death by Alexander in 327, whose history went up to the death of Darius, Alexander’s general Ptolemy, afterwards king in Egypt, Nearchus who commanded the fleet that sailed from the Indus to the Persian Gulf, Onesicritus who served as pilot in the same fleet, Aristobulus who was with Alexander in India, Clitarchus, a contemporary, if not an eye-witness, important from the fact that his highly coloured version of the life of Alexander became the popular authority for the succeeding centuries. Besides the historical narrative, there were works mainly geographical or topographical left by persons like Baeton and Diognetus, whom Alexander had employed (as βηματισταί) to survey the roads over which he passed. All such original sources have now perished. The fragments are collected in the Didot edition of Arrian by Karl Müller. Not reckoning scattered notices, we depend principally upon five later compositions, Diodorus, book xvii. (c. 20 B.C.), the work of Quintus Curtius (c. A.D. 42), Plutarch’s (c. 45–125 A.D.) Life of Alexander, Arrian’s Anabasis and Indica (c. A.D. 150), and the relevant books of Justin’s abridgment (2nd cent. A.D.) of the history of Trogus (c. 10 B.C.?). To these we may add the Latin Itinerarium Alexandri, a skeleton outline of Alexander’s campaigns dedicated to the emperor Constantius (A.D. 324–361), printed at the end of the Didot edition of Arrian, and the Epitome Rerum Gestarum Alexandri magni, an abridgment made in the 4th or 5th century of a lost Latin work of uncertain date, combining history with elements taken from the Romance (edited by O. Wagner, Leipzig, 1900). The relation of these works to the various original sources constitutes the critical problem before the modern historian in reference to the history of Alexander. See Droysen vol. i. appendix i.; A. Schoene, De rerum Alexandri Magni scriptorum imprimis Arriani & Plutarchi fontibus (1870); Fraenkel, Die Geschichtschreiber Alex. d. Grossen (1883); O. Maas, Kleitarch und Diodor (Petersburg, 1894); Kaerst, Forschungen zur Gesch. Alex. d. Grossen (1887), and Gesch. d. hellenist. Zeitalters (vol. i., 1901), pp. 421 f.; F. L. Schoenle, Diodorstudien (1891); E. Schwartz, articles “Aristobulos (14),” “Arrianus,” “Quintus Curtius,” “Diodorus” in Pauly-Wissowa’s Realencyclopädie.
For modern views of Alexander see Thirlwall, History of Greece; Niebuhr, Lectures on Ancient History (Eng. trans. rev. by author, 1852); Grote, History of Greece; Droysen, Histoire de l’Hellénisme (translation by Bouché-Leclerq); Ad. Holm, History of Greece (Eng. trans., 1898); B. Niese, Gesch. der griech. u. maked. Staaten (vol. i.); Kaerst, Gesch. des hellenist. Zeitalters (1901); J. Beloch, Griechische Gesch. (vol. iii., 1904); J. B. Bury, History of Greece (1902); A. von Gutschmid, Geschichte Irans (1888). Among the mass of monographs and special articles, reference may be made to Freeman, Historical Essays, 2nd series, pp. 182 f.; Dodge, Alexander (in a series called Great Captains) 1890; Mahaffy, Problems in Greek History (1892), ch. viii.; D. G. Hogarth, Philip and Alexander of Macedon (1897), a striking effort of historical imagination to reconstruct Alexander as a man of the real world; Benjamin I. Wheeler, Alexander the Great (1900) in the “Heroes of the Nations Series.” The purely military aspect of Alexander’s campaigns is treated in general histories of warfare (Rustow-Kochly, Bauer, Delbrück, Verdy du Vernois), and in special monographs by Hogarth, Journ. of Philol. vol. xvii., 1888, pp. 1 foll.; H. Droysen, Untersuchungen über A. des Gr. Heerwesen (1885), and Graf Yorck von Wartenburg, Kurze Übersicht der Feldzüge A. de Gr. (1897). For further references to the literature on Alexander, see Kaerst’s article in Pauly-Wissowa’s Realencyclopädie (1894). (E. R. B.)
The Romance of Alexander.
