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Besieger of Cities

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"I am the new man of Alexander's new empire. My world began 35 years ago when the conqueror died in Babylon. I am bound by nothing that happened earlier... There are no gods. There are no fatherlands. There are no laws of right and wrong. What distinguishes me from a wolf is that I can think as well as fight. I am the master of my own life, until some stronger sword strikes me down."

This brutal speech could summarize the philosophy of any one of the Successors, the poor provincial nobles of rocky Macedonia who suddenly found themselves in control of the vast territories and hoarded gold of the vanished Persian Empire. They spent that gold on huge warships, vast armies of mercenaries, ingenious war engines, and new cities named for themselves. They fought each other on a scale never seen before, for no better reason than their personal amusement.

Demetrios Poliorketes belonged to the second generation of these Hellenistic warlords, and nobody had bigger ships, vaster armies, more ingenious siege engines, or a more bloated ego. He was the archetype of an age that is mostly forgotten by popular history, lost between Classical Greece and Imperial Rome.

Alfred Duggan often created fictional characters who are deep in self-delusion and denial at the beginning of the book, but gradually wake up to reality. Here he found one ready-made in the pages of Plutarch. Demetrios is convinced that he is reuniting Alexander's empire while actually looting and wrecking it. He thinks he is restoring democratic freedoms to Athens while the Athenians supinely declare him a living god and billet him in the Parthenon. Driven off the land and forced to become a pirate? Just a temporary setback.

This was the first of Duggan's novels that I read as a teenager and it left a powerful impression on me. It hasn't held up quite as well as some others -- one man's egomania can't really support a whole book. Still, it is much better than most of today's trashy historical novels and I hope it eventually gets included in the current Phoenix Press reprint series.

Poorly written, with wooden characters. The history is there, but the writing quality isn't. Fie on the WSJ reviewer who listed it as a must read -- this was to writing as Kenny G. is to jazz