Plutarch devotes two speeches and a biography specifically to Alexander. Current scholarship prioritizes the author over his subject. The erudite Plutarch employs numerous Alexander sources for his own writerly purposes. In the speeches he argues that Alexander’s successes are due to his own efforts rather than gifted by fortune. It is to be doubted that Plutarch had a serious polemical or philosophical point to prove; his epideictic oratory aims at rhetorical display and furnishing evidence from ready knowledge. The Life is similarly moulded by generic requirements. Plutarch provides an episodic birth-to-death account of Alexander, in which he presents himself as a competent interpreter and adviser. He quotes early sources, in particular from a collection of letters by Alexander, to render his depiction more authentic. Focusing on the ‘signs of the soul’, Plutarch is most interested in court politics and personal morals. His Alexander is determined by his physical make-up and greatness of soul on the one hand, and how effectively education and philosophy direct his ambition on the other. His biography is not apologetic; rather he wishes to educate his readership on how personal morality impacts on governance. References to his own context, if at all present, are oblique.

Arete of Cyrene was daughter and disciple of the founder of the Cyrenaic school and mother and teacher of the figure who codified its principles. Our sources emphasize her as a link in the intellectual chain connecting the school it its Socratic roots, to the detriment of preserving her own philosophical ideas. In this chapter, I make a case for her philosophical contribution to the Cyrenaics, as revealed in a careful reading of the few sources we have. I follow this with methodological reflections on how we might access a figure like Arete. I argue that this task requires and licenses the adoption of severed methodological strategies related to an added open-mindedness to source material. I reflect on how these methodological points contribute to a wider project of recovering the thought of marginalized figures.