Alexander the Great
The Anabasis and the Indicatranslated by Martin HammondOxford University Press, 2013 Despite the slightly dyspeptic scurrility of John Atkinson’s Introduction – in which he refers to the Roman emperor Trajan as “bellicose” and calls his Parthian War of 114-117 “ill-conceived,” prompting a natural curiosity about how many regions of Mesopotamia Atkinson managed to conquer on his last sabbatical – Martin Hammond’s new translation of the Anabasis and the Indica of Arrian is another triumph for Oxford University Press’ revivified line of World’s Classics. It’s a much slimmer but very fitting companion to the magnificent translation Pamela Mensch did for Robert Strassler’s The Landmark Arrian. The new Oxford volume is simply called Alexander the Great, and it forms a perfect, handy paperback of the works that tell the modern world more about Alexander than any other source material.“Source material” being a tricky term here, of course, since as Atkinson puts it when he’s not slandering Trajan, “it may seem strange to label a text of the second century AD a primary source for a chapter of history of the period 336 to 323 BC.” Arrian was a military man under Trajan (so he would have been the first to object to Atkinson’s cavalier claim that "...after capturing the Parthian capital of Ctesiphon, and following the Tigris down to the Persian Gulf, Trajan had to pull back and effectively abandon most of the territory he had won,” since it was Arrian’s friend Hadrian who abandoned that territory, after Trajan was dead), and he was a made political creature under Hadrian, a senator in Rome, an archon in Greece, and a best-selling popularizer of other people’s work in the Roman bookshops.Among that popularized work was much of the then-current historical work on Alexander the Great, including the memoirs written by Alexander’s mighty lieutenant Ptolemy, his great admiral Nearchus, and his paid flak Aristobulus. Arrian took all this material (lost to the present day) and more, mixed and weighed it in his own judgement, and produced his popular book about Alexander, the Anabasis, which both Hammond and Atkinson rightly remind readers is to be considered more a work of literature than a work of history, despite the many and obvious rhetorical tributes Arrian pays to Herodotus along the way.The Anabasis (and the later Indica, wonderfully included in this volume) is the work of a seasoned literary professional, and it’s the great virtue of Hammond’s translation that it reads so. Neither his version nor Mensch’s matches the urbane fluidity of the translation Aubrey de Selincourt did for Penguin a generation ago, but in the hindsight their work provides, this turns out to be a blessing – it shines a light on just how much de Selincourt was giving his readers de Selincourt and not Arrian. In Hammond’s strong, no-nonsense version, and especially in the set-piece speeches Arrian can sometimes manage so well, Hadrian’s toady for the first time speaks directly to English-only readers. When Alexander’s troops, exhausted at the end of the known world, refuse to follow him any farther, he rounds on them with a furious address, and in Hammond’s translation, we can feel the lash of the young conqueror’s anger, the reflexive preen of his pride, and the snap of his sarcasm, all at once:
And now I had intended to send home those of you no longer fit for active service and to make them the envy of their countrymen. But since you all want to go, go then - all of you! Go back to your homes and tell them there about your king Alexander. Tell them of his victories over the Persians, Medes, Bactrians, and Sacae; his subjection of Uxians, Arachosians, and Drangians; his conquest of Parthyea, Chorasmia, and Hyrcania as far as the Caspian Sea; how he went over the Caucasus beyond the Caspian Gates, crossed the river Oxus and the Tanais, even the Indus which no one but Dionysius had ever crossed before, as well as the Hyphasis too if you had not lost your nerve; how he burst out into the Great Sea by both mouths of the Indus, and came through the Gedrosian desert, where no one had every taken an army before, acquiring Carmania and the land of the Oreitans along the way. Tell them this. And then tell them that, when his fleet had successful completed its voyage along the west coast from India to Persia and you were safe back in Susa, you deserted him and took yourselves off, leaving him to the mercy of the very barbarians he had defeated. A fine tale indeed, sure to raise you in men's esteem and meet with the gods' approval. Now go!
The Oxford Alexander the Great comes with all the pedagogical features you might expect in an edition that hopes for university bulk-orders. There are several crisp, detailed maps, appendices on the arrangement of armies and the value of money, and generous explanatory notes for everything else. It’s an exceedingly well-done volume – so much so that even Professor Atkinson can be forgiven, albeit grudgingly!
