I Wish I'd Been There (R): Book Two: European History (I Wish I'd Been There, Two, 2, Band 2) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 030727764X ISBN 13: 9780307277640

Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2009

Inhaltsangabe

“What is the scene or incident in European history that you would like to have witnessed-and why?”

 

With lively and detailed accounts of some of the most dramatic events in history, some of our finest historical writers now turn their attention to Europe in this companion volume to I Wish I'd Been There: Twenty Historians Bring to Life the Dramatic Events that Changed America.  

Guided by peerless scholars such as Paul Kennedy, John Keegan, Ross King, Freeman Dyson, and Katherine Duncan-Jones, readers will be transported to the signing of Magna Carta, the Versailles Conference, the German surrender in WWII on Luneburg Heath, and other key turning points in the drama of European history. These essays encompass two millenia and an entire continent, addressing issues of politics, law, religion, peace and war, science and the arts, and social change, all telescoped into finely observed narratives. The result is an historical pageant of characters and episodes that will attract and delight all readers of history.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Byron Hollinshead is president of American Historical Publications, a producer of books in history for adults and for children. Previously, he was president of American Heritage Publishing Company and Oxford University Press, Inc. He was publisher of MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History and Time Machine: American History for Kids, and edited I Wish I'd Been There (books one and two).

 

Theodore K. Rabb is a professor of history emeritus at Princeton University. He is the author of The Struggle for Stability in Early Modern Europe and The Last Days of the Renaissance, among other books. Rabb was the principal historical adviser and commentator for the Emmy-nominated PBS series Renaissance and wrote the series's companion book, Renaissance Lives.

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JOSIAH OBER
At the Deathbed of Alexander the Great

Josiah Ober is the Constantine Mitsotakis Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford University, where he holds appointments in Political Science, Classics, and Philosophy. After teaching at Montana State University, he joined the Classics Department at Princeton University in 1990, where he was the David Magie Professor of Classics from 1993 to 2006. Professor Ober has written extensively on military history, classical political thought, and ancient and modern democracy. He is the author of a number of books, including Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens, The Athenian Revolution, Political Dissent in Democratic Athens, and, most recently, Athenian Legacies: Essays on the Politics of Going On Together (2005). He is currently completing a new book on participatory democracy, knowledge organization, and innovation. He spends as much of his spare time as possible wading the streams near Bozeman, Montana, fly-fishing for trout.

To start this volume, he takes us back to the last days of the greatest conqueror in history.

***

At the Deathbed of Alexander the Great

The last days of Alexander the Great have been obsessively studied since antiquity and much is known; the numerous Greek literary sources can be complemented by precious cuneiform texts and the evidence of archaeology. We know when and where he died: June 11, 323 b.c., between 4:00 and 5:00 p.m., on the banks of the Euphrates River in the fabled city of Babylon, in a palace built by the great and notorious Nebuchadnezzar a quarter millennium before. At the moment of his death, Alexander was surrounded by his lieutenants, soldiers, wives, and eunuchs; by Macedonians, Greeks, Persians, and Babylonians; along with petitioners, ambassadors, admirers, and gawkers from across three continents. The cause of death was fever. The symptoms began several days before, after a long night of heavy drinking. The fever abated briefly, then became increasingly severe. At the end Alexander could barely move and could not speak clearly, but he retained enough strength to press his signet ring into the hand of one of his generals. When asked to whom his spear-won realm should pass, the king, it was said, managed to whisper "to the strongest."

Few ancient death scenes are as well documented, yet so much remains mysterious. Upon Alexander's demise, a rumor circulated that he had been poisoned. Fingers pointed to Antipater, the veteran commander who had been left in charge of Macedon when the twenty-year-old Alexander set out to conquer Asia. Antipater's son Cassander arrived in Babylon just a few days before the onset of the king's fever and had quarreled violently with Alexander. Cassander's brother Iolaus was the king's cupbearer; the story held that Cassander had smuggled into Babylon a poison so deadly that it corroded all metal and could only be contained by a mule's hoof. Had Cassander passed a hoof-full of death to Iolaus, fearing that the king planned to strip Antipater of his command? But if so, what was the poison? Ancient and modern pharmacologists have struggled to correlate the reported symptoms with the action of poisons known in Alexander's day.

