Description: Until recently, popular biographies and most scholars viewed Alexander the Great as a genius with a plan, a romantic figure pursuing his vision of a united world. Green, a Cambridge-trained classicist who is also a novelist, portrays Alexander as both a complex personality and a single-minded general, a man capable of such diverse expediencies as patricide or the massacre of civilians. 14 maps and 2 tables.

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Reviews: "[A] vibrant, immensely readable biography. . . . History leaps off the page in this passionate narrative. . . . Green strips away romantic legends to lay bare an Orwellian tyrant whose unbroken ascent to absolute power led to his estrangement from reality." (Publishers Weekly)

"A superb character study. . . . A thicket of intrigues, battles, treaties made and broken. . . . It drives forward, clarified by Green's easy command of the material and saturated with his sense of that gorgeous, raging, brilliant time in which an implacable golden demigod rammed Hellenism forever into history and legend. The scale of Alexander's life is marvelously conveyed. . . . A magnificent biography (and an unflinching study of Realpolitik in the ancient world." (Kirkus Reviews)

"As one reads through Peter Green's enthralling life of Alexander . . . one feels every strand of the mythical story coming apart. . . . Green takes a very bold revisionist stand against the imperial vainglory of antiquity." (...

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