The First European: A History of Alexander in the Age of Empire

"Just to join the gap, the first two books we were looking at are the earliest surviving, or some of the earliest surviving, narratives about Alexander the Great, even though they were written centuries after his time. In the medieval period people didn’t read the Greek texts, Greek wasn’t a language used in western Europe. Maybe Curtius was read a bit, but the dominant stories told about Alexander came from The Alexander Romance . It’s difficult to know how to describe this because it’s an evolving story that starts in Greek in the 3rd century BC, probably. We come across it in a manuscript that dates from the third century AD in Greek, but it’s translated into lots of other languages including Latin and Persian. Ultimately it goes on spreading into the modern period, so you have Scottish Alexander texts, you even have Icelandic stories about Alexander. And this is a story full of fantasy, it’s imaginative and not strict history. And then in the Enlightenment period you start to get a return to interest in the Greek texts and in a more scientifically historical study of Alexander and this coincides with the periods of European overseas expansion. You have people writing about Alexander in the light of what French Kings like Louis XIV are doing and other European countries embarked on overseas expansion. A series of ideas about Alexander develops. Then, there’s this big change of direction after the American war of independence, with the British and French focusing more on India and indeed Persia and the growth of Russian power to the north, leaving Persia and Afghanistan as the borderlands between Russian interests and British interests. You’ve also got, at the beginning of the 19th century, Napoleon invading Egypt and the French getting this strong brief interest in Egypt before the British move in. So, at the very end of the 18th century and in the early 19th century the modern battles of empire are taking place in the territories where Alexander had fought, and Alexander’s empire becomes an interesting model for people thinking about their world. Alexander the Great is interpreted in the light of contemporary imperial and colonial ideas and that’s what Briant talks about in this book. The book was originally written in French and published in France and there’s quite a strong French focus to it, although when the English translation was prepared, this was balanced slightly differently. You have emphases on Alexander as a kind of scholar-King, Alexander as an advocate of trade and the creation of a commercial empire. You also have an interest in Afghanistan as this borderland between British India on the one hand and Russia on the other, and people becoming fascinated by what Alexander did in Afghanistan—where he went, and finding the places that he went to. Alexander gets tied to ideas related to the Great Game, the world of espionage between the British Empire and Russia in the second half of the 19th century. Briant chooses to end the book talking about German interest in Alexander the Great. This is interesting, because at the time when the reunification of Germany was happening under Bismarck, you have Johann Droysen writing a history of Philip and then of Alexander. Droysen sees Philip as a Bismarck-like figure, uniting the Greeks in the way that Bismarck united the Germans, so these multiple small states are brought together in a useful empire as preparation for Alexander’s imperial achievements. A lot of modern scholarship has tended to go back to Droysen, and what Briant does is tell the story before Droysen. If you read any modern book about Alexander the Great, although they will say that they’re going back to Arrian and Curtius and the other two or three ancient narratives, their approach is schooled by this tradition of how you write about Alexander that comes to us from Droysen. But before then you have all these other writers—French, English, Scottish—who start to create in their books this 18th- and 19th-century version of Alexander the Great that is, in many ways, the lens through which everyone who writes a biography of Alexander has tended to look. Yes, absolutely. Alexander as a tyrant and therefore a bad thing is also one of the models that Briant discusses, especially in the period after the French Revolution . There are multiple ways in which Alexander can be a model and this does include the idea of the absolute monarch as a bad thing. So, whereas Louis XIV or Napoleon can see Alexander as a good model to follow, others see Napoleon and absolutist monarchy as a bad thing and for those writers Alexander is a model in a negative sense."