THE GREEK ALEXANDER ROMANCE
The Greek Alexander Romance has been one of the most long-lived and influential works of Greek literature. Wrongly attributed by early modern scholars to the contemporary historian of Alexander, Callisthenes, it was probably composed in its earliest form in the third or second century BC. It was rewritten and expanded several times in antiquity, with the result that there are at least three widely divergent Greek texts. The earliest version, now lost, was translated, with further variations, into Syriac, Ethiopic, Armenian and Pahlavi, whence it contributed stories to the Qur’an and inspired the Persian writers Firdausi and Nizami. A Latin version of the third century AD was the basis for the extensive Alexander traditions of medieval Europe, which are known from texts in more than a dozen languages as well as from the visual arts. The adventures which the Alexander of the Romance adds to the achievements of his historical original, the world conqueror, include an ascent into the air in a basket borne by eagles, a descent into the ocean in a diving bell, a meeting with the Amazons, an interview with the Brahmans or naked philosophers, and the search for the Water of Life, which ended in the transformation of Alexander’s daughter into a mermaid. The Romance reflects Alexander’s metamorphosis in legend from a consummate general to a sage and beloved of God.
Richard Stoneman is the author of several books on Greece and the classical tradition, including A Literary Companion to Travel in Greece (Penguin, 1984; reissued by the J. P. Getty Museum, 1994), Land of Lost Gods: The Search for Classical Greece (1987), Aquarian Guide to Greek Mythology (1991) and Daphne into Laurel (1982), a widely praised anthology of classical literature’s reception into the English literary heritage through poetic translation and imitation. He has published Legends of Alexander the Great (Everyman, 1994) and is working on a general study of the Alexander traditions.
THE
GREEK ALEXANDER
ROMANCE
TRANSLATED WITH AN
INTRODUCTION AND NOTES BY
RICHARD STONEMAN
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This translation first published 1991
5
Copyright © Richard Stoneman, 1991
All rights reserved
The moral right of the translator has been asserted
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject
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EISBN: 978–0–141–90711–6
To Geoffrey de Ste Croix
and for my son Alexander
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements
Introduction
A Note on the Text
THE GREEK ALEXANDER ROMANCE: THE LIFE AND DEEDS OF ALEXANDER OF MACEDON
Supplements to the Text
Notes
Map: The World of Alexander
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am grateful, as ever, to the various libraries I have used for the plenty of their resources – in particular, the London Library, indispensable support of the wandering scholar, and the Library of the Institute of Classical Studies. Especial thanks are owed to Professor Waldemar Heckel and Professor Peter Parsons, both of whom read the Introduction and made many valuable suggestions for its improvement. Any errors that remain are of course my own.
The book is dedicated to my undergraduate tutor, Geoffrey de Ste Croix, who first introduced me to the historical Alexander. He will, I am sure, have firm views as to which Alexander – the historical one or he of the Romance – is of the more abiding importance and interest.
INTRODUCTION
ALEXANDER THE GREAT IN HISTORY AND LEGEND
When Marco Polo visited the city of Balkh, ancient Bactra, ‘Mother of Cities, Paradise of the Earth’, his hosts still spoke of the marriage that had taken place there between Alexander the Great and Roxane, the daughter of Darius, king of Persia. Not much further on, in Badakhshan, the Venetian traveller was told of horses for which was claimed a direct line of descent from Alexander’s horse Bucephalus: ‘They were all born like him with a horn on the forehead. This breed was entirely in the possession of one of the king’s uncles, who, because he refused to let the king have any, was put to death by him. Thereupon his wife, to avenge her husband’s death, destroyed the whole breed, and so it became extinct.’
It was not only the horses whose ancestry was legendary. Many of the kings of Bactria, Derwauz and neighbouring regions claimed descent from Alexander the Great.1 One of them, the Mir (or Thum) of Nagir, Shah Sikander Khan, minted coins on which his profile bore a striking resemblance to that of his putative ancestor.2
These examples are chosen to illustrate the power of legend over the minds of men, the longevity of the name of Alexander over two millennia, and also the unimportance of historical fact for the endurance of a great name. Alexander never married the daughter of Darius, and the kings’ claims could not be other than fiction. He did marry Roxane, but she was a Sogdian princess and not a Persian. No historian claims her for a daughter of Darius; that piece of legend is due directly to the Alexander Romance.
It is not only on such dynastic claims that the Romance had an impact. The legends of Alexander entered a common stock of central Asian lore through the manifold translations and retellings of the legend. Visitors to English cathedrals such as Wells and Gloucester will recognize in the Romance the source of frequent representations – on misericords, roof bosses and the like – of scenes of Alexander’s flight into the heavens. His name is known in Malaya and in Russia, in Israel and in Spain.
