This chapter discusses Arrian’s characterization of Alexander the Great. Beginning from a brief history of scholarship on Arrian and his unusually large role in shaping modern understandings of Alexander, it approaches Arrian as an active creator of historical knowledge. Using examples from the Anabasis, it demonstrates that Arrian observed a shift in Alexander’s behaviour arising from the increasingly complex political and personal circumstances of his life. He described this change overtly at times, but more often by setting Alexander into a literary framework based on Herodotus’ portraits of despotic Persian kings and tweaked to reflect philosophical and moral concerns contemporary in Arrian’s own lifetime. The Anabasis forms the core of the discussion but the Discourses of Epictetus and the Indica provide complementary readings and show consistency in Arrian’s approach to his favourite subject.

In the chapter I argue that we should set aside the Quellenforschung arguments of Lefèvre and Brunt and Atkins and others and look at what Cicero is up to in book 3, where he aims to fill in a gap left by Panaetius and not followed up by Posidonius. My analysis focuses in particular on Cicero’s redeployment of the Ring of Gyges thought experiment to undercut the Epicurean reliance on Kuria Doxa (KD) 5 to bolster their ‘moral’ hedonism; and the critical role, or so I argue, of the correspondence with Cassius (which cites KD 5 in Fam 15.19) in the development of Cicero’s argument (with additional reference to Fin. 1-2, where KD 5 also takes a critical role). In addition to making the case for the importance of the correspondence as ‘work in progress’, I argue that Cicero’s engagement with Posidonius, Panaetius et al. represents a mature, confident Cicero philosophus, ready to make a targeted contribution to Stoic ethics, with none of the dissimulatio doctrinae of the works of the 50s.