Thanks for commenting. Anything that gives a fresh slant on Alexander (and Hephaestion) is always welcome to me and I'm sure there is a historical background to the Romance, but with a lot of surface gloss. I often get the impression with the books I've read on Alexander that the writers rely too much on what might be called the first-tier of scholarship (eg Heckel and Lane Fox among those I've used here) and don't really examine what the sources actually say but rely on scholarly interpretation. So if the principal scholars don't really mention the Romance, then neither do the other sources. Oh, I wish I were a proper scholar!

Robin Lane Fox does say that Alexander doesn't appear to have put any of Aristotle's philosophy into practice, but sadly I'm not a philosophy scholar either! But it would be nice to think that if Hephaestion did lack the temperament to be a first-rate soldier, then it might have been because he thought too much.