Introduction

A modern history of early Rome opens with an explanation for the length of its introductory section about the ancient sources. One of the author’s main

reasons was that all the surviving literary accounts were written centuries after the events they describe.5 For classical Greek history, things are not as bad as that until we reach the reign of Alexander the Great, when, quite suddenly, there is a jump of three hundred years before we get to a surviving account. For this reason I shall deal with the specially tricky problems posed by the Alexander historians separately, in the long n. 1 to Chapter 19.