Alexander The Great: The Most Reliable Sources Of History

Very few reliable sources on Alexander the Great’s reign remain in existence today. Of these sources, the four major ones are histories by Plutarch, Diodorus, Arrian and Quintus Rufus. The earliest of these sources was written in the first century BC, so it is clear to see that the author’s own personal outlook may have influenced by their times and personal experiences in life that may or may not have changed since Alexander was alive since he died about three-hundred BC. In addition to the times that these histories were written, it is important to know more about the authors of these histories, Their views and approaches to writing their histories, and more about the histories in general in order to determine the accuracy and biases that

First, let’s take a look at the historian Diodorus of Sicily. Now, Diodorus lived in the first century BC, and wrote the earliest surviving major source regarding Alexander the great’s reign. Diodorus lived near the end of the Roman Republic, and he wrote about the military campaigns of Caesar in one of his books (Bagnall et al. 2115). Now, due to the scarcity of sources on people of that time, not very much was known about this man, but it was known that he titled his history Bibliotheke or the Library as he intended to write a sort of universal history of his time. It was also known that he was from Agyrium, Sicily and he travelled all across the known world to gather the information that he needed to write his history. We also know that he wrote a great many books, but only fifteen of these books exist in full today (Sacks

Rufus wrote the work titled Historae Alexandri Magni Macedonis or The History of Alexander the Great of Macedon. This source had 10 books, but the first two have been lost to history. Additionally, we don’t know very much about Rufus’ life or the time that he composed the book, and these things have been the topic of scholarly debate (Heckel 1). Despite this, we know that Rufus lived after the foundation of the Empire which makes him, at the earliest, a contemporary of Diodorus. Additionally, from what we know about Rufus, he had a short senatorial career the Roman province of Africa, or modern