Alexander & the Problem of Ancient History
As Father Tucker points out, it's Alexandromania right now. There's the movie, and the History Channel documentary (which I watched tonight) and two Discovery Channel documentaries. There are probably going to be Alexander the Great happy meals and XBox games.
Watching the History Channel doc, I'm reminded of one of the big problems of ancient historiography - its total unreliability. Ancient historians basically acted by compiling as many local traditions on their subject as they could gather, reconciling discrepancies where they could and acknowledging them where they could not. Living in, and writing about, an age before widespread written records, and lacking any kind of archeological abilities, this was the best they could have done, and they did what they could with it. But it's a historical method that's very open to error. There's no meaningful way to distinguish actual historical events from plausible (or even not-so-plausible) legends. Imagine trying to write a history of the 16th century by going around asking people what they think happened and you'll have some sense of the difficulty Arrian encountered in attempting to write his Anabasis Alexandri.
My point is that we know that, when you're reading a "history" written in the classical era or antiquity, some portion of what you're reading almost certainly didn't happen. But there's no way to know, while you're reading, which parts are genuine and which parts are a kind of historical pious fraud, included not out of malice or the desire to deceive but simply because the author, no better than we, had no way of knowing true from false.
Take, for example, the story of the decadence of Alexander's court after he became Emperor. It's certainly possible that the king, who conquered the Persians, was conquered in turn by Persian luxury, as it's said of him, that he took a concubine for every day of the year and demanded the Greeks hail him as they would a god. But it's also true that the idea of the stalwart European undone by non-European luxe is a pretty antique meme, known to the Greeks and Latins as surely as it is to us. So is it possible that the stories were cooked up, or at least exaggerated, as a pedagogical tool, a way of using the life of Alexander to promote sobriety and virtue. Who knows? Then there's the too-good-to-be-true story of him scaling the walls of Multan by himself, engaging the defenders in hand-to-hand combat, where - wounded by an arrow to the lung - he was defended by the bearer of his Trojan shield. Riiiiiight. And so we trust these stories as true, even knowing that some of them are false (as the History Channel did tonight).
Ahh, well: print the legend.
UPDATE: See generally, TNR.
Watching the History Channel doc, I'm reminded of one of the big problems of ancient historiography - its total unreliability. Ancient historians basically acted by compiling as many local traditions on their subject as they could gather, reconciling discrepancies where they could and acknowledging them where they could not. Living in, and writing about, an age before widespread written records, and lacking any kind of archeological abilities, this was the best they could have done, and they did what they could with it. But it's a historical method that's very open to error. There's no meaningful way to distinguish actual historical events from plausible (or even not-so-plausible) legends. Imagine trying to write a history of the 16th century by going around asking people what they think happened and you'll have some sense of the difficulty Arrian encountered in attempting to write his Anabasis Alexandri.
My point is that we know that, when you're reading a "history" written in the classical era or antiquity, some portion of what you're reading almost certainly didn't happen. But there's no way to know, while you're reading, which parts are genuine and which parts are a kind of historical pious fraud, included not out of malice or the desire to deceive but simply because the author, no better than we, had no way of knowing true from false.
Take, for example, the story of the decadence of Alexander's court after he became Emperor. It's certainly possible that the king, who conquered the Persians, was conquered in turn by Persian luxury, as it's said of him, that he took a concubine for every day of the year and demanded the Greeks hail him as they would a god. But it's also true that the idea of the stalwart European undone by non-European luxe is a pretty antique meme, known to the Greeks and Latins as surely as it is to us. So is it possible that the stories were cooked up, or at least exaggerated, as a pedagogical tool, a way of using the life of Alexander to promote sobriety and virtue. Who knows? Then there's the too-good-to-be-true story of him scaling the walls of Multan by himself, engaging the defenders in hand-to-hand combat, where - wounded by an arrow to the lung - he was defended by the bearer of his Trojan shield. Riiiiiight. And so we trust these stories as true, even knowing that some of them are false (as the History Channel did tonight).
Ahh, well: print the legend.
UPDATE: See generally, TNR.
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