In search of the Lost testament of Alexander the great

‘Eusebius, like any other educated man, knew what proper history was. He knew that it was a rhetorical work with a maximum of invented speeches and a minimum of authentic documents.’²

‘This is not the site of ancient Ilium, if one considers the matter in accordance with Homer’s account.’³

The city of Troy is still referred to as ‘legendary’. Yet Thucydides, Arrian, and Alexander, who commenced his campaign with sacrifices at what were presented to him as the tombs of his Homeric heroes, were never in any doubt of its past glory.⁴ Neither were the historians and geographers who dated the fall of the city anywhere from 1184 to 1334 BCE based upon the Dorian occupation of the Peloponnese supposedly two generations after.⁵

Modern excavations of the remains of the hill at Hissarlik in northwest Anatolia suggest some accuracy to Homeric geography, and this argues for Heinrich Schliemann’s 1868 dissertation Ithaka, der Peloponnes und Troja, in which ‘the father of Bronze Age archaeology’ first claimed his Trojan find, though the diplomat-archaeologist, Frank Calvert, and before him the geologist, Charles Maclaren, had significantly pointed the way.⁶ Yet the modest scale of the fortified mound, as Strabo’s Geography noted, argues against its fabled size. Moreover, archaic references to Troy remain somewhat ambiguous.

Dardanus (a son of Zeus and Electra) was supposedly the founder of an eponymous settlement (Dardania) in the Troad and also a tribe, the Dardanoi, who were referred to interchangeably as Trojans in some sources. But the nearby city of Troy was known to the Greeks of the classical world as both Ilios and Troia (or Trosia) after two of Dardanus’ descendants, Ilos and Tros. Wilusiya and Taruisa, two states comprising the Assuwan Confederacy listed in Hittite texts, remain contenders for the site whose origins were lost along with Greek knowledge of the Hittite Empire itself. References scattered through the texts of Herodotus and Strabo provide an interwoven genealogy of the tribes of Asia Minor, many with links to Crete as well as the legendary city, apparently justifying Homer’s inclusion of Cretans, Lycians, Ionians and Paphlagonians among the diverse allies in the defence of Troy.

Schliemann himself was not good at differentiating fact from legend and he has since been termed a ‘pathological liar’.7 Nine distinct ‘cities’ have now been identified in the Hissarlik mound and none has turned up a definitive link to the citadel of Priam. The last settlement, Novum Ilium, was planted by Rome, no doubt to reinforce her own ancestral claims.⁸ Rome was warned of rebuilding on the soil of Troy lest she suffer the same ill-fated fortune, and true to the prophecy, like its breached walls and the vaster empire of Alexander, her borders were to crumble and her temples were to fall.⁹

Alexander and Rome shared a common heritage and one symbolically apt for our claims. But if a homogenous metropolis had once existed in the Troad, does that mean the decade-long battle to bring its walls down was truly acted out? If the Epic Cycle is endemic to the recounting of Alexander’s deeds, it is a historical fusion that raises many questions. We know the Macedonian conqueror lived, but just as with the crumbled ruins at Hissarlik, do we have the genuine article, or are we treading the literary foundations of later Roman construction?

A plate titled ‘View of Hissarlik from the North. Frontispiece. After the Excavations. From the publication Troy and Its Remains. A Narrative of Researches and discoveries made on the site of Ilium, and in the Trojan Plain. By Dr. Henry Schliemann. Translated with the author’s sanction. Edited by Philip Smith, B.A., Author of History of the Ancient World and of the Student’s Ancient History of the East. With map, plans, views, and cuts, representing 500 objects of antiquity discovered on the site.’ Printed 1875.

Diodorus, whose Bibliotheke unfortunately survives in tattered fragments for the post-Ipsus period and without the useful chapter proektheses (synopses or lists of the detail covered), also mourned the poorly documented years with a proem that underlined his own ‘universal’ efforts:

And of those who have undertaken this account of all peoples, not one has continued his history beyond the Macedonian period. For while some have closed their accounts with the deeds of Philip, others with those of Alexander, and some with the Diadokhoi or the Epigonoi, yet, despite the number and importance of the events subsequent to these and extending even to our own lifetime which have been left neglected, no historian has essayed to treat of them within the compass of a single narrative, because of the magnitude of the undertaking.¹²

The literary wasteland gives the superficial impression that in Rome’s sphere of influence, too, there was lack of interest in overseas history through this era, which, as McGing puts it, was neither ‘proper Greek history, which lost its appeal after Alexander, nor yet the vital part of proper Roman history…’¹³ But Rome had been establishing herself over the twelve-city confederation of the intensely pious Etruscans and other neighbouring tribes, which was clearly the early priority, and the war against Carthage (Qart-hadasht, ‘New City’ in Punic, Karthago to the Greeks) occupied its attention for the latter part of the period. Any trade delegations, government embassies, treaties and skirmishes that did take place between Rome and the Macedonian-dynasty-dominated Hellenic East in the post-Ipsus years were simply lost with intervening literature.

Clearly familiar with (and influenced by) Herodotus, Thucydides and Xenophon, and highly opinionated on what ‘history’ should be, Polybius contended that monographs were inferior to his ‘universal’ approach. This was supposed to highlight that the earlier Greek accounts, especially those of the 4^th century BCE, leaned to ‘the great leader theory of history’, focusing on single individuals and so revealing just dissected parts when the ‘whole body’ needed a post-mortem.¹⁸ The Greek historians had placed war, with its victors, the vanquished, and the proponents of war, centre-stage in their perception of epochal change. His criticism of Theopompus’ Philippika, now ‘double abbreviated’ through first Trogus and then his epitomiser Justin, brought the point home: ‘It would have been much more dignified and more just to include Philip’s achievements in the history of Greece, than to include the history of Greece in that of Philip.’¹⁹

Polybius began his main ‘holistic’ narrative of affairs in the Mediterranean Basin, in which he recorded Rome’s contact with the Diadokhoi kingdoms to the East, in the 140^th Olympiad, so 221/220 BCE,²⁰ the year Philip V ascended the throne of Macedonia and Hannibal Barca was appointed commander of Carthaginian forces in Spain. Unsurprisingly, he never actually named the Alexander-era historians at all, save Callisthenes and in a somewhat disparaging manner;²¹ his fourteen digressions on Alexander’s behaviour (besides five passing references), which offered little unique material, provided him little more than a somewhat stoical mixed review.22 Nevertheless, these monographs, and Theopompus’ unique character focus, provided Polybius with the anonymous essences he slotted into his ‘entire network’ with its many ‘interdependences’.²³

True to his polemical literary ancestral roots, Polybius didn’t shy away from attacking ‘competing’ historians, Phylarchus, Philinus and Fabius Pictor, for example, who covered the wars with Carthage.²⁴ He was also highly critical of his forerunner, the long-lived Timaeus (Lucian claimed he lived to age 96), whose Olympiad reckoning system Polybius nevertheless adopted to calibrate his own chapters which commenced at the point at which Timaeus had closed his (the 129^th Olympiad).²⁵ His loud invective against Timaeus, ironically, preserved much of the detail he had set out to destroy, and yet Polybius’ charity ‘was conspicuously lacking’, for he also proposed: ‘We should not find fault with writers for their omissions and mistakes, and should praise and admire them, considering the times they lived in, for having ascertained something on the subject and advanced our knowledge.’²⁶

Timaeus’ account, rich in detail of colonies, city foundations and genealogies (and highlighted coincidences – all the detail Polybius ‘subordinated’), was probably worthy of a place on the shelves,²⁷ but the exiled Sicilian had himself famously criticised everyone and gained the title epitimaeus, ‘slanderer’, along the way; he must have invited additional criticism when he spuriously dated Rome’s founding to 814/813 BCE (the thirty-eighth year before the first Olympiad) to synchronise it to Carthage’s in order to imply the cities enjoyed twinned fates.²⁸ Possibly despising Timaeus for his self-declared lack of military experience, Polybius’ summing up did elucidate the principal problem of the day: Timaeus ‘… was like a man in a school of rhetoric, attempting to speak on a given subject, and show off his rhetorical power, but gives no report of what was actually spoken.’²⁹

But Polybius didn’t remain faithful to his own critiques; he is branded a prejudiced eyewitness to the calamitous events of his day, and the frequent reconstituted speeches we read in Polybius were the product of his ‘subjective operations’. His directionless last ten books read like personal memoirs ‘focused on himself’ in order to ‘write himself into Roman history’.³⁰ In the opinion of one Greek scholar, Polybius could be ‘… as unreliable as the worst sensationalist scandalmonger historians of antiquity, provided that he is out of sympathy with his subject matter.’³¹ If pragmatic his history was, at times holistic it was not in unravelling events. Yet within Polybius’ focus on contemporary affairs, his assessment of constitutions articulated the notion of anakyklosis; this presented the theory, and even the prediction, of the evolution of governance through time.

As part of his perception of change, Polybius expressed an appreciation of what we might term ‘globalism’:

Now in earlier times the world’s history had consisted so to speak of a series of unrelated episodes, the origins and results of which being as widely separated as their localities, but from this point onwards history becomes an organic whole: the affairs of Italy and Africa are connected with those of Asia and of Greece, and all events bear a relationship and contribute to a single end.³⁴

Whilst he credited Alexander’s Asian empire with opening up the East, for him, this ‘organic whole’ now meant ‘Rome’ in her stellar fifty-three-year rise to rule the then-known world, ‘Fortune’s showpiece’ as he described it.³⁵ Whether he was truly in awe of Rome and her conquests, or simply disdainful of her sway over Greece, we may never know, but (indirect) vexatious references we see in his books suggest the Romans were considered barbaroi, amongst the barbarian tribes.³⁶

The pre-Polybian ‘twilight zone’ had its sequel, however, when ‘an even more vexatious twilight descends’ on Hellenistic history after Polybius passed.³⁷ Although homebred Roman historians were spurred into action after the Second Punic War (or ‘Hannibalic War’, 218-201 BCE), they focused on the progress of the mother city through the Annales Maximi and not on gathering in the detail of the broader Hellenistic story.³⁸ But Rome’s early history commenced on shaky ground. The invasion by Gauls in 390 BCE and the fire that followed it left much of the city and its records in ruins. The vacuum let in falsehoods which made their way sometimes innocently, sometimes deliberately, into its founding story. Good examples of the latter are the formative speeches in Livy’s Ab Urbe Condita Libri, literally Chapters from the Founding of the City, better known today as The Early History of Rome.³⁹

The traditions of what happened prior to the foundation of the City or whilst it was being built, are more fitted to adorn the creations of the poet than the authentic records of the historian… The subject matter is enveloped in obscurity; partly from its great antiquity, like remote objects which are hardly discernible through the vastness of the distance; partly owing to the fact that written records, which form the only trustworthy memorials of events, were in those times few and scanty, and even what did exist in the pontifical commentaries and public and private archives nearly all perished in the conflagration of the City.⁴³

Macaulay agreed that the chronicles to which Livy, amongst others, had access were filled with ‘… battles that were never fought, and Consuls that were never inaugurated… such, or nearly such, appears to have been the process by which the lost ballad-poetry of Rome was transformed into history. There was an earlier Latin literature, a literature truly Latin, which has wholly perished, which had indeed almost wholly perished long before those whom we are in the habit of regarding as the greatest Latin writers were born.’⁴⁴

The earlier historians of Rome had more often than not appeared on the fasti, the list of city magistrates. These were the wealthy elite, a point that supports the contention by Malthus’ 1798 An Essay on the Principle of Population that ‘… the histories of mankind that we possess are – in general – histories only of the higher classes’, though the unfortunate woes of those below are inevitably exposed in passing.⁴⁵ If the accounts of the past do indeed revolve around the higher social strata, then historians have a dilemma, for: ‘the upper current of society presents no criterion by which we can judge the direction in which the undercurrent flows.’ So the perfect historian, according to Macaulay, is one who ‘… shows us the court, the camp, and the senate. But he shows us also the nation…’ so that ‘… many truths, too, would be learned, which can be learned in no other manner.’⁴⁶ But they were few and far between. As far as Ammianus Marcellinus’ retrospective view was concerned, the deeds of the Roman plebeian were in any case ‘… nothing except riots and taverns and other similar vulgarities… it prevents anything memorable or serious from being done in Rome.’47 Perhaps Marcellinus, himself a soldier in imperial service, should have questioned why there were riots in the first place, for he might have revealed a cause of the empire’s steady decline.⁴⁸

These early republican historians, nevertheless, had advantages the later annalists did not: before imperial edicts closed them to public eyes, public records provided a first-hand account of events, for the Annales Maximi of the Pontifex Maximus, the Commentarii of the censors, and the Libri Augurales too had all been available to consult.⁴⁹ One of the outcomes was the avowed later use of the so-called Libri Lintei, Linen Rolls supposedly kept in the Temple of Juno Moneta, a doubtful documentary source supposedly consulted by the historian Licinius Macer (died 66 BCE) when nothing else was at hand.⁵⁰

But Rome needed a heroic start in ink, and lacking the pedigree of the great cities of Greece, Augustus finally commissioned a founding epic from Virgil in the style of Ennius (who wrote in the hexameters of Homer) and Naevius (ca. 270-201 BCE). The result was the Aeneid which firmly root-grafted a Roman legendary past to Homer’s heroes of Troy, a heritage reinforced in Dionysius of Halicarnassus’ Roman Antiquities, also written in Augustus’ reign.⁵¹ According to Timaeus, the sacrifice of the October Horse at the Campus Martius in Rome was a commemoration of the Trojan Horse itself.⁵²

The Mykonos Vase: a decorated storage container, pithos, and the earliest object known to depict the Trojan Horse from Homer’s Iliad though the warriors wear the panoply of the later hoplite age. Found on the island of Mykonos in 1961 it dates to ca. 670 BCE and it resides today in the island’s archaeological museum.

In Macaulay’s view, ‘new’ Roman output could not compare to Greek output of ‘old’ and he was scathing about what emerged after:

The Latin literature which has come down to us… consists almost exclusively of works fashioned on Greek models. The Latin metres, heroic, elegiac, lyric, and dramatic, are of Greek origin. The best Latin epic poetry is the feeble echo of the Iliad and Odyssey. The best Latin eclogues are imitations of Theocritus. The plan of the most finished didactic poem in the Latin tongue was taken from Hesiod. The Latin tragedies are bad copies of the masterpieces of Sophocles and Euripides. The Latin philosophy was borrowed, without alteration, from the Portico and the Academy; and the great Latin orators constantly proposed to themselves as patterns the speeches of Demosthenes and Lysias.⁵⁴

Macaulay additionally reminded us that for ‘modern’ scholars ‘… the centuries which separated Plutarch from Thucydides seemed as nothing to men who lived in an age so remote.’⁵⁵ Temporal gulfs aside, in the case of the Greeks and Romans it was their literary output, perhaps above anything else, that gave them the sense of self-identity that the barbarians pressing on their borders always lacked. So the wholesale loss of Greek and Hellenistic literature must have been incomprehensible to the scholars of the stalwart Roman Empire.

