Doherty on Alexander

A hand-me-down, in this case from the Bourne Hall Library. The story of the death of Alexander the Great by a chap who, so the blurb inside the back cover informs me, is an internationally renowned author, educated at Liverpool & Oxford universities and who specialises in books about the deaths of ancient eminences who came to untimely & suspicious ends. See reference 1.

I found his style a bit tiresome and did not manage to get to the end of this one. But I did learn some stuff about the life and times of Alexander.

First, the complicated and murderous goings on in the courts of people like Alexander were a real life match for anything to be found in series one of 'Game of Thrones'.

Second, the ancient Macedonians liked to relax from time to time in serious drinking bouts. It was in the course of one of these that Alexander caught whatever it was that killed him - arsenic according to Doherty.

Third, I was reminded that some ancient generals joined in and fought in the front line, with Alexander being popular with his soldiers on this account. I also remember reading somewhere that once an ancient battle was joined, there was generally little that a general could do to manage it, so he might just as well join in. In which he would probably have had the advantage of better physique, training and equipment than most of his adversaries. A bit like Achilles having fancy equipment specially knocked up for him by the divine Hephaestus.

Fourth, perhaps a corollary of third, Alexander sometimes went in for serious punishments. Crucifying the odd thousands and selling the odd tens of thousands into slavery. Plus the odd torturing to death for especially heinous crimes. Or the odd decimation. And my understanding is that the Romans were into all this as well, several hundred years later. And the Normans played quite rough a thousand or so years after that - it taking us humans quite some time to learn that farming a country for produce & revenue was a better bet than smashing it up - and perhaps a lesson we would have done better to remember when we smashed up Iraq.

PS: part of this morning's cruise around the Ewell Village Clockwise was given over to pondering the pros and cons of massed infantry armed with leaf bladed spears 15 feet in length and weighing the same number of pounds. One might have thought them a bit unwieldy, but I also think that crack infantry formations from Spain were still using something similar as late as the 16th century CE.

Reference 1: http://www.paulcdoherty.com/.