Alexander the Great in legend
The vast conquests of the Macedonian king Alexander the Great quickly inspired the formation and diffusion of legendary material about his deity, journeys, and tales.
This text would spawn a genre of literature about the legends and exploits of Alexander across centuries, going through over one hundred versions in premodern times and appearing in almost every language in both European and Islamic worlds.
The seer Aristander interpreted this to mean that Olympias was pregnant, since men do not seal up what is empty, and that she would bring forth a son who would be bold and lion-like.
[1] After Philip took Potidaea in 356 BC, he received word that his horse had just won at the Olympic games, and that Parmenion had defeated the Illyrians.
[5] Josephus describes these gates in the context of a barbarian group called the Scythians, for whom the boundary prevents their incursion.
Around 1260, Bertold von Regensburg preached, that like Alexander believed that "he could take down the highest stars from the sky by hand, so you too would like to go up in the air if you could".
In the legend, Alexander finds the immortal water behind after walking three days in darkness, behind two mountains that open and close.
"The Two-Horned One"),[14][15][16] a figure that appears in Surah Al-Kahf in the Quran, the holy text of Islam, which greatly expanded the attention paid to him in the traditions of the Muslim world.
It was composed during the reign of Hisham ibn Abd al-Malik (r. 724–743) from Greek sources like the Epistola Alexandri ad Aristotelem.
Other texts in this tradition from the tenth century onward included Ṣiwān al-Ḥikma (Chest of Wisdom) of Abu Sulayman Sijistani, the Al-Ḥikma al-Khālida (Everlasting Wisdom) of Miskawayh, and the Al-Kalim al-Rūḥānīya fīʾl-Ḥikam al-Yūnānīya (Spiritual Sayings about Greek Maxims) of Ibn Hindu.
Other examples include the Tārīkh (Historiae) of al-Yaʿqūbī (d. 897), the al-Rusul waʾl-Mulūk (History of the Prophets and Kings, or simply Annales) of al-Tabbari (d. 923), the Murūj al-Dhahab (Meadows of Gold) of al-Masudi (d. 956), and the Naẓm al-Jawhar (String of Pearls) of Eutychius of Alexandria.
[18] The earliest full-length Arabic Alexander Romance was the Qissat al-Iskandar of ʿUmara ibn Zayd, composed in the late 8th or early 9th century.
This is an ironic outcome considering Zoroastrian Persia's hostility to the national enemy who finished the Achaemenid Empire, but was also directly responsible for centuries of Persian domination by Hellenistic "foreign rulers".
In another tradition, Alexander is the son of Dara/Darab and his wife Nahid, who is described to be the daughter of "Filfus of Rûm" i.e. "Philip the Greek" (cf.
[27] In Europe, the Alexander Romance was forgotten until Leo the Archpriest discovered a Greek copy in Constantinople while he was on a diplomatic missions.
He produced a translation into Latin titled the Nativitas et victoria Alexandri Magni regis, which became the basis of the far more successful and expanded version known as the Historia de Proeliis, which went through three recensions between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries and made Alexander a household name throughout the Middle Ages.
[30][35] The Syriac Alexander Legend, composed either in ~630 shortly after Heraclius defeated the Persians[36] or in the mid-6th century during the reign of Justinian I,[37] contains additional motifs not found in the earliest Greek version of the Romance, including the apocalypticization of the wall built against Gog and Magog.
Persian versions of the Alexander Romance began with depictions covering three sections of Ferdowsi's Shahnameh (Book of Kings).
The first full length Persian recension of the Romance appeared in an anonymous work entitled the Iskandarnameh, likely dating to the eleventh century.
The next major Persian version was the Ayina-i Iskandari (Alexandrine Mirror) of the poet Amir Khusrau, who began first by surveying the earlier works of Ferdowsi and Nizami before proceeding into his own portrait.
