2022

This volume is a collection of papers that have been given at an international conference in December 2019 in Bregenz, Austria. They focus on Arrian of Nicomedia’s Anabasis Alexandrou which is our main source for the life and reign of Alexander the Great. So far, scholarship has paid only little attention to the Anabasis as literary cosmos of its own right. The various contributions critically evaluate the still extant general opinion, that Arrian deserves a distinguished status as the main source on the Macedonian conqueror since he allegedly closely followed his sources. But the first accounts of the participants in Alexander’s famous expedition have only survived as fragments and thus their literary production is more or less shrouded in mystery. Hence, the tension between Arrian’s literary creativity, propinquity to his sources, his relationship to his role-model Xenophon merits serious examination when assessing the value of his work as a historical source. The volume is the first attempt to contextualize the work of Arrian against various backdrops. This includes the reign of Alexander, the Classical and contemporary literary trends, the Second Sophistic as intellectual framework, the until yet neglected idea of "empire" as well as echoes and stimuli from the Achaemenid and Hellenistic period. The various contributions create a more complex image of Arrian as an author, his literary production and his idea of the Macedonian conqueror that helps us to gain a better understanding of this complex text and Alexander the Great as its protagonist.

Histos 16, 2022

The World of Alexander in Perspective: Contextualizing Arrian (Classica et Orientalia 30), 2022

R. Rollinger and J. Degen (eds.), The World of Alexander in Perspective: Contextualizing Arrian (Classica et Orientalia 30), Wiesbaden 2022: Harrassowitz, 189-216 https://www.harrassowitz-verlag.de/ddo/artikel/84347/978-3-447-11908-5_Free%20Open%20Access%20Download.pdf (open access)

Greece, Macedon and Persia, 2015

By analysing Arrian's account of Alexander's 335 BCE battle against the 'Autonomous Thracians', and comparing it to Arrian's account of his own battles against the Alanoi, this paper argues that Arrian was not merely a slavish copier of Hellenistic originals but a literary stylist and historiographer in his own right. However much he is indebted to Ptolemy’s history, Arrian's Anabasis Alexandrou is not simply a conduit for Ptolemy.

Classical World, 2007

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J.M. Madsen & R. Rees (eds.), Roman Rule in Greek and Latin Writing. Double Vision, 2014

This is a digital offfprint for restricted use only | © 2014 Koninklijke Brill NV

Greek Roman and Byzantine Studies, 2011

A RRIAN STATES in his Cynegencus 1.4 that his lifelong interests were philosophy, generalship and hunting. 1 With the topic of generalship the Anabasis Alexandri immediately springs to mind, but Arrian's interests in the art of command went far beyond his historical pursuits and assumed a personal and contemporary significance. 2 As legatus Augusti pro praetore of Cappa do cia (ca 131-137), Arrian held a military post on the Euphrates frontier second in importance only to the governorship of Syria. To this point in his life Arrian had led one of the most brilliant public careers of the Hadrianic period, especially for a novus homo from Nicomedia. He had been the first Greek (known so far) to govern a western province, when he served as proconsul of Baetica in the late 120' s; he became the first Bithynian to hold the consulship, probably in 129; and he was only the second Greek to command in Cappadocia. (c. Julius Quadratus Bassus was the first Greek governor, 107/8-110/11.) Nor was Arrian a novice at military command: he probably saw action in Trajan's Parthian war as a tribune and possibly served as legatus legion is on the Danubian frontier in the early 120'S.3 In 135 deteriorating relations between Rome and Caucasian Iberia prompted pharasmanes II to summon the Sarmatian Alani through the Caucasus in a display of force. Cappadocia was threatened. Arrian assembled his army, deterred the Alani, and Roman territory was 'See most recently A. B. Bosworth, "Arrian and the Alani," HSCP 81 (1977) 217-55; Professor Bosworth was extremely kind in sending me a draft of this paper before its publication. I cannot agree with his views concerning either Roman-Iberian relations or the Acies (see n.5 infra).

ABSTRACT: This chapter addresses the textual relationship between Maurice's Strategicon and its classical antecedents, a largely unexplored question, given that this late sixth-century military treatise has been studied primarily by Byzantine historians and as a foundational document of Byzantine military theory. While the unprecedented vernacular idiom, institutional jargon, technical content and documentary source-material of the Strategicon are consistent with Maurice’s professed intention to write a non-literary elementary compendium, his familiarity with examples of classical military writing is evident in explicit references to ‘the Ancients’, his adherence to the conventions and rhetorical repertoire of the genre and a self-conscious positioning of his treatise in relation to this literary tradition, as well as in conceptual and structural parallelism and similarities of language and/or substance. Without claims to exhaustive Quellenforschung, the paper examines the extent and nature of Maurice’s interaction with ‘the Ancients’ in general, and Aelian’s Tactica theoria and Arrian’s Acies contra Alanos in particular, with a view to differentiating the various ways in which Maurice exploited this classical heritage, whether as conceptual models, sources of technical content, validatory antique authority or allusive literary ornament. Greater clarity in this regard sheds light on the Nachleben of these two classical treatises, Maurice’s methodology, authorial credentials and literary-cultural milieu, and the transmission and reception of Greco-Roman military literature in late antiquity. KEYWORDS: Maurice’s Strategikon / Strategicon, Aelian / Ailianos, Arrian, Greco-Roman military literature, Late Antiquity, Classical Reception, Late Roman army.