Empire of Ashes: A Novel of Alexander the Great Read online

  Praise for the Books of Nicholas Nicastro

  On Circumference: Eratosthenes and the Ancient Quest to Measure the Globe:

  “Forget the myth of Columbus' daring in imagining a round earth. Nicastro not only traces the conception of a spherical world back more than a millennium before the seafarer set sail but also recounts in fascinating detail how the ancient Greek geometer Eratosthenes measured that sphere with astonishing accuracy. Though it would be thousands of years before his feat received appropriate recognition, Eratosthenes conducted his revolutionary science with nothing more complex than a sundial and a compass. With reader-friendly clarity, Nicastro explains the surprisingly simple calculations behind the earth measurement. But readers learn about much more than geodesy: Nicastro delivers the deeply human story of a multitalented genius whose tenure as the head of Alexandria's famed library occasioned remarkable achievements in literature, history, linguistics, and philosophy despite the political turmoil that periodically rocked the Ptolemaic world. Indeed, this polymath plays out his long career against a colorful backdrop peopled with a rich variety of conquerors and cosmologists, murderers and mathematicians. A distant yesterday still furnishes fascinating drama for readers today.”

  --Bryce Christensen, Booklist

  “Propelled by the story of Eratosthenes's solution of an ancient puzzle -- how big is the earth? -- Circumference offers many unexpected pleasures along the way. With an amiable voice and a flowing style, Nicholas Nicastro brings historical places and people to vivid new life, from the shining city of Alexandria to the great conqueror for whom it was named. A real treat for lovers of history and science.

  --Steven Strogatz, author of Sync: How Order Emerges from Chaos in the Universe, Nature, and Daily Life, and Schurman Professor of Applied Mathematics, Cornell University

  “Given the paucity of material in English on Eratosthenes, anything is a welcome addition, but this book is much better than nothing. In its pages, historians of science will learn much about the ancient world, and historians of the ancient world will learn much about science.”

  --Bryn Mawr Classical Review

  On Antigone’s Wake: A Novel of Imperial Athens:

  “Nicastro is an author who clearly relishes his subject. Each sentence bursts with juicy, nurturing historical detail and considered thought about the hopes, aspirations, ideals and troubles of those who lived in the distant past. We follow the triumphs and travails of Sophocles as he struggles to create his art and also be what Athens wants him to be—a brilliant general. Athens as a great civilisation is constructed in front of our eyes. Nicastro brings to life both the back-streets of the city and the sea-battle-lanes of its Empire. The towering giants of Western history, Sophocles, Euripides, Pericles—and his consort Aspasia—are, through his vivid imagination, given a voice. This book allows the reader to inhabit the Golden Age of Athens, and to taste its grit as well as its glory.”

  --Bettany Hughes, broadcaster and author of Helen of Troy: Goddess, Princess, Whore

  On The Isle of Stone: A Novel of Ancient Sparta:

  “With The Isle of Stone, Nicholas Nicastro joins the illustrious pedigree of Mary Renault, Valerio Massimo Manfredi and Steven Pressfield with great style and enormous panache. His hero's checkered life story is used to frame a dark and darkening history of Sparta between a hugely destructive natural disaster, a great earthquake in 464 BC, and a self-inflicted, man-made debacle during the prolonged and even more destructive Peloponnesian War. Nicastro knows his ancient sources intimately, but also has the born novelist's instinct to flesh out their bare bones all too plausibly. Nicastro's antiheroes of the isle of Sphacteria are the dark side of Pressfield's heroes in Gates of Fire: both demand and repay the attention of all lovers of expert historical fiction.”

  --Paul Cartledge, Professor of Greek History, University of Cambridge, and author of Alexander the Great: The Hunt for a New Past

  “From its explosive first pages, The Isle of Stone draws you into the gritty reality of Sparta during the Peloponnesian War. Nicastro writes powerful prose, but this is no exercise in debunking. With drama, passion, and a sure touch for the facts, Nicastro reveals the heroism behind the humiliation of the shocking day when some of Sparta's unconquerable soldiers surrendered. His images of life and death under the Mediterranean sun hit you like the glare of a polished shield.”

