Alexander's Path

By Freya Stark

More information to be announced soon on this forthcoming title from Penguin USA.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Penguin Group
• Release date: Mar 9, 1990
• ISBN: 9781590209189

Reviews for Alexander's Path

[dinadansfriend · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I like Freya Stark's books. She actually researches the places she is about to visit, and writes well about what she really sees when she is there. This time, she traces the path of the Macedonian, Alexander as he moved along the south shore of Anatolia from Antalaya to the plains of Cilicia, where his army fought the battle of Issus. While it is obviously a look at the Turkey she found on her journey, there are enough classical references to tell a good deal of Alexander's difficulties as well. the book has been reprinted three times since I read it.

[thorold_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Alexander's Path was the result of three lengthy trips Stark made to Southern Anatolia in the 1950s. In the course of her travels, she became interested in puzzling out the exact route that Alexander the Great followed through Asia Minor with his Macedonian army between the battles of the Granicus and Issus (334-333 BCE). The book evolved into a composite narrative of Stark's travels, geographically arranged "in reverse order" from East to West, followed by a more scholarly appendix that sets out the evidence Stark found for and against the different theories about where the Macedonians actually marched.Although I'm moderately interested in Alexander, I don't really know the source material well enough to be seriously interested in the nitty-gritty of this mountain pass versus that one, and I didn't have any good maps of the region to hand when I was reading this anyway, so I skipped rather lightly over a lot of the military history, but I very much enjoyed Stark's often almost lyrical accounts of the landscapes and cities she found, and her hard-nosed but also oddly sympathetic comments on the people she met, the realities of their lives, and their reactions to her as an independent woman traveller. Although her chief business is to look at Hellenic-era ruins in the context of the landscape, she isn't one of those archaeological writers who regard the current inhabitants of the area they are visiting as merely a nuisance and/or a source of cheap labour - she clearly has a lot of respect for the Anatolian villagers who are often struggling to make a living in very difficult conditions. And when she stays the night in someone's house, rents horses from them, or employs them as a driver or guide, she wants to know about their families, how they live, what their aspirations are, and so on. In several cases this clearly develops into a real friendship. But she is also an old hand at Asian travel by this time, so she doesn't hesitate to hit back when someone tries to feed her misleading information, or to cheat her beyond the generally understood permissible limit. Her scorn falls equally on lazy Turkish innkeepers and on inexperienced British archaeologists who don't know the first thing about managing horses on mountain tracks. But not on Alexander, with whom she's clearly more than a little in love, and who can do no wrong...A very entertaining, very human bit of travel writing.

[timspalding · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I know I'm supposed to enjoy Freya Stark. I just don't. Nor do her travels shed any real light on that path.