Book Review – The Virtues of War – Steven Pressfield
Author Steven Pressfield’s books never disappoint. His “The Virtue of War” novel is a ‘fictional’ recounting of events of Alexander the Great’s brief and violent life. The story was told in the first person of what could easily be assumed as a ‘make-believe autobiography.’ The book paints a vivid picture of Alexander's life through a brilliantly told narrative. Some of the battle sequences were written as if Pressfield was sitting right there on the battlefield. The remarkable descriptions were combined flawlessly with gruesome action and Pressfield's superb ability to introspectively describe the conflicts of war and conquest. I was impressed with Pressfield's portrayal of Alexander the Great. He shows him as a fierce warrior hell bent on victory, but also a man with a strict set of values - virtues of war - that he would not let himself nor any of his men abuse. The tale shows the relation between emotion and fascination and thorough details of battle tactics and maneuvers that Alexander performed. He was a military genius. This novel is about Pressfield doing what he does best, mixing excitement and stimulating accuracy with great storytelling of one of the greatest military strategists and leaders in world history - Alexander the Great. A captivating and thought-provoking historical war and military read…

A fictional account of Alexander's life in 1st person. It has some interesting points, but it reads more like Pressfield's philosophy than Alexander's. It does have some amazing descriptions of battles, including the Granicus, Issus and especially Gaugamela. It would probably help if you know at least the basics of Alexander's life because the names abound, and can easily become confusing.

Strangely as I continued to read, the less I liked Alexander. His struggle to control his 'daimon', which is not an easy word to translate, brings out the bad and the good of his character. Pressfield leaves it to Hephaestion to question some of Alexander's actions, which Alexander professes to love about him, but you also have to wonder if that's mainly for 'publication' as they say.

I did enjoy the book, but frankly I think the real Alexander wouldn't have felt the need to express himself so much. He was what he was, take it or leave it.

I have read or listened to this book about 4 times. One of my all time favorites. Granted, I am a bit obsessed with Alexander the Great and Pressfield is probably my favorite author.
However, this book is a must for any leader, as far as I’m concerned.
Stories stick with you.. it’s the human factor. Rather than tell someone “lead from the front” - recommend a book like this that showcases spectacularly a leader that leads from the front.

Steven Pressfield did a lot of research and really knew his stuff. He has a great understanding of the character of Alexander the Great. The story is believable and the battles are breathlessly exciting. Unfortunately, I don't like his style very much. It felt clunky, and I was often pulled out of the action by anachronism or colloquial speech that didn't seem to fit. A fun read, but not great literature.

The way Alexander tells his story from his point of view through Steven Pressfield's talented writing brings you back to that time. I am now more than ever interested in all the events of that time, and how those have formed the western society and philosophy of which we build upon today. This is a book I will return to, and one that honors its title, as it is filled with principles and virtues one can learn from and apply to today's life. There is much knowledge and psychology intertwined in the story and its characters. Characters I have grown affection and respect for.
I look forward to reading and learning from other books by Steven. Thank you.

I get specific so I’ll put this under a spoiler. The short version is, I took quite a dislike to Alexander as here portrayed - he wasn’t a hero-figure for me. I thought, from an Alexander novel, what I want is a hero figure. But this turned out to quite interest me, with its ambivalence. I’d like to be more certain about the author’s intentions: I don’t suppose I was meant to take so against Alexander.

I was intrigued by the title, and in the end, it’s what most interests me. Alexander’s the spokesperson for the virtues learnt in war, and since we’re in Alexander’s head, he’s the one who gets to expatiate. (He does expatiate, too often he offers you a lesson. The set-up is he’s talking to a page, so you can feel talked-down to.) Pressfield titles his sections after these virtues: The Will to Fight, Love of Glory, Self-Command, Shame at Failure, Contempt for Death, Patience, An Instinct for the Kill, Love for One’s Comrades, Love for One’s Enemy. That looks schematic, and a bit too straightforward, and for ages I thought Alexander, and these virtues, and his belief in these virtues, went too uncriticised.

