Not So Great : ALEXANDER OF MACEDON 356-323 BC; A Historical Biography <i> By Peter Green (University of California: $34.95; 650 pp.) </i>

Robert Graves once wrote a satirical poem about the Battle of Marathon (or was it Salamis?) called “The Persian Version,” in which all the best-known features of the engagement were subtly inverted to give the impression of a victory for Xerxes. As one reads through Peter Green’s enthralling life of Alexander, commonly known as “the Great” or in Greek, Alexandros Megalos , or in some convenient Greek nationalist slang as Megalexandros , one feels every strand of the mythical story coming apart. If a Hellenic Lytton Strachey had set himself to writing a major work of debunking titled “Eminent Macedonians,” this is how it would have come out. Words, that is to say, are not minced:

“For 25,000 miles, Alexander had carried his trail of rapine, slaughter and subjugation. What he achieved of lasting value was largely unintentional: In political terms his trail-blazing activities through the Near East had a curiously ephemeral quality about them. The moment he moved on, rebellion tended to flare up behind him, and when he died--just as he himself predicted--the empire he had carved out at once split into anarchic chaos, while the next 40 years saw an indescribably savage and bloody struggle between his surviving marshals.”

In other words, the answer to Christopher Marlowe’s haunting “Is it not passing brave to be a King/ And ride in triumph through Persepolis?” turns out to be a blunt “No.” Indeed, Alexander vandalized Persepolis and made it famous only by accident, since the combustion visited by his soldiers had a preservative effect on certain artifacts.

The paradox of Alexander is that he was an imperialist without an empire. The Roman Augustus was later to express his bafflement at the fact that “Alexander did not regard it as a greater task to set in order the empire which he had won than to win it.”

Green tries to supply an answer to this enigma by providing a profile of a spoiled, driven narcissist. His mother was a jealous, intriguing dynast and his father a tyrannical bully. Aware, perhaps, of his own lack of polish, Philip made an astoundingly sapient decision when he selected the cunning tutor Aristotle for the training and instruction of his son. By this means, a relatively backward Macedonian princeling acquired a veneer of Hellenism and enough grounding in the works of Homer to lay claim to a heroic tradition. He also picked up some rudiments of statecraft: Aristotle advised him to be “a hegemon to the Greeks and a despot to the barbarians, to look after the former as after friends and relatives, and to deal with the latter as with beasts or plants.”

This distinction, like the maxims of Machiavelli, turned out to be easier to adumbrate than to observe. In order to become a hegemon in the first place, Alexander may have had to treat friends and family like beasts. Green makes a very powerful circumstantial case for his complicity in the murder of Philip (perhaps incited by his mother) and in the later mopping-up of rivals at court. Alexander would not be the first or the last monarch to decide that the expansionist urge would quench domestic doubts; he may have felt the psychic dimension of this prompting more intensely than most.

Green takes a very bold revisionist stand against the imperial vainglory of antiquity--bolder than anything I have read since Brecht’s “A Worker Reads History” or Shelley’s “Ozymandias”--and against the uses that modern Greek fascists have made of this tradition. He seems also to feel the need to express this view in deliberately demotic, colloquial style:

“He now made lavish sacrifice to Athena and dedicated his own armor at the goddess’s altar. In exchange, he received a shield and panoply of guaranteed Trojan vintage, with which he armed himself for his first engagement on Asiatic soil, at the Granicus river. However, they got rather badly knocked about during the fighting. . . .

“Alexander had sent envoys to Siwah asking if it would be lawful to worship Hephaestion as a god. No, the oracle replied, but it was permissible to establish a hero-cult in his honour. Alexander at once wrote off to the rascally Cleomenes, now his governor of Egypt, promising him a blanket pardon for all his many misdeeds.”

The difficulty with this no-nonsense, plain-man’s mode is that too often (as with “anarchic chaos” in the extract above) it deviates into either cliche or tautology. In the fascinating case of Alexander’s favorite boy-eunuch Bagoas--already known to fans of Mary Renault--Green twice dismissively describes him as “sinister” without giving any definite reason for his opinion. And even if you relish puns, you may find yourself wincing a bit when Green writes “The king, who actively disliked ugly people (and was himself in a very ugly mood),” or, recording the stoning to death of Alexander’s rivals, allows himself to say that he was “never averse--in the most literal sense on this occasion--from killing two birds with one stone.”

Prof. Green published an earlier version of this book in England in 1974, well before the argument about classics and the canon that now convulses the American campus, and well before Martin Bernal’s philological argument for the concept of a black Athena. So it is of great interest to find him making such explicit connections between Pharaonic Egypt and ancient Hellas.

Legend had it that Alexander himself was the natural son of the Egyptian monarch Nectanebo. He was more anxious for the title of Pharaoh than for any of the other glorifications or semideifications that came his way by right of conquest. He was most in awe of the Nilotic oracle Zeus-Ammon, where the term or name Ammon was a Hellenization of the Egyptian deity Amen-Ra. Not by coincidence is Alexandria on the Egyptian littoral, or the restoration work at Karnak and Luxor attributable to the Macedonian adventurer. To the Greeks at least, there was no obstacle to the acknowledgement of Egyptian provenance when it came to matters of civilization that could not be called “Western.”

How, if this conceited young thug was so capricious, cruel and superstitious, did he come down to us as a figure of daring and romance? Obviously, the fact that he died young gave him an advantage, as it has done to many subsequent opportunists. We are not confronted with the spectacle of a gross and swollen old age amid the miseries of a contracting dominion.

Green further argues that later historians in Greece and in Western Europe sought either to glamorize the idea of a “civilising mission” or, when that fell out of favor, to give a more lenient account of the spread of Greek ideas. I could myself still, as a foe of imperial illusions, have done with a little more on the catalytic influence of Alexander’s conquest, which brought many slumbering parts of the ancient world into contact with each other and with a wider sphere.

Yet one is left with the callousness of Alexander’s last words, where, in full knowledge of the consequences, he bequeathed his empire to “the strongest.” There will always be a sadistic taint to this grandiose gesture, on the part of one who cannot bear to believe that the known world can or will get along without him.

Despite his tale of patricide, mother-fixation and inappropriate male bonding, Green cautions against any too-facile Freudian reading. Nonetheless, one closes this combative, occasionally irritating book with an enhanced sense of the ways in which the House of Atreus is said to lie so near the roots of our discontents.