#1: Alexander Through Our Curious Lens: Alexander the Great: His Life and Mysterious Death, Anthony Everett, 2019, NY, 1-75 of 464 pages

The spirit of the author is refreshingly open to antiquity and, in his considerations of the facets of that lost age’s greatest military light. As with most academics, he does not understand the use of the chariot as battle taxi to get heavily armored men to the fight without fatigue. Again. The Iliad as Alexander’s guide is cast aside for combat considerations, but is at least retained to explain Alexander’s piety, his possible sacrifice of two men at his father’s tomb, his rage at his mother for murder and desecrated of a rival wife of his polygamous father. I quite like Everitt’s style and intend to read the book section by section as I follow Arrian. Everitt’s specialty is Rome and Athens, is a Brit, which makes him mess of an idealogue and more of a student of human character than his American counterparts. To do the learned man justice I do below, offer summarized narrative and quotes from his really excellent effort at correcting the drift in ancient studies has been increasingly corrupted by our twisted mirror.

Preface

Everitt points out that increasingly Alexander has been cast in the light of “a classical Hitler or Stalin… it is time for a new look… he deserves to measured against the values of his own time and not ours. My intention is to understand rather than praise or condemn.”

This is the modern mind’s greatest challenge. The culture of antiquity is unfortunately skewed towards late Greek decadent sophists under declining Roman rule. Everitt will face the greatest hurdle, not in terms of understanding the faith, politics and economics of Antiquity, but violence. The ancient ideal that might was not only right but morally redemptive, that a wound is honorable rather than tragic, that killing with one’s own hand places the actor on a higher moral and metaphysical plane than a political body commanding a state functionary to execute an enemy or a criminal, seems beyond Everitt’s ken.

In the preface, Everitt condemns Alexander for glorifying war and “the fame it conferred o the valiant.” that “he enjoyed violence and was suicidally brave, appearing to see fighting in battle as a form of healthy physical exercise,” is condemned as a ‘dark side,” of the subject’s character. Already, Everitt has thrown away his pledge to judge Alexander by the values of is time rather than by our own perverse, pensive and sissy values or sheltering in place, etc. There seems to be no glimmer of understanding that Alexander was intensely religious, and that his total lack of fear represented his respect for heaven’s dispensation and as well, his pathological desire to join his Creator in heaven as ascendant son. Alexander is accused of “great cruelty,” and being “chivalrous, kind and loyal.”

As Advent: The Son of God progresses, we shall seek for these acts of goodness and cruelty, and develop a balance sheet.

Everitt begins with Alexander’s mysterious death. This writer will use Everitt as a guide for Book 7 of the son of God and the Areid, the parallel novels.

Chapter 1: Goat Kings

July 20, 356 B.C. Alexander was born among portents.

Phillip fought at the head of his army, in the front rank, wearing distinctive armor as his seven bodyguards tried to ward off the attention of enemies targeting the rightly armored king. Phillip was an actual, Homeric, hero king. The Macedonians seem closely related to Scythians, to include blond hair, and the various tribes of the Balkans. Phillip, as a king, sold enemies into slavery. On one occasion, a chained man noticed that Phillip’s genitals were exposed and advised him on covering himself. Such modesty contradicts other charges of Phillip being an orgy goer. Any man, free or not, could speak to the king.

Page 6, typo, the Persian Empire was not founded in the 5th but 6th century. Everitt does not use Before common era, but B.C., which si so refreshing.

512 B.C., from this date down until the rule of Phillip, the exposed Macedonian kings, surrounded by mountains and plains and sea, placed in the invasion path from Asia to Europe, were compelled to marry royal children to mountain kings and Persian governors. In the discussion of Alexander’s sexuality, Everitt is better than most academics. After describing the sexual license of Phillip and the rudish lack of interest in SEX at all by Alexander, it does not occur that Alexander was a puritan, a reactionary prude disgusted by his father’s one great failing,s exual over indulgence, with 7 wives, slave girls, and apprently two young men. Everitt does point at that this did not include anal sex, that the tardition in greece as man-to-man foreplay. There is no evidence of such perversion in Scythian, German or other Arуan races in traibal states. This seems to have come into eastern european culture through contact with decadent near eastern monetary civilizations, in which slaves and silver were the chief goods and and the eunuch made his appearance on the world stage to plague Hellas and Rome for 1500 years.