But then in ‘Love for One’s Comrades’ we’re in Babylon after the victory, where the corruptions of success set in, where he starts to become alienated from his soldiers, at odds with his officers; and this section culminates with Alexander’s assassination of his old comrade Parmenio, on pragmatic grounds that – as written here – only sickened me. So why is this section titled ‘Love for One’s Comrades’? Unless Pressfield orders randomly, and I won’t accuse an author of that unless I have to… is this irony?

The last section, ‘Love for One’s Enemies’ is set in India and… I have to say, of peoples met in the East, I felt only India got treated not with love – that isn’t the question – but with respect. Alexander started to irk me after he was master of Persia, with his civilizing mission, that was too like later European civilizing missions. His soldiers had an honest contempt for Persia and its society, but I felt Alexander had a concealed contempt – underneath his pity for them, his wish to grace them with Greek culture. I know these attitudes were Greek. But in these cases, I crave for an indication from the author, that he sees above, that he’s aware his characters have Greek blinkers on. I didn’t feel sure of Pressfield on this point. Not when he has Darius’s mother agree with everything Alexander says. Wouldn’t she have more to say for her culture, more of a defence when Persian ways are set against the Greek? Next we went to Afghanistan, and I felt very much we only heard an ignorant outsider��s perspective – that is, Alexander’s. It’s made worse when, after a slew of insults, he claims, “I came, myself, to love them.” Maybe, but he didn’t come to respect them, and I’d like the chance to argue to him – nor to understand them. Throughout, there’s this: “In their stead we have free Afghan, Scythian, and Bactrian cohorts. Such tribesmen cannot be trained to fight like Europeans, but with their tattooed faces and panther skin-bedecked ponies, they add a dash of colour and savagery.” Okay, it’s more than possible that Alexander thought thus. And my only issue is, I wish to have an Alexander who was truly open to the foreign cultures he met – I like to think of him that way. And this Alexander annoys because he believes he’s being so great towards them, and so distinct from his ignorant soldiers.

This sentence – though not about his attitudes to the East – sort of captures how and why he annoys me: “Most gratifying of this battle’s issue was its affording of an occasion for magnanimity.”

But in these late stages of the book Alexander is subjected to question. From Hephaestion, who gives a (simplistic perhaps) anti-war speech, declares “I have come to hate war” and critiques the title of the whole: “Or shall we cite Achilles and say we emulate the virtues of war? Rubbish! Any virtue carried to an extreme becomes a vice.” Then we have the soldiers’ revolt, refusal to go further. In this telling, I felt the soldiers’ spokesperson made sense, I was sympathetic. When Alexander shamed this part of his army into a change of heart, I thought, these tactics of humiliation wouldn’t have worked on me.

At last, in India, about its religious sages, we hear the statement – from Hephaestion – “These are not barbarians, Thessalus.” Although I’m afraid he goes on, “They are not slavish, as Babylonians, or idolatrous, as the men of Egypt.” And an old old comrade of Alexander’s joins the sages to find a life after soldiering, and we are left with an image of Alexander as limited by that creed or fact that begins the book: “I have always been soldier.”

A note for those who want to know. In Alexander’s own words: “And let me put this plain, for those of a depraved cast of mind” – there’s nothing physical between him and Hephaestion. Pressfield’s Alexander has a discomfort with the idea.

This my second Pressfield novel and is one of those books that inspired a lot of mixed feelings in me. I originally rated it four stars but I think I have to ultimately give it three. What it does, it does excellently, but what it lacks is totally nonexistent. While it does have a ton of fascinating information on Alexander's military and how he carved such a massive empire in a relatively short time without losing a single battle, it's almost impossible to engage on a personal level, which I really don't think is the author's fault and I'll do my best to explain why.

