“Alexander: The Ambiguity of Greatness”, by Guy MacLean Rogers

464 pages, Random House, ISBN-13: 978-1400062614

Alexander: The Ambiguity of Greatness by Guy MacLean Rogers is one of the latest in a long shelf of books recording the feats and plumbing the character of Alexander the Great who, in the space of a dozen years, conquered most of his known world and then expired, at age 32, probably of a fever. In a nutshell: Alexander III of Macedon was born in 356 B.C.E., son of Philip II, the king of Macedonia, a more-or-less Greek region north of Greece proper. Philip assembled the finest army the world had seen up to that time, put the strong-arm on the other Greek states and set about to invade the Persian empire, which controlled much of the modern-day Near East. Before Philip could launch his crusade he was assassinated, possibly with the complicity of Alexander and his mother. At the age of 20 Alexander inherited Philip’s throne, army and mission. He crossed the Bosporus in 334 B.C.E., never to see his homeland again. Over the following years he won a series of brilliant victories and tossed Darius III off the Persian throne. He drove his Macedonian army as far as India, where his men dug in their heels and refused to go further. Alexander then backtracked to Babylon, where he died. His empire, which fractured almost immediately after his death, encompassed a huge landmass, including the modern countries of Egypt, Turkey, Syria, Iran, Afghanistan and Iraq (the Battle of Gaugamela, one of Alexander's greatest victories, took place just east of Mosul, scene of recent fighting). The historian of an ancient-world figure like Alexander is only as good as his sources, and therein lies the rub. The problem isn’t so much the quantity of the primary material as the quality.

Rogers is, to say the least, impatient with recent scholars who have stressed the Alexander’s atrocities and supposed drunkenness – he is out to revise the revisionists, you could say – but he doesn’t try to hide Alexander’s faults as a human being and the war atrocities that he is ultimately responsible for and, it must be said, for which he was later regretful. For example, after successfully laying siege to the city-state of Tyre, Alexander had 30,000 Tyrians sold into slavery and crucified 2,000 more as an example of what would happen to cities that resisted him. “The siege unquestionably was brutal and its outcome horrific”, Rogers writes, “[b]ut the Tyrians conducted their resistance in a way that probably guaranteed that no mercy would be shown to them” (apparently at one point they slit the throats of Macedonian captives in full view of Alexander’s army). “Modern historians who have condemned Alexander and the Macedonians…have failed to mention this Tyrian atrocity”, Rogers writes. The book is studded with similar examples of this authorial scale-balancing.

The impact of Alexander cannot be overestimated, although it has become fashionable for the anti-Alexandrian school of historians and scholars to extrapolate on the negative aspects of Alexander’s conquests and brutal suppression of resistance and revolt. But, really now, it’s so easy for historians to sit in their school offices and home dens and on some sort of a moral high chair applying the moral values of today to the constant warlike conditions of Alexander’s brutal era. If you knew you had Alexander’s unruly genius for military command and tactics and you knew you could vanquish the barbarian Persians and impose the ideals and culture of your country, would you not have done what Alexander did? How could anyone really put himself in Alexander’s sandals? How many people in today’s age can even imagine what it was like to be in one of these battles wearing armor and wielding only a 2’ blade sword knowing that you could be struck down or decapitated any moment? But it's easy for us to sit in our couch or behind a computer screen and type, “I could have done better. He wasn’t so great. I wouldn’t have killed so many people. I’m morally superior than that.” Indeed, considering the vast power he attained and wielded over such a ginormous territory in such antiquity, Alexander has to be considered one of the most generous and magnanimous monarchs of all time. He could have butchered and wiped out populations on a grand scale…but he didn’t. He could have forcibly imposed Macedonian culture, religion, administration and governance on the lands he conquered…but he didn’t. He always gave city-states or tribes a chance to surrender; only when there was resistance and Macedonian lives lost would his wrath be brutal and systematically ruthless. Alexander was virtually generous to a fault to the people he conquered in many cases.

