2026, Oakland | My Living Room

Preface: Book acquired from an estate sale in Marin county, RIP, my fellow animator. This is the preface of the book, typed by me.

I first met Homer and Alexander fourteen years ago and form different reasons I have been intrigued by them ever since; if any one reader puts down this book with a wish to read Homer, or with a sense of what it might have been like to have followed Alexander, I will not have written to no such purpose. I have not aimed at any particular class of reader, becasue I do not believe that such classes exist. I have written self-indulgently, as I myself like to read about the past(me too). I do not like the proper names of non-entities, numbres dates of unknown years or refutations of other men's views(me neither). The past, like the present, is made up of seasons and of faces, feelings, disappoinments and things seen. I am bored by institutions and I do not believe in structures(same). Others may disagree.

This is not a biography nor does it pretend to certainty in Alexander's name. More than 20 contemporaries wrote books on Alexander and not one of them survives. They are known by quotations from later authors, not one of whom preserved the original wording: these later authors are themselves only known from the manuscripts of even later coypists and in the four main sources these manuscripts are not complete. The most detailed history goes back to only one manuscript, whose text cannot be checked; another, much used, has often been copied illegibly. Alexander left no informal letter which is genuine beyond dispute and the two known extracts from his formal documents both concern points of politics. On the enemy side his name survives in a Lycian grave-inscription, in Babylonian tablets on building work and astronomy and in Egyptian captions to temple dedications. It is a naive belief that the distant past can be recovered from written texts(no shit). But even the written evidence for Alexander is scarce and often peculiar. Nonetheless, 1472 books and articles are known to me on the subject in the past century and a half, many of which adopt a confident tone and can be dismissed for that alone. Augustine, Cicero and perhaps the emperor Julian are the only figures from antiquity whose biography can be attempted. And Alexander is not among them. This book is a search, not a story, and any reader who takes it as a full picture of Alexander's life has begun with the wrong suppositions.

I have many debts, none more lasting than the generous support and complete freedom from duties which I have enjoyed first as an undergraduate, then as a Fellow at Magdalen College, Oxford. During my time there, Mr C.E Stevens first showed me that history did not have to be dull to be true. Mr G.E.M de Sainte Croix revived my interest in Alexander and fed it with many intriguing insights into the classical past. Dr J.K Dais has been a constant source of suggestion as shrewd comment. Dr A.D. H. Bivar directed me to Iranian problems which have since become a primary enticement. The lectures of the late stefan Weinstock on Roman religion raised even more if i had been able to take it into full account. But at a time when so much of ancient history is a desert, I have gained most from the lectures and writing of Mr Peter Brown. It is my great regret that there is not the evidence to begin to treat Alexander's age as he has treated late antiquity.

I am grateful to The Hogarth Press and Harcourt Brace Novanvich, New York, for permission to reproduce the poem 'In the Year 200 b.c.' from The Complete Poems of C.P. Cavafy translated by Rae Dalven and to Faber & Faber Ltd and Random House Inc., New York, for permission to quote from W.H. Auden's poem The Shield of Achilles. Other debts are more personal. Like Alexander's treasurer, I have been helped through solitary years by a garden and a lady, and in both respects I have been more fortunate. The garden has grown more obligingly and the lady, though not a goddess, is at least my wife(dang). 🔥