Alexander the Great

BACKGROUND AND SOURCES

My line of business is narrative history. I am interested in people and in the bustling life of the past. I set myself two cardinal rules: I am blind to the future, and I describe the lives of my characters as though I did not know what was going to happen next.

Second, I avoid so far as possible the acrid debates among Alexander experts. Despite his fame, many of the memoirs of those who knew him and took part in his astounding career have been lost. The sources we have are less than adequate and were composed hundreds of years after the fact. Modern classicists have clever minds and have cleared up many conundrums, but sometimes they go too far and stretch speculation beyond the limits of the data. Their speculations recall the attributions made by the professional connoisseurs of Old Master paintings.

Thus, there is scarcely any evidence for the modern claim that Alexander plotted over many years the destruction of a family of loyal Macedonian generals. I shave with Occam’s razor. Of competing solutions to tricky questions, it is often simplest to accept what the ancient historians tell us if it is not obviously wrong.

I usually leave scholarly discussions to brief comments in the endnotes. Anyone who seeks further and better particulars will find the bibliography a starting point.

The inadequacy of the ancient historians brings with it another difficulty. We do not know enough to reconstruct Alexander’s psychology in detail. A picture does emerge, but in soft focus. We are told what he did, and from those actions it is possible to make an educated guess about the emotions that powered him. That is all.

The spelling and pronunciation of Greek proper nouns is problematic. The Romans transliterated them into Latin, and it was these versions which the English-speaking world inherited and which are still in common use today. So Achilleus became Achilles, and Alexandros answered to Alexander.

I have abandoned a search for rules other than the comfort of the reader and have chosen names on a case-by-case basis. I accept Persian names in their Greco-Latinate form—Darius, for example, rather than Dareios (Greek) or Dārayava(h)uš (Old Persian). Some lesser-known names I leave in Greek. A few, such as Athens or Tyre, have been anglicized. The Latinate Hephaestio just looks wrong. The Greek form is Hephaistion, but I opt for a commonly adopted hybrid version, Hephaestion.

The pronunciation of most names is obvious, but the letter “e” at the end is spoken as “ee.”

In an effort to be easily understood, I sometimes use contemporary appellations for places and territories—so, for example, the Punjab, the Hindu Kush, and the Middle East instead of Greek place-names that no one has heard of or for which no convenient Greek term exists.

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THE STUDY OF ANCIENT HISTORY is rather like the reporting of current affairs. In each case, there is too little evidence to be sure of exactly what has happened. Either too much source material has been lost or too little has yet been revealed. To fill the gaps we have to use our judgment. The basic rules of politics—the making and breaking of deals, the uses and abuses of power—do not appear to have changed greatly since the days of Alexander and in this biography are applied in much the same way as when we analyze the tergiversations at the White House or the inscrutabilities of the Forbidden City. I will be happy if my interpretations of a distant past are as plausible as the best of today’s political commentaries.

Most ancient historians, certainly the ones who have survived the literary cull of time, write incompetently about battles. Almost invariably they were not present and they make up for ignorance with invention, usually quantities of flyblown rhetoric. Sometimes they cite the reports of participants, but these can be unreliable witnesses too. A battlefield was a noisy and confusing place.

However, there is usually enough evidence to propose a broad outline of what happened. We can see that Alexander’s extraordinary skill was to judge the enemy’s intentions simply by looking at how he arranged his troops, scrutinizing the slightest of signs, and making last-minute dispositions (often a clever trap) while he could still communicate with his subordinates.

New technology has transformed warfare, but has not touched the imperatives of military strategy. Modern scholars have convincingly reconstructed Alexander’s victories, but their accounts sometimes fail to make the battle real. I want the reader to understand what was in Alexander’s mind, so far as we can tell, and how the day went.

Two giants bestride modern scholarship. They did their best to tell the truth about Alexander, but it is salutary to see how their accounts reflect the concerns of their own age as much as they do of his. In the first half of the twentieth century, Sir William Tarn was an admirer. His Alexander was the model of an English gentleman who played by the rules, believed in the “unity of mankind,” and, if he had been alive at the time, would have helped found the League of Nations.

After the Second World War, the Austrian-born Ernst Badian had little trouble dismantling the Tarn version. But Badian, too, was a man of his time. For him Alexander was a prototype of the totalitarian dictator, a classical Hitler or Stalin. It is a powerful analysis, but leaves a disagreeable impression of animus.

