ARRIAN, ANABASIS 1.17.10–12 AND THE HISTORY OF FOURTH-CENTURY EPHESUS

Abstract

Arrian's account of Alexander's brief time at Ephesus (Anab. 1.17.10–12) is shot through with political and factional violence, but he nevertheless concludes that Alexander received acclaim for what he did in the city. But what did Alexander actually do at Ephesus? Arrian offers a list of events that historians have traditionally interpreted as connected to Macedonian intervention in Asia Minor before indicating that Alexander put an end to the violence. This article offers a new reading of this passage by situating these events in the context of fourth-century Ephesus to show how Alexander's actions responded to the local conditions that he encountered.

I. EPHESUS AND ITS HISTORIOGRAPHICAL KNOT

Alexander arrived at Ephesus soon after his victory at the Granicus in 334. At his approach, the Persian garrison seized two ships from the harbour and fled (Arr. Anab. 1.17.9). Arrian offers a succinct portrait of what happened next. The citizens of Ephesus greeted the Macedonians with open gates and overwhelming enthusiasm. Alexander thus entered Ephesus in triumph. In a matter of days, he resolved local disputes, declared his support for democracies, and led his soldiers in a procession to the temple of Artemis, prompting Arrian to conclude that ‘never did Alexander achieve such acclaim as for what he did at Ephesus’ (καὶ εἰ δή τῳ ἄλλῳ, καὶ τοῖς ἐν Ἐφέσῳ πραχθεῖσιν Ἀλέξανδρος ἐν τῷ τότε εὐδοκίμει, Anab. 1.17.12).

Despite the darker thread of political violence running through Arrian's portrait of the city, modern scholars have largely accepted this positive assessment.¹ In part, Arrian still enjoys a privileged position among the ancient sources, but, more critically in this case, the other accounts offer no alternatives.² The relevant book of Curtius’ history is lost and the accounts of Diodorus Siculus, Pompeius Trogus and Plutarch bypass Ephesus altogether. When modern historians expand their discussions of Alexander and Ephesus, therefore, it is usually to pad their histories with the rich anecdotal tradition that begins with the erroneous association of the conflagration at the temple of Artemis with his birth (Plut. Alex. 3.4; Cic. Nat. D. 2.69) and ends with stories about the relative appreciation of art by Alexander and Bucephalus (Ael. VH 2.3; Plin. HN 32.95).³ However, a narrow focus on Alexander obscures the local context in which his actions need to be interpreted.

In this paper, I re-evaluate this passage of Arrian to demonstrate that he compresses the history of fourth-century Ephesus in ways that contribute to persistent misunderstandings about its relationship to Alexander. With this approach, I aim to make three correctives to the modern interpretation of Ephesus in the 330s which holds that a Macedonian-backed democratic coup seized power between 338 and 336, followed by the reassertion of a Persian-backed junta from 336 to 334, before, finally, Alexander restored the democracy to great acclaim. First, examining the history of Ephesus prior to Alexander's arrival reveals a period of political renaissance during the mid fourth century coinciding with diminished central authority from Persia that allowed Ephesus to exert power over its neighbours. In my interpretation, actions during this period, rather than during the 330s, won its leading figure, Heropythos, the exceptional honour of a tomb in the agora. Second, revising the history of Ephesus in the middle third of the fourth century calls into question the existence of the democratic uprising in the early 330s typically assumed by modern historians. Third, this reassessment reveals both that the sanctuary of Artemis was not of particular importance to Alexander and that the Ephesians had already substantially repaired it by the time he arrived. The standard interpretation follows the ancient historians in presenting the singular importance of Alexander's influence at the expense of local activity, but closer inspection reveals that Alexander's actions were constantly modulated by the conditions he encountered.

II. HEROPYTHOS AND A FOURTH-CENTURY EPHESIAN RENAISSANCE

Classical Ephesus is poorly attested, but the conspicuous silence emanating from both literary and epigraphical sources belies that Ephesus controlled or sought to control its smaller neighbours.⁴ Tracking the relationship between Ephesus and its erstwhile satellite, Pygela, reveals both these imperial ambitions and that, after a century of impotence, Ephesus underwent a political renaissance in the middle of the fourth century.⁵

