History 320: Alexander and the Hellenistic World

By the age of thirty-three, Alexander III of Macedon had done the unthinkable: through a startling combination of violence, propaganda, and sheer showmanship, he had "claimed mastery" over regions and peoples extending from Athens to Asia Minor, from the eastern coast of the Mediterranean to Egypt, and across western Asia as far as Bactria and India. In doing so, he captured the giddy imagination of "Big Man History," supercharging debates, both ancient and modern and in multiple traditions, regarding imperial power and the role of the individual in society. And although Alexander’s myth has continued to loom large -- with a myriad of interpretations, from the celebratory to the moralizing to the subversive and condemnatory -- Alexander himself did not live to do more than "conquer." At his death, his titanic project fractured, re-emerging more than twenty years later as four kingdoms interlocked by competing visions of "global" power. It was this world -- known to scholars as the "Hellenistic" -- that experienced new dynamics of power/knowledge, from brutal wars and colonial displacements to international libraries and monumental museums leveraging cultural capital, to challenges to old forms of authority and the peculiar advent of a new geo-political force, Rome. This course examines the full range of these stories and their many receptions, from the meteoric career of Alexander to the last stand of Cleopatra. At once book-ended and punctuated by large-scale personalities, this course also explores the profound importance of social, political, and economic trends, using a combination of literary, archaeological, art-historical, and theoretical analyses to re-read a three-hundred-year period of rapid change. May be taken for credit toward the History requirement of the Classics majors.