Textual history
The Epistola was composed in Greek. The original version may have adhered more closely to historical fact than later versions. An abridged version, including much fabulous material, was incorporated into the Alexander Romance no later than the third century AD. In the Greek alpha recension of the Romance, the letter is chapter 17 of book III. The Epistola was widely translated and circulated both with the various versions of the Romance and independently of it. In some later Greek recensions of the Romance, the letter is switched from the first person to the third person (losing the character of a letter) and melded seamlessly into the narrative.
Julius Valerius most likely made the first translation of the letter into Latin. Around 310, he partially incorporated it into his Latin translation of the Romance. A fuller translation into Latin was made sometime between the 4th and 7th centuries. This last version circulated independently of the Romance and is found in 135 manuscripts. [6] The Zacher Epitome, a heavily abridged version of Valerius' translation of the Romance with the letter excised, was usually accompanied by the full translation of the letter in the manuscripts. Sometime before 1000, a revised version of the Latin Epistola was produced. Its Latin is less polished. [8] It circulated alongside Leo of Naples's translation of the Romance.
The first vernacular translation in western Europe was made into Old English and interpolated into Alfred the Great's translation of Orosius in the tenth century. It is preserved in the Nowell Codex. The original translation was in the Mercian dialect, but the surviving version is West Saxon. A separate Middle English translation was made between about 1250 and 1300 for the romance King Alisaunder . In addition, the Epistola was twice translated into Old Irish and twice into Old French. There is also an Old Norse version from Iceland and an Italian version known from a fifteenth-century manuscript.
The eastern tradition of the Epistola stems from a Syriac translation of the Romance. Not all derivative versions retain the letter, however. It is absent in the Armenian. Two translations from Syriac into Arabic were made in the ninth century. Although one of these translations is lost, its version of the Epistola was incorporated into a separate, popular romance about Alexander, the Sīrat al-Iskandar . Material derived from the Arabic Epistola can also be found, no longer in the form of a letter, in the Persian Shahnameh and Iskandarnameh . The Epistola or material from it entered Ethiopic and Turkish through translations of the Romance and Iskandarnameh, respectively.
Synopsis
The letter begins with Alexander's attack on the Indian king Porus in July 326 BC. Alexander describes the palace of Porus and his trip to the Caspian Gates. He then passes through a sandy wasteland. His guides are unreliable. He encounters a river of unpotable water. When he notices a castle of reeds on an island in the river, he orders some men to swim to it, but they are killed by hippopotamuses. He then orders the guides to swim it, but they too are eaten. Some Indians from the island approach in a boat and lead Alexander to a freshwater lake. He and his men pitch camp there.
Beside the lake, the army suffers the "Night of Terrors". The camp is repeatedly attacked by strange beasts. First, large snakes and giant crabs, followed in succession by giant white lions, giant pigs, giant bats and the beast called Odontotyrannus, which is "larger than an elephant, with three horns on its forehead." It kills dozens of men. The army is then attacked by large shrews and red vultures with black beaks. At dawn, they strike camp.
Following the "Night of Terrors", the army continues the campaign against Porus and his war elephants. They face stormy weather and find Liber Pater sleeping in a cave. They visit the oracle of the "Trees of Sun and Moon", which predict Alexander's premature death. They then enter a valley containing snakes with emeralds in their necks. The letter ends with Alexander announcing that he has built two tall statues in Babylon and Persepolis containing an account of his feast in India.
Gog and Magog or Ya'juj and Ma'juj are a pair of names that appear in the Bible and the Qur'an, variously ascribed to individuals, tribes, or lands. In Ezekiel 38, Gog is an individual and Magog is his land. By the time of the New Testament's Revelation 20, Jewish tradition had long since changed Ezekiel's "Gog from Magog" into "Gog and Magog".
The story of Dhu al-Qarnayn is mentioned in Surah al-Kahf of the Quran. It has long been recognised in modern scholarship that the story of Dhu al-Qarnayn has strong similarities with the Syriac Legend of Alexander the Great. According to this legend, Alexander travelled to the ends of the world then built a wall in the Caucasus Mountains to keep Gog and Magog out of civilized lands.
