The author describes this ambitious work as "an arabesque of intertwining biography, an interpretative prosopography or 'prosobiography'" (xxii). It is, in fact, a revised and updated version of an important part of Helmut Berve's prosopography of Alexander's empire, Das Alexanderreich auf prosopographischer Grundlage (Munich 1926), still an indispensable work for all students of this subject in spite of its venerable age. Like other great compendious works of scholarship completed in the earlier part of this century, Berve's prosopography could not easily be revised and brought up to date within the same compass (two large volumes, of approximately 360 and 440 pages, respectively) by a single individual. New discoveries of evidence and a vast proliferation of scholarly literature have so inflated the amount of material to be dealt with that the task has now to be divided among several works (compare the proliferation of contributors to the new edition of the Cambridge Ancient History). Berve had written a kind of Who Was Who? catalogue of all the individuals (834 altogether by his count) reported by any ancient source to have been associated with Alexander (his volume II), arranged alphabetically, supplementing a smaller volume (I) containing accounts of the institutions, organizations, and groups, both civil and military, which provided the framework for the lives that he documented in the second volume. Heckel, on the other hand, concentrates only on biographies, of two different groups of people: first (Part I; chapters i-iv) "the most prominent of Alexander's officers" (xxi) -- several of the most famous, however, (including Antigonos the One-Eyed, Lysimachos, Ptolemy Soter, Seleukos Nikator, and Eumenes), being treated only partially because they either have lately received or are about to receive separate book-length treatment by other scholars -- ; and second (Part II; chapters v-ix) such other important individuals as the somatophylakes, pages, hypaspists, and commanders of infantry and cavalry.

This second edition of Heckel’s Marshals is in part a response to the volume and quality of recent Alexander scholarship. The bibliography contains over 400 items published since the first edition, not all on Alexander but all pertinent to him. This is a reflection of the tremendous vitality in Alexander scholarship in recent years, not merely scholars working away in isolation (although they do) but engagement and debate. Since Brian Bosworth and Elizabeth Baynham organised a symposium on Alexander in 1997, which went to press as Alexander the Great in Fact and Fiction (Oxford 2000) there have been frequent international conferences, each of which has subsequently been published. Then there are the commentaries: again Bosworth led the way with his landmark Arrian commentaries, but to these can be added Heckel’s own commentary on Justin (with John Yardley), Luisa Prandi on Diodorus 17, and John Aktinson on Curtius. To these can be added all the Alexander biographies, the books on aspects of Alexander’s reign and a continuous flow of papers, some more significant than others. There are also developing areas of research, not so relevant to Heckel’s book, but further evidence of the influence of Alexander in modern scholarship: work on the reception of Alexander, subject of a forthcoming Brill companion, and an increasing interest in the Age of the Successors. None of this may have radically altered our image of Alexander and his reign but it has done much to enrich it.