spitamenes wrote:Would anyone be able to give me an idea of what exactly the "Alexander Romance" actually is?just a brief explanation will suffice. I run accross authors talking about the Alexander Romance all the time and don't know if its something specific, or if its a collection of works, or what. Can it be purchased? Or does the term just get used as an umbrella for many works of a certain period or writing style contributed to Alexander? Thanks in advance.
All the best,
Spitamenes.
Modern scholarship has divided the antique manuscripts by ancient authors that treat the history of Alexander into three broad "traditions":
1. The so-called "Official Tradition" mainly represented by Arrian and the
Itinerarium Alexandri and based on the eyewitness accounts of Ptolemy, Aristobulus and Nearchus (but heavily edited for "