The Secretum Secretorum or Secreta Secretorum, also known as the Sirr al-Asrar, is a treatise which purports to be a letter from Aristotle to his student Alexander the Great on an encyclopedic range of topics, including statecraft, ethics, physiognomy, astrology, alchemy, magic, and medicine. The earliest extant editions claim to be based on a 9th-century Arabic translation of a Syriac translation of the lost Greek original. It is a pseudo-Aristotelian work. Modern scholarship finds it likely to have been written in the 10th century in Arabic. Translated into Latin in the mid-12th century, it was influential among European intellectuals during the High Middle Ages.
The Alexander Romance is an account of the life and exploits of Alexander the Great. Of uncertain authorship, it has been described as "antiquity's most successful novel". 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. In this context, the term Romance refers not to the meaning of the word in modern times but in the Old French sense of a novel or roman, a "lengthy prose narrative of a complex and fictional character".
Hikayat Iskandar Zulkarnain is a Malay epic in the tradition of the Alexander Romance describing fictional exploits of Dhu al-Qarnayn (Zulkarnain), a king briefly mentioned in the Quran. The oldest existing manuscript is dated 1713, but is in a poor state. Another manuscript was copied by Muhammad Cing Sa'idullah about 1830.
Odontotyrannos, also odontotyrannus or dentityrannus ("tooth-tyrant") is a mythical three-horned beast said to have attacked Alexander the Great and his men at their camp in India, according to the apocryphal Letter from Alexander to Aristotle and other medieval romantic retellings of Alexandrian 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. These appeared shortly after his death, and some may have already begun forming during his lifetime. Common themes and symbols among legends about Alexander include the Gates of Alexander, the Horns of Alexander, and the Gordian Knot.
Julius Valerius Alexander Polemius was a translator of the Greek Alexander Romance, a romantic history of Alexander the Great, into Latin under the title Res gestae Alexandri Macedonis. The work is in three books on his birth, acts and death. The work is important in connection with the transmission of the Alexander story in the Middle Ages.
The Res gestae Alexandri Macedonis is the earliest Latin translation of the Alexander Romance, usually dated between 270–330 AD and attributed to Julius Valerius Alexander Polemius. It was based off of the α recension of the Romance, but it also has unique material, like the Letter of Zeuxis. The original meaning of the common material was kept, but Julius also wrote with an expansive style of narration, using the literary style of amplificatio. Julius was also impacted by the influence of some earlier authors, the most important one being that of Virgil especially in his Aeneid.
The Syriac Alexander Legend, is a Syriac legendary account of the exploits of Alexander the Great composed in the sixth or seventh century. For the first time in this text, the motifs of Gates of Alexander, an apocalyptic incursion, and the barbarian tribes of Gog and Magog are fused into a single narrative. The Legend would go on to influence Syriac literature about Alexander, like in the Song of Alexander. It would also exert a strong influence on subsequent apocalyptic literature, like the Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius composed in the late seventh century. In Quranic studies, the representation of Alexander in the Legend is also seen as closely related to the Quranic figure named Dhu al-Qarnayn.
Alexanders saga is an Old Norse translation of Alexandreis, an epic Latin poem about the life of Alexander the Great written by Walter of Châtillon, which was itself based on Quintus Curtius Rufus's Historia Alexandri Magni. It is attributed in manuscripts of the saga to Brandr Jónsson, bishop of Skálholt who is also said to have been responsible for authoring Gyðinga saga. Kirsten Wolf has commented on the saga's literary qualities thus: "Alexanders saga [...] has stirred the admiration of scholars and writers for centuries because of its exceptionally imaginative use of the resources of language and its engaging narrative style."
The Historia de preliis Alexandri Magni (History of Alexander's Battles), more commonly known as the Historia de preliis (History of Battles), refers to a Latin translation and the main abridgements of a work that was originally as the Nativitas et victoria Alexandri Magni regis. Between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries, the Historia went through three major recensions and it is through these recensions that the text is known today as the original is lost. The three recensions are called I1, I2, and I3 (also called J1, J2, and J3 in some publications). Their influence was enormous on medieval European literature, spawning an immense number of translations into almost every vernacular and subsequently making Alexander a household name in the European Middle Ages. The Alexander Romance, through the Latin Historia, underwent more translations than any text with the exception of the Gospels.
