The Virtues Of War: A Novel Of Alexander The Great (2005) - Plot & Excerpts
I get specific so I’ll put this under a spoiler. The short version is, I took quite a dislike to Alexander as here portrayed - he wasn’t a hero-figure for me. I thought, from an Alexander novel, what I want is a hero figure. But this turned out to quite interest me, with its ambivalence. I’d like to be more certain about the author’s intentions: I don’t suppose I was meant to take so against Alexander. (view spoiler)[I was intrigued by the title, and in the end, it’s what most interests me. Alexander’s the spokesperson for the virtues learnt in war, and since we’re in Alexander’s head, he’s the one who gets to expatiate. (He does expatiate, too often he offers you a lesson. The set-up is he’s talking to a page, so you can feel talked-down to.) Pressfield titles his sections after these virtues: The Will to Fight, Love of Glory, Self-Command, Shame at Failure, Contempt for Death, Patience, An Instinct for the Kill, Love for One’s Comrades, Love for One’s Enemy. That looks schematic, and a bit too straightforward, and for ages I thought Alexander, and these virtues, and his belief in these virtues, went too uncriticised. But then in ‘Love for One’s Comrades’ we’re in Babylon after the victory, where the corruptions of success set in, where he starts to become alienated from his soldiers, at odds with his officers; and this section culminates with Alexander’s assassination of his old comrade Parmenio, on pragmatic grounds that – as written here – only sickened me. So why is this section titled ‘Love for One’s Comrades’? Unless Pressfield orders randomly, and I won’t accuse an author of that unless I have to… is this irony? The last section, ‘Love for One’s Enemies’ is set in India and… I have to say, of peoples met in the East, I felt only India got treated not with love – that isn’t the question – but with respect. Alexander started to irk me after he was master of Persia, with his civilizing mission, that was too like later European civilizing missions. His soldiers had an honest contempt for Persia and its society, but I felt Alexander had a concealed contempt – underneath his pity for them, his wish to grace them with Greek culture. I know these attitudes were Greek. But in these cases, I crave for an indication from the author, that he sees above, that he’s aware his characters have Greek blinkers on. I didn’t feel sure of Pressfield on this point. Not when he has Darius’s mother agree with everything Alexander says. Wouldn’t she have more to say for her culture, more of a defence when Persian ways are set against the Greek? Next we went to Afghanistan, and I felt very much we only heard an ignorant outsider’s perspective – that is, Alexander’s. It’s made worse when, after a slew of insults, he claims, “I came, myself, to love them.” Maybe, but he didn’t come to respect them, and I’d like the chance to argue to him – nor to understand them. Throughout, there’s this: “In their stead we have free Afghan, Scythian, and Bactrian cohorts. Such tribesmen cannot be trained to fight like Europeans, but with their tattooed faces and panther skin-bedecked ponies, they add a dash of colour and savagery.” Okay, it’s more than possible that Alexander thought thus. And my only issue is, I wish to have an Alexander who was truly open to the foreign cultures he met – I like to think of him that way. And this Alexander annoys because he believes he’s being so great towards them, and so distinct from his ignorant soldiers. This sentence – though not about his attitudes to the East – sort of captures how and why he annoys me: “Most gratifying of this battle’s issue was its affording of an occasion for magnanimity.” But in these late stages of the book Alexander is subjected to question. From Hephaestion, who gives a (simplistic perhaps) anti-war speech, declares “I have come to hate war” and critiques the title of the whole: “Or shall we cite Achilles and say we emulate the virtues of war? Rubbish! Any virtue carried to an extreme becomes a vice.” Then we have the soldiers’ revolt, refusal to go further. In this telling, I felt the soldiers’ spokesperson made sense, I was sympathetic. When Alexander shamed this part of his army into a change of heart, I thought, these tactics of humiliation wouldn’t have worked on me. At last, in India, about its religious sages, we hear the statement – from Hephaestion – “These are not barbarians, Thessalus.” Although I’m afraid he goes on, “They are not slavish, as Babylonians, or idolatrous, as the men of Egypt.” And an old old comrade of Alexander’s joins the sages to find a life after soldiering, and we are left with an image of Alexander as limited by that creed or fact that begins the book: “I have always been soldier.” A note for those who want to know. In Alexander’s own words: “And let me put this plain, for those of a depraved cast of mind” – there’s nothing physical between him and Hephaestion. Pressfield’s Alexander has a discomfort with the idea. (hide spoiler)]
This my second Pressfield novel and is one of those books that inspired a lot of mixed feelings in me. I originally rated it four stars but I think I have to ultimately give it three. What it does, it does excellently, but what it lacks is totally nonexistent. While it does have a ton of fascinating information on Alexander's military and how he carved such a massive empire in a relatively short time without losing a single battle, it's almost impossible to engage on a personal level, which I really don't think is the author's fault and I'll do my best to explain why.Alexander is brilliant and relentlessly shoved onward by what he calls his daimon, peeling apart and smashing the armies of the Greek, Persian, and Indian armies who stand against him, but he's also cold as ice. I felt like Pressfield tried to avoid this by including his interactions with his friend Hephaestion, and scenes of him getting all weepy over stuff. They don't work, and why should they? I don't think anyone has said that Alexander was a warm, compassionate humanist. He started a war with a pretty dubious casus belli and caused the deaths of so, so many people and the destabilization of a huge part of earth, as well as even managing to posthumously cause the wars of the Diadochi which caused even more death and chaos. Yet for some reason we kind of look at him in a romanticized, lover-warrior kind of view. The best reason for this that I can come up with is that he came from a Hellenistic culture and a lot of people, including myself, grew up with kind of this nice ideal of them which we don't have for similar cultures who raised gifted conquerors like the Huns, Mongols, etc. At first I kind of balked at this calculating, alien portrayal of Alexander but then I realized that this is who these people were; they valued glory and power and catapulting themselves into legend through fire and death. This probably leaves very little room left for small-time stuff like