In this, as in all the comedies except _Mother Bombie_ and _Love's Metamorphosis_, Lyly used classic myth for his chief material. Yet he but followed a custom of the day, for most of the plays given at court between 1570 and 1590 by the children's companies were based on such material: for instance, _Iphigenia_, _Narcissus_, _Alcmæon_, _Quintus Fabius_, and _Scipio Africanus_. These subjects seem to have been treated as pastorals, histories, and possibly allegories. Lyly rejected in _Alexander and Campaspe_ the allegorical and the pastoral form, and told rather naïvely, except in style, the story of the love of Alexander and Apelles for Campaspe, repeating in his sub-plot many historic retorts of Diogenes. In details of method Lyly seems to have had a precursor. Richard Edwardes (born 1523, died 1566) in his _Damon and Pythias_, printed in 1582, but usually assigned to 1564, wrote in a way very suggestive of Lyly in _Alexander and Campaspe_. He disclaimed in his prologue intention of referring to any court except that of Dionysius at Syracuse; introduced lyrics; gave Aristippus the philosopher an important place; inveighed against flattery at the court; brought in the comic episode of Grim the collier without connection with the main plot, just as Lyly often introduces his comic material; and derived the fun of this scene mainly from two impudent pages. Certainly it would have been natural for Lyly, early in his career, to look to the plays of a former prominent master of the Chapel Children. =Alexander and Campaspe: Date, Sources.=--The exact date of _Alexander and Campaspe_ it seems impossible to determine. It was written before April, 1584, for it was licensed for printing in that month. The facts that similes and references in _Euphues_ are found in it, and that the work--here of a kind which Lyly never exactly repeats--resembles the early _Damon and Pythias_ suggest that _Alexander and Campaspe_ belongs early in his dramatic career. It has been held that it should precede _Endimion_, but the allegory in that play; the fact that Blount, who places _Sapho and Phao_, _Gallathea_, _Mydas_, and _Mother Bombie_ in the order approved by the most recent criticism, puts it second; and the better characterization, more natural dialogue, and slightly closer binding together of the main and the sub-plot, argue for the second place. The play, like the _Anatomie of Wit_, is a composite. The main plot--the story of Apelles and Campaspe--Lyly found in Book 35 of Pliny's _History of the World_. His setting he took from Plutarch's _Life of Alexander_. That, too, gave him the siege of Thebes, Timoclea, some of the philosophers' names, most of their speeches, the generals, and Hephestion, and probably suggested the possibilities of Diogenes as a comic figure. The material for the scenes of the Cynic, and the name Manes, he found in the _Lives of the Philosophers_ by Diogenes Laertius.