SOURCE: An introduction to The Campaigns of Alexander, by Arrian, translated by Aubrey de Sélincourt, rev. ed., Penguin Books, 1971, pp. 13-40.

[In the essay below, Hamilton offers an overview of Arrian's Anabasis Alexandri, discussing the way Arrian used his sources as well as the style and tone of the work.]

Arrian is remembered today only as the author of The Campaigns of Alexander and as the pupil of the philosopher Epictetus who preserved his master's teachings from oblivion. Yet he was a famous man in his own time. The Campaigns of Alexander was only one of a number of substantial historical works, while he held the chief magistracies at Rome and Athens and governed for a lengthy period an important frontier province of the Roman empire.

LIFE OF ARRIAN

Flavius Arrianus Xenophon, to give him his full name,¹ was a Greek, born at Nicomedia, the capital of the Roman province of Bithynia, probably a few years before a.d. 90.² His family was well-to-do, and Arrian himself tells us that he held the priesthood of Demeter and Kore in the city. Like other wealthy Greeks, Arrian's father had received the Roman citizenship, evidently from one of the Flavian emperors, most probably Vespasian. Hence Arrian became at birth a Roman citizen with the prospect, if he wished it and possessed the requisite ability, of a career in the imperial service.

Arrian's boyhood and youth were spent in his native city, where he presumably received the customary upperclass Greek education in literature and rhetoric. Then, like many other young Greeks of similar social standing who planned a career in the imperial service, Arrian decided to complete his education by studying philosophy. He went about the year 108 to Nicopolis in Epirus, where the Stoic philosopher Epictetus had founded a school after the general expulsion of philosophers from Rome by Domitian in a.d. 92/3.³ This remarkable man, a former slave, concerned himself mainly with ethics, and his teachings with their emphasis on the need for the individual to concern himself with his soul and their contempt for wealth and luxury had certain affinities with Christianity. Indeed, they have sometimes been thought, though wrongly, to have been influenced by the new religion. Like Socrates, Epictetus wrote nothing for publication, but fortunately he made such an impression on the young Arrian that he took down his master's words in shorthand and later published them in eight books of Discourses.⁴ Four of these still survive to give us a vivid portrait of a striking personality. Also extant is the Manual or Handbook (Encheiridion) in which, for the benefit of the general public, Arrian combined the essentials of Epictetus' teaching. In the Middle Ages it enjoyed great popularity as a guide of monastic life. It is clearly from Epictetus that Arrian derived the high moral standards by which he judges Alexander. Epictetus, too, warmly commends repentance after wrongdoing, an attitude which finds an echo in Arrian's praise for Alexander's conduct after the murder of Cleitus. Since Epictetus drew on his experience of life in Rome under Domitian to illustrate his teachings, it is possible that Arrian's comments on ‘the bane of monarchs’, the courtier, have their origin in the same source.

Of Arrian's career in the imperial service until he reached the consulship in 129 or 130 we know only that he served on the Danube frontier and possibly in Gaul and Numidia. Arrian's career may have been forwarded by the phil-hellenism of Hadrian, the ‘Greekling’ as he was nicknamed, who succeeded Trajan as emperor in a.d. 117. But his appointment, in the year following his consulship, to the governorship of Cappadocia, it is safe to say, recognised his military and administrative abilities; for there is no evidence that Hadrian allowed sentiment to imperil the security of the empire. At this time the large and important frontier province of Cappadocia extended northwards to the Black Sea and along its eastern coast from Trapezus as far as Dioscurias, and Arrian commanded two Roman legions and a large body of auxiliary troops, a rare, perhaps unexampled, command for a Greek at this period. It was an unsettled time ‘produced by Trajan's momentary conquests beyond the Euphrates, and by Hadrian's prompt return to a defensive policy.’⁵ In 134 the Alans from across the Caucasus threatened to invade Cappadocia and although they did not cross the frontier Arrian is recorded to have driven the invaders out of Armenia. The extant work of Arrian, The Formation against the Alans, describes the composition of his force, with its order of march and the tactics to be followed. Two other works dating from the period of his governorship are extant, the Circumnavigation of the Black Sea (Periplus Ponti Euxini) and a Tactical Manual, the latter dated precisely to 136/7 a.d. It is concerned only with cavalry tactics; for Arrian tells us he had already written a work on infantry tactics. The Circumnavigation is an account, based on the official report (in Latin) which he, as governor, submitted to the emperor, of a voyage from Trapezus to Dioscurias combined with two other passages to form an account of the whole Black Sea coast. This voyage took place at the beginning of his office—he mentions hearing of the death of king Cotys in 131/2 in the course of it—in order to inspect the defences of his area.

Arrian is attested as governor of Cappadocia in 137, but he retired or was recalled before the death of Hádrian in June 138. He seems not to have held any further office, for reasons we can only guess at, but to have taken up residence at Athens and to have devoted the remainder of his life to writing. He became an Athenian citizen and in 145/6 held the chief magistracy, the archonship. We last hear of him in 172/3 as a member of the Council, and in 180 the satirist Lucian refers to him in terms which reveal that he was already dead.