Little from the letters written by and to Alexander the Great is preserved today, and much of what purports to be his correspondence is in fact fictitious. The autograph manuscripts are all lost. Only a few official letters addressed to the Greek cities survive because they were inscribed on stone, although some of these are official instructions (writs) and not true letters. The content of others is sometimes reported in historical sources, such as Diodorus Siculus, Arrian and Plutarch, but only occasionally do these sources seem to quote such letters. Only a small fraction of Alexander's correspondence is thus accessible today, and even less of his actual words.
The Sīrat al-Iskandar is a 13th-century Arabic popular romance about Alexander the Great. It belongs to the sīra shaʿbiyya genre and was composed by Mufarrij al-Ṣūrī in the 15th century.
The Qiṣṣat Dhī ʾl-Qarnayn is a Hispano-Arabic legend of Alexander the Great preserved in two fourteenth-century manuscripts in Madrid and likely dates as a ninth-century Arabic translation of the Syriac Alexander Romance produced in Al-Andalus. In this respect, it is similar to the Hadīth Dhī ʾl-Qarnayn and is an example of the literary genre of Qisas al-Anbiya. It is to be distinguished from another text also known as the Qissat Dhulqarnayn found in the book of prophets by al-Tha'labi as well as the Qiṣṣat al-Iskandar, a text dating to the late eighth or early ninth century representing the earliest translation of the Alexander Romance into Arabic. The Qissat depicts the travels of Alexander whom it identifies with the figure named Dhu al-Qarnayn in Surah al-Kahf of the Quran, referred to as Dhulqarnayn in the text. The Qissat depicts Alexander (Dhulqarnayn) as a faithful believer and as a proto-Muslim who spreads monotheism through his conquests. It combines elements of pre-Islamic Alexander legends in addition to novel traditions developed in the oral Arab-Islamic tradition. Using the Islamic citation method of isnad, the text prefaces each narrative episode with a chain of transmitters that root in one of Muhammad's companions. Its primary transmitters are given as Ka'b al-Ahbar, Ibn 'Abbas, Muqatil ibn Sulayman, 'Abd al-Malik al-Mashuni, and 'Abd al-Malik b. Zayd. An English translation of the Qissat Dhulqarnayn was first produced by David Zuwiyya in 2001.
The Qiṣṣat al-Iskandar is the earliest narrative of Alexander the Great in the tradition of the Alexander Romance genre in the Arabic language. It was composed by ‘Umara ibn Zayd (767-815) between the late 8th to the early 9th century as a recension on the Syriac Alexander Legend. It is not to be confused with the Qissat Dhulqarnayn or the Sirat al-Iskandar.
The Hadīth Dhī ʾl-Qarnayn, also known as the Leyenda de Alejandro, is an anonymous Hispano-Arabic legend of Alexander the Great. It dates to the 15th century.
The Sadd-i Iskandarī was composed by Ali-Shir Nava'i (1441–1501) in the second half of the fifteenth century. It is the only rendition of the Alexander Romance in Chagatai Turkish. Alexander legends did exist in other forms of Turkish though, such as Taceddin Ahmedi's Iskendername.
The Syriac Alexander Romance is an anonymous Christian text in the tradition of the Greek Alexander Romance of Pseudo-Callisthenes, potentially translated into Syriac the late sixth or early seventh century. Just like the Res gestae Alexandri Macedonis of Julius Valerius Alexander Polemius, the Armenian Alexander Romance and the Historia de preliis of Leo the Archpriest, the Syriac Romance belongs to the α recension of the Greek Romance, as is represented by the Greek manuscript A. Another text, the Syriac Alexander Legend, appears as an appendix in manuscripts of the Syriac Alexander Romance, but the inclusion of the Legend into manuscripts of the Romance is the work of later redactors and does not reflect an original relationship between the two.
Alexander the Great was the king of the Kingdom of Macedon and the founder of an empire that stretched from Greece to northwestern India. Legends surrounding his life quickly sprung up soon after his own death. His predecessors represented him in their coinage as the son of Zeus Ammon, wearing what would become the Horns of Alexander as originally signified by the Horns of Ammon. Legends of Alexander's exploits coalesced into the third-century Alexander Romance which, in the premodern period, went through over one hundred recensions, translations, and derivations and was translated into almost every European vernacular and every language of the Islamic world. After the Bible, it was the most popular form of European literature. It was also translated into every language from the Islamicized regions of Asia and Africa, from Mali to Malaysia.
