Who burned Persepolis: Alexander's revenge, or a drunken party?

Alexander's army took Persepolis in 330 BC, and a fire destroyed its palaces soon after. Whether it was a calculated act of revenge or a drunken party that went wrong depends on which ancient writer you read, and modern historians still weigh them against each other.

Alexander stayed at Persepolis for several months, after letting his soldiers plunder the city, all but the palaces. In the spring of 330 BC, before he left, a fire destroyed the palaces. Only the columns, parts of the walls, stairways and doorways remained.

Account one comes from Arrian. According to him, Alexander deliberately set fire to the palaces as revenge for the Persian destruction of Athens and its temples in 480 BC, even though his general Parmenion advised him against it.

Account two comes from Diodorus Siculus, Quintus Curtius Rufus and Plutarch. In their version, the fire began during a drunken celebration at the suggestion of Thaïs, an Athenian courtesan. She or Alexander threw the first torch. Diodorus even remarks that the act of Xerxes at the Athenian Acropolis had been repaid in kind by one woman, in sport.

The story gets stranger afterward. Plutarch says that Alexander ordered the fires put out but it was too late. Curtius says he did not regret it until the next morning.

Historians do not have to pick just one. The two accounts need not exclude each other: the fire may have been both a symbolic act of revenge and the outcome of a feast. It may also have had a political purpose, to destroy an iconic symbol of the Persian monarchy that might otherwise have become a focus of Persian resistance.