A. is born (6 Hecatombaeon = July 20) to Philip II and the Epirote princess Olympias.

Although Alexander’s campaign has received less attention than it might from the perspective of geographical studies, the image of Alexander himself as an explorer has, paradoxically, enjoyed great success in the modern historiography. This is partly to be explained by the widespread belief that Aristotle had a great influence on his student. From this perspective, the image of Alexander as an intellectual and a friend of knowledge fits perfectly with that of an explorer eager to know the world. In the eyes of many scholars, an assumption of this sort has allowed Alexander to become more than a mere conqueror. A new way of understanding this problem is proposed here, since we consider that both Alexander the conqueror and Alexander the explorer were essential and indissociable elements of Alexander the king, that is to say, they were indispensable characteristics of any Argead monarch, and these two facets of rulership must be studied together. In other words, knowing the world was one more way to conquer it and rule it.

Thanks to the career of Alexander the Great, Macedonia has become synonymous with military innovation and territorial conquest. The question of how he was able to accomplish this has been explored in detail by generations of scholars, and an exhaustive list of works explore this topic, by scholars including Heckel, Hatzopoulo, Karunanithy, Sekunda, Heckel, Bosworth, Engels and Fuller. This chapter outlines key elements of Alexander’s army and tactics to develop a discussion about some of the fundamental shifts he brought onto the battlefield and how they reflect aspects of Macedonian identity.

Alexander continues to be a subject of military as well as historical or cultural interest. In modern times, he began as the greatest of Great Captains, then became the inventor of modern mobile warfare, the model for romantic military genius, and, in recent decades, the unlikely precedent for leaders as different as Hitler and Mao Tse Tung. The writers promoting him include both Clausewitz and the contemporary Israeli writer, Martin Van Creveld; his detractors include Frederick the Great of Prussia and the most influential modern British military writer, B. H. Liddell-Hart. Machiavelli, Montaigne, and Montesquieu are among the civilians who join military men in giving opinions of Alexander as both a strategist and a fighter of battles. This chapter begins, however, with Julian, whose dialogue, Caesares, is the first extended comparison of great generals in the Western literary tradition. From there it moves to Machiavelli and thence to Italian as well as French writers, before going on to recent literature dominated by writers in German and English. The chapter ends with speculation as to why Alexander remains an authoritative yet iconoclastic figure in military history.

The Macedonia Alexander left in spring 334 BCE was principally the making of his father Philip II, though Philip’s ‘Macedonia proper’ had been largely a recovery of the Argead realm of Alexander I more than a century earlier. Early expansion from Pieria into the central plain of Bottiaea established a core of Argead control in Lower Macedonia. Following the retreat of Xerxes’ army after 479, Alexander I took full advantage of a power void to expand into the eastern region, conquering eastern Mygdonia, annexing Crestonia and Bisaltia eastwards to the Strymon valley and gaining control of rich supplies of mineral deposits and timber. Most of the eastern territory was lost after 450 BCE, but Philip II, in addition to recovering the old kingdom and consolidating Upper with Lower Macedonia, through conquest and diplomacy more than doubled the politically controlled territory of Macedonia. His transformation of Macedonia included the subjugation of Paeonians, Illyrians, Thracians and Triballians, the opening up of trade and securing of mining, control of Epirus, domination of Thessaly and the uniting of the southern Greek poleis under his hegemony. Alexander inherited a stable kingdom, a tested army of Macedonians, subordinate allies and a secure supply line to Asia.

Throughout the long sixth century BCE, family names and conventions for recording them were well established among a restricted segment of the Babylonian urban population. The practice emerged in the eighth and seventh centuries BCE and had antecedents stretching back to the late second millennium. Family names were derived from either ancestral names – typically masculine but occasionally feminine – or occupational titles derived from temple functions. In texts, individuals were designated as descendants of the family name in genealogies that covered two, three, or even four generations. It can be unclear to a modern reader if the final patrilineal ancestor in a genealogy designated a family name or an actual person. This is especially true of two-tier genealogies in which the second tier could be a family name or the father’s name, and the chapter outlines strategies for distinguishing family names in such cases. Family names became common at different times in different parts of Babylonia and some family names were localized to specific locales. The practice can first be observed at Babylon and nearby cities and the spread of some family names was due to the movement of people. The practice never took hold at Nippur.