Rome did her fair share of literary damage; the Senate and Caesar had comprehensively inflamed the keepers and the contents of the libraries in Carthage and Alexandria. Although an unrepentant arsonist, Rome did become the most enduring beneficiary of Alexander’s sweat, blood and ichor, his immortal blood.⁵⁶ Alexander’s reception in the Eternal City, however, was something of a mixed one; whilst Rome displayed respect for the scale of the Macedonian conquests – they had after all paved the way for her own Eastern Empire – that appreciation was tainted by the ‘filial forbearance, which educated Romans showed towards Greece in her childish and petulant decline’.⁵⁷

A damaging process had already been at work on the legacy of Alexander before Roman-era authors added their contemplations to the subject. Modern scholars bemoan, as did Polybius, that since the 4^th century BCE, history had become the servant of rhetoric, the ‘science of speaking well’, according to Quintilian. The power of artful speech had been appreciated as a political tool as far back as Hesiod’s Theogonia when a king’s persuasiveness was portrayed as a gift of the Muses: ‘Upon his tongue they shed sweet dew, and honeyed words flow from his mouth.’⁶⁰

Hesiod had visited Delphi and had been shown the Omphalos, the sacred stone that assisted communication with the immortals. Possibly because of that he went on to receive posthumous good fortune, for in the Certamen Homeri et Hesiodi (The Contest of Hesiod and Homer, ‘the poets who gave the Hellenes their gods’),⁶¹ a narrative now traceable to the 4^th century BCE and the Delian festival in honour of Apollo, it is Hesiod who takes the literary prize ahead of the father of the Trojan epics.⁶² He might have believed that his victory was due to his instruction by the Muses in the pastures of Mount Helicon, but these were the same Muses that explained to him: ‘We know how to tell many falsehoods which are like truths, but we know also how to utter the truth when we wish.’63

The pejoratives associated with ‘artful speech’, as the Muses hinted, remind us that it involved a less than clinical approach to capturing the facts. The writers of the period had a utilitarian view of history itself, considering their overriding responsibility to be the edification of the reader, or to eristic argument.⁶⁴

As for history – the witness of the ages, the light of truth, the life of memory, the teacher of life, the messenger of the past – with what voice other than the orator’s can it be entrusted to immortality?⁶⁵

As witnessed by this extract from De Oratore, Cicero believed orators alone should be entrusted with the past, and he outlined a series of noble tenets on how it should be recorded: ‘The first is not daring to say anything false, and the second is not refraining from saying anything that is true. There should be no suggestion of suspicion of prejudice for, or bias against, when you write.’⁶⁶ Cicero was a trained rhetorician who assumed imperial posts, and he knew his noble tenet was asking too much of the day.⁶⁷ But, as pointed out to Cicero by his friend, Titus Pomponius Atticus, ‘it is the privilege of rhetoricians to exceed the truth of history’, a point of view the austere Brutus strongly objected to.⁶⁸ Cicero, no angel of method, further admitted that, ‘unchanging consistency of standpoint has never been considered a virtue in great statesmen’;⁶⁹ it was a damaging hypocrisy, if it was not espoused satirically, but presented so eloquently, who could object? And who can deny that the artistic flumine orationis of Demosthenes, Aeschines and Isocrates, or Cicero’s powerful use of tricolons, framed some of history’s greatest oils?⁷⁰

Elsewhere, Cicero praised plain speaking and likened the rhetorical overlay to ‘curling irons’ (calamistra) on a narrative, further remarking that: ‘All the great fourth century orators had attended Isocrates’ school, the villain who ruined fourth century historiography.’⁷¹ Unsurprisingly then, that when he branded Herodotus from Halicarnassus ‘the father of history’, he also bracketed him alongside Theopompus as one of the innumerabiles fabulae, the band of notorious liars.⁷² Alexander was the century’s greatest son, and his story was bound to come under the influence of the rhetorical ‘whetstone’, as Isocrates described himself.⁷³ So there emerged ‘a sort of tragic history’ that merged rhetorical narrative and tragic poetry together, a result that describes reasonably well the Roman Vulgate genre on Alexander.⁷⁴

We can only touch lightly on a topic that is deep and without conclusion, for neither Cicero nor Marcus Antonius (died 87 BCE, grandfather of the Triumvir better known today as Mark Antony) finished their treatises on an art that encompassed what Ennius termed ‘the marrow of persuasion’, suada.⁷⁵ Rhetoric is embedded in the nature of a man and his desire to throw his persuasive cloak over another under ‘the systemisation of natural eloquence’.76 Diodorus even suggested that the Egyptians had long been fearful of the influence of such honey-coated speeches in legal proceedings so everything was conducted in writing in court; later papyri fragments suggest the Ptolemies maintained a sophisticated paper trail of written testimony through court clerks and scribes, as a legacy of that:

For in that case there would be the least chance that gifted speakers would have an advantage over the slower, or the well-practised over the inexperienced… for they knew that the clever devices of orators, the cunning witchery of their delivery… at any rate they were aware that men who are highly respected as judges are often carried away by the eloquence of the advocates, either because they are deceived, or because they are won over by the speaker’s charm…⁷⁷

Timaeus claimed Syracuse in Sicily as the birthplace of rhetoric.⁷⁸ So its floruit in Athens was more of a ‘categorisation awakening’ than a beginning, and it brought with it a new appreciation of its method and application. There was never a protos heuretes, a single inventor of the art, as the wide corpus of recommended reading in Dionysius’ De Imitatione suggests, for its development was firmly rooted in pre-history and Greece’s Homeric past.⁷⁹ Homer provided us with a vivid image of Odysseus’ skill with words: ‘snowflakes in a blizzard’, and Phoenix, the tutor to Achilles, encouraged him to ‘… be both a speaker of words as well as a doer of deeds.’⁸⁰ Here in the Iliad the power of discourse, psychagogia, was being recognised, and it was thought to persuade souls to take the direction of the truth.⁸¹

The etymology of rhetorike was formed from rhetor – typically describing a speaker in a court or assembly – and ike, linking it to art or skill, and the compound of the two was possibly first seen in Plato’s Gorgias. Aristotle claimed Empedocles (ca. 490-430 BCE) had developed an ‘art’ that was already expressed in the Greek logon technai, the ‘skills of speeches’,⁸² and, according to Cicero, the first manual was written by a Sicilian Greek, Corax of Syracuse, in the 5^th century BCE.⁸³ Gorgias of Leontini (ca. 485-380 BCE), ‘the father of sophistry’ (the skillful use of false but persuasive arguments, often employed to present the merits of both sides of a case) of and paradoxologia (‘nihilism’ according to some commentators) ferried it to Athens where Tisias and Antiphon dragged rhetoric and sophistry into the Areopagus or the boule (citizen council) when pitting individual rights against the legal code. With them there did, indeed, appear dissoi logoi, the ‘arguments on both sides’.⁸⁴

The great Isocrates and Protagoras (ca. 490-420 BCE) ‘clarified’ truth in the streets as well as in the courts for fees previously unheard of, for logographers (speechwriters) were extremely well paid ‘to make the weaker argument stronger’, ton hetto logon kreitto poiein.85 Protagoras is said to have charged 10,000 drachmas per pupil for a single course in his sophistry; its value was no doubt persuasively justified with ‘man is the measure of all things’.⁸⁶ Ironically, at that time, On Nature by Anaxagoras (ca. 510-428 BCE), a revolutionary book full of groundbreaking cosmic theories (including the impiety that the sun was a ball of fire), could be purchased for just one drachma in the street.⁸⁷

With no public prosecutor’s office in Athens, individuals had to resort to private suits (dike) and self-funded public suits (graphe) to bring charges. Once their speeches had been written, gifted speakers were sought to deliver the desired result, for witnesses were not cross-examined, jurors were often ignorant of the law, and speakers were restricted in delivery time under the watch of a klepsydra, the judicial water clock. Paradoxically, whilst mendacity detected in speeches given at the boule or assembly was punishable by death, court case perjury remained risk-free, encouraging the subordination of ‘fact’ to deimotes, a ‘forcefulness’ of style.⁸⁸

Isocrates protected the intellectual property of his teachings at his newly opened rhetorical school by penning Against the Sophists in which he claimed it is impossible to write a handbook on the subject,⁸⁹ and within two generations of its first public appearance in Athens, rhetoric was endemic to debate, whether legal or historical. Timon summed it up: ‘Protagoras, all mankind’s epitome, Cunning, I trow, to war with words.’⁹⁰ The ‘cunning’ was a verbal mageia, a word first recorded by Gorgias in his Encomium of Helen: ‘The power of speech over the disposition of the soul is like the disposition of drugs… by means of some harmful persuasion, words can bewitch and thoroughly cast a spell…’⁹¹

By Alexander’s day, the Akademia had been drawn in. Aristotle launched his Gryllos on Isocrates, prompting a riposte from Cephisodorus, and there followed detailed polemics from both sides: the Protreptikos and the Antidosis. Rhetoric was being vitiated by rhetoric to the detriment of literature in general, and as Aristotle argued, fine language was being disarmed by fine argument, skills that Demosthenes and Aeschines were to refine. Demosthenes had been aided by lessons from actors, by speaking with a mouth full of pebbles, from long nights rehearsing (his arguments were labelled as ‘smelling of lamp wicks’),⁹² and according to Aeschines, by fancy footwork as well.⁹³ When the great logographos was asked for the most important element in his craft, Demosthenes artfully replied ‘only three things count, delivery, delivery and again, delivery’, so Quintilian claimed.⁹⁴

A Roman marble herm of Demosthenes inspired by the bronze statue by Polyeuctus, ca. 280 BCE. Now in the Louvre in the Department of Greek, Etruscan and Roman Antiquities.

Lucian said of street ‘philosophers’ in general that their ‘argument is turned upside down, they forget what they are trying to prove, and finally go off abusing one another and brushing the sweat from their brows; victory rests with him who can show the boldest front and the loudest voice, and hold his ground the longest’; the ‘butcher’s meat’ of fact was being garnished ‘with the sauce of their words’.⁹⁷ Their arguments, however, when preserved with an attached epistolary corpus, are useful indicators of the social currents of the day, but their influence on literature meant epideictic rhetoric fleshed out what might have once been leaner and untainted accounts, so that they now require bariatric surgery under Quellenforschung’s knife to get to the internal organ of fact.⁹⁸ Whichever way it is bottled, the tumult of rhetoric was drowning out the simpler tones of truth, as the Peripatetic school at Athens was soon vocally pointing out.⁹⁹

The Lyceum (unearthed in Athens in 1996) and later the Academy churned out manuals which loved to classify, a predisposition taken from Pythagoras. Aristotle quickly had rhetoric hung, drawn, and systematically quartered into a sunagoge technon, a collection of methods (in defiance of Isocrates’ claim) and he then did the same to sophistry.¹⁰⁰ When he inherited the subject from Plato, who viewed it as the ‘art of enchanting the soul’,¹⁰¹ he concluded: ‘In the case of rhetoric, there was much old material to hand, but in the case of logic, we had absolutely nothing at all, until we had spent a long time in laborious investigation.’102 Not to be outdone by Plato’s six species, Aristotle saw four uses for the art (panegyric, encomium, funeral oration and invective), with three modes of persuasion and four lines of argument under five main headings for use in the seven courses of human action, discounting the subheadings. Plato didn’t thank Aristotle for being ‘out-classified’ for the Platonists despised kainotomia, innovation; he soon termed him the ‘the foal’, presumably because, as Diogenes Laertius tells us, Plato said of his pupil’s secession, ‘Aristotle has kicked us off…’¹⁰³

In Rome, the newly imported seductive oratorial arts, and the attendant new philosophies, were not universally accepted, and neither was Greece itself. The sapient Cato the Elder (234-149 BCE, also known as ‘Cato the Censor’), who started life as a rigid Sabine farmer, warned his son:

I shall explain what I found out in Athens about these Graeci, and demonstrate what advantage there may be in looking into their writings (while not taking them too seriously). They are a worthless and unruly tribe. Take this as a prophecy: when those folk give us their writings, they will corrupt everything.¹⁰⁴

Cato did, nevertheless, appreciate the practical advantages of rhetoric; something of an antilogy.¹⁰⁵ In 181 BCE, newly unearthed Pythagorean manuscripts of Numa Pompilius, the legendary second king of Rome (who supposedly reigned 715-673 BCE), were burned in the forum (they were in any case frauds) for containing unsuitable Greek doctrine (‘subversive of religion’), and Cato went on to warn of Greek doctors that they were ‘sworn to kill all barbarians with medicine…’¹⁰⁶ In this censorious environment, the comedies of the home-grown playwright, Plautus (ca. 254-184 BCE), released between 205 and 184 BCE, stood little chance of being aired. There were no permanent theatres in Rome, possibly because drama was still considered a corrupting influence too (no doubt due to its Greek heritage), and it wasn’t until 55 BCE that Pompey (‘the Great’) opened his theatre in the Campus Martius, inspired by a visit a few years earlier to Greek Mytilene.

Clearly xenophobic and a master of invective, Cato fought with distinction in the campaigns against Hannibal in the Second Punic War. It was an experience that furnished him with a call for a rerum repetitio when ending his senatorial orations: ‘ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam’ – ‘furthermore, I maintain that Carthage should be destroyed’. Cato’s rigid virtue would have gladly hurled a spear dipped in blood across the Carthaginian border, whilst the Hellenism of sophisticated and distinguished Roman families continued to offend him.107 They included the gens of Scipio Africanus to whom he remained firmly opposed. Unsurprisingly, a collection of widely read pithy and conservative maxims, the Disticha Catonis, was falsely attached to the brooding censor.¹⁰⁸

Cato supported the Lex Oppia (Oppian Law) which restricted women to wearing no more than half-an-ounce of gold adornment as an austerity measure in the troubled days following Hannibal’s victory at Cannae (216 BCE). Rome itself was lucky to avoid an assault, and the two suffetes of Carthage and the Tribunal of One Hundred and Four must have demanded why the Carthaginian general failed to attack the city immediately after;¹⁰⁹ some 50,000 Roman soldiers had died in the battle and the path to the gates lay relatively undefended.¹¹⁰ Cato additionally advocated the Lex Orchai, which limited guests at an entertainment, and the Lex Voconia, designed to check the amount of wealth falling in the hands of women. This inspired Livy to wholly construct a speech in which Cato entreated husbands to control their errant wives.¹¹¹ Though Cato’s invective contributed to the eventual fall of Carthage, the result saw such great wealth arriving in Rome that it forced the repeal of the unpopular laws following street protests by women. The newly arriving funds did, however, justify Cato’s adage, bellum se ipsum alet: ‘war feeds itself’.

The Macedonian Alexander, an ‘orientalist’ who fell into the barbarian trappings of the Persian Great Kings, was not a figure to be rolled out at banquets in the presence of the censor. Cato had also fought at Thermopylae in 191 BCE thwarting the invasion of Antiochus III; it was a battle that ended Seleucid influence in Greece and suffocated the last gasps of Alexander’s Diadokhoi. In the same year Cato gave a speech in Athens and he conspicuously delivered it in Latin although he spoke Greek.¹¹² He was a redoubt that for an influential time threw back many cultural imports, and it has even been proposed that his Latin works were instrumental in halting Greek from becoming the dominant language in Rome. Yet Cato’s Origines (of Italian towns) in which Lucius Valerius had reminded him that he had emphasised the role of women in the founding of the city, and his rustic De Agri Cultura (On Farming) could not distract the populace from finally turning their heads to the more exotic and seductive themes of the Hellenistic Age.

