Alexander Romance

The Alexander Romance is an account of the life and exploits of Alexander the Great. Although constructed around a historical core, the romance is mostly fictional. It was widely copied and translated, accruing various legends and fantastical elements at different stages. The original version was composed in Ancient Greek some time before 338 CE, when a Latin translation was made, although the exact date is unknown. Several late manuscripts attribute the work to Alexander's court historian Callisthenes, but Callisthenes died before Alexander and therefore could not have written a full account of his life. The unknown author is still sometimes known as Pseudo-Callisthenes. Between the 4th and the 16th centuries, the Alexander Romance was translated into Coptic, Ge'ez, Middle Persian, Byzantine Greek, Arabic, Persian, Armenian, Syriac, Hebrew, and most medieval European vernaculars. The romance was also put into verse, as in a Byzantine recension of 1388. Owing to the great variety of distinct works derived from the original Greek romance, the "Alexander Romance" is sometimes treated as a literary genre, instead of a single work. Alexander was a legend during his own time. In a now-lost history of the king, the historical Callisthenes described the sea in Cilicia as drawing back from him in proskynesis. Writing after Alexander's death, the historian and philosopher Onesicritus invented a tryst between Alexander and Thalestris, queen of the mythical Amazons. (Onesicritus was widely criticized even in his own time for his inaccuracies; according to Plutarch, when Onesicritus read the relevant passage to his patron Lysimachus, one of Alexander's generals who later became a king himself, Lysimachus quipped, "I wonder where I was at the time.") Throughout classical antiquity and the Middle Ages, the Romance experienced numerous expansions and revisions exhibiting a variability unknown for more formal literary forms. Latin, Armenian, Georgian, and Syriac translations were produced in Late Antiquity (4th to 6th centuries).