Editing Alexander the Great (section)

==Historiography==
{{Main|Historiography of Alexander the Great}}
Apart from a few inscriptions and fragments, texts written by people who actually knew Alexander or who gathered information from men who served with Alexander were all lost.{{sfn|Roisman|Worthington|2010|p=186}} Contemporaries who wrote accounts of his life included Alexander's campaign historian Callisthenes, Alexander's generals; Ptolemy and [[Nearchus]], [[Aristobulus of Cassandreia|Aristobulus]], a junior officer on the campaigns, and Onesicritus, Alexander's chief helmsman. Their works are lost, but later works based on these [[primary source|original sources]] have survived. The earliest of these is [[Diodorus Siculus]] (1st century BC), followed by Quintus Curtius Rufus (mid-to-late 1st century AD), [[Arrian]] (1st to 2nd century AD), the biographer Plutarch (1st to 2nd century AD), and finally [[Justin (historian)|Justin]], whose work dated as late as the 4th century.{{sfn|Roisman|Worthington|2010|p=186}} Of these, Arrian is generally considered the most reliable, given that he used Ptolemy and Aristobulus as his sources, closely followed by Diodorus.{{sfn|Roisman|Worthington|2010|p=186}}