The earliest fifth-century evidence for the relationship between Ephesus and Pygela comes from the Athenian Tribute Lists, which record the phoros payments from the members of the Delian League from 454/3, at which point Pygela, along with Isinda, was already subordinate to Ephesus.⁶ The Ionian-Carian district rubrics are particularly fragmentary, but they reveal that the Ephesian syntely made one phoros payment of seven-and-a-half talents by 453/2, before undergoing a process of apotaxia at some point between 447/6 and 444/3 that led to the three communities making three separate phoros payments.⁷ Scholars have traditionally interpreted apotaxia as the product of imperial regulations designed either to squeeze revenue out of the allies or to strengthen the Athenian grip over its empire.⁸ However, Jensen has recently shown both how the process of apotaxia responded to local requests and that ‘sub-hegemonies’ persisted through the changes to the payment structures.⁹ The case of Ephesus supports Jensen's challenge to the traditional interpretation. Ephesus’ phoros dropped to six talents, Pygela paid one and Isinda paid one thousand drachmae (one-sixth of a talent), meaning that the transition marginally reduced the overall tribute levels.¹⁰ Ephesian hegemony over these satellites must have been a system vulnerable to abuse, and exploitation by Ephesus offered good reason for these communities to demand a change.

Nothing about Ephesus’ relationship with Athens in this period indicates resistance to the change in the phoros regime, but indirect evidence suggests that Ephesus never relinquished its claim to ownership of Pygela. When Athenian forces attacked Pygela in the last decade of the fifth century, relief came not from Ephesus but from the more distant Miletus (Xen. Hell. 1.2.1–3). Ephesus and Pygela nominally shared an enemy, so the choice probably meant that the Pygelans saw Miletus as a viable counterweight to the ambitions of its larger neighbour. This calculation probably also lay behind a treaty of isopoliteia concluded between Pygela and Miletus in the late fourth century (I.Ephesos 3110).¹¹ By the 290s, the tides had again shifted. An inscription from the boulê and the dêmos of Ephesus granting honours for Melanthos of Theangela attests to the presence of neopoiai overseeing sacrifices in Pygela as well as to the close relationship between the imperial garrison and Ephesian citizens living there, which may indicate that Lysimachus had incorporated it into the new imperial city of Arsinoeia (I.Ephesos 1408.2, lines 4–5).¹²

From the remainder of the fourth century only a single reference, from Book 7 of Polyaenus’ Strategems, testifies to the relationship between Ephesus and Pygela. According to Polyaenus, Mausolus (reigned 377/6–353/2) devised a pretext for a campaign to capture the fortified city of Latmus first by enlisting three hundred Latmians and then by leading them past the city (Strat. 7.23.3). Captivated by the spectacle, the citizens came out to watch the procession, only to find that a second force entered through the now-open gate. The specificity of the ancillary details suggests a kernel of historical accuracy that connects it to Ephesus.¹³ According to Polyaenus:

καὶ δὴ χειρωσάμενος αὐτοὺς ἐς ἀκρότατον εὐνοίας ᾔτησε παρ᾽ αὐτῶν ἄνδρας τριακοσίους φύλακας, ἐς Πύγελα παριὼν ὡς δεδιὼς Ἡρόφυτον Ἐφέσιον.

Having won their greatest goodwill, he [Mausolus] asked for three hundred men as guards to accompany him to Pygela since he feared Herophytus the Ephesian.

The name ‘Herophytus’ (Ἡρόφυτος) is not attested anywhere else, leading the modern consensus to identify it as a corruption of Heropythos (Ἡρόπυθος), which appears seven times in this small pocket of Asia Minor, including three at Ephesus from the middle third of the fourth century: two in Arrian and Polyaenus, one in an unpublished coin that Philip Kinns dates to 340–325.¹⁴ Given Greek naming practices, the occurrences of the name in Ephesus could refer to two, perhaps related, men, but the absence of the name before and after this period makes it more likely that all three occurrences at Ephesus refer to the same person.

The sources that mention Heropythos withhold most of the pertinent information about him. Polyaenus simply presents him menacing Pygela before 353. Arrian offers marginally more, revealing that he was dead by 334 and that he received the uncommon honour of having been buried in the Ephesian agora for having liberated the city (Anab. 1.17.11):

ὁ δὲ δῆμος ὁ τῶν Ἐφεσίων, ὡς ἀφῃρέθη αὐτοῖς ὁ ἀπὸ τῶν ὀλίγων φόβος, τούς τε Μέμνονα ἐπαγομένους καὶ τοὺς τὸ ἱερὸν συλήσαντας τῆς Ἀρτέμιδος καὶ τοὺς τὴν εἰκόνα τὴν Φιλίππου τὴν ἐν τῷ ἱερῷ καταβαλόντας καὶ τὸν τάφον ἐκ τῆς ἀγορᾶς ἀνορύξαντας τὸν Ἡροπύθου τοῦ ἐλευθερώσαντος τὴν πόλιν ὥρμησαν ἀποκτεῖναι.

