The Behistun relief: Darius I receiving the submission of rebel kings, carved c. 520 BC — The Behistun relief of Darius I (c. 520 BC) — the Persian Empire's own voice in stone, and a reminder of the sources we *don't* have for Alexander.

The Sources Problem

Alexander died in 323 BC. Our best history of him was written around AD 150. Everything in between is reconstruction — this page shows the wiring.

The gap

No contemporary narrative of Alexander’s reign survives. His court historian Callisthenes wrote an official account of the early campaigns — lost, except in quotations. Ptolemy (the future king of Egypt) and Aristobulus (an engineer on the campaign) both wrote memoirs — lost. Cleitarchus wrote the ancient bestseller about Alexander — lost. Onesicritus wrote marvels — lost. What we have are five authors who read those lost books:

Author	Work	Date written	Gap after Alexander	Main lost source used
Diodorus Siculus	Bibliotheca Book 17	c. 60–30 BC	~280 years	Cleitarchus
Quintus Curtius Rufus	Historiae 3–10	1st c. AD	~350 years	Cleitarchus (mostly)
Plutarch	Life of Alexander	c. AD 100–120	~430 years	Many; fond of anecdote
Arrian	Anabasis	c. AD 130–160	~450 years	Ptolemy, Aristobulus
Justin (epitome of Trogus)	Epitome	2nd–3rd c. AD	~500 years	Trogus (lost)

Every narrative on this site is, at bottom, one of these five people telling you what a lost book said.

The two traditions

Modern scholarship (since the 19th century) sorts the tradition into two streams:

The “official” stream: Ptolemy and Aristobulus → Arrian. Sober, military, apologetic. Ptolemy was there — but he was also a king justifying his own career, and Arrian chose him precisely because he found him most trustworthy. Trustworthy about tactics; self-serving about politics.
The “vulgate” stream: Cleitarchus → Diodorus and Curtius. Colorful, moralizing, sensational — the ancient equivalent of the bestselling biography. Cleitarchus may never have left Egypt; his battle numbers are fantasy, but he preserves episodes (Thaïs at Persepolis, the Susa weddings in full) the official stream downplays.

Plutarch floats above both, cherry-picking anecdotes for character. When Arrian and the vulgate disagree — and they often do — there is no referee.

What the gap does to the history

Speeches are invented. Every set speech in every source (Alexander at the Hyphasis, Darius’ letters) is the author’s composition. Ancient historiography allowed this; modern readers should not mistake it for reporting.

Numbers are rhetoric. Army sizes, casualties, treasure totals — all suspect, often by an order of magnitude. See campaigns.

Motives are retrofitted. The “policy of fusion,” the “brotherhood of mankind,” the divine-sonship program — each may be Alexander’s design or his historians’ explanation. We see the actions; the intentions are argued.

Chronology wobbles. Diodorus’ year-dating and Arrian’s campaign-sequence sometimes conflict by a full year. The timeline follows the modern consensus reconstruction.

The exceptions: contemporary evidence

Three things escape the gap:

The Babylonian astronomical diaries — cuneiform tablets recording the battle of Gaugamela and Alexander’s death year. Non-Greek, contemporary, bureaucratic. The single most underrated source in Alexander studies.
Coins and inscriptions — the Alexander coin types, the Priene dedication, city decrees. Contemporary, but they speak in propaganda and administration, not narrative.
The Royal Journals (Ephemerides) — quoted by Arrian and Plutarch for the final illness. If genuine, a day-by-day court record; if not, a very early forgery. Either way, our only “diary” of Alexander.

Why Arrian wins (and what it costs)

Arrian is the default backbone of modern narratives — including this site’s — because he names his sources, notes disagreements, had military experience, and wrote in the plain style of Xenophon. But Arrian’s Alexander is Ptolemy’s Alexander: the brilliant commander with the politics sanded off. Reading only Arrian gives you the campaigns and loses the court — the drinking, the paranoia, the Persian dress. This site uses all five, and says which one each paragraph comes from.

Source notes

The standard analysis: A. B. Bosworth, From Arrian to Alexander (Oxford, 1988); N. G. L. Hammond’s source studies; the Landmark Arrian introduction (2010).
On Cleitarchus: the fragments in FGrH 137; on the vulgate vs. official division, see Bosworth’s Conquest and Empire.

Limitations

Source criticism is itself an argumentative field; the “two traditions” model is the consensus but not unchallenged.
New papyrus fragments (e.g., of lost historians) continue to appear; any paragraph above could be revised by a new find.