… Alexander to Actium is a rich feast, enlivened throughout with Green’s flare for delicious details and legends that are possibly fanciful but too remarkable to leave out.

But telling the actual narrative of the Hellenistic world, however bizarre and entertaining it gets, is really only the superficial purpose of Alexander to Actium. No, the real point of the book, and the real reason to stick around for all 700 pages, is to witness Peter Green’s incredible, almost maniacal act of vengeance against an era he despises.

Whether it’s playwrights …

The poet-playwright Menander … has always struck me as a classic example of a growth industry created by papyrological accident.

… poets …

Callimachus, like Ben Jonson, has always had a rather better press than he deserves, and for much the same reason: his academic ideals and credentials can hardly fail to appeal to those other academics … I cannot help finding him at once pretentious and faintly distasteful, a literary exhibitionist with an unpleasant groveling streak about him, a sycophant implacable in his attacks on rival sycophants[.]

… philosophy …

Popular philosophies — and Stoicism must be accounted one of the most popular ever — almost always tend to have an intellectually suspect quality about them.

… coin portraits …

Prusias I of Bithynia is porcine, crass, and self-satisfied. The early kings of Pontus resemble nothing so much as a family of escaped convicts: Pharnaces I has the profile of a Neanderthaler, and Mithridates IV that of a skid-row alcoholic.

… or academia itself …

Museum faculty developed a reputation for symposia, frivolous research topics, and alcoholism: to anyone in the same profession there cannot fail to be a certain sense of deja vu.

… Green knows how to write a burn. It’s not simply that he’s a hater: his book about the Battle of Salamis overflows with love and admiration for the golden age Greeks who defeated the Persians. No, Green specifically has a bone to pick with the Hellenistic era and its rulers, its people, its art, and its ideas. For those who read for entertainment, the best part of Alexander to Actium isn’t the battles, the George R.R. Martin-esque politics, or the even more Martin-esque incest — it’s tagging along as Peter Green gets revenge on the Hellenistic Age by writing a definitive textbook about it, so that all students of history who come after him will read of his scorn and contempt.

Green’s harsh attitude is clear right from the preface, when he sets the book’s scope.

[I will not] devote specific sections either to law or to school education, on the grounds that during our period the first … was little more than an elaborate sham masking the realities of power, while the second offered nothing, in essence, but literary rote learning, elementary mathematics, music, athletics, and — most important — a rhetorical grab bag that would enable men at the top to talk their way into, or out of, anything.

Hellenistic historiography fares just as badly:

Polybius remains the only worthwhile historian of the Hellenistic period whose work substantially survives. Diodorus, as we are too often reminded, is a third-rate compiler … I have no wish to burden an already overlong book with yet another imaginative analysis of his chronological inconsistencies and synthetic rhetoric. Like Plutarch, he believed that one virtue of history lay in “recording the nobility of distinguished men, publicizing the vileness of the wicked, and in general promoting the good of mankind”. Successful statesmen, he thought, were righteous, while evil ones met with frustration: nothing, in short, succeeds like success. None of this inspires confidence.

From there the savagery continues almost non-stop, right down to the last page when Green ridicules imperial Roman literature for “guttering out” by the mid-2nd century. Virtually nothing escapes.¹

Take philosophy, that most noble of ancient endeavors. The Hellenistic world’s biggest philosophical contribution was Stoicism. Today, Stoicism enjoys a good reputation for encouraging adherents to be stolid and uncomplaining in the face of difficulties. Green, though, puts the spotlight on Stoicism’s lesser-known traits like its determinism and pantheism, then singles it out as a shallow ideology perfect for helping elites rationalize their own hypocrisies.

Sandbach correctly notes that “the belief that the world was entirely ruled by Providence would have an appeal to the ruling class of a ruling people”. What Stoicism offered, in fact, was a built-in justification — moral, theological, semantic — for the social and political fixed order: it was the most powerful and subtle instrument of self-perpetuation that the Hellenistic ruling class ever conceived. The mere fact of anything happening meant that it had been fated to happen; and since nature was providentially disposed toward mankind, what was fated could not fail to be all for the best. This interesting version of determinism is most often presented as a source of comfort when things seemingly went wrong; but of course, as I have suggested, it would be of even greater benefit to those who were anxious to have some moral principles to offer the world in justification of ruthless self-interest. If it was bound to happen, it had to be right.

People have always wanted to learn the future, but Stoicism’s belief in a deterministic yet providential cosmos drove a tremendous increase in the popularity of astrology, divination, and other woowoo, often egged on by the philosophers themselves.² Green even hypothesizes that Stoicism’s popularity directly sabotaged whatever nascent scientific progress there was in the late Hellenistic age.

Blake Neff, “GUEST REVIEW: Alexander to Actium, by Peter Green”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2025-10-20.

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1. Don’t assume that you, the reader, will be free from Green’s scorn. Green studied the classics at Cambridge back when standards were standards. The preface alone includes untranslated phrases in Greek, Latin, French, and even German, a norm that continues throughout the book for the first three languages (and for the fourth in the highly-entertaining footnotes). Green has no patience for the puny monolinguists of today.
2. Posidonius of Apamea, one of the most famed Stoic writers of the ancient world, was also one of its most famed astrologers.