Cato blamed the campaign against Macedonia in 168 BCE for importing more Greek moral laxity into Rome, claiming, ‘… the surest sign of deterioration in the Republic [is] when pretty boys fetch more than fields, and jars of caviar more than ploughmen.’114 His austerity continued to prevail, for a while, and in 161 BCE rhetoricians were expelled from the city. Some seven years earlier the still-circulating Alexander-styled currency had also been banned.¹¹⁵ But in 155 BCE Athens impressed Rome with a ‘philosophical embassy’ sent to argue for the repeal of a 500 talent fine; it included the Stoic, Diogenes of Babylon (ca. 230-145 BCE), the Peripatetic, Critolaus (ca. 200-118 BCE), and the Sceptic, Carneades (214-129 BCE). Between them they disarmed all opposition by the magic of their eloquence so that the youth of the city flocked to hear them plead their case and became immediately ‘possessed’.¹¹⁶

Although Cato, now almost eighty, arranged their speedy departure, the door to new ideas had been irreversibly opened and soon ‘Rome went to school with the Greeks’.¹¹⁷ When the official philosophical schools at Athens were closed in 88 BCE by edict of the Roman Senate,¹¹⁸ Greece experienced a ‘brain drain’ as philosophers and rhetoricians journeyed west to become ‘household philosophers’ in Rome, though whether they too inscribed Probis pateo – ‘I am open for honest people’ (inscribed on city gates and on entrances to schools) – above the door is debatable.¹¹⁹ And with them arrived the topic of Alexander on a tide of new philosophical doctrines and their associated ‘wisdoms’.

The Attic style of epideictic flourished elsewhere, in Rhodes for example, where it perpetuated the tradition until Apollonius Molon settled on the island and taught Caesar and Cicero to orate.¹²⁰ As Lucian imagined it in the cultured centres, there were ‘everywhere philosophers, long-bearded, book in hand… the public walks are filled with their contending hosts, and every man of them calls Virtue his nurse… these ready-made philosophers, carpenters once or cobblers.’¹²¹ But ‘Virtue lives very far off, and the way to her is long and steep and rough…’,¹²² and so we can only speculate on the quality and experience of the ‘beards’ arriving from Greece.

The Hellenistic era had witnessed the emergence of the philosophical schools of the Kynikoi, Stoikoi, Skeptikoi and the happier followers of Epicurus at the expense of the Academy and Lyceum of Plato and Aristotle, as thinkers tried to rationalise a radically changing world, or, as Epicurus espoused, withdraw from it, for he suffered from perennial bad health. Inevitably, Alexander became the perfect canvas on which to project their new ideas for Roman contemplation; the Macedonian king was used as an exemplum and his life a propaedeutic to a full-blown syllabus on rhetoric and in the process he became a punch-bag for a Roman conscience being newly tested by its own aggressive expansion in the East. As one scholar put it, Alexander was ‘… both a positive paradigm of military success and a negative paradigm of immoral excess, of virtus and vitia in a single classroom incantation.’¹²³

Despite a further castigation of rhetoricians in Rome enacted in 92 BCE by the censors in an effort to stem their influence in the Senate,124 a manual on rhetoric from the articulate politician Marcus Antonius had appeared sometime between in the decade before, though the still anonymous Rhetorica ad Herennium may have been the first Latin manual on the subject, a possible remodel the Rhetorica ad Alexandrum once attributed to Aristotle.¹²⁵ Cicero’s De Inventione Rhetorica was published when he was still an adolescent (likely in 88-87 BCE), his De Oratore followed (55-46 BCE?), and soon after his Partitione Oratoriae and his Brutus Or A History of Famous Orators.

The bust of Cicero at the Capitoline Museum, Rome

But by then free speech was dying in Rome; Cicero’s manuals could not be fully exploited when civil wars threatened and proscription lists appeared, and his De Optimo Genere Oratorum was only published posthumously.¹²⁶ Some rhetors like Potamon of Mytilene, a renowned expert on Alexander, soon enjoyed the patronage of the Roman emperors, in this case Tiberius. Yet even for that notoriety, Potamon’s works, including On the Perfect Orator, did not survive.¹²⁷ Finally, funded by a salary from the Privy Purse, Quintilian’s twelve-book Institute of Oratory (written through 93-95 CE) and Tacitus’ Dialogue on Orators emerged; Romans had finally ‘submitted to the pretensions of a race they despised’.¹²⁸ So there appeared the claim from Horace: ‘Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit et artes intulit agresti Latio’ – ‘Captive Greece conquered its fierce conqueror and civilised the peasant Latins.’ Virgil had been right to warn of Greeks bearing gifts.¹²⁹

When searching for the remains of the original Alexander, we have to deal with the realities of historians living within the literary Pax Romana (‘absolutism as the price for peaceful order’) for censorship was tangible and authors were fair game.¹³⁰ Precedents had been set and the sound of Praetorian Guards marching into the atrium was never difficult to imagine, and neither was the drifting stench of the Tullianum, Rome’s notorious prison. If we detect Livy himself was attached to the idea of a Republic, he never quite told that to his emperor, Augustus, who had by then suppressed publication of the Acta Senatus, the official records of senatorial debates at the dawn of the Principate.131 Livy, ‘peculiarly Roman’ with ‘a hundred kings below him, and only the gods above him’, had by now published much of his monumental 142-book Ab Urbe Condita Libri.¹³² He was given the young Claudius to tutor and sweetened his history lessons by suggesting the Macedonians ‘had degenerated into Syrians, Parthians and Egyptians’ when referring to the Hellenistic kingdoms of Alexander’s successors.¹³³

It seems that there was still sensitivity to the lingering power of the Diadokhoi-founded dynasties in the wake of the self-serving propaganda of Octavian which held that ‘the last of the Ptolemaic dynasty was threatening to hold sway in Rome itself’; that is, with the help of Mark Antony who fell under the spell of Cleopatra.¹³⁴ Livy, who commenced his long work when Diodorus (broadly) ended his, felt he needed to defend Rome from insinuations that she would have fallen to the Macedones:¹³⁵

Anyone who considers these factors either separately or in combination will easily see that as the Roman Empire proved invincible against other kings and nations, so it would have proved invincible against Alexander… The aspect of Italy would have struck him as very different from the India which he traversed in drunken revelry with an intoxicated army; he would have seen in the passes of Apulia and the mountains of Lucania the traces of the recent disaster which befell his house when his uncle Alexander, King of Epirus, perished.¹³⁶

Livy, Lucan (39-65 CE), Cicero, and the stoical Seneca, managed to frame Alexander as an example of moral turpitude when highlighting the depravity of absolute power, and their Epistulae Morales and Suasoriae (persuasive speeches) flowed. Arrogance and false pride were the two principal vices of Stoic doctrine and the opening pages of Seneca’s On the Shortness of Life could be an unfriendly dedication to Alexander, with its rejection of insatiable greed and political ambition, the squandering of wealth and the foolhardiness of inflicting dangers on others. In the case of Seneca, a tutor to young Nero, the Alexander-Aristotle relationship was clearly being relived. Lucan’s De Bello civili, better known as Pharsalia and treading dangerous polemical ground under Nero, termed Alexander ‘the madman offspring of Philip, the famed Pellan robber’; he was further described as nothing short of mankind’s ‘star of evil fate’. Lucan added: ‘He rushed through the peoples of Asia leaving human carnage in his wake, and plunged the sword into the heart of every nation.’¹³⁷

Seneca took at face value Trogus’ claim (preserved by Justin) that Alexander caged Lysimachus with a lion as a punishment for his pitying Callisthenes; he had allegedly handed poison to the caged historian to end his suffering.¹³⁸ It was useful as a character defamation and yet Curtius clearly stated the report was nothing but a scandal; moreover, this Lysimachus was likely Alexander’s Arcanian tutor and not the Somatophylake who inherited Thrace.139 Seneca likewise accepted the ill-fated quip made by the Rhodian, Telesphorus, about Lysimachus’ wife, Arsinoe (the daughter of Ptolemy by Berenice), along with his subsequent mutilation at Lysimachus’ hand.¹⁴⁰ Athenaeus had read no evidence of mutilation and Plutarch credited the remark to Timagenes.¹⁴¹ Neither episode was challenged, for each provided the perfect dish for a polemic on the corruption of kings and tyrants.

Alexander’s deeds inspired the republican iconoclasts to vilify him publicly and the city’s first men to emulate him privately; in Valerius Maximus’ nine books of Memorable Deeds and Sayings (published sometime under Tiberius) the Macedonian king appears at the centre of the frequent exempla on behaviour encompassing both virtues and vices, suggesting a transition was in progress.¹⁴² And despite their thunderous tirades and the continuous cloud-cover of the earlier Greek invective, the rays of grudging admiration managed to shine through.

As unbridled power manifested itself ever more comfortably through dictators in Rome, and as independent power was stripped from the comitia, the concilium, the plebeian tribune, and finally from the Senate, the diluted conscience of the Roman republic was more easily assuaged. When apotheosis was finally muttered and Eastern campaigns planned, Alexander emerged once more into the sunlight of imperial emulation when philhellenism returned to fashion, a somewhat ironic result in light of Macedonia’s own suppression of Greek freedom.¹⁴³ Finally, emperors embraced Alexander in earnest, portraying him as a giant who turned the course of Hellenic history and ultimately that of Rome. They besieged his name, stormed his historical pages and inhabited the very footsteps he walked in.

Pompey, who shared the epithet invictus (‘unconquered’) with Scipio and Alexander,¹⁴⁴ and then Julius Caesar, Augustus, Caligula, Nero, Trajan, Marcus Aurelius (ruled 198-211 CE), Caracalla and Septimus Severus (145-211 CE) who locked up the Alexandrian tomb to deny anyone else a glimpse of Alexander’s corpse, all felt the need to stylise themselves on the Macedonian conqueror in some way. Even Crassus believed he was treading in his footsteps en route to his disastrous invasion of Parthia, and probably Mark Antony did too, with similar calamitous results. Like Alexander, they managed to attach themselves to Heracles and Dionysus, but unlike the Macedonian, neither made it to India where the divine hero and god ‘civilised’ and procreated.¹⁴⁵

Septimus Severus is even said (perhaps spuriously) to have reconstituted a Silver Shields brigade in emulation of the elite Macedonian hypaspist corps (mobile infantry, used on special missions). Caracalla, who named his officers after Alexander’s generals, demanded the title ‘Great’, and he even took the name ‘Alexander’ after inspecting his body in its tomb in Alexandria; he deposited his own cloak, belt and jewellery, we are told, in return for Alexander’s drinking cups and weapons.146 Caracalla is said to have persecuted philosophers of the Aristotelian school based on the lingering Vulgate tradition that Aristotle had provided the poison that killed the Macedonian king (T9, T10).¹⁴⁷

Alexander, with his unique dunasteia (broadly, his aristocratic house, thus ‘dynasty’), was now being subsumed into the essence of Rome; Gore Vidal said of the emperors: ‘The unifying Leitmotiv in these lives is Alexander the Great.’¹⁴⁸ A century and a half ago Nietzsche encapsulated their historical perspective, reminding us why we need to reconstitute Alexander without the Roman-era additives:

Should we not make new for ourselves what is old and find ourselves in it? Should we not have the right to breathe our own soul into this dead body? Being Roman they saw it is as an incentive for a Roman conquest. Not only did one omit what was historical; one also added allusions to the present and not with any sense of theft but with the very best conscience of the imperium Romanum.¹⁴⁹

In this environment it was inevitable that a new wave of historians felt compelled to reconstruct the story of the Argead king.

A marble bust of Caracalla by Bartolomeo Cavaceppi (ca. 1750-70) based on a likeness in the Farnese collection in Rome and then Naples, believed to date from the 200s CE. In planning his invasion of the Parthian Empire, Caracalla equipped 16,000 Macedonians as a traditional phalanx despite the fact that it was by now an obsolete tactical formation. They were armed as ‘in Alexander’s day’ with ‘helmet of raw ox-hide, a three-ply linen breastplate, a bronze shield, long pike, short spear, high boots, and sword’. Unless this refers to other brigades outside the traditionally outfitted pezhetairoi, this description is challenging.¹⁵⁰

But the biggest Roman-era historiographical disservice was not to name their sources at all. Even when considered worth preserving, the literary forerunners were, more often than not, publicly assassinated, quietly assimilated and destined to servitude as an anonymous section in voluminous Bibliotheke or a series of biographical Vitae. Moreover, any methodology for working with sources remained a highly personalised affair.

Arrian announced a basic and instinctive form of Quellenforschung with: ‘Wherever Ptolemy and Aristobulus in their histories of Alexander, the son of Philip, have given the same account, I have followed it on the assumption of its accuracy; where their facts differ I have chosen what I feel to be the more probable and worthy of telling.’¹⁵² But did Arrian appreciate the responsibility that came with the statement? For the version he selected stuck and all else has vanished for eternity, for: ‘Every history written elbows out one which might have been.’¹⁵³ His approach was surely an emulation of Xenophon who voiced the same sentiment in his Hellenika, which, rather than a history of Greece, reads more like a book of prejudiced memoirs written for ‘those in the know’ (it was hostile to Thebes, in particular, for her ascendancy over Sparta).¹⁵⁴ If Arrian unconsciously let the nostalgia of the Second Sophistic slant his prose, and recalling that his primary sources had been politically intriguing, then both conscious and unconscious processes were at work on Alexander.

The result of these unconscious processes: ‘All history is contemporary history, the re-enactment of past experience relevant to the present’,¹⁵⁵ and as far as a historian, modern or from the classical past, ‘…time sticks to his thinking like soil to a gardener’s spade’.¹⁵⁶ So ‘a fully objective critique’ of history is impossible, as a Horizontverschmelzung, a ‘fused horizon’, blinds interpretation with a ‘historically effected consciousness’.¹⁵⁷ In other words, the Roman-era historians re-rendered Alexander in their own philosophies and words. Although individual ideology was not subject to state control (though clearly it was threatened by it), the wider biases of class, value, and culture were as prominent then as today. It is against this backdrop that the extant accounts of Diodorus, Justin, Curtius, Plutarch and Arrian were written under successive Roman dictators and emperors. Their information could not have been better than that they had inherited, though perhaps they thought otherwise, and at this point Rome was not devoid of primary and intermediary sources that had documented the era (in contrast to the period post-Ipsus), as evidenced by the many contributing historians named in Plutarch’s accounts.¹⁵⁸

But Quellenforschung’s forensic eye is revealing that what have been often termed ‘good’ sources – those behind the so-called ‘court tradition’ of Arrian, for example – include what are now considered deposits of highly dubious material. On the other hand, writers once deemed ‘dubious’ provide us, on occasion, with a core of credible information from genuine lost texts. But identifying where that core separates from the mantle and the crust remains a challenge, so as far as the value of these secondary sources to Alexander’s story: ‘The old custom of dividing their writings into “favourable” and “unfavourable” has now been abandoned for a more sceptical, cautious and nuanced approach.’¹⁶¹ In Peter Green’s opinion, ‘The truth of the matter is that there has never been a “good” or a “bad” source-tradition concerning Alexander, simply testimonia contaminated to a greater or lesser degree, which invariably need evaluating, wherever possible, by external criteria of probability.’ ¹⁶²

The earliest of the five extant writers dealing with the exploits of Alexander, the Greek Sicilian Diodorus, was constructing a ‘universal’ narrative along the lines of Polybius and Ephorus, and with no monographic pretensions towards the Macedonian king. Noting that events ‘lie scattered about in numerous treatises and in divers authors’, Diodorus echoed a rather Polybian case for his thirty years of research and compilation as part of the introduction we cited above:

Most writers have recorded no more than isolated wars waged by a single nation or a single state, and but few have undertaken, beginning with the earliest times and coming down to their own day, to record the events connected with all peoples…¹⁶³

With less space allocated to the extended didactic speeches we find in Thucydides, for example, and yet clearly influenced by what appears to be Ephorus’ sentiment (derived from Isocrates) on ‘moral utility’, Diodorus once more focused on ‘great men’, and he seems to have scorned democracy with its ‘vast numbers that ruin the work of the government’ in the process.164 Polybius had already commented on Athens’ political system and perhaps set the tone: ‘It naturally begins to be sick of present conditions and next looks out for a master, and having found one very soon hates him again, as the change is manifestly for the worse’,¹⁶⁵ a statement that conveniently appears to back-up his anacyclotic model.

