ABSTRACT
No man, in antiquity, had so many books written about him as Alexander the Great. Fragments of dozens survive, many more are nothing but names to us, and there must be scores of which we have not even heard. It is a devastating comment on our knowledge of the ancient world that the earliest narrative substantially surviving is that of Diodorus Siculus, and that we turn to a writer of the age of Hadrian for our most trustworthy information. Needless to say, this state of affairs has stimulated Quellenforschung more than in most fields of ancient history. And in the sad state of our evidence we can take some comfort in the fact that scholars of the calibre of Schwartz and Jacoby have laboured to sift the débris and reconstruct the edifice of the tradition. Pearson has bravely joined them; and inevitably he owes a great deal to them. 1