The rumors about the cause of Alexander's death are intertwined with reports of his plans for the future: Having conquered Greece, Egypt, and Asia as far east as India, what lands would the Undefeated God, as the king had recently designated himself, choose to conquer next? A massive fleet of warships had recently gathered at Babylon, and the rivers had been cleared of obstructing dams: The waterway was open to the Persian Gulf. At the least, it seemed, Alexander's plans included circumnavigation of the Arabian Peninsula. That would be a notable feat of navigation-and allow him to acquire the spice and incense-producing coastal zones of Arabia. But those in the know said that the king had his eye on restive city-states in Greece, and on fresh conquests in Africa, Italy, and even Spain. Close to hand, the city-state of Athens had recently (if only briefly) offered asylum to Alexander's onetime chief treasurer, Harpalus, who had absconded with thousands of talents of silver. Farther west, on the northern shore of Africa, lay the hugely wealthy Afro-Phoenician state of Carthage, and then there were the luxury-loving Etruscans of central Italy and their neighbor, the fast-rising state of Rome. Mineral riches were there for the taking in Spain. To the north lay Thrace and Scythia, rich in gold and grain. According to the rumor mill, no part of the civilized world lay outside the king's ambit of desire. Which of these rumors were true?

And by what system of governance and what social policies did Alexander intend to rule his vast kingdom? Would he continue to reign as his father Philip had before him, as king of the Macedonians and constitutional hegemon of the Greek city-states? Would he bring all of his realm under one government, lording over the world from Babylon as the legitimate successor of a long line of Persian Kings of Kings, on the model of Cyrus, Xerxes, and Darius? Had he reinvented himself as the greatest of the Central Asian warlords during the challenging Indo-Bactrian campaigns of the last several years? Would he return to Egypt, to rule as a divine conqueror-pharaoh on the model of Ramses the Great?

We could frame an answer to these questions if only we could observe how Alexander chose to dress in public and in private. Dress mattered a lot in the ancient world: How you dressed was an indication of who you were. It is certain that the king had taken to wearing selected items of Persian garb, at least on certain occasions: gorgeous purple robes, but not trousers; the diadem, but not the tiara. How often and in what circumstances did Alexander choose to costume himself as Persian royalty? As Macedonian soldier or rough-riding warlord? How widely and deeply were oriental court customs being adopted by his Macedonian followers? Some were happy to adopt Persian protocol by prostrating themselves before the king. Other men, who openly scorned the Persian custom of proskinesis, had recently lost their lives: Callisthenes, the philosopher and nephew of Alexander's teacher Aristotle, died in prison. Cleitus the Black, whose quick work with a sword had saved Alexander's life at the start of the Asian adventure, had been stabbed to death by Alexander in a drunken quarrel. The squabble had been over the king's growing passion for the trappings of what Cleitus despised as orientalism. How important was it to the son of Philip of Macedon that he be humbly acknowledged by one and all by obsequies traditionally accorded the Persian Great King?

Even more pressingly: How would he treat his subjects-and how would they relate to one another? A few months before his death, Alexander had held a military review of thirty thousand Persian youths who had just completed four years of training in the arts of fighting in the Greek style. Apparently Macedonians and Greeks would no longer hold a monopoly on military service; Persians were being incorporated into the cavalry and into the infantry phalanx. Were these the first moves toward a unified empire, whose diverse ethnic groups would be equal in the eyes of their king?

Perhaps the key to understanding the king's intentions lay with the new cities populated by mustered-out veterans, recently founded by and named for Alexander. Many new cities had been planned, but were they to be culturally purely Greek, as the king's old tutor, Aristotle, advised? Or semi-Greek? Or some exciting hybrid form as yet unknown? The port city of Egyptian Alexandria was becoming a cosmopolitan center of trade, culture, and government. But what of the others? At the farthest northeast frontier of the empire, at the modern site of Ai Khanoum on...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2009
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 030727764X
• ISBN 13: 9780307277640
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 336
• Herausgeber: Hollinshead Byron, Rabb Theodore K.
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: GPSR Kontakt; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Deutschland