The writings of Arrian's Athenian period are numerous and varied. The order in which they were composed cannot be determined with certainty, but we may with confidence place early in his stay his biographies of Dion of Syracuse and Timoleon of Corinth, and possibly a life of Tilliborus, a notorious bandit who plagued Asia Minor. Of these no trace remains. In his writings he frequently refers in a spirit of rivalry to his namesake, the Athenian Xenophon, and a short work on hunting forms a supplement to the older writer's book on the same topic. By choosing the same title, On the Chase (Cynegeticus), Arrian stresses the connexion and challenges comparison. Indeed, he writes that he had from his youth onwards the same interests as the Athenian Xenophon—hunting, tactics, and philosophy. His major historical works came later. Apart from The Campaigns of Alexander (Anabasis Alexandri), whose title and division into seven books are clearly modelled on Xenophon's Anabasis, he wrote the still extant Indica, an account of the voyage of Alexander's fleet from India to the Persian Gulf (based on Nearchus' book) prefaced by a description of India and its people. Of his Events after Alexander in ten books we have virtually only the narrative of the first two years. The rest has perished—undoubtedly the greatest loss among the works of Arrian. We possess only fragments of his other works, a Parthian History dealing with Trajan's campaigns in seventeen books, and a History of Bithynia which traced the story of his native land from mythical times down to 74 b.c., when the last king, Nicomedes IV, bequeathed his kingdom to Rome.

THE CAMPAIGNS OF ALEXANDER

This book was intended to be Arrian's masterpiece, his lasting claim to fame. How important it was to him, his own words (I.12) make clear:

I need not declare my name—though it is by no means unheard of in the world; I need not specify my country and family, or any official position I may have held. Rather let me say this: that this book is, and has been since my youth, more precious than country and kin and public advancement—indeed, for me it is these things.

He had, he felt, a splendid subject, and a splendid opportunity. No one had had more written about him than Alexander, yet no one, poet or prose-writer, had done him justice. The real Alexander was hidden behind a mass of contradictory statements, while the works of earlier writers contained downright error. They could not even get right the location of the decisive battle against Darius; they did not know which men had saved Alexander's life in India. Not to speak of Achilles' good fortune in having Homer relate his exploits, lesser men, such as the Sicilian tyrants, had fared better than Alexander. Arrian's book was intended to end this state of affairs. Such is the importance of Alexander that he will not hesitate to challenge the great historians of Greece.

For this task Arrian possessed substantial advantages. We cannot say with any certainty when he began his book, but a date before the middle of the second century would seem highly unlikely. Arrian, therefore, was probably in his sixties; he had read widely in the Alexander-literature and was thoroughly familiar with the classical historians, Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon; he had written a considerable amount, although perhaps nothing as ambitious as this; he had at least some philosophical training and considerable military and administrative experience; finally, and not least important, he possessed, it is evident, a good deal of common sense.

But he faced formidable difficulties, difficulties he shared with the other extant writers on Alexander. Of these the earliest is the Sicilian Greek Diodorus, who almost exactly three hundred years after Alexander's death, devoted the 17th Book of his Universal History to his reign. The Latin writer Quintus Curtius wrote his History of Alexander in the first century a.d., while early in the next century the Greek biographer Plutarch wrote a Life of Alexander which provides a useful supplement to Arrian. The Philippic Histories of the Romanised Gaul Pompeius Trogus, who wrote a little earlier than Diodorus, is extant only in the wretched summary of Justin (3rd cent. a.d.).⁶ All these authors were faced with the problem of choosing from a multiplicity of conflicting sources. For Arrian does not exaggerate the mass of material that confronted the historian of Alexander. Much of this has perished almost without trace, but enough remains, in the shape of ‘fragments’ embedded in extant writers, to confirm his statement that many lies were told about Alexander and many contradictory versions of his actions existed.

Many of those who accompanied Alexander wrote of the expedition and its leader from their particular standpoint.⁷ Callisthenes, Aristotle's nephew, acting as Alexander's ‘press-agent’ composed for Greek consumption—for Alexander's allies were by no means enthusiastic—an account of the expedition in which the king, who surely ‘vetted’ Callisthenes' narrative, bore a distinct resemblance to the ‘heroes’ of legend. This official version was necessarily broken off when its author was arrested, and later executed, on suspicion of treason. The last event certainly dealt with was the battle of Gaugamela. Chares, the royal chamberlain, wrote a book of anecdotes, valuable when he is dealing with events at court, otherwise useless, while Onesicritus, Alexander's chief pilot, who had been a pupil of Diogenes, created a dangerous blend of truth and falsehood with a Cynic flavour. For him Alexander was the ‘philosopher in arms’, a man with a mission. Nearchus, who commanded Alexander's fleet on its voyage from India to the Persian Gulf, followed with a more sober account, beginning, unfortunately, only with the start of his voyage. Lastly, to mention only the most important of the contemporary accounts, we have the histories of Ptolemy, who after Alexander's death became ruler and later king of Egypt, and of Aristobulus, apparently an engineer or architect. With these I shall deal later. But the history of Alexander which enjoyed the greatest popularity in succeeding centuries—Caelius, the friend of Cicero, read it—was written by a man who was not a member of the expedition, Cleitarchus, who wrote at Alexandria at the end of the fourth century, or perhaps even later. He portrayed Alexander as ‘heroic’, as Callisthenes had done, and (somewhat incongruously) as the possessor of the typical virtues of a Hellenistic king. But the main attraction of his book was almost certainly the vivid descriptions and the sensational incidents it contained—the Greek courtesan Thais leading Alexander, the worse for drink, in a Bacchic revel to set fire to the palace at Persepolis, Alexander's wholesale adoption of Persian luxury and practices, including a harem of 365 concubines, the week-long revel in Carmania, the poisoning of Alexander—to mention but a few.

All or much of this Arrian will have read. He will doubtless have been familiar, too, with the criticisms of the philosophical schools, particularly the Stoics, and the rhetoricians.⁸ These found a congenial theme in Alexander's drunkenness, his conceit, his lack of self-control erupting into murderous violence, and his divine aspirations.

