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    Alexander the Great
    Alexander the Great
    Alexander the Great
    Ebook80 pages1 hour

    Alexander the Great

    By E E Rice

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    Of all those who have set out to conquer the world, Alexander the Great came closest to finishing the job. The son of King Philip II of Macedonia, from an early age he was taught that he was a descendant of Achilles and Hercules and was conditioned for conquest and kingly glory. Alexander was educated by the philosopher Aristotle and first led troops when he was just eighteen. In 336 BC, King Philip was killed and Alexander ascended to the throne of Macedonia. Over the next twelve years Alexander conquered almost the entire known world of his era, irrevocably changing the course of history. In doing so he defeated the Thebans, the Persian Satraps, overthrew Darius, overran Syria and Phoenicia, possessed himself of all the cities along the Mediterranean, conquered Egypt and founded Alexandria.He died suddenly at age 33, in Babylon, after a bout of heavy drinking; some suggest he was poisoned, though no cause of death has ever been proved.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherThe History Press
    Release dateAug 26, 2011
    ISBN9780752468389
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      Book preview

      Alexander the Great - E E Rice

      INTRODUCTION

      AND SOURCES

      It is a daunting task to write a biography of Alexander the Great. In the first place there is much that is not known about one of the most famous figures in history. In the second place, the heavily documented scholarly bibliography which already exists – due in part to the endless speculation caused by our lack of information – is huge and constantly growing. In this Pocket Biography I have therefore attempted to present a short account of Alexander’s life based on a synthesis of academic material known to me, which is aimed at the intelligent general reader interested in the facts and problems which I and other ancient historians think are important to the understanding of this enigmatic figure. Of necessity I have had to be ruthlessly selective within the confines of this series and would never claim that this book is comprehensive or intended to be so. It is emphatically not a documented account of Alexander’s military campaigns. I hope none the less that this volume may go some way to dispel various myths commonly held about Alexander by those who have not had the opportunity to delve behind the many strictly ‘popular’ writings about him which exist.

      The Sources

      That we know anything at all about Alexander is primarily due to the ancient literary sources which discuss him. Many university students in my experience would gladly pass over a section on ‘source criticism’, the analytical study of historical sources to determine the worth of what any of them say. However, this is an essential part of the study of history, and the study of Alexander poses a major source problem. Many, many histories of Alexander were written in antiquity (he was a source of fascination to the ancients as well as to moderns), but most are known only by title or in fragments because of the circumstances of historical survival. These included eyewitness accounts by men who had accompanied Alexander’s expedition (the so-called ‘primary sources’), who were at least in a position to tell the truth about the parts of the campaigns they knew about in so far as they understood it, although bias or even malice might have crept in. A notable example was Callisthenes of Olynthus (a Greek city in Chalkidiki in Macedonia), a relative of the philosopher Aristotle, who accompanied Alexander’s expedition as its official historian. It is often said that ‘he was the Homer to Alexander’s Achilles’ (a reference to the epic poem the Iliad which celebrated the Trojan War and the Greek hero Achilles, by a poet traditionally known as Homer). There were also later writers who both made use of these eyewitness accounts and drew upon the wealth of popular stories which quickly grew up about Alexander.

      The most reliable of the latter group (so-called ‘secondary sources’) form the basis of all modern histories of Alexander the Great. The best known of these writers is Lucius Flavius Arrianus, ‘Arrian’ in anglicised form, who was a Greek from the Roman province of Bithynia (an area of modern Turkey near the south-west corner of the Black Sea). Arrian was a prolific historical writer with a busy and successful political career in the Roman civil service. Although his exact dates continue to be debated, he lived in the last decade or so of the first century AD throughout the first decades or more of the second century; that is, more than four hundred years after Alexander’s death, and therefore without any personal knowledge of his subject. His six-book history of Alexander is known in Greek as the Anabasis (literally ‘an expedition up into a country’), and provides a coherent, chronological, and largely convincing description of Alexander’s campaigns. Arrian states that he based his history on two main eyewitness accounts available to him: that of Ptolemy, Alexander’s boyhood friend in Macedonia and later a general (subequently to become King Ptolemy I of Egypt), and that of a man named Aristoboulos, usually considered a civil engineer of some kind. We do not know why Arrian chose these sources nor how good they were. Since other Alexander historians do not use them, we have no independent evidence for their worth or otherwise. He also includes various ‘stories’ or ‘tales’ (as he calls them) about Alexander, the origin of which remains obscure. Much of the difficulty in interpreting Arrian arises from this lack of knowledge about his sources. Arrian has been criticised in many areas, but despite the problems of his sources and his late date, his Anabasis appears to be our best history of Alexander. Arrian also wrote a separate work called the Indika (‘Indian Matters’) which described the journey of part of Alexander’s army down the Indus river and along the Persian Gulf in 325–4 BC. This was based on the account of Alexander’s admiral Nearchus who headed the expedition.

      The second important secondary source for Alexander is Diodorus Siculus (‘Siculus’ is the Latin adjective meaning ‘Sicilian’). Diodorus wrote during the first century BC a work translated from the Greek as the Historical Library. This was a chronological history of the world from mythological times until his own day. Necessarily generalised and brief, this type of historical writing enjoyed considerable popularity in Roman times, in the same way as encyclopaedias can be used today instead of detailed books on individual topics. Book XVII of this work contains a history of Alexander the Great. Living so much later and facing a task of enormous scope, Diodorus was clearly dependent on earlier sources for his material, but in Book XVII he does not identify them (or it). This question has occasioned considerable debate and the answer may never be known for certain, but most scholars, using a combination of complex arguments, consider as his

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