Roman Empire (Hadrianic), 2nd century CE

The Anabasis of Alexander

Name: The Anabasis of Alexander
Author: Arrian

Arrian's history of Alexander's campaigns — the best and most reliable surviving account, written in the second century CE on the lost memoirs of Alexander's own officers Ptolemy and Aristobulus, and the foundation of the sober historical Alexander.

By Arrian · c. 130–150 CE (events of 336–323 BCE)

What it is

The Anabasis of Alexander (sometimes Englished as The Campaigns of Alexander) is Arrian's seven-book history of Alexander the Great's conquests, written in the second century CE — some four and a half centuries after the events. The platform reads it as the single best and most reliable surviving account of Alexander, and the foundation of the sober, historical Alexander as against the legendary one of the romance tradition. The title deliberately echoes Xenophon's Anabasis, the other great Greek narrative of a march into the Persian interior, which Arrian consciously took as his model.

Its sources and method

The platform reads the work's authority as resting on Arrian's choice of sources. He built his narrative chiefly on the lost memoirs of two of Alexander's own officers — Ptolemy, who became king of Egypt, and Aristobulus — reasoning that men who had served with Alexander and written after his death, when flattery no longer paid, were the most trustworthy witnesses. Where they agreed, Arrian followed them; where they differed, he said so; the sensational and the incredible he set aside or flagged. The platform reads this under historical method: a Roman-era Greek applying critical judgement to recover the historical Alexander from a mass of legend.

Its argument and character

The platform reads the Anabasis as a study of generalship and command as much as a chronicle of conquest. Arrian, himself a Roman governor and general who had commanded troops on the Danube and against nomad cavalry, writes with a soldier's eye for the campaigns — the battles of Granicus, Issus and Gaugamela, the sieges, the marches, the logistics of conquering an empire. He admires Alexander while recording his faults (the murder of Cleitus, the destruction at Persepolis, the growing autocracy), and the platform reads the result as the most balanced ancient portrait of the conqueror, read under military command.

Why the platform carries it

The Anabasis of Alexander is the platform's primary text for the Alexander and Hellenistic cluster and the indispensable source for the historical Alexander. The platform reads it for what it preserves of Alexander's own officers' testimony and for Arrian's exemplary source-criticism, and develops both in Arrian and the Alexander tradition. It is the companion, and the corrective, to Plutarch's more moralising Life of Alexander.

Related reading

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Arrian
The Greek historian, philosopher and Roman governor of the second century CE whose Anabasis is the best surviving history of Alexander — and who preserved the teaching of the Stoic Epictetus for posterity. A bridge between Greek learning and Roman power.
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Alexander the Great
The Macedonian king whose thirteen-year conquest of the Achaemenid world remade the political and cultural map of the eastern Mediterranean and Iran — and whose afterlife in the European tradition has not stopped being read as the working case of unprecedented personal power.
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Ptolemy I Soter
Alexander's general who seized Egypt and founded the longest-lived of the Successor dynasties — the pragmatic state-builder who made Alexandria the capital of Hellenistic culture and ruled as both Macedonian king and Egyptian pharaoh.
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Hellenistic World
Three centuries of Greek-speaking imperial monarchies that followed Alexander's conquest of the Achaemenid Persian world — the political and cultural substrate the Roman world would inherit and the Christian east would eventually grow out of.
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Macedon
The territorial kingdom on the northern edge of the Greek world that Philip II forged into the dominant military power of its age and Alexander used to conquer the Persian Empire — the state that ended the era of the free city and opened the Hellenistic age.
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The decisive edge that new weapons, formations and methods of war confer — the Macedonian phalanx and combined-arms army that Philip forged and Alexander wielded, and the long contest of military adaptation it set in motion.
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Arrian and the Alexander tradition
An interpretive reading of how the historical Alexander reaches us through Arrian — his source-criticism, his reliance on the eyewitness memoirs of Ptolemy and Aristobulus, and the wider problem of the Alexander tradition.
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The Seleucid Empire
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Conquest and Integration
The difference between taking territory and holding it — the problem of binding conquered peoples into a lasting order, which Alexander began to address through fusion and his successors solved, where they did, by accommodation.
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The act of forging a multi-ethnic dominion by conquest and consolidation — the problem Alexander posed and his successors inherited, of how to turn a sweep of victories into a governable, durable state.
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Hellenization
The spread of Greek language, cities, art and ideas across the Near East and Egypt in Alexander's wake — the cultural transformation that created the Hellenistic world and made Greek the common idiom of an empire of many peoples.
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Royal Legitimacy
How men who won kingdoms by the sword made themselves into rightful kings — the Hellenistic problem of manufacturing legitimacy through victory, descent, divine association and benefaction, when no traditional title to rule existed.
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Succession Crisis
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Alexander versus Caesar
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The Successor kingdoms
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