the landmark arrian the campaigns of alexander

But he is in all ways the best of the bunch: not only does he write with verve, but he brings the edge of experience to his subject. Diodorous Siculus, writing in the late 1st century BC, is too credulous Quintus Curtius Rufus, in the 1st century AD, is too florid the great Plutarch, writing around AD 111, is sketchy for all his greatness, and even our own Arrian can be prissy. With brief pauses for illness and consolidation-by-marriage, Alexander was always in motion he was practically designed for Strassler's series, and the new Landmark Arrian brings him to life as few mere prose accounts could.īut which Alexander? We have no contemporary narratives, and all the ones dating from centuries later have their defects. His earliest chroniclers wrote of his precipitous, questing nature - the Greek characteristics of tolma and pothos, adapted to indefatigable Macedonian toughness. He was born in 356 BC and dead by his early thirties. Of all the archaic warlords, only Alexander worked with a scope and speed appropriate for motorised vehicles and air transport, yet he did it all with horses and camels. It is an inspired idea, and in dealing with the ancient world it finds its perfect subject: Alexander the Great, whose conquests stretched from Greece to the heart of India, from Egypt to the Caspian Sea. These editions are oversized and stuffed with maps of telescoping specificity, cartographical caves of wonder designed to show that the past moved every bit as much as the present does. Robert Strassler's Landmark series of classical editions, begun in 1996 with The Landmark Thucydides, and continued in 2007 with The Landmark Herodotus and in 2009 with The Landmark Xenophon's Hellenika, operates from a very simple premise: geography is the best illustration of history. Translated from the Attic by Pamela Mensch The Landmark Arrian: The Campaigns of Alexander

The landmark arrian the campaigns of alexander