Alexandre

BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 205 put most frequently quoted by Dercy in this study. If this pattern is truly representative, it is surely significant that this is the period that witnessed the development of vegetable tanning. The transition to new methods may have been regarded as profoundly disturbing , particularly because it was very visible. Simple curing can be carried out piecemeal, but tanning implies an increase in scale, since it is a capital- and labour-intensive process with delayed returns. Might the fear of the social consequences of this concentration of resources in the hands of wealthy individuals have been a factor in the choice of craftsmen to lampoon in plays? Thanks to the extent and variety of the sources consulted and the detailed discussion of the references, this volume represents a fundamental contribution to the study of ancient technology, making the information available to those without a linguistic background who are interested primarily in the craft of leatherworking. The author also demonstrates convincingly that a thorough understanding of the technology of production is essential for the correct interpretation of the written record. There are many other “invisible” technologies that would benefit from a similarly multi-faceted approach. University of Leiden Carol van Driel-Murray Alexandre: Ex egÁ ese des lieux communs. By Pierre Briant. Paris: Éditions Gallimard (Collection Folio Histoire no 259). 2016. Pp. 660, 16 b/w illustrations, 10 color. Pierre Briant's new book displays erudition, keen judgment, and verve in analyzing an amazing diversity of sources and controversies from antiquity to the present concerning how to write the history of Alexander and the history that followed upon his expedition into Asia, and how to evaluate the cultural consequences he directly and—to an even greater extent—indirectly set in motion. Briant details the “commonplaces,” the topoi that appear over and over again in scholarly and popular works about Alexander. These commonplaces, broadly speaking, involve evaluating Alexander positively or negatively, and interpreting his expedition either as a “civilizing mission” (an interpretation Briant traces back to Plutarch) bringing a superior “Western” culture to a despotic and dysfunctional “East,” or (to overstate it only a little) as a relentless campaign of violence against “others” by a killer reveling in massacres. The overarching context is Briant’s insistence on the necessity for reorienting the history of Alexander from a Hellenocentric focus to one encompassing Achaemenid history. Briant’s wondrous Table of Contents reveals a volume of complex breadth and depth displaying its author’s multi-layered, thematically intertwined approach.1 Interspersed with matter-of-fact titles are allusive phrases such as “Sous le masque de l’uchronie.” “Uchronie,” a neologism on the model of “utopia” created by Charles Renouvier for the title of a 1876 novel, is here compared to the Anglophone concept of “counterfactual history,” the “What If?” question as applied to Alexander. Similarly intriguing is “La mort du ‘vampire’?,” which comes from Droysen’s assertion that Persian domination had sucked up the force of the economic life of the people of the empire “like a vampire” (281), an alleged failure that Alexander’s assumed monetization of the economy revitalized. In 1 The table of contents is available at https://www.academia.edu/29557958/Alexandre. Ex%C3% A9g%C3%A8se des lieux communs. 206 PHOENIX fact, Briant shows, the notion of this particular “civilizing” effect is baseless; hence, the “death of the vampire.” Like his earlier section on “l’hydraulique babylonienne,” which summarizes Briant’s detailed scholarship dismantling the modern view that Alexander ruined Mesopotamian agriculture by removing seasonal river barriers, this sub-chapter joins other discussions intermingled throughout the book in exposing the simple-minded folly of the “fausse alternative ” (253) fueling scholarly conflict for centuries over whether to evaluate Alexander as a “civilizer” or a “destroyer.” The title of the penultimate chapter, “Au péril de l’histoire immédiate,” points to Briant’s skepticism that there are lessons to be learned from the history of Alexander about modern conflicts, especially in Afghanistan. Exceptionally valuable is the second chapter (97–205), the longest, on Alexander in the cultural traditions of the “East,” meaning Persian, Islamic, and Indian. One remarkable irony in this subject is that Islamic

Art · Art history · Craft · Folio · Humanities · Interpretation (philosophy) · Linguistics · Literature · Publishing · Sociology · Variety (cybernetics) · Visual arts · Ancient Mediterranean Archaeology and History · Artificial Intelligence · Classical Antiquity Studies · Computer Science · History · Philosophy