This Plutarch selection collects Greek lives from the world before, during and after Alexander’s rise. It is useful for people-centred accounts of fourth-century Greece and Macedon, including the political world around Demosthenes, Phocion and Alexander, the fall of the independent city-state order and the campaigns that carried Macedonian power into Asia. It is biography rather than continuous military history, but it gives context for the people behind the age of Chaeronea and Alexander.
Plutarch’s biographies are not neutral chronicle. He selects episodes that reveal character and often compares moral qualities across Greek and Roman subjects. The collection is therefore useful both for the historical traditions it preserves and for understanding how later antiquity interpreted leadership, ambition and civic virtue in the generations surrounding Alexander and the Successors.
Adrian Goldsworthy
12 books
Xenophon
Mary Beard
Arrian