The landmark Arrian : the campaigns of Alexander

Arrian's Anabasis Alexandrou in Pantheon's beautiful Landmark series with many footnotes, side-notes, maps, battle plans and grayscale images of locales, coins, and archeological finds. There are a series of modern essays as appendices. [The very last appendix reveals that Arrian was the student whose notes are what we have of Epictetus.] Arrian has his own criticisms of Alexander, but still, he was the great revered conqueror and leader of antiquity. To modern eyes it seems like a long way to go to find new people to kill and enslave, but it must have been all Alexander thought about since he was a child - defeat Persia and why stop there? If his "Last Plans" are authentic, then he was planning to take Arabia next and to interchange Greek and Asian peoples to make the civilized world homogeneous. Fortunately or unfortunately something like typhoid fever intervened.