Alexander Romance
[1] The Romance describes Alexander the Great from his birth, to his succession of the throne of Macedon, his conquests including that of the Persian Empire, and finally his death.
Although constructed around a historical core, the romance is mostly fantastical, including many miraculous tales and encounters with mythical creatures such as sirens or centaurs.
The original version was composed in Ancient Greek some time before 338 AD, when a Latin translation was made, although the exact date is unknown.
Some manuscripts pseudonymously attribute the text's authorship to Alexander's court historian Callisthenes, and so the author is commonly called Pseudo-Callisthenes.
[5] Nectanebo II, the last Pharaoh of Egypt, foresees that his kingdom will fall to the Persians and so flees to the Macedonian court under the guise of the identity of a magician.
He marries Roxane, the daughter of Darius, and writes letters to Olympias describing all he saw and his adventures during his conquests, including his wandering through the Land of Darkness, search for the Water of Life, and more.
The conspiracy succeeds, and Alexander begins to die, though he names the rulers who will control the provinces of his empire after he is gone before ultimately succumbing to the poison.
[6] The Romance locates the Gates of Alexander between two mountains called the "Breasts of the North" (Greek: Μαζοί Βορρά[7]).
The gates enclosed twenty-two nations and their monarchs, including Gog and Magog (therein called "Goth and Magoth").
The geographic location of these mountains is rather vague, described as a 50-day march away northwards after Alexander put to flight his Belsyrian enemies (the Bebrykes,[8] of Bithynia in modern-day North Turkey).
Andreas confesses about what happened with the fish, and he is whipped for it, but he denies that he drank any and does not mention that he stored some, and asks Alexander over why he should worry about the past.
At a later point, Andreas manages to use the water to seduce Alexander's daughter, who is enticed by the opportunity to drink from it, which she does and becomes immortal.
In a journey that is directed towards Polaris, the Polar constellation, he is to find the Land of the Blessed at the edge of the world which in "a region where the sun does not shine" (2.39).
Historians also suspect the use of Greek-language Egyptian sources underlying traditions about the pharaohs Nectanebo II and Sesostris.
[22] A strikingly close parallel to Alexander's relentless quest, though one limited by the constraints of human and mortal existence, is in the Epic of Gilgamesh.
[15] The first commentary to the Romance was a German work titled Der griechische Alexanderroman, published by Adolf Ausfeld in 1907.
[24] In 2007, Richard Stoneman published an Italian edition of the Romance in three volumes, titled Il Romanzo di Alessandro.
Throughout classical antiquity and the Middle Ages, the Romance experienced numerous expansions and revisions exhibiting a variability unknown for more formal literary forms.
[26][27] In Europe, the popularity of the Alexander Romance resurged when 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 historia 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,[28] being translated more times in the next three centuries than any other text except for the Gospels.
There is also a variant of β called λ, and the now-lost δ was perhaps the most important in the transmission of the text into the non-Greek world as it was the basis of the 10th-century Latin translation produced by Leo the Archpriest.
[71] An Ethiopic version of the Alexander Romance was first composed in the Geʽez language between the 14th and 16th centuries was produced as a translation of an intermediary 9th-century Arabic text of what ultimately goes back to the Syriac recension.
The earlier came into existence between the fourth and seventh centuries and its influence is detectable in extant Georgian texts such as The Conversion of Kartli chronicles and in The Life of Kings.
Later, in the eighteenth century, the 18th-century king Archil of Imereti would produce a translation of a Serbian or Russian Alexander Romance into Georgian, and this one has survived.
