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What kind of kingdom produced Alexander the Great, what empire did he set out to attack, and what range of much later sources survives to reconstruct his reign?

The historical context for the study of Alexander the Great: the geography and situation of the kingdom of Macedon and the Argead monarchy; the transformation of Macedon under Philip II through his army reforms and the sarissa phalanx; the unification of Greece by force at Chaeronea and through the League of Corinth in 337 BC and the planned invasion of Persia; the Achaemenid Persian empire that Alexander would attack; and the nature, range and limitations of the sources, given that no contemporary narrative survives and our accounts (the vulgate of Diodorus, Curtius Rufus and Justin, Arrian, and Plutarch) are all centuries later

A focused answer to the HSC Ancient History context for Alexander the Great - Macedon transformed by Philip II, the sarissa phalanx and the League of Corinth of 337 BC, the Achaemenid empire he set out to attack, and the source problem, since no contemporary narrative survives, only the later vulgate of Diodorus, Curtius and Justin set against Arrian.

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Alexander (born 356 BC, king 336 BC, died 323 BC) has to be read against the kingdom of Macedon and the Argead monarchy, and above all against the work of his father Philip II (reigned 359 to 336 BC), who rebuilt the army around the sarissa phalanx and the Companion cavalry, defeated Athens and Thebes at Chaeronea (338 BC), organised Greece through the League of Corinth (337 BC) and planned the invasion of the Achaemenid Persian empire then ruled by Darius III. The defining source problem is that NO contemporary narrative survives: every full account is 300 to 500 years later and derivative, split into the dramatic vulgate (Diodorus Book 17, Curtius Rufus, Justin, from Cleitarchus) and the sober "good tradition" of Arrian (following the eyewitnesses Ptolemy and Aristobulus), with Plutarch's late biography beside them. Because the evidence is late and slanted, historians such as Tarn, Badian and Bosworth reach very different Alexanders, which is why source criticism, weighing the traditions against each other and against the documentary and archaeological record, is central to the topic.

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What this dot point is asking

NESA's "Context" strand for Alexander the Great wants you to set the scene BEFORE and AROUND his reign: the kingdom of Macedon and the Argead monarchy he inherited; the transformation of that kingdom into a dominant military power by his father Philip II, through the army reforms and the sarissa phalanx; the unification of Greece by force at Chaeronea (338 BC) and through the League of Corinth (337 BC), together with the Persian invasion Philip planned; the vast Achaemenid Persian empire that Alexander would attack; and, just as importantly, the nature and limits of the surviving evidence. This dot point does not ask for a narrative of Alexander's campaigns. It asks what kind of kingdom and world produced him, what he set out to conquer, and, crucially, why the sources are such a problem, since no contemporary account survives and every full narrative we have was written centuries later.

The answer

The kingdom of Macedon and the Argead monarchy

Macedon lay to the north of the Greek city-states, a kingdom of fertile plains and rugged uplands whose people spoke a form of Greek but were often looked down on as half-barbarian by the southern cities. It was ruled not as a democracy or oligarchy but as a personal monarchy by the Argead (or Temenid) royal house, which claimed descent from the hero Heracles through Temenus of Argos. The Macedonian king was above all a warrior-leader, acclaimed and supported by his army and his nobles, and his authority depended on military success. Its royal centre was at Aegae (modern Vergina), with Pella as the working capital. This was the throne, and the tradition of the fighting king, that Alexander would inherit in 336 BC.

Philip II and the transformation of Macedon

The decisive change came under Alexander's father, Philip II (reigned 359 to 336 BC). Taking over a kingdom under threat, Philip rebuilt the army into the finest fighting force of the age. He re-armed the infantry, the "foot companions" (pezhetairoi), with the sarissa, a pike some four to six metres long, and drilled them in a deep phalanx whose hedge of points could pin and hold an enemy line. Alongside this he developed the elite Companion cavalry (the hetairoi) as a shock force, so that the phalanx fixed the enemy while the cavalry delivered the decisive charge, the tactic often summarised as "hammer and anvil." He added hypaspists, light troops and siege engines to make a true combined-arms army, and paid for this standing, professional force with the gold and silver of the Pangaeum mines (founding Philippi in 356 BC). By diplomacy, marriage alliances and war, Philip turned a weak border kingdom into the dominant power of the Greek world.

