Review of new translation of Arrian's Alexander

BOOK REVIEW in Hellenic News of America:

The Campaigns of Alexander: Anabasis Alexandrou

Paths of Glory
By STEVE COATES

THE LANDMARK ARRIAN

The Campaigns of Alexander: Anabasis Alexandrou

Translated by Pamela Mensch

Edited by James Romm

Illustrated. 503 pp. Pantheon Books. $40.

[...]

Arrian's great work on Alexander's electrifying campaigns of Asian conquest is now the subject of “The Landmark Arrian,” the most recent volume in the much-praised Landmark series of annotated editions of Greek historians, this one skillfully edited by James Romm, a professor of classics at Bard College, and supplemented with a panoply of maps, illustrations and background essays by leading Alexander scholars. The addition of Arrian to the Landmark list represents a departure of sorts. The previously featured historians — Thucydides, Herodotus and Xenophon — lived in the great era of Greek city-states in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C.; by and large, they did their work by recording their own experiences or information related to them by others.

By contrast, Arrian lived in a radically different world, as an ethnic Greek and a Roman citizen, a military commander and high public official under the emperors Trajan and Hadrian, as well as a philosopher and leading literary light of his day; as a historian, Arrian sets out to describe events that took place 400 years before his own lifetime, based on a wide variety of earlier historical accounts, all now lost, written with widely differing aims, from the fabulous to the propagandistic. In this sense, Arrian is closer to modern historians than to his more famous precursors, “a noble predecessor and even, perhaps, a little bit of a model,” as it's put in “The Landmark Arrian.”

[...]

No wonder “attempting to reconstruct the historical Alexander is almost as problematic as trying to reconstruct the historical Jesus,” as Paul Cartledge writes in this volume's introduction. ...