Arrian

Based on Wikipedia: Arrian

The most reliable ancient account of Alexander the Great's conquests was written by a man who lived four centuries after Alexander died. This curious fact tells us something important about how history gets preserved—and about the remarkable life of the historian who preserved it.

His name was Arrian, and he was not simply a scholar tucked away in a library. He governed a Roman province, commanded legions in battle against nomadic invaders, studied philosophy under one of antiquity's most influential teachers, and counted the Emperor Hadrian among his personal friends. To understand Alexander, we must first understand the man who shaped how we know Alexander.

A Greek Citizen of Rome

Arrian was born around 86 to 89 AD in Nicomedia, a prosperous city on the Sea of Marmara in what is now northwestern Turkey. Today the city is called İzmit. In Arrian's time, it served as the capital of the Roman province of Bithynia—a region that had been Greek-speaking for centuries before Rome absorbed it.

His full Roman name, Lucius Flavius Arrianus, reveals something about his family's status. The "Flavius" indicates Roman citizenship that likely stretched back several generations, probably to the time Rome first conquered the region some 170 years before his birth. His family belonged to the Greek provincial aristocracy—wealthy, educated, culturally Greek, but politically Roman. This dual identity would shape his entire career.

Think of it like being from a prestigious Boston family in the early American republic: your immediate culture is distinctly local, but your political allegiance and opportunities come from the larger nation you belong to.

The Philosophy Student

Sometime between 117 and 120 AD, the young Arrian traveled to Nicopolis in northwestern Greece. He went to study under Epictetus, a Stoic philosopher whose influence would ripple through Western thought for two millennia.

Epictetus himself had a remarkable story. Born a slave in Phrygia (another region of modern Turkey), he had been freed and eventually became one of the most respected teachers of his age. His philosophy emphasized what we can and cannot control, the importance of accepting what happens to us, and the cultivation of inner tranquility regardless of external circumstances. These ideas would later influence Marcus Aurelius, and through him, countless others down to the present day.

Here is where Arrian made his first lasting contribution to history. Epictetus, like Socrates before him, never wrote anything down. Everything we know about his teachings comes from Arrian's notes. The young student recorded his teacher's lectures, creating what became known as the Discourses of Epictetus and a shorter handbook called the Enchiridion—a pocket-sized summary of Stoic principles that monks copied and carried through the Middle Ages.

Arrian claimed he published these notes only because unauthorized versions had begun circulating. Whether this was genuine reluctance or conventional modesty, we cannot know. What matters is that he gave us Epictetus.

His philosophical studies earned him a significant nickname. The Athenians began calling him "the young Xenophon," comparing his relationship to Epictetus with Xenophon's relationship to Socrates four centuries earlier. Xenophon, a soldier and writer, had been a student of Socrates and later wrote histories, philosophical dialogues, and practical treatises. Arrian would eventually embrace this comparison so fully that he called himself "the second Xenophon."

The Imperial Career

Philosophy was not Arrian's only path forward. By around 126 AD, he had become a friend of the Emperor Hadrian—one of Rome's most cultured and capable rulers, famous for building the wall across Britain and for his extensive travels throughout the empire.

Hadrian appointed Arrian to the Roman Senate, a remarkable honor for a provincial Greek. Around 130 AD, Arrian became a consul suffectus, meaning he held the consulship for part of a year rather than as one of the two main consuls elected at the start of the year. The consulship was the highest regular office in Rome, and holding it typically required being about 42 years old. This timing is actually how historians estimate when Arrian was born—counting backwards from his consulship.

Then, in 132 AD, Hadrian made him governor of Cappadocia, a large and strategically important province in eastern Anatolia, bordering hostile territories. This was not a ceremonial position. Arrian commanded two legions—around 10,000 soldiers—and bore responsibility for defending the empire's frontier.

The Battle Against the Alani

In 135 AD, Arrian faced his moment of military crisis. The Alani, a nomadic people related to the Scythians and ancestors of the modern Ossetians, launched an invasion at the instigation of King Pharasmanes II of Iberia (a kingdom in the Caucasus, not the peninsula containing Spain).

The historian Cassius Dio recorded what happened:

A second war was begun by the Alani (they are Massagetae) at the instigation of Pharasmanes. It caused dire injury to the Albanian territory and Media, and then involved Armenia and Cappadocia; after which, as the Alani were not only persuaded by gifts from Vologaesus, but also stood in dread of Flavius Arrianus, the governor of Cappadocia, it came to a stop.

The Alani were feared warriors, mounted archers and lancers from the steppes north of the Caucasus Mountains. They had swept through several territories before reaching Cappadocia, where Arrian's legions stopped them cold. The combination of diplomatic pressure (bribes from the Parthian king Vologaesus) and military deterrence (fear of Arrian's forces) ended the threat.

Arrian wrote an account of this campaign called "Deployment Against the Alani"—a fragmentary work that survives in pieces. In it, he explicitly described using Greek military methods, particularly the formation and discipline of the phalanx, adapted for Roman legionary warfare. Here was a man who read ancient Greek military texts and then actually applied them in battle.

The Historian of Alexander

Arrian's most enduring work is the Anabasis of Alexander, a history of Alexander the Great's campaigns from his accession to his death. The title deliberately echoes Xenophon's Anabasis, which described the march of Greek mercenaries through Persia. "Anabasis" literally means "going up" or "expedition into the interior," and Xenophon's account of ten thousand Greek soldiers fighting their way home from the heart of the Persian Empire was a classic that every educated Greek knew.

Why did Arrian's account become the standard? Largely because of his sources. For the military narrative, he relied primarily on Ptolemy and Aristobulus—both of whom had accompanied Alexander on his campaigns. Ptolemy later became pharaoh of Egypt and founder of the dynasty that ended with Cleopatra. Aristobulus was an engineer and architect in Alexander's army. Both wrote memoirs that are now lost, surviving only through Arrian's use of them.

