[Alexander’s] one failure, the single break, as it were, in the long chain of his successes, was that he had no worthy chronicler to tell the world of his exploits. No prose history, no epic poem was written about him; he was not celebrated even in such choral odes as preserve the name and memory of Hiero or Gelo or Thero—or many other men not in the same class as Alexander—with the result that the wonderful story of his life is less familiar today than that of the merest nonentities of the ancient world.