368 pages, Alfred
A. Knopf, ISBN-13: 978-0307271648
James Romm's Ghost on the Throne: The Death of Alexander the Great and the War for Crown and Empire begins in the last weeks of
Alexander's life and follows his would-be successors through several years of
bloody in-fighting. Most histories of this period begin and end with Alexander,
leaving the chaotic decades following his death either summarized or completely
unexplored. It's easy to see why: Alexander was an arresting personality who
centered over a decade of politics and conquest on the single focal point of
himself, while the generals who fell to squabbling for preeminence after his
death were a hodgepodge of individuals of varying quality, and the ever more
complex politicking among them makes for a potentially confusing narrative. At
Alexander's death he had no heir. He had an illegitimate son, a Bactrian
wife in her final trimester of pregnancy and a clique of high-ranking generals
of firm loyalty to himself but riven with strife among each other. He gave Perdiccas his signet ring, a clear mark of favored authority, but at his death
the rivalries and suspicions among the generals and their distrust of the
foreign elements in Alexander's army (the Persian and Indian soldiers and
generals, Alexander's Bactrian wife) not to mention decommissioned veterans
eager to return home after over a decade at war and rogue local commanders,
fell apart without Alexander's powerful center at the top. The empire
fractured, fragmented, and finally collapsed into chaos.
James
Romm takes this potential chaos of names, motives, loyalties, movements,
battles, and betrayals and creates a compelling, highly readable history of the
period. His treatment of the subject is really masterful – it's easy to keep
track of the scores of individuals populating the story, their relations to
each other, and what's going on at any given moment across the vast stage on
which the story played out. At various times Romm will deal with Aristotle as
he abandons Athens, mutinous Macedonian veterans in what is now Pakistan,
Ptolemy in Egypt, and half-dozen generals battling each other in Asia Minor,
and, incredibly, it all makes sense. Ghost on the Throne is a masterpiece of
organization., but
the story is also exciting. Romm does an excellent job of keeping the story
moving, a virtue too often lacking in the work of modern historians. He never
allows the story to bog down, especially in discussing the conflicting reports
of sources. I've read many modern histories that repeatedly lose track of the
narrative when discussing sources, but Romm deftly summarizes and evaluates
such problems with not a wasted word. Ghost on the Throne moves at a brisk
speed that successfully conveys how quickly and catastrophically Alexander's
empire collapsed.
I
had a few very minor quibbles with the book: I found the system of endnotes
difficult to sort through (though Romm gives good reasons for preferring this
system in the preface to the book) and there are a few sections that felt
needlessly redundant. But those redundant sections were spaced well apart in
the book and may be of service to readers who have a difficult time keeping
track of all the ancient names and places mentioned in the book. Those readers
should be few and far between, but passages like those should help reorient
them if they get lost. Finally, I found the
epithet "old man Antipater" irritating after a while. But
these minor flaws in no way detract from the overall quality of the book.
Romm's gifts of organizing a complicated narrative and of making it exciting
and readable have allowed him to produce one of the finest, most readable
popular histories I've read.
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