Ernst Badian

Ernst Badian (8 August 1925 – 1 February 2011) was an Austrian-born classical scholar who served as a professor at Harvard University from 1971 to 1998.

His main goal was to counter the influential works of William Woodthorpe Tarn (1869–1957), who made a very idealistic portrait of Alexander, presented as a fine gentleman spreading Greek civilisation over the Earth, while also dismissing some points of his personality (his drunkenness, bisexuality, or cruelty).

[5] In 1958, Badian published his first article on Alexander, in which he bluntly wrote in the introduction: Ever since 1933, Tarn's figure of Alexander the Dreamer has explicitly claimed the credit for this re-orientation: the phantom has haunted the pages of scholarship, and even source-books and general histories of philosophy and of ideas – at least in this country – have begun to succumb to the spell.

For example, in his 1971's article on Agis III, Badian wrote that Tarn was "blinded by even more than his usual prejudice towards opponents of Alexander, and distort[ed] the actual facts in an all but irresponsible fashion".

[9] In 1999 Austria awarded him the Cross of Honor for Science and Art (Österreichische Ehrenkreuz für Wissenschaft und Kunst).