The unification of Greece and the planned Persian invasion

Philip's rise brought him into conflict with the leading Greek states. At the Battle of Chaeronea in 338 BC his army, with the eighteen-year-old Alexander commanding on one wing, decisively defeated the alliance of Athens and Thebes and broke their power to resist. Rather than annex Greece, Philip organised the defeated states into the League of Corinth (the Hellenic League) in 337 BC, a "common peace" of nominally free states with himself as its leader (hegemon). Sparta pointedly stood aside. The League then declared a panhellenic war on Persia, framing the coming invasion as a shared Greek enterprise of revenge for the Persian invasions of the previous century, an idea long urged by the orator Isocrates. In 336 BC Philip sent an advance force under Parmenion into Asia Minor, but before he could follow he was assassinated at Aegae by Pausanias of Orestis. The throne, the army and the Persian war all passed to Alexander.

The Achaemenid Persian empire

The empire Alexander set out to attack was the Achaemenid Persian empire, founded by Cyrus the Great from about 550 BC and, by the fourth century, the largest the ancient Near East had yet produced. At its height it reached from Asia Minor and Egypt in the west to the Indus in the east, and it was governed through provinces called satrapies, each under a satrap answerable to the Great King, linked by royal roads and sustained by tribute and by large numbers of Greek mercenaries. When Alexander came to the throne in 336 BC the Persian king was Darius III, who had taken the throne that same year. Despite its scale, Persia was widely thought vulnerable: Xenophon's account of the march of the Ten Thousand (401 BC) had shown that a disciplined Greek force could strike deep into the empire, and this belief underpinned the whole panhellenic case for invasion.

The problem of the sources: no contemporary narrative survives

The single most important thing to grasp about the evidence for Alexander is that none of the accounts written during his lifetime survives. The official history by Callisthenes (a great-nephew of Aristotle, who marched with the expedition until his execution in 327 BC), the firsthand narratives of the generals Ptolemy and Aristobulus, the account of the admiral Nearchus, and the court diary known as the Royal Journal (Ephemerides) are all lost. What survives is a set of much later narratives that used these lost works, so we see Alexander only at second or third hand.

Historians sort these surviving narratives into two broad traditions, plus Plutarch:

The vulgate. This is the more colourful tradition, descending largely from Cleitarchus, a writer of about the late fourth century BC whose vivid and sensational account was widely read but often unreliable. It survives through Diodorus Siculus (Book 17 of his Bibliotheke, mid first century BC), the Latin history of Quintus Curtius Rufus (first century AD), and the epitome by Justin of the Philippic Histories of Pompeius Trogus. The vulgate is rich in drama, rhetoric and moralising, and useful for episodes the soberer tradition omits, but weak on precise military and chronological detail.

Arrian, the "good tradition." Arrian (Lucius Flavius Arrianus, about AD 86 to 160) wrote his Anabasis of Alexander in the second century AD, but based it explicitly on the eyewitness companions Ptolemy and Aristobulus. Because Ptolemy was a senior general with access to official records, Arrian is generally regarded as our soundest narrative for the campaigns, their geography and their military detail, and he names his sources and flags where they disagree.

Plutarch, Life of Alexander (c. AD 100). Part of Plutarch's Parallel Lives (paired with Julius Caesar), this biography is anecdotal and moralising rather than a continuous history. It preserves valuable material from now-lost writers, but was written some four centuries after Alexander and selects for character and morality rather than strict accuracy.

The abiding difficulty is that every one of these was composed roughly 300 to 500 years after Alexander died, and each had an agenda, whether to entertain, to flatter the Ptolemaic dynasty, or to draw a moral. Reconstructing Alexander therefore means constant source criticism: asking who wrote, when, from which lost firsthand source, and with what bias.

