Arrian: The Campaigns of Alexander

Explanation and Analysis of the Document

Two related themes unify the selections offered here: the dichotomy between Greek and barbarian they present and their highly rhetorical nature. In a series of speeches, Alexander attempts to persuade his soldiers through the rhetorical force of his arguments (before the Battle of Issus, prior to the planed invasion of India, and in connection with the integration of conquered peoples into the army), while the last section is Arrian's own speech in judgment of Alexander.

Stenographic records of political speeches, especially in the middle of a military campaign, would rarely have been made in antiquity; thus it was typical for historians to compose their own speeches that seemed best to express what a certain figure probably said on a given occasion. Arrian, in particular, was trained as a Sophist—something like a cross between a university professor and a lawyer—and so was as much concerned with literary creation as with historical reporting. He modeled his writing on that of the classical Greek soldier and historian Xenophon (thus his Anabasis, or “mountain journey,” takes the same title as Xenophon's memoir of his service as a mercenary in the Persian Empire a century before Alexander and thus also Alexander's allusion to Xenophon in his speech before the Issus) and self-consciously chose to write about Alexander, whom the Sophists considered to be the ideal of Greek culture.

In sophistic education, the equivalent of university-level students were often given assignments to compose effective speeches of the kind that they would have to give in their professional careers, such as a general might use to inspire troops to battle, or even to compose speeches appropriate to particular historical circumstances, such as Alexander's attempt to persuade his army to invade India. Arrian's speeches are fictions of this kind. They are most unlikely to reflect Alexander's actual words, but Arian's invention of a commander’s words “to encourage brave men in such a critical moment before the perils of battle.” This explains in part why the speeches are somewhat repetitive: they reuse standard tropes in variations on a theme. This intrusion of rhetorical forms into the text makes it quite difficult to evaluate some of the possible evidence that Arrian presents. For instance, did Alexander actually intend to conquer the entire world (or even India), or has the literary trope of the ruler bent on world conquest entered the text in place of Alexander's real goals?

If a common thread runs throughout these selections, it is the Greek stereotyping of and prejudice against the conquered Persians and other so-called barbarians (a dismissive term for non-Greek-speaking peoples). Notably, however, Alexander's atrocities against civilians in India were not premised on any estimation that their lives were somehow less worthy. Such massacres had been commonplace in the wars between Greek city-states and were simply considered to be an inevitable part of warfare. On the eve of the Issus, Alexander tells his commanders that the Persians are weak because they were “men who had become enervated by a long course of luxurious ease.” Similarly, in India some natives “submit to us of their own accord, and others are captured in the act of fleeing.” These statements betray a deep-seated Greek belief in their own superiority to other peoples. Alexander's soldiers are outraged when he gives these very barbarians the same privileges and status as themselves. This prejudice seems to prevent Arrian from appreciating the possibility that Alexander integrated the Persian aristocracy into the army on a footing equal to that of Greeks and Macedonians because he saw that only through such a policy of equality could his empire become a cohesive whole, a nation-state instead of a colonial empire.