Search Results

This chapter examines the traditions that comprise the Alexander compilation in Bavli Tamid, as well as its implications for the traditions from the Roman East as a major constituent of the Babylonian Talmud. Before considering the evidence that these traditions reached rabbinic Babylonia from the eastern Roman provinces, the chapter provides a background on Alexander Romance. It then looks at traditions found in ancient Greek biographical and historical accounts of Alexander, as well as traditions found in ms L, the most complete version of recension-beta of the Alexander Romance. It also analyzes the Bavli’s version of the Alexander Romance (Tamid 31b–32b), Alexander’s travels to Africa and his encounter with the African women, and the lessons imparted by Bavli Tamid’s Alexander compilation.

This chapter treats a series of fictional letters between Alexander the Great and the Persian king Darius, preserved partly in the Alexander Romance and partly on papyrus. It argues not (as Merkelbach thought) that there was once a complete, integrated epistolary novel, but that there was a fluid body of this material in circulation. Nevertheless, the letters are sophisticated and creative examples of popular literature.

This chapter consists of three examples of sound and music tales in Alexander’s life as transmitted in Italian medieval literature, and a coda pertaining to the early modern era. It deals with the Italian segment of Alexander’s musical legacy in medieval European literature, elaborated from vulgarisations and adaptations of the so-called Alexander Romance. Three main topics are focused on: human voice vs non-human voice, music education for a king and sonorous mirabilia. Two features are introduced: the significant role of music in shaping Alexander’s knowledge and his image as a chivalric king; the impact of the literature on Alexander upon 13th–14th century travellers by Europeans in Asia. The coda concerns the possibility that Alexander was imitated as idealised patron of the sciences and arts in the musical performance (intermedi) organised for the 1589 Florentine wedding of Ferdinand I de’ Medici and Christina of Lorraine.

This chapter examines the parallel literary traditions of the mythic Alexander the Great in the Eurasian archipelagic peripheries of Britain and Southeast Asia, focusing on how Alexander stories were transmitted from late antiquity through the medieval period and transformed by early modern authors. It looks at the global literary networks linking the British and Southeast Asian peripheries, along with their receptions of the Greek novel Alexander Romance. It also explores how Alexander was appropriated into English and Malay literatures and how both literary traditions connected him to the material culture and imagined presence of foreign others as part of their intercultural resonances. Finally, it describes how the myth of Alexander became intertwined with alterity and foreign relations at the two ends of the Eurasian trade routes, how he became associated with long-distance trade, and how he influenced the self-representation of emerging maritime empires.

This chapter presents a particularly fascinating imitation of Priam's escape from the Achaean camp, which appears in the Alexander Romance, pseudonymously attributed to Callisthenes, historian to Alexander the Great, and composed in the late second or the third century ce Among other things it tells how Alexander, disguised as Hermes, daringly entered and escaped from Darius's palace. This episode merits special treatment insofar as it entices its readers to recognize it as a parody of the end of the Iliad. The reader should see here an imitation of Hermes' appearances to Priam in Iliad 24. In the first appearance, Hermes takes with him his soporific wand and disguises himself as a Myrmidon; in the second, he appears as himself to Priam as he sleeps. In the novel, Ammon disguises himself as Hermes, wand in hand, and appears to Alexander as he sleeps.

This chapter examines the synchronic renewals and the repurposing of Alexander the Great’s image in canonical English and Malay literatures. More specifically, it considers the transmission of the Alexander Romance and its common motifs into English and Malay as well as the shared strand of literary reception that link these traditions together as cousins rather than wholly separate. It also explores how both English and Malay literatures, invoking Alexander to mediate intercultural encounters, use him to fashion a vocabulary for a cultural politics of hybridity. More importantly, English and Malay literary traditions meet in connected themes mediated by Alexander and intersect in their shared deployment of him to figure intercultural relations arising from trade.

This chapter provides an extended analysis of the theme of hybridity and intermarriage in the Alexander Romance, where Alexander turns out to be the son of the Thracian Olympias and the last Egyptian pharaoh, Nectanebo.

Alexander the Great was a symbol of Hellenism; but he was also, quite independently, a symbol of imperial autocracy across cultures. This chapter explores the ways in which figures of absolute power like Alexander, and his precedent Cyrus, operate both within and beyond specific cultural traditions.

This Epilogue narrates an incident in which the Islamic Alexander became a rallying cry for the anti-kafir (infidel) movement in Sumatra. It considers how Ahmad Shah bin Iskandar, a claimant to Sumatra’s Minangkabau throne in Palembang, professed the status of a saint to wage holy war against the Dutch, and turned to the legend of Alexander the Great to inspire his resistance. As a leader of the anti-kafir movement, Ahmad Shah garnered support from various chiefs in the region and sought to build an archipelagic alliance. An analysis of Ahmad Shah’s uses of the Alexander legend reveals how the Alexander Romance was turned to religiously motived politics in European encounters with Southeast Asia. Ahmad Shah’s exegesis of Iskandar Zulkarnain’s name emphasizes the latter’s dual role as king and prophet, and in laying claim to an Alexandrian descent of Palembang provenance, Ahmad Shah pretended to sacral kingship.

Egypt is a culture that had novelistic literature earlier than others, and which was open to multiple different cultural influences over a long period. This chapter introduces the Alexander Romance, a text that embodies generic and cultural fluidity, surviving as it does in multiple different forms demonstrating multiple different linguistic and cultural registers. The Alexander Romance was antiquity’s most widely disseminated text after the Bible.

This chapter starts with the report by Ctesias (early fourth century BCE) that the Indians are a very just people. This prompts various questions, for instance on the sources of his information and their quality, and on whether what he meant by 'just' corresponded to any Indian reality or terminology. This leads into an investigation of Greek writing on India from Homer to the Alexander Romance so as to ascertain what Greeks imagined to be the components of Indian justice, and to a comparison with Indian texts that include the Rgveda, Upanishads, Arthsastra, Dharmasutras, and Laws of Manu. A conclusion is that the Greek texts are more reliable than is sometimes supposed.

This chapter compares the historiographical practice of genealogizing mythic heroes with the genealogies of Jesus in the gospels of Matthew and Luke. It discusses why genealogies went back to heroes and kings, why generations were sometimes omitted, and why traditions of double paternity made sense to ancient readers.