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Excellent, thank you!

Just getting ready to starting my A-level Alexander course again, with a new set of bright-eyed an bushy-tailed girls! Wish me luck...

Tantalisingly, I'm afraid it does not give a reference. Neither does it say anything about what kind of animal the Tartars used so I assume, like you, that it was not a camel! The edition I have is the Everyman translation by Rawlinson, including his own footnotes, dating from 1858 and dedicated res...

A bit like a homing pigeon - yes, this explanation really does ring true. My copy of Herodotus reads as follows (3.102, 105): "The Indians... take 3 camels and harness them together, a female in the middle and a male on either side, in a leading rein. The rider sits on the female, and they are ...

Thank you both for some interesting speculations! I quite like the idea of its being a metaphor for Darius being a bit girly - or for its meaning a horse not fit for purpose, which I suppose must come to the same thing. I wonder where Plutarch got it from. I suppose we will never know.

Can anyone help with this rather odd query? During Gaugamela Plutarch says that Darius abandoned his chariot and rode away on a mare which had recently foaled. I am sure that somewhere I have read the suggestion that this was for greater speed, but I can't see why this should be so (although I know ...

I certainly will. By Quintus I suppose you have in mind Q. Curtius Rufus? I can see he might be a good balance to Arrian and Plutarch since he comes from a different tradition of Alexander history. But as Marcus says, we unfortunately don't have time to read a huge amount (and at 17 to 18 they usual...

I'm at Haberdashers' Aske's school for girls, in Elstree - we're lucky enough to be able to offer Latin, Greek and Class Civ. The other A2 option they do is Tragedy. For AS they study the Iliad and the Life and Times of Cicero - and they used to take the Roman Epic (ie Aeneid) option for A2, but I a...

Marcus - thank you for looking at the specification - yes, AQA is the one. There isn't much in the way of past papers since this topic has only recently been an option. There is a specimen paper on the public AQA site (it is topic 4B) and just one past paper from June 2010 which is accessible via th...

Many thanks both, I shall enjoy checking out your suggestions! Another teacher has also recommended me Ruth Sheppard "Alexander and his Enemies" - do you know this one?

I would really welcome input from forum members on books about Alexander. I have just finished teaching an A-level course on Alexander for the first time and will be teaching it again next year. My problem is the lack of a suitable textbook for the course. The students have to read Plutarch and book...

Thank you very much and I will certainly get the book. The board is AQA and yes, I am enormously enjoying it although it is more work than all my other courses put together, since although I am a Classics graduate I never studied Alexander at uni or before! I am finding this website invaluable as yo...

I am considering buying this as a reference book - I'm teaching Alexander as an A level topic and both I and my students find the sheer number of characters and names in Alexander's story quite confusing. Does anybody know/use this book - would you recommend it?

Catherine, I think it was not just Alexander III, but many of the Argead kings previous to him who were wannabe Greeks. Argeads claimed to descend from figures in Greek mythology but then so did everybody from Molossians to Illyrians. What the common people thought of these royal pretensions is any...

It is indeed an odd passage - odder the more you think about it. It certainly looks as though Alexander regarded Macedonian as a different language, otherwise why ask the question? Obviously it was sufficiently different for non-Macedonians not to understand it. Does that make it another language or...

This is all truly fascinating and many thanks to all those who have pitched in to answer my query. So I suppose it was Elamite which was the lingua franca in the Persian empire at this time, and Alexander probably used translators (he certainly doesn't seem to have had any difficulty in communicatin...