Arrian approached his sources with a critical eye unusual for ancient historians. He compared accounts, noted discrepancies, and generally favored Ptolemy for military matters while acknowledging that a king might have incentive to embellish his own role. This methodology, combined with his own military experience, gave his account a credibility that other Alexander histories lacked.

For centuries, scholars treated Arrian as almost unimpeachable. Modern research has become somewhat more skeptical, recognizing that Arrian made choices about what to include and how to frame events—he was not simply a neutral transmitter of facts. Nevertheless, the Anabasis remains our fullest and most coherent ancient account of Alexander's conquests.

The Other Works

Arrian was prolific. Besides the philosophical writings and the Alexander history, he produced works on an impressive range of subjects.

The Indica described India and recounted the voyage of Nearchus, one of Alexander's admirals who sailed a fleet from the Indus River to the Persian Gulf. The first part drew heavily on Megasthenes, a Greek ambassador who had traveled to the court of the Indian king Chandragupta Maurya. The second part used Nearchus's own journal. This was Arrian acting as a compiler and editor, weaving together accounts of lands most Greeks and Romans would never see.

He wrote a History of the Diadochi—the "successors" who carved up Alexander's empire after his death in 323 BC. Originally ten books, it survives only in fragments and summaries. The period of the Diadochi saw some of history's most brutal wars as Alexander's generals fought each other for decades, eventually establishing the Ptolemaic kingdom in Egypt, the Seleucid empire in the Near East, and the Antigonid kingdom in Macedonia.

The Parthica, a seventeen-book history of the Parthian empire and Trajan's wars against it, is almost entirely lost. The Parthians ruled Persia and Mesopotamia from about 247 BC to 224 AD, Rome's great rival in the East. Their mounted archers frustrated Roman legions for centuries.

He wrote on military tactics. His Techne Taktike, written around 136-137 AD, was a treatise on cavalry and infantry formations, including information on the nature, arms, and discipline of the phalanx. Part of it may have been a tribute to Hadrian, written for the emperor's twentieth anniversary celebration, but scholars debate whether the detailed tactical discussions had practical applications or were purely literary exercises.

And he wrote on hunting. His Cynegeticus describes coursing hares with sighthounds—specifically the Celtic greyhound, called vertragi in Latin. This was a gentleman's sport, and Arrian wrote about it with evident enthusiasm. He explicitly positioned his work as an addition to Xenophon's earlier treatise on hunting, further cementing the connection to his literary model.

The Reputation

The Roman writer Lucian described Arrian as "a Roman of the first rank with a life-long attachment to learning." The Greek word Lucian used was paideia—a concept meaning something like "cultivation" or "education," but with connotations of the complete formation of a cultured person. Someone with paideia was not merely educated but refined, steeped in the Greek literary and philosophical tradition that remained the cultural standard even under Roman rule.

Arrian embodied the successful provincial Greek: fluent in both cultures, serving Rome with distinction while preserving and transmitting Greek heritage. He governed with Roman authority, commanded Roman legions, and held Roman office. But he wrote in Greek, studied Greek philosophy, modeled himself on Greek predecessors, and made it his mission to record Greek history.

The Afterlife of the Texts

Much of what we know about Arrian's life comes from a Byzantine scholar named Photius, who compiled a massive library guide called the Bibliotheca in the ninth century—some seven hundred years after Arrian lived. Photius summarized and excerpted hundreds of ancient works, many now lost, and his notes on Arrian preserve information found nowhere else.

The Enchiridion of Epictetus took a particularly interesting journey. Simplicius, a sixth-century philosopher, made a copy that somehow became attributed to a Christian monastic writer named Nilus. Under this disguise, it spread through monastery libraries across the Christian world. Monks copied and studied what they thought was a Christian text, unaware they were preserving pagan Stoic philosophy.

The Anabasis survived more openly, recognized for what it was and copied because of its importance. The first printed editions appeared in the sixteenth century. Translations into modern languages followed—notably William Vincent's 1809 English translation of the Nearchus voyage and the associated geography. Today, the Penguin Classics translation by Aubrey de Sélincourt, first published in 1958 and regularly reprinted, has introduced Arrian to generations of readers interested in Alexander.

Why Arrian Matters

Consider the strangeness of our situation. Alexander the Great died in 323 BC. He was written about by people who knew him, but their works are lost. What survives are later accounts—and the best of them was written by a Roman governor who lived four hundred years after the events he described, working from sources that he himself could not fully verify.

This is how ancient history works. We see the past through a series of reflections, each shaped by the circumstances and biases of the reflector. Arrian was a military man, and his Alexander is primarily a military leader. He was a Stoic, and his Alexander shows Stoic virtues of self-control (along with notable lapses). He was a Greek proud of Greek heritage, and his Alexander represents the spread of Greek civilization.

Modern historians must read Arrian critically, asking not just "what does he say happened?" but "why does he tell the story this way?" Yet even with these caveats, Arrian remains indispensable. Without him, our picture of Alexander would be far hazier, drawn from more fragmentary and less coherent sources.

And there is something appealing about Arrian himself—the philosopher-soldier, the Greek who served Rome, the student who preserved his teacher's words, the commander who wrote tactical manuals and hunting treatises and histories spanning from Alexander to his own time. He lived a full life in an age when such lives were possible for the fortunate few, and he left behind a body of work that has lasted two thousand years.

When we read about Alexander's campaigns, we are really reading Arrian. When we encounter Stoic philosophy in its ancient form, we are often reading Arrian's notes. He stands as an intermediary between the ancient Greek world and our own, shaping what we know and how we know it. The second Xenophon earned his title.