Arrian was a Greek soldier, scholar, and politian in the 1^st-2^nd century BCE. He is best known today for his history of the campaigns of Alexander the Great, the Anabasis (literally a journey upcountry from the sea). It described Alexander’s campaign in and conquest of the Persian Empire 336-323 BCE. The narrative, written in seven books, is chiefly military, demonstrating its relationship to an earlier work of the same title by the Greek historian Xenophon, which Arrian deliberately emulated.

This edition is a later printing of the 16^th century edition by the Flemish classical scholar Bonaventura Vulcanius (the Latin form of his original surname de Smet ‘the blacksmith’). The vellum biding bears the arms of Amsterdam on the front and back boards.