Further, Everitt takes it for granted that the model Alexander chose for himself, Achilles, was a lover of Patroculus. The evidence for this is not in the Iliad of homer, where both men have female lovers. Everitts source comes from Banquet with the sophists written some thousand years later in the age when sophists were increasingly degenerates. I know fighting mne, many of them, who do not have sex at all, do not have time for that “dissipation.” Everitt does discuss the fact that Alexander’s parenst asked him to have sex with a famous hooker, and that he refused. Alexander is given no credit for high morals here, onl questionable orientation. It is noted that Phillip must have been writing alexander out of the royal house when the young king went into exile with the agrianes after an argument with his father. The evidence is that no marriage was ararnegd by Phillip fr Alexander, bt among other children. Based on the teamwork fatehr and son showed defeating the greeks, with alexander winning a battle and foundinga city at 16, it is probable, that phllip, who was practical, dilomatic and icreasingly hubristic, had plans of marrying Alexander to a high persian princes after he took Anatolia to the Taurus Mounatins. Hillip was not planning on taking all of Asia. That was not his measured style.

Also, when Alexander personally conducts the slaughter of the heroic, homosexual, married Theban Sacred Band, this is not thought worthy of comment upon Alexander’s possibly prudish dislike for man sex. Alexander would go on to marry very carefuly and father at elast oen child. Everitt touches on the bloodline horror show that was Macedonian clan politics and that the Persians were paying off agents to thwart Macedonian expansion.

An early Alexander, “bold-scheming son of Amyntas,” [from Pindar] went to great lengths to prove a greek Argive bloodline, despite the common Macedonians speaking a hybrid barbarian dialect. In 452 Macedonian had an effeminate homosexual king who was a failure. Into the 300s Macedonians were stil,r egarded as barbarian. Demosthenes, a paid agent of the Persians, and a famous Athenian speaker called Macedonia, “a land where once you couldn’t even by a decent slave.”

This is telling, in that peoples who make good slaves, do not conquer but are conquered.

399 B.C. Archelaus, King of Macedon is assassinated. It is obvious at with mines in upper macedonia and access to narrow seas in the lowe lands, that the kings of Alexander’s country, were at high risk for murder. It is shown that tis is often from within, but also that there was much influence peddling in Macedonia by Persia and Athens.

359 B.C. Perdiccas king of Macedon, is killed in a battle with the Illyrians. Phillip, his brother, who ahd been held hostage in thebes and elarned iproved warfare methods, was the final brothe rof the ryal house old enough to rise to the embattle docacsion.

Everitt does a fanatstic job describing Macedonia as a place with ebnemies on all sides, that must rise or sink.

Phillip fght in many battels and had visible injuries: crushed hand, maimed leg, a lost eye and a broken collar bone. Such injuries are often caused by stones, which academics scorn as metaphors in the Iliad. No wonder Alexander cleaved to that book, with a father who seems to have emerged from battle with Hector like Diomedes.

Phillip beat soldiers for lack of discipline with his own hand, lead from the front and boasted that even women giving birth were not allowed the luxury of warm water in his country. Alexander had a teacher who made sure, that as a boy and youth, the notoriously homosexual academic Greek teachers would not molest him. He was brought up strictly under a tough father and a wicked mother who worshipped the darker earth powers. He would prefer the heavenly powers to those that his mother who slept with snakes. He also opined tha sex, like sleep, was waste of time. Obviously, in his mind, he had a world to conquer, even renaming a conquered city after himself at 16.

In Chapter 2, The Apprentice, more information is presented about Alexanders youthful condition, his appearance, and temper. Much of the material here is available from the ancient sources, where I shall examine it.

Chapter 3, The Bull is Wreathed

Alexander’s parents frame the coming disaster, in which Phillip will be killed by a scorned male lover, in October 336, at a sate occasion. There is no strong evidence for who was behind the murder, though the killer had been raped by a gang of men and Phillip had failed to avenge him. Athens, Thebes, Persia, which Phillip was in the process of invading, or Olympias, originally Polyxena, recently shunned for a new “favorite” wife were all possible backers.

Everitt returns to the perennial Macedonian position of being beset by many enemies and places Alexander in the context of his 20th Year rising t the challenge of saving a country that had cost his remarkable father four body parts, and an early death in his 40s, with “No one gave the boy a chance.”

Chapter 4: The Lone Wolf, page 76, marks an excellent advent to Arrian’s tale of expedition, which is beyond the scope of this overture.