Arrian of Nicomedia
Lucius Flavius Arrianus -or Arrian, as he is usually called in the English language- was born in Nicomedia, one of the Greek towns in the Roman empire, in c.87 CE. He read philosophy in Nicopolis, where the famous philosopher Epictetus had a small school, which counted the future emperor Hadrian among its students. Arrian joined the army, was stationed in Bavaria, must have visited Germania, and took part in the Parthian war of the emperor Trajan (114-117).
When his friend Hadrian became emperor, Arrian was rewarded with a seat in the Senate. In the following years, he served as governor of Andalusia, became consul (129 or 130) and was governor of Cappadocia, where he fought a brief war against the Alans, a nomad tribe from Kazakhstan. Later, Arrian settled in Athens, where he died after 145.
In spite of his dazzling career in the Roman government, Arrian found time to write many books. A catalogue shows his philosophic, historical, topographic-ethnographic and military interests, which culminate in his books on Alexander
eight books containing the teachings of Epictetus (four books survive);
twelve books containing Epictetus' conversations (lost);
a Meteorology - the study skies were considered part of the usual philosophical curriculum (lost);
a History of Bithynia in eight books (lost; excerpt);
a work on the Alans (lost);
a History of the Parthian wars in seventeen books, of which ten were devoted to the war in which the author had taken part (lost; an excerpt survives);
a book on military tactics (the part on cavalry survives);
a military handbook on the best tactics in a war against the Alans - he advises to fight as Alexander had done;
biographies of Dion of Syracuse, Timoleon of Corinth and a bandit named Tilliboros (all lost);
a book on hunting;
a description of the Black Sea in twenty-five books;
the seven books of the Anabasis: the history of Alexander's march into Asia (excerpt);
the Indikê (one book), telling about the marvels of India and the voyage home of Alexander's admiral Nearchus;
the ten books Events after Alexander, known from a Byzantine summary.
The Anabasis (Journey Up-Country) is the most important source on the reign of Alexander. The reason is that Arrian ignored Cleitarchus' immensely popular History of Alexander and used other sources. In the prologue, Arrian explains why:
It seems to me that Ptolemy and Aristobulus are the most trustworthy writers on Alexander's conquests, because the latter shared Alexander's campaigns, and the former -Ptolemy- in addition to this advantage, was himself a king, and it is more disgraceful for a king to tell lies than for anybody else
Few modern scholars will be impressed by the last remark, but all of them agree that Arrian chose the right sources for the right reason: Ptolemy and Aristobulus had been eyewitnesses. However, Alexander had read more than these two authorities and offers sometimes stories that he had not found in these authors.
Another quality is that he knows what he is writing about. He knew what it meant to fight a war, he had been a provincial governor and had lived at the imperial court. Moreover, the war against the Parthians had offered him an opportunity to visit Mesopotamia, and he probably visited places like Gaugamela and Babylon. To Arrian, it seemed that all his life had been a prelude to the writing of this work: in the prologue, he says that to him, the literary activity was his country and his family and his countless public offices, and had been right from his youth. (He modestly added 'I therefore think that I am not unworthy of the first rank in Greek letters, just as Alexander was of the first rank in military matters.')
Like Cleitarchus, Arrian tried to give some sort of assessment of Alexander, but his opinion is the opposite of Cleitarchus', who had presented the Macedonian king as a young prince who had been corrupted by his constant success. Arrian, on the other hand, admires Alexander, although he is too much a philosopher to be completely uncritical. Sometimes, he condemns aspects of the conqueror's behavior, but as a whole, he is positive about Alexander's achievements. A typical part of the Anabasis is book 4, where Arrian places three painful incidents together and condemns Alexander's behavior: chronologically, two of them do not belong at this place, and by treating them together, he has prevented that the reader came up against the hard facts too often.
