How Edmund Richardson Conquered Alexander the Great

Edmund Richardson didn’t want to write about Alexander the Great. The softly spoken classics professor, draped in purple velvet and matching socks, initially recoiled at the suggestion. “The idea of coming up against Alexander, and all of these thousands of versions of his story written by some of the people I admire the most in the world, was absolute terror,” he admits.

But his editor persisted, and Richardson’s decade-long obsession with the ancient conqueror has just paid off spectacularly. His book, Alexander: God, King, Man, won the prestigious 50,000-pound Baillie Gifford prize for nonfiction this year, cementing the classicist’s place among contemporary historical writers.

A Story for Our Times

Richardson’s timing feels almost prophetic. Here’s a man who had everything - unlimited wealth, absolute power, the world at his feet - yet collapsed under the weight of his own ambitions. “This is a moment where people are finding that there are limits to what unlimited wealth and power can do, and that humanity catches up with you, whether you like it or not,” Richardson observes.

Alexander conquered most of the known world by age 30, only to see his empire unravel before his death at 32. The brutality was staggering by any standard. Yet Richardson argues the real legacy lies elsewhere, in the “ripple effects” still felt today. Babylonian science flowing into Greece. Greek art appearing on the Indus borders. A world becoming increasingly connected. “He was antiquity’s answer to the internet,” Richardson suggests.

This perspective distinguishes his work from countless previous takes on the Macedonian king. From Plutarch to Horrible Histories, Alexander’s story has been told endlessly. But Richardson wanted to excavate the man before the mythology, tracing his journey from provincial boy to world-shaper.

The Personal Price of History

The research itself became an adventure matching Alexander’s own scope. Richardson travelled from the British Museum’s storage rooms to Egyptian catacombs to the Himalayan foothills, gathering evidence unavailable to earlier historians. But the journey wasn’t romantic. During research in Cairo, he stumbled upon burning tyre barricades during protests. His planned Afghanistan trip was abandoned after the Taliban ransacked his hotel.

“Terrible things tend to happen to people who take up papyrus or laptop to write the Alexander story,” Richardson notes wryly. Alexander’s first biographer, Callisthenes, was crucified according to some sources. Richardson’s own trials proved more contemporary.

About three years ago, while barely 40, Richardson received a cancer diagnosis. This wasn’t his first encounter with the disease; he’d had melanoma as a teenager with recurrences since. “I was writing this book not knowing if I would be around when it was out in the world,” he recalls. His universe contracted to hospital corridors and fluorescent lights.

Writing became his escape, his way of travelling to the world of ideas when his body couldn’t move. After receiving the all-clear, he returned to hospital after collapsing from stress, only to find himself on a ward with patients handcuffed to police officers. “And there was me with my laptop and my hieroglyphs,” he laughs.

Yet this crisis point transformed his work. He’d been struggling with the ending - “Obviously everyone dies and everything goes wrong” - but emerged with a determination to find hope in the ruins. The result captures Alexander as truly human: capable of extraordinary cruelty and extraordinary kindness, what Richardson describes as a “beautiful monster” to write about.

What Comes Next

Richardson, now 44 and a news darling thanks to his Baillie Gifford win, plans to return to his “happy place”: writing about obscure people nobody’s heard of. His next subject is British Egyptologist Flinders Petrie, who believed in 1888 he’d discovered a way to defeat death itself.

Before that, there’s the BBC calling, still strange for an academic used to writing for sparse audiences. What explains the current hunger for ancient history? “It’s not just a story about the distant past,” Richardson explains. “We work with fragments, with ghosts, with things that have almost vanished, but that also lets us make these stories our own.”

In the end, Richardson’s Alexander reminds us that even the most powerful figures among us are ultimately human, vulnerable, and mortal - and perhaps that’s the most important lesson we could learn from history.

Source: The Guardian