In his philosophical introduction, Diodorus informed us that his Bibliotheke Historika covered 1,138 years and was arranged into three distinct sections.¹⁶⁶ The first was the ‘mythical’ in which he introduced Greek and Egyptian creation theories and narrated events through to the Trojan War. The second was a compendium of accounts ending at Alexander’s death, and he originally planned the third, the last twenty-three books, to run past the first ‘unofficial’ Roman Triumvirate of 60/59 BCE formed between Julius Caesar, Crassus and Pompey, and through to Caesar’s Gallic Wars of 46/45 BCE. But he ceased at the earlier terminus, though later events were mentioned; the halt was probably prudent considering the danger of commenting on contemporary events during the bloody Second Triumvirate.¹⁶⁷ Of his original ‘library’, only books one to five, and eleven to twenty, survive anywhere near intact, though fragments from the remaining sections can be found in the 280 surviving epitomes of Photius.¹⁶⁸ Fortunately, Philip II, Alexander and the Successor Wars years under scrutiny, reside in books sixteen to twenty.

Diodorus’ work has been a weapons testing ground for the deployment of Quellenforschung and yet we know little about his life beyond what he himself told us, along with one further reference by the Illyrian Eusebius Sophronius Hieronymus (ca. 347-420 CE), otherwise known as St Jerome: ‘Diodorus of Sicily, a writer of Greek history, became illustrious.’¹⁶⁹ Diodorus hailed from one of the oldest and formerly wealthiest, and yet now (according to Cicero) one of the most impoverished, settlements in the interior of Sicily, Agyrium, where a surviving tombstone inscription is dedicated to a similar named ‘son of Appollonius’ – we assume the historian. In 36 BCE, in the decade in which Diodorus was likely publishing, Octavian stripped the Sicilians of their Roman citizen rights, Latinitas, previously granted to them by Sextus Pompey.¹⁷⁰

Nevertheless, Diodorus afforded Agyrium – which may have suffered as a result of opposing Roman interests in the First Punic War – and its Heraclean cult (Heracles had supposedly visited the town) an importance out of context in the scale of his overall work (Timaeus was accused of much the same); he made ‘events in Sicily finer and more illustrious than those in the rest of the world’.¹⁷¹ Ephorus, too, had repeatedly assured his readers that the population of his home, Cyme in northwest Asia Minor, was ‘at peace’, possibly taking Euripides’ words at face value: ‘The first necessity of a happy life is to be born of a famous city’, and apart from attachments to Homer and Hesiod, Ephorus inferred every Spartan or Persian military action had some strategic link with Cyme.172 So when Diodorus digresses into a Cymian saga we can confidently pinpoint his source.¹⁷³

Evidence suggests Diodorus’ information gathering took place broadly between 59 BCE and the publication date somewhere between 36-30 BCE, a period in which Roman authority reached ‘to the bounds of the inhabited world’, a state of affairs that concerned him despite his admiration for Rome’s earlier achievements.¹⁷⁴ But parts of his first books appear to have circulated earlier, released as a separate packet.¹⁷⁵ He seems to have spoken imperfect Latin (though living on Sicily gave him a ‘considerable familiarity’ with the language) and the jury remains out on whether he drew from Latin texts at all for detail on Roman affairs. Like Herodotus, he claimed to have travelled widely in the continents he would have termed ‘Europa’ and ‘Asia’, but at times his geography is just as shaky as Herodotus’, in whose Histories we see the first references to those continental names. It is clear from his eyewitness testimony, however, that he did spend time in Egypt (from ca. 60/59 BCE) and he appears to have consulted the ‘royal records’ in Alexandria before basing himself in Rome (from ca. 46/45 BCE) for a ‘lengthy’ time, though no patrons nor reading circle associates were ever mentioned.¹⁷⁶

Admitting he followed ‘subject-system’ subdivisions, Diodorus dealt with the fate of individuals sequentially, separating biographical threads rather than developing them in parallel, a method that complicates our understanding of the chronological progression; the result is at times akin to a ‘kaleidoscopic disjunctiveness’.¹⁷⁷ Whilst dubbed ‘universal’ in approach, and indeed at times he was panoramic in his scope, Diodorus all too often provided us with a monographic narrative that Polybius would have termed historia kata meros, history ‘bit by bit’, a definition close to the criticism afforded to Thucydides (only mentioned once in the extant chapters of Polybius) by Dionysius of Halicarnassus, whose books, beside those of Polybius and Diodorus, represent the only surviving works of the Hellenistic era sufficiently intact to be of use to modern historians.¹⁷⁸

Diodorus was cutting and pasting ‘the numerous treatise from divers authors’, squeezing them into a highly generalised timeframe, though he was not blind to the shortcomings of his method, as he himself explained:

… it is necessary, for those who record them, to interrupt the narrative and to parcel out different times to simultaneous events contrary to nature, with the result that, although the actual experience of the events contains the truth, yet the written record, deprived of such power, while presenting copies of the events, falls far short of arranging them as they really were.¹⁷⁹

In Diodorus’ chronological progression, Alexander’s achievement sat like a huge boulder – the greatest in history he believed – in the literary road from prehistory to the increasingly turbulent present, and one that could not be split this time with fire and sour wine.¹⁸⁴ In his opinion: ‘Alexander accomplished greater deeds than any, not only of kings who lived before him but also of those who were to come later down to our time.’¹⁸⁵ And that would have been a slap in the face to the career of Julius Caesar had not Diodorus additionally and expediently stated that Caesar was the historical character he admired the most.¹⁸⁶

The chapters focusing on Alexander in Diodorus’ Bibliotheke are considered to be about one-tenth as long as Cleitarchus’ narrative (estimated from scant evidence), whereas Curtius’ biography roughly tracked Cleitarchus’ original length; this uneven abridgement would explain many of the discrepancies within otherwise comparable Vulgate profiles.¹⁸⁷ And though a subject of intense debate, it remains easier (though less tantalising) to swallow the idea that the tones and nuances attachable to earlier Hellenistic historians that we see in the Roman-era Vulgate, also came from Cleitarchus, who, publishing in the 370s or 360s BCE, had himself incorporated these influences. The alternative requires us to accept that each Vulgate historian flitted between a number of earlier sources and yet still produced a markedly similar result. Any remaining variation in commentary we see simply reflects the ethnic backgrounds and social climates attachable to the latter-day authors and the varying degrees to which they compressed Cleitarchus’ account.

For details of events that followed Alexander’s death, scholars have reached a ‘somewhat uneasy agreement’ that Diodorus shifted sources to Hieronymus of Cardia, once again with a heavy compression of text.¹⁸⁸ Faced with the complete loss of Hieronymus’ original account, the slant of Diodorus’ chapter-opening proemia (prologues, which sometimes, however, conflict with his narrative) and the identification of unique diction may provide a valuable path back to his original sources.189 As examples, idiopragia (‘private power’ rather than ‘mutual gain’) and the technical terms katapeltaphetai (literally ‘catapultists’) and asthippoi (elite cavalry units whose role is still debated) uniquely used by Diodorus to describe episodes we believe Hieronymus had eyewitnessed, act as tell-tales to his presence when we see them reused elsewhere.¹⁹⁰ Inevitably, in this shifting of sources at the point of Alexander’s death, there was an overlap in information, and the result was untidy and conflicting with his later narrative.

In his opening proem, Diodorus expressed the fear that future compilers may copy or mutilate his work; perhaps this is suggestive of his own guilty conscience.¹⁹¹ Classical writers frequently regurgitated their sources uncreatively, and Diodorus, the ‘honest plodding Greek’ who adopted a utilitarian and stoical approach, was no exception.¹⁹² Termed an uncritical compiler, Diodorus took the path of least resistance in completing the ‘immense labour’ behind his interlocking volumes.¹⁹³ In 1865 Heinrich Nissen reasoned that Diodorus habitually followed single sources due to the practical difficulties of delving into multiple scrolls for alternative narratives.¹⁹⁴ As early as 1670 John Henry Boecler (and later Petrus Wesseling in 1746) determined he had been plagiarising Polybius to a scandalous degree and this was no better illustrated than in his digressions on Fortune.¹⁹⁵ It has even been suggested that Diodorus took his information through intermediaries, Agatharchides of Cnidus for example, in an already epitomised form. But there is little proof, and to what extent he did use mittelquellen, middle sources, or showed true independence of thought and opinion, remains sub judice.¹⁹⁶

Diodorus’ own declaration of method suggests he was not entirely mechanical and the title of his work, Library of History, was honest to the content, for it suggested nothing more than a collection of available texts,¹⁹⁷ which under Hegel’s strict definition, would classify him as a ‘compiler’ not a ‘historian’.¹⁹⁸ In a sense this is fortunate and we might thank him for lacking any great gift of originality, for a more personal interpretation might have rendered his Alexander sources unrecognisable, where instead (we believe) we receive a fair impression of Cleitarchus’ underlying account of Alexander, and of Hieronymus’ account of the years that followed. As it has been observed, some ‘universal’ historians were more ‘universal’ than others.¹⁹⁹

We would like to say much about Gnaeus Pompeius Trogus, a Romanised Vocontian Gaul writing ‘in old fashioned elegance’ in the rule of Augustus, and the least possible about Justin, in whose epitomised books Trogus’ cremated ashes are compacted.²⁰⁰ Unfortunately, little remains of Trogus’ original Historiae Philippicae (et totius mundi origines et terrae situs), ‘the only world history written in Latin by a pagan.’201 Justin did however provide useful prologoi or summaries of the contents of each chapter in his Epitoma Historiarum Philippicarum libri XLIV in a similar manner to Trogus himself and the anonymous 4^th century Periochae compiler who summarised Livy’s lost books. The problem with epitomes, as Brunt proposed, is that they ‘… reflect the interests of the authors who cite or summarise the lost works as much or more than the characteristics of the works concerned.’²⁰²

Within Justin’s précis of Trogus there remains a clear bias in content towards Spain, Gaul (which reportedly sent envoys to Alexander in Babylon), Carthage, and the western provinces of the Roman Empire, understandable for an author born in Gallia Narbonensis, broadly modern Provence. Trogus’ work stretched back to the dawn of time covering the successive great kingdoms in the style of Herodotus, but now extending further forward, through the empires of Assyria, Media, Persia, Macedonia and to Rome with its present Parthian challenge.²⁰³ Trogus’ family had made its mark in Rome; his grandfather and uncle served under Pompey the Great, and Trogus claimed his father was some kind of secretary-diplomat to Julius Caesar. This last detail suggests a switched allegiance, for Pompey and Caesar were opponents until the final decisive battle at Pharsalia in June 48 BCE, after which Pompey fled to Egypt and assassination by Pothinus, the eunuch of Ptolemy XIII Theos Philopatros (the ‘father loving God’).²⁰⁴

Of Trogus’ forty-four books, those numbered seven to thirty-three focused on the rise and fall of Macedonia, and six of them on the deeds of first Philip II, and then Alexander. If Ptolemaic Egypt is considered an extension of their influence, then Macedonian dynasties dominated the texts through to book forty. All in all, Philip came off badly, a sine qua non of the late Roman republic: he was the terminator of Greek liberty, though both Polybius and Trogus credited him with laying the foundation stone of Alexander’s success.²⁰⁵

Trogus’ annalistic history did not pander to the audience in Rome whose imperialism is criticised through the device of rhetorical speeches, and Parthia is positioned as the moral heart of the Persian Empire, casting doubts on Roman incursions. Here Fortuna, the new incarnation of the Greek goddess Tyche, played her part in Alexander’s quest to be named king of the world, universum terranum orbem.²⁰⁶ Justin’s epitome suggests Trogus’ original work, though eloquent (sufficiently so for Trogus to have confidently criticised both Livy and Sallust),²⁰⁷ appears to have reinforced the darker themes attached to Alexander, as well as other influences already embedded in Cleitarchus.²⁰⁸ Of course, the closer-to-home exhortations of Roman republican polemic had their effect as well; corruption by wealth is blamed for the downfall of the Lydians, the Greeks, and ultimately, Alexander himself.209

How much of the vocabulary in Justin’s epitome was his rather than Trogus’ remains debatable, though scholars are now inclining to credit him with some originality and even linguistic creativity.²¹⁰ He was not naively epitomising, however; in his preface, which took the form of an epistle, Justin suggested he was arranging an anthology of instructive passages, omitting ‘… what did not make pleasant reading or serve to provide a moral.’²¹¹ These selections were akin to the Greek classroom preparatory exercises, but now arranged as a history, and for all we know Justin might have simply been a student on such a syllabus. As Carol Thomas recently pointed out, Romans grew up with Alexander and: ‘As a schoolroom staple he was a key figure in hortatory texts.’²¹²

The petals of Justin’s self-titled florum corpusculum, a little body of flowers, have sadly fallen too far from the original roots to tell us more about Trogus’ pages.²¹³ Nonetheless, Justin’s brief resume of his history is, sadly, the only surviving continuous narrative of events in the Eastern Mediterranean that spans the whole of the Hellenistic Age. Less optimistic is Tarn’s conclusion of Justin’s efforts: ‘Is there any bread at all to this intolerable deal of sack?’²¹⁴

Tarn’s 1948 source study also assaulted Curtius’ Historiae Alexandri Magni Macedonis, if that indeed approximates the original title of our third extant book, and so enigmatic, though influential, is Curtius’ work, that we dedicate a later chapter to his identification.²¹⁵

Curtius was likely aboard the Roman cursus honorum, the senatorial career path, where training as a rhetorician was vital to success; it was not an uncommon twinning of abilities in the so-called Silver Age of Latin. But the dating of Curtius’ work remains uncertain and there is no firm evidence it was widely known or ever used before the Middle Ages, after which interest was reignited.²¹⁶ The first two books of his monograph, in which Curtius might have identified himself more fully, have been lost. Judging by an encomium in his tenth chapter he would have prefaced his introduction with an imperial dedication that would have dated him nicely (T11). Frequent lacunae appear elsewhere and yet sufficient remains to propose both he, and Cleitarchus, shared a common bond: they placed the edification of their audience above purer historiographical pursuits, with the earlier production assimilated into Curtius’ restaging of the play.

