Alexander the Great

Résumé du livre

Alexander is the towering hero of the classical world. His fame has grown for well over two millennia and embraces Eastern and Western cultures alike. In Alexander the Great, Paul Cartledge, the distinguished scholar and historian long acknowledged as perhaps the preeminent authority on Sparta and Greece, glowingly illuminates the brief but iconic life of Alexander (356-323 BC), king of Macedon, conqueror of the Persian Empire and founder of a new world order. Cartledge's book is, above all, a hunt for a new past to counter the myths, legends, and often skewed history that have been passed down to us. At the age of twenty, Alexander inherited the mantle of his father, Philip of Macedon, becoming master of the Greek world east of the Adriatic. A mere six years later, he had conquered the mighty Persian Empire, and by the time he was thirty he had taken his victorious armies even further, ruling an empire that stretched from the Mediterranean to the Hindu Kush. But before his thirty-third birthday Alexander was dead.