Well
Chaotic, I was being tongue in cheek (hence the smiley face →
← ).
And you’re quite right about Arrian, who is like a Hollywood film director, keeping his literary camera
firmly fixed on his hero Alexander, and never letting the entire truth get in the way of a good story.
But ALL the ancient historians either wrote decades, generations or centuries after the events they
reported, or had some sort of distorting bias in their writings.
Do we dismiss the battles of Marathon, Plataea, and the whole Persian invasion because Herodotus wasn’t present?
Do we dismiss the battles of Trebia, Trasimene, Cannae, and Hannibal’s war because Polybius was born later?
Do we dismiss the entire works of Livy because he wrote about events centuries before his time?
About the only people who were actually present at the times they describe is Caesar and Thucydides…
…and both of these are biased in their own way. Caesar wrote propaganda to gain the popular vote back in Rome,
and Thucydides constantly praises Sparta and denigrates his native Athens because being an oligarch he was exiled
by the democratic demos of his home city, and had an (understandable) chip on his shoulder about it.
Our entire knowledge of ancient history is based on the writings of ancient historians such as these.
They are all we’ve got.
If we start censoring and proscribing these accounts, we’ll have nothing left but our own wild imaginations.
Creating a set of ancient wargame rules is like trying to reconstruct a jigsaw puzzle, where we don’t have a
picture to start with and many of the pieces are missing and some of them are the wrong shape and won’t fit.
In this situation it would be very foolish to discount any small crumbs of information we can get our hands on.
And this is the cause of our dilemma…if an ancient historian says a certain thing happened, but a modern writer
or game designer says that can’t happen, whom do we believe?
Well, call me naive but I’ll go with the ancient historian, even when I don’t fully understand quite how they did it.
If I can’t fully comprehend something, then the fault is mine, not that of the ancient writer.
I think ancient wargame rules should follow and reproduce the events described by the ancient historians.
After all, even modern writers and game designers have their own personal prejudices and bias.
But if we can duplicate the events as described by the ancient historians on our wargames tables, warts and all,
then that is what playing an ancient wargame is all about.
Which brings me the case in point:-
DBA 2.2 used to say “(a River) is neither good nor bad going…” (and the early drafts of DBA 3.0 said the same).
DBA 3.0 currently says “
For movement, a river is neither good nor bad going…”
…and this change was made by
Phil Barker himself, who obviously wants us to only apply the “neither good
nor bad” for movement
only, and not also for combat as well.
And he is quite right…allowing troops to retain side and rear-support in rivers makes a much better game.
It avoids ridiculous things such as standing IN a river to avoid being quick killed, and troops in a river that
is passing through a bad going wood having a higher combat factor in the water than the troops defending
the riverbank!
Yes, troops in a river should be penalised, and they are: they give the enemy a +1 for defending the bank.
It makes rivers playable, instead of having them break the game and rarely if ever being used.
It also allows the ‘possibility’ of Alexander’s pikemen fighting their way over the river at Granicus (and even
if we dismiss Arrian’s account of this battle, we will still have to contend with his crossing the river as Issus).
(And you’re right…I DO sound like a lawyer. Maybe I joined the wrong profession.
It would certainly be nice to be in court but on the other side of the dock for a change! 
)
)