William Woodthorpe Tarn


Sir William Woodthorpe Tarn, usually cited as W. W. Tarn, was a British classical scholar and a writer. He wrote extensively on the Hellenistic world, particularly on Alexander the Great's empire and its successor states. Tarn has been criticized for romanticizing philhellenism, and using it to further his own racial colonial theories. He was a Fellow of the British Academy. He was born in London and died in Muirtown.

Works

According to some, Tarn offered a somewhat idealistic interpretation of Alexander's conquests as being essentially driven by his vision of the "unity of mankind", in line with the interpretation of Plutarch. In his outdated work 'Alexander the Great', Tarn offered a pedigree for Alexander which flips upside down the notion of a Macedonian or much less Greek lineage: "Alexander certainly had from his father and probably from his mother Illyrian, i.e., Albanian, blood."
Jeanne Reames remarked that "Tarn's portrait of Alexander turned the Greek conqueror into a proper Scottish gentleman. Engaging in sometimes elaborate apologetics to explain away Alexander's questionable decisions, Tarn painted him as the original philosopher in armor, a chivalrous young king who brought higher Greek culture to the poor benighted barbarians.
two-volume biography of Alexander and his article in the "Cambridge Ancient History" influenced the popular thinking of future generations even after in scholarly circles his theories had been torpedoed by Harvard's Ernst Badian. In fact, portrayals of Alexander in some high school and college world history text books still reflect Tarn more than anyone who has come after. Reames also saw Tarn's strong influence in Mary Renault's trilogy of historical novels about Alexander - though Renault's acknowledged Alexander's homo-erotic tendencies, while Tarn had regarded references to them in ancient sources as "defamations" which the Macedonian king had to be defended against.
Tarn also researched extensively on the history of the Greco-Bactrians and Indo-Greeks in his book The Greeks in Bactria and India. His work followed Osmund Bopearachchi's publication on the study of Indo-Greek coins.

Publications