Richard Stoneman

An exploration of how the Greeks reacted to and interacted with India from the third to first centuries BCE. When the Greeks and Macedonians in Alexander's army reached India in 326 BCE, they entered a new world. The plants were unrecognisable, and the customs of the people were various and puzzling. Alexander's conquest ended with his death in 323 BCE,...

In his brief life, Alexander the Great gained fame as the military genius who conquered the known world. After death, his legend only increased. Alexander the Great (356–323 B.C.) precipitated immense historical change in the Mediterranean and Near Eastern worlds. But the resonance his legend achieved over the next two millennia stretched even farther—across foreign cultures, religious traditions, and distant...

Xerxes: The first full-scale account of a Persian king vilified by history. Xerxes, Great King of the Persian Empire from 486–465 B.C., has gone down in history as an angry tyrant full of insane ambition. The stand of Leonidas and the 300 against his army at Thermopylae is a byword for courage, while the failure of Xerxes’ expedition has overshadowed...