  --Barry Strauss, author of The Battle of Salamis: The Naval Encounter that Saved Greece - and Western Civilization and Professor of History and Classics, Cornell University

  “Reading one of Nicastro's books has the same fascination as staring at a terrible car crash. The scenes he constructs force us to grapple with the disturbing roots of our own cultural assumptions. Each of these characters spins into a series of bloody events far beyond individual control. Nicastro lays naked the complex web of collective motivations that shape the events of history. The Isle of Stone shows Nicastro's intimate understanding of this distant time and deeply foreign culture. By giving human faces to the dry bones of ancient battles, he goes a long way towards making ancient motivations somehow explicable. Once again, Nicastro proves his talent for capturing the attitude of historical times while spinning a passionate drama.”

  --Pamela Goddard, Ithaca Times

  On The Eighteenth Captain: The John Paul Jones Trilogy v. 1:

  "Nicastro takes you by the scruff of your neck and yanks you into the action of history. From the moment the spine is creased, you are there, on board the ship, like Jim Hawkins in the apple barrel listening to Long John Silver's most secret plan. . . . Kudos to Nicholas Nicastro and even more kudos to McBooks Press for adding this finely wrought novel to their armada of Maritime literature!"

  —Eric Machan Howd, Ithaca Times

  "This maritime historical novel fairly shimmers with furtive lustiness and wry humor. Embellishing John Paul Jones' early naval intrigues and sexual liasons, Nicholas Nicastro preserves the true spirit of a mercurial and moody hero."

  —Jill B. Gidmark University of Minnesota Professor of English

  “In The Eighteenth Captain, Nicholas Nicastro gives us a nuanced, insightful and thoroughly believable portrait of an American hero that few know beyond his saying "I have not yet begun to fight" which, in fact, he probably did not say. Nicastro does what the artist can do and the historian cannot; probe the inner mind of the historical John Paul Jones, guess who he really was from the empirical evidence, and then present that portrait in words and deeds that are on the one hand often fiction, but on the other true to the spirit of Jones. And he does it very well, showing us our American Tragic Hero, great but flawed, a conqueror brought down by his own faults. The Eighteenth Captain is beautifully framed by the fall-out of the French Revolution which represented the end of much that Jones loved but was a consequence in part of Jones' own actions, a lovely metaphor for the man's life and deeds. Carefully researched, accurate in tone and detail, The Eighteenth Captain is an insightful portrait of a man, a hero and his times, and what each of those things, in their essence, truly mean."

  —James L. Nelson, author of the Revolution at Sea Saga

  Other Books by Nicholas Nicastro

  Novels

  The Eighteenth Captain

  Between Two Fires

  The Isle of Stone

  Antigone’s Wake

  The Passion of the Ripper

  Non-Fiction

  Circumference: Eratosthenes and the Ancient Quest to Measure the Globe

  Cover image © Jovan – Fotolia.com

  •

  Empire of Ashes

  A novel of Alexander the Great

  by

&n
bsp; Nicholas Nicastro

  •

  Kinder Shore Books

  Dedicated with love to my wife, Maryanne

  Sine qua non

  Foreword to the 2009 Edition

  Just a few weeks after Empire of Ashes was first published in 2005, I experienced what the people at National Public Radio call a “driveway story.” That is, I heard something on the air that was so compelling that I pulled into my driveway and sat in the car listening to it until it was finished.

  The item was a commentary by writer and philosopher Alain de Botton, who had produced a year-end series of commentaries on Big Ideas. The title was “Having an idealized view of the world can be appealing and helpful.” The most relevant part is the following: “We’re obsessed with puncturing ideals. We’re obsessed by biographies which show us the man behind the statue and reveal that the great figure was, in fact, a weakling with a bad temper. We can’t quite get out of our minds how often the reality departs from the ideal…” To de Botton’s mind, this was unfortunate, because idealization has its uses, especially in helping us aspire to improve our world.

