Hello professor! How in control was Alexander of the narrative of his legacy? How much of the way we remember him was his own work, and how much was shaped by other people?
Alexander and Marketing
Boy, is that a thorny question. LOL
So, first, Alexander seemed unusually savvy about what we, today, would call “marketing.” Maybe (probably) this was in reaction to how the Athenians, and Demosthenes in particular, controlled the narrative about his father’s career, and trashed Philip’s public image. Alexander wanted to get out ahead of any such treatment. He no doubt hoped this control would extend to his legacy too…but he died too soon, and the subsequent bloody Successor Wars meant the Diadochi (Successors) used his image to their own ends.
I’m reminded of the Hamilton musical finale: “Who lives, who dies, who tells your story?” It’s a really great breakdown of how historical narrative works. “When you die, who remembers your name, who keeps your flame, who tells your story?” Someone recently asked me which Diadoch might have tried to stay truest to Alexander’s vision, and I’m not sure any could/did. But an equally important question is whether any tried to fairly tell his story. The one person who might have cared to—Hephaistion—was already dead.
Alas, we’ve lost MOST of what was written in antiquity. I’d wager we have between a fifth and a quarter left. When it comes to Alexander, as I’ve noted before, we have exactly ZERO that was written during his own lifetime, or even shortly after. At best, we have material embedded in later historians.
I’ve discussed these remaining sources in other Tumblr Entries, and now also on YouTube. I’ll link those at the end of this entry, so you can explore further.
We can divide surviving and lost Alexander sources into three basic groups:
1) Official accounts and other material written during Alexander’s lifetime (mostly lost).
2) Material (also lost) written during the Successor Wars after his death, which can be further subdivided into things penned before the Battle of Ipsos (301 BCE) that more or less finalized the Hellenistic Kingdom divisions, and material written after. But all of it, in one way or another, serves a particular view related to those Hellenistic kings.
3) Material written much later under the dying days of the Roman Republic and the emergent Empire. That can, again, be subdivided into Stuff/histories still existing, and Stuff now lost. Also, we can do “early” and “late” and “really late.”
(Most) ALL our surviving sources come from #3, with a few forensic speeches from #1 (largely Demosthenes, Hyperides, and Aeschines).
What that means is all our surviving sources were not controlled by Alexander, and several were outright hostile or were writing literally centuries after he lived.
All that said however, Alexander was clever about controlling his message, which is why Kallisthenes was brought along in the first place as Court Historian. In fact, from what we’re told, Alexander may be the first western example of such official accounts. The ancient near east had been doing it for, literally, a millennium or two. But Greece was new to the party. Prior historians Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon had all entertained their own unique biases in favor of this or that participant—but none had directly worked for the people/poleis/matters they wrote about. In short, they were moderately independent.
Kallisthenes (Callisthenes) was hired by Alexander to write what amounted to “Dispatches from the Front.” No, he didn’t call it that, but that’s how we might imagine it in modern terms. He was Aristotle’s nephew and seems to have got the gig for that reason. Aristotle, for those who don’t know, tutored the teenaged Alexander. And he got that gig because he knew Philip growing up, as his own father had been court physician for Philip’s father, King Amyntas III. Yup, All In the Family.
Anyway, Alexander brought Kallisthenes along to write about his conquests for posterity = a Greek audience. Again, he may have been inspired by how badly his father’s conquests had been detailed by hostile actors. But he was probably also inspired by Homer’s account of the Trojan War, Herodotus’s account of the Persian War, Xenophon’s account of Cyrus’s failed rebellion, not to mention various Persian histories of their kings, et al. So he had plenty of precedent, even if such an “official” account was more of a near eastern thing than a Greek thing.
From what we do know of Kallisthenes’s history, it involved a lot of over-the-top in flattery. Yet Kallisthenes himself was a difficult personality who liked to play up his asceticism, philosophy, and devotion to free speech (elutheria). His rough attitude made him unpopular and eventually got him arrested. Even Aristotle washed his hands of him, remarking that (basically) he didn’t have enough sense to know when to keep his mouth shut. He wanted to engage in egregious flattery to pay the bills while (wink-wink, nudge-nudge) HE was above succumbing to such nonsense. E.g., biting the hand that fed him. The result was a general lack of respect from most.
That said, his was the official account, giving him access to battle records, etc. I’d love to have that history, however absurd it might have been in places, because of that access to details. After his death (and maybe even before) the official history transferred into the traditional secretariat of the Persian court.
Other accounts of Alexander’s Great Adventure were written shortly after his death, but these would all have had some role in the subsequent Successor Wars for this or that player (or self-aggrandizement in the case of some, like Ptolemy and Nearchos). That’s why I separate these out from official material during his life, even if they appeared within a decade or so of his death. Doesn’t matter. That was a whole different (political) world, by then. And we have to regard it as such.
As more time passed, Alexander’s image waxed and waned, which of course affected how writers of those later eras presented him. Unfortunately, ALL our main historians (4 + 1) date to these periods. The earliest is Diodoros, writing during the fall of the Republic. Then in the Imperial period, Curtius (probably next), Plutarch, and Arrian. Finally, Justin (which is very short and highly problematic). Yes, they use earlier accounts, including Kallisthenes, but they weren’t just quoting directly. They editorialized. What did they carry over, and what did they tweak?
All right, for fuller discussions, see these entries (especially the first) for some detail about our historians:
“Alexander, Achilles, and the Ancient Sources” (2019)
“Alexander and Propaganda” (2024)
“Historians of Alexander the Great” (2025)
“Plutarch, Moralizing, Alexander, and akratia” (2021)
“What the Hell is Historiography (and Why Should You Care)?” (2022)
Then, on YouTube, I now have a series on the sources, so you can go directly to that Playlist. You can skip the first one, as that’s mostly about me and why I started the YouTube series, but after that, I talk about how to read ancient sources, what missing (“lost”) sources are, and then several videos on the sources we have, and the sources we don’t:
