Macedonia Is Too Little

Before he had done anything, Alexander had been told by his mother that his father was a god, by his father that the kingdom was too small for him, and by a hired tutor that he was Achilles. This is the equipment he was issued.

A course on the thought of Alexander.

Philosophy · Antiquity

Course outline

  1. The Boy and the Ambassadors — A seven-year-old questions Persian ambassadors about the roads into inner Asia, and twenty years later he takes an army down them. It is a wonderful story, and it is the exact shape of a story…
  2. Macedonia Is Too Little — A horse nobody at court can ride, priced at thirteen talents, and a boy who notices the one thing everybody else has missed. His father's reaction is the line that names the whole reign. The horse…
  3. The Secret of His Birth — Both parents have a dream and the dreams do not point the same way. There is a serpent, an oracle, a physical anchor at Delphi — and one sentence from Eratosthenes that cannot honestly be quoted…
  4. What Happened at Mieza — Philip hired the best mind in Greece to teach his son and gave them a rebuilt precinct to do it in. Nobody knows what was taught there. The best answer anyone has offered works by changing what the…
  5. The Casket Copy — Of everything at Mieza, exactly one object followed him into Asia: an annotated Iliad, kept in a jewel case taken from the Persian king's baggage. The provenance is what turns the object into an…
  6. The Bastard at the Wedding — A drunk toast at his father's seventh wedding puts the boy's legitimacy in the room in front of the court. The famous line he throws back is not the revealing part; what he does in the following…
  7. The Left Wing at Chaeronea — Philip gives his eighteen-year-old son the left wing, opposite the best infantry in Greece. What can be said about what happened there is narrower than any retelling admits — and there is one piece…
  8. Four Minutes in the Theatre at Aegae — Philip is killed in a theatre by one of his own bodyguards, in front of the assembled Greek world, weeks before the invasion he had spent his reign preparing. Two explanations survive, one personal…

Built from

This course was built from 9 books.

  • Plutarch, Life of Alexander (Dryden)
  • E. Badian, Collected Papers on Alexander the Great
  • Paul Cartledge, Alexander the Great — The Hunt for a New Past
  • Robin Lane Fox, Alexander the Great
  • Peter Green, Alexander of Macedon
  • Ian Worthington, Philip II of Macedonia
  • A. B. Bosworth, Conquest and Empire
  • J. F. C. Fuller, The Generalship of Alexander the Great
  • Diodorus Siculus, Library of History XVI (Welles)

Part of the Simposeum course library.