  Now it must be admitted that, beyond simple judgments of thumbs-up or thumbs-down, it’s pretty rare to hear discussions of aesthetics on the radio, even on NPR. Still, having just published a decidedly mixed portrait of Alexander the Great, I couldn’t help but wonder if I was one of those people who is “obsessed” with puncturing ideals, who “can’t get it out his mind” that reality departs from the ideal. Was Monsieur de Botton talking to me as I sat there in my driveway, contemplating the chore of opening my manually-powered garage door in the middle of another sub-ideal late December in upstate New York?

  By way of explanation, Empire of Ashes tells the story of Alexander the Great through the eyes of Machon, an Athenian soldier with historiographic pretensions. Alexander respects Machon as a representative of that sophisticated class of big-city Greeks who ordinarily look down their noses at the provincial Macedonians. Machon starts off admiring Alexander, but as he witnesses his patron’s gradual descent into paranoia and brutality, he comes to believe the man would be better off dead than let loose among civilized folk. After Alexander dies in Babylon, Machon is called to account by the pro-Macedonian faction in Athens for his suspected role in the king’s demise.

  In response, my character paints a decidedly human portrait of the would-be god. What is important to remember, of course, is that narrator for most of the book is Machon, and he is not necessarily a disinterested observer. He’s on trial for his life. Nor should we believe everything said by Aeschines the prosecutor, who is in the pay of the pro-appeasement faction. In his statement, Aeschines praises Alexander to the skies, going out of his way to affirm every obsequious myth about the man. In this sense the novel is not really about Alexander, but about the fight over Alexander’s image in history.

  Now even before the book’s formal publication I had some hints that this approach might lead to some trouble. My agent had been busy selling translation rights to the novel—and one of the first takers was a major publishing house in Athens. In fact, my wife and I met representatives of this company (which will remain nameless but is one of the leading Greek publishers) at Athens airport to cement our deal. You may well imagine my surprise, however, when I returned from my research trip to hear that the Greeks had withdrawn their offer to publish. Apparently, they had finally gotten around to actually reading the book they had purchased the rights to, and what they found troubled them. After inquiring further, I found that their concerns included the following (and this is their words):

  -- “He [Nicastro] mentions Homer in a scene to state that scenes of brutalities have happened in the past, when Achilles has punished Hector.”

  -- “There is a jeu de mot with the world bottom. Ifestionas was the top and Alexander the bottom to explain the homosexual relation between the two friends.”

  According to both the translator and the second reader the most important thing is that “the author underestimates the strategical and the political genius of Alexandros and emphasizes the bad aspects of his personality: homosexual, capricious, brutal, drunk. There are many biographers of Alexandros who mentioned all these problems but none of them ever implied that his brother was the real hero. We know that this is fiction and that the author writes a historical novel and not a non-fiction history book, but we also know that there is a respectable part of the public who won't appreciate Empire of Ashes. That's why we decided to withdraw our offer.”

  “We don't have anything personal with you or the agent (it was a real pleasure to meet you and your lovely wife) but we would like you to understand that the subject of the book is very important for the Greek public. We wish you good luck with the publication of the book in the States and we are looking forward to collaborate with you in the future.”

  Well, considering that the so-called “bad” aspects of Alexander’s personality, including his bisexuality and taste for drink, are among the best documented things about him, it seems this publisher’s rejection says more about the selective memory of the Greeks than about the book. Unfortunately, all this can’t be put down just to nationalist heroizing. Oliver Stone’s movie version of Alexander’s life ran into similar criticism on this side of the Atlantic. Consider the following review from The New York Post’s Lou Lumenick:

  “Sporting a dreadful blond pageboy and a micro-mini toga while exchanging come-hither looks with his mascara-loving childhood pal, Hephaistion, Colin Farrell looks more like Alexander the Fabulous than Alexander the Great…Stone and Farrell end up going too far--their light-in-the-sandals Alexander is often such a simpering, indecisive wuss that it's hard to accept he conquered most of the known world before his mysterious death...”

