Philip II and Alexander the Great: Father and Son ... - Historia Antigua

Preface
I n July of 1997, A. B. Bosworth and E. B. Baynham convened an
international symposium on Alexander the Great at the University
of Newcastle (NSW, Australia). The conveners then edited a selection
of papers from the conference, Alexander the Great in Fact and Fiction,
published by Oxford University Press in 2000. This conference
and publication became a model for what has become a continuing
series of symposia focusing on the world and impact of Alexander
and involving junior and senior scholars from a variety of academic
disciplines, undergraduates and graduates, and the general public.
Each symposium has produced a publication. In January 2002,
Waldemar Heckel convened a symposium at University of Calgary; he
and Lawrence Tritle then edited a collection derived from that
meeting, Crossroads of History: The Age of Alexander, published in
2003. In January of 2005, Professor Heckel again generously sponsored
a symposium; he, Lawrence Tritle, and Pat Wheatley edited a
collection derived from the second Calgary symposium, Alexander’s
Empire: Formulation to Decay, published in 2007. In that same year,
Pat Wheatley hosted a conference at the University of Otago, New
Zealand. He and Robert Hannah coedited a collection of papers related
to that meeting; Alexander and His Successors: Essays from the
Antipodes that Regina Books published in May of 2009. So too the
present collection of articles has its origin in an international symposium,
“Philip II and Alexander III: Father, Son and Dunasteia,” held
April 3–5, 2008, at Clemson University in South Carolina. The current
manuscript constitutes a selection from the papers delivered at
the symposium, though many of these papers now differ markedly
from their earlier oral versions. As we write, another Alexander Symposium,
convened by Victor Alonso Troncoso, is planned for September
2010 at Universidad de La Coruña, Spain.
Each symposium has differed a bit from the others in focus, or
composition, or organization but all have provided invaluable experience
for those interested in the world of Alexander and ancient
Macedonia, the rare opportunity for specialists ordinarily scattered
around the world to talk at length, to bounce ideas off each other, and