Quick questions on The evaluation and interpretations of Alexander the Great: HSC Ancient History

Historians sort the surviving accounts into two broad traditions, each drawing on different lost sources.

Out of these strands the ancient world built two competing images. The first is the invincible hero: Alexander as a new Achilles and son of Zeus-Ammon, the unbeaten conqueror of Granicus (334 BC), Issus (333 BC) and Gaugamela (331 BC). This image was cultivated in his lifetime by Callisthenes, who publicised the divine sonship confirmed at Siwah in 331 BC, and it underpins the heroic Alexander of legend and the later Alexander Romance.

Modern historiography splits along a line that mirrors the ancient one. The romantic, idealising tradition reached its height with Sir William (W.W.) Tarn, whose Alexander the Great (1948) presented a chivalrous, high-minded Alexander whose deepest aim was the "unity of mankind" - a brotherhood in which Greeks and Persians would be partners. Tarn built this largely on the prayer for concord at the Opis banquet (324 BC) and on Plutarch's rhetorical essay On the Fortune or Virtue of Alexander, and he tended to explain away the darker episodes.

The most recent scholarship reframes the "hero or tyrant" question rather than simply choosing a side. Pierre Briant, the leading historian of the Achaemenid Persian empire, reads Alexander from the Persian side, treating him in large part as the last of the Persian Great Kings and shifting the focus from Macedonian glory to the continuities of the empire he seized. Paul Cartledge (Alexander the Great: The Hunt for a New Past, 2004) offers a deliberately balanced modern biography. And the "Alexander in reception" turn - work such as Diana Spencer's The Roman Alexander (2002) - studies how every age, from Rome to the medieval Alexander Romance to modern cinema, has remade Alexander in its own image, so that "the visionary" and "the tyrant" are themselves cultural constructs as much as historical findings.