Alexander the Great: Historical Texts in Translation (Blackwell Sourcebooks in Ancient History)

Rating:
Summary: Not what I expected
Review: I was very much looking forward to this Heckel/Yardley effort, but the actual book turned out to be something other than I was expecting. Unfortunately, although I suspect it will be extremely popular with undergraduates eager to find a source of citations for their term papers (and too lazy to do their own research), I'd have to say that it fell considerably short of my expectations.

The good news is that the HeckelYardley team includes quite a number of passages from hitherto difficult-to-find English versions of the Metz Epitome, the Itinerary of Alexander, the Heidelberg Epitome, and the Book of the Death of Alexander, all in new translations by the redoubtable Yardley. In addition they provide quotes from other sources, as well as from the five classic biographies, including those from Athanaeus, Cicero and so on. The bad news, from my perspective, begins with the fact that Heckel has chosen to include only representative quotes on each of his chosen topics and has omitted to add a list of the other source citations on those topics, which I think would have considerably increased the value of this book to scholars. Instead, he has clearly aimed this work at students.

It is difficult to blame Heckel and Yardley for this decision, in view of the incredible amount of work they put into their 1997 Clarendon collaboration Justin: Epitome of the Philippic History of Pompeius Trogus, Vol. I, Books 11-12: Alexander the Great, only to find that it sold very few copies other than to libraries, in large part because the first printing was priced beyond the reach of any but dedicated scholars. With Sources in Translation's attractive price and broader appeal, they should finally see some decent income from their efforts - and that's a good thing, because, as a team, they have made some major contributions to modern Alexander scholarship and can be expected to make more in the near future.

But, for serious students of Alexander, part of the problem with this book is exactly that it is aimed at those who are less so. Heckel's explanatory snippets are brief, and thus highly-compressed, and therefor necessarily something short of comprehensive. His footnotes are sparing and early on I found a cross-reference in the introduction that pointed to a passage from the Metz that does not actually appear to have made it into the published book - which I take as evidence of poor proofreading on the part of Heckel's editors.

In sum, this is not the book I wish Heckel and Yardley had produced - one which would have collected only passages from sources other than the five mainstay biographies - and I don't think the book they did do is as useful to serious students of Alexander as that one would have been. At the same time, I think this book will be warmly welcomed by the undergraduate community - and I would be surprised if university-level classical history instructors are not inundated by term papers about Alexander (all of which will both be based on this book and parrot Heckel's explanations), from now until the end of time.