If we consider that Curtius embellished Cleitarchus, who had already embellished the agenda-laden works of Alexander’s contemporaries, we appreciate how thick the sugar coating became on his bittersweet biography. Curtius’ method has been described as one that frittered away priceless sources ‘… in the course of a tedious literary concept about the goddess Fortuna and many florid exercises in Roman rhetoric.’²²⁰ Tarn and Syme summed him up as nothing more than a ‘hasty irresponsible rhetorician’ who was little more than a ‘superior journalist’, whilst Tarn’s personal polemic is more colourful still: ‘He can slough the rhetoric, as a snake sloughs a dead skin. And one neglects that rhetoric at one’s peril, for scattered through it, like pearls in a pig-trough, are some quite valuable facts and strange pieces of insight; the book is both repellent and fascinating.’²²¹

Once again, opinion is inclining towards a reinstatement of his credentials as a judicious historian; scholars including Seibert and Schachermeyr and more recently Errington and Baynham in particular, have done much to salvage him as worthy of respect.²²² His technical descriptions are at times superior to Arrian’s even if his ‘… monograph remains something of a cliché of the Graeco-Roman rhetorical tradition.’ Daniel Heinsius went as far as terming him Venus Historicorum.²²³ A good summation comes from Olbrycht: ‘Scholarly research has overestimated the rhetorical and artistic contribution of Curtius while neglecting its actual relation to historical events.’²²⁴

The monographs by Cleitarchus and Curtius may have been one-time bids for fame, for we are not aware they authored anything but a book on Alexander. Prising them apart is not an easy task as time firmly has laminated them together. But why did Curtius’ work survive when Cleitarchus’ account, once so popular in Rome, did not?²²⁵ Although his had become the perfect pizza base for new moralistic toppings, Cleitarchus may have been disdained by the literati with pretensions. But the most significant answer to Curtius’ survival is perhaps summed up with ‘Latin’. Cleitarchus had published in Greek, the language later used by Roman intellectuals but not by the populace in general, and the effort required to translate a Greek work was greater than producing a new Latin text, so copies dwindled as Latin books proliferated in the later empire. That proliferation was especially true of books written by the politically connected, in which context it remains vexing why Curtius, likely himself a politician, is unreferenced before the Middle Ages.226 The owners of the relatively few manuscripts most likely had no idea of their frailty and proximity to extinction, and when Rome’s own borders finally broke and libraries were burned by barbarian torches, her own Latin productions followed the Greek tragedy into the flames.

Trogus and Curtius, at the heart of the Vulgate genre, were peddling their rhetoric just as the Athenian sophists and rhetors had honed their oratory skills in the courts, where, like ships ‘before a veering wind, they lay their thoughts and words first on one tack then another…’ And though Diodorus considered that ‘history also contributes to the power of speech’, we have reason to believe it was in fact the other way around.²²⁷

There is no doubting the eloquence of Plutarch, the author of the fourth surviving profiling of Alexander. He multi-sourced ‘from the best to the very worst’ with vigour to sculpt the character he wished to display, or rather its face, expression and eyes, for he mused ‘our senses are not meant to pick out black rather than white’ but to receive ‘reflected impressions’.²²⁸ Much of the detail that featured in his rendering of Alexander was derived from the oft-cited corpus of letters he believed to be authentic, though he also implied his access to books was limited in provincial Chaeronea, a town that still displayed the tree known as Alexander’s Oak in his day. But, as we know, the composition of letters was a popular template in rhetorical training and sophists’ lectures (epideixeis, ‘digressions illustrative of character’) with their harsh suasoria as part of learning declamatio, when deceit was not the aim but rather accomplished emulation.²²⁹ In 1873 Hersher published his Epistolographi Graeci containing some 1,600 examples.²³⁰

Plutarch also indicated that his understanding of Latin was imperfect, and the appreciation of ‘the beauty and quickness of the Roman style, the figures of speech, the rhythm, and the other embellishments of the language’ did not come easy to him either.²³¹ In contrast to Diodorus’ more monogamous method, Plutarch’s frequent changing of source partners renders any attempt to identify the authors underpinning his biographical compendiums near impossible.²³²

A senior Priest of Apollo at the oracle of Delphi, and employed to interpret the auguries of Delphic priestess Pythia, he maintained that gods never spoke but only gave signs, and that the divine escaped recognition if the belief was lacking.²³⁴ Unsurprisingly, Alexander’s death (like much of his life) became a chapter more sympathetic to mysterious portents, Chaldean prophecies, diviners and superstition, as well as the liberating of the soul to higher things, for Plutarch was also a firm believer in reincarnation.²³⁵ Thanks to sources like Aristobulus, he, and Arrian a few decades after him, had all the materials they needed (T21, T22).²³⁶

Plutarch had no agenda of preserving history per se, as he himself freely admitted; he was hunting for vices and virtues ‘from a chance remark or a jest that might reveal more of a man’s character than the mere feat of winning battles’, and he was plucking rhetorical leaves to flavour his biographical stews along the way.²³⁷ But Plutarch was also dumping non-exploitable chapters, something of both Xenophon and Justin in his approach, and, moreover, he was inconsistent in his methodology too; where it suited his direction, Plutarch introduced fabulae, and where it didn’t, he was quick to scorn exaggeration.²³⁸

The Parallel Lives, his cradle-to-grave biographies in which Greeks were paired with Roman counterparts – Alexander with Julius Caesar for example – illustrated his own political juxtaposition of citizenship in both Greece and Rome; perhaps his pairings were further inspired by Polybius’ adjacent-chapter profiling of Hannibal and Scipio.²³⁹ Outside of the requirement for skilled and artful comparison, Plutarch’s was not an approach that fuelled his forensic curiosity. As for his biography of Alexander, Tarn suggested it was written late in life when ‘the fire had burnt low and [he] was swamped by his much reading’, though we know little of the relative chronology behind the production of his Lives.²⁴⁰ The increasing tension between Alexander’s self-control and his temper (disasters are always linked to excessive drinking in Plutarch’s biography) is illustrated, as Mossman notes, by ‘interweaving and contrasting epic and tragic elements throughout the Life’ along with connections to the story of the god Dionysus, whence the call to drunkenness came.²⁴¹

As far as Macaulay was concerned, Plutarch ‘reminds us of the cookery of those continental inns… in which a certain nondescript broth is kept constantly boiling, and copiously poured, without distinction, over every dish…’242 It was an unfair summation that belittles Plutarch’s deep curiosity about human nature, and his ‘pottage’ contained ingredients we find nowhere else. Along with the Vulgate historians, and like the more recent restoration of Leonardo Da Vinci’s Last Supper, the faded and flaking primary pigments were retouched in brighter oils and re-rendered in vivid tones that give us vivid moralistic portraits that are inevitably larger than the lives themselves.

The final extant narrative on the life and campaigns of Alexander is Arrian’s Anabasis, which was the last one of them to be written. It was penned more than 400 years after the death of the Macedonian king, and some 550 years after Herodotus walked seemingly unawares past both the Hanging Gardens at Babylon and the Sphinx at Giza, for neither were mentioned in his parental Histories.²⁴³ Arrian laid down his stylus some 670 years after Cyrus the Great was beheaded by the Massagetae,²⁴⁴ 900 years after the first Greek Olympiad, and perhaps a millennium, or more, after the era of Homer, who was, in fact, a Babylonian hostage (a play on the Greek homeros) named Tigranes, jested Lucian.²⁴⁵ The Anabasis appeared 1,300 years after Troy had supposedly burned to the ground, and some 2,000 years after King Hammurabi (or Khammurabi) had set down the social laws of the Babylonians on a stele.²⁴⁶

If Plutarch was adorning Alexander with epideictic passages, and Curtius was laying on rhetorical oils, then in contrast Arrian was applying paint-stripper ‘to set the records straight’, or so he would have us believe.²⁴⁷ The conflict and vagueness he found in earlier works irked his precise military mind, as did the fame and choral odes afforded to lesser men than Alexander; the tyrants of Sicily and Xenophon’s Ten Thousand for example, each of whom unfairly outshone his model Macedonian warrior.²⁴⁸ This must explain why Arrian largely marginalised the deeds of Philip II which launched Alexander on his journey.²⁴⁹

Holding the positions of both Consul of Rome and archon of Athens through the decade of 130-140 CE, Arrian was a ‘public intellectual’ with authoritas in both peninsulas, like Plutarch and Polybius (from his association with Roman nobiles) before him.²⁵⁰ He challenged the legends that frequented the Alexander accounts to show a judicial backbone, and Arrian appears to have been deeply religious with the requisite soldier’s superstition. His Anabasis ended with ‘I too, have had God’s help in my work’, implying a favoured client relationship with the divine, and if Alexander was a new Achilles then Arrian was to be his Homer.²⁵¹ Here he was employing a more subtle rhetoric than his forerunners: that of self-promotion through the façade of truth’s envoy, whilst his personal reflections and pedantic, though shallow, autopsy of his sources at times betrays arrogance thinly disguised as investigative fervour.252

As a Romanised Greek from Nicomedia in Bithynia (northern Asia Minor) and the author of a Bithynaika,²⁵³ we might conjecture Arrian credited Alexander’s success with laying the foundation of Rome’s Eastern Empire, thus furthering his own career. According to the Suda, Dio Chrysostom (ca. 40-post 112 CE, literally ‘golden mouth’), a fellow Bithynian historian, had a generation earlier written On Alexander’s Virtues in eight books and this must have set an influential encomiastic tone.²⁵⁴ Close parallels between Arrian and Alexander certainly did exist: Arrian served in Trajan’s war against Parthia (114-117 CE), a post that would have seen him marching south through Mesopotamia and eastern Babylonia, then down the Tigris to the Persian Gulf. And as with Alexander’s reality check at the Hyphasis River in India, this hard-earned Roman territory was soon lost again to the Eastern barbarian kings.²⁵⁵

Arrian may have additionally likened himself to Alexander’s secretary-soldier, Eumenes of Cardia, who became a central character in his sequel, Events After Alexander (Ta Meta Alexandron) which was based on Hieronymus’ account, for both were Greeks operating under a foreign regime and each was tasked with pacifying Cappadocia. In Arrian’s case this meant driving back the Alans; his treatise on the tactics used, Deployment Against the Alans, described his dispositions in classical Greek and Macedonian terms. He was literally walking in the footsteps of the Macedonian conquest, which had itself marched in the soleprints of Xenophon’s leather iphikratides; appropriately Photius did term Arrian the ‘young Xenophon’.²⁵⁶ His eastern experiences may explain why Arrian’s first chapters read as a hurried narrative of Alexander’s consolidation of Greece and the Balkans, for he was impatient for his pages to land on the now familiar Asian soil.

One observer notes that Arrian was ‘engaging in a dialogue with the great historical masters’ in the style of Tacitus, another orating product of the Roman cursus honorum with extensive military experience.²⁶¹ Influential with the Emperor Hadrian (76-138 CE), Arrian opened his story with ‘I have no need to write my name, for it is not at all unknown among men’,²⁶² a self-introduction that cannot help recalling Livy.²⁶³ Arrian went on, not without self-confidence:

…let me say this: that this book of mine is, and has been from my youth, more precious than country and kin and public advancement – indeed, for me it is these things. And that is why I venture to claim the first place in Greek literature, since Alexander, about whom I write, held first place in the profession of arms.

The self-righteousness here is also somewhat reminiscent of the epilogue to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and it rings of Polybius who dedicated several chapters to the honour of the Scipios, which, nevertheless, read as his own Curriculum Vitae.

Scholarly debate is ever divided on Arrian’s value as a historian. If, like Thucydides, he may have thought he was producing ktema es aei, ‘a possession forever’,²⁶⁵ he was ultimately an ‘apologist’, and ‘what emerges is a powerful portrait of Alexander… confident of the justice of his cause, careful of the legitimacy of his crusade, and pious at the moment of his triumph…’²⁶⁶ But the need to combine the best qualities of a king, with the worst of a tyrant, would have produced a character portrait that could only have curdled on Arrian’s pages, and he permitted no Vulgate agenda of moral decline to accommodate Alexander’s transformation; even the king’s drinking binges were, he accepted, ‘a social courteousy to his friends’. So he exploited a lingering bigotry to legitimise the mass slaughter of ‘barbarians’, while praising the exceptional conquered tribes in condescending tones: ‘Like the best of the Greeks, they claimed to know the distinction between right and wrong.’²⁶⁷

In the process, Arrian was forced to become a master of omission like Ptolemy before him,²⁶⁸ and he dismissed what could not be erased with ‘then there is a story – to me quite incredible’…‘a thing one might have expected from an Oriental despot [Xerxes], but utterly uncharacteristic of Alexander.’²⁶⁹ This last example was, paradoxically, expressing his disbelief in Alexander’s destruction of the temple of Asclepius at Ecbatana, when he had earlier fulsomely reported his burning of the Achaemenid ceremonial capital at Persepolis.270

For all his posturing, Arrian’s study of Alexander lacked creativity, as did its title, Anabasis, which once again emulated Xenophon’s with its eight-book length. Tarn believed that of the seven surviving speeches in the book, most are once more, an ‘allusion to Xenophon’; it was yet another example of ‘subject matter fitting the moment’.²⁷¹ In fact, it has been argued that Arrian’s own agnomen, Xenophon, which appeared in his full name, was likewise born of the nostalgia linking him to the pupil of Socrates.²⁷²

Arrian adopted the Ionic Greek dialect of Herodotus for his Indike in which Nearchus’ log and elements of Eratosthenes and Megasthenes were being blended into a formless ‘discussion of Indian affairs’.²⁷³ And yet we must recall that the Second Sophistic, in which ‘Greeks were Romans and Romans, it often seems, sought to be like Greeks’, demanded nothing less.²⁷⁴ It was a period that saw Cassius Dio pen a Roman history in Greek in a (poor) emulation of Thucydides, and the Cynic, Dio Chrysostom (most likely his grandfather), who was banished by the emperor Domitian, depart Rome with nothing more than the lessons and speeches of Plato and Demosthenes in his bags. The period inspired Quintus of Smyrna to finally bridge the Homeric gap between the end of the Iliad and the start of the Odyssey with an epic fourteen book Ta meth’ Homeron (better known as the Posthomerika), literally ‘things after Homer’, and in one view, when the Roman Empire ceased to know Greek, its decline truly began.²⁷⁵

Arrian is himself credited with single-handedly preserving the teachings of his Greek-speaking Phrygian Stoic mentor, Epictetus (ca. 55-135 CE, the Greek name meant ‘acquired’), in the form of the Discourses and Enkheiridion Epiktetou, a manual written, unsurprisingly, in the style of Xenophon’s Apomnemoneumata (broadly, ‘records’) which preserved Socrates’ recollections.²⁷⁶ Inevitably, Epictetus’ particular philosophical interpretations of kingship infiltrated his pupil’s summation of the Macedonian king.²⁷⁷

If classical history was ‘the circulated written works of a social elite’, we have no better examples than these, for both Plutarch and Arrian enjoyed prominent political offices that provided wider publication capabilities, and thus we still read them today.²⁷⁸ Although they were both educated far above the plebeia and the hoi polloi, Arrian and Plutarch were, nonetheless, shackled to the mind-set of the time. Arrian, hamstrung by a lifelong affection for his Pellan conqueror, rarely shone a torch into the undergrowth either side of his hero’s well-trodden path, except where he saw thick clods sitting on an artificial-looking turf. He added nothing truly insightful to the detail found in the Vulgate, and Plutarch was satisfied to ponder, once again, fortune’s tides and fate’s inevitability in stoic fashion. Polybius had frequently deferred to tyche (not the deity Tyche, Rome’s Fortuna, but broadly fate or providence, things beyond explanation), which ‘steered almost all the affairs of the world’, as a final explanation,279 and a similarly stoical Arrian chose an easy route over ‘wholehearted religious or philosophical commitment’.²⁸⁰

