- There are many episodes in the story of Alexander when it is hard to be sure just where the historical element ends and ‘romance’ begins, and by tradition, much legendary material had already infiltrated biographies of the Classical period. But for the Greeks the stories of the past were literally mythoi, and the segregation between myth, legend, and the factual past was a soft border blurred by Homeric epics and Hesiod’s Theogonia which permitted a coeval interaction between men, heroes, and gods. So the emergence, and development, of the Greek Alexander Romance, in the Hellenistic world, is perhaps not surprising. As far as the Romance, separating the fact from the fabulae has, indeed, proved no easy task, for material was added through a gradual process of accretion, a dilemma encapsulated in Peter Green’s biography of the Macedonian king: … the uncomfortable fact remains that the Alexander Romance provides us, on occasion, with apparently genuine materials found nowhere else, while our better-authenticated sources, per contra, are all too often riddled with bias, propaganda, rhetorical special pleading or patent falsification and suppression of evidence.
- Attributing the Romance in its earliest form to a single author or date remains impossible, but evidence suggests that both the unhistorical and the quasi-historical elements were in circulation in the century following Alexander’s death. The oldest text we know of today, recension ‘A’, is preserved in the 11th century Greek manuscript known as Parisinus 1711; the text is titled The Life of Alexander of Macedon which most closely resembles a conventional historical work’, though any factual narrative is just the early backbone to which other elements were attached. Recension A, whilst poorly written, full of gaps and clearly a syncretic account, is nevertheless the best staging point scholars have when attempting to recreate an original (usually referred to as ‘α’ – alpha) dating back some 700 or 800 years (or more) before the extant recension A. We cannot discount an archetype that may have been written even earlier still, in the Ptolemaic era. If Alexander’s official court historian, Callisthenes, was once credited with its authorship (thus ‘pseudoCallisthenes’), the prevailing belief must have been that it emerged in, or soon after, Alexander’s Asian campaigns. Through the centuries that followed, the Romance evolved and diversified into a mythopoeic family tree whose branches foliaged with the leaves of many languages, faiths and cultures; more than eighty versions appeared in twenty-four languages.
- Genre Parallels
- We have many examples of the genre offspring which were hugely influential in the Middle Ages and they were amongst the earliest texts translated into the vernacular literature that emerged in the Renaissance. Historia de Preliis Alexandri Magni (The Wars of Alexander the Great) of Archpriest Leo of Naples (10th century), first put to print in 1487, gave rise to a whole new generation of re-renderings of the story, as did the Alexandreis siva Gesta Alexandri Magni, a Latin poem in epic-style dactylic hexameter by the theologian Gautier de Chatillon (ca. 1135-post 1181), with much credit paid to the goddess Fortuna. The verses were so popular that they displaced the reading of ancient poets in grammar schools. Like the oil paintings of the period, they were cultural palimpsests, absorbing textual supplements and stylistic elements from other classical works as well as the iconography of their day. Through the romance genre Alexander’s story finally infiltrated the East in a more permanent way than his own military conquest managed to. A Persian Romance variant was the Iskandernameh and alongside it Armenian and Ethiopian translations circulated imbuing the tale with their own cultural identities.
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