Faces of Power: Alexander's image and Hellenistic politics by Andrew Stewart

Recommend, or otherwise, books on Alexander (fiction or non-fiction). Promote your novel here!

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Alexias
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Faces of Power: Alexander's image and Hellenistic politics by Andrew Stewart

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This is an impressive book, highly detailed and organised with scholarship ranging from semantics to sociology to numismatics. Occasionally the adjective 'obsessive' does come to mind though, but I am in awe of the dedication and scholarship that went into producing this. Published in 1993 it is perhaps a little out of date now as other Alexander images have come to light since then, and undue prominence does seem to be given to the Getty Alexander, but I suspect that this was due to proximity to the author (it is an image that has always made me somewhat uncomfortable for it to be Alexander as it looks far too young and intense to be a public image of a leader, but what do I know).

Whilst providing fascinating insights into the production and dissemination of Alexander's image, occasionally the book does seem to take the analysis of the images a little too far. For example, the so suggest that Lysippos turned out by the dozen in his Sikyonian workshop (P. 168) bronze images of Alexander Doryphoros for distribution to cities wishing to honour Alexander or those cities he founded. This is the image of a youthful Alexander, standing naked and slack-hipped and holding an upright spear, and possibly a nike or sword in his other hand.
As exercises in rhetorical auxesis or "enhancement", they were equivalent to the heroic image of his court historians and the later epideixeis of the orators and used similar persuasive devices: carefully chosen visual metaphor and striking realism of detail. They asserted that what the kouros and Polykleitos's Doryphoros had been to archaic and classical Greece, respectively, Alexander would be to the brave new world he was creating.
Really? This might be true from a history of art perspective, but did Alexander, Lysippus and their contemporaries really see Alexander's image in this light. Were they conscious that Alexander was a modern version of the kouros and that he was creating a brave new world, or was it rather more about reminding them who was king and top of the pile?

The book is also full of some interesting tie-ins. For example, we've all heard of Julius Caesar weeping when he saw a statue of Alexander and realised he had achieved nothing in comparison at the same age. This image was actually in the temple of Melkart in Gades (modern Cadiz), a city founded by Phoenicians from Tyre. Stewart proposes that this image may have been commissioned by the city when Alexander returned from India and received foreign envoys in Babylon, letting him know that, unlike at Tyre, he could worship any time he liked in their temple.

I would highly recommend this book, but maybe borrow from a library as it is expensive.
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