As we noticed in the catalogue above, Arrian also published an Indikê, which is essentially an appendix to the Anabasis. This remarkable text probably tells less about India than about the literary tastes of Arrian's age. To start with, it is entirely based on the Indikê by Alexander's fleet-commander Nearchus. More recent descriptions are quoted by several Christian authors and Arrian's younger contemporary Philostratus, but Arrian chose to ignore these recent sources because they were written in "Koinê-Greek", which was considered ugly in the second century CE. Nearchus, on the other hand, had written decent 'classical' Greek and even though the contents of his Indikê were outdated, Nearchus was to be preferred. A second point is that Arrian choose to write his own Indikê in the Ionian dialect. This was done because the classical text on geography, the Histories of Herodotus of Halicarnassus, were written in that dialect and contained no reliable information on India.
As we already saw, Arrian also wrote a book on the Events after Alexander. It is known from a summary by the Byzantine patriarch Photius (820-897), and breaks off rather abruptly. Maybe this work remained unfinished (more...).
It is a tribute to the quality of these works and their author, that modern scholarship usually follows Arrian, who personifies the 'good' tradition, and adds details from the authors of the 'vulgate' tradition. It is only since the publication of the Astronomical diary (1988) that oriental texts are receiving attention.
Ptolemy
Ptolemy was born in 367 and was a youth friend of Alexander. He took part in the battle of Issus, joined the journey to the oracle of Ammon, was present during the burning of Persepolis (his mistress Thais played an important role; text), and had his first independent commands during the wars in Sogdia. He was never one of Alexander's main commanders, but remained one of his closest friends and bodyguards,a title that means something like adjutant.
Ptolemy rose to prominence immediately after the death of Alexander: he was appointed satrap of Egypt and started to behave as an independent ruler. Alexander's mentally deficient brother Arridaeus was unable to prevent it, and his regent, general Perdiccas, came with an army to Egypt to discipline Ptolemy, but he was defeated. A few months later, Ptolemy managed to obtain Alexander's dead body (320), which was interred in Mamphis and, later, in Alexandria. After this, he was recognized as an independent ruler, and had himself proclaimed king in 306. This, and not the conquest by Alexander, meant the formal end of the unity of the Achaemenid empire.
Ptolemy wrote memoirs on Alexander's campaigns. They are almost entirely known from Arrian's Anabasis, but this is sufficient to come to some conclusions about their nature. In the first place, he uses Callisthenes' Deeds of Alexander and a sequel, because he has the correct chronology of the events and knows the names of the appointees. In the second place, Ptolemy sometimes exaggerates his own role. For example, he gave himself an important role in the battle near Issus. In the third place, the work was biased against Antigonus Monophthalmus, one of Ptolemy's rivals in the wars after the death of Alexander; Antigonus' successful campaigns in what is now Turkey, are completely ignored. In the fourth place, Ptolemy concentrated on the war; there are no indications that his memoirs contained digressions. A unifying psychological concept, like Cleitarchus' idea that Alexander's success corrupted him or Aristobulus' pothos-motif (below), seems to have been absent: in Ptolemy's view, Alexander had been a rational expansionist.
At one place, Ptolemy corrects Cleitarchus' account of Alexander's campaigns, and this proves that Ptolemy's history was published after theHistory of Alexander, which can be dated between 310 and 301. However, we can perhaps be a little bit more precise. There are indications that Ptolemy's memoirs were published before 301, because in that year, Antigonus was killed, which made Ptolemy's bias against his rival rather pointless. This argument, however, is not conclusive.
It is possible that Ptolemy started to write his memoirs in order to prove that he was worthy of the royal title he had assumed: for example, he wrote that he had killed an Indian king and had stripped him of his armor, an incident that must have reminded his readers of the behavior of the heroes of Homer, who had been kings
cont..
) i have found the history of alexander by Tarn but it turned out to be the volume 2. I am trying to find out the works of arianne and others in english as it seems i am playing in the dark without reading them and which obviously u have gone through. Without these i am left with works of some professors found widely on the google but i think i get the point of yours when u say stick to facts. May be when we read the originals rather than tertiary ones we can analyse better.
