Mercer perhaps best sums up Alexander the Great's theme in the closing pages, when he quotes from W. W. Tarn's biography of the same title: "For whatever else he [Alexander] was, he was one of the supreme fertilizing forces of history. He lifted the civilized world out of one groove and set it in another; he started a new epoch; nothing could again be as it had been."
Alexander the Great contains unusually good characterizations for a work of nonfiction. Even some of the secondary characters are well drawn. Olympias, Alexander's mother, is the beautiful and mysterious daughter of the king of Epirus, a mountain kingdom near present-day Yugoslavia. She engages in mystical rites, charms snakes, and claims to be descended from Achilles, the famed Greek warrior of the Iliad.
Extremely domineering, she soon.....
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