Vanishing point

Looking back at our reading it begins to seem as though we have been looking at the same question through a variety of lenses. We moved from the vulnerable defenders of Melos and students of the Encheiridion to some of the prime movers and shakers of the ancient world, but many of the texts seem to grapple with a recurring cluster of concepts and motifs -- materialism and immaterialism, Fortune and freedom, empire and res publica, agents of change and those seeking to remain faithful to past origins, virtue and chance. All having to do, one way or another, with the question of liberty -- individual, political, expressive (parrhesia), and ontological.*


More and more clearly one sees that the comparison of Caesar and Alexander would have been the capstone, or perspectival axis of the Lives - a crucial text, involving judgments about two of the most complex figures of the ancient world. (A rather elementary effort by Appian is here.) That it is "lost" is just another enigmatic property attaching to these two ultimate men of mystery.


Mussy will be sending an update of our schedule, but in brief, we begin Sept. 3, 1 p.m., at the Fruitville Library with the Story of David. The Robert Alter text will be used by some, the King James Bible by others, but any good edition is fine. That will be followed in October by the Wasteland. Paul should be updating us with more on this soon.

*This first section was rewritten in part in an effort to be clearer.

Sources for Alexander: Modern and Ancient

From Wikipedia:

The five main surviving accounts are by Arrian, Curtius, Plutarch, Diodorus, and Justin.

• Anabasis Alexandri (The Campaigns of Alexander in Greek) by the Greek historian Arrian of Nicomedia, writing in the 2nd century AD, and based largely on Ptolemy and, to a lesser extent, Aristobulus and Nearchus. It is considered generally the most trustworthy source.
• Historiae Alexandri Magni, a biography of Alexander in ten books, of which the last eight survive, by the Roman historian Quintus Curtius Rufus, written in the 1st century AD, and based largely on Cleitarchus through the mediation of Timagenes, with some material probably from Ptolemy;
• Life of Alexander (see Parallel Lives) and two orations On the Fortune or the Virtue of Alexander the Great (see Moralia), by the Greek historian and biographer Plutarch of Chaeronea in the second century, based largely on Aristobulus and especially Cleitarchus.
• Bibliotheca historia (Library of world history), written in Greek by the Sicilian historian Diodorus Siculus, from which Book 17 relates the conquests of Alexander, based almost entirely on Timagenes's work. The books immediately before and after, on Philip and Alexander's "Successors," throw light on Alexander's reign.
• The Epitome of the Philippic History of Pompeius Trogus by Justin, which contains factual errors and is highly compressed. It is difficult in this case to understand the source, since we only have an epitome, but it is thought that also Pompeius Trogus may have limited himself to use Timagenes for his Latin history.

To these five main sources some scholars add the Metz Epitome, an anonymous late Latin work that narrates Alexander's campaigns from Hyrcania to India. Much is also recounted incidentally in other authors, including Strabo, Athenaeus, Polyaenus, Aelian, and others.

Plutarch offers a list of some of his sources:

46 Here the queen of the Amazons came to see him, as most writers say, among whom are Cleitarchus, Polycleitus, Onesicritus, Antigenes, and Ister; 2 but Aristobulus, Chares the royal usher, Ptolemy, Anticleides, Philo the Theban, and Philip of Theangela, besides Hecataeus of Eretria, Philip the Chalcidian, and Duris of Samos, say that this is a fiction.

The man whose life made Caesar weep

Plutarch's Life of Alexander is here.