Article Alexander is a product of later ages. The surviving literary sources—Diodorus Siculus, Quintus Curtius Rufus, Plutarch, Arrian, Justin—all wrote under the Roman Empire, from around the mid-first century bc to the start of the third century ad; almost all contemporary and Hellenistic historiography pertaining to Alexander is lost. Alexander, as we have him, is…

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Article ALEXANDER’S LAST DAYSSeveral ancient Greek and Roman historians described Alexander’s last days. They had access to many contemporary texts that no longer survive, including a mysterious source called the “Royal Diaries” or “Journal” [1,2]. We know that five men close to Alexander wrote accounts of his death: Alexander’s bodyguard and friend Ptolemy, his admiral…

Article Between roughly 450 BCE and 1450 CE, readers across the Levant, North Africa, and Europe were united by complex networks of interrelated texts, attested in a multiplicity of languages, that contemporary scholars call the Ancient Novel. All available evidence points to the Afroasiatic origins of the narrative devices that typify these compositions (Anderson 1984;…

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Article The reception of Alexander is a theme in which the conqueror is uncharacteristically passive. The point has been well made that the Alexander we receive in Diodorus, Rufus, Arrian, Plutarch and Justin is primarily a construct of these authors writing centuries after Alexander’s death, reflecting not just their contemporary concerns, but also their reliance…

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Article Syriac Text The first group includes variations such as the confusion between r and l in the Syriac translation of Greek proper nouns: e.g. l instead of r is found in the spelling of the Greek noun Gránikov, in Syriac «glnyqws» (BUDGE, History, p. 253, 6)4 ; while we find r where we would…

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Article While the issue appears in several studies and monographs on Alexander’s policies in Asia. Various aspects of the Iranians’ presence in Alexander’s army have been analyzed in Berve 1926 I, 103–217; Brunt 1963, 27–46; Griffith 1963, 68–74; Badian 1965, 160–1; Bosworth 1980, 1–21; Hammond 1983; 1996; 1998; Olbrycht 2004; 77–204; 2010, 364–365. There has…