Between roughly 450 BCE and 1450 CE, readers across the Levant, North Africa, and Europe were united by complex networks of interrelated texts, attested in a multiplicity of languages, that contemporary scholars call the Ancient Novel. All available evidence points to the Afroasiatic origins of the narrative devices that typify these compositions (Anderson 1984; Loprieno 2003), whose several types show a diffusional pattern from the Levant around the Mediterranean and into Europe, southward through the 駆ijヂz and Yaman to Ethiopia as well as eastward across ┆rヂn to India and central Asia. Reciprocally, Indic and other oriental matter moved west, following the trade routes, progressively reworked as it crossed cultures to accord with Levantine-Mediterranean narrative traditions. A product of the intellectual ferment that Karl Jaspers termed the Achsenzeit (“Axial Age”) (Jaspers 1949, 15-106; Eisenstadt 1986; Arnason, et al. 2005), the ancient novel flourished as an epiphenomenon within the multi-ethnic tributary empires of the Mediterranean and Middle East—┆rヂn, Makedonia, Rome, Byzantion, the Caliphates—where it achieved both its greatest artistic complexity and its widest geographical diffusion between the second and twelfth centuries CE. Under Ottoman rule, in Christian Ethiopia, and Mughal India the form continued to flourish well into the nineteenth century CE (Keith-Falconer 1970 and Budge 1968), but with the decline of feudal culture in the West and the advancement of the capitalist world system (Wallerstein 1974), such texts all but ceased to circulate in Europe.
In fact, it is the Alexander Romance, which Ken Dowden accurately singles out as “antiquity’s most successful novel” ( Reardon 1989, 650) a work that survives in several dozen languages and well over a hundred different versions, none of which can claim to be original or definitive in form. There is at present no general survey of all surviving versions of the Romance. The most up-to-date account of the Greek recensions and their historical vicissitudes Fraser 1996, 203-26; Jouanno 2002. Cf. also Carey 1956; Merkelbach 1977; Ross 1986; Stoneman 2007b. Greek texts: Stoneman 2007a. Its overtly patchwork makeup and continuous (re)composition (Cf. Stoneman 2003), in poetry as well as prose, is attested from the third century BCE through the nineteenth century CE. The terminus ante quem for the material that makes up the core of the Romance is ca. 240 BCE, a date guaranteed by a citation from Teles the Cynic in Stobaeus, Eclogae 97.31. However, the oldest surviving recension of the narrative that has come down to us—represented by a single examplar: the eleventh-century Codex Parasinus graec. 1711—can be dated on philological grounds to ca. 300 CE; see Wyss 1942. For those portions of Roman imperial world which remained pre-capitalist up until the Napoleonic invasion of Egypt—in particular, Ethiopia and the lands under Ottoman hegemony—the Romance continued to circulate through the nineteenth century; see Budge 1968. Across a geographical expanse that ranges from Afghanistan to Spain and Ethiopia to Iceland—that is, precisely the larger temporal and geographical coordinates of the Levantine-Mediterranean tributary states. Not only was the Alexander Romance the single most popular narrative for roughly a millennium and a half, in effect a protean network of interrelated texts disseminated over massive tracts of Asia, Africa, and Europe ( see Jasnow 1997).
Significantly, it is not the historical Alexander that has entered these holy accounts, but the Alexander of the romance and, accordingly, there are not only pagan, but Jewish, Christian, Mazdean, and Islāmic versions of the tale (See McInerny 2007). Whereas the historical treatments of Alexander’s life—which gain currency only relatively late—give us the facts of the man’s military career (Auberger 2001), what the Romance attempts to capture is the overall significance of Alexander’s deeds for the tributary epoch, not the “accidents” of history, as it were, but rather their “essence”—what Aristotelビs called lὸ lき ἦつ jἶつαせ: “the what-it-meant-to-be” Alexander.
