SPEAKING OF ALEXANDER THE GREAT, here's a review of two new books about him, a novel and a history:

Authors offer new look at Alexander the Great

By David Walton
FOR THE [PITTSBURG] TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Sunday, November 14, 2004

"The Virtues of War: A Novel of Alexander the Great," by Steven Pressfield; Doubleday, $24.95, 301 pages, and "Alexander the Great: A New Life," by Paul Cartledge; Overlook Press, $28.95, 347 pages.

Novelist Steven Pressfield says he "looted shamelessly" writers ancient and recent for "The Virtues of War," his fictional re-creation of the military career of Alexander the Great.

Surprisingly, new information continues to turn up about Alexander, who fought and died three centuries before the birth of Christ, Caesar and the Roman Empire. Satellite photography and computer technology have made possible detailed reconstructions of battlefields, weaponry and battle tactics, confirming and correcting ancient legend and historiography. These past 20 years have been an exciting time for classical archaeology -- a subject almost nobody is interested in anymore.

Pressfield's device is to let Alexander tell his own story. "I have always been a soldier," he begins . . .

In the string of excellent new histories over the last decade, the most readable and engrossing is Paul Cartledge's "Alexander the Great: A New Life," just published. Cartledge, the world's leading historian on Sparta and ancient Greece, adapted his book from his Cambridge University lectures over the past 20 years. His approach is immediate, discursive, insightful, and highly engaging, aimed at the audience for the BBC-PBS series on the Spartans and Greek civilization that Cartledge has written and advised.

Cartledge looks at Alexander's "extraordinary achievement" not only for what he accomplished in his own time, but for its "subsequent impact" -- which continues to this day, when Alexander is still prayed in aid by fishermen in Greece, cursed as a thief in Iran, and worshipped as a saint in the Coptic Church of Egypt.

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