Arrian: The Campaigns of Alexander

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Arrian: The Campaigns of Alexander
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Abstract

These selections from Arrian’s Anabasis Alexandri, or The Campaigns of Alexander (ca. 150), his history of Alexander the Great, feature a few speeches attributed to Alexander and contain the Roman historian Arrian’s general assessment of the famed Macedonian king. While Arrian gives the best single account of Alexander surviving from antiquity—because of his judicious use of the work of earlier historians whose writings are lost to us and because of his independent understanding of military affairs from his own career as a soldier—these sections also highlight a different aspect of Arrian’s work, namely, its literary character as part of the Second Sophistic (a cultural movement of the Roman Empire, not to be confused with the Sophists of classical Greece). Alexander, as unifier of the Greek world and conqueror of the Persian Empire, was one of the great heroes of the Second Sophistic.

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