The Campaigns of Alexander (Classics) (2 page)

A
RRIAN
is remembered today only as the author of
The Campaigns of Alexander
and as the pupil of the philosopher Epictetus who preserved his master’s teachings from oblivion. Yet he was a famous man in his own time.
The Campaigns of Alexander
was only one of a number of substantial historical works, while he held the chief magistracies at Rome and Athens and governed for a lengthy period an important frontier province of the Roman empire.

Flavius Arrianus Xenophon, to give him his full name,
¹
was a Greek, born at Nicomedia, the capital of the Roman province of Bithynia, probably a few years before
A.D
. 90.
²
His family was well-to-do, and Arrian himself tells us that he held the priesthood of Demeter and Kore in the city. Like other wealthy Greeks, Arrian’s father had received the Roman citizenship, evidently from one of the Flavian emperors, most probably Vespasian. Hence Arrian became at birth a Roman citizen with the prospect, if he wished it and possessed the requisite ability, of a career in the imperial service.

Arrian’s boyhood and youth were spent in his native city, where he presumably received the customary upperclass Greek education in literature and rhetoric. Then, like many other young Greeks of similar social standing who planned a career in the imperial service, Arrian decided to complete his education by studying philosophy. He went about the year 108 to Nicopolis in Epirus, where the Stoic philosopher Epictetus had founded a school after the general expulsion of philosophers from Rome by Domitian in
A.D
. 92/3.
³
This remarkable man, a former slave, concerned himself mainly with ethics, and his teachings with their emphasis on the need for the individual to concern himself with his soul and their contempt for wealth and luxury had certain affinities with Christianity. Indeed, they have sometimes been thought, though wrongly, to have been influenced by the new religion. Like Socrates, Epictetus wrote nothing for publication, but fortunately he made such an impression on the young Arrian that he took down his master’s words in shorthand and later published them in eight books
of Discourses
.
⁴
Four of these still survive to give us a vivid portrait of a striking personality. Also extant is the
Manual
or
Handbook
(
Encheiridion
) in which, for the benefit of the general public, Arrian combined the essentials of Epictetus’ teaching. In the Middle Ages it enjoyed great popularity as a guide of monastic life. It is clearly from Epictetus that Arrian derived the high moral standards by which he judges Alexander. Epictetus, too, warmly commends repentance after wrongdoing, an attitude which finds an echo in Arrian’s praise for Alexander’s conduct after the murder of Cleitus. Since Epictetus drew on his experience of life in Rome under Domitian to illustrate his teachings, it is possible that Arrian’s comments on ‘the bane of monarchs’, the courtier, have their origin in the same source.

Of Arrian’s career in the imperial service until he reached the consulship in 129 or 130 we know only that he served on the Danube frontier and possibly in Gaul and Numidia. Arrian’s career may have been forwarded by the phil-hellenism of Hadrian, the ‘Greekling’ as he was nicknamed, who succeeded Trajan as emperor in
A.D
. 117. But his appointment, in the year following his consulship, to the governorship of Cappadocia, it is safe to say, recognised his military and administrative abilities; for there is no evidence that Hadrian allowed sentiment to imperil the security of the empire. At this time the large and important frontier province of Cappadocia extended northwards to the Black Sea and along its eastern coast from Trapezus as far as Dioscurias, and Arrian commanded two Roman legions and a large body of auxiliary troops, a rare, perhaps unexampled, command for a Greek at this period. It was an unsettled time ‘produced by Trajan’s momentary conquests beyond the Euphrates, and by Hadrian’s prompt return to a defensive policy.’
⁵
In 134
the Alans from across the Caucasus threatened to invade Cappadocia and although they did not cross the frontier Arrian is recorded to have driven the invaders out of Armenia. The extant work of Arrian,
The Formation against the Alans
, describes the composition of his force, with its order of march and the tactics to be followed. Two other works dating from the period of his governorship are extant, the
Circumnavigation of the Black Sea
(
Periplus Ponti Euxini
) and a
Tactical Manual
, the latter dated precisely to 136/7
A.D
. It is concerned only with cavalry tactics; for Arrian tells us he had already written a work on infantry tactics. The
Circumnavigation
is an account, based on the official report (in Latin) which he, as governor, submitted to the emperor, of a voyage from Trapezus to Dioscurias combined with two other passages to form an account of the whole Black Sea coast. This voyage took place at the beginning of his office – he mentions hearing of the death of king Cotys in 131/2 in the course of it – in order to inspect the defences of his area.

Arrian is attested as governor of Cappadocia in 137, but he retired or was recalled before the death of Hadrian in June 138. He seems not to have held any further office, for reasons we can only guess at, but to have taken up residence at Athens and to have devoted the remainder of his life to writing. He became an Athenian citizen and in 145/6 held the chief magistracy, the archonship. We last hear of him in 172/3 as a member of the Council, and in 180 the satirist Lucian refers to him in terms which reveal that he was already dead.