The Ephesian dêmos, relieved of fear from the oligarchs, rushed to kill those who had brought in Memnon, looted the sanctuary of Artemis, cast down the statue of Philip in the sanctuary, and dug up the tomb in the agora of Heropythos, the liberator of the city.

Arrian provides a list of grievances during the period immediately before Alexander's arrival that led to the bloody retribution, but no information about either the circumstances or the date of Heropythos’ death. The scant detail usually leads scholars to conclude that he died during the ousting of a Persian-backed regime thought to have happened between 338 and 336.¹⁵ After all, the public memorial that was his tomb was desecrated during the brief period of a Persian-backed junta that governed Ephesus from c.336 until Alexander arrived in 334, in which case the deliberate destruction could be construed as a form of damnatio memoriae.¹⁶ Alexander restored the exiles forced from the city on his account (τούς τε φυγάδας, ὅσοι δι᾽ αὐτὸν ἐξέπεσον τῆς πόλεως, κατήγαγε, Anab. 1.17.10), so the freedom brought by Heropythos serves as a precedent for the one brought by Alexander.

Indeed, this is a tidy picture and plausibly the one Arrian meant to suggest, but its very tidiness masks the more complicated reality of fourth-century Ephesus and leads to the erroneous association of Heropythos and the Macedonian actions. The missing connection is Heropythos himself, who probably rose to prominence when political upheaval in Anatolia afforded Ephesus an opportunity to assert a measure of autonomy.¹⁷ The period immediately following the ‘Satraps’ Revolt’ in the 360s saw Ionia experience a renaissance that manifested in a wave of building projects up and down the coast. Where poleis such as Miletus experienced this rebirth under Hecatomnid hegemony, the evidence suggests that Ephesus asserted local autonomy.¹⁸

Between the earlier appearance of Heropythos menacing Pygela and the factional strife described by Arrian there is a gap of nearly two decades and a frustrating lack of evidence. The break is short enough that it is possible a younger Heropythos led Ephesus against Mausolus and an older man died liberating Ephesus from oligarchic rule, but I propose a simpler solution: that Heropythos had died and received a tomb in the agora already before Philip's interventions in the eastern Aegean. If Heropythos was instrumental to Ephesus’ restoration in the 350s, then this would have been reason enough to honour him—and reason enough for his tomb to be obliterated during a Persian-backed coup in c.336.

III. AN EPHESIAN REVOLUTION?

Revising Heropythos’ period of prominence at Ephesus to the 350s invites a re-examination of the remaining evidence for a democratic revolution. Scholarly consensus holds that there was a pro-Macedonian democratic revolution at Ephesus effected either with the support of Macedonian soldiers or in the expectation that the expeditionary force would soon arrive.¹⁹ The evidence for this political revolution is found entirely in Arrian's Anabasis. Arrian describes a statue for Philip erected in the Artemisium and toppled sometime before Alexander arrived in 334, and presents a close connection between Alexander's restoration of the Ephesian exiles and his support for democracies in Asia Minor. Much like the revision to Heropythos offered above, closer examination reveals the remaining evidence for this revolution to be flimsy.