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ALEXANDER THE GREAT’S CAREER was so world-changing that some forty of his contemporaries or near contemporaries wrote books about his life and times, whether they knew him personally or not.

The king himself employed a secretariat and a Royal Journal was kept of his activities day by day. It was an essential feature of the royal administration. Other official records threw light on events—for example, the astronomical readings of the night sky (unearthed by modern archaeologists) which priests in Babylon translated into predictions of the future—on occasion with startling accuracy. Specialist members of the army that the king led into Asia must have written down useful information—for example, bematists’ measurements of distance and engineers’ designs of siege engines. Some of this material was published later.

Of necessity the king was a copious correspondent, and collections of his letters were published after his death. Unfortunately, many were spurious and it can be difficult to tell which is which when they are quoted in surviving sources.

Alexander took with him a relative of Aristotle called Callisthenes. His task was to record and interpret events as they took place, always making sure that they reflected the king’s wishes and showed off his achievements to their best advantage. He may have had access to the Royal Journal. In truth, he was less a historian than a public relations officer. In 327, Callisthenes fell from favor after the conspiracy of the Royal Pages and was either executed or died of natural causes as a prisoner. His history was probably carried down to 331 or even 329. The first in its field, it was published not many years later and, although filled with information, was generally felt to be too hagiographical.

Cleitarchus, a Greek from Alexandria in Egypt, wrote the most popular account of the king’s life, but although he was Alexander’s contemporary they never met. Cleitarchus appears to have looked down on Macedonians and disliked Alexander. He was less interested in facts than in sensation. Quintilian, a rhetorician of the first century A.D. and a good judge, found him “brilliantly ingenious but notoriously untrustworthy” and sided with Callisthenes. He was a tutor of Ptolemy and sometimes exaggerated his role in events. His history was a substantial text in twelve books and was published by the end of the fourth century.

Two authors knew Alexander well. Marsyas was raised in Pella and was a syntrophos, or fellow-student, of Alexander. He wrote the Makedonica, which primarily dealt with Philip’s reign and did not extend beyond the campaign in Asia Minor. The other writer who knew Alexander was Aristobulus, a Greek engineer, who accompanied Alexander from the beginning of the Asian campaign and remained with him until his death. He started writing his historical memoir only at the age of eighty-four and was more than ninety when he died. He enjoyed the king’s confidence and was an apologist both for him and for Ptolemy.

Others who served under Alexander recorded episodes in which they played a special part—the admiral Nearchus described the voyage from the Indus to the Persian Gulf, and Alexander’s helmsman Onesicritus wrote of the philosophy of the Brahmins and the utopian rule of an Indian rajah, Musicanus. Chares, royal chamberlain and usher, reported on etiquette and ceremonial at Alexander’s court as well as events such as the murder of Cleitus.

Ptolemy, one of the king’s leading associates and later pharaoh of Egypt, was the author of a substantial history of Alexander. He has been accused of writing up his role, but denied Cleitarchus’s report, or (rather) invention, that he saved the king’s life in India.

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OF ALL THIS MASS of material nothing has survived except for the Babylonian tablets and numerous fragments, mostly overwritten papyrus palimpsests dug up from long-forgotten Egyptian rubbish dumps. To this should be added a miscellany of innumerable quotations from the fourth and fifth centuries B.C. in the Deipnosophists (Learned Banqueters) of Athenaeus.

Time has reduced the literary wealth freely available in ancient times to a few more or less complete texts, first published hundreds of years after Alexander’s death. They are of variable value.

The earliest of these works is Book 17 of the Historical Library, a “universal history” written by Diodorus of Sicily in the first century B.C. Diodorus’s custom was to base each book’s text on a single, preferred source, in this case the unreliable Cleitarchus.

Not long afterward a Gallo-Roman historian called Gnaeus Pompeius Trogus wrote Philippic Histories and the Origin of the Whole World and the Places of the Earth in forty-four books. Its central theme was the Macedonian empire, but it was also a general history of all those parts of the world that came under Macedonian rule. Books 11 and 12 are devoted to Alexander. Trogus’s work survives in an epitome or abbreviation written by Marcus Junianus Justinus Frontinus (Justin) in the second century A.D. It contains useful material, but like all summaries should be used with caution.

Quintus Curtius Rufus wrote the only full-scale study of Alexander in Latin. His dates are uncertain, but he may have flourished in the reign of the Roman emperor Claudius. The first two books of his ten-book Histories of Alexander the Great are missing and there are large lacunae elsewhere. Cleitarchus and Ptolemy were among his sources. Curtius is tendentious and moralizing; his style is heavily rhetorical and he composed many elaborate speeches for his protagonists. He was surprisingly well-informed about the geography of the Middle East (see Engels, passim).