Faced with this mass of evidence Arrian decided, very sensibly, to use the histories of Ptolemy and Aristobulus as the basis of his narrative. Where their versions tallied, he tells us, he accepted their consensus as true. Where they differed, he sometimes gives both versions; more often, one suspects, he followed Ptolemy. Certainly for military matters Ptolemy is his principal source. His reasons for his choice, admittedly, do not inspire confidence. Since Alexander was dead when they wrote, neither, he claims, had anything to gain by not telling the truth, while it would be disgraceful for a king, as Ptolemy was when he wrote, to tell lies. It is not difficult to think of reasons why Aristobulus and, especially, Ptolemy might not care to tell the truth, at least the whole truth. But it would seem reasonable to suppose that Arrian had come to the conclusion, after long study of the available material, that these authors provided the most honest and most reliable accounts of Alexander. To supplement their works Arrian includes the ‘stories’ of other writers, such as Callisthenes and Chares, where these appeared ‘worth relating and reasonably reliable’.

So far as we can judge, Arrian's choice of Ptolemy as his main source was fully justified, particularly as he concerned himself largely with military matters. For Ptolemy was an experienced soldier who had taken a part, although not at first a prominent one, in many of the operations he describes. His accounts of Alexander's major battles, as we see them through Arrian's eyes, are by no means free from problems, perhaps because of the difficulty a participant has in obtaining an overall view of the fighting. We should remember too that Ptolemy was not promoted to ‘the Staff’ until late in 330. The other military operations, particularly those in which Ptolemy took part, are reported with admirable clarity, although Ptolemy's tendency to exaggerate his personal contribution seems well established.⁹ This is understandable, and unimportant. Less excusable is the apparently systematic denigration of Perdiccas, his bitter enemy in the struggle for power after Alexander's death.¹⁰ The main fault of his book, it seems, lies elsewhere, in his reticence about some of the more controversial, and perhaps discreditable, episodes in Alexander's career. Arrian does not cite him as a source for his narrative of the murder of Cleitus, although it is difficult to believe that Ptolemy did not mention the tragedy, while neither he nor Aristobulus is the basis of Arrian's account of Alexander's attempt to introduce the ceremony of prostration (proskynesis). It would seem that Ptolemy said no more than he had to about these incidents. The same is probably true of the ‘plot’ of Philotas and the conspiracy of the Pages, although he asserted the guilt of Philotas and Callisthenes.

Aristobulus' book provided a useful supplement to Ptolemy, since he was, it seems, more interested in geography and natural history. Most of the geographical and topographical detail in the Campaigns comes from Aristobulus and it was he who described Alexander's measures to improve the canal system of Babylonia and the navigation of the River Tigris. Aristobulus was ordered by the king to restore the tomb of Cyrus near Pasargadae which had been plundered by robbers, and it is to him that we are indebted for the description of the tomb before and after it was robbed, a description that modern archaeology has confirmed. It is probable that the vivid narrative of the march through the Gedrosian desert with its valuable botanical observations comes from the same source. It is Aristobulus too who related the exploration of the coasts of Arabia and the plans which Alexander had made for its conquest. One of Alexander's motives for the expedition, Aristobulus tells us—we learn this from Strabo, for Arrian does not mention the name of his source—was the expectation that the Arabians would recognize him as a god.

But it is on the personal side that Aristobulus' account is open to question. Whereas Ptolemy had been content to pass over the less pleasant aspects of Alexander's character, Aristobulus' book seems to have had a distinctly ‘apologetic’ character which earned him in antiquity the soubriquet of ‘flatterer’ (kolax). He justifiably stressed the generosity of the king towards the captured Persian royal family, and put forward the tenable view that Cleitus asked for trouble, but although he asserted the guilt of Philotas and Callisthenes he was apparently as reticent as Ptolemy about the reasons for his judgement. Then his statement that the king was not a heavy drinker, but remained long at banquets only for the sake of the conversation, must provoke a smile. The murder of Cleitus alone disproves it. In fact, it represents an excessive reaction from the quite indefensible view that Alexander was habitually drunk. Many writers depicted the king towards the end of his life as a prey to superstitious fear. According to them Alexander, on the advice of his seers, put to death the sailor who had worn the royal diadem and the man who had sat upon the royal throne. Aristobulus, however, stated that the sailor was merely flogged and then let go and that the second man was tortured to reveal his motive, implying, it would seem, that he suffered nothing worse. But, as the man was a scapegoat, this seems doubtful. On the other hand, Aristobulus relates that he learned from the seer Peithagoras himself that Alexander had treated him with great favour because he had told the king the truth, namely that his sacrifices had disclosed impending disaster for him.

