Index # 15904
Will Count Towards Classics MAJOR
Will Count Towards Classics MINOR
Few historical figures have had so significant an impact as Alexander, the son of Philip II, king of Macedonia and hēgemōn ‘leader’ of the Hellenic League (or League of Corinth), a military alliance dominating the city-states of homeland Greece. Against expectation, Alexander succeeded to his father’s preeminence after Philips’s assassination and launched a campaign against the Persian Empire. Exceeding his father’s goal of the liberation of the Asian Greeks and the conquest of Asia Minor, Alexander seized Egypt, the Near East, much of central Asia, and the Indus valley. His empire established a Greco-Macedonian military, political, cultural dominance that would survive into the kingdoms of his Successors (or Diadochi) and into the “successor” states of non-Greek nations. Hellenistic civilization, which has had an extraordinary impact on the art, literature, and belief systems of subsequent periods, rests on an Alexandrian foundation. A rich documentation grapples with Alexander’s personality, military leadership, statesmanship, and charisma. Intense debate surrounds topics as disparate as Alexander’s tactics and his sexuality. The Alexander Romance stands second to the Bible as the most translated work of literature or creed before the 20th century. Our seminar will aspire to offer its members an introduction to this fascinating leader, while inculcating an awareness of the concepts and the methodologies which historians deploy to recreate the experiential texture of a major historical agent of the distant past. The interplay of history and of myth-history will receive its proper emphasis inasmuch as Alexander is one of the most mythologized and fictionalized figures in history.
About Professor Figueira
[instructor bio]