The Landmark Arrian: The Campaigns of Alexander - Hardcover

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9780375423468: The Landmark Arrian: The Campaigns of Alexander

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 037542346X ISBN 13: 9780375423468

Publisher: Pantheon, 2010

The Landmark Arrian is an important new edition of The Campaigns of Alexander, the most authoritative ancient account of one of the world’s most brilliant military leaders. During twelve years of continuous campaigns, Alexander conquered an empire that stretched from the shores of the Adriatic to the edge of modern India. Arrian’s history of those conquests, the most reliable and detailed account to emerge from the ancient world, is a work that will fascinate readers interested in classical studies, the history of warfare, and the origins of East-West tensions that still simmer today in Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan. Drawing on Ptolemy’s memoirs and other sources that have not survived antiquity, Arrian’s portrait of Alexander is unmatched for its accuracy and immediacy. Having served as a high Roman official with command of an army, Arrian had a unique perspective on Alexander, imbued with a level of understanding that only firsthand military experience can provide. In the richl

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About the Author:

James Romm is James H. Ottaway Jr. Professor of Classics at Bard College. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. His books include The Edges of the Earth in Ancient Thought and the forthcoming Ghost on the Throne: The Death of Alexander the Great and the War for Crown and Empire.

Robert B. Strassler is an unaffiliated scholar who holds an honorary Doctorate of Humanities and Letters from Bard College and is chairman of the Aston Magna Foundation for Music and the Humanities. He lives in Brookline, Massachusetts.

From Booklist:

Anabasis Alexandrou (The Campaigns of Alexander), by Lucius Flavius Arrianus, a Roman of the second century, is the principal literary source for modern accounts about the Macedonian conqueror. If its composition three centuries after Alexander the Great lived inherently raises scholarly questions, Arrian’s account possesses a narrative momentum that will always interest general readers of ancient Greek history. To that audience, the editors have directed their Landmark series, which counts Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon in its prior lineage. Its formula of maps, photographs, chronologies, footnotes, and appendixes exceptionally elucidates texts without impeding their flow; readers may digress into academic controversies or forge ahead to the next battle, according to their wont. Arrian satisfies the latter inclination: historians use his information to reconstruct Alexander’s battlefield tactics, which this volume’s charts graphically depict. Arrian’s Roman audience harbored additional curiosities about Alexander, such as omens of his divinity, purges of his retinue, or incidents damaging to his reputation such as the destruction of the Persian capital Persepolis. A dual-use technology, the Landmark package is ideal for library needs: students may study, and browsers may browse. --Gilbert Taylor

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