These five extant historians, representing the ‘court’ tradition and the ‘Vulgate’ genre (Plutarch arguably had a foot in each camp), represent the major part of what we have on Alexander today. The geographical treatise of Strabo and the forays into natural history by Pliny, make frequent references to the Macedonian campaign in the East, but little more than that. Supplementing them for detail on the Successor Wars we have Plutarch’s biographies of the generals, kings and politicians who played their part in the fate of the Diadokhoi. We have fragments from anonymous epitomes and codices, such as the Codex Palatinus Graecus 129, known as the Heidelberg Epitome (so named for its discovery in the German city), with its four relevant excerpts, and whilst as vexatious as they are useful, they help us to build a picture of these dramatic war-torn years.²⁸¹

The ironic result is that the Historical Miscellany of Aelian, a philhellene teaching rhetoric in Rome and whose accomplished florid Greek earned him the title meliglossos (‘honey-tongued’), stands as an irreplaceable goldmine of diverse historical facts and fables, anecdotes, pithy maxims and moralising epithets that occasionally touched on Alexander’s world. This, alongside Athenaeus’ Dinner Philosophers (Deipnosophistae), in which some 1,250 authors and more than 2,500 works are referred to, takes on an incongruous weight in the preservation of the voices of the period.²⁸² Athenaeus’ diversional by-product of the Pax Romana contains no fewer than sixteen of the thirty-six fragments we possess of Duris, the lost Samian historian, and thanks to the Deipnosophistae we have more lines of verbatim Theopompus, who ‘claimed the first place in rhetorical education’ and who ominously credited progress in the ‘art of discourse’ for the improving quality of historians,²⁸³ than any other lost Greek historian.²⁸⁴

These cultural snapshots of the classical world, never intended to be histories themselves, beside Diogenes Laertius’ Lives and Deaths of the Eminent Philosophers (whose detail occasionally overlapped statements found in the Suda), have been mined deeply for insights perhaps more thoroughly than their authors intended. Although Nietzsche held a dim view of compilers like Diogenes (‘the dim witted watchman who guards treasures without having a clue about their value’),²⁸⁵ we are faced with the fact that ‘the somewhat greasy heap of a literary rag-and-bone-picker like Athenaeus’ has nevertheless been ‘turned to gold by time’.²⁸⁶ Anthologies and compendiums like these, the productions of what Momigliano would have termed ‘antiquarians’ rather than ‘historians’,²⁸⁷ caught the imagination of the reader, for anecdotal collections are usually accompanied by scandal, slanders and political intrigue: the sugar and spice that sells the bake more effectively than plain dough.

1.Cicero De Oratore Book 2.13, translated by EW Sutton, Cambridge Harvard University Press, 1942, quoting Marcus Antonius.

3.Strabo 13.1.27, translated by HC Hamilton and W Falconer, published by Henry G Bohn, London, 1854. Strabo 13.1.1, and 13.1.38 additionally voiced the view that no trace remained.

4.For Alexander’s arrival at Troy see Arrian 1.12.1-6, Diodorus 17.17.3 and Plutarch 15.7-9. Thucydides 1.10-11 is just one example of the historians Alexander would have read who clearly accepted the Trojan epics as fact.

5.For the dating of the fall of Troy see Robbins (2001) p 85. Early dates for the fall of Troy come from Duris at 1334 BCE and later estimates from Eratosthenes at 1184 BCE, for example. Most ancient historians inclined to dates between 1170 and 1250 (within the years proposed by Eratosthenes, Herodotus, Sosigenes, Timaeus and the Parian Chronicle for example). Apollodorus and the so-called Canon of Ptolemy also dated the fall of Troy. Fragments from ancient historians suggested the following dates BCE: Duris 1334, Life of Homer 1270, Herodotus ca. 1240, Cleitarchus 1234, Dicaearchus 1212, Parian Chronicle 1209, Thrasyllus 1193, Timaeus 1193, Eratosthenes and his disciples (Apollodorus, Castor, Diodorus, Apollonius, Eusebius) 1184/3; Sosibius 1171, Phanias ca. 1129, Ephorus ca. 1135; detail taken from Mylonas (1964) p 353. Robinson (1953) pp 60-61 for citations from Callisthenes’ Hellenica and Plutarch’s Camillus stating Callisthenes, Ephorus, Damastes and Phylarchus were in agreement on the month of its fall. See C Baikouzis, MO Marcelo, Is an Eclipse Described in the Odyssey? Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 105 (26): 8823, June 24, 2008, for the modern scientific dating of the fall of events said to have occurred at the fall of Troy. Modern archaeoastronomy places Troy’s final fall at 1188 BCE, probably in the Greek month of Thargelion (May-June) – see Pearson (1960) pp 60-61 for ancient sources citing Thargelion; the method scientifically cross-references Homeric mention of Hermes (Mercury), Venus, the Pleiades and the ‘new moon’ along with the additional claim that ‘the sun was blotted out of the sky’, thus a total eclipse, on the day Odysseus’ returned to Greece a decade later. An eclipse occurred on 16 April 1178 BCE, though suspiciously only the seer, Theoclymenus, witnessed the ‘invading darkness’. Homeric discrepancies aside, and unlike most other disciplines for fathoming the past, archaeoastronomy is unique; its usefulness improves with time thanks to scientific advances in astronomical calculations that can be readily backdated.

6.A more extensive report of the finds made in excavations through 1871, 72, 73, 78, 79 was published in Ilios, the city and country of the Trojans, Harper & Brothers, New York, 1881; further discussions of recent works in J Sammer The Identification of Troy in New Light on the Dark Age of Greece, Immanuel Velikovsky Archive, March 1999. Frank Calvert had commenced excavations at Troy in 1865 finding the remains of Greek and Roman cities but lacked the funding to continue. The ruins are now labelled Troy VIIa in excavations.

7.The verdict on Schliemann came from D Easton Schliemann’s Mendacity – a False Trail? Antiquity 58, 1984, p 198.

8.For Rome’s claims to Trojan roots see Spencer (2002) pp 8-14 for full discussion citing Virgil’s Aeneid and Ennius’ Annales. Naevius’ Bellum Punicum was the first poem to recognise the mythical connection of Aeneas (Latinised spelling) and his Trojans with the foundation of Rome. Also see Dionysius of Halicarnassus Roman Antiquities 1.14.1 ff.

11.Polybius 8.10.11 for ‘numerous historians’, who probably included Duris, Diyllus and Demochares; see Bosworth-Baynham (2000) p 302. The oft-cited works of the pro-Athenian Diyllus (early 3^rd century BCE, his history spanned 356 to 297 BCE, in twenty-six books), along with Timaeus’ thirty-eight-book history of Sicily and then Pyrrhus of Epirus (which reached to the Punic War of 264 BCE), fell into that hole. As did the accounts of Phylarchus (3^rd century BCE), the memoirs of Aratus of Sicyon (lived ca. 271-213 BCE) and Philochorus the Atthidographer (ca. 340-261 BCE), all of which are lost bar fragments. Extracts of Euphantus of Olynthus (whose On Kingship was likely dedicated to Antigonus Gonatas), Nymphis of Heraclea and Demochares the nephew of Demosthenes, whose history might have stretched back to Philip’s reign ca. 350 BCE, suggest they also narrated the events of the early Hellenistic world. Discussion in Tarn (1948) p 63 and for Diodorus see Pearson (1960) p 239. Hammond (1994) p 16 for Diyllus and Diodorus 21.5 for Diyllus’ twenty-six books.

13.The lack of interest is an observation made in Shipley (2000) p 7; quoting McGing (2010) p 6.

14.A theme discussed in Hornblower (1981) p 236. Also see Bosworth-Baynham (2000) p 296.

16.Polybius 9.1-2, translation by I Scott-Kilvert, Penguin Classics edition, 1979.

18.Quoting Billows (1990) p 2 and ‘dissected parts’ from Polybius 1.4.7-8. Flower (1994) p 148 ff for discussion of Theopompus exampling this. McGing (2010) p 51 ff for the works influencing Polybius.

19.Polybius 8.11.4. See discussion in Walbank (1962) p 2 ff for Theopompus’ treatment. The criticism might be unfair as Philip V of Macedonia reduced the work to sixteen books when excerpting detail on only Philip II from it, so much of Theopompus’ fifty-eight-book work must have dealt with other matters.

20.Polybius 1.3 stated that main narrative commenced at 220 BCE, the 140^th Olympiad and at 1.5 he explained the Roman starting point as Rome’s first overseas venture in the 129^th Olympiad, so dovetailing with Timaeus’ history. Discussed in McGing (2010) pp 21-22 and p 97 and in Hornblower (1981) pp 183-184.

21.Callisthenes is mentioned at Polybius 6.45.1 and 12.17-22 where he is termed ‘ignorant’ and unable to distinguish the impossible from the possible. See Robinson (1953) p 55 for the full entries.

22.Bosworth-Baynham (2000) pp 286-306 for a useful summary by R Billows of Polybius’ view of Alexander; p 289 for the passages concerning Alexander. McGing (2010) p 130 ff for his dating and age.

23.Polybius 1.4 for ‘entire network of events’. Hammond (1994) p 90 for ‘double-abbreviated’.

24.Polybius’ critique didn’t deter him from extracting detail from their works; Philinus had lived through the First Punic War (264-241 BCE) adopting a pro-Carthaginian perspective, whilst Pictor fought for Rome in the Second Punic War against Hannibal (218-201 BCE); Polybius 1.14-15 for Philinus’ role with Hannibal. Polybius also attacked Xenophon, Plato and Demosthenes, but Timaeus in particular, dedicating much of his twelfth book to a polemic on his methods.

25.Polybius 1.1.5; Polybius 12.11 described Timaeus’ comprehensive cross-referencing of Olympiads with list of ephors, kings, Athenian archons and priestesses of Hera at Argos in the forms of tables; Momigliano (1977) pp 49-50. Lucian Makrobioi 22 for Timaeus’ age.

27.See discussion of Polybius’ polemics against Timaeus in Walbank (1962) pp 8-11 and Momigliano (1977) pp 50-51. Pseudo-Lucian Makrobioi 22 claimed Timaeus lived to age ninety-six.

28.Strabo 14.1.22 for Timaeus’ epithet. Also discussion in Walbank (1962) p 3. For Polemon’s Against Timaeus see discussion in McGing (2010) p 65. Timaeus’ invective spawned a twelve-book (or more) retaliatory work by the antiquarian Polemon, a contemporary of Polybius, suitably titled Against Timaeus. Momigliano (1977) pp 54-55 for the founding date of both cities, upheld by Timaeus.

29.Quoting Polybius 12.25a1-12.25b4 (Loeb) and 12.27.10-11 for his emphasis on the importance of military experience when writing about war.

30.Discussion in Pitcher (2009) pp 106-107 on Polybius’ critiques and method. Also Green (1990) was particularly scathing about Polybius’ partisan approach. For discussion of Polybius’ speeches see Champion (2000) p 436 quoting FW Walbank for ‘subjective operations’. Quoting Walbank and discussed in Momigliano (1977) p 71 on Polybius’ final chapters. Following McGing (2010) p 15 for ‘writing himself into Roman history’.

32.Polybius provided his own explanation of anakyklosis at 6.3.5-6.4.13; following Bosworth-Baynham (2000) p 308 for Herodotus’ empire progression.

33.Polybius 6.43.1, 6.44.9 and 6.10-18 for the ‘mixed constitution’ discussion. Polybius 6.9.12-14 for the prediction of Rome’s decline and 6.9.10 for politeion anakyklosis.

34.Polybius 1.3.3-6, translation by I Scott-Kilvert, Penguin Classics edition, 1979.

35.Polybius 3.59.3 ff for credit to Alexander, quoting 1.1.3 and for ‘Fortune’s showpiece’ 1.1.4. He was referring to the years 200 BCE, the beginning of Rome’s war against Hannibal, down to 168/176 BCE and the defeat of King Perseus of Macedonia at the Battle of Pydna.

36.Polybius 12.4b.2-4; for his attitude to Rome and use of barbaroi discussed in Champion (2000) pp 425-444; more on the development of the Greek term barbaroi in chapter titled The Rebirth of the Wrath of Peleus’ Son.

38.The Annales Maximi were city records kept by the Pontifex Maximus; Cicero in his De republica 1.25 claimed they were legitimate until 400 BCE when an eclipse was mentioned. They were assembled into eighty books and finally published by Publius Mucius Scaevola in 130 BCE; for full discussion see Frier (1979) chapter 8 p 162 ff, and for their dating see Crake (1940) p 379.

41.HG Gadamer Wahrheit und Methode, Grundzüge einer philosophischen Hermeneutik, Mohr-Siebeck, 1960 and quoting Braudel (1969) p 47 for the analogy to time and soil. Following Braudel (1969) p 4 and p 6 for liking narrative history to a personal philosophy and ‘child of its time’.

43.Livy 1.1 and Livy Preface 1, translation by Rev. Canon Robert, EP Dutton and Co., 1912 and Livy 6.1 for his comments on the fire and loss of genuine public records.

47.Quoting Gibbon (1776 to 1789) 26.5 on Marcellinus. For Tacitus’ view of the lower classes and Ammianus Marcellinus, see Grant (1995) p 62.

48.Ammianus Marcellinus 15.5.22 and 31.16.9 for the declaration of his career and ethnicity.

50.The authenticity of the Libri Lintei has been questioned. Discussed in Gudeman Romans (1894) p 143. They appeared in the Historia Augusta 1.7-10 which is perhaps an endorsement of their doubtfulness.

51.Ennius’ Annals was an epic poem in fifteen books, later expanded to eighteen covering Roman history from the fall of Troy (stated as 1184 BCE) down to the censorship of Cato the Elder in 184 BCE; see Brown (1959) p 5 for discussion. About 600 lines survive. Naevius’ Bellum Punicum was the first poem to recognise the mythical connection of Aeneas and his Trojans with the foundation of Rome. Also Dionysius of Halicarnassus Roman Antiquities 1.14.1 ff. For Rome’s claims to Trojan roots see Spencer (2002) pp 8-14 for full discussion citing Virgil’s Aeneid and Ennius’ Annales.

52.Discussed in Champion (2000) pp 431-432. It is an unlikely claim by Timaeus for horses were regularly sacrificed before battle by many barbarian tribes according to Polybius 12.4c.1.

56.Dioxippus is said by Aristobulus to have quoted Homer’s lines on ichor the blood of the gods, after which Alexander snubbed him with a retort; see discussion in Tarn (1948) pp 358-359. The quote comes from Athenaeus 251a. Also Plutarch 28.3 has Alexander reminding his men that he was losing blood and not ichor from an arrow wound. The quote is also attributed to Callisthenes (Seneca Suasoria 1.5) and Anaxarchus (Diogenes Laertius Anaxarchus 9.60).

59.Diogenes Laertius Pyrrho 64-65 quoting Timon’s Silli, translation from the Loeb Classical Library edition, 1925

60.Hesiod Theogonia 83-87, based on the translation by ML West, Oxford World Classics, 2008 edition p 5.