Arrian lists the destruction of the statue of Philip among the four crimes committed by the Ephesian oligarchs, which, by implication, links it to the actions of Heropythos.²⁰ The fact that the inscription that would have accompanied Philip's statue does not survive poses a problem for understanding the dedication. Scholars have offered several suggestions for it while still accepting the context implied by Arrian. Bieber proposed that Alexander commissioned this statue as a posthumous memorial, but this requires an untenable chronology if the crowd actually destroyed the statue.²¹ Since the statue was supposed to have been erected in the sanctuary of Artemis (ἐν τῷ ἱερῷ, Anab. 1.17.11), a more common interpretation is that it served a cult function.²² There are two principal objections to the thesis. First, ἐν τῷ ἱερῷ, which this thesis interprets as locating the statue in the temple alongside the statue of Artemis, more probably refers to its location in the sanctuary, perhaps beside the temple. Second, Arrian refers to the statue as an εἰκών (a likeness) rather than as an ἄγαλμα (a cult statue), which leads Bosworth and Worthington to reject the cultic thesis, correctly.²³ However, doing so primarily on semantic grounds takes for granted a rigid distinction between statue types that is not always born out in practice. Pindar's Third Nemean, for instance, terms itself a χώρας ἄγαλμα for the victor Aristocleides (line 13),²⁴ while a fragmentary line from Hyperides’ prosecution of Demosthenes in 323 reads ‘to erect a statue (εἰκό[να) of King Alexander, the unconquerable god’ (στῆσαι εἰκό[να Ἀλεχάν]δρου βασιλ[έως τοῦ ἀνι]κήτου θε[οῦ, 5.32). Worthington interprets this line as sarcastic hyperbole directed at the Athenian response to Alexander's divine pretensions and without merit since no such statue existed, but it nevertheless uses εἰκών with reference to the hypothetical statue of a divine king.²⁵

Both the cultic thesis and Bieber's proposal of a posthumous honour also fail to account for the growing phenomenon of civic honorific dedications.²⁶ Excavations at Ephesus have revealed a veritable topography of urban dedications in the Hellenistic and Roman city, but archaic and classical dedications, including grants for citizenship, appeared at the Artemisium rather than in the agora.²⁷ Erecting Philip's statue in the sanctuary of Artemis neither imbued it with cultic symbolism nor needs to be interpreted as thanks for liberation. Rather, the presence of the statue is a sign of Philip's diplomatic efforts in the eastern Aegean, which, in turn, explains why the Persian-backed regime targeted this statue in particular once in power.²⁸

A second complication is the absence of evidence for a democracy in Ephesus before 334. Nawotka argues that an increased number of published decrees accompanied the transition from oligarchy to democracy and this appears in the epigraphic record at Ephesus only after Alexander captured the city.²⁹ Similarly, since Arrian says that Alexander restored exiles to Ephesus, one might assume Memnon had done likewise when he returned Persian power to the city in c.336. But this is nowhere attested, which suggests that there was no precipitating event like a democratic revolution that created a group of recent exiles in the early 330s. Rather, comparatively lax Persian oversight in Asia Minor during the third quarter of the fourth century, at the same time that the Persian centre was embroiled in dynastic turmoil, presented the Ephesians with an opportunity to receive Philip's entreaties. His death left them in a precarious position when they opted to double-down on their bet on the Macedonians, dispatching the orator Delius to Alexander to advocate on their behalf (Plut. Mor. 1126D).³⁰ This left an opening for an opposition party to appeal to Memnon, who was then reasserting Persian authority in the region. Syrphax and his associates orchestrated a power grab that, if the retributive purges in 334 are any indication, was bloody and brutal. They desecrated the tomb of Heropythos, toppled the statue of Philip, and drove the remaining members of the regime into exile until 334, when Alexander restored them to Ephesus.

IV. THE ARTEMISIUM

Ephesus had been under Persian control for roughly two years when Alexander's army arrived in 334, and the city immediately succumbed to an orgy of retributive violence. The Ephesians dragged Syrphax along with his son and nephews from the sanctuary and lynched them before Alexander put a stop to both enquiry and punishment in case the crowd should target innocent people (Anab. 1.17.12). This amnesty, combined with the restoration of exiles, lay behind the positive reputation that Arrian attributes to Alexander at Ephesus. Even though Arrian barely mentions the Artemisium, the sanctuary casts a long shadow over modern interpretations of the relationship between king and city.

According to Arrian, Alexander ordered the Ephesians to pay the phoros due Persia to the sanctuary of Artemis (τοὺς δὲ φόρους, ὅσους τοῖς βαρβάροις ἀπέφερον, τῇ Ἀρτέμιδι ξυντελεῖν ἐκέλευσεν, Anab. 1.17.10), but this directive has led to controversy on two interconnected grounds. First, Arrian subsequently says that Alexander relieved the phoros from Ionia, replacing it with a syntaxis (‘contribution’, Anab. 1.18.2), and, second, because a tradition found in Strabo holds that the Ephesians first rebuffed an offer from Alexander to fund the sanctuary (14.1.22). The implication that Alexander allowed the Ephesians to keep their tribute local while requiring the remaining Ionians to pay for the expedition creates a contradiction. Was Ephesus simply exempt from the new syntaxis?

