God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great

AUTHOR’S NOTE

I am an author, not a linguist – a novelist, and not fully an historian. Despite this caveat, I do the best I can to research everything from clothing to phalanx formations as I go, and sometimes I disagree with the accepted wisdom of either academe or the armchair generals who write colourful coffee table books on these subjects.

And ultimately, errors are my fault. If you find a historical error, please let me know!

One thing I have tried to avoid is altering history as we know it to suit a timetable or plotline. The history of the Wars of Alexander is difficult enough without my altering it. In addition, as you write about a period you love (and I have fallen pretty hard for this one) you learn more. Once I learn more, words may change or change their usage. As an example, in Tyrant, I used Xenophon’s Cavalry Commander as my guide to almost everything. Xenophon calls the ideal weapon a machaira. Subsequent study has revealed that Greeks were pretty lax about their sword nomenclature (actually, everyone is, except martial arts enthusiasts) and so Kineas’s Aegyptian machaira was probably called a kopis. So in the second book, I call it a kopis without apology. Other words may change – certainly my notion of the internal mechanics of the hoplite phalanx have changed. The more you learn…

A note about history. I’m always amused when a fan (or a non-fan) writes to tell me that I got a campaign or battle ‘wrong.’ Friends – and I hope we’re still friends when I say this – we know less about the wars of Alexander than we do about the surface of Mars or the historical life of Jesus. I read Greek, I look at the evidence, and then I make the call. I’ve been to most of these places, and I can read a map. While I’m deeply fallible, I am also a pretty good soldier and I’m prepared to make my own decisions in light of the evidence about everything from numbers to the course of a battle. I may well be “wrong,” but unless someone produces a time-machine, there’s no proving it. Our only real source on Alexander lived five hundred years later. That’s like calling me an eye-witness of Agincourt. Be wary of reading a campaign history or an Osprey book and assuming from the confident prose that we know. We don’t know. We stumble around in the dark and make guesses.

And that said, military historians are, by and large, the poorest historians out there, by virtue of studying the violent reactions of cultures without studying the cultures themselves. War and military matters are cultural artefacts, just like religion and philosophy and fashion, and to try to take them out of context is impossible. Hoplites didn’t carry the aspis because it was the ideal technology for the phalanx. I’ll bet they carried it because it was the ideal technology for the culture, from the breeding of oxen to the making of the bowl, to the way they stacked in wagons. Men only fight a few days a year if that, but they live and breathe and run and forage and gamble and get dysentery 365 days a year, and their kit has to be good on all those days too. The history of war is a dull litany of man’s inhumanity to man and woman, but history itself is the tale of the human race from birth until now. It’s a darn good story, and worth repeating. History matters.

Why does history matter? I should spare you this rant, after all if you’re reading this part of the book, chances are you’re a history buff at least, possibly a serious amateur historian, maybe a professional slumming in my novels. But just for the record, a week after I finished the final page proofs of this book, I happened to read a Facebook post by a Holocaust denier. I’m still mad. It’s not just the tom-fool anti-Semitism, it’s the anti-history. A person who denies the Holocaust happened is denying that history exists; that research and careful documentation, eye-witness accounts and government archives have any meaning. In this kind of relativism, there is no truth. Pontius Pilate wins. And historical fiction is just fantasy without magic.

Well, I happen to believe that the past really happened. And that the more we know about it, the more we are empowered to deal with the present.

Finally, yes, I kill a lot of characters. War kills. Violence and lives of violence have consequences, then as now. And despite the drama of war, childbirth probably killed women of warrior age about twice as fast as it killed active warriors, so when we get right down to who’s tough . . .

Enjoy!