The only author to write about Alexander who can be read with undiluted pleasure is the Greek biographer and essayist Plutarch, who flourished in the first and second centuries A.D. He is best known for his Parallel Lives, short biographies pairing and comparing distinguished Greeks and Romans. The longest was devoted to Alexander (who was coupled with Julius Caesar) and contains much interesting information. Other lives, such as those of Demosthenes and Phocion, also offer rewarding insights into Alexander and other leading personalities of the age, as do Plutarch’s essays On the Virtue and Fortune of Alexander I and II and Sayings of Kings and Commanders. However, although he understood the principles of historical inquiry, Plutarch was not a historian and did not claim to be one. His interest lay in the personalities of his subjects and the ethical conclusions that could be drawn from their behavior. On occasion, he repeated stories because they were telling rather than because they were likely to be true.

The Metz Epitome (so called because the only manuscript was found in Metz) is a summary written in late antiquity of various fragments dealing with the campaigns of Alexander the Great from Hyrcania to southern India. It is indebted to Cleitarchus. The manuscript includes the so-called Liber de Morte Alexandri Magni Testamentumque, a curious account of the king’s death and will.

Long passages in the above texts share a common source, probably Cleitarchus, and are sometimes corralled, not especially helpfully, as a group under the heading of the “Alexander Vulgate.” They are set against an apologetic tradition which features the Anabasis of Alexander and the Indica, by Lucius Flavius Arrianus Xenophon, and the anonymous Itinerary of Alexander.

Lucius Flavius Arrianus, Arrian for short, was a Greek who enjoyed a distinguished political career culminating in a consulship under the Roman emperor Hadrian. His Anabasis describes Alexander’s career from his accession to his death. Arrian modeled his style partly on that of his namesake, the Athenian soldier and author Xenophon, and also on the great historians Herodotus and Thucydides. His main sources were Ptolemy and Aristobulus. He is the best authority on Alexander’s campaigns, but, while he could be critical of the king, his main purpose was to justify him.

In addition to the Anabasis, Arrian also wrote the Indica, the chief theme of which is the voyage of Nearchus’s fleet from the river Indus to the Persian Gulf but which also discusses the history, geography, and culture of the Indian subcontinent.

The anonymous Itinerary was written about A.D. 340 and was dedicated to the emperor Constantius II. It tells the story of Alexander’s journey of conquest and is influenced by Arrian.

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OTHER CLASSICAL AUTHORITIES TOUCH on Alexander, among them the Greek historian Polybius during the second century B.C.; also the Greek geographer Strabo and the Roman historian Livy, both of whom wrote in the first century B.C. Three military authors cast light on tactics and siege warfare: Aelian, Polyaenus, and Vitruvius.

Perhaps the oddest text, or, rather, assemblage of texts and versions, is the Alexander Romance. Popular in medieval times and much translated, it mixes legends and sensationalist fantasies with accurate data.

Archaeologists have unearthed inscriptions in Greek cities which mainly record legislation passed by people’s assemblies and displayed in public places. They reflect the impact of Alexander’s doings, but seldom the doings themselves. Most remarkably, royal Macedonian tombs have been unearthed, most of them untouched by robbers.

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A VOICE IS MISSING, that of the Persians.

In our literary sources, the fall of the Achaemenids is viewed entirely from the Greek and Macedonian point of view. The Great King made announcements, sent messages, and carved his successes into mountain cliffs; there was architecture and sculpture, but no histories, no dramas or poems, no letters have survived—indeed, we do not know whether they were ever written. What did the Persians think of the Greeks? What was their political worldview? What did their subject peoples think of them? How did the court and the Great King himself react to events?

There is not even a memory.

All we have is what the cold Hellenic stare saw.

ANCIENT SOURCES, ABBREVIATIONS

Many of the ancient authors cited below appear in the Loeb Classical series where Greek and Latin originals are accompanied by versions in English. Good translations for many of them can also be found in Penguin Classics.

