Book Review: Alexander At the End of the World

The Years of Forgetting Aristotle

Alexander At the End of the World: the Forgotten Final Years of Alexander the Great, by Rachel Kousser, published in July, 2024, is a biography of Alexander the Great that picks up his life story with his conquest of Persia through to his death. The focus of the narrative is, of course, on Alexander himself, most particularly, his military and political actions. The story is told well, and makes for a captivating read.

As this blog about philosophy, this review will focus on the tiny part of the book that concerns philosophy. The key facts in this story are that Aristotle personally tutored Alexander for several years when Alexander was a teenager, and all during the period covered by this book, Alexander had with him in his traveling court several philosophers, most notably, Callisthenes, Aristotle’s nephew; Onescritus, the Cynic; the Democritean philosopher, Anasarchus, and his protege, Pyrrho; and for a couple of years, Kalanos, an Indian philosopher.

As other reviewers have noted, the choice of subtitle, “the forgotten years” is strange. As Steve Donoghue points out, “there’s nothing ‘forgotten’ here, since every single bowl of gheymeh Alexander ever slurped during those years has been the subject of multi-volume studies over the last 2000 years.” These were the years where Alexander was at the pinnacle of his success. How can they be said to have been forgotten? For the purposes of this review, a better subtitle would be “The Years of Forgetting Aristotle.”

Alexander’s approach to virtue and eudaimonia could scarcely be more different from that prescribed by Aristotle. Aristotle counsels moderation. Alexander’s motto could be said to be that there’s nothing worth doing that’s not worth doing to excess. In choice after choice, Alexander would make wild swings from one extreme to the other. It makes for entertaining reading, but it was rough going for his counselors, nearly all of whom eventually got sidelined, or worse.

One bit of direct advice Aristotle gave Alexander for his campaign was “to deal with the Greeks like a leader, and barbarians like a despot; to treat the Greeks like friends and fellow citizens, but to behave towards the rest like they were animals or plants.” This advice Alexander firmly rejected in favor of multi-culturalism and cultural fusion. His first act of embracing cultural fusion was, following his successful conquest of Persia, to give his…