This new edition of Arrian's Anabasis and Indica pairs two important sources for the campaigns of Alexander the Great in a single volume, and also pairs the talents of an able translator, H., with the expertise of J. Atkinson, an esteemed historian of the Alexander era. The result must certainly be judged a success, but a success qualified by the book's stinginess with maps and illustrations.
Arrian's plain, sober prose style poses far fewer challenges to the translator than does H.'s last assignment for Oxford, Thucydides. This version has good flow and exhibits many fine touches, especially where tricky military terminology is concerned. One small problem is the rendering of Alexander's famous pothos, the keynote of Arrian's interpretation of Alexander's motives, as ‘yen’, a word that seems too folksy and familiar for such a grand emotion; but such errors in judgement are few and far between.
The volume's real strengths, however, lie in the annotations and auxiliary materials supplied by Atkinson. The notes are generous by comparison with the much scantier Penguin edition, if not quite as full as those of The Landmark Arrian. The quality of the commentary is consistently high. Atkinson takes an admirably neutral tone, refusing either to judge Alexander severely or to follow Arrian in excusing, or obscuring, the king's failings. His delivery of information is clear, concise and interesting, and the reader who follows along closely will learn much about the historian's craft. As with other Oxford World's Classics volumes, notes are signalled in the text by an asterisk and then given at the back – a system that works well for those adept at flipping pages, though some may find on-page notes, like those in the Landmark series, more convenient.
Atkinson supplies two highly useful appendices, both in the form of outlines or lists. The first gives an overview of the Macedonian army, here broken down into its many units and sub-units; each division or officer is briefly explained and then indexed with citations from the text. A second appendix gives much the same sort of breakdown of the courts and administrations of both the Macedonian and Persian empires. These resources contain detailed information of the kind that cannot be easily found elsewhere, and offer valuable help to first-time readers of the Anabasis – a text that relies heavily on an understanding of ancient military terminology and tactics.
The book's extremely generous index stands in contrast to its sparse set of six maps. Four of these depict regions of Alexander's world and two show Halicarnassus and Tyre, but there are no illustrations of the battles and military manoeuvres that make up so much of the Anabasis, nor any attempt to trace the route of Nearchus' voyage in the Indica. In a volume that has taken such care in other ways to ease the reader's path through Arrian's narratives, this is a grave disappointment, but perhaps one that can be remedied in a future edition.