It would hardly be an exaggeration to say that the legends of Alexander are as widely disseminated, and as influential on art and literature, as the story of the Gospels. Each age makes its own Alexander: the Hebrew tradition makes him a preacher and prophet, the later Christian Greek and Syriac versions emphasize his faithful obedience to God; in the European Middle Ages he is an exemplar of the chivalrous knight; for the Persians he is, in one tradition, the arch-Satan because he destroyed the fire-altars of the Zoroastrian religion,3 while in the epic authors he is the legitimate king of Persia because he is really the son of Darius and not of Philip; for the modern Greeks he is one of the half-magical bearers of Romiosyni, lord of storms and father of the mermaids. The Greek Alexander Roma
nce stands at the beginning of these traditions and is fundamental to the understanding of all of them. It is also not without interest for historians of Alexander. But it is above all a repository of excellent adventure tales, some of which will seem familiar to readers of the Adventures of Sindbad or of Baron Munchausen: the floating island that turns out to be a whale is common to all three; the Baron’s horse is named Bucephalus; the use of small animals to defeat an army of elephants is common to the Romance and Munchausen. One can also discover interesting cross-fertilizations of the Arab and Greek legends: for example, the discovery of the Valley of Diamonds in the Adventures of Sindbad is in other Arab legends associated with Alexander,4 and the talking trees called waq-waq trees in the Syriac versions share the name of the legendary islands of Waq-Waq in the Arab tales.
How did legends of this kind come to be attached to the historical figure of Alexander the Great? In sober fact, Alexander was born in 356 BC at Pella, the son of Philip II of Macedon and his wife the Epirote princess, Olympias.5 He was educated by the philosopher Aristotle, who seems to have instilled in him a taste for discovering the secrets of distant lands – he took numerous scholars and scientists with him on his expedition to Asia; and his taming of the horse Bucephalus is mentioned even in the least extravagant historians.
In 336 Philip was murdered and Alexander became king of Macedon. He swiftly put into action a plan, which may have been already outlined by his father, for a war against Persia ‘to avenge the wrongs of the Greeks’ suffered in the Persian wars of a century and a half before. (Though the Macedonians were not Greeks, and the common people did not speak Greek, their kings claimed Greek nationality and direct descent from the hero Heracles.)
In 334 Alexander crossed the Hellespont with an army of 40,000 men, and for the next eleven years he advanced steadily across Asia, defeating the Persian army in the three great battles at the river Granicus, at Issus and at Gaugamela, finally occupying the capital city of Persepolis and confiscating the king’s treasure. In the course of this expedition, he made a detour to the oracle of Ammon at Siwa in the Egyptian desert, where he seems to have been told by the priests that he was the son of Ammon. At this time he also founded the city of Alexandria in Egypt.
Once king of Persia, Alexander’s ambition grew in grandeur. Tension was caused among his Greek and Macedonian courtiers by his adoption of oriental clothing and customs such as greeting by prostration, and by his insistence on plunging further and further into Asia – over the Hindu Kush, into Khwarizm, and as far as the Indus – on a voyage of exploration and conquest the like of which had never been seen before. Botanists, ethnographers, and historians travelled with Alexander to record both his exploits and the customs and geography of the lands they traversed.
Eventually a mutiny of his troops at the river Hyphasis forced him to abandon plans to march to the Ganges, and he returned to Babylon. For this journey part of the troops were sent with the admiral Nearchus down the Indus and followed the coastal route to Mesopotamia, and part marched with Alexander through the Gedrosian desert – a disastrous episode in which most of the participants died, and which contemporaries attributed simply to his desire to emulate a similar march by the legendary Queen Semiramis.
At Babylon Alexander fell ill, perhaps as the result of a heavy drinking bout (a typically Macedonian practice), and died. Among his papers were controversial documents including his Last Plans – for conquest of the West. Almost at once dissension between his generals resulted in the division of the Empire into several separate, and often warring, kingdoms.
Assessments of the historical Alexander have differed widely. Some see in him the wild and youthful adventurer, hounded on by his own pothos (yearning) to ever more discoveries. This is essentially the view of Arrian (a historian of the second century AD, generally regarded as the most reliable account), and this romantic vision of the youthful explorer is central to the treatment of more recent biographers such as Robin Lane Fox. Other sources were more critical and emphasized his intolerance, his bouts of murderous rage and his ruthlessness. Much of this comes across in Quintus Curtius Rufus (first century AD), and for a modern historian like Ernst Badian6 there is little to choose between Alexander and Hitler. W. W. Tarn saw him as a visionary who believed in the brotherhood of man and a world state; this view receives some slight support from the possibly authentic letter of Aristotle to Alexander on the World State,7 but is generally rejected as a view of Alexander’s own motivation. Lately the military genius of Alexander, for whom the establishment and consolidation of political rule was always a foremost objective, has been stressed again by Donald W. Engels.8
There will never be a definitive portrait of Alexander. The legends began to crystallize around his person even as the catafalque bearing his body rolled across the desert from Babylon en route to Siwa – until it was hijacked by Ptolemy and re-routed to Memphis, and later Alexandria, where the king’s tomb became a talisman of Ptolemy’s own kingly rule in Egypt.