Ael NA

Aelian, De Natura Animalium

Ael Tact

Aelian,Tactica

Ael VH

Aelian,Varia Historia

Aesch Ctes

Aeschines, Against Ctesiphon

Aesch Emb

Aeschines,On the False Embassy

Aesch Tim

Aeschines,Against Timarchus

Aeschyl Ag

Aeschylus, Agamemnon

Aes

Aesop, Fables (trans. Olivia and Robert Temple, Penguin Classics, London, 1998)

Alex Chron https://www.livius.org/​sources/​​content/​​​mesopotamian-chronicles-content/​bchp-1-alexander-chronicle/

Alexander Chronicle (BM 36304)

Anti GA

Antipater of Sidon, see Greek Anthology

Ar Cael

Aristotle, On the Heavens (De Caelo)

Ar Anim

Aristotle, Inquiries into Animals

Ar Nic Eth

Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics

Ar Meta

Aristotle, Metaphysics

Ar Met

Aristotle, Meteorologica

Ar Pol

Aristotle, Politics

Ar Rhet

Aristotle, Rhetoric

Arrian

Arrian, Anabasis

Arr Ind

Arrian, Indica

Arr Succ

Arrian, Successors to Alexander

Ascl

Asclepiodotus, Tactics

Athen

Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae (Learned Banqueters)

Aug

Augustine, City of God

Aul Gell

Aulus Gellius, Noctes Atticae

Cic Arch

Cicero, Pro Archia

Cic Att

Cicero, Letters to Atticus (trans. D. R. Shackleton-Bailey, Duckworth, London, 1971)

Cic Nat

Cicero, De Natura Deorum

Cic Rosc

Cicero, Pro Roscio Amerino

Cic Tusc Disp

Cicero, Tusculan Disputations

Clem

Clement of Alexandria, Stromateis

Nep Eum

Cornelius Nepos, Lives of the Eminent Commanders, Eumenes

Curt

Curtius Rufus, Quintus, Historiae Alexandri Magni Macedonis (The History of Alexander)

Dem

Demosthenes, Speeches

Dem Crown

Demosthenes, On the Crown

Did

Didymus, On Philippics of Demosthenes

Dio Chrys

Dio Chrystostom, Discourses

Diod Sic

Diodorus Siculus, Library of History

Diog Lae

Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers

Diog

Diogenes of Sinope, Letters (attrib.)

Dion Hal

Dionysius of Halicarnassus, To Ammaeus

Eur Androm

Euripides, Andromache

Eur Andr

Euripides, Andromeda

Eur Bacc

Euripides, Bacchae

Eur Med

Euripides, Medea

Ezek

Ezekiel (Bible, New International Version)

Alex Rom

The Greek Alexander Romance (trans. Richard Stoneman, Penguin, Harmondsworth 1991)

Gk Anth

Greek Anthology

GHI

Greek Historical Inscriptions 359–323 B.C. (trans. P. J. Rhodes, London Association of Classical Teachers, 1971)

142 FS

Hegesias of Magnesia FGrH

Herod

Herodotus, Histories

Hes WD

Hesiod, Works and Days

Il

Homer, Iliad

Hom Hymns

Homeric Hymns

Hyp Dem

Hypereides, Against Demosthenes

Hyp Fun

Hypereides, Funeral Oration

Isoc Alex

Isocrates, Letters to Alexander

Isoc Phil

Isocrates, Oration to Philip

Isoc Plat

Isocrates, Plataicus

IG

Inscriptions Graecae

Itin

Itinerary of Alexander (Itinerarium Alexandri)

Jos Ant

Josephus, Flavius, Antiquities of the Jews

Jos Api

Josephus, Flavius, Against Apion

Just

Justinus (Justin), Marcus Junianus, Epitome of the Philippic History of Pompeius Trogus (trans. Rev. J. S. Watson, Henry G. Bohn, London, 1853)

LiberM

Liber de Morte, Concerning the Death and Testament of Alexander the Great

Luc Alex

Lucian, Alexander the False Prophet

Luc Dial Dead

Lucian, Dialogues of the Dead

Luc Herod

Lucian, Herodotus and Aetion

Luc Slander

Lucian, Slander

Metz

Metz Epitome

Oxy

Oxyrhycus Papyri

Od

Odyssey,Homer

Paus

Pausanias, Description of Greece

Phot

Photius, Bibliotheca

Pind

Pindar, Odes (trans. Maurice Bowra, Penguin Classics, Harmondsworth 1982)

Pind Enc

Pindar, Encomia

Pind Pyth

Pindar, Pythians

Plato Gorg

Plato, Gorgias

Plato Rep

Plato, The Republic

Pliny

Pliny, Natural History

Plut Alex

Plutarch, Age of Alexander (trans. Scott-Kilvert, Ian, and Duff, Timothy E. [also contains Lives of Artaxerxes, Pelopidas, Dion, Timoleon, Demosthenes, Phocion, Alexander, Eumenes, Demetrius, Pyrrhus] Introductions and Notes, Duff, Timothy E., Penguin Books, London, 2011)