How to read a source on this topic

Section III sources for this dot point will typically describe (never reproduce verbatim) a passage of Arrian or the vulgate, a fragment of a lost writer such as Callisthenes, an anecdote from Plutarch, or a document such as the League of Corinth oath. Three reading habits.

First, place the source in the stemma. Is it from the sober "good tradition" (Arrian, following the eyewitnesses Ptolemy and Aristobulus) or the dramatic vulgate (Diodorus, Curtius, Justin, descending from Cleitarchus), or is it Plutarch's anecdotal biography? Above all, remember that all of them are late and derivative, because the contemporaries are lost.

Second, fix each source's purpose and bias. Ptolemy may have magnified his own role and flattered the dynasty he founded; the vulgate wrote to entertain; Plutarch wrote to illustrate character. Purpose drives reliability.

Third, always move from content to reliability to usefulness to perspective, and reach a judgement, rather than simply retelling what the source says. On this topic that almost always means testing one tradition against the other, and both against the documentary and archaeological record.

Model exam responses

1. Source-analysis response (using a passage of Arrian). "A described passage of Arrian is valuable because Arrian based his Anabasis (second century AD) explicitly on the eyewitness companions Ptolemy and Aristobulus, giving us the soundest surviving narrative of the campaigns and their military detail. Its usefulness is limited, however, by the fact that Arrian wrote roughly 450 years after the events and depended on Ptolemy, a general who founded a royal dynasty and may have magnified his own part; Arrian is also broadly favourable to Alexander. The passage is therefore most reliable for the course and geography of the campaigns, and should be tested against the fuller but more sensational vulgate before it is trusted on Alexander's motives."

Marker's note: markers reward identifying the tradition and its eyewitness basis, an explicit usefulness/limitation split (lateness plus Ptolemy's bias), and corroboration rather than description alone.

2. Essay paragraph (the sources shape the man). "Our image of Alexander is decisively shaped by the accident of what survived, because no contemporary narrative is left and every full account is centuries later. Where Arrian, following Ptolemy and Aristobulus, gives a sober, campaign-focused Alexander, the vulgate of Diodorus, Curtius and Justin, descending from Cleitarchus, dramatises his courage and fortune for effect, and Plutarch mines lost writers for character. The gap between these traditions is why modern historians reach opposite verdicts from the same evidence: as W.W. Tarn built an idealised visionary while A.B. Bosworth and Ernst Badian, reading the sources critically, recovered a ruthless autocrat. The historian's task is not to repeat one tradition but to weigh them against each other and against the documentary record."

Marker's note: this paragraph scores because it uses the contrast between the traditions as evidence for the argument, and names historians (Tarn, Bosworth, Badian) to build the case.

Command words and how to use a source

Outline/describe wants a small number of clearly separated points; explain wants a point, evidence and why it matters; assess/evaluate/to what extent wants a sustained argument reaching a supported judgement.

Using a source properly means four things every time: (1) content, what does it actually show or say; (2) reliability, who produced it, when, and for what purpose; (3) usefulness, what specific question can it help answer, and how far; (4) perspective, whose viewpoint does it represent, and what does it leave out. For Alexander, always state which tradition a source belongs to (Arrian's good tradition, the vulgate, or Plutarch), and remember that all are late and none is firsthand, since that usually decides its value.

Weaving in historiography means using a historian's named position to build your argument, for example "as Bosworth argues, only disciplined source criticism can recover the historical Alexander from this late and partisan material," used to qualify a specific claim rather than dropped in as decoration.

