Arrian - Arrian's life, Arrian's Work, Other surviving classical histories of Alexander

Greek historian, a native of Nicomedia in Bithynia. An officer in the Roman army, in 136 he was appointed prefect of Cappadocia (legate in 131–7). His chief work is the Anabasis Alexandrou, or history of the campaigns of Alexander the Great, which has survived almost entire. His accounts of the people of India, and of a voyage round the Euxine, are valuable for studies of ancient geography.

175), known in English as Arrian, and Arrian of Nicomedia, was a Greek historian and philosopher of the Roman period. As with other authors of the Second Sophistic Arrian wrote primarily in Attic. His works preserve the philosophy of Epictetus, and include an important account of Alexander the Great, the Anabasis of Alexander, as well as a description of Nearchus' voyage from India following Alexander's conquest, the Indica.

Arrian's life

Arrian was born in the coastal town of Nicomedia (now Izmit), the capital of the Roman province of Bithynia, in what is now north-western Turkey, about 70 km from Byzantium (now Istanbul). During this period Arrian wrote several works, in Latin, on military tactics, including Ektaxis kata Alanoon, which detailed the above battle against the Alans and the Techne Taktika.

On the death of his patron, the Emperor Hadrian, in 138, Arrian retired to Athens, where he became a citizen and a member of the Boule (Council).

Arrian's Work

Arrian is an important historian because his work on Alexander is the widest read, and arguably the most complete, account of the Macedonian conqueror. Arrian was able to use sources which are now mostly lost, such as the contemporary works by Callisthenes (the nephew of Alexander's tutor Aristotle), Onesicritus, Nearchus and Aristobulus. Most important of all, Arrian had the biography of Alexander by Ptolemy, one of Alexander's leading generals and allegedly his half-brother.

Arrian's work is to a considerable extent a reworking of Ptolemy, with material from other writers, particularly Aristobulus, brought in where Arrian thought them useful. Ptolemy was a general, and Arrian relied on him most for details of Alexander's battles, on which Ptolemy was certainly well informed. Details of geography and natural history were taken from Aristobulus, although Arrian himself had a wide knowledge of Anatolia and other eastern regions.

Today more interest focuses on Alexander as a man and as a political leader, and here Arrian's sources are less clear and his reliability more questionable. Probably it was not possible for Arrian to recover an accurate picture of Alexander's personality 400 years after his death, when most of his sources were partisan in one way or another.

Arrian was in any case primarily a military historian, and here he followed his great model (from whom he earned his nickname), the terse and narrowly-focused soldier-historian Xenophon.

Nevertheless, Arrian's work gives a reasonably full account of Alexander's life during the campaign, and in his personal assessment of Alexander he steers a judicious course between flattery and condemnation.

Arrian in his daily life would have spoken the koine, or "common Greek" of the Hellenistic and Roman periods. In Arrian's case this meant following the Attic style of Xenophon and Thucydides. This is somewhat the equivalent of a modern historian trying to write in the English of Shakespeare (although it is unheard of for a modern academic to write in Elzabethan English whereas harking back to the language of the Classical past was rather common pratice amongst Arrian's contemporaries).

The result is a work which was inevitably stilted and artificial, although Arrian handled the strain of writing 500-year-old Greek better than some of his contemporaries. Modern historians may regret that so many of the earlier works on Alexander have been lost, but they are grateful to Arrian for preserving so much.

Other surviving classical histories of Alexander

The Roman historian Quintus Curtius Rufus wrote Historiae Alexandri Magni. a biography of Alexander the Great in Latin in ten books of which the last eight survive. The Greek historian/biographer Plutarch of Chaeronea wrote the On the Fortune or the Virtue of Alexander the Great and a Alexander The Roman historian Justin wrote an epitome of the Historiae Philippicae written by Gnaeus Pompeius Trogus, in 44 books. Arrian, Anabasis Alexandri, (section 4.18.4-19.6), Sogdian Rock, translated by Aubrey de Sélincourt Arrian, Events after Alexander (from Photius' Bibliotheca) translated by John Rooke, edited by Tim Spalding Arrian, The Indica translated by E. Arrian, Array against the Alans translated by Sander van Dorst, with the Greek (transliterated) and copious notes. Photius' excerpt of Arrian's Anabasis, translated by J.S. Freese Photius' excerpt of Arrian's Bithynica, translated by J.S. Freese Photius' excerpt of Arrian's Parthica, translated by J.S. Freese Photius' excerpt of Arrian's Events after Alexander, translated by J.S.