Nearchus The Cretan 1

The reputation of Nearchus, the Cretan from Amphipolis, shines like a good deed in the admittedly naughty world of Alexander historians. ² A loyal friend of Alexander’s since youth, he was among those banished as a result of the Pixodarus affair, ³ and he retained an honest and sincere admiration for the king, ⁴ yet without indulging in reprehensible flattery. ⁵ An eminent historian, known chiefly for topographical and military researches, waxes rhetorical: ⁶

The description going back to him of his reunion with Alexander the Great after his voyage over the Indian Ocean is a unique pearl of world literature, which in loyalty and depth of penetration into a human personality (here that of Alexander the Great) is unsurpassed by any other description surviving from antiquity, and which can be compared – and that only at a considerable distance – to very few passages in ancient literature.

Nearchus the writer is matched by Nearchus the great man: he is the only one of Alexander’s subordinates who has any major achievement of his own to show, and who, ‘as it were, provides a complement by sea to the conqueror of the earth’. ⁷ It is rare to find the mild protests of a perceptive scholar like Truesdell S. Brown: ‘A more careful examination shows that … Nearchus was not exclusively concerned with painting an accurate picture of events, particularly events in which he had himself played a part.’ ⁸ Lionel Pearson studied Nearchus against his literary background, ⁹ showing not only the obvious imitation of Herodotus, but the more surprising epic elements borrowed from the Odyssey. It should not be necessary, by now, to demonstrate that Nearchus was not a detached scientist trying to present an objective record of the results of his voyage of exploration for the instruction of his readers. Not only was he, as even Berve had to acknowledge, ¹⁰ insufficiently critical of the mirabilia that he heard from local sources: we know that he reported his own wonders where he must have known better, to impress rather than to instruct; thus the whale 90 cubits long that was measured by his own men, ¹¹ or the skins of large ants of which he personally saw a considerable number brought into the Macedonian camp, ¹² or the savages with hair all over their bodies and claws like beasts’, who dressed in the skins of fishes, ¹³ or shadows falling towards the south at a time well after the autumn equinox. ¹⁴