By contrast, Arrian lived in a radically different world, as an ethnic Greek and a Roman citizen, a military commander and high public official under the emperors Trajan and Hadrian, as well as a philosopher and leading literary light of his day; as a historian, Arrian sets out to describe events that took place 400 years before his own lifetime, based on a wide variety of earlier historical accounts, all now lost, written with widely differing aims, from the fabulous to the propagandistic. In this sense, Arrian is closer to modern historians than to his more famous precursors, “a noble predecessor and even, perhaps, a little bit of a model,” as it’s put in “The Landmark Arrian.”

The manipulation of Alexander’s story began in the king’s own lifetime; Alexander himself, as we’ve seen, had a flair for symbolism and publicity; his official portraiture caught that look of otherworldly aspiration that helped inspire the modern notion of “Alexander the Dreamer”; he ostentatiously emulated his mythical ancestor (and Greek literature’s other killer angel) Achilles, the Homeric scourge of Asian Troy; and he employed an official historian all too aware of literature’s ability to shape reality. His legend never ceased to be elaborated: a highly fictionalized biography, the “Alexander Romance,” with roots in classical times but embellished through the centuries with layer after layer of fantastical elements, was translated, adapted or expanded in Greek, Latin, Syriac, Persian, Arabic, Hebrew and the languages of medieval Europe. In the Middle Ages, it won Alexander a paradoxical place in Christian mythology and thought (his image decorates cathedrals), and was translated more frequently than any other work except the Gospels.

No wonder “attempting to reconstruct the historical Alexander is almost as problematic as trying to reconstruct the historical Jesus,” as Paul Cartledge writes in this volume’s introduction. Arrian approaches this task by relying above all on the writings of a remarkable witness — Ptolemy, a general of Alexander’s who later founded the Hellenistic kingdom of Egypt and originated the long line of Macedonian rulers there that ended only with Cleopatra. Both Ptolemy and Arrian, “The Landmark Arrian” informs us, had their own biases — in Ptolemy’s case, a desire to exalt himself at the expense of his rivals, and in Arrian’s, perhaps, an exaggerated regard for authority, both military and imperial. Arrian’s frank admiration of Alexander is qualified on moral grounds, but still bears the marks of apologia, playing down the king’s drunkenness, his martial brutality (which in India devolved into sheer genocide), the reigns of terror he inflicted on subordinates who got in his way, and his megalomania.

Nonetheless, while far from definitive, Arrian has usually been considered the most reliable source on the period. And with his direct and austere yet elevated style, well captured in the new translation by Pamela Mensch, he was a consummate literary artist. As Romm puts it, of all our sources Arrian best succeeds “in making the campaign a real event, and in making Alexander a real, if remote and inscrutable, human being.” At another level, the writer-generals Arrian and Ptolemy provide an account that can be read purely as high military adventure, with Alexander as lion­hearted hero, riding at the head of one of history’s most devastating, and fascinating, military machines.