Arrian on Alexander's Conquest of the Levant

The excerpt below reports on Alexander’s conquest of Tyre and Gaza. Both cities resisted the Macedonian conquerors fiercely, and their territories were consequently razed. As is generally the case in classical accounts of Alexander’s conquest, there is no mention of any inland invasion of Samaria or Judaea. The absence of a Hellenistic record of Alexander ever having visited Jerusalem may indicate that the Macedonian conquest of Jewish territory was relatively uneventful as compared to the conquests of nearby Tyre and Gaza. Jews preserved their own accounts of encounters between local leaders and Alexander, generally considered legends by modern historians. In his encounter with the leaders of Tyre, Alexander is depicted as wishing to worship at the shrine of the Phoenician god Melkart (also spelled Melqart, Melkarth, and Melicarthus)—who entered the Greek pantheon as Heracles—but the Tyrians refuse to admit him. In the Greek accounts, Alexander’s reported visits to local cultic centers and the adoption of non-Greek court and ritual practices are significant starting points for the characterization of the Hellenistic era as the merging of “Greek” and other cultures.

The Anabasis of Alexander was composed by Lucius Flavius Arrianus, known simply as Arrian (ca. 86–160 CE), an important source for the history of Alexander’s conquests and the early Hellenistic period. Arrian drew from reports of Ptolemy I (ca. 367–282 BCE) and Aristobulus of Cassandria (ca. 375–301 BCE), who accompanied Alexander on many campaigns and are thought to have personally witnessed some of the events recorded in Arrian’s Anabasis.