Alexander continues to be a subject of military as well as historical or cultural interest. In modern times, he began as the greatest of Great Captains, then became the inventor of modern mobile warfare, the model for romantic military genius, and, in recent decades, the unlikely precedent for leaders as different as Hitler and Mao Tse Tung. The writers promoting him include both Clausewitz and the contemporary Israeli writer, Martin Van Creveld; his detractors include Frederick the Great of Prussia and the most influential modern British military writer, B. H. Liddell-Hart. Machiavelli, Montaigne, and Montesquieu are among the civilians who join military men in giving opinions of Alexander as both a strategist and a fighter of battles. This chapter begins, however, with Julian, whose dialogue, Caesares, is the first extended comparison of great generals in the Western literary tradition. From there it moves to Machiavelli and thence to Italian as well as French writers, before going on to recent literature dominated by writers in German and English. The chapter ends with speculation as to why Alexander remains an authoritative yet iconoclastic figure in military history.

Macedonian kings used four methods of divination common among the Greeks – extispicy and other sacrifices, teratology, oneiromancy, and oracles – and resembled the Greeks in regard to when and how they consulted seers. The evidence mainly concerns Alexander III but allows conclusions to be drawn about traditional Macedonian royal practice. This practice differed from Greek divination on two counts: the employment of Egyptian and Babylonian seers by both Alexander and his Successors and the combination of royal divination with ruler cult; in other words, the combination of some sacrifices made by or for Macedonian kings with sacrifices made to them as quasi-divine beings. Demetrius Poliorcetes illustrates the perils of combining divination and ruler cult. This chapter also surveys Macedonian divinatory personnel, notably Aristander of Telmessus, Alexander’s chief seer, but also including unnamed Babylonian seers employing astrological methods foreign to the Greeks and Macedonians.

Over the course of more than a millennium, the ancient Greeks and Romans put hundreds of millions of animals to death in acts of sacrifice, yet also developed the first vegetarian literature and made animals subject to legal proceedings. This complex situation affected major trends in ancient philosophy, such as Pythagoreanism, and also ancient cosmological concepts. To some degree, philosophy and religious custom clashed with one another, and philosophers and other writers responded by trying to moderate, ignore or avoid this conflict. Missing from the ancient literature is any concept of animal rights. Scholarship on animal sacrifice, much of it fascinated by the subject of sacrificial violence, has given anthropological and zoological explanations for ancient practices, but has not reached a consensus on why sacrifice was widespread, or on how it fitted into ancient paganism as a whole. Recent writing on the rights and status of animals has only begun to influence scholarship.