APOLOGIA ALEXANDRU (ARRIANOS: ANABASIS I, 7-9)

In 335 B. C. the young Macedonian king, Alexander III. with his Greek allies besieged Thebes and razed it to the ground. The nicomedian Arrian provides a detailed account ont the event that shocked the Greek world; but he unlike to the other historians (Diodor, Plutarch), tries to exonerate Alexander from the responsibility for the devastation of the city. On the one hand the present paper makes an attempt to display the sophisticated methods of Arrian with which he manipulates his readers by stealth, on the other hand seeks the answer to the question why it may have been important to the nicomedian historiographer to gloss over Alexander's deeds in Thebes.