Alexander in the East

Lesche: Ancient Greece, New Ideas

Rachel Kousser joins me in the Lesche to discuss Alexander III of Macedon's post-Persepolis campaigns in Asia (330-323 BCE), the subject of her recent book Alexander at the End of the World: The Forgotten Final Years of Alexander the Great.

About our guest

Rachel Kousser writes and teaches about Alexander the Great, the destruction of monuments in ancient Greece, and the representation of gender and power in the Mediterranean world. For her work, she has received fellowships from the National Endowment of the Humanities, the Getty Research Institute, and the Center for the Advanced Study of the Visual Arts. She’s published articles in Art Bulletin, American Journal of Archaeology, and Res: Archaeology and Aesthetics, as well as two books with Cambridge University Press. Rachel is currently the chair of the Classics Program at the Graduate Center, City University of New York and a professor of ancient art and archaeology at Brooklyn College. She has a B.A. in Classics and Art History from Yale University and a Ph.D. in Classical Art and Archaeology from New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts.

Ancient texts

• Polybius, Histories
• Diodorus, Bibliotheca
• Curtius, Historiae Alexandri Magni
• Plutarch, Life of Alexander
• Arrian, Anabasis Alexandri

Also mentioned

• Brooke Allen, "Alexander the Great: Or the Terrible?" The Hudson Review, Vol. 58, No. 2 (Summer, 2005), pp. 220-230.
• Pierre Briant, The First European: A History of Alexander in the Age of Empire (translated from the French by Nicholas Elliott), Harvard 2017.
• Michael Kulikowski, "A Very Bad Man: Julius Caesar, Génocidaire." London Review of Books, 18 June 2020.
• Alexander scholarship by W. W. Tarn, Ernst Badian, and Brian Bosworth.

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Thanks for joining us in the Lesche!
Podcast art: Daniel Blanco
Theme music: "The Song of Seikilos," recomposed by Eftychia Christodoulou using Sibelius
This podcast is made possible with the generous support of Brown University’s Department of Classical Studies and the John Nicholas Brown Center for Advanced Study.

Instagram: @leschepodcast
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