compassion, rationality, selflessness, etc. All of this stuff still makes it a compelling portrait of what someone who achieved this kind of wide-scale subjugation might be like. I just had to resign myself to the fact that I wasn't gonna like Alexander. That said...I still had a thrill in watching him take on such huge Persian armies and smash through them with his repeated uses of deception, feints, and insane cavalry charges straight at the enemy commander (often Darius himself) that basically cause every enemy on the field to shit their pants and stampede each other trying to get away. The battles are always, always fascinating as they present this huge picture of what Alexander is seeing in his head before, during, and after the fighting and Pressfield writes him as a very, very smart and talented soldier. I might be a little too hard on him, as he does obviously feel some remorse over Thebes and generally wasn't as hard on his conquered peoples and enemies as some, but overall a pretty icy and even disingenuous dude.So another good one from Pressfield, just one that I had a relatively limited connection with--and that's probably how it should be. If you find yourself connecting too much with a person who killed thousands upon thousands of people and caused so much turmoil for an ultimately futile and kind of misguided cause, you're probably a little unbalanced--or the next Alexander the Great. Despite all that ranting I did about Alexander's character in this novel I still kept turning the pages and enjoying myself as I learned more about him once I let go of the desire to like him. Kind of makes me want to revisit another book with a character I thought turned into a totally murderous dick that ended up making me dislike the story; Conn Iggulden's Lords of the Bow, which is another credit to Pressfield. Two out of two so far, although certainly not as affecting as Gates of Fire, which all fans of historical fiction should probably give a shot if they haven't.
What do You think about The Virtues Of War: A Novel Of Alexander The Great (2005)?
Awesome book about Alexander the Great, a man who became king at 20 and used his military expertise to conquest Egypt, The mighty Persian Empire, India and much more of the known world. This book is a novelization of his life, and one gets a front seat view of his mindset as the book is written in first person. So how does someone who achieves, conquers and even destroys so much think? Take away lessons: 1) Complete and utter certainty of purpose. Alexander's destiny, as he calls it, was to conquer Persia. At the time Persia was a world super power, extremely wealthy and had a much stronger military than Macedonia. Yet, he still believed, actually he knew, that he would defeat them and operated with complete certainty toward that end. 2) Leading by example. Alexander behaved to the highest standard because he knew that the only way to lead men was to exemplify leadership qualities. Even as King and Commander, he worked way harder in much worse conditions than his contemporaries. He slept 1/3 the amount they did, in a single bed in a mediocre tent, trained harder than the soldiers, and even took less personal wealth from his victories in battle. Further, he was very much against shameful behaviour. In once instance, after the Macedonian army won a battle against the Persians, the soldiers began to pilliage the riches and rape the women. At the time such was the custom, but Alexander stopped such behaviour immediately. He then discplined his troops with hours and hours of training, until they were at utter exhaustion. 3) Do the hard thing, it will strengthen you. When Alexander was young, he had a mentor who would wake him up very early in the morning and make him dive into an icy cold river to strengthen him. The mentor one day suddenly noticed that when he would go to wake up Alexander, he was no longer in the tent. This is because Alexander started waking up even earlier to do the cold plunge on his own accord. 4) Facing reality, because only in doing so may one overcome difficulty. Alexander on facing an army of a million soldiers, when his force was only approximately 40 000. "Nothing so steadies a company confronting great odds as a sober recitation of the facts. The more dread-inducing the reality, the more directly it must be faced."5) Always be proactive, even when deciding to withdraw. "Always attack. Even in defense, attack. The attacking army possesses the initiative and thus commands the action. To attack makes men brave, to defend makes them timorous"
—Hamza Nasir
Written in first person, this novel tells the story of Alexander's conquests through his own words. This book was a major turn-off in the beginning because it was nothing more than a statistical summary of all the components of his army during one campaign versus another. He would list in detail the types of weapons his men carried, how much these weapons weighed, how they were utilized and why they were so effective in certain situations. Also a lot of detail on battlefield strategy, which interested me not in the least. What I was looking for was a story about Alexander and how he came to power, not a checklist of his supplies. But in the end, I realized that my expectations were probably set too high. When you consider that Alexander spent his entire adult life making war, it's probably a pretty accurate depiction of who he really was. What else could be said about a guy who was always thinking ahead to his next battle? So perhaps the novel's weaknesses shouldn't be blamed on Pressfield but instead on Alexander, who maybe just wasn't as interesting as I would've thought. I would like to add, however, that there were parts to the story that I liked very much, especially toward the end when Alexander begins to express a faint sense of regret. If this had been a bigger part of the plot, I would have given it a much better recommendation.
—Scott
I don't know if Pressfield planned to write a series of books about the great battles of Greek history when wrote Gates of War, but this third installment (Tides of War is the second, about portions of the Peloponnesian War) is very good. I recommend it with one reservation-- there is (obliquely narrated) an instance of beastiality at the book's open. It's not without function in the narrative, to contrast Alexander with this elders, to foreshadow the Macedonian invasion of Persia, etc. The remainder of the book is elevated quite above its opening.Pressfield presents the battles of Charonea, Granicus, and Issus thoroughly and masterfully-- his description of Charonea is, I think, his best battle. By Gaugamela the reader only sees that part of the battle that Alexander would have seen, with big gaps, too. Pressfield leaves out the battle of Hydaspes, sadly; he gives a list of reasons why it is Alexanders biggest and best victory; I hope he essays to write it out one day.If there is any better treatment of Alexander's early career, I would like to see it.
—Ezra Hood
