Jennifer Finn offers a fresh perspective on the Roman reception of Alexander the Great. Her book pursues a path opened by D. Spencer, The Roman Alexander (2002), and followed by J. Peltonen, Alexander the Great in the Roman Empire, 150 BC to AD 600 (2019) and C. T. Djurslev, Alexander the Great in the Early Christian Tradition (2020). There have been two main schools of Alexander scholarship: one more interested in reconstructing the fourth-century b.c.e. reality behind the Roman narratives, the other more focused on how contemporary concerns shaped the Alexander(s) that we encounter in the Roman-period sources. F.'s study focuses on how Roman writers used the Alexander tradition to construct Augustus’ reign and Roman supremacy, and present it as the determinist outcome of the history of previous world empires. F.'s approach is to focus on certain episodes in the Alexander literature, identify Roman manipulation of the stories and demonstrate their contemporary relevance. Ch. 2 deals with the Trojan and Persian wars and the Great Weddings at Susa. Ch. 3 focuses on the battle(s) of Thermopylae in 480 and 191 b.c.e. and Alexander's victory at the Persian Gate. F. writes that both Alexander's historians and later Romans contrasted their respective victories with the fate of the Spartans who lost their battle against the troops of Xerxes I, underlining their claims to world domination. F. identifies compelling connections between different literary accounts, but the interpretation requires a lot of reading between lines, since the Roman writers do not explicitly make the comparison with the battle of Thermopylae in 480 b.c.e.

Ch. 4 analyses the account of Alexander's ‘last plans’ that appears solely in Diodorus’ narrative. In contrast to some earliert scholars (notably Badian and Atkinson), F. sees the ‘last plans’ as a late invention intended to portray Augustus as a new Heracles and Alexander. Ch. 5 analyses the role of Alexander's memory in the imaginary of the Roman Civil Wars, focusing on the representation of Pompey and his opponent Sertorius as new Alexanders. The connection between stories told about Alexander and Sertorius is a novel contribution to the literature. The Alexander Romance tradition seems to be related to the story where Sertorius visits the ‘Isles of the Blessed’. Ch. 6 takes a different approach to the rest of the volume by exploring how Roman writers compared Alexander to the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar. F. argues that the Roman-period accounts of the siege of Tyre represent Alexander as surpassing Nebuchadnezzar, who failed to conquer the part of the city that was situated on the island. In her analysis, the story of Alexander's visit to Jerusalem was similarly invented in order to depict Alexander as an anti-Nebuchadnezzar, treating the Jewish people with more benevolence than the Babylonian king, who destroyed the temple of Solomon. The fact that there are no explicit references to Nebuchadnezzar in the surviving Alexander tradition makes the argument speculative. But there can be no doubt that the historical Alexander knew that the Babylonian king had been unsuccessful in his siege of Tyre, and probably also that the Babylonians had destroyed the temple of Jerusalem. It is often very hard to determine conclusively what was done by the historical Alexander, what was added in the time of his successors and what was invented by the Roman writers. The line between fact and fabrication is blurred.

F.'s book underlines this fundamental issue, while also showing why Alexander and his reception continue to intrigue ancient historians. She also demonstrates elegantly how the Romans wanted to depict their supremacy as part of the grand story of the previous world Empires, in which Alexander played a key role. I highly recommend this book to any scholar or student interested in the history of Alexander or his reception.