This chapter introduces the reader to the repertoire of personal names recorded in cuneiform texts from Babylonia in the first millennium BCE. It offers a historical introduction to the text corpus and outlines the aims and limitations of the present volume within the current state of research.

Macedonian conqueror, in both Jewish and Christian sources, was a composite and of complicated design. It was constantly created and recreated, using varied techniques and inspirations, which resulted in a number of disparate, fragmentary projections. The dominant features of these projections were selected according to the immediate need and agenda of the text in which the figure of Alexander appeared. There is a certain continuity between the development of Alexander stories and legends in the Jewish milieu and those of the Greek and Roman pagan traditions, but there are significant innovations as well. As for the Christian authors, as much as they were familiar with Classical writings on Alexander, they would also exploit the Jewish corpus of Alexander legends, some of which have no direct parallel in Greco-Roman pagan writings.

This chapter discusses the typology and the social and gender aspects of Babylonian female names recorded in the Neo-Babylonian and Persian periods (626–330 BCE). As to typology, a distinction is made between names that constitute a sentence and those that constitute a noun. In both categories, further subdivisions are possible. As to the social use of female names, the chapter discusses how names indicate the social status and origins of their bearers. Although most female names were given to women of any social status, some names were typical of enslaved women. Finally, the chapter discusses the distinctions between male and female names.

The transmission of the condicio coloniaria appears determined by the characterisation of it as a lesser status and the senatusconsultum Claudianum used as correction. But this was not restricted to coloni. Other groups involved in an industry important for the emperor (weapon smiths, silk weavers, purple snail divers, miners, minters) were also tied and subjected, as the corporati of towns, important for the municipal services (fire men, etc.). The term condicionales is used. However, from the enumeration it follows that the lesser status, which also impeded the fulfillment of official functions, was restricted to these groups and was not a general phenomenon.

The Introduction locates the current volume initially in the context of the work of the Alexander equipe since 1997, and then more broadly in the context of visions of Alexander proffered since the work of Droysen in 1833, with particular attention to those of Berve (1926), Wilcken 1931, Tarn (1948), Schachermeyr (1949), Badian (1958–), Lane Fox 1973 and Bosworth (1980–). A response is given to the objections voiced against the approach of the activities of the equipe formulated by James Davidson in 2001 under the slogan ‘Alexanderland’. The breakdown of the book’s parts and chapters is laid out and justified, with the contents of each contribution briefly summarized. Particular attention is given to the selection of the historical sources accorded focused discussions in Part III.

Alexander spent at most eight months in Egypt (mid/late October of 332 to late June of 331), but his brief time there has sparked more academic debate than any other similar period in his eleven-year campaign. In order to contextualize such a diversity of scholarly opinion, this chapter will investigate the Greco-Roman literary sources, the contemporary Egyptian language documents, and the archaeological evidence through four key events–Alexander’s arrival in Memphis, his founding of Alexandria, his visit to Siwah, and his return to Memphis and departure.

This chapter presents basic information on the most commonly attested male names in Babylonian cuneiform sources from the first millennium BCE. Starting with the spelling of personal names with orthographic markers (‘Personenkeil’), this chapter gives an overview of typical elements of male Babylonian names (theophoric elements, kinship terms, and other frequent nouns, verbs, and adjectives), different grammatical structures (sentence names, compound names consisting of genitive constructions, single word names), possible additions (filiations, status terms, occupational titles), principles of shortening names to reduced forms, and the use of nicknames and double names. The chapter offers substantial examples of each name type or feature discussed and offers indications of how common or rare those types and features are.