Although Alexander’s campaign has received less attention than it might from the perspective of geographical studies, the image of Alexander himself as an explorer has, paradoxically, enjoyed great success in the modern historiography. This is partly to be explained by the widespread belief that Aristotle had a great influence on his student. From this perspective, the image of Alexander as an intellectual and a friend of knowledge fits perfectly with that of an explorer eager to know the world. In the eyes of many scholars, an assumption of this sort has allowed Alexander to become more than a mere conqueror. A new way of understanding this problem is proposed here, since we consider that both Alexander the conqueror and Alexander the explorer were essential and indissociable elements of Alexander the king, that is to say, they were indispensable characteristics of any Argead monarch, and these two facets of rulership must be studied together. In other words, knowing the world was one more way to conquer it and rule it.

Thanks to the career of Alexander the Great, Macedonia has become synonymous with military innovation and territorial conquest. The question of how he was able to accomplish this has been explored in detail by generations of scholars, and an exhaustive list of works explore this topic, by scholars including Heckel, Hatzopoulo, Karunanithy, Sekunda, Heckel, Bosworth, Engels and Fuller. This chapter outlines key elements of Alexander’s army and tactics to develop a discussion about some of the fundamental shifts he brought onto the battlefield and how they reflect aspects of Macedonian identity.

Alexander continues to be a subject of military as well as historical or cultural interest. In modern times, he began as the greatest of Great Captains, then became the inventor of modern mobile warfare, the model for romantic military genius, and, in recent decades, the unlikely precedent for leaders as different as Hitler and Mao Tse Tung. The writers promoting him include both Clausewitz and the contemporary Israeli writer, Martin Van Creveld; his detractors include Frederick the Great of Prussia and the most influential modern British military writer, B. H. Liddell-Hart. Machiavelli, Montaigne, and Montesquieu are among the civilians who join military men in giving opinions of Alexander as both a strategist and a fighter of battles. This chapter begins, however, with Julian, whose dialogue, Caesares, is the first extended comparison of great generals in the Western literary tradition. From there it moves to Machiavelli and thence to Italian as well as French writers, before going on to recent literature dominated by writers in German and English. The chapter ends with speculation as to why Alexander remains an authoritative yet iconoclastic figure in military history.

The Macedonia Alexander left in spring 334 BCE was principally the making of his father Philip II, though Philip’s ‘Macedonia proper’ had been largely a recovery of the Argead realm of Alexander I more than a century earlier. Early expansion from Pieria into the central plain of Bottiaea established a core of Argead control in Lower Macedonia. Following the retreat of Xerxes’ army after 479, Alexander I took full advantage of a power void to expand into the eastern region, conquering eastern Mygdonia, annexing Crestonia and Bisaltia eastwards to the Strymon valley and gaining control of rich supplies of mineral deposits and timber. Most of the eastern territory was lost after 450 BCE, but Philip II, in addition to recovering the old kingdom and consolidating Upper with Lower Macedonia, through conquest and diplomacy more than doubled the politically controlled territory of Macedonia. His transformation of Macedonia included the subjugation of Paeonians, Illyrians, Thracians and Triballians, the opening up of trade and securing of mining, control of Epirus, domination of Thessaly and the uniting of the southern Greek poleis under his hegemony. Alexander inherited a stable kingdom, a tested army of Macedonians, subordinate allies and a secure supply line to Asia.

Macedonian conqueror, in both Jewish and Christian sources, was a composite and of complicated design. It was constantly created and recreated, using varied techniques and inspirations, which resulted in a number of disparate, fragmentary projections. The dominant features of these projections were selected according to the immediate need and agenda of the text in which the figure of Alexander appeared. There is a certain continuity between the development of Alexander stories and legends in the Jewish milieu and those of the Greek and Roman pagan traditions, but there are significant innovations as well. As for the Christian authors, as much as they were familiar with Classical writings on Alexander, they would also exploit the Jewish corpus of Alexander legends, some of which have no direct parallel in Greco-Roman pagan writings.

The Introduction locates the current volume initially in the context of the work of the Alexander equipe since 1997, and then more broadly in the context of visions of Alexander proffered since the work of Droysen in 1833, with particular attention to those of Berve (1926), Wilcken 1931, Tarn (1948), Schachermeyr (1949), Badian (1958–), Lane Fox 1973 and Bosworth (1980–). A response is given to the objections voiced against the approach of the activities of the equipe formulated by James Davidson in 2001 under the slogan ‘Alexanderland’. The breakdown of the book’s parts and chapters is laid out and justified, with the contents of each contribution briefly summarized. Particular attention is given to the selection of the historical sources accorded focused discussions in Part III.

Alexander spent at most eight months in Egypt (mid/late October of 332 to late June of 331), but his brief time there has sparked more academic debate than any other similar period in his eleven-year campaign. In order to contextualize such a diversity of scholarly opinion, this chapter will investigate the Greco-Roman literary sources, the contemporary Egyptian language documents, and the archaeological evidence through four key events–Alexander’s arrival in Memphis, his founding of Alexandria, his visit to Siwah, and his return to Memphis and departure.

