Product Description

If Alexander the Great had not existed, then he would have to have been invented. But the "Alexander" that still fascinates now is far more than the sum of the mainstream biographical tradition. This book offers an insight into a world where to think about Alexander was to engage with the burning ideological issues of Rome during the first centuries BCE and CE, a period of intense and often violent political and cultural change. Diana Spencer has made a selection of the diverse mentions of Alexander, comparisons with Alexander and cultural paradigms that have collected around him, in order to reveal the story of the peoples who have been interested in him - a novel investigation of power and national identity in the Roman world. The book explores and synthesises a selection of key texts, drawn from verse and prose, history, epic and oratory, to form the basis of a series of themed discussions investigating the cultural significance of Alexander for Rome.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #534652 in Books
• Published on: 2002-12-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 304 pages

Customer Reviews

Live Fast, Die Young
Alexander the Great is one of the great icons of ancient and modern mythology and Diana Spencer's excellent study provides a comprehensive, diverse and sensitive critique of the varied faces of Alexander across the centuries. This fascinating account engages primarily with the classical appropriations and reinventions of Alexander as warrior, as politician and as flawed tragic hero. But with an assured touch and a broad understanding of cultural legacy Spencer also recognises the continuing power of the Alexandrian iconography into the twentieth-century. As the cover illustration of Warhol's Alexandrian silk-screen shows, the story of the original live fast, die young hero remains as relevant to us as it was to the ancient Greeks and Romans. Diana Spencer's book will surely become a key text in the filed of Alexander studies.

The unreal afterlife of an ancient media superstar
In the 90s we were bombarded with university textbooks and Discovery Channel documentaries peddling 'the real Alexander'. Now, finally, we get the *surreal* version -- and it's much, much better.

Diana Spencer's fetchingly packaged paperback quickly dispenses with the tired old 'evidence' for Alex's life, character and so on -- threadbare answers to questions that were never really that interesting to begin with. Instead she hones in on Alexander's afterlife in the ancient world's political imagination, particularly in the Rome of the late Republic and early Empire. For ambitious Roman warlords and would-be emperors, 'Alexander' was a name to conjure with -- a paradigm of military achievement, but also a cautionary tale. Could they emulate his rise while sidestepping the historically inevitable fall? Could any Roman with ambition go East without *becoming* the enemy?

Summoning the ghost of Alexander brought a fascinating mess of ideological problems into play. Spencer's achievement is to uncover these Roman fantasies and anxieties via detailed, sensitive readings of key Alexander moments in Latin literature. To my knowledge, no-one has done anything like this before -- and it succeeds brilliantly, laying bare the imaginative aftershocks of Alexander within the alien culture that first labelled him 'the Great'.