Alexander is brilliant and relentlessly shoved onward by what he calls his daimon, peeling apart and smashing the armies of the Greek, Persian, and Indian armies who stand against him, but he's also cold as ice. I felt like Pressfield tried to avoid this by including his interactions with his friend Hephaestion, and scenes of him getting all weepy over stuff. They don't work, and why should they? I don't think anyone has said that Alexander was a warm, compassionate humanist. He started a war with a pretty dubious casus belli and caused the deaths of so, so many people and the destabilization of a huge part of earth, as well as even managing to posthumously cause the wars of the Diadochi which caused even more death and chaos. Yet for some reason we kind of look at him in a romanticized, lover-warrior kind of view. The best reason for this that I can come up with is that he came from a Hellenistic culture and a lot of people, including myself, grew up with kind of this nice ideal of them which we don't have for similar cultures who raised gifted conquerors like the Huns, Mongols, etc.

At first I kind of balked at this calculating, alien portrayal of Alexander but then I realized that this is who these people were; they valued glory and power and catapulting themselves into legend through fire and death. This probably leaves very little room left for small-time stuff like compassion, rationality, selflessness, etc. All of this stuff still makes it a compelling portrait of what someone who achieved this kind of wide-scale subjugation might be like. I just had to resign myself to the fact that I wasn't gonna like Alexander.

That said...I still had a thrill in watching him take on such huge Persian armies and smash through them with his repeated uses of deception, feints, and insane cavalry charges straight at the enemy commander (often Darius himself) that basically cause every enemy on the field to shit their pants and stampede each other trying to get away. The battles are always, always fascinating as they present this huge picture of what Alexander is seeing in his head before, during, and after the fighting and Pressfield writes him as a very, very smart and talented soldier. I might be a little too hard on him, as he does obviously feel some remorse over Thebes and generally wasn't as hard on his conquered peoples and enemies as some, but overall a pretty icy and even disingenuous dude.

So another good one from Pressfield, just one that I had a relatively limited connection with--and that's probably how it should be. If you find yourself connecting too much with a person who killed thousands upon thousands of people and caused so much turmoil for an ultimately futile and kind of misguided cause, you're probably a little unbalanced--or the next Alexander the Great. Despite all that ranting I did about Alexander's character in this novel I still kept turning the pages and enjoying myself as I learned more about him once I let go of the desire to like him. Kind of makes me want to revisit another book with a character I thought turned into a totally murderous dick that ended up making me dislike the story; Conn Iggulden's Lords of the Bow, which is another credit to Pressfield. Two out of two so far, although certainly not as affecting as Gates of Fire, which all fans of historical fiction should probably give a shot if they haven't.

Although it was a good description of the campaigns of Alexander the Great and of what war was like more than two thousand years ago, this book lacked the human dimension. Alexander was a great general and strategist; he led his armies three quarters of the way across what was then the known world, making allies of some nations and cities, and conquering those who did not want to become part of his empire. Steven Pressfield captures this aspect of Alexander's life very well. At times, maybe the author captured it too well--too many pages are simply lists: how many thousand infantry, how many thousand cavalry, how many thousand men carrying bows, how many thousand men carrying slings, how many horses, how many oxen, etc, etc.

If I ever need to capture a pre-Roman country I'll be sure to consult this book. But the book lacked a human dimension. Yes, Alexander get angry, but by morning he seems to have got over it. e hear about how he loves and cares for his soldiers and his companions. But we learn little of his loves, jealousies, his humor, his cravings (other than to stand on the shores of the great ocean at the end of the world--that is the Pacific ocean on the far side of China). Infusion of a little more humanity would have improved this book greatly.

