Alexander the Great was antiquity\'s greatest commander

[Gregory J. Liebau]

Regarding the sources, it's absolutely impossible to tell how reliable they are, of course... But it's also impossible to tell how reliable any source from such a long time ago is, even if it is contemporary with the subject! These writers were the most famous historians of their time and had a great many resources available to them that we no longer can imagine possessing. It would be like writing a book about George Washington today relying on primary evidence. It's certainly a reasonable feat - I don't like the idea that in two thousand years people will be questioning our interpretation of the revolutionaries of the 18th century merely because we wrote a handful of generations after their deaths. If anything, our perspective is more realistic, considering that we know the course of history and are outside of the political influence surrounding these men and their priorities, prestige and promotion. It brings Procopius's Buildings and his Secret History to mind to realize just how tainted contemporary history can be. Would a contemporary account of Alexander be any better than those written hundreds of years after his death? I think it would much more likely be fraught with political and cultural propaganda, and possibly skew our vision of the man even more than the sources which are available to us!

-Gregory