Alexander the Great: The Anabasis and the Indica

"Arrian, very helpfully, does tell us who he was getting his facts from. He relies principally on two authors. One is Ptolemy, son of Lagus, who becomes Ptolemy I, the first Ptolemaic ruler of Egypt. The other is a Greek called Aristobulus. Both of them accompanied Alexander on his campaigns. Both of them probably wrote their accounts many decades after Alexander’s death, possibly 40 or 50 years after Alexander’s death, a generation or so later. It’s also worth saying that, although Ptolemy was there at all the battles, he probably often didn’t know what was going on. I think there’s good reason to suppose that Ptolemy actually used other histories to write his own, even though he was an eyewitness. Alexander had an official historian, or someone who is referred to as an official historian, called Callisthenes, who was later arrested, accused of plotting against Alexander and died in captivity. It may be that for the bits where Callisthenes got to before he stopped writing Ptolemy was able to use his account. So Arrian is using these two figures. The important thing is that they were contemporaries of Alexander and they’re either using their own memory or supplementing their memory with what other contemporaries wrote. Arrian has slightly implausible explanations as to why you should trust them. He says you should trust Ptolemy’s account because Ptolemy is a king and kings don’t lie. “I think that the modern tendency to point out how bad Alexander was probably misses the point of what historians should be doing” A third writer on Alexander, who I didn’t choose, is Plutarch, who wrote the life of Alexander the Great round about AD 100, so a little bit before Arrian. In one or two places in his book, he mentions episodes, and lists all the historians who report the event and those who denied it happened. The most obvious one of these is when the queen of the Amazons visits Alexander. Arrian and Ptolemy both deny this happened, but others, including some who were contemporaries of Alexander, people who were there, are listed as having told this story. So, we do clearly have people, even in Alexander’s time or within living memory of Alexander, telling implausible stories about him. Arrian chooses those who don’t do that. The other thing to say is that Arrian has probably got a particular reader in mind, and that reader is the Emperor Hadrian. Arrian knew Hadrian. Arrian was made a consul and that would have been a decision of Hadrian. Hadrian inherited an empire from his predecessor, Trajan, that reached into Mesopotamia, that included a lot the territory in which Alexander had fought. One of Hadrian’s first acts was to withdraw from the region east of the Euphrates River—so he was abandoning places Alexander had once controlled. Part of what Arrian is doing in his book is suggesting that there were things that Alexander the Great did that were good, but there were also things Alexander did which weren’t necessarily a good idea for a wise ruler to follow. So Arrian is using Alexander as a model for how to be a king: setting up his bad points as things to avoid and his good points as things to follow. One other important thing about Arrian is that he’s from a Greek background. He’s from a town in western Anatolia, but he’s very much a figure of Greek literature. He sat at the feet of a famous philosopher, Epictetus, and recorded his work. He wants to present Alexander in a positive light as a Greek, as a sign of how great the Greeks were in the past. This is a ‘look what the Greeks have done for us’ kind of presentation, or ‘look how glorious the ancestors of the Greeks were.’ It’s not solely about Alexander’s conquests, although his skill as a general is mentioned a lot. There are stories about Alexander’s interest in culture, sometimes suspiciously so because, for example, Arrian is not particularly keen to suggest that Alexander adopted Persian clothes, but Alexander did adopt Persian clothes and some Persian court practices. Arrian is ambivalent about these, so he does present these aspects in a bad way to some extent, but at the end he says, ‘well, he was only doing it to be a better ruler.’ Broadly speaking, Arrian wants to suggest that most of the time Alexander is moderate and it’s only occasionally that he is excessive. At the very end there’s a sort of obituary of Alexander where he sums things up and he says, amongst other things that, according to Aristobulus, Alexander only ever drank moderately. So Arrian was trying to play down the stories of Alexander getting drunk and doing things in a drunken fury, although even he shows that this happened from time to time. So, it’s a picture of Alexander as a good character, more perhaps than Alexander as a bearer of Greek culture. But that Greekness is there in Arrian, minimising the extent to which Alexander was working within an Achaemenid Persian set up. It is a good read, yes. The thing that my students tend to find difficult with all these books is getting used to the names. But it tells a good story. It’s got some interesting and exciting events. In the middle there’s a whole series of rather bloody episodes, with Alexander showing off his bad side, but broadly speaking, it is a good read."