Plut Erot

Plutarch, Erotikos (Dialogue on Love)

Plut Age

Plutarch, Life of Agesilaus

Plut Alex

Plutarch, Life of Alexander

Plut Gal

Plutarch, Life of Galba

Plut Mor

Plutarch, Moralia

Plut Fort

Plutarch, On the Fortune or the Virtue of Alexander

Plut Pel

Plutarch, Life of Pelopidas

Plut Per

Plutarch, Life of Pericles

Plut Rom

Plutarch, Life of Romulus

Poll

Pollux, Julius, Onomasticon (pub. Imm. Bekker, Berlin, 1846)

Poly

Polyaenus, Stratagems in War

Polyb

Polybius, The Histories

Quint

Quintilian, Institutes of Oratory

Strabo

Strabo, Geography

Suda

Suda

Theo Phil

Theopompus, Philippica

Theo Hell

Theopompus, Hellenica

Val Max

Valerius Maximus, Memorable Deeds and Sayings

Virg Aen

Virgil, Aeneid

Vit

Vitruvius, De Architectura

Xen Cyr

Xenophon, Cyropaedia

Xen Anab

Xenophon, Anabasis

Xen Hip

Xenophon, Hipparchicus (On the Cavalry Commander)

MODERN SOURCES

Here is a selection from modern scholarship for the interested general reader. I am especially grateful for two invaluable compendiums—the Oxford Classical Dictionary, which contains in brief everything worth knowing about the Greek and Roman world, and Waldemar Heckel’s Who’s Who in the Age of Alexander the Great (for details of both, see below).

Arsuaga, Juan-Luis, and others. The Lameness of King Philip II and Royal Tomb I at Vergina, Macedonia. Washington, D.C.: National Academy of Science of the United States of America, vol. 112, no. 32, 2015.

Badian, Ernst. “Alexander’s Mules.” New York Review of Books, December 20, 1979.

———. Collected Papers on Alexander the Great. Abingdon Oxon: Routledge, Abingdon, Oxfordshire, 2012.

Bodson, Liliane. “Alexander the Great and the Scientific Exploration of the Oriental Part of His Empire: An Overview of the Background, Trends and Results.” Ancient Society (published by the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium), vol. 22 (1991), pp. 127–38.

Bosworth, A. B., Conquest and Empire: The Reign of Alexander the Great. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

Bosworth, A. B., and E. J. Baynham. Alexander the Great in Fact and Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Briant, Pierre. From Cyrus to Alexander: A History of the Persian Empire (trans. Peter D. Daniels). Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisembrauns, 2002.

Brill’s New Jacoby, Leiden, Netherlands, 2007.

Cambridge Ancient History, Volume 6, the Fourth Century B.C. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

Carney, Elizabeth. “Macedonians and Mutiny: Discipline and Indiscipline in the Army of Philip and Alexander.” Classical Philology, vol. 91, no. 1 (January 1996), pp. 19–44.

———. Olympias, Mother of Alexander the Great. New York and Abingdon: Routledge, 2006.

———. Women and Monarchy in Macedonia. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2000.

Ceccarelli, Paola. Ancient Greek Letter Writing. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.

Chugg, Andrew. Alexander’s Lovers. Raleigh, N.C.: Lulu.com, 2016.

Connolly, Peter. Greece and Rome at War. London: Greenhill Books, 1998.

———. The Greek Armies. London: Macdonald Educational, 1977.

Engels, Donald W. Alexander the Great and the Logistics of the Macedonian Army. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1978.

———. “A Note on Alexander’s Death.” Classical Philology, vol. 73, no. 3 (July 1978), pp. 224–28.

Everitt, Anthony. The Rise of Athens: The Story of the World’s Greatest Civilization. New York: Penguin Random House, 2016.

Everson, Tim. Warfare in Ancient Greece: Arms and Armor from the Heroes of Homer to Alexander the Great. Stroud, U.K.: Sutton Publishing, 2004.

Finkel, Irving L. “The Hanging Gardens of Babylon.” In Peter A. Clayton and Martin J. Price, eds., The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. London and New York: Routledge, 1988.

Forster, E. M. Alexandria: A History and a Guide. New York: Doubleday, 1961 (originally published 1922; Alexandria: Whitehead Morris Ltd.).