61.Herodotus 2.53 suggested Homer and Hesiod ‘gave the Hellenes their gods’. Following Jaeger (1939) and the observation that Hesiod was uniquely speaking to men of his own time, about his own time.

62.The later date was first proposed by Neitsche Die Florentinischer Tractat über Homer und Hesiod, in Rhetorica (Rheinisches museum für philology) 25 (1870:528-40) and 28 (1873:211-49). For its link with the Delian festival see discussion in Shelmerdine (1995) p 8.

63.Hesiod Theogonia 22-34. Hesiod Theogonia 27 claimed the Muses instructed him as he tended his lambs in his mountain pastures. Translation from Jaeger (1939) p 75.

66.Cicero De Oratore 2.62-63, translation by AJ Woodman and appearing in Pitcher (2009) p 15. This was set after the death of Marcus Licinius Crassus (91 BCE) and shortly before the Social War and the war between Marius and Sulla commenced. Cicero’s house had already been sacked and he himself had recently returned from exile.

67.For a summary of Lucian’s career see the introduction by AM Harmon to The Works of Lucian in the Loeb Classical Library edition, 1913. Lucian, from Samosata on the banks of the Euphrates (in modern Turkey), entered imperial service late in life. Cicero’s De Oratore was built around a fabricated dialogue in 91 BCE between L Licinius Crassus, Marcus Antonius the orator, P Salpicius Rufus and C Aurelius Cotta, plus others.

71.Suetonius Julius Caesar 56.2, drawing from Cicero Brutus 262, for Cicero’s likening rhetoric to curling irons; the analogy repeated in Quintilian 2.5.12, 5.12.18-120. Cicero De Oratoria 2.57-2.94 for the comment on Isocrates. For the dating of Cicero’s treatises see Dominik (1997) pp 13-15 and De Oratoria 1.5 for Cicero’s own description of his adolescence. The view that these historians (Flower (1994) p 46 for a list) attended Isocrates’ school is rejected by Schwartz and Flower (1994) pp 44-62 and put down to Hellenistic-era invention or Cicero using the term ‘school’ in a metaphysical sense.

72.Discussed in Momigliano (1966) p 127 quoting Cicero De Legibus 1.1.5. for the ‘father of history’ label.

73.Cicero De Oratoria 2.57-2.94; Flower (1994) p 43 for the accreditation of the quote. Pseudo-Plutarch Isocrates: Isocrates was asked how, not being very eloquent himself, he could make others so? He answered: ‘Just as a whetstone cannot cut, yet it will sharpen knives for that purpose.’

74.Quoting and following Grant (1995) pp 27-28. Polybius 2.56.10-12; discussed by TP Wiseman in Gill-Wiseman (1993) p 134.

75.Quintilian 3.1.19 recorded that neither Cicero nor the rhetor Marcus Antonius (died 87 BCE) completed their works on rhetoric. The Greek counterpart to suada was peitho, respectively stemming from ‘sweet’ and ‘persuasion’; Dominik (1997) p 3 for discussion.

76.Quoting B Vickers In Defence of Rhetoric, Oxford University Press, 1988 and repeated in Flower (1994) p 185.

77.Diodorus 1.76.1. Bagnall-Derow (2004) pp 206-211 for Ptolemaic papyri detailing legal procedures.

80.In the Iliad 9.442 Achilles’ tutor, Phoenix, was appointed to teach him about the art of public speaking as well as fighting. At 3.212-223 there is a description of Odysseus’ skill at public speaking.

81.Homer Iliad 9.343-344; Psychagogia was used by Plato in his Phaedra 261a and defined a positive aspect of rhetoric in persuading souls to see truth: ‘techne psychagogia tis dia logon.’

82.Diogenes Laertius Empedocles 3 also Diogenes Laertius Zeno the Eleactic 4. The origins of rhetorike in Pernot (2000) pp 21-23.

84.Guthrie (1971) p 270; for Gorgias’ label see Wardy (1996) p 6. Antiphon’s On Truth is preserved in Oxyrhynchus Papyri, xi, no. 1364, quoted in Kagan (1965) p 2965. In translation the Rock of Ares, also called Areopagus, situated northwest of the Acropolis, functioned as a Court of Appeal for criminal and civil cases in ancient times; discussed further in chapter titled Wills and Covenants in the Classical Mind.

86.Plato Theatetus 151e (and Sextus Against the Mathematicians VII.60) attributed the phrase to Protagoras’ Truth. For the fees charged by the Sophists; see full discussion in Worthington (2007) pp 306-307. Aristotle Rhetoric 1402a23-5 recorded Protagoras’ claim to ‘make the weaker argument the stronger’.

87.For Anaxagoras On Nature see discussion in Boyer-Merzback pp 56-58. For Anaxagoras’ imprisonment, see Plutarch Moralia 607f or On Exile 17 and de Placitis Philosophorum, Anaxagoras. Anaxagoras claimed the sun was a red-hot stone the size of the Peloponnese and not a deity.

88.See discussion of 5^th century Athenian law court practice in Worthington (2000) p 161. The implication of lies at the Assembly and lack of punishment for court case perjury discussed in Worthington (2001) p 163 and p 224.

89.See discussion in Cahn (1990) p 128 and pp 147-149. Modern opinion is that Isocrates never wrote a treatise on the art of rhetoric.

90.Diogenes Laertius Protagoras 52, translation from the Loeb Classical Library edition, 1925.

91.Collins (2008) Introduction pp xiii for Gorgias’ use of mageia and his Encomium of Helen 14 which related rhetoric to a drug or bewitchment; translation from Collins (2008).

92.Pytheas made the lamp wick slur in Lucian Demosthenes: an Encomium 15, recorded by Plutarch Demosthenes 8.3-4.

93.See the paired speeches in prosecution and defence discussed by Ryder (1975) pp 11-54. Aeschines went into voluntary exile to Rhodes when Demosthenes’ speech On The Crown resulted in his victory over Aeschines’ Against Ctesiphon in 336 BCE. For his help from actors and speaking with pebbles see Pernot (2000) pp 30-31. For the fancy footwork see Aeschines Against Ctesiphon 206.

95.Cicero Tusculan Disputations 5.3.7. Riedweg (2002) p 91 citing Heracleides of Pontus’ claim also recounted in Diogenes Laertius Heracleides of Pontus 1.12.

96.Riedweg (2002) pp 90-97 for full discussion, citing Croesus’ dialogue with Solon in Herodotus 1.30.2.

97.Lucian The Double Indictment 6, translation by HW and FG Fowler, Clarendon Press, 1905. Quoting Lucian Demosthenes, An Encomium 10 for the meat sauce analogy.

99.See discussion on the Peripatetic objections to Demosthenes’ style in Worthington (2000) pp 234-238. Demetrius of Phalerum and Theophrastus both attacked Demosthenes.

100.Aristotle On Sophistical Refutations. For Pythagoras’ classifications see the anonymous Life of Pythagoras 10-19 preserved by Photius.

101.Aristotle Rhetoric translated by J Gillies, published by T Cadell, London, 1823, Book 3.1 and contents of Book 1.1-2.20. Also Diogenes Laertius Plato 93.

103.Diogenes Laertius Aristotle 2 – ‘Aristotle has kicked us off, just as chickens do their mother after they have been hatched.’ Or perhaps the analogy is related to a quote by Diogenes the Cynic where he claimed ‘men strive in digging and kicking to outdo one another’: Diogenes Laertius Diogenes 6.27.

104.Cato Praecepta ad Filium (broadly Maxims Addressed to his Son), quoted by Pliny 29.13-14.

105.See discussion of Cato’s familiarity with Greek rhetoric and educating his sons to its principles in Dominik (1997) p 6 quoting Quintilian 3.1.19 who stated Cato was the first he knew of to ‘handle’ the topic.

106.Pliny.29.13-14 for Cato’s warning; Pliny 13.28, 13.84 and Livy 40.29 for the burning of the manuscripts.

107.The rerum repetitio was a Roman demand for reparations that usually led to war; the ceremony saw a blood-dipped spear hurled into the offenders’ territory with a formal incantation, after which, and following a thirty-three day warning, war was declared. See Livy 1.24 and 1.32 for descriptions of the ceremony and procedures.

109.Hannibal was denied reinforcement by Hanno’s political opposition in Carthage. See discussion in TA Dodge, Hannibal, Da Capo Press, New York, 1995 reprint of 1891 edition, pp 396-397, quoting Livy. The lack of reinforcements is blamed for his ultimate inability to subdue Italy. Hannibal’s men wanted to march on Rome after Cannae. See Livy Histories 22.51. Even the Romans expected a siege of the city.

110.Losses at Cannae were variously recorded: Livy 22.49.8-25 gave 45,000 infantry and 2,700 cavalry. Polybius claimed 70,000 infantry killed with 10,000 captured. Appian Hannibalic War 4.25 claimed 50,000; Plutarch Fabius Maximus 16.8 claimed 50,000 infantry dead with a further 10,000 captured.

112.For Cato’s speech in Athens in Latin see Plutarch Cato 12.4. Whilst he spoke sufficient Greek, he gave the speech through an interpreter.

113.Horace Epistles 2.1.156-157, translation from Epistles, and Ars Poetica, Loeb Classical Library edition no. 194, edited and translated by HR Fairclough, 1929 p 408. In translation: ‘Greece, the captive, made her savage victor captive, and brought the arts into rustic Latium.’

115.Suetonius Lives of Eminent Rhetoricians 25 for the expulsion of rhetoricians from Rome. For the banning of coins see Atkinson (2009) p 39.

118.Athenaeus 213d. Athens had sided with Mithridates of Pontus in his revolt against Rome and the city felt the Senate’s backlash. The so-called brain drain quote from Potter (2006) p 528.

119.Probis pateo was traditionally inscribed above the city gates or the doors of places of learning in the Roman world.

120.Plutarch Cicero 4.4-5; Quintilian 12.6.7; Valerius Maximus Dictorum factomque memorabilium libri (Memorable deeds and sayings) 2.2-3; Aelian Varia Historia 12.25; Pseudo-Aurelius Victor De Viris Illustribus Urbis Romae 81.2; Plutarch Caesar 3.1.

121.Lucian The Double Indictment 6, translation by HW and FG Fowler, Clarendon Press, 1905.

125.Following the discussion in Dominik (1997) p 6. We inherit the Rhetoric to Alexander as part of the corpus of Aristotle’s manuscripts but it is more likely attributable to Anaximenes of Lampsacus; see discussion in Pernot (2000) p 40. Dominik (1997) p 4 for Antonius’ probable publication date.

127.Following discussion in Pearson (1960) p 248 on Potamon of Mytilene. The Suda mentioned his link to Tiberius and Pseudo-Lucian’s Makrobioi 23 for his age. The On the Perfect Orator was mentioned in the Suda. Plutarch 61 mentioned his expertise on Alexander.

129.Horace Epistle 2.1.156-157: ‘Graeci capta ferum victorem cepit et artis intulit agresti Latio.’ Virgil’s line from the Aeneid book 2 was in fact ‘fear the Danaans, even those bearing gifts!’ In full, Equo ne credite, Teucri! Quidquid id est, timeo Danaos et dona ferentis. It referred to the wooden horse at Troy.

135.Livy 38.17.12. The dating of Livy’s work is uncertain; he commenced the Ab Urbe Condita Libri mid-life and completed it much later. He is thought to have been born ca. 60 BCE and to have died ca. 17/18, possibly the same year as Ovid, as claimed by St Jerome (Eusebius Sophronius Hieronymus ca. 347-420). Diodorus published sometime between 36 and 30 BCE.

137.Quoting Lucan De Bello civili 10.20-52 and 10.1. Seneca Epistles 113.27-30, 83.18-25 and Suasoria 1.5-6 are good examples of vitriol hurled at Alexander; cited by Spencer (2002) p 89 and discussed at pp 140-143; Lucan 10.22-45 cited by Stewart (1993) p 14; for other polemics against Alexander see Livy 9.18.1-7, Cicero Letters to Atticus 12.40-13.28 also cited by Spencer (2002) pp 53-60.

138.The caging episode was retold in Justin 15.3.3-9, Plutarch Demetrius 27.3-4, Pausanias 1.9.5, Curtius 8.1.14-19, Valerius Maximus 9.3 etx.1, Seneca de Ira 3.17.2, 3.23.1, Pliny 54.

140.Seneca Concerning Anger 3.17.1-4 and Concerning Clemency 1.25.1. See citation in Curtius 8.1.17. The Lysimachus episode discussed in Heckel (1992) p 249.

141.Athenaeus 598b-c mentioned his being caged but does not mention the mutilation of the ears and nose that Seneca recounted. Plutarch Symposiacs 2.634f had the story almost identically transmitted about Timagenes making the fatal quip, but no punishment was mentioned.

142.Valerius Maximus’ use of Alexander as an exemplum discussed in Wardle (2005).

143.See discussion in Spencer (2002) pp 15-21 for Rome’s dictators and their emulation of Alexander; also p 37 for the Trajan-era admiration. Following discussion of I Worthington in Carney-Ogden (2010) p 167 for the return of philhellenism.

145.Atkinson (2009) p 245 for discussion on the last sighting of Alexander’s body in Alexandria. Septimus Severus had the tomb locked according to Cassius Dio 7513.2 but Caracalla, who saw himself as a reincarnation of Alexander, allegedly saw the tomb in 215. De Polignac (1999) p 8 for discussion of the emperors emulating Alexander. For Crassus thinking he was following in Alexander’s footsteps see Cassius Dio 40.17 and 68.29.1, 68.30-31 for Trajanus’ emulation. Arrian 7.4-10 for a digression in Dionysus and Heracles in India.

146.Historia Augusta, Alexander Severus 50 for the Silver Shields. Further discussion in Roisman (2012) p 243. Stewart (1993) p 348 for Caracalla’s title from the anonymous Epitome de Caesaribus Sexti Aurelia Victoris 21.4. Herodian 4.8.9 for Caracalla’s deposits and Cassius Dio 78.7.1 for his withdrawals.

149.F Nietzsche The Gay Science, Vintage Books, New York, 1974, pp 137-8, citing Nisetich (1980) p 73.

150.Herodian book 4.8-9 and Cassius Dio 78.7-8 for his emulation of Alexander and Cassius Dio 7-8 for his arming 16,000 Macedonians and mistreating followers of Aristotle’s doctrine. See chapter titled Sarissa Diplomacy: Macedonian Statecraft for more on the pezhetairoi.

151.Quintilian 10.101-105. Cicero De Officiis 2.13. Crassus became consul in 95 BCE and married the daughter of Quintus Mucius Scaevola Augur who was an expert on Roman law and later defended Marius.

152.Arrian Preface 1.1-2 translation by A de Selincourt, Penguin Books edition, 1958.

154.Compare the statement in Xenophon Hellenika 4.81: ‘I shall pass over those actions that are not worth mentioning, dealing only with what deserves to be remembered.’ For Xenophon’s prejudices see Warner (1966) p 22 ff and for ‘those in the know’, p 34.

155.Quoting Benedetto Croce (1886-1952); discussed in Boardman-Griffin-Murray (1986) p 235.

157.In 1960 Hans-George Gadamer published Truth and Method which refined earlier treatises on ‘philosophical hermeneutics’; this was its central proposition.

158.Diodorus confirmed the wealth of literary materials when he arrived in Rome. Plutarch used at least twenty-four sources for his Alexander biography alone.