Common exam traps

Narrating the campaigns instead of setting the context: This dot point is about the world around Alexander, Macedon and the Argead monarchy, Philip's reforms, the League of Corinth, the Persian empire, and the sources. Save the battles of Granicus, Issus and Gaugamela for the other Personalities dot points.
Forgetting that no contemporary narrative survives: This is the defining source fact for Alexander. Any answer that treats Arrian or Diodorus as an eyewitness has missed the central problem.
Confusing the traditions: Arrian belongs to the sober "good tradition" (Ptolemy and Aristobulus); Diodorus, Curtius and Justin are the dramatic vulgate (from Cleitarchus). Mixing these up wrecks a source answer.
Crediting Alexander with Philip's work: The army, the sarissa phalanx and the united Greece that made the conquest possible were built by Philip II. Strong context answers give Philip his due.

Practice questions

Original practice questions graded from foundation to exam level, each with a full worked solution. Try them before revealing the solution.

foundation3 marksSource A: a reconstructed inscription of this type, in the style of the surviving oath of the League of Corinth, records that the Greek states swore to keep the common peace, not to make war on one another, and to follow the appointed leader (hegemon) in a campaign against Persia. Using Source A, describe what it reveals about Philip II's settlement of Greece in 337 BC.

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A 3-mark "describe" needs what the record is, what it shows about Philip's settlement, and one supporting detail.

What the record is: Source A reflects the founding oath of the League of Corinth (the Hellenic League) that Philip organised in 337 BC after his victory at Chaeronea (338 BC), binding the Greek states into a common peace under his leadership (1 mark).
What it reveals: It shows that Philip controlled Greece not by annexation but by making himself hegemon of a league of nominally free states, who swore to keep the peace among themselves and to campaign under his command (1 mark).
Supporting detail: The oath's commitment to a war against Persia shows that Philip used the League to legitimise the planned Persian invasion as a shared Greek (panhellenic) enterprise rather than a Macedonian conquest (1 mark).

Marker's note: markers reward direct use of the source's detail (common peace, a hegemon, a war on Persia) rather than a general account of Philip's reign.

foundation4 marksOutline the main military reforms of Philip II that transformed the Macedonian army.

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A 4-mark "outline" needs the key reforms and how each strengthened the army.

The sarissa phalanx: Philip re-armed the infantry (the pezhetairoi, or "foot companions") with the sarissa, a pike some four to six metres long, formed up in a deep phalanx whose massed points held and pinned the enemy line (1-2 marks).
The Companion cavalry: He developed the elite Companion cavalry (the hetairoi) as a shock strike force, so that infantry fixed the enemy while the cavalry delivered the decisive charge, the "hammer and anvil" (1 mark).
A professional combined-arms force: Philip drilled a standing, professional army that combined phalanx, cavalry, light troops, the hypaspists and siege engines, funded by the gold and silver of the Pangaeum mines (1 mark).
Result: These reforms turned Macedon from a weak border kingdom into the dominant military power of the Greek world, the instrument Alexander would inherit (1 mark).

Marker's note: markers reward the sarissa phalanx and the hammer-and-anvil use of the Companion cavalry, not a vague claim that Philip "made the army stronger."

foundation4 marksOutline the nature of the Achaemenid Persian empire that Alexander set out to attack.

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A 4-mark "outline" needs the empire's origin, extent, organisation and its ruler in 336 BC.

Origin: The Achaemenid empire was founded by Cyrus the Great from about 550 BC and was, by Alexander's day, the largest empire the ancient Near East had yet seen (1 mark).
Extent: At its height it stretched from Asia Minor and Egypt in the west to the Indus in the east, embracing many peoples and rich resources (1 mark).
Organisation: It was governed through provinces called satrapies, each under a satrap answerable to the Great King, linked by royal roads and supported by imperial tribute and Greek mercenary soldiers (1 mark).
Its ruler: When Alexander came to the throne in 336 BC the Persian king was Darius III, who had taken the throne the same year; Xenophon's account of the Ten Thousand (401 BC) had already suggested Persia was vulnerable to a disciplined Greek force (1 mark).

Marker's note: markers reward the satrapy structure and the vast extent, and credit the point that Persia looked beatable, not just a list of place names.

core6 marksExplain how Philip II transformed Macedon into the dominant power in Greece.

