NOTES

1 Politics, para1311a22c = bk5 ch10 in (e.g.) TJ Saunders’s Penguin tr.

2 Alexander, ch10 para6.

3 Alexander, ch10 paras6-7.

4 Arrian (writing in Greek, 2nd century AD) combined military and gubernatorial experience with philosophical enthusiasms. Curtius Rufus (Latin) is a shadowy figure, possibly holding high military and political office in the 1st century AD; cf. the Penguin tr. by J. Yardley and W. Heckel.

5 Alexander, ch10 para7.

6 Alexander the Great: The Invisible Enemy (1992). Other suggestions include bowel perforation, malaria, pancreatitis, typhoid fever, and West NIle Virus; cf. DW Oldach/RE Richard/EN Borza/RM Benitez (NOT Raffa!), ‘A Mysterious Death,’ New England Journal of Medicine 338 (1998), 1764-89.

7 ‘Harpalus’, Journal of Hellenic Studies 81 (1961), p36; cf. AB Bosworth, ‘The Death of Alexander the Great: Rumour and Propaganda,’ Classical Quarterly 21 (1971), pp112-26.

8 RD Milns, Alexander the Great (1968), pp256-8.

9 E.g. Curtius Rufus, bk10 ch17; Pliny, Natural History, bk30 ch53 para149.

10 Alexander of Macedon (1974), p477.

11 Abraham Sacks & Hermann Hunger, Astronomical Diaries and Related Texts from Babylon (1988), vol. 1, p207.