Arrian brought to his task patience, common sense, and a shrewd knowledge of human affairs, as well as considerable military and administrative experience. In military matters his adherence to Ptolemy produced good results. Here he followed a first-rate source well up in the inner circle of the Macedonians, whom he seems almost always to have understood. We might be tempted to depreciate Arrian by saying that he did little more than summarize Ptolemy's narrative. To do so would be unfair. We have only to compare his account of Issus or of Gaugamela with that of Quintus Curtius, who certainly had access to Ptolemy's book at first or second hand, to see his achievement. This is not to say that his account of military operations is everywhere satisfactory or that he tells us all we would like to know about the Macedonian army. We do not know, for example, what the soldiers in the various units were paid, and, more important, we hear almost nothing of the logistics of the army. Again, at Gaugamela Arrian fails to explain how a messenger from Parmenio could reach Alexander after he had begun the pursuit of Darius. Only occasionally does he appear to misunderstand Ptolemy, for it is unlikely that the Macedonian supposed that Alexander, after crossing the Hydaspes, rode ahead with his cavalry in the expectation that he could defeat Porus' entire army with it alone. On the other hand he offers sensible criticism of Aristobulus' statement that Porus' son was sent with only 60 chariots to oppose Alexander's crossing of the R. Hydaspes, and rightly commends Alexander for refusing to risk attacking the Persians by night at Gaugamela, as Parmenio advised. Moreover, Arrian nearly always uses technical terms correctly, an immense help to the student of military history, and takes care to name the commanders of the various units. His use of taxis (‘unit’) as a utility word and of ‘Companions’ (Hetairoi) to refer either to the Companion cavalry or to Alexander's ‘Peers’ does give rise to difficulties, but for this Arrian can hardly be held responsible. The same painstaking attention to detail is evident in administrative matters. Appointments of governors are duly mentioned, and throughout his book Arrian is careful to give the father's name in the case of Macedonians, e.g. Ptolemy son of Lagus, and in the case of Greeks their city of origin. One can imagine the confusion that would have resulted had he not done so, in view of the shortage of Macedonian proper names and the resultant abundance of Ptolemys and Philips.

We must regret, however, that Arrian has interpreted his subject in a somewhat narrow fashion, perhaps because his model, Xenophon, had concentrated on his expedition. Unlike Polybius, he does not discuss why Alexander invaded Asia—he might, however, have said that this was a matter for the historian of Philip and that Alexander never thought of not continuing an operation already begun—nor does he mention previous operations in Asia or the existence of a Macedonian force in Asia in 334. His account of the events of 336, which determined Alexander's relations with the Greek states, formally at least, are dealt with so summarily as to be barely intelligible. Consequently the reader, I suspect, is in the dark when, without having heard of the League of Corinth, he is told of ‘the resolutions of the Greeks’. In fact, Alexander's relations with the Greek states and events in Greece during the expedition are almost entirely neglected. This is to some extent understandable and justifiable, although Persian hopes of transferring the war to Greece in 333 are not fully intelligible without the background of Greek discontent. Indeed, Arrian's preoccupation with Alexander leads him to treat this important, though admittedly abortive, episode in the war very sketchily. Again, the reader must be curious, one would think, to learn what happened to King Agis of Sparta who vanishes from the pages of Arrian after receiving 30 talents and 10 ships from the Persians, even if we regard the Spartan revolt in 331, as Alexander is said to have regarded it, as ‘an affair of mice’.

Arrian clearly made no attempt to give a comprehensive account of the war, or of its antecedents. We hear only incidentally of the troubles in the Persian empire that preceded Darius' accession in 336, and every reader must have asked himself the question: ‘Why did the Persians allow Alexander's forces to cross into Asia unopposed?’ Even after the start of the expedition we hear what the Persians have been planning and doing only when they come into contact with Alexander. It is only on the eve of Issus in November 333 that we are told of Darius' plans in the preceding months. Arrian deliberately chose to disregard the Persian background, as Professor Brunt has proved.¹¹ He was not ignorant of Persian matters; but his method ‘was to follow the movements and describe the activities of Alexander himself’.

Arrian's portrait of Alexander is in general more open to criticism than his narrative of military operations, partly through his reliance on Ptolemy and Aristobulus. Yet Arrian's portrait is more than the sum of his sources; for he possesses a distinct personality of his own which we can detect most clearly in his attitude to religion and morals. Many of the characteristics of his Alexander are undeniably true. We can see clearly the qualities which enabled Alexander to maintain for so many years his hold upon his men, the dashing leadership which was expected of a general in his day—although Arrian does not conceal the fact that his officers thought that the king sometimes went too far in hazarding his life—the confidence (seldom disappointed) of success, with which he inspired his troops, and his care for their welfare. We remember how after the victory at the Granicus Alexander ‘showed much concern about the wounded, visiting each, examining their wounds, asking how they were received, and encouraging each to relate, and even boast of, his exploits’. We recall his determination and persistence in many sieges, notably in the face of the desperate resistance by the Tyrians for seven long months, and his courage in adversity, exemplified by his ‘noblest deed’, the refusal to drink the helmetful of water, too little for his troops to share, in the burning heat of the Gedrosian desert—a proof, as Arrian remarks, of his endurance and his generalship. Arrian, too, rightly praises his generous treatment of the defeated Indian rajah Porus—although this was not altogether disinterested—and his compassion for the captured Persian royal family. There are many instances of Alexander's affection for his friends, particularly his alter ego Hephaestion, and his trust in them is portrayed in the celebrated scene with his doctor Philip, while Arrian warmly commends his repentance after his murder of Cleitus.

It is when Arrian's imagination is kindled by incidents such as these that he raises the pitch of his narrative and achieves eloquence. For the most part he is content to let the story speak for itself. Certainly he deliberately avoided sensationalism and he explicitly denied the truth of such favourite stories as the visit of the Amazon queen or the week-long revel through Carmania. Perhaps no passage better illustrates Arrian's admiration for his hero and the heightened tone of his narrative than that in which he describes the king's return to his army after his recovery from the wound which so nearly caused his death. I quote the end of the passage:

Near his tent he dismounted, and the men saw him walk; they crowded round him, touching his hands, his knees, his clothing; some, content with a sight of him standing near, turned away with a blessing on their lips. Wreaths were flung upon him and such flowers as were then in bloom.