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A 6-mark "explain" needs the internal reforms, the expansion of Macedonian power, and the settlement of Greece, each linked to Macedon's rise.

Securing and reforming Macedon: On becoming king in 359 BC, Philip stabilised a threatened kingdom, and reorganised the army around the sarissa phalanx and the Companion cavalry into a professional combined-arms force. This gave the Argead monarchy, whose warrior-king was acclaimed by the army, a decisive military instrument (2 marks).
Expansion and resources: Philip expanded outward by war, diplomacy and marriage alliances, seizing the gold and silver of the Pangaeum region (founding Philippi in 356 BC), which funded his standing army and his influence over Greek states (2 marks).
The conquest of Greece: At Chaeronea in 338 BC Philip's army, with the young Alexander commanding on one wing, crushed the alliance of Athens and Thebes. Rather than destroy the cities, Philip organised the League of Corinth in 337 BC, making himself hegemon of a "common peace" and preparing a panhellenic war on Persia (2 marks).

Marker's note: markers reward the causal movement from army reform to resources to the settlement of Greece, not a narrative of separate battles.

core6 marksSource B: a reconstructed passage of this type, in the dramatic and moralising manner of the vulgate tradition, describes Alexander plunging alone among the enemy in a reckless blaze of courage, his life hanging by a thread while fortune and the gods look on. Using Source B and your own knowledge, explain the difference between the vulgate tradition and Arrian's account of Alexander.

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A 6-mark "explain" needs use of the source, the character of the vulgate, and how Arrian differs.

Use of the source: Source B captures the vulgate's taste for vivid, emotional and moralising scenes that dramatise Alexander's courage and fortune rather than weigh the evidence coolly (2 marks).
The vulgate: The vulgate (Diodorus, Book 17 of his Bibliotheke, mid first century BC; Curtius Rufus, first century AD; and Justin's epitome of Pompeius Trogus) descends largely from Cleitarchus, a colourful writer of about the late fourth century BC. It is rich, rhetorical and sensational, and often unreliable on detail (2 marks).
Arrian: Arrian's Anabasis (second century AD) instead follows the eyewitness companions Ptolemy and Aristobulus, and is sober, campaign-focused and generally the most trusted narrative, though it is favourable to Alexander and thin on some matters (2 marks).

Marker's note: markers reward the contrast between a dramatic vulgate descended from Cleitarchus and Arrian's sober account based on Ptolemy and Aristobulus.

core6 marksExplain the problem posed for historians by the loss of the contemporary sources for Alexander.

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A 6-mark "explain" needs what was lost, why it matters, and how we know it at all.

What was lost: Every account written during Alexander's reign has perished: the official history by Callisthenes (Aristotle's great-nephew, who accompanied the expedition until his execution in 327 BC), the firsthand narratives of Ptolemy and Aristobulus, Nearchus' account of the Indian voyage, and the court diary known as the Royal Journal (Ephemerides) (2 marks).
Why it matters: As a result, no eyewitness narrative survives intact; our fullest sources (Arrian, the vulgate and Plutarch) all wrote roughly 300 to 500 years later and depended on these lost works, so we see Alexander only at second or third hand, filtered through later selection and bias (2 marks).
How we know it: The lost writers survive only as they were used and quoted by the later authors, above all Ptolemy and Aristobulus through Arrian, which is why source criticism of who used whom is central to studying Alexander (2 marks).

Marker's note: markers reward naming the lost contemporaries and explaining the consequence, that our narratives are late and derivative, not just that "sources are missing."

exam8 marksAssess the value and limitations of Arrian's Anabasis as a source for the reign of Alexander the Great.

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An 8-mark "assess" answer needs the nature of the source, its value, its limitations and a judgement.