The figure of Alexander naturally impressed itself upon the imagination of the world which his career had shaken. Even in India we are told that he was held in honour by the native kings who took his farthest provinces in possession. But Eastern tradition, so tenacious of the old myths of primitive man, has a short memory for actual history, and five centuries later Alexander was only remembered in Irān as the accursed destroyer of the sacred books, whose wisdom he had at the same time pilfered by causing translations to be made into “Roman.” That the East to-day has so much to tell about Alexander is only due to the fact that old mythical stories of gods or heroes who go travelling through lands of monsters and darkness, of magical fountains and unearthly oceans, became attached to his name in the popular literature of the Roman empire, and this mythical Alexander was reintroduced in the 7th century A.D. into the farther East, where the historical Alexander was almost forgotten. The romance of Alexander is found written in the languages of nearly all peoples from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic, but all these versions are derived, mediately or immediately, from the Greek original which circulated under the false name of Callisthenes. The Greek pseudo-Callisthenes (otherwise Aisopos we possess in three recensions, based all upon a book produced in Egypt in the 2nd century A.D. But this book itself was a farrago of heterogeneous—pieces of genuine history, ancient stories once told in Babylon of Gilgamesh or Etanna, literary forgeries of the days soon after Alexander, like the oldest part of the “Testament of Alexander,” variations due to Egyptian patriotic sentiment, like that which made Alexander the son of the last Pharaoh, Nectanebus. As the story was reproduced, variations were freely introduced according to the bent of different times and peoples; in the Persian version Alexander (Iskander) became a son of Darius; among the Mahommedans he turned into a prophet, hot against idols; the pen of Christian monks made him an ascetic saint.
The Alexander romance found its way into Europe through the medium of Latin, but originated mainly from the versions of the pseudo-Callisthenes, not from the more sober narrative of Quintus Curtius. The pseudo-Callisthenes, in a recension which has not been preserved, was translated into Latin by Julius Valerius about the end of the 3rd century, and an epitome of this translation, also in Latin, was made some time before the 9th century, and is introduced by Vincent de Beauvais into his Speculum historiale. Much of the legend is a running travesty of the true history of the conqueror. The first book deals with his birth and early exploits. The trace of Alexandrian influence is to be found in the pretence that his actual father was Nectanebus, a fugitive king of Egypt. The latter was a great magician, able, by operating upon waxen figures of the armies and ships of his enemies, to obtain complete power over their real actions. Obliged, however, to flee to Pella in Macedonia, he established himself as an astrologer, and as such was consulted by the childless Olympias. Having promised that Zeus Ammon would visit her in the form of a dragon, he himself assumed the disguise. In due course Alexander was born, and Philip’s suspicions were overcome by a second appearance of the dragon, which was held to prove the divine fatherhood. The child was small and somewhat deformed, but of great courage and intelligence. When he was twelve years old he was instructed in starcraft by Nectanebus, who was killed by a fall into a pit, into which he had been playfully pushed by Alexander. The first book also relates his conquests in Italy, Africa, Syria and Asia Minor; his return to Macedonia and the submission of Greece. The second book continues the history of his conquests, and the third contains the victory over Porus, the relations with the Brahmins, the letter to Aristotle on the wonders of India, the histories of Candace and the Amazons, the letter to Olympias on the marvels of Farther Asia, and lastly the account of Alexander’s death in Babylon.
The most wide-spread Latin version of the story, however, was the Historia de proeliis,[1] printed at Strassburg in 1486, which began to supersede the Epitome of Julius Valerius in general favour about the end of the 13th century. It is said to have been written by the Neapolitan arch-presbyter Leo, who was sent by Johannes and Marinus, dukes of Campania (941–965) to Constantinople, where he found his Greek original. Auxiliary sources for the medieval romance-writers were:—the opuscule (4th century) known as Alexandri magni iter ad Paradisum, a fable of Eastern origin directed against ambition; the Itinerarium Alexandri (340), based partly on Julius Valerius and dedicated to Constans, son of the emperor Constantine; the letter of Alexander to Aristotle (Epist. de situ et mirabilibus Indiae), and the correspondence between Alexander and the king of the Brahmins, Dindimus, both of which are often contained in MSS. of the Epitome; and the treatise (based on a lost history of Alexander by Onesicritus), De gentibus Indiae et Bragmanibus, ascribed without certainty to Palladius (d. c. 430), successively bishop of Helenopolis and Aspona.
The Ethiopic versions are of great interest as a striking example of literary “accommodation.” Not only is the whole atmosphere Christian in colouring, but we actually find the Greek gods in the guise of Enoch, Elijah, &c., while Philip is a Christian martyr, and Alexander himself a great apostle, even a saint; quotations from the Bible are frequent. Syriac and Armenian versions were made in the 5th century. Persians and Arabs told the
- ↑ Nativitas et victoriae Alexandri magni regis was the original title.