Alexander was the kind of leader that comes along once in history. He was extremely intelligent, observant, brave beyond reason, and lethal in combat. He set clear goals and focused relentlessly on how to achieve them. He knew and respected his enemies, but feared no one. He motivated his soldiers by displaying a willingness to sacrifice on their behalf. In sum, he was a charismatic, inspirational leader, and his unbroken string of victories suggested that he was beloved of the gods. That is why tens of thousands were willing to follow him from Macedon to the Indus River.

“Michelangelo and the Pope’s Ceiling”, by Ross King

304 pages, Walker Books, ISBN-13: 978-0802713957

Perhaps the most famous fresco in the world is the Sistine Chapel Ceiling by Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni (or just Michelangelo to you and me), a cornerstone of High Renaissance art, but as any reader of Irving Stone’s 1961 novel The Agony and the Ecstasy (or any viewer of the 1965 film adaptation of the same) will know, Michelangelo considered himself a sculptor above all else and had no desire to paint this ceiling; in fact, as Ross King makes clear in Michelangelo and the Pope’s Ceiling, the artist only consented to the command of Pope Julius II to paint the ceiling as a stepping stone to get back to the project he really desired: the sculpting of Julius’s tomb (a tomb that was never even begun, much less completed).

Michelangelo’s artistic achievements were great, wide and varied, but by focusing on this single, famous project that occupied better than three years of his life, King is able to give us a living portrait of this genius: we get to see his petulance and penny-pinching, as well as his fantastic work; we get to see his fights with family, assistants and pope, as well as his tireless work to better his family and amaze his observers; we get to see a man more like us with his cares and worries, as well as his triumphs. It is a story told with a plethora of detail...arguably, too much detail, as every artist and every assistant artist (and many of their relatives and patrons) are given, along with their towns and some of their history, often with little relevance to the story of the ceiling. This is a lot to wade through and is more than is necessary, I think.

There is also a fair amount of repetition, as well, as when we are told (three times at least) that, contrary to the (supposed) popular belief, Michelangelo was not a single man lying on his back, covered in paint working on his masterpiece, but was rather leading a team of assistants of varying competence, standing on his specially designed-and-constructed platform with head tilted back to paint the ceiling. Some details are, however, truly enlightening, as when we learn that, rather than a flawless work created as a single outpouring of genius, the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel was made by a man who made mistakes and tried to fix them, who learned from (as well as inspired) other artists, and whose work improved as he worked and mastered the skills of fresco.

Arguably, the person who has the most developed and interesting character is not the artist but the man who commissioned him, Pope Julius II, “il papa terribilea”, perhaps the most domineering, vain and aggressive man ever to wear the Papal triple-crown (and that’s saying something), who was perhaps more interested in the power struggles among the Vatican and the Italian city-states (and against France) in the 16^th Century than in the finer points of the Catholic faith. We never get a definitive idea of how Michelangelo himself felt about Julius (though in balance it seems rather negative) and we also don’t get much info on Michelangelo’s attitude toward religion, though it is suggested that he was a believer (with little supporting evidence).

Battling against ill health, financial difficulties, domestic problems, inadequate knowledge of the art of fresco, and the pope’s impatience, Michelangelo created figures, depicting the Creation, the Fall, and the Flood, so beautiful that, when they were unveiled in 1512, they stunned his onlookers. Modern anatomy has yet to find names for some of the muscles on his nudes, they are painted in such detail. While he worked, Rome teemed around him, its politics and rivalries with other city-states and with France at fever pitch, often intruding on his work. From Michelangelo’s experiments with the composition of pigment and plaster to his bitter competition with the famed painter Raphael, who was working on the neighboring Papal Apartments, Michelangelo and the Pope’s Ceiling presents a magnificent tapestry of day-to-day life on the ingenious Sistine scaffolding and outside in the upheaval of early-16^th Century Rome.