ABSTRACT
The historical Alexander is a difficult figure to reconstruct: records of his career are all partisan. Favourable accounts were made in the Royal Journal by two of his secretaries during the campaigns, and one, supposedly, in a diary kept by Callisthenes, a nephew of Aristotle who accompanied Alexander. Two more pro-Alexander records were written by the first Hellenistic king of Egypt, Ptolemy I, and the general Aristoboulus. From these two versions a major history of Alexander was written in the second century a.d. by Flavius Arrianus, Roman governor of Cappadocia. This history, the Anabasis, is our present main source. Simultaneously, hostile accounts were circulated, chiefly by the Peripatetics and Stoics of Athens who opposed Alexander’s policies. All of these records, however, were supplemented by innumerable romanticized tales, which, along with elaborations and apocryphal fragments, passed into public belief and found their way into historical commentaries of the Christian era several centuries after. From these later romanticized accounts the Alexander legend grew.
