Ghost on the Throne

Review by Jeremy Rutter

During the 1,500 years spanned by Classical antiquity, when empires took at least decades (Persian) if not centuries (Assyrian, Roman, Parthian) to build, Alexander the Great’s astonishing achievement in creating the largest western empire ever known in less than a dozen years (334-323 BCE) has been the subject of countless historical narratives for well over two millennia. The equally rapid fragmentation of his Macedonian empire, accompanied by the total annihilation of its 400-year-old Argead ruling house, is by comparison a story seldom told, not least because of how many different characters it involved. One reason for the large number of personalities that populate this history is their generally short life expectancy once they became prominent players in the unfolding drama: what many of Alexander’s generals and would-be successors (the so-called Diadochoi) envisioned as a struggle for supremacy often enough became a fight for mere survival.

James Romm succeeds brilliantly in bringing to life the seven-year period (323-316 BCE) that is his focus by presenting his large cast of characters through a series of relatively brief episodes (3-6 months at a time) in the careers of interacting clusters of his principals. Each chapter, sequenced in chronological order, deals with just a few of these groups, the characters within which are constantly shifting. The result is an interleaved, multi-person biography told synchronically in bite-sized increments that are each coherent and complete narratives. What is usually considered to be an almost impenetrable period for historians to present intelligibly to new readers is converted into a continuous series of dramatic episodes in the lives of half-a-dozen major figures competing in an extremely fast-paced politico-military contest stretching from Greece to Pakistan.

The range of personality types in this complex web of tales is broad, and Romm delineates them sharply enough so that most readers will soon enough have picked their favorites. Some will be comparatively well known to history buffs—for example, the Athenian orator Demosthenes, the crafty one-eyed Macedonian general Antigonos or Alexander’s bloodthirsty mother Olympias—but most, including Romm’s clever and ultra-loyal hero Eumenes of Cardia, will be familiar only to specialists. One consequence of this relative anonymity of his principal characters is that Romm’s saga of the tumultuous years immediately following Alexander’s relatively sudden death in Babylon at the age of 33 becomes something of a thriller: which of Alexander’s seven official Bodyguards (Somatophylakes), his innermost circle of trusted generals, and which of the ever-shrinking numbers of his wives, mistresses, children and relatives will survive until the next chapter in this roller coaster of an imperial succession story?