摘要：Over the years the work of Pierre Briant has helped to redefine howhistorians approach both the study of Achaemenid Persia and ofAlexander. This is his seventeenth book (not to mention his collaborationin a further eight). It is unlikely to be the least in terms of its impact.Now in his seventies, he has recently turned his attention to a neglected, and,as he shows, a highly revelatory, dimension to Alexander-studies, namely, thetreatment of Alexander in the European history-writing of the Enlightenment.He points out that two of the last century’s greatest names in the studyof ancient history, Elias Bickermann and Arnaldo Momigliano, both realisedindependently that the history of Alexander by the German historian JohannDroysen (%), a prelude to Droysen’s famous Geschichte des Hellenismus (vols., %, %), had roots in what Briant now shows to have been a veryconsiderable and geographically diffuse interest taken in Alexander by eighteenth-century historical writers: in Enlightenment France, above all, but also,since the Enlightenment became an international movement, in England,Scotland, and Germany, to name the three further main foci of Briant’s research.He omits the treatment of Alexander in the literature of czarist Russia,where Catherine the Great was a famous (if qualified) patron of the Enlightenment,only from ignorance of the language. As it is, Briant has consultedmore than works of European literature in his chosen period (seebelow), not just substantive works but also the more ‘trivial’ writings of theage of the Enlightenment, now largely forgotten, including learned reviews inthe burgeoning journal-literature of the age; he also emphasises re-editionsand translations of works in gauging the impact of such-and-such an author.
