Author Description

Anabasis Alexandri, the Campaigns of Alexander by Arrian, is the most important source on Alexander the Great. This is the Complete Edition. The Greek term anabasis referred to an expedition from a coastline into the interior of a country. The term katabasis referred to a trip from the interior to the coast. So a more literal translation would be The Expedition of Alexander. This work on Alexander is one of the few surviving complete accounts of the Macedonian conqueror's expedition. Arrian was able to use sources which are now lost, such as the contemporary works by Callisthenes (the nephew of Alexander's tutor Aristotle), Onesicritus, Nearchus, and Aristobulus, and the slightly later work of Cleitarchus. Most important of all, Arrian had the biography of Alexander by Ptolemy, one of Alexander's leading generals and possibly his half-brother. It is primarily a military history; it has little to say about Alexander's personal life, his role in Greek politics or the reasons why the campaign against Persia was launched in the first place. When I began this Translation, more than two years ago, I had no intention of publishing it; but as the work progressed, it occurred to me that Arrian is an Author deserving of more attention from the English-speaking races than he has yet received. No edition of his works has, so far as I am aware, ever appeared in England, though on the Continent many have been published. In the following Translation I have tried to give as literal a rendering of the Greek text as I could without transgressing the idioms of our own language. My theory of the duty of a Translator is, to give the ipsissima verba of his Author as nearly as possible, and not put into his mouth words which he never used, under the mistaken notion of improving his diction or his way of stating his case. It is a comparatively easy thing to give a paraphrase of a foreign work, presenting the general drift of the original; but no one, unless he has himself tried it, can und