ABSTRACT
THE history of Darius III, the last Achaemenid King, must almost entirely be gathered from sources that see him through a Greek lens; and not only Greek, but sources concerned to celebrate the history and achievements of Alexander III of Macedon. Our surviving sources, as is well known, were in fact written centuries after his death, in Greek or (following Greek sources) in Latin. 2 The distortion inevitably caused by this tradition, and increased by the Latin sources where they add Roman distortion, 3 has shaped the standard modern view of Darius, as a mere foil to Alexander ‘the Great.’ Indeed, the modern tradition has until recently tended to follow the ‘official’ Greek tradition, as reflected by Arrian, and made little use of even the ‘vulgate’ Greek sources.
