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Alexander the Great and the Hellenistic Age
By Peter Green
Wiedenfield and Nicolson, 234 pages, £16.99

Polymathic, polyglot Peter Green seems to be enjoying his salad days, though he is now well into his ninth decade. Poet, novelist, critic, man of letters extraordinaire, he is also a professional ancient historian of the first rank, specialising in the epoch created by the world-conquering exploits of Alexander the Great (died 323 BC). The Hellenistic Age is the awkward name given to the last three centuries BC in the central and eastern Mediterranean as far east as modern Pakistan. Professor Green has made this complex and pullulating world his own.

This laconic history of it may have been typeset at the Spartan Press Ltd of Lymington, Hampshire, but there is nothing spartan about it. Rhetorical ornament was a speciality of the Hellenistic elites; so also of our author.

Besides, this little book offers two for the price of one: not in any crude marketing sense, but because it distils the essence of his two much fatter books respectively on Alexander and on the Hellenistic Age down to the battle of Actium in 31 BC. Victorious in the latter over the forces of Antony and his Graeco-Macedonian consort Cleopatra of Egypt, Octavian – later the Roman Emperor Augustus – was able to swallow up the remnants of the Hellenistic world not already parts of Rome’s mainly Mediterranean empire and to project himself as a super-Hellenistic potentate.

Green, like Edward Gibbon, is a firm believer in chronologically ordered narrative, and Gibbon would have agreed that Hellenistic history is little more than the register of man’s crimes, follies and misfortunes. In fact, Green hasn’t a good word to say for Alexander (a “terrifying embarrassment”), and not many for his successors – a slew of autocrats frantically engaged in the ceaseless merry-go-round of political skulduggery and murderous mayhem that typified dynastic life at the top.

Not all of us are convinced that narrative is the most perspicuous method of handling such a confusing and often paradoxical era, so Green’s regular excurses on themes and topics such as slavery, sexuality, science and technology, artistic taste and philosophical movements provide welcome as well as expert relief. There is a sprinkling too of error – not even the bloodthirsty Crassus crucified as many as 20,000 of Spartacus’s revolted slaves along the Appian Way, and it was the capital city of Pergamon in Asia Minor, home of a library second only to Alexandria’s, that gave its name to parchment (pergamenta charts, Italian pergameno), not vice versa.

Yet these are slight in comparison to the perspective, perceptiveness and the pungently robust good sense that Green consistently dispenses. “Big book, big evil”, one Hellenistic librarian is said to have declared. This one is neither.

Paul Cartledge.

That Athens' interests here were in large part economic there can be little doubt. Kimon's expeditions to Cyprus and Egypt, the famine of 445, Perikles' cruise into the Black Sea, the eventual expeditions to Sicily: all carry a subtext involving the pursuit of grain, timber and precious metals. An empire without bread starves. A naval empire without timber rapidly becomes a contradiction in terms.