The Greek Alexander Romance as we have it represents an advanced stage of development of this kind of legendary material, and the historical framework has itself become very shaky, as well as being overlaid by many layers of fabulous material.
*
The plot of the Greek Alexander Romance is as follows. Nectanebo, the last Pharaoh of Egypt, foreseeing by his magic arts the defeat of his country by the Persians, flees to the Macedonian court (I.1–3). Falling in love with Olympias, the wife of King Philip, he devises a way to make love to her by disguising himself as the god Ammon (4–7). When in due course Olympias becomes pregnant, Nectanebo explains that the child will be the son of a god and the avenger of his father. Philip’s suspicions of Olympias’ pregnancy are allayed by Nectanebo who sends a magic sea-hawk to him in a dream to explain the situation, a proceeding that is supported by other omens (8–11). But Philip remains suspicious of the child.
When Alexander begins to grow up, one of his first actions is to dispose of Nectanebo in a murder whose motivation is obscure. As he dies, Nectanebo tells him the truth about his paternity (9–14).
Alexander grows up, is educated by Aristotle, tames the horse Bucephalus and goes to compete at the Olympic Games (15–20). On his return he nearly murders Philip in a quarrel (21–2). In his father’s absence on campaign he receives ambassadors from Persia who have come to collect their usual tribute, and treats them to a display of youthful intransigence (23). Philip dies (24). A series of campaigns in Greece and elsewhere is followed by the invasion of Asia. The chronology of the Romance – or perhaps its geography – is so confused that this campaign is interrupted by a further series of campaigns in Greece and Italy: clearly the author had no idea where these places were (25–9).
Alexander then goes to Egypt, where an oracle of the god Ammon gives him instructions on where to found the city that will be Alexandria. Its construction is described in detail – especially Alexander’s erection of an altar at the sanctuary of Sarapis. The god Sarapis predicts to Alexander the prosperity of Alexandria (30–33). Alexander continues to Memphis, where he is received as the reincarnation of Nectanebo (34).
Alexander now marches into Asia, conquers Tyre (35) and begins the long campaign against the Persian king, Darius, in the course of which he and Darius exchange a series of diplomatic letters. The historical events of this campaign are given in some detail and with passable accuracy (36–42), but are interrupted by a reprise of the campaigns in Greece (43–II.6) including the sack of Thebes (I.46) and the resistance in Athens (II.1–6).
The story of the Persian campaign resumes (7–11) and Darius seeks the assistance of the Indian king, Porus (12). Alexander uses various tricks to demoralize the Persians (13) and visits the Persian court in disguise (14–15), crossing for this purpose the mysterious river Stranga which can freeze and unfreeze in a moment. The battle on the Stranga (16) corresponds to that at Arbela in the historical accounts. Alexander burns the palace at Persepolis – although the city is not named in t
he text (17). The murder of Darius by his satraps (20) is followed by Alexander’s proclamation to his subjects and execution of the murderers (21).
Alexander now prepares to marry Darius’ daughter Roxane (22) and writes a letter to Olympias with a long account of his adventures, starting with a reprise of what has already been described in the text and continuing with travels in strange regions (23–44). His adventures include meeting strange beasts, magic trees and stones; he tries to explore an island but an unseen voice tells him to return (38). He explores the sea in a diving bell and marches into the Land of Darkness towards the Land of the Blessed; the stratagem of taking mares without their foals enables them to return safely, led by the mares’ instinct. Alexander discovers the Water of Life but fails to drink it (39). Two birds with human heads appear and tell him to turn back. An attempt to explore the heavens in a basket carried by eagles is also unsuccessful (40). He meets Sirens and fights Centaurs (41).
Then Alexander advances to India and the City of the Sun, where he receives an oracle foretelling his death (44). The campaign against Porus is interrupted by a mutiny of the soldiers (III.1), but Alexander defeats Porus in single combat (4). Then he visits the Brahmans (5–6). Here follows the Letter of Alexander to Aristotle about India (7–16).
He visits the trees of the Sun and Moon (17), and then conceives a desire to see the palace of Semiramis, now inhabited by Queen Candace of Meroe. He visits her in disguise, and gets into her good graces by rescuing her son Candaules from his enemies (18–23). Candaules brings him to the Dwellings of the Gods, where the Pharaoh Sesonchosis warns him of his inevitable death (24).
Alexander visits the Amazons and makes them his subjects (25–6). A second letter to Olympias repeats this account and then describes his visit to the City of the Sun and the Palace of Cyrus with its golden ornaments (27–9).
The Greek Alexander Romance Page 1