His Biographers

Abstract

This chapter looks at how several contemporary scholars, courtiers, and writers who knew Alexander wrote histories of his exploits. From them scholars can glean some idea of historical events, but also the nonhistorical ones, as well as much that was generated by prejudice for or against their subject. All these historians have been discussed by Lionel Pearson in his The Lost Histories of Alexander the Great, a monograph of the American Philological Association of 1960. An even fuller account of these sources is Professor U. P. Arora's Greeks on India, Alexander to Megasthenes. The chapter dwells especially on two authors who depended on and quoted these sources—Plutarch and Arrian—writing long after the events.