ALEXANDER THE GREAT'S LEGACY

Sub-titled 'The Decline of Macedonian Europe In the Wake of the Wars of the Successors', for Macedon there was not the thousand years of glory that was the extraordinary destiny of the Romans, nor even the 200 years of Persian primacy, only 50 or so years of strife and trauma, ending in a Galatian deluge that threatened the sacred site at Delphi. This was the period during which Cassander and Lysimachus had seemed about to construct durable Europe-based processes of civil government. It had seen the likes of Demetrius Poliorcetes and Pyrrhus of Epirus battling and besieging across Macedonia, Thrace and Greece. So why was it that the Macedonian state virtually created by Philip II and taken to the heights of epochal triumph by his son Alexander the Great had, hardly two generations after his death, become a weaker entity than it had been when the young conqueror had crossed the Hellespont? The story that unfolds explores how the unique character and particular legacy left when Alexander died at Babylon in 323BC at the age of just 32 ensured that his homeland failed to gain the kind of imperial dividend of the world's other great empires. We see the remarkable parallels to the earlier Persian invasions of the Greek world that Alexander had claimed to avenge. 288pp, colour plates and maps.