ABSTRACT
The period of Alexander the Great is at first sight well attested.1 There is an apparent abundance of narrative material: full-length histories of the reign by Arrian and Curtius Rufus, a formal biography by Plutarch, a whole book of Diodorus Siculus' Bibliotheca, two books of Justin's epitome of Pompeius Trogus, and substantial passages in the latter books of Strabo's Geography. This wealth of documentation is misleading, for all the primary sources are late. The earliest of our extant authorities, Diodorus, composed his work in the third quarter of the first century BC. Strabo wrote in the late Augustan period, Curtius at a still undefined date in the early Empire,2 Plutarch and Arrian in the second century AD, and Trogus' work, composed under Augustus, is known through the third-century epitome of Justin. There is, then, a hiatus of close to three centuries between the death of Alexander in June 323 and the first connected narrative of the reign. The problem of transmission therefore becomes acute. What sources did our extant authorities use and how faithfully did they report the substance of what they read? Both questions are clearly important. A careless and perfunctory epitome by a secondary author can be as rich a source of historical error as conscious mendacity and distortion in a contemporary historian. On the other hand a derivative history based on reliable authorities, carefully selected and meticulously reported, may be more trustworthy than any single first-generation source.
