THE FRAGMENTS OF ALEXANDER'S EPHEMERIDES RECONSIDERED: NEW EVIDENCE FROM PLUTARCH'S CORPUS

The article puts forward new arguments for attributing more passages from Plutarch (Quaest. conv. VIII 9, 3, 734b; Alex. 23, 3-6 and 8; Alex. fort. II 6, 338d) to the Ephemerides of Alexander the Great than those already collected by Jacoby in FGrHist 117. On the basis of this enlarged corpus of fragments, the article argues that only one text circulated in the im-perial period under the title of Ephemerides and that the portrait of Alexander emerging from it was probably positive, while the hostile emphasis on Alexander's drinking habits that char-acterizes some of the fragments may be due to the authors who preserve them.