  Which begs the question, why couldn’t Alexander have been both fabulous and great?

  Or to pose the question another way: what does it say about the job we’re doing as educators, when a fact as well attested as ancient Greek fabulousness is still somehow controversial?

  The need to idealize our heroes is not quite as dead as de Botton fears. For example, the following comments about the novel were posted on a popular online bulletin board by a reader who identifies him or herself only as “FicusFan”:

  I am reading Empire of Ashes by Nicholas Nicastro. It is about Alexander the Great. What a crock of bull####. He reduces Alexander to a mincing, petulant, spoiled brat who is drunk and pissed off all the time. Nicastro also mixes up events and puts the worst light on whatever Alexander does. A typical hatchet job. I am slogging through it just to see what horrors he created next.

  FicusFan has other choice things to say, including “The writing is workman-like and it flows like Clive Cussler.”

  Another poster, identified as “Jmarks”, wonders: “How does a piece of crap like this get published? Just who did the author sleep with to get a book deal?”

  The larger points here are not subtle: it is repugnant to present Alexander’s flaws, yet somehow “typical” that novelists do “hatchet jobs” of this kind. We are “obsessed” with puncturing this good and decent man. In this sense, FicusFan and JMarks make much the same complaint that de Botton does, except in a less “appealing and helpful” tone.

  As some of you might be aware, my first forays into historical fiction focused on the life and times of John Paul Jones, of Revolutionary War fame. That portrayal also had its shadows and highlights. Yet despite the fact that John Paul Jones is about two thousand years closer to us in chronological terms, and an adoptive American to boot, my portrayal of Alexander the Great has generated far greater heat. Let that be a rejoinder to those who claim that classical history is somehow lost its relevance to modern audiences.

  The two major accounts of Alexander’s campaigns were written by Romans, centuries after his death, based on first-hand Macedonian accounts that have since been lost. I take it as given that the renowned account by Ptolemy played down the negative aspects of Alexander’s campaign, not only beca
use history is written by the winners, but because Ptolemy had his own legitimacy to build as the new pharaoh of Egypt.

  The Romans, Quintus Curtius Rufus and Lucius Flavius Arrianus, likewise take generally positive view of the great man’s achievements. Yet even they, on occasion, could not restrain themselves from swinging the hatchet. For instance, Curtius is our source for infamous Massacre of Branchidae: while campaigning across the Oxus River in Sogdia, Alexander encountered the descendants of a Greek clan that once administered the Sanctuary of Apollo at Didyma. The details are contradictory here, but it seems that during the wars with Persia in the early 5th century BCE, these Branchidae had surrendered the temple to curry favor with the Persians. To pay back the collaborators, the Great King resettled them in a remote corner of this empire, forever out of reach of Greek retribution. Or so he thought.

  According to Curtius, when Alexander happened upon the descendants of the Branchidae four or five generations removed, the king oversaw the following;

  “The Branchidae, who were unarmed, were butchered throughout the city, and neither community of language nor the olive-branches and entreaties of the suppliants could curb the savagery. Finally, the Macedonians dug down to the foundations of the walls in order to demolish them and leave not a single trace of the city. Woods, too, and sacred groves, they not only cut down but actually uprooted, so that nothing would remain after the removal of the roots but empty wasteland and barren soil. Had this punishment been devised against the people responsible for the treachery, it might have appeared to be fair revenge instead of brutality but, as it was, the guilt of the ancestors was being atoned for by descendants who had not even seen Miletus and accordingly could not possibly have betrayed it to Xerxes.” (trans. John Yardley)