Fuller, Major-General J. F. C. The Generalship of Alexander the Great. London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1958.

Garland, Robert. Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1998.

Green, Peter. Alexander of Macedon. Harmondsworth: Pelican Books, 1974.

Hammond, N. G. L. A History of Greece to 322 B.C. Oxford, 1959.

Hammond, N. G. L., and G. T. Griffith. A History of Macedonia, vol. 2. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979.

Hammond, N. G. L., and F. W. Walbank. A History of Macedonia, vol. 3. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988.

Harding, Phillip, ed. and trans. From the End of the Peloponnesian War to the Battle of Ipsus. Translated Documents of Greece and Rome. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.

Heckel, Waldemar. The Conquests of Alexander the Great. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.

———. “Two Doctors from Kos?” Mnemosyne (4th ser.), vol. 34, fasc. 3/4 (1981), pp. 396–98.

———. Who’s Who in the Age of Alexander the Great. Chichester, U.K.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.

Holt, Frank L. Alexander the Great and Bactria. Leiden, New York, and Köln: E. J. Brill, 1988.

Hornblower, Simon. Mausolus. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982.

——— and Antony Spawforth, eds., The Oxford Classical Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Jackson, Ralph. Doctors and Diseases in the Roman Empire. London: British Museum Press, 1998.

Jacoby, Felix. Die Fragmente der griechischen Historiker. Berlin: Brill, 1923 FGrH.

Lane Fox, Robin. Alexander the Great. London: Allen Lane in association with Longman,1973.

Langdon, S. Building Inscriptions of the Neo-Babylonian Empire I. Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1905.

Lehmann, P. W. Samothrace: A Guide to the Excavations and the Museum. New York: NYU Institute of Fine Arts, 1975.

Llewellyn-Jones, Lloyd. King and Court in Ancient Persia 559–331 B.C.E. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013.

Marsden, E. W. The Campaign of Gaugamela. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1964.

Merritt, B. D. Hesperia 21, American School of Classical Studies at Athens, Princeton 1952, pp. 355–59.

Montaigne, Michel de. The Complete Essays. Translated by M. A. Screech. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987.

Oates, Joan. Babylon. London: Thames & Hudson, 2008.

O’Brien, John Maxwell. Alexander the Great: The Invisible Enemy. London and New York: Routledge, 1992.

Oppenheim, A. Leo. Ancient Mesopotamia: Portrait of a Dead Civilization. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1964.

Pritchett, W. K. “Observations on Chaeronea.” American Journal of Archaeology, vol. 62 (1992), pp. 307–11.

Reade, Julian. “Alexander the Great and the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.” Iraq, vol. 62 (2000), pp. 195–217.

Renault, Mary. The Nature of Alexander. London: Allen Lane, 1975.

Roisman, Joseph, and Ian Worthington, eds. A Companion to Ancient Macedonia. Chichester, U.K.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010.

Samuel, Alan E. “Philip and Alexander as Kings: Macedonian Monarchy and Merovingian Parallels.” American Historical Review, vol. 93, no. 5 (December 1988), pp. 1270–86.

Schachermeyr, F. Alexander in Babylon und die Reichsordnung nach seinem Tode. Osterreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften: Philosophisch-Historische Klasse: Sitzungsberichte 268, Abhandlung 3, 1970.

———. Alexander der Grosse: Das Problem seiner Personlichkeit und seine Wirkens. Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1973.

Schuster, Angela M.H. “Not Philip II of Macedon.” Archaeology, April 21, 2000, Online Features, https://archive.archaeology.org/​online/​features/​macedon/.

Seltman, Charles. Wine in the Ancient World. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1957).

Spawforth, Antony J. S. “The Pamphleteer Ephippus, King Alexander and the Persian Royal Hunt,” Histos, vol. 6 (2012 ), pp. 169–213.

Stein, Sir Aurel. “Notes on Alexander’s Crossing of the Tigris and the Battle of Arbela,” The Geographical Journal, vol. 100, no. 4 (October 1942), pp. 155–64.

——. On Alexander’s Track to the Indus, Macmillan and Co., 1929.

Stoneman, Richard, trans., The Greek Alexander Romance. Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1991.

Tod, M. N. A Selection of Greek Historical Inscriptions II. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1948.

Worthington, Ian. By the Spear, Philip II, Alexander the Great and the Rise and Fall of the Macedonian Empire. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.

——. Demosthenes of Athens and the Fall of Classical Greece. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.