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This chapter looks at how several contemporary scholars, courtiers, and writers who knew Alexander wrote histories of his exploits. From them scholars can glean some idea of historical events, but also the nonhistorical ones, as well as much that was generated by prejudice for or against their subject. All these historians have been discussed by Lionel Pearson in his The Lost Histories of Alexander the Great, a monograph of the American Philological Association of 1960. An even fuller account of these sources is Professor U. P. Arora's Greeks on India, Alexander to Megasthenes. The chapter dwells especially on two authors who depended on and quoted these sources—Plutarch and Arrian—writing long after the events.

Surveys the scope, themes, and style of Epictetus’ Discourses, starting with an assessment of their transmission by Epictetus’ student, Arrian. They should be read as an accurate record of how he taught the young men who were his students to internalize the principles of Stoicism and practise that philosophy in daily life. Epictetus’ expository style has three components: protreptic, elenctic, and doctrinal, for which he appeals to three respective authorities—Socrates, the Cynic Diogenes, and the Stoic Zeno.

This chapter focuses on a recent study which suggested a possible link between the religious tonsure spoken of by Bede and others and the singular hairstyles identified on Iron Age iconographic human representations from central Europe that appear to show parts of the head deliberately shaved. In the second century ad, the Greek author Arrian wrote the Cynegetica, a treatise on hunting in which he describes its practice among the Gauls not only as an elite sport, but also as having a close link with religion, remarking that the Gauls never engaged in hunting without first seeking the blessing of the gods. An amazing Iron Age site, High Pasture Cave, on the Island of Skye, has revealed evidence for the special, ritual treatment of a musical instrument very similar to the one depicted at Paule. Characteristic of many Iron Age and Roman-period bog-bodies are signs of physical abnormality, particularly associated with malnutrition.

The fourth chapter discusses Alexander the Great’s expressions of remorse after his drunken murder of the courtier Cleitus. Here the dark side of remorse emerges more clearly, for his remorse is treated by most of the sources as either simply performative, or as genuine, but pointless, for it does not ameliorate his behaviour.

This chapter considers accounts of the geography and ancient history of India. For example, Arrian explicitly based his account of the geography and hydrography of India on Eratosthenes, who must have used Megasthenes, while Strabo incorporated his references to Megasthenes into the general discussion of these matters in which he takes issue with all his predecessors, referring also from time to time to Daimachus and Patrocles. The closest approach to Megasthenes' original has usually been taken to be Diodorus 2.35–42. Regarding the boundaries of India, Diodorus overlaps with Megasthenes, but the latter is not necessarily his sole source. In fact, he may be following Eratosthenes in the first instance. He also follows Eratosthenes on the Sacae.

This chapter singles out three men from the second century AD who exalted the ideal of the philosopher ruler, and who themselves were honoured as philosophers: Plutarch, Arrian, and Marcus Aurelius. Their ambitions clearly combined the abstract and the practical, a desire to do what was right and noble and to be honoured for doing so. Yet that pursuit of honour, that philotimia, gave birth to inner tensions and contradictory desires that tended to destabilize their philosophic world-view. In his Meditations, Marcus Aurelius shows that he was troubled by a desire for fame which he knew to be useless, and by the emptiness of death: he longed for a guarantee that the gods would bless him after death and his fame would continue. Arrian too was driven by a desire for glory, while hoping to benefit others. Plutarch’s ambition was to accept Plato’s challenge and educate the political elite, from which he too hoped to win honour.

A mass of comparative material, Greek and Latin, rhythmic and unrhythmic, enables us to scrutinize sharply Plutarch’s treatment in the Life of Alexander of Alexander’s leap into an Indian city full of enemies. Alexander’s life was a field cultivated with particular assiduity by ancient writers; Plutarch himself treats the incident at length in a philosophical work: De Alexandri Magni Fortuna aut Virtute, speech 2. The density of rhythm in this passage is crucial to making the moment a climax in the Life; the writing is actually sober and intently compact when compared both to Plutarch’s own treatment in the piece mentioned and to the Homeric account in Arrian. This sobriety is historiographical as well as stylistic.

Connected with textual unfinishedness are several concepts. Chapter 3 explores two such concepts and their connection to the idea of textual stability and authorial intentionality: accidental publication and postpublication revision. Unfinished texts often became what Larsen calls “accidentally published.” Publication was notional and social in antiquity, as the form of a published text would not necessarily differ from an unfinished one. The idea of accidental publication did a lot of different kinds of work for different writers. Moreover, even if a text was intentionally published, it could undergo substantive postpublication revision. All of the above calls into question what it means to talk about a “final” version of a textual tradition.