L.'s book is a welcome contribution to the field of Arrianic studies, as it constitutes an original, thorough and successful effort to contextualise Arrian's compositional strategies (mainly in the Anabasis) within the prism of literary and intellectual trends of the Second Sophistic.
The book consists of an introduction, four chapters, conclusions, an appendix and two indexes. In the short introduction L. offers a concise Forschungsbericht on the relationship between Arrian as a historian and his intellectual environment, and sets the goal of the book: ‘to show how contemporary concerns and long-standing features of Greek historiography live side by side in Arrian's work, transforming and conditioning one another’ (p. 4). In Chapter 1 L. juxtaposes Arrian's careful treatment of his sources with the distortive fashion in which sophists exploited historical events in speeches defined by L. as ‘historical declamations’. L. initially draws our attention to the sophists’ practice of inviting their audiences to enter an intentional make-believe game of pretending that they participate in moments of the glorious past of the classical era. This practice is treated by L. as part of a wider and established attitude towards history, in opposition to which, L. unconvincingly argues, historians acted as some kind of ‘counterculture’. L. also analyses passages that reflect ancient historians’ traditional tendency to juxtapose the utility of their own expertise with the pleasurable nature of rhetoric declamation. To this tradition, L. reasonably notes, belong Arrian's historical writings. Within the prism of the aforementioned set of contrasts between rhetorical declamation and historical narratives, L. offers a fresh reading of Arrian's cautious stance towards his sources about Callisthenes’ opposition to Alexander's wish to impose his proskynesis in the central digression of An. 4.8–14. L. reaches the conclusion that, contrary to the sophists’ effort to invite their audience to relive the past, Arrian invites his readers to distance themselves from the narrated events.
In Chapter 2 L. sees Arrian's effort to correct the errors of previous literature on Alexander as part of his aspiration to update certain works of the classical period. Through an original and meticulous comparative reading of the proems of the Anabasis, the Cynegeticus and Xenophon's On Horsemanship, L. unearths verbal similarities between them, which he convincingly takes as strong pieces of evidence in support of the following thesis: just as in his Cynegeticus Arrian wished to enrich the outcomes of Xenophon's Cynegeticus on the basis of current developments in the art of hunting, in a similar vein in the Anabasis he aspired to teach his readership new modes of reconstruction of the truth about the past. In this line of thought L. traces in the Anabasis passages that betray exactly this intention on Arrian's part to teach us new ‘strategies of truth reproduction’. Again, L. mainly focuses on cases in which Arrian assesses the validity of his sources. The chapter ends with the analysis of some passages in which, L. argues, Alexander serves for readers as an example of a man who occasionally seems to learn from the mistakes of historical (Herodotean) figures, such as Darius and Cyrus, and at other times seems to perpetrate the same mistakes. Although the chapter is generally solidly argued, in a single case L. does not read the chapters on Alexander's enterprise against the Scythians in Book 4 in relationship with their context and thereby fails in strengthening an already persuasive point of argument. For Arrian stresses Alexander's failure to learn from Darius’ mistake not only in An. 4.4.3 but also in two further instances in Book 4. The first passage is found in the opening paragraph of the book, in which Arrian strikingly notes that the Scythians are described by Homer as ‘just and poor’ (An. 4.1.1). Homer is Alexander's basic reading according to the tradition (in contrast to Herodotus, who is never mentioned in our sources as being read by the king). The second source informing Alexander about the Scythians is his own historian, Callisthenes, who advises Alexander to learn from historical examples such as Cyrus’ and Darius’ humiliations by the Scythians (An. 4.11.9). These two passages, adding two further sources for Alexander apart from Herodotus (Homer and Callisthenes), strengthen L.'s view that Alexander did not take into serious consideration the historical knowledge about the Scythians he had access to.
In the last two chapters L. discerns certain trends of Roman literature and philosophy in the way(s) in which Arrian delineates Alexander's portrait. In Chapter 3 L. argues that Arrian, following his contemporaries’ practice of using historical exempla (including Alexander) as a means to express in a covert way their views about the proper conduct of monarchy, composes in the Anabasis a dynamic system of comparisons between Alexander and several other – mainly Herodotean – kings. This scheme roughly comprises four stages: (a) the narrative of Alexander's activities until the battle of Gaugamela, in which readers are encouraged to treat Alexander as the avenger of the Persians in favour of all the Greeks; (b) the ensuing account up to the occupation of the Mesopotamian cities, in which Alexander is invited to deal with the new challenges of the Persian kingdom and no longer convinces us that he continues his campaign as a representative of Greece; (c) the account of the campaign in Eastern Asia, in which Alexander is presented as resembling the expansionism of the Persian kings we read of in Herodotus; and (d) an account that stresses Alexander's rivalry with Heracles and Dionysus during his expedition in India.
Although this system is mostly convincing, certain parts of it can be questioned. First, I see no textual evidence in support of L.'s view that Alexander's campaigns in Thrace and Illyria are presented by Arrian as part of Alexander's alleged Panhellenic vision. On the contrary, Arrian repeatedly notes that Alexander ordered that the spoils from his victories in these territories be transferred to Macedonian soil (An. 1.2.1; 1.4.5). Second, L. treats the account of Alexander's victory over the Uxians as mirroring Arrian's intention to present him as resembling the incompetence of Herodotean Persian kings to control such peoples. L. bases this view on the following points: first, Alexander deigned to attack them at night in contrast to his unwillingness to do so in the battle of Gaugamela. Second, he acts as a Persian king by following Darius’ mother's advice to spare the Uxians. Third, Arrian, through his silence about whether or not Alexander appointed a governor for the Uxians, implied that Alexander failed to gain full control of them. All three arguments are weak. First, Alexander's night attack in this case should not be contrasted with a hoplite battle, but should rather be paralleled with Arrian's positive portrayal of this tactic in his account of Alexander's campaign in Europe in Book 1. Second, this is not the first time Alexander takes consideration of an Anatolian woman, as he has already offered Caria to Ada (An. 1.23.7–8). Third, Arrian mentions no appointment of a governor because he clearly says that the Uxians of the fields (and thus those of the mountains after their defeat) are to be included in the Persian satrapy (An. 3.17.1), as governor of which Alexander appointed Phrasaortes (An. 3.18.11).
In Chapter 4 L. brilliantly reads passages about Alexander's attitude towards corporal virtues, attrition and sufferings as a reflection of current views of the imperial era about issues of physicality. The book ends with a few general conclusions, after which L. offers an appendix, in which he gathers and reassesses the hitherto expressed views about the possible dating of the composition of the Anabasis, concluding that the most satisfying view is A.B. Bosworth's assumption that the work was composed ‘sometime in or shortly before 131/132 ce’ (p. 121).
Needless to say, the aforementioned criticisms by no means diminish the value of L.'s study, which is cohesively argued and attractively produced. L. vigorously and in an unprecedented way invites us to speculate on the ways in which imperial readership could have read Arrian's oeuvre, and mostly the Anabasis, as part of Arrian's dialogue with current intellectual and literary trends. In this way he unearths an abundance of facets of the relationship between Arrian and the Second Sophistic.