Badian resolved this problem by arguing that the fickle king turned hostile to the prideful Ephesians, refusing to relieve the phoros and levying the syntaxis in addition.³¹ While there is no reason to dispute Arrian's basic chronology that Alexander first ordered the Ephesians to pay their phoros to the sanctuary and later replaced the phoros with a syntaxis as a general policy, neither did Alexander have a consistent plan to manage the captured cities.³² The notion that Alexander intended the Ephesians to pay their phoros to the sanctuary in perpetuity is a conflation with later traditions where the Ephesians also rebuffed his offer of perpetual patronage. Arrian's only claim to a repeated action is to the Ephesians paying their tribute to Persia in the past.³³ Moreover, nothing in Arrian's account of Ephesus marks this sanctuary as particularly special to Alexander, despite the anecdotal traditions about his birth and its destruction in 356. The earliest-known connection between the two events is in Hegesias of Magnesia, a third-century rhetorician whose work was accounted perverse and puerile in antiquity.³⁴ If Alexander ordered the Ephesians to give their phoros to the sanctuary ex post facto before abolishing the phoros altogether, then Ephesus no longer stands out from the rest of the tribute regime.

On the second issue, Alexander's offer to pay the sanctuary expenses in perpetuity, the principal evidence comes from Strabo, who credited the first-century b.c.e. geographer Artemidorus with praising his predecessors for not accepting a donation from one god to another.³⁵ Most scholars juxtapose the proposed dedication with Arrian's comment about the phoros to suggest that this was a workaround once the Ephesians rejected his initial offer.³⁶ However, Artemidorus’ comment is just the final piece in a longer discussion of the repairs to the Artemisium after Herostratus’ arson (Strabo 14.1.22):³⁷

ὡς δὲ τοῦτον Ἡρόστρατός τις ἐνέπρησεν, ἄλλον ἐμείνω κατεσκεύασαν συνενέγκαντες τὸν τῶν γυναικῶν κόσμον καὶ τὰς ἰδίας οὐσίας, διαθέμενοι δὲ καὶ τοὺς προτέρους κίονας⋅ τούτων δὲ μαρτύριά ἐστι τὰ γενηθέντα τότε ψηφίσματα, ἅπερ ἀγνοοῦντά φησιν ὁ Ἀρτεμίδωρος τὸν Ταυρομενίτην Τίμαιον καὶ ἄλλως βάσκανον ὄντα καὶ συκοφάντην … λέγειν ὡς ἐκ τῶν Περσικῶν παρακαταθηκῶν ἐποιήσαντο τοῦ ἱεροῦ τὴν ἐπισκευήν⋅ οὔτε δὲ ὑπάρξαι παρακαταθήκας τότε, εἴ τε ὑπῆρξαν, συνεμπεπρῆσθαι τῷ ναῷ: μετὰ δὲ τὴν ἔμπρησιν τῆς ὀροφῆς ἠφανισμένης, ἐν ὑπαίθρῳ τῷ σηκῷ τίνα ἄν ἐθελῆσαι παρακαταθήκην κειμένην ἔκειν; Ἀλέξανδρον δὴ τοῖς Ἐφεσίοις ὑποσχέσθαι τὰ γεγονότα καὶ τὰ μέλλοντα ἐναλώματα, ἐφ᾽ ᾧ τε τὴν ἐπιγραφὴν αὐτὸν ἔχειν, τοὺς δὲ μὴ ἐθελῆσαι, πολὺ μᾶλλον οὐκ ἂν ἐθελήσαντας ἐξ ἱεροσυλίας καὶ ἀποστερήσεως φιλοδοξεῖν⋅ ἐπαινεῖ τε τὸν εἰπόντα τῶν Ἐφεσίων πρὸς βασιλέα, ὡς οὐ πρέποι θεῷ θεοῖς ἀναθήματα κατασκευάζειν.

When one Herostratus set [the Artemisium] aflame they furnished another, better, one, gathering the women's jewellery and private offerings, and disposing of the earlier columns. Contemporary decrees bear witness to this. Artemidorus says that Timaeus the Tauromenian, being ignorant of these and generally being a slanderous sycophant …, says that they restored the temple with the deposits the Persians had made. But in the first place there was nothing deposited there then and, if it had been, it would have been burned together with the temple. After the conflagration it was missing a roof, and who would want to deposit such things lying in an open-air enclosure? Alexander [he adds] offered to the Ephesians to undertake all costs that had occurred and all those yet to come, in return for an inscription, but they were unwilling, just as they were unwilling to acquire a reputation for temple-robbery. [Artemidorus] praises the Ephesian who said to the king that it was unseemly for a god to make dedications to gods.