But Arrian's evident admiration for Alexander and his achievements did not prevent him from criticizing his hero where he failed to reach the high standard which, as a Stoic, Arrian felt a king ought to attain. In particular, Alexander is censured several times for his excessive ambition. Arrian does not know, and commendably will not speculate about, Alexander's future plans, but he is convinced that he would never have rested content with his conquests. The Indian wise men are expressly commended for their view that ‘each man possesses just so much of the earth as he stands on’, and Alexander, despite his applause of this sentiment, is said to have acted always in a way completely opposed to it. It is clear that for Arrian Alexander's conquests are merely an expression of Alexander's insatiable appetite for fame. There is some truth in this, but it is not the whole story. It is, however, entirely to Arrian's credit that he wholeheartedly condemns Alexander's letter to Cleomenes, the governor of Egypt (7.23.6-7), in which the king offers to pardon him for his past misdeeds and to give him a free hand in the future if he erects temples in Egypt for the dead Hephaestion. The historian's understanding and humanity is apparent in his attitude to the murderer of Cleitus. Alexander's act excites in him pity for the man who has given way to two grave vices, passion and drunkenness. The king has failed to achieve that self-mastery which, as Arrian has remarked a little earlier, is necessary before one can be happy. A similar sentiment occurs in the speech of Coenus at the River Hyphasis when he says to Alexander ‘when things go well with us, the spirit of self-restraint is a noble thing’—surely Arrian's own view, whether or not it was shared by Coenus.

The main weaknesses in Arrian's portrait of Alexander seem to me two-fold—a tendency, which he derives from his sources, to gloss over the less attractive side of the king's character, and a failure to appreciate Alexander's intentions, especially with regard to the Persians.

The first of these is apparent before the expedition gets under way. The slaughter of the Thebans, perhaps rightly, and the destruction of the city and the enslavement of the survivors is blamed on the Greek allies of Alexander. Nothing is said of his responsibility for permitting them, as in fact he did, to pass this sentence. Yet even Plutarch, whom no one could accuse of hostility to Alexander, implicitly holds him responsible; as he saw, Alexander's intention was to terrify the other Greek states into submission. At the battle of the Granicus Arrian relates without comment the massacre of the Greek mercenaries, nearly 18,000 according to his own account; he does not remark on the cruelty or the inadvisability of the massacre. In the same way at Massaga in India the massacre of 7,000 Indians passes without comment. Nor should we guess from Arrian that some writers had doubts about the involvement of Philotas in a plot against the king. He is content to accept Ptolemy's statement, although the ‘manifest proofs’ of his guilt adduced by him do not amount to much. Again, the burning of the palace at Persepolis is very briefly referred to with no mention of the alternative tradition that it was set on fire during a drunken revel. On the other hand, Arrian gives a much more balanced account of the murder of Cleitus than Aristobulus seems to have done, and he is obviously reluctant to accept the statements of Ptolemy and Aristobulus that Callisthenes was involved in the conspiracy of the Pages.

What the modern reader misses in Arrian's book is an appreciation of the larger issues. Alexander emerges as a great leader, a great conqueror possessed of boundless ambition, a man who reached the height of human prosperity and who, if he committed great crimes, had the magnanimity to repent of them. Certainly the conquest of the Persian Empire was his most lasting achievement, but what we want to know is whether he was more than the supreme conqueror. What plans did he have for his empire? What part did he intend the conquered peoples to play in it? Amid a great deal that is obscure about Alexander, one thing is certain, that he was very much in earnest about what modern writers have called his ‘policy of fusion’. The clearest expression of this policy is his prayer at Opis—a prayer that Arrian records without comment—that Macedonians and Persians might live in harmony and jointly rule the empire. This was a revolutionary idea, not shared by his Macedonians, nor, we can be sure, by many Greeks either. For the most distinguished of Alexander's many teachers, the eminent philosopher Aristotle, who inspired him with a love of Greek literature and particularly of Homer, is said by Plutarch to have written to Alexander advising the young king to behave towards the Greeks as a leader but towards the ‘barbarians’ as a master. This contemptuous attitude towards ‘barbarians’ was no doubt widespread. But Alexander, who may have felt doubts about it even before the expedition—Artabazus and other leading Persians lived as exiles at Philip's court when Alexander was a boy—soon came to reject it. After Gaugamela we find him appointing Persians as governors, certainly not through a lack of suitable Macedonians.

Arrian clearly shared Aristotle's prejudice against ‘barbarians’ and had no conception of Alexander's vision of a partnership between the two peoples. In the characterisation of Alexander at the end of his book he sees Alexander's adoption of Persian dress and his introduction of Persian troops into the Macedonian army as a mere ‘device’, designed to render him less alien to his Persian subjects. Indeed, Arrian has earlier (4.7) condemned his adoption of oriental dress as a ‘barbaric’ act not so different from his ‘barbaric’ punishment of the pretender Bessus. Both acts, in Arrian's view, indicate a deterioration of Alexander's character. Even in the case of Bessus Arrian does not see that the punishment was a Persian punishment inflicted on him by Alexander in his position as ‘Great King’. Elsewhere, he refers to Alexander ‘going some way towards “barbarian” extravagance’, and his comment on the king's marriage to Roxane, the Bactrian princess, is illuminating. ‘I approve’, he writes, ‘rather than blame’. This ‘policy of fusion’ with the adoption of Persian dress and Persian court ceremonial was bitterly resented by the Macedonians, as Arrian is well aware. Drink led Cleitus to give utterance to grievances which were deeply felt and widely shared, while the extent of the Pages' conspiracy leads one to think that their motives were not so much personal as political. Yet Arrian does not ask himself whether Alexander would have persisted in a policy so universally detested if it were nothing more than a ‘device’ to win Persian favour.

