where necessary inventing circumstantial detail. His style and completeness unfortunately made him
rather popular, but at least he stands out as one who had thought about the purposes that history should
serve, and got them wrong.
To the modern eye another pupil of Isocrates, Theopompus of Chios is more attractive; he wrote a
Hellenica, a continuation of Thucydides, and then a work which suggests by its title the new direction
that history was taking, a Philippica, or history with Philip, king of Macedon, at its centre. These works
gaily exposed both the deviousness and corruption of Athenian politicians at all periods and the drunken
barbarism of the new Macedonian ruler of Greece. Anti-history, the exposure of vice and incompetence,
is always fun, and Theopompus wrote to puncture the pretensions of the great. But he also foresaw the
need for a new type of history, as the title of his Philippica shows-history for (or against) a world ruled
by kings.
History for Kings
Alexander the Great was the first serious challenge, and, being a man who knew that he was making
history, he was careful to take a historian along to record it. His choice was unfortunate; Callisthenes,
Aristotle's nephew, after displaying a mixture of sycophancy and sullenness, began tampering with the
Royal Pages and had to be disposed of. The actual Alexander historians are a motley crew, to judge from
their fragments-for ironically no continuous account of this great event, the conquest of the world,
survives from before the Roman imperial period. Our standard history, written more than four centuries
later by Arrian, a Roman official, chose to use two eyewitness narratives which were certainly
competent, one by Aristobulus, an architect, and one by Ptolemy, a junior commander who later became
founder of the Egyptian successor kingdom. Other accounts such as that of Diodorus use a popular
romantic version written by Cleitarchus, a shadowy figure of uncertain date and not necessarily a
participant. Many who went on the expedition wrote their memoirs in different literary styles. The most
genial is Nearchus, Alexander's admiral, who explored the Indus valley, the Punjab, and the desolate
Makran coast to the mouth of the Tigris in 326-324, and wrote a Herodotean account of it which is an
important source for Arrian's description of the Indian expedition. But the most lasting consequence of
the career of Alexander the Great was the tradition of the Alexander Romance, perhaps the most popular
book in world literature, compiled in late antiquity from various Hellenistic strands such as a fanciful
biography and collections of forged letters and treatises: the result is sheer fairy-tale, with Euphrates and
Tigris flowing into the Nile and Alexander born of an Egyptian snake, visiting men without heads and
Indian brahmins (the last a true episode), descending to the seabed in a diving bell, and flying in a basket
powered by griffins.
The Hellenistic Age
The challenge of the historical Alexander was therefore refused, and it is worth asking why neither the
age of Alexander nor the period of the Hellenistic kingdoms produced a new form of political history,
why no tradition of biographies of kings or dynastic histories emerged to cope with the great empires
and kingdoms. One reason was the strength of the tradition of history-writing created by the city-state;