Alexander the Great, perhaps the most commanding leader in  history, united his empire and his army by the titanic force of his  will. His death at the age of thirty-two spelled the end of that unity.

The  story of Alexander’s conquest of the Persian empire is known to many  readers, but the dramatic and consequential saga of the empire’s  collapse remains virtually untold. It is a tale of loss that begins with  the greatest loss of all, the death of the Macedonian king who had held  the empire together.

With his demise, it was as if the sun had  disappeared from the solar system, as if planets and moons began to spin  crazily in new directions, crashing into one another with unimaginable  force.

Alexander bequeathed his power, legend has it, “to the  strongest,” leaving behind a mentally damaged half brother and a  posthumously born son as his only heirs. In a strange compromise, both figures—Philip III and Alexander IV—were elevated to the kingship,  quickly becoming prizes, pawns, fought over by a half-dozen Macedonian  generals. Each successor could confer legitimacy on whichever general  controlled him.

At the book’s center is the monarch’s most  vigorous defender; Alexander’s former Greek secretary, now transformed  into a general himself. He was a man both fascinating and entertaining, a  man full of tricks and connivances, like the enthroned ghost of  Alexander that gives the book its title, and becomes the determining  factor in the precarious fortunes of the royal family.

James  Romm, brilliant classicist and storyteller, tells the galvanizing saga  of the men who followed Alexander and found themselves incapable of  preserving his empire. The result was the undoing of a world, formerly  united in a single empire, now ripped apart into a nightmare of warring  nation-states struggling for domination, the template of our own times.

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