164.Diodorus 1.74.7 and 12.95.1 for his own comments on democracy. Quoiting Sacks (1990) p 26 on ‘moral utility’.

168.See Goralski (1989) p 81 for reference to the 280 surviving works of Photius. Bosworth-Baynham (2000) p 311 for Diodorus’ chronological scope.

169.St. Jerome Kronikon; the entry was cited under the Year of Abraham 1968 (49 BCE).

170.Diodorus complex attitude to Rome discussed in Sacks (1990) p 212 ff; p 129 for Sicilian loss of enfranchisement. Caesar has proposed sine suffragio for the whole island, though Mark Antony claimed he had requested Latinitas for Sicily, before Sextus Pompey; discussed in Sacks (1990) p 207 ff.

171.Diodorus 1.4.4 for Agyrium and 4.24 for its Heraclean cult. Diodorus 4.24 for Heracles’ visit. Quoting Polybius 12.26 on Timaeus; discussed in Momigliano (1977) p 48. Diodorus 16.82.5 and 16.83.3 for hints of Agyrium’s former importance; Sacks (1990) p 165 for discussion.

172.Plutarch attributed the Ode containing the line to Sosius in his Demosthenes 1.1 but to Euripides in his Alcibiades 11.

174.In his Kronikon St. Jerome stated Diodorus was in his prime in the year of Abraham 1968, which would suggest 49 BCE. His presence in Egypt in 59 BCE is suggested at 1.83.8 and further references to Egypt at 144.1-4 indicate he started composing as early as 56 BCE whereas at 16.7.1 his references to Tauromenium (modern Taormina) and Caesar’s removal of the citizens relates to activity of 36 BCE. Diodorus 1.4.3 for the statement on Rome’s expansion; Bosworth-Baynham (2000) pp 312-314 for a summary of Diodorus’ attitude to Rome.

175.See Diodorus’ comment at 40.8 on filching and earlier publishing by third-parties; his comment on ‘before they were ready’ rather than before the ‘whole Library was completed’ does, nevertheless, suggest he may have published packets himself.

176.1.4.4 for Diodorus’ claim to a ‘considerable familiarity’ with Latin. Herodotus 2.16 for Europe and Asia. Diodorus’ geography of Mesopotamia put Nineveh on the Euphrates for example. He never mentioned the Acropolis at Athens. At 1.4.2 Diodorus mentioned Rome as the only other place he visited apart from Egypt. Diodorus 1.83.8-9 for his eyewitness account of an incident in Egypt and 3.381 for mention of the ‘royal records’ in Alexandria. Sacks (1990) p 189 for Diodorus’ seeming lack of affiliations in Rome.

177.Discussion in Barber (1993) p 14 and p 17. See Green (2007) p IX for the term ‘kaleidoscopic disjunctiveness’, though applied to the earlier Hellenistic period.

178.See discussion in Pitcher (2009) p 115 for his method and p 127 quoting Dionysius of Halicarnassus On Thucydides 9.

179.Diodorus 20.43.7. Translation RM Greer from the Loeb Classical Library edition, 1954.

181.Polybius 33.2 and quoting Seneca Quaestiones Naturales 7.16, translation by J Clarke, 1910.

182.Sempronius Asellio Rerum Gestarum Libri fragment 1, translation from Dominik (1997) p 217.

183.Braudel (1969) p 11, commenting on Leopold von Ranke’s adherence to contemporary documentary evidence.

184.Diodorus 17.117.5 commented that Alexander had accomplished greater deeds than any of the kings before or after his own time. Fire and sour wine – a technique Hannibal used to clear mountain paths when crossing the Alps; detailed in Livy 21.37.

186.Diodorus 32.27.3 for his eulogizing Caesar; discussion in Sacks (1990) p 74 ff.

188.Quoting Hadley (2001) p 3 for the ‘uneasy agreement’. Errington (1970) on the other hand sees the exclusive use of Hieronymus in books 18-20.

192.Tarn (1948) p 92 for his description of Diodorus as an ‘honest plodding Greek’.

196.Examples are discussed at length by Simpson (1959) pp 370-379 and Hornblower (1981) pp 62-75. The degree to which Diodorus adhered to a single source and plagiarised its content is still debated, yet it seems clear he followed single authors where he could. Much of his history of Alexander closely correlates with Curtius’ work suggesting Cleitarchus as a common link. For discussions see Anson (2004) pp 1-33, Hornblower (1981) pp 1-75 and also discussion in Baynham (1998) p 85. Following the views of Brown (1947) p 692 for the fortunate lack of creativity. Detailed discussion of Diodorus’ methodology in Sacks (1990) p 21 ff citing Agatharchides.

198.Referring to Hegel (1837) and its contention that only a recorder of contemporary events merits the title ‘historian’. Recorders of events of the past are deemed ‘compilers’. His Lectures on The Philosophy of History were originally delivered as lectures at the University of Berlin, 1821,1824,1827,1831. First published by Eduard Gans in 1837 and by Karl Hegel in 1840. ‘Self evident’ taken from the first line of III Lectures on the Philosophic History. They led to the concept of Geistgeschichte that unified the ‘spirit’ of the age.

200.Justin Preface 1 described Trogus as vir priscae eloquentiae; discussed in Baynham (1998) p 30.

203.Justin 12.13.1 for the embassy from the Gauls; the succession of empires discussed in Alonso-Núñez (1987) pp 62-70.

206.Justin 11.6.3, 12.13.1 and 12.16.9 for Alexander’s quest to become king of the universe or the entire world.

208.Duris is reckoned to have been anti-Macedonian in his treatment of Alexander and his successors. See Shipley (2000) p 161 for discussion. Also Hornblower (1981) pp 68-70. This is largely disputed by Billows (1990) p 336.

209.See full discussion on Trogus’ style and content in Alonso-Núñez (1987) pp 56-72.

211.Discussed in Heckel-Yardley (1997) Introduction p 9. Also Baynham (1995) p 61.

213.Horace described himself as a hard-working bee gathering sweetness from myriads of flowers, cited in Highet (1949) p 226.

214.Tarn (1948) p 125. Also see Tarn’s summation of Justin in Watson-Miller (1992) pp 106-110.

216.For arguments that a reference in Hegesippus’ work (he died ca. 180 CE) might have been drawn from Curtius 9.4.30-31 see Fears (1976) p 217 footnote 18. Again they remain inconclusive and are refuted by Fears. Discussion in Baynham (1998) p 3 and in chapters titled The Precarious Path of Pergamena and Papyrus and Comets, Colophons and Curtius Rufus.

218.As an example see Curtius 4.14.9-26 for the speech provided before the battle at Gaugamela. Also Justin 11.9.9-10 for Darius’ pre-battle rhetoric. Quoting Tarn (1948) p 92.

222.Curtius’ relative merit discussed by Schachermeyr and Sibert and cited in McKechnie (1999) p 47, as well as in detail in Baynham (1998). For Errington’s comments on Curtius see discussion in McKechnie (1999) p 47 and quoting Errington (1970) pp 49-77.

223.Summarising Baynham (1998) p 14. Romane (1987) observed Curtius’ technical account of the siege of Tyre was superior to Arrian’s. Heinsius’ praise from WH Crosby’s preface to the Cellarius edition published in 1854.

225.For Cleitarchus’ popularity see Pearson (1960) p 213; he was cited by Diodorus, Plutarch, Strabo, Cicero, Athenaeus, Pliny, Quintilian and Diogenes Laertius, to name a few, alongside references from many rhetoricians. The extant fragments can be read in Robinson (1953) pp 171-183.

226.Quoting Atkinson (2009) p 19. In the chapter titled Comets, Colophons and Curtius Rufus we argue that Curtius most likely published in the term of Nero; this preceded, or marked the very beginnings of the Second Sophistic when Greek writing and culture once again became popular.

227.Quoting Longinus On Sublimity 22.1 (full extract in Gray (1987) pp 470-471) and Diodorus 1.2.

228.In an analogy of his method Plutarch 1.3 explained he relied mostly on the face, the expression and the eyes and paid less attention to the other parts of the body. Quoting Tarn (1948) p 296 for ‘best to worst’. Plutarch Demetrius 1.1 for the quote on senses.

229.The various themes of letters to and from Alexander discussed in Pearson (1955) p 449.

231.In Plutarch Alexander he referred to personal letters of Alexander at 7.6, 8.1, 17.8, 19.5-8, 20.9, 22.2, 22.5, 27.8, 39.4, 39.7, 39.13, 42.1, 46.3, 47.3, 55.6, 55.7, 60.1, 60.11. No other historian seems to have had access to them and how genuine they were remains open to speculation. Plutarch Demosthenes 2.1.1-4 for his limited library.

232.See discussion on the unraveling of Plutarch sources in Hammond (1993) pp 1-2 citing Powell (1939) pp 229-240 and Tarn (1948) p 296.

233.Following Whitmarsh (2002) for ‘virtual history’ and noting the diptych comparisons.

234.Plutarch Moralia 404d or De Pythiae Oraculis 21, translated by Sir Thomas Browne, and Plutarch Coriolanus 75, cited in Clement The Stomata (Miscellanies) 5.88.4.

235.Plutarch 73-76. On reincarnation see Moralia, Consolation to his wife (Consolatio ad Uxorem), Loeb Classical Library edition, vol. VII, 1959, pp 575-605 and J Rualdus Life of Plutarch 1624. In a letter to his wife concering the death of their daughter, Plutarch firmly suggested his belief in reincarnation or at least the survival of the soul.

236.Arrian 7.18 and 7.23. Aristobulus is cited several times as author of the mysterious portents.

238.Compare his treatment of the meeting with the Amazon Queen and his account of Alexander’s pre-death portents.

239.Polybius books 10 and 11 for the detail on Hannibal and Scipio. ‘Cradle-to-grave’ quoting SR Asirvatham in Carney-Ogden (2010) p 201.

244.Arrian 4.11.9 and 5.4.5 for Cyrus’ death at the hands of the Scythians and Herodotus 1.204-216.

246.Aristotle was demonstrably bigoted. Thus a social code written when Hellenes were learning to smelt iron would have undermined his own sense of superiority. Aristotle’s proposal that Hellenes were born to rule over all other nations gave a moral underpinning to Alexander’s invasion of the Persian Empire.

248.Arrian 1.12.2-3 for a digression on the relative fame of Alexander and (in his opinion) lesser men that Rome favoured.

249.Discussion of Plutarch’s relegation of Philip by SR Asirvatham in Carney-Ogden (2010) pp 202-204.

250.Quoting Atkinson from Hammond-Atkinson (2013) Introduction p xxxvi for ‘public intellectual’. See Hamilton (1971) Introduction: Plutarch had been granted Roman citizenship with possibly an honorary Roman consulship and was also a Greek magistrate and archon in his municipality; also AH Clough Plutarch’s Lives, Liberty Library of Constitutional Classics, 1864, Introduction. For Polybius see the Introduction to The Rise of the Roman Empire, Penguin Classics edition, 1979, pp 13-15 for his career in Achaean federal office and in Rome.

251.Quoting Arrian 7.30.3. As an example Arrian 4.28.2-3 and 5.1 and 5.3 for his doubt surrounding the legends of Heracles and Dionysus and India, and his doubt on the claimed geography of the Caucasus. Following SR Asirvatham in Carney-Ogden (2010) p 203 for the comparison of Arrian to Homer; Arrian 1.12.2 for his understanding of Alexander’s self-comparison.

252.Arrian opened with a polemic against previous works, asking the reader to compare them against his own. See the introduction by Hamilton to the Penguin Books edition, 1971, p 9 for references to the style used in the Indike and Pearson (1960) p 112.

254.See Bosworth (1976) p 118 for discussion of Dio Chrysostom’s earlier book.

255.Following Hammond-Atkinson (2013) Introduction p xv. For the Hyphasis River episode see chapter titled The Rebirth of the Wrath of Peleus’ Son.

256.The Athenian general, Iphicrates, son of a shoemaker, is said to have started a trend in military leather sandals known as iphikratids; he and Xenophon were contemporaries; Diodorus 15.44.4. Photius epitome 58.4 for the ‘young Xenophon’.

258.Arrian Preface 2 for his accepting that ‘as a king he would have been honour-bound to avoid untruth’.

259.Arrian 3.8.6 stated the total Persian numbers at Gaugamela as 40,000 cavalry with one million infantry whilst Curtius stated 200,000 infantry. Also Arrian 3.15.6 for Persian troop losses of 300,000, again far higher than Curtius at 40,000 and Diodorus at 90,000. For the one hundred men lost on the Macedonian side, Arrian 3.15.6.

261.Bosworth-Baynham (2000) Introduction p 4 for the quote. Tacitus had worked his way through to military tribute, questor, praetor and proconsul of Asia, serving with legions under Domitian, Nerva and Trajan; Pernot (2000) pp 128-129 for Tacitus’ oratorical career.

263.Pliny’s Preface to his Natural History included a Livian quote nowhere found in Livy’s extant texts and must have come from a later work which read ‘I have now obtained a sufficient reputation, so that I might put an end to my work, did not my restless mind require to be supported by employment.’

264.Ovid Metamorphoses Epilogue 875 ff. Polybius 31.22-25 is essentially an encomium to the Scipios in which Polybius stressed his own importance in his friendship and advice.

266.For Arrian’s deliberate omissions of the darker episodes see Baynham (1995) p 70. Quoting McInerney (2007) p 429.

268.See discussion of Arrian’s politics in the introduction by Hamilton (1971) Introduction.

270.Arrian 3.18.11-12. Arrian 7.29.4 for his acceptance of the reason, following Aristobulus, of Alexander’s drinking.

272.Arrian 1.12.1-3 for references to Homer and Xenophon. Arrian’s use of the title Xenophon in his own name discussed in the 1958 Penguin edition of The Campaigns of Alexander, introduction p 1; refuted by Stadter (1967) p 155 ff who argued it was a genuine part of Arrian’s name.

276.Preface to the Discourses of Epictetus by Arrian headed Arrian to Lucius Gellius, with wishes for his happiness, translation by George Long from the 1890 edition published by George Bell and Sons. Arrian expressed (somewhat confusingly) his efforts with: ‘I neither wrote these Discourses of Epictetus in the way in which a man might write such things; nor did I make them public myself, inasmuch as I declare that I did not even write them. But whatever I heard him say, the same I attempted to write down in his own words as nearly as possible, for the purpose of preserving them as memorials to myself afterwards of the thoughts and the freedom of speech of Epictetus.’ Only four of the eight books are extant.

277.Arrian’s stoic interpretations of kinship following Pearson (1960) Introduction p 7. The original title of the Discourses is unknown; it has been variously named the Diatribai and Dialexis amongst others.

284.Billows (1990) p 333. Following Flower (1994) Introduction p 2 for Athenaeus’ preservation of Theopompus; we have eighty-three verbatim quotations (598 lines of text) with 412 lines in Athenaeus. Flower (1994) p 156 for Photius paraphrasing Theopompus who claimed the ‘first place in rhetorical education.’

285.Nietzsche, from an unpublished manuscript on Diogenes Laertius and his sources, a contribution of the history of ancient literary studies; quoted by Glenn W Most, Speech at the Israel Society for the Promotion of Classical Studies 42^nd Annual Conference.

286.Quoting the comment of JR Lowell, 1867, see Loeb Classical Library edition, 1937, Prefatory Note p vii.