Plutarch, perhaps exaggerating, puts the number of cities founded by Alexander at seventy. In his Campaigns Arrian mentions fewer than a dozen foundations; not a cause for complaint, for he was not compiling a catalogue. But we are not told what Alexander's motives were, military or economic or, as some scholars believe, part of his mission to spread Greek culture throughout Asia. It is from the Indica that we learn that cities were established among the conquered Cossaeans to encourage them to forsake their nomadic habits and become a settled people.

Alexander took his religious duties very seriously indeed, as the account of his last days makes plain. Arrian frequently records that the king offered sacrifice or made drink-offerings, and the prophecies made by his seers, notably Aristander, are faithfully reported. Only once, before the siege of Tyre, is he provoked to sarcasm; ‘The plain fact’, he writes, ‘is that anyone could see that the siege of Tyre would be a great undertaking’. But Arrian's hostile or sceptical attitude to the ruler cult of his day—an attitude he shares with Plutarch and the historian Appian—prevents him from doing justice to Alexander's divine aspirations. That Alexander believed himself to be the son of Ammon-Zeus, as his ancestor Hercules was son of Zeus, is very probable, although admittedly not susceptible of proof. Arrian will have none of this. Alexander set out for Siwah ‘hoping to learn about himself more accurately, or at least to say that he had so learnt’. For him Alexander's claim was merely another ‘device’, to impress his subjects. He displays the same sceptical attitude towards Alexander's divinity. In 324 the Greek states, probably in response to a ‘request’ from the king himself, sent theoroi (envoys sent on sacred missions) to crown him with a golden crown at Babylon. That the envoys were theoroi admits of no doubt; the fact that they themselves wore crowns proves it. If Arrian writes that ‘they came as theoroi forsooth’, using a Greek particle implying disbelief or sarcasm, he is suggesting that Alexander, as a mortal, could never be a god. Gods were immortal, men were not, and ‘after all’, as Arrian drily comments, ‘Alexander's death was near’.

Arrian set out to produce the best and most reliable account of Alexander's expedition, avoiding the exaggerations of his predecessors and correcting their errors. That he succeeded few will dispute. The histories of Diodorus and Curtius and, particularly, the biography of Plutarch throw light (and sometimes darkness) on the character of Alexander and occasionally even on his military exploits, but Arrian's book is the basis of our knowledge. It impresses one as the work of an honest man who has made a serious and painstaking attempt to discover the truth about Alexander—a task perhaps impossible by his time—and who has judged with humanity the weaknesses of a man exposed to the temptations of those who exercise supreme power. We need not deny the limitations of the work, but it is proper to remember that Alexander's idea of an empire in whose rule conquering Macedonians and conquered Persians were to share perished with him. To spare the conquered was one thing, to associate them with one in government was another, an idea that was not to reach fulfilment until long after Alexander's death.

ALEXANDER'S ARMY¹²

In the spring of 334 Alexander set out from Macedonia, leaving Antipater with 12,000 infantry and 1,500 cavalry to defend the homeland and to keep watch on the Greek states. The size of the army with which he crossed the Hellespont has been variously reported, totals ranging from 30,000 to 43,000 for infantry and 4,000 to 5,500 for cavalry. But the detailed figures given by Diodorus (17.17), 32,000 infantry and 5,100 cavalry, agree essentially with the totals in Arrian (Ptolemy), and may be taken as substantially correct. The size and composition of the force holding the bridgehead at Abydos—there surely must have been some troops there in 334—is not known, but the likelihood is that it was small and consisted mainly of mercenary infantry.

The backbone of the infantry was the Macedonian heavy infantry, the ‘Foot Companions’, organized on a territorial basis in six battalions (taxeis) of about 1,500 men each. In place of the nine-foot spear carried by the Greek hoplite, the Macedonian infantryman was armed with a pike or sarissa about 13 or 14 feet long, which required both hands to wield it. The light circular shield was slung on the left shoulder, and was smaller than that carried by the Greek hoplite which demanded the use of the left arm. Both Greek and Macedonian infantry wore greaves and a helmet, but it is possible that the Macedonians did not wear a breastplate.¹³ The phalanx (a convenient term for the sum total of the Macedonian heavy infantry), like all the Macedonian troops, had been brought by Philip to a remarkable standard of training and discipline. Unlike the phalanx which the Romans encountered over a century later, Alexander's phalanx was capable of rapid movement and was highly manoeuvrable, as one can see from a reading of the first half-dozen chapters of Arrian's book.

In battle the right flank of the phalanx was guarded by the Hypaspists or ‘Guards’. These were an élite corps, consisting of a Royal battalion (agema) and two other battalions, each of approximately 1,000 men. Alexander used them frequently on rapid marches and other mobile operations, often in conjunction with cavalry and light-armed troops. This suggests, although it does not prove, that they were more lightly armed than the heavy infantry; but if they were less heavily armed, we do not know where the difference lay.

The member states of the Corinthian League contributed 7,000 heavy infantry, while 5,000 Greeks served as mercenaries. The remainder of Alexander's infantry consisted of 7,000 Thracian and Illyrian light troops armed with javelins and two bodies of archers from Crete and Macedonia respectively. The outstanding unit among the light troops was the Agrianians, 1,000 strong, who have been well compared in their relation to Macedon and in their quality to the Gurkhas of the Indian army. Alone of the allies they served throughout the campaign and Arrian mentions them almost fifty times. With the archers and the Guards they took part in all the reconnaisances and skirmishes as well as fighting superbly in the set pieces.