Recommended to me by Chris, one of my Graduate Student Instructors at Cal.
For all of his success, Alexander is a debated figure in history due to things like his drinking habit, burning Persepolis, and killing of one of closest generals. Pressfield frames his book in a way that makes the reader sympathize with Alexander and see him in a good light.
Pressfield does this by dividing Alexander's character into two sides. One being the virtuous man Alexander and the other 'Alexander' his daimon. The Ancient Greeks believe the daimon is a person's inner spirit and ambition. It is a good and bad thing. If not controlled properly a person's daimon can make a man a monster.
Pressfield frames Alexander's "non-virtuous" acts as Alexander losing control of his daimon, the same force that led him to his vast conquests. Pressfield weaves the story around this theme, of Alexander, and the people around him, trying to balance the two sides of Alexander's personality through their epic conquests.
This is a perspective I like, as I have a classical romantic view of Alexander the Great and want him to be remembered as a great man. Not for his flaws.
I was sad when Alexander died and the book ended. This is because I felt like Alexander was on the verge of coming to terms with his daimon, learning how to control it, and going to use it to rule his empire justly. However, as history tells Alexander died young before this could happen.
Overall an easy and enjoyable read I would recommend to anyone interested in ancient history.

Here’s the thing about Virtues of War: it doesn’t just grip you; it slams you into the dirt and dares you to stand back up. Pressfield writes like war isn’t a choice but a condition—a fever that boils blood and blinds eyes. His sentences are lean, stripped to the sinew, every word a dagger. This isn’t a book; it’s a battlefield, and you can hear the clash of swords in every line. The air reeks of blood and iron, the kind of stink that stays with you even after you’ve turned the last page.

You don’t read this book; you survive it.

Pressfield captures the unbearable weight of command, the kind that presses a man’s soul into a thin sheet of brittle steel. He digs into the grit of glory—how it’s less about shining and more about not cracking under the grind. This isn’t about heroes with gleaming armor and perfect hair. It’s about men breaking under the weight of their own legend. The hunger for victory that feels like swallowing a mouthful of broken glass—sharp, intoxicating, and inevitable.

And the metaphors? They’re brutal. A cavalry charge isn’t just fast—it’s the earth breaking apart under the hooves of gods. A retreat isn’t just shame—it’s the weight of your ancestors collapsing on your chest. Pressfield makes you feel every inch of the battlefield: the blistering heat, the cold fear, the sticky, coppery taste of failure.

The dialogue cuts like it’s forged from the same steel as the swords. Sharp. Efficient. Honest in a way that only people who’ve bled together can be. Pressfield doesn’t waste time with long speeches or noble declarations. It’s what’s left unsaid that matters—the loaded pauses, the tension so thick you could slice it with a spear tip.

And the ending? It wrecks you. It doesn’t just make you cry—it steals the air from your lungs, leaves you sitting in stunned silence, staring at the wall, questioning everything. It’s not cheap sentimentality; it’s raw truth. The kind that strips you bare and leaves you grateful for the pain because it means you felt something.

This is a book that doesn’t ask for your attention. It demands it. Virtues of War doesn’t care if you’re comfortable. It doesn’t care if you like war or hate it or think it’s noble or vile. It only cares if you’re willing to confront it—its glory, its horror, its undeniable, unstoppable pull. And trust me, you won’t walk away the same.

Haunting.

Pressfield summons the shade of Alexander and has him lay his soul out onto the pages for all to see and judge as he recounts his battles.

“The sarissa’s song is a sad song.
He pipes it soft and low.
I would ply a gentler trade, says he,
But war is all I know.”

Excerpt From
Virtues of War
Steven Pressfield

This was a hard march for me, a dedicated life-long pacifist. I found myself skipping the long paragraphs of "[Unpronounceable Greek Name] holding the left wing"; these got especially dense toward the end. The battle scenes were similarly grueling, but I found myself reading them, and all knotted up with anxiety. I suppose this was magnificently researched, to the extent that one can trust what comes down to us from 2,354 years ago. The character of Alexander, so carefully developed, meshes nicely with my sense of the nobility of the best military leaders from time immemorial: like me, they hate war, and especially the part where nobles are seldom seriously damaged, but the soldiers are slaughtered in the thousands. How does that work?