After Alexander: The Time of the Diadochi (323–281 bc ) ed. by Victor Alonso Troncoso and Edward M. Anson (review)

The time of the Diadochi, a period long notorious for its destructive warfare and power struggles, has become much better appreciated in the past decade and a half as a result of a number of specifically focused international conferences, edited volumes, and monographs.¹ After Alexander: The Time of the Diadochi, edited by Victor Alonso Troncoso and Edward M. Anson, is the revised proceedings of a conference held in September 2010 at the University of La Coruña in Spain entitled “The Time of the Diadochi (323–281 bc).”² Collectively, these papers by addressing a multiplicity of problems arising from uncertain chronology and inadequate source material help to illuminate a critically formative period of history.

The 18 papers from 18 contributors³ (and 12 countries) offer, as Edward Anson describes, “a fairly eclectic collection of studies” (1), which the editors have thoughtfully arranged around four “Diadochan themes”: sources and their use, the struggle for power among the Diadochi, the role of the Iranians in the age of the Diadochi, and the use of image and slogan in the time of the Diadochi. Anson identifies the themes in the introduction and also gives a succinct summary of each contribution contained in the volume, thus offering the reader a very good overview of its contents. However, the four themes are not indicated as such in the table of contents, where the sections are simply headed I, II, III, IV, while in the text there is no numbering of sections or demarcation of themes.

The seven papers treating the first theme—sources and their use—address what Anson identifies as one fundamental problem for historians of the Diadochi: the dearth of narrative evidence. The problem is explored through critiques of the reliability of traditional sources as well as through the examination of the potential of peripheral sources. For example, the cuneiform texts, which Tom Boiy (Chapter 1) examines, include the Babylon king list and the Uruk king list; three chronicles of the Diadochi period; post factum “prophecy” texts; historical notes attached to astronomical diaries; and legal and administrative documents. Boiy credibly demonstrates how cuneiform sources do add to chronological knowledge but admits they offer little else to the reconstruction of history. Pat Wheatley (Chapter 2), in his examination of the Heidelberg Epitome, while concluding that the quality of this late circa mid-fifteenth-century source does not compare with other sources for “after Alexander,” nevertheless offers a valuable scrutinizing discussion and brief analysis of a neglected and relatively inaccessible source. Franca Landucci Gattinoni’s (Chapter 3) study of “the issues related to the interconnections” of Seleucus and Antigonus presents a somewhat obscure argument, although readers will benefit from an analysis here of the numerous sources for that relationship: Diodorus, Nepos, Photius/Arrian, Hieronymous, POxyrynchus, Duris, Demodamus of Miletus, and Patrocles (30). Duris of Samos is examined more fully in Frances Pownall’s (Chapter 4) paper where attention is drawn to Duris’ hostility toward the Macedonians (luxury and extravagance as symbols of tyranny), in contrast with his praise of Eumenes and Phocion. Next, the editors place Timothy Howe’s (Chapter 5) historiographical approach to the question of Alexander’s divinity, specifically to what extent it is an invented tradition. Arguments for the manipulation of tradition as a highly useful weapon and for the period of the Diadochi as a “perfect environment” for invention do reiterate earlier scholarship, yet one finds insight here into the motivation for such invention. Alexander Meeus’s (Chapter 7) paper on what we do not know and the methodological consequences of gaps in the evidence helps to put into perspective the many lost sources already touched on in preceding papers, including Brian Bosworth’s (Chapter 6) mention of Nicolaus of Damascus as an eye-witness source for Strabo on Indian customs.

The order of the essays within the overall...