This new volume in the Aris & Phillips series is like its many useful predecessors in format but in content strikes out on a new path (though one might compare the volumes on select fragments of Sophocles and Euripides). Instead of a brief account of the author and his career as a letter writer, the introduction begins with the complicating fact that very little of Alexander’s actual letters survive. What we have are mostly paraphrases, brief summaries, and a few quotes that later authors, above all Plutarch, have handed down. Monti’s introduction opens with an in-depth, scholarly assessment of the complex nature of these sources (pp. 1–6) and, after recounting a great deal of what can be said about Alexander’s writing of letters, his addressees, secretaries, etc. (pp. 6–49), returns to the challenges of studying fragments and delineates some important interpretative tactics (pp. 49–51). A thorough history of scholarship on Alexander’s letters completes the introduction (pp. 51–66). The scholarly depth here and in the commentary make it a valuable resource, though it assumes much of the neophyte reader. In the preface Monti proposes two noteworthy theses: (1) that Alexander’s dropping of “Greetings” (χαίρειν) from his letters after Gaugamela marks an epistolographic shift that “could rightly be part of the introduction of Persian customs at court” (p. vii); and (2), that Plutarch, the source of most of the Greek passages included, “appears as a key promoter of the image of Alexander as the new Great King, especially from what emerges through the letters” (p. vii). Neither of these potentially significant theses receives sufficient development in the introduction or in the commentary. Nevertheless, this book effectively raises these questions and provides, especially on individual texts, a compilation and assessment of select ancient data and modern scholarship that will be of use to scholars working on Alexander’s letters.
The heart of a volume in the series is the ancient text, the translations, and commentary. There are a total of forty-three passages numbered as Fragments 1–34, with some parallel passages marked as a, b, or c. They range in length from one to forty-four lines, thirty passages being only one to five lines, nine more ranging up to seventeen lines, and two being forty-some lines, the whole amounting to 280 lines of text, equivalent to ten pages of the Teubner editions usually followed. Twenty-eight of the fragments are from Plutarch’s Alexander, another four each from other works of Plutarch, from Arrian and Athenaeus, one each from Pliny the Elder, Aulus Gellius, Pollux, and Eustathius. The majority of the forty-three passages in fact only make brief mention of Alexander in the act of writing, or speaking. Twenty, though, contain substantive content from an actual letter, often only in summary but occasionally with explicit quotes; and in ten of those twenty passages we may have Alexander’s own words. The longest of these, F7b, just over forty lines, is the famous letter of Alexander to Darius after the battle of Issus preserved by Arrian (Anab. 3.14.4–9). The ancient texts are printed with an apparatus criticus, usually as found in the Teubner edition but with some updates. The translations are literal, written “to offer the reader a clear idea of what is and what is not in the surviving text” (p. x).
A sequential pair of fragments illustrates the most common sort of letter “fragment” and how Monti presents, translates, and comments on them.
F9. “To the Greeks of Asia, About tyrannies (331)” (Plut., Alex. 34.2): φιλοτιμούμενος δὲ πρὸς τοὺς Ἕλληνας, ἔγραψε τὰς τυραννίδας πάσας καταλυθῆναι καὶ πολιτεύειν αὐτονόμους. “Wanting to earn honours among the Greeks, he wrote that all tyrannies had been abolished and that they [sc. the cities] ruled autonomously” (p. 95).
F10, “To the Plataeans, Reconstruction of Plataea (331)” (Plut., Alex. 34.2): ἰδίᾳ δὲ Πλαταιεῦσι τὴν πόλιν ἀνοικοδομεῖν, ὅτι τὴν χώραν οἱ πατέρες αὐτῶν ἐναγωνίσασθαι τοῖς Ἕλλησιν ὑπὲρ τῆς ἐλευθερίας παρέσχον. “In particular, (he wrote) to the Plataeans that he would rebuild the city, since their fathers had given the Greeks the land to fight for freedom” (p. 96).
The very format of fragments, as Monti has discussed (pp. 49–51), can impede assessment. These two, for instance, form a single sentence in Plutarch. Monti is right to see that Plutarch is describing two distinct letters, thus the required numbering, but this division of Plutarch’s sentence runs the risk of missing the question of why Plutarch, the “transmitting” author (p. 50), summarized these two letters one after another. Monti briefly touches on this pairing of letters but only relative to Alexander (p. 165), not to Plutarch. In the two translations, the present infinitive ἀνοικοδομεῖν in F10 is correctly translated as “he would rebuild”; the earlier present infinitive phrase in F9, πολιτεύειν αὐτονόμους, should also be translated this way, as “would be autonomous city-states.” Comparison to the imperatival infinitive phrase “[they] shall be autonomous,” αὐτο|[νό]μους εἶναι could have been added here, a phrase written by Alexander in 334 BCE in a letter to Priene (Rhodes & Osborne no. 86, I.Priene 1, Tod 185, ll. 3–4).
The commentary on F9 assembles a great deal of historical data about Alexander’s activities in 331 following his victory at Gaugamela. Monti notes that Alexander has now been acclaimed “king of Asia” (p. 163), but there is no consideration here of the significance of this shift in Alexander’s status for either of the above-mentioned theses about Alexander’s letters and how he presented himself or how Plutarch presented him. Regarding the new autonomy of the Greek city-states in Asia Minor in F9, Monti does suggest a comparison between Alexander and the Spartans and how they had failed to protect and eventually had abandoned the Greek city-states of Asia Minor in the early decades of the fifth century (p. 163). More than a page-long note then follows about the stores of wealth found in Susa and about the famous statues of the Tyrannicides, all of which is introduced to illustrate “another gesture [of Alexander’s] that recalls the Persian conflict” (p. 163). Both these comparisons seem too tangential to F9, especially when historical comparanda about how Alexander “sought to earn honor among the Greeks” exists, as, for example, in the above-mentioned inscribed letter to Priene, one of the cities addressed, presumably, in the letter in F9.
The commentary on F10 similarly includes information that is sometimes less relevant to the immediate passage, or even problematic, and leaves out related information that would be fundamental to the stated goals of the book. Most of the page of commentary on F10 addresses what the ancestors of the living Plataeans did back in 479 BCE, a detail that is clearly important for Alexander and for Plutarch. But the reasons why Plataea was in need of restoration at all are left unmentioned; some account of the destructions and restorations of Plataea during the Peloponnesian War, in the 380s and 370s, after the battle of Chaeronea, and after the destruction of Thebes, would be very helpful to Monti in showing how great Alexander would look for making such a proclamation. Such historical data would also build on the comparison to Sparta, the original destroyer of Plataea, that Monti makes in the commentary on F9, arguing all the more for Alexander as the worthy hegemon of the Greeks. As with F9, four and five lines on the source and authenticity of the letter conclude the note.
Readers approaching this text and commentary in search of the historical Alexander without prior knowledge of the state of the evidence may be disappointed. by what is not here: letters by Alexander, rather than mentions of letters by Alexander. Readers of Plutarch’s Alexander, wanting an expansion of Hamilton’s always useful but succinct 1969 commentary, will find pages of value on those twenty-eight short passages in Alexander considered here by Monti. Readers interested in the larger Alexander tradition and the Alexander Romance, will have to wait for what looks like the suggestion of a future book (p. x), which I hope comes to fruition.