T HE problems surrounding the character and aims of Alexander the Great do not stop with his death. One of those most abundantly discussed has been that of the hypomnemata that Perdiccas presented to the army after the king’s death. Diodorus tells the story: 1 after Alexander’s death, in the course of other events (see below), Perdiccas produced to the army at Babylon the hypomnemata of the dead king. These included — at least among other things: Diodorus is not very clear on this — written instructions allegedly given to Craterus by the king when, late in 324, he was sent home to take 10,000 discharged veterans to Macedon. The contents of the hypomnemata were in various ways so extravagant that Perdiccas preferred (apparently with the agreement of the other marshals at Babylon) 2 not to execute them; but in order not to be charged with arbitrarily diminishing the king’s glory, he asked the army to decide on the matter, 3 and the army duly decided that the plans should be ignored. This account (not found in any other source) is followed by the punishment of the leaders of sedition and of Meleager — told summarily, but in outline similar to the version of these events found in the epitome of Arrian’s Successors and not far removed from the version of Curtius. 4

Tarn rejected the story as a late invention. 5 Admitting that most of Book 18 is from Hieronymus of Cardia and therefore acceptable, he tried to show that Diodorus starts using Hieronymus only with the beginning of chapter 5 , while the story of the hypomnemata , with its whole context, is ‘patchwork,’ containing much that could not have been in Hieronymus. He came to the conclusion that, in order to evaluate the plans, we are ‘thrown back once again on an analysis of the actual plans.’ This led him to the view (p. 393) that the document was a Hellenistic composition, certainly not older than the second century B.C.