Miscellanea Anthropologica et Sociologica 2014, 15 (3): 134–146 Bogdan Burliga 1 Xenophon’s Cyrus, Alexander φιλόκυρος. How carefully did Alexander the Great study the Cyropaedia? It is well known that for Alexander the Great the Persian dynast Cyrus (559–530 BC) was an object of imitation; there was a tradition in antiquity that Alexander was “fond of Cyrus” (φιλόκυρος; philokyros). Te purpose of this paper is to examine what kind of imitation it actually was, and how serious Alexander’s following of the Persian ruler was: did the famous Cyropaedia (Te Education of Cyrus), a Greek tale of the Achaemenid king, play an important role as a source in Alexander’s calculations and actions or in his notions of how his own kingdom would look? It is argued that in this case the infuence of Xeno- phon’s major work must have been intense, but that one should not seek it everywhere when examining Alexander’s expedition, or to understand such infuence too literally, though there were a few cases where Alexander seems to have purposefully and publicly emphasised his close connection to Cyrus. Key words: Alexander the Great, Cyrus, the Cyropaedia, imitation, acculturation As every Alexander the Great reader knows well, the problem of the Macedonian king’s “motivation and ideas” in his Blitzkrieg against the Achaemenid empire 2 , is among the most unclear and difcult of issues. To date, much ink has been poured on this problem, but without any hope for a satisfactory solution. Te food of speculations occasionally results in the desperate conviction that it may be better to abandon such a theme entirely as – some historians and archaeologists suggest – essentially unanswerable, unless one intends to settle the matter based on mere 1 Uniwersytet Gdański; flbb@ug.edu.pl. 2 Te term in the inverted commas is borrowed from the title of Bodil Due’s contribution Alex- ander’s Inspiration and Ideas in the highly valuable collection of articles Alexander the Great. Reality and Myth (Bodil 1993: 53–60); see also the fragments about “a genuine philhellene, a lover of Greek culture” and the king’s “orientalism” in: (Worthington 2014: 185f., cf. 214f.). This copy is for personal use only - distribution prohib - This copy is for personal use only - distribution prohibited. - This copy is for personal use only - distribution prohibited. - This copy is for personal use only - distribution prohibited. - This copy is for personal use