Pride of place among the cavalry was held by the Macedonian ‘Royal Companions’, originally 1,800 troopers divided into 8 squadrons or Ilai, all under the command of Parmenio's son, Philotas. Among them the Royal Squadron, consisting of perhaps 300 men, was Alexander's own bodyguard, which spearheaded the devastating cavalry charge in the major battles. Their position was on the immediate right of the Guards, who had the task of maintaining contact between the Companions and the phalanx. The counterpart of the Companions on the left of the phalanx was the Thessalian cavalry, also 1,800 strong at the start of the expedition. Under the general command of Parmenio, they had the difficult task at Issus and Gaugamela of holding much superior forces of Persian cavalry while Alexander delivered the decisive blow on the right. The Greek allies furnished 600 horsemen, and the remaining 900 were made up of Thracians, Paeonians, and ‘Scouts’ (Prodromoi) who were also called ‘Lancers’ (Sarissophoroi) since they were armed with the sarissa, presumably shorter than those carried by the infantry which required the use of both hands. Whether these light cavalry were Macedonians or Thracians is not clear; certainly they were distinct from ‘the Thracians’. Finally, although Diodorus does not mention mercenary cavalry in his list of forces, Alexander may have had some from the beginning. By Gaugamela at least he had perhaps 1,000 of these.¹⁴

Despite the need for garrisons in Asia Minor and Egypt, Alexander's army at Gaugamela numbered 40,000 infantry and 7,000 cavalry. The only substantial reinforcements of Macedonian and allied troops recorded by Arrian reached Gordium early in 333, and there is no good reason to suppose that Alexander received any worthwhile number of Macedonians or allies apart from these before Gaugamela. For Quintus Curtius, who after 331 records the arrival of many reinforcements not mentioned by Arrian, mentions reinforcements only of mercenaries in this period. Indeed, it is clear that the increase in the number of Alexander's troops was due principally to the recruitment of mercenaries from Greece and to the enlistment of mercenaries who had fought for Persia. Alexander had begun by treating the latter as traitors, but finding that this merely encouraged desperate resistance decided within a few months to change this unsuccessful policy. Many of the garrisons doubtless consisted in large part of mercenaries.

Soon after Gaugamela Alexander received strong reinforcements of Macedonian troops, no fewer than 6,000 infantry and 500 cavalry. This enabled him to create a seventh battalion of infantry, which was certainly operating early in 330.¹⁵ The other battalions must have remained over strength for some time. This is the last draft of Macedonians he is known to have received until he returned to the west after his Indian campaign, and there is no compelling reason to think that he received any others. In 330 the allied troops from the Greek states and from Thessaly were discharged at Ecbatana. Many, we are told, chose to re-enlist as mercenaries. Increasing use was made of Greek mercenaries, and the garrisons of the many cities founded by Alexander in the eastern satrapies consisted of them together with the native inhabitants and some unfit Macedonians. Presumably few of the 10,000 infantry and 3,500 cavalry left behind to protect Bactria in 327 were Macedonians.

After Gaugamela the pattern of warfare changed. In Bactria and Sogdiana Alexander found himself faced with a national resistance which, under the leadership of Bessus and then of Spitamenes, wisely avoided major conflicts and concentrated on widespread guerrilla activity. It was probably to cope with this altered mode of fighting that in 329 Alexander made an important change in the organization of his Companion cavalry. We no longer hear of eight squadrons (Ilai), but of (at least) eight regiments (Hipparchiai), each consisting of two, or perhaps more, squadrons. Some of these squadrons, it seems likely, now included or consisted of the excellent Persian cavalry.¹⁶ Certainly Alexander made use of Persian cavalry outside the Companions. As early as 330 we hear of a unit of Persian mounted javelin-men (3.24), and at the battle of the River Hydaspes in 326 he had in his army a body of Daae, mounted archers, as well as horsemen from Bactria, Sogdiana, Scythia, Arachotia, and the Parapamisus, or Hindu Kush, region.

At Massaga in India Alexander is said to have attempted to enlist Indian mercenaries in his army, but when they attempted to desert to have massacred them. No further recruitment of Indian mercenaries is recorded, and the only Indian troops that we hear of in his army are those provided by the rajahs Taxiles and Porus and the city of Nysa, some 11,000 in all. However, if Nearchus is correct in saying (Indica 19.5) that at the start of the voyage down the River Hydaspes Alexander had 120,000 fighting men with him (a figure given by Curtius (8.5.4) for the army at the start of the Indian campaign and by Plutarch (Alexander 66.4) for the (Infantry) force with which Alexander left India), Alexander must have had a great many Indian troops in his army. But their presence was only temporary, since there is no indication that any Indians returned to the west with him.

Among the grievances of the Macedonians in 324 Arrian (7.6.4) mentions the (recent) creation of a fifth cavalry regiment consisting, if we accept Professor Badian's emendation of Arrian's text,¹⁷ almost entirely of Iranians. This means that the division of the Companion cavalry into eight regiments had been abandoned and that for a brief period after the return from India there were only four. It is sometimes said that the change reflects the losses sustained in the march through the Gedrosian desert. This need not be the case. Hephaestion's command is described (7.14.10) as a ‘Chiliarchy’, a group of 1,000 men, and, although it is true that he was ‘Chiliarch’ or ‘Vizier’, it is not self-evident that the preservation of his name required that his unit be called ‘the chiliarchy of Hephaestion’ rather than ‘the regiment of Hephaestion’. It is probable, it seems to me, that the new regiments were (nominally) 1,000 strong. If this is so, the change will have been a change in organization, a consolidation of the cavalry into fewer and stronger units.

