The Alexander Romance is a difficult text to define and to assess justly. From its earliest days it was an open text, which was adapted into a variety of cultures with meanings that themselves vary, and yet seem to carry a strong undercurrent of homogeneity: Alexander is the hero who cannot become a god, and who encapsulates the desires and strivings of the host cultures.
The papers assembled in this volume, which were originally presented at a conference at the University of Wrocław, Poland, in October 2015, all face the challenge of defining the Alexander Romance. Some focus on quite specific topics while others address more overarching themes. They form a cohesive set of approaches to the delicate positioning of the text between history and literature. From its earliest elements in Hellenistic Egypt, to its latest reworkings in the Byzantine and Islamic Middle East, the Alexander Romance shows itself to be a work that steadily engages with such questions as kingship, the limits of human (and Greek) nature, and the purpose of history. The Romance began as a history, but only by becoming literature could it achieve such a deep penetration of east and west.
Reviews
Marc Steinmann in Museum Helveticum 77/2 (2020), pp. 276-277
Tommaso Braccini in Medioevo Greco 19 (2019), pp. 258-259
Chiara Di Serio, Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2019.08.10
RICHARD STONEMAN
Introduction: on using literature for history VII
I Defining the Alexander Romance as literature
IVAN LADYNIN
Alexander – ‘the new Sesonchosis’: an early Hellenistic propagandist fiction and its possible background 3
YVONA TRNKA-AMRHEIN
The fantastic four: Alexander, Sesonchosis, Ninus and Semiramis 23
RICHARD STONEMAN
The Alexander Romance and the rise of paradoxography 49
HAILA MANTEGHI
The king and the wizard: Apollonius of Tyana in the Iskandarnāma of Nizāmi Ganjavi (1141-1209) 63
DANIEL SELDEN
Alexander in the Indies 69
II How to read ‘bad’ history
GRAHAM OLIVER
The Alexander Romance and the Hellenistic political economy 111
BENJAMIN GARSTAD
Alexander’s circuit of the Mediterranean in the Alexander Romance 129
KRZYSZTOF NAWOTKA
History into literature in the account of the Campaign of Gaugamela in the Alexander Romance 159
HARTMUT WULFRAM
Intertextuality through translation: the foundation of Alexandria and Virgil in Julius Valerius’ Alexander Romance 169
ELIZABETH BAYNHAM
“Joining the gods”: Alexander at the Euphrates; Arrian 7.27.3, Metz Epitome 101-102 and the Alexander Romance 189
III Related texts: the impact of the Alexander Romance
CHRISTIAN THRUE DJURSLEV
Revisiting Alexander’s gates against ‘Gog and Magog’: observations on the testimonies before the Alexander Romance tradition 201
ALEKSANDRA KLĘCZAR
The universal rule of Alexander in Tamid 32: an overview 215
CORINNE JOUANNO
Alexander Romance and Byzantine world chronicles: history cross-fertilized by fiction and the reverse 225
EMILY COTTRELL
Alexander at the Buyid Court 245
Abstracts 279
Contributors 287
Indices 291
Index Locorum 291
General Index 302
