deathbed, rather godlike ourselves, and say okay, you're done. Enough killing. But as moderns, we're also unconsciously trained to feel a certain disdain for the personality types who conquer empires from horseback, and inflame the breasts of men reading by candlelight a thousand or two thousand years later. In reality, he was a man you or I would not have dared make eye contact with. One of his own subordinates, later a king of Macedon himself, once had so frightening an interview with him that years later he suffered a panic attack on unexpectedly seeing Alexander's statue.

So it's not the case that his death somehow represents a career exhaustion that he could not have remedied. If Alexander had lived, and kept moving west and homeward, he might have transformed the Mediterranean world even more than he did anyway by the example of his life and by the physical fact of the empire he created being subsequently in the hands of his three best generals and their dynasties. Imagine him living long enough to shape a Mediterranean world in which, who knows? -- there might have been no Rome. It was possible. Who would need a Rome, when there was still an Alexander centuries beforehand, still making really big decisions?

Plutarch doesn't give grand pronouncements or summations of this Life, moralist though he may be. We read of Alexander's physical courage and his military ability for ourselves, just as we read that flattery made him lawless and bad advice made him cruel. Nowhere, in fact, does the author ever call him "the Great." When the story is done, it's done. Next up, at the bottom of the page: The Life of Caesar. "After Sylla became master of Rome, he wished to make Caesar put away his wife, Cornelia ...."