In 324 the 30,000 young Persians (the ‘Successors’), who had been undergoing training in Macedonian fashion for the last three years, joined Alexander at Susa. Later in the same year, after the mutiny at Opis, Alexander sent home those Macedonians who were unfit or past the age for service, about 10,000 infantry and perhaps 1,500 cavalry, probably the bulk of his Macedonian forces. In 323 strong reinforcements reached Babylon. Philoxenus brought an army from Caria and Menander one from Lycia, while Menidas came with the cavalry under his command. It is likely that, as Brunt suggests,¹⁸ these were fresh drafts from Macedon to replace the veterans now on their way home; Alexander had not drawn on the manpower of the homeland since 331 and it is not likely that he wished the Macedonian element in his army to be reduced to negligible proportions. In addition, Peucestas brought 20,000 Persian archers and slingers, as well as a considerable force of Cossaean and Tapurian troops, presumably infantry. Alexander now carried out his last reform. The Persians were integrated into Macedonian units in such a way that each platoon consisted of 4 Macedonian NCOs and 12 Persians, each armed in their national fashion.

For the future, then, or at least for the immediate future, the army in Asia was to consist predominantly of Iranian troops. The only indication of the size of the Macedonian component is given in a speech in Quintus Curtius purporting to have been delivered by Alexander but certainly the historian's own composition. There (10.2.8) the king mentions an army of 13,000 infantry and 2,000 cavalry, surely all Macedonians, excluding the garrisons already in being.

Notes

1. Philip A. Stadter (Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies 8, 1967, 155ff) has shown that Xenophon was not merely a nickname, but part of the historian's name.

2. Arrian was suffect consul in 129 or 130 a.d., and in his day it was usual for a man to hold the consulship at about the age of 42; see JRS 55 (1965), p. 142 n. 30.

3. We do not know why Arrian chose to study under Epictetus rather than, as we should have expected, at Athens. In an important article on Arrian's governorship in the English Historical Review 1896 (reprinted in his Essays, ed. F. Haverfield, Oxford, 1906), Professor H. F. Pelham has suggested that Arrian was probably influenced by the traditions of his mother's family, the ‘gens’ Arria, famous in the history of Roman Stoicism. He conjectures that the cognomen Arrianus indicates the family of the historian's mother, as cognomina often did in the first and second centuries a.d.

4. In a letter to a Lucius Gellius Arrian gives his reasons for publishing them. We now know that this Gellius was an eminent citizen of Corinth, L. Gellius Menander, who with his son, L. Gellius Iustus, set up an inscription in honour of Arrian at Corinth; see G. W. Bowersock in Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies 8 (1967), 279-80.

5. The quotation is taken from page 218 of Pelham's article mentioned in n. 3.

6. Diodorus' 17th Book is translated (with useful notes) by C. Bradford Welles in the Loeb Classical Library, Curtius by J. C. Rolfe in the same series, and Justin (with Cornelius Nepos and Eutropius) in Bohn's Library. Plutarch's Alexander has been frequently translated (usually with a number of other Lives), most recently by Ian Scott-Kilvert in The Age of Alexander (Penguin Books).

7. These authors are the subject of detailed study by Lionel Pearson, The Lost Histories of Alexander the Great (New York, 1960).

8. On these see my Plutarch Alexander: A Commentary (Oxford, 1969), lx-lxii.

9. See the convincing analysis by C. B. Welles, ‘The reliability of Ptolemy as an historian’, in Miscellanea … A. Rostagni (Turin 1963) 101ff. Curtius, who had the advantage of reading Ptolemy's book, presumably refers to this aspect of Ptolemy's writing when he describes him (9.5.21) as a man ‘who was certainly not inclined to depreciate his own glory’.

10. R. M. Errington, ‘Bias in Ptolemy's History of Alexander’, in CQ 1969, 233ff., gives several instances of misrepresentation by Ptolemy. He considers that Aristonous was deprived of the credit for helping to save Alexander's life, but he contests the usual view that Antigonus' hard-fought victories over the survivors of Issus were ignored by Ptolemy, because of his rivalry with Antigonus in the years following 314.

11. See his ‘Persian Accounts of Alexander's Campaigns’ in CQ 1962, 141ff. The quotation which follows is taken from p. 141.

12. For details of Alexander's troops see especially Major-General J. F. C. Fuller, The Generalship of Alexander the Great (London, 1958); E. W. Marsden, The Campaign of Gaugamela (Liverpool, 1964), Appendices I and II; A. R. Burn, ‘The Generalship of Alexander’, in Greece and Rome 1965, 140-54.

13. See G. T. Griffith, Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Association, 4 (1956/7), pp. 3ff.

14. P. A. Brunt, ‘Alexander's Macedonian Cavalry’, in JHS 83 (1963), 27-46 discusses the many problems concerning Alexander's cavalry.

15. As R. D. Milns has demonstrated in Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies 7 (1966), 159-166.

16. On the Hipparchies see Appendix A.

17. E. Badian in JHS 85 (1965), 161.

18. JHS 83 (1963), 39.

Abbreviations

AJP: American Journal of Philology.

CQ: Classical Quarterly.

Ehrenberg Studies: Ancient Society and Institutions. Studies presented to Victor Ehrenberg, edited by E. Badian (Oxford, 1966).

Fuller: Major-General J. F. C. Fuller, The Generalship of Alexander the Great (London, 1958).

JHS: Journal of Hellenic Studies.

Tarn, Alexander: Sir William Tarn, Alexander the Great, 2 Vols. (Cambridge, 1948).

Tod: M. N. Tod, A Selection of Greek Historical Inscriptions, vol. 2 (Oxford, 1948).

Wilcken, Alexander: Ulrich Wilcken, Alexander the Great, translated by G. C. Richards (London, 1932); reprinted with an introduction to Alexander studies, notes, and a bibliography by Eugene N. Borza (New York, 1967).