Lewis Vance Cummings

Lewis V. Cummings’ Alexander the Great highlights a flaw in my reading strategy; I pick up books that interest me on the spur of the moment rather than pursuing a coherent program. Thus, recently I’ve been reading about the Hellenistic period as books show up in the remainder bins. I’m not even remotely a Classical scholar (for one thing I’d have to know Greek and Latin, and I don’t) so I really can’t judge if a book I’m reading is state of the art scholarship, or bullshit.

My previous exposure to A the G was through the ancient authors; then I picked up Philip Freeman’s Alexander the Great, which seemed to be a competent history. Cumming’s book covers the same ground but from a different direction. Cummings was a British army cartographer, and the book was first published in 1940; thus it has some of the prejudices you’d expect from that time and class background. For example, according to Cummings the Indians Alexander fights are “tall, blonde, bearded Aryans”. As a cartographer, he’s very interested in tracing Alexander’s route; he’s familiar with all the Classical sources but also apparently knows some Sanskrit and thus attempts to find plausible Sanskrit originals for place names mentioned by the Classical authors.

Cummings also indulges in a lot of amateur psychoanalysis, chronicling Alexander’s descent from a rough-and-ready Macedonian king to a megalomaniac Oriental despot convinced of his descent from Zeus. I suspect Cummings is giving too much credence to the Classical authors here; these were Greeks and Romans who were culturally suspicious of that sort of thing.

Still, I found it readable enough. The maps are all pretty good, as you’d expect from a professional cartographer. Heavily footnoted but no endnotes or bibliography, and a skimpy index.… (mehr)