Nature: Arrian (Lucius Flavius Arrianus, about AD 86 to 160) wrote the Anabasis of Alexander in the second century AD, roughly 450 years after the events, but based it explicitly on two eyewitness companions of Alexander, Ptolemy and Aristobulus (2 marks).
Value: Because Ptolemy was a senior general (later king of Egypt) with access to official records, and Aristobulus served on the expedition, Arrian preserves the soundest surviving narrative of the campaigns, its geography and its military detail, and he applies a critical method, naming his sources and noting where they disagree (2 marks).
Limitations: Arrian is still late and derivative; Ptolemy may have magnified his own role and flattered a dynasty he founded; Arrian is broadly favourable to Alexander, gives limited attention to the empire's administration and the non-Greek perspective, and must be tested against the fuller (if less reliable) vulgate (2 marks).
Judgement: Arrian is the single most valuable narrative source precisely because of his eyewitness sources and critical method, but his lateness, his pro-Macedonian bias and his dependence on Ptolemy mean he is best used alongside the vulgate and the documentary and archaeological record (2 marks).

Marker's note: markers reward weighing Arrian's eyewitness basis and method against his lateness and bias, and reaching a supported judgement rather than praising him uncritically.

exam25 marksTo what extent is our understanding of Alexander the Great limited by the nature of the surviving sources? In your response, refer to relevant sources and historians' interpretations.

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A Band-6 response needs a clear thesis, argument lines tied to specific sources and dates, engagement with historiography, a model paragraph and a judgement answering "to what extent."

Thesis: Our understanding of Alexander is seriously, though not fatally, limited by the sources, because no contemporary narrative survives and every full account is centuries later and derivative; yet careful source criticism, cross-checking the vulgate against Arrian, and the documentary and archaeological record still allow a defensible reconstruction.
Argument 1: the fundamental gap: No account written during the reign (336 to 323 BC) survives. The official Callisthenes, the eyewitnesses Ptolemy, Aristobulus and Nearchus, and the Royal Journal are all lost, so we depend on writers 300 to 500 years later. This lateness is the root limitation.
Argument 2: the surviving traditions each distort: The vulgate (Diodorus Book 17, mid first century BC; Curtius Rufus, first century AD; Justin) descends from Cleitarchus and is dramatic, rhetorical and often unreliable; Arrian (second century AD) is soberer but favourable to Alexander and reliant on Ptolemy, who may have magnified his own part; Plutarch's Life (about AD 100) is anecdotal and moralising. None is neutral or firsthand.
Argument 3: but the limits can be managed: The very fact that we have both a "vulgate" and Arrian's "good tradition" lets historians cross-check them; documentary and archaeological evidence (coins, inscriptions, the royal tombs at Vergina, city foundations named Alexandria) provides an independent check on the empire and its scale that no literary bias controls.
Argument 4: interpretation reflects the source problem: Because the evidence is thin and slanted, modern historians reach opposite Alexanders from the same material: W.W. Tarn built an idealised visionary of the "unity of mankind," while Ernst Badian and A.B. Bosworth, reading the sources critically, recovered a ruthless, calculating autocrat. The disagreement itself shows how far the sources shape the picture.
Model paragraph: The clearest sign of the limitation is that the same episode can look wholly different depending on which tradition reports it. Where the vulgate dramatises Alexander's reckless courage and fortune for effect, Arrian, following Ptolemy and Aristobulus, gives a cooler, campaign-focused account, and Plutarch mines lost writers for character-revealing anecdote. None is contemporary, and each has an agenda, whether to entertain, to flatter a dynasty, or to moralise. As Bosworth argues, only disciplined source criticism, asking who wrote, when, from what firsthand source and with what bias, can turn this late and partisan material into history; the alternative, taking any one tradition at face value, produces the very idealisation Tarn was later criticised for.
Judgement: To a large extent our understanding is limited, because the loss of the contemporaries leaves us with late, derivative and biased narratives; but not wholly, since the survival of rival traditions to be weighed against each other, plus the documentary and archaeological record, still supports a critical reconstruction of Alexander.

Marker's note: markers reward a sustained argument answering "to what extent," precise use of named sources with dates, historians used to build the case (Tarn, Badian, Bosworth), and explicit awareness that no contemporary narrative survives.