The 2003 edition of W.’s reader on Alexander provided students and scholars with a useful resource containing selections from the primary ancient sources and from recent scholarship, all conveniently arranged in eleven thematic chapters. (See K. McGroarty's review in CR 54.1 [2004], 149–51.) In this second edition W. has preserved the reader's basic structure but has expanded it by an additional 25%, adding one chapter, increasing the number of pages devoted to scholarship and enlarging the bibliographical items. As before, each chapter is divided into four parts: (1) an introduction of 1–3 pages; (2) a selection of between 2–20 primary sources (for a total of 119); (3) about 1–3 articles or book chapters from modern scholars; and (4) suggestions for additional reading. This structure preserves the first edition's two primary virtues, which were to highlight the information on Alexander found in contemporary ancient sources that are fragmentary and often inaccessible, and to expose readers to the scholarly controversies and divergent opinions characteristic of Alexander studies today. Since the first edition's appearance, however, students and scholars have had access to another resource that somewhat compromises the novelty of W.’s collection of primary sources: in 2004 W. Heckel and J.C. Yardley published a reader devoted solely to historical sources on Alexander, both primary and secondary (Alexander the Great: Historical Sources in Translation). Heckel and Yardley offer 331 selections arranged thematically in thirteen chapters that parallel W.’s chapters. Consequently their selections tend to be lengthier and to range more widely in the ancient scholarship on Alexander, including generous passages from Diodorus Siculus, Justin (= Pompeius Trogus) and Curtius. Also, it should be noted that W.’s fragments often come from such quite accessible sources as Plutarch and Arrian: indeed, in the first six chapters more than 60% of the selections attributed to the likes of Aristobulus and Ptolemy can be found in these two later authors alone.

Two of the more notable changes in W.’s second edition are the addition of a chapter entitled ‘From Mass Marriage to Death’ (30 pp.) and a significant overhaul of the modern scholarship in half the other chapters. The new chapter addresses the most serious lacuna in the first edition, which contained just a single paragraph's discussion of Alexander's death and fragments describing it from three primary sources (2003: pp. 149; 158–9). Chronologically the new chapter bridges the period from Alexander's return from India to Susa (March 324 b.c.) until his death in Babylon (June 323), although its focus is solely on the portentous events leading up to Alexander's death, the feverish symptoms and final days, and the theorising in the primary ancient sources about its various causes. Here too the primary sources as we find them in Arrian and Plutarch predominate, joined by several additional passages from Athenaeus and Aelian. W.’s choice for the sole example from modern scholarship perhaps explains why this new chapter was added. Bosworth's 1971 article in CQ 21 (‘The Death of Alexander the Great: Rumour and Propaganda’) today appears to be a prescient forerunner of the more recent uptick in scholarship devoted to re-examining the question of who or what was responsible for Alexander's death. And Bosworth's opinion, that Alexander was assassinated by poison, also seems to preview the increasing popularity of this hypothesis over the traditional ancient and modern consensus that he died of a ‘natural’ disease or of disease abetted by alcoholism. (Interestingly, W. here foregrounds Bosworth's choice of assassination even though he disagrees with it [pp. 245–6].)

Among the original chapters benefitting from updated or overhauled contributions by modern scholars, Chapter 6, ‘Alexander and the Persian Empire’ (formerly ‘Alexander and Asia’), is the most significant. W. has expanded the chapter from a mere 11 pages to a robust 63. Works from 1986 and 1993 by N.G.L. Hammond and M.M. Austin, respectively, yield first to P. Briant's 30-page overview of the last 35 years of the Achaemenid Empire from the perspective of the Acheamenids themselves (‘The Empire of Darius III in Perspective’). Here the choice of Briant reflects one of the two most significant changes in Alexander studies in contemporary historiography: the eschewal of a traditional Hellenocentric understanding of Alexander's conquests as the inevitable triumph of a vigorous Occident over the enervated decline of a decadent Orient. Next, F. Holt's brief ‘Alexander's Settlements in Central Asia’ likewise reflects the effort of this scholar and others to emphasise the Bactrian–Sogdian campaigns that were typically neglected by traditional Alexander scholarship – and that appear more clearly to our age as difficult and ultimately failed attempts at Macedonian colonisation. Lastly, the chapter concludes with W.’s own attempt in 2010 to offer a more balanced assessment of Alexander's successes and failures as an empire-builder and manager, and this selection represents to some degree the second significant change in contemporary Alexander studies, which in the first edition was largely confined the final chapter. I am speaking of the willingness of contemporary historians to assess objectively, after centuries of hero worship by European historians, the great conqueror's errors, faults and incapacities.

Other meaningful changes in the representation of contemporary scholarly views turn out, however, to be less successful and suggest one way in which this reader falls short of one of its principal aims. As McGroarty put it in his review of the first edition, this goal was to help undergraduates ‘understand that scholarship is fundamentally a matter of opinion’, with the hope that this might ‘help sharpen [their] critical faculties’ (p. 150). For example, in Chapter 5, ‘Alexander and the Greeks’, W. does well to replace an outdated discussion of the Corinthian League (Ryder 1965) with E. Poddighe's detailed and lengthy account, but here undergraduates will be awash in far more detail than they can assimilate. (As in the first edition, this chapter's primary sources also contain selections from inscriptional evidence on the Exiles’ Decree that exceed what students can manage.) In the same vein the addition in Chapter 11 (‘Alexander and Conspiracies’) of Borza's illuminating discussion in 1981 of the conflictual relationship between two of the intellectual lights at Alexander's court, Anaxarchus of Abdera and Callisthenes, really addresses the interests of scholars specialising in philosophical schools of the late-fourth century or in the muddled question of Alexander's own intellectual profile.

A few final points. One curious defect in the first edition persists in the second: the chapter on ‘Alexander's Battles and Generalship’ (formerly ‘Alexander as General’) contains the same single scholarly contribution: an excerpt from Fuller's The Generalship of Alexander the Great (1960). Surely the continuing popular and academic fascination with Alexander as a military strategist requires more updated analyses and evaluations. More positively, several improvements in this edition may appear minor but genuinely contribute to a more user-friendly experience by the reader. Among these is the listing in the table of contents under each chapter of the selections from modern scholarship contained in that chapter. W. has also organised all 119 selections from the primary sources under sub-headings in boldface, clearly indicating the subject matter discussed in each fragment. The enlargement of the bibliographical entries under ‘Additional Reading’ is perhaps the most impressive and helpful of these improvements. Most chapters now have easily twice the number of items. On the whole, therefore, W. has considerably enhanced the several virtues of his first edition while leaving unattended its very few shortcomings.