#Alexander historians

[jeannereames]

"There is no one about whom more have written more variously." --Arrian, speaking of Alexander

(...οὐδ᾽ ἔστιν ὑπὲρ ὅτου πλείονες ἢ ἀξυμφωνότεροι ἐς ἀλλήλους... [Anab. 1.1.2])

[ciderbird]

academic bias is so funny because you’ll be reading about the same historical event and one person is like “Despite the troubles that befell his homeland and near constant criticism of the court King Blorbo remained strong in the face of adversity” and the other one is like “after letting his people carry the brunt of his cringefail decisions Blorbo the Shitface refused to listen to any reason and continued to be a warmongering piece of shit. Also he was ugly.”

[icarusbetide]

Reminder that apparently Alexander Hamilton was invited to Thomas Jefferson's for a dinner in a room with portraits of "the three greatest men the world had ever produced": Bacon, Newton, and Locke.

And this little shit heard Jefferson say this, and replied "the greatest man that ever lived was Julius Caesar" probably KNOWING that it would absolutely make Democratic-Common Folk Woodland Nymph Farmer Thomas Jefferson have a stroke.

Happy Ides of March!

he paused for some time: ‘the greatest man, said he, that ever lived was Julius Caesar.'

Jefferson's Letter to Benjamin Rush

[hiidkwhatimdoing7525]

Others: you ship the Founding Fathers??? eww. it's not real! me: no one else was in the room where it happened

[gracehosborn]

I decided to work on updating my bibliography for The American Icarus: Volume I and I started counting…. In total (as of writing this) I have/will consult three massive manuscript collections, twenty secondary books, and a freaky THIRTY volumes of printed primary sources.

What the hell????

[opera-ghosts]

Alexander Glazunov, Leopold Auer, St. Petersburg 1912

[toastytrusty]

top 10 frustrating things is hearing that there's some two dozen surviving hamilton-laurens letters and only having been able to find 18 in my effort to compile them all. need to take extensive notes on every bit of surviving correspondence between them but i can only scrounge up some dates from when other letters that were destroyed were supposed to have been written on. a tragedy really

[selfproclaimed-historian]

I’m a historian; of course I dream about late-night conversations with George Washington and Alexander Hamilton.

[wylanzahn]

Oh also are there any historians on here who have specific studies in Ancient Macedonia? I have the idea for a really cool series.

[waifu-napoleon]

[waitingforminjae]

just remembered alexander hamilton had a grandson named after john laurens who ALSO died tragically young in the army omg

[jeannereames]

Of all the lost ancient sources on Alexander - those we do not have - which one do you think is more likely to be just or mostly propaganda instead of actual history?

Alexander and Propaganda

Well, I suspect all of them had some useful history embedded, but I reckon Onesikritos is the most notorious for writing nonsense recognized as nonsense in his own time. He reputedly cracked up Lysimachos with his account of the Amazon Queen. He seems generally to be regarded as a boaster. He certainly inflated his own place in the campaign.

Ephippos of Olynthos is almost certainly guilty of negative propaganda, although we have so little of it (reliably attributed to him), it's hard to tell a lot. He didn't like Alexander (or Hephaistion), apparently.

Pompeius Trogus (on which Justin's account is based) was also highly problematic (and negative), not unlike Theopompos of Chios, writing about ATG's father Philip. This is one reason (of several) that Justin simply can't be relied on unless it backs up something found elsewhere ... which is super-annoying as some things are found ONLY in Justin. But is he making shit up?

Last, I want to mention Kallisthenes, Alexander's own court historian. It would be LOVELY to have Kallisthenes in full, even if it cut off in Baktria ('cause he was arrested!). Yet as the official account, I think we can tag it as propaganda in at least some places. He wrote some nonsense to flatter Alexander, such as the waves of the Aegean bowing to the king at one point. 🙄 He's also the one who did the most to promote Alexander as the son of Ammon.

BUT it would be great to have him because there's probably quite a lot of useful detail embedded in the account thanks to access to official records. We'd have to be careful of some exaggeration (especially in enemy numbers and enemy dead, et al.) but it would still be info much closer to the source than anything we've got now. So yes, definitely propaganda, but I'd still like to have it.

(This doesn't address later, Roman accounts who used him for moral lessons, like Lucian of Samosata and Seneca the Elder. What they're writing is akin to modern preachers telling parable anecdotes in sermons, and about as divorced from history. After all, a good parable can be TRUE without being, you know, historically accurate.)

For more on Alexander in our Roman-Era authors.

[ciderbird]

you know considering how many clinically insane takes on history I’ve already seen I’m surprised no one wrote a paper on Alexander I’s sexuality yet. Like Napoleon has a whole book trying to prove he’s bi but Alexander “religious guilt” Romanov who doesn’t have any kids, keeps platonic relationships with nearly all his ‘mistresses’ and is routinely described as effeminate is supposed to be straight? Like there should be at least some sort of discussion about this

[icarusbetide]

if you could have any smaller historical blorbo reach the same heights of visibility and popularity but arguably the same amount of misunderstanding and extreme idolization/villainization as alexander hamilton, who would you pick?

[une-sanz-pluis]

Alexander Neville, Norvicus: The City of Norwich (Text and Translation), published and issued from the press of Henry Bynneman, in the year of Humankind's Salvation 1575, in I. Walton, C. Wilkins-Jones, & P. Wilson (Eds.), The Histories of Alexander Neville (1544–1614): A New Translation of Kett's Rebellion and The City of Norwich (Boydell & Brewer, 2019)

[girlspecimen]

there is something so wonderfully horny seeming about biographers talking about their favorite historical figure of interest. one of the expert biographers of ho chi minh they have speaking in this documentary keeps talking about how as a young man he had like an "air of intensity" and "dark, sharp eyes that seemed to bore into the soul" lololol