ARRIAN: NEITHER CONTRARIAN NOR MADAM LIBRARIAN

Always judge a book by its cover

Arrian (i.e. Lucius Flavius Arrianus "Xenophon," or Ἀρριανός) wrote the Alexandrou Anabasis (Ἀλεξάνδρου ἀνάβασις), published by Landmark as The Campaigns of Alexander. Arrian -- something of a fan-boy -- sought to emulate Xenophon, whom he name-drops repeatedly, both in style, mode and title, not to mention taking the name "Xenophon" itself as a preferred pseudonym. Almost in spite of himself, however, Arrian manages to create a unique work chronicling Alexander's romp across the Asian landmass. One interesting thing he does is incorporate material from differing sources (remember he wrote nearly four centuries after Alexander's death) and insert all of it in his own text, meaning certain events either play out in several different ways or certain statements contradict one another. This creates a neat sort of literary as well as scholarly effect. At times he draws attention to where his sources derive from (actually he opens, with rather audacious sobriety for a second-century A.D. work on Alexander, with a list of his principal sources (Ptolemy, Aristoboulos)) and considers their possible biases. Always fun to see a little rudimentary historiography. Probs his weakest pt, particularly in comparison to the Polybius (the Spielberg of classical historians), is his rather unclear descriptions of battles -- the Landmark annotations suggest this is a result of his sources being primarily firsthand and therefore muddled in the middle of a battle, a fortiori his crystal clear descriptions of the orders of battle. But Arrian's Greek is supposedly superb, so I'm looking forward to rereading it in the original at some pt in the near-ish future. Next up: Peter Green's translation of the Argonautika!