Both Artemidorus’ boast about Ephesus and Alexander's demand to receive an inscription are red herrings.³⁸ Artemidorus and Timaeus agree that the Ephesians had already raised funds for work on the temple, the one citing inscriptions for the selling of columns from the old temple and dedication of private jewellery, the other alleging that they stole Persian gold.³⁹ Following Artemidorus, Strabo dismisses the last source of revenue as slander from Timeaeus on the grounds that the Ephesians would not stoop to sacrilege, but also deduces that the dedications went up in flames along with the temple in 356 and claims there would not have been any because the temple lacked a roof. Despite widespread criticism of Timaeus in antiquity, none of these critiques stands up to scrutiny.⁴⁰ Nothing in the passage Strabo quotes suggests that the gold that the Ephesians stole was in the temple in 356, and Strabo does not explain why a roofless temple would have stopped the gold from having come through the sanctuary. Artemidorus seems offended at Timaeus’ account both because of his failure to acknowledge the other sources of temple funds and because of what he interpreted as sacrilege. Timaeus’ omission of the contemporary decrees is puzzling given his reputation for research,⁴¹ but these other inscriptions do not necessarily discredit him. The Ephesians probably would not have left an inscription as a receipt saying that they had taken the phoros.

If Strabo's quotation is accurate, then Timaeus reveals that, at some unknown time, the Ephesians took Persian gold deposited at the temple. Strabo interprets παρακαταθήκη as a reference to dedications at the sanctuary, but the word can also refer to deposits without religious significance. Like many sanctuaries in the Greek world, the Artemisium functioned as a bank.⁴² Xenophon specifically praises Megabyxos, the neokoros of Artemis, for his scrupulous guardianship of a deposit (An. 5.3.6).⁴³ Moreover, given the centrality of the Artemisium to Ephesian diplomacy, they may have stored the collected phoros at the sanctuary. Thus a speculative reconstruction connects these deposits with the confiscated tribute owed to Persia that Alexander retroactively dedicated to the sanctuary.

The sanctuary of Artemis at Ephesus clearly held symbolic value as a space for Ephesian diplomacy and Alexander led his soldiers on a procession at the sanctuary that echoed Agesilaus’ garlanded processions in the 390s during his campaign similarly branded for Greek freedom.⁴⁴ Alexander may have made an offer to the sanctuary—the name Agesilaus inscribed on the temple probably indicates that the Spartan king had done the same in the 390s⁴⁵—but the exchange did not have the signal importance that later sources impart to it. Alexander found the temple substantially repaired in 334 and absolved the Ephesians of having confiscated Persian gold, but neither punished them by requiring double payment nor rewarded them by allowing them to invest their tribute in this local institution. However, like the rebirth of the oracle at Didyma, the relationship between Alexander and Ephesus grew in memory.⁴⁶

V. CONCLUSION: MEMORY OF A CITY

Modern historians are usually satisfied to accept Arrian's verdict before using the episode to offer an interpretation about Alexander's rule or character.⁴⁷ Complicating these assessments, though, is that the relationship between Alexander and Ephesus outside this one passage of Arrian is largely anecdotal and centres on the stories about Alexander and the artist Apelles.⁴⁸ What is clear, though, is that Alexander's amnesty did not last. Political violence in Ephesus re-emerged by the 320s when Philoxenus arrested three brothers on charges of tyrannicide after local officials flaunted his orders to arrest them (Polyaenus, Strat. 6.49).⁴⁹

Arrian's account of Alexander at Ephesus presents a deceptive level of detail that, when combined with the absence of evidence from the other sources, has led to his version of events holding an authoritative position in modern scholarship. Closer examination reveals that Arrian collapses a longer history into a few short sentences and bends everything toward Alexander. This, in turn, is reflected in modern scholarship.⁵⁰ This Alexander-centric history also exacerbates the tendencies of what Briant calls the ‘psychologistic’ approach to Alexander, where every action is a reflection of his character.⁵¹ Contextualizing Arrian's history and the other accounts of Alexander in light of local circumstances, by contrast, not only offers a clearer picture of the effect of the Macedonian conquest on communities but also reveals the crucial drama of local politics that shaped Alexander's actions.