The writings of Arrian’s Athenian period are numerous and varied. The order in which they were composed cannot be determined with certainty, but we may with confidence place early in his stay his biographies of Dion of Syracuse and Timoleon of Corinth, and possibly a life of
Tilliborus, a notorious bandit who plagued Asia Minor. Of these no trace remains. In his writings he frequently refers in a spirit of rivalry to his namesake, the Athenian Xenophon, and a short work on hunting forms a supplement to the older writer’s book on the same topic. By choosing the same title,
On the Chase
(
Cynegeticus
), Arrian stresses the connexion and challenges comparison. Indeed, he writes that he had from his youth onwards the same interests as the Athenian Xenophon – hunting, tactics, and philosophy. His major historical works came later. Apart from
The Campaigns of Alexander
(
Anabasis Alexandri
), whose title and division into seven books are clearly modelled on Xenophon’s
Anabasis
, he wrote the still extant
Indica
, an account of the voyage of Alexander’s fleet from India to the Persian Gulf (based on Nearchus’ book) prefaced by a description of India and its people. Of his
Events after Alexander
in ten books we have virtually only the narrative of the first two years. The rest has perished – undoubtedly the greatest loss among the works of Arrian. We possess only fragments of his other works, a
Parthian History
dealing with Trajan’s campaigns in seventeen books, and a
History of Bithynia
which traced the story of his native land from mythical times down to 74
B.C
., when the last king, Nicomedes IV, bequeathed his kingdom to Rome.

This book was intended to be Arrian’s masterpiece, his lasting claim to fame. How important it was to him, his own words (I.12) make clear:

I need not declare my name – though it is by no means unheard of in the world; I need not specify my country and family, or any official position I may have held. Rather let me
say this: that this book is, and has been since my youth, more precious than country and kin and public advancement – indeed, for me it
is
these things.

He had, he felt, a splendid subject, and a splendid opportunity. No one had had more written about him than Alexander, yet no one, poet or prose-writer, had done him justice. The real Alexander was hidden behind a mass of contradictory statements, while the works of earlier writers contained downright error. They could not even get right the location of the decisive battle against Darius; they did not know which men had saved Alexander’s life in India. Not to speak of Achilles’ good fortune in having Homer relate his exploits, lesser men, such as the Sicilian tyrants, had fared better than Alexander. Arrian’s book was intended to end this state of affairs. Such is the importance of Alexander that he will not hesitate to challenge the great historians of Greece.

For this task Arrian possessed substantial advantages. We cannot say with any certainty when he began his book, but a date before the middle of the second century would seem highly unlikely. Arrian, therefore, was probably in his sixties; he had read widely in the Alexander-literature and was thoroughly familiar with the classical historians, Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon; he had written a considerable amount, although perhaps nothing as ambitious as this; he had at least some philosophical training and considerable military and administrative experience; finally, and not least important, he possessed, it is evident, a good deal of common sense.

But he faced formidable difficulties, difficulties he shared with the other extant writers on Alexander. Of these the earliest is the Sicilian Greek Diodorus, who almost exactly three hundred years after Alexander’s death, devoted the 17th Book of his
Universal History
to his reign.
The Latin writer Quintus Curtius wrote his
History of Alexander
in the first century
A.D
., while early in the next century the Greek biographer Plutarch wrote a
Life of Alexander
which provides a useful supplement to Arrian. The
Philippic Histories
of the Romanised Gaul Pompeius Trogus, who wrote a little earlier than Diodorus, is extant only in the wretched summary of Justin (3rd cent.
A.D
.).
⁶
All these authors were faced with the problem of choosing from a multiplicity of conflicting sources. For Arrian does not exaggerate the mass of material that confronted the historian of Alexander. Much of this has perished almost without trace, but enough remains, in the shape of ‘fragments’ embedded in extant writers, to confirm his statement that many lies were told about Alexander and many contradictory versions of his actions existed.

Many of those who accompanied Alexander wrote of the expedition and its leader from their particular standpoint.
⁷
Callisthenes, Aristotle’s nephew, acting as Alexander’s ‘press-agent’ composed for Greek consumption – for Alexander’s allies were by no means enthusiastic – an account of the expedition in which the king, who surely ‘vetted’ Callisthenes’ narrative, bore a distinct resemblance to the ‘heroes’ of legend. This official version was necessarily broken off when its author was arrested, and later executed, on suspicion of treason. The last event
certainly dealt with was the battle of Gaugamela. Chares, the royal chamberlain, wrote a book of anecdotes, valuable when he is dealing with events at court, otherwise useless, while Onesicritus, Alexander’s chief pilot, who had been a pupil of Diogenes, created a dangerous blend of truth and falsehood with a Cynic flavour. For him Alexander was the ‘philosopher in arms’, a man with a mission. Nearchus, who commanded Alexander’s fleet on its voyage from India to the Persian Gulf, followed with a more sober account, beginning, unfortunately, only with the start of his voyage. Lastly, to mention only the most important of the contemporary accounts, we have the histories of Ptolemy, who after Alexander’s death became ruler and later king of Egypt, and of Aristobulus, apparently an engineer or architect. With these I shall deal later. But the history of Alexander which enjoyed the greatest popularity in succeeding centuries – Caelius, the friend of Cicero, read it – was written by a man who was not a member of the expedition, Cleitarchus, who wrote at Alexandria at the end of the fourth century, or perhaps even later. He portrayed Alexander as ‘heroic’, as Callisthenes had done, and (somewhat incongruously) as the possessor of the typical virtues of a Hellenistic king. But the main attraction of his book was almost certainly the vivid descriptions and the sensational incidents it contained – the Greek courtesan Thais leading Alexander, the worse for drink, in a Bacchic revel to set fire to the palace at Persepolis, Alexander’s wholesale adoption of Persian luxury and practices, including a harem of 365 concubines, the week-long revel in Carmania, the poisoning of Alexander – to mention but a few.