The images of Alexander deriving from his own lifetime fall into two main categories: on the one hand, representations without attributes, which are more or less what we would now term ‘portraits’; and on the other hand, representations with attributes, which have an allegorical function, their purpose being to give out a message about Alexander, to tell a story about him, rather than merely to convey his likeness. Images of Alexander in sculpture tended towards ‘realism’, while images of him in painting and glyptics tended towards allegorization. The attributes given to Alexander in art during his own lifetime are restricted in their epistemological content, being predominantly of a military sort, such as a spear or armour. But a much richer repertoire of attributes emerges for him in the posthumous representations of the king generated by and for his successors in the Hellenistic age. Above all, these allowed for his direct association with the divine: the aegis associated him with Zeus and Athena; ram’s horns with Zeus-Ammon; goat’s horns with Pan; bull’s horns with Dionysus; the lion-scalp with Heracles; the elephant-scalp with Dionysus; and the radiate crown with Apollo-Helios.

This chapter discusses Arrian’s characterization of Alexander the Great. Beginning from a brief history of scholarship on Arrian and his unusually large role in shaping modern understandings of Alexander, it approaches Arrian as an active creator of historical knowledge. Using examples from the Anabasis, it demonstrates that Arrian observed a shift in Alexander’s behaviour arising from the increasingly complex political and personal circumstances of his life. He described this change overtly at times, but more often by setting Alexander into a literary framework based on Herodotus’ portraits of despotic Persian kings and tweaked to reflect philosophical and moral concerns contemporary in Arrian’s own lifetime. The Anabasis forms the core of the discussion but the Discourses of Epictetus and the Indica provide complementary readings and show consistency in Arrian’s approach to his favourite subject.

We consider changes (Persianizing one) that Alexander made to his court from mid-330 BCE onwards, as well as opposition to it (and him) in the form of conspiracies and other clashes. Discussion is framed by a brief look at changes introduced by previous kings, as well as at new evidence from archaeology in north Greece that alters our understanding of early Macedon. It also takes into account the Greco-Roman literary topoi that overlay our sources, particularly with regard to major conspiracies, conflict, and the ‘mutiny’ at Opis – all in an effort to excavate the original underlying Macedonian perspective, insofar as we can.

The reason for Alexander’s life and work simply put was conquest and the quest for everlasting glory. He was a young man dead before his thirty-third birthday, the conqueror of the old adversary Persia, having led the most proficient army the world had to this time ever seen to victory after victory. His desire for fame and triumph at the time of his death had not been fulfilled. He had plans for further conquests in Arabia and across the western Mediterranean. Only his death ended his pursuit of these driving forces in his life.

The so-called Alexander Romance is the most widely read text about Alexander from the ancient world. An unknown author composed this fantastical piece of Greek historical fiction, which narrates Alexander’s entire life, deeds, and death in an extraordinary fashion. The three books of inventive prose narrative, embedded with about 280 lines of verse, are bookended by stories of the king’s conception (1.1–14) and funeral (3.34). Here the text is appreciated in its ancient context, with the provision of an overview of its central issues, potential solutions to them, and possible future directions for study. Several significant matters are focused on: the constitution of the original Greek text of the Alexander Romance; its problematic dating; its contents and structure; its various sources; its characterization of Alexander; its generic classification; and the possible contexts for its original composition.

This chapter deals with the main issues bearing upon Clitarchus and his work, moving beyond the usual division between Testimonia and Fragmenta and giving attention to the context and the agenda of each writer that mentioned him. Attention is given to his popularity as an Alexander historian and as a fine writer, as well as to the real significance of the narrative material attributed to him. This evidence can be combined with his few known biographical details in the evaluation of his chronology, which remains uncertain. The last two sections, dealing with his chronology and with the presentation of Alexander in his work, end with a question mark and invite the reader’s own reflections.

The Alexander most visible to us today is one who was created and recreated in the Roman period. While Alexander’s presence in literature is strong enough that we can reasonably describe the trajectory of intellectual interest in Alexander during the Roman period, more difficult to pin down is the degree to which powerful Romans engaged in conscious imitatio or aemulatio Alexandri, which generally involves squaring literary hints with material evidence that does not always speak to us as directly as we would like it to. Without dismissing the world of ways in which various aspects of Alexander-myth may have been subtly exploited by powerful Romans, this paper charts a path between overly credulous and overly sceptical conclusions concerning individual Romans by taking an overview approach of imperial interest and tightening our definitions of ‘imitation’ or ‘emulation’ in the context of Romans and Alexander. I conclude that both imitatio and aemulatio look quite different at Rome than they do in the provincial east.

This chapter reviews the fragmentary evidence for the five first historians and histories of Alexander: Callisthenes of Olynthus, Chares of Mytilene, Nearchus of Crete, Onesicritus of Astypalea and the royal diaries of the king, perhaps compiled by Eumenes of Cardia. These Greek authors took part of the Asiatic expedition and enjoyed a unique vantage point from which to report on the central events of the campaign. Nevertheless, they often resort to literary convention or even invention along the lines of other great Greek literature, especially Homer and Herodotus. Moreover, they all purport to have had some kind of personal access to the king, and the evidence suggests that they sought to magnify that link in various ways during Alexander’s lifetime and after his death. The chapter is structured around a biographical sketch of each author or, in the case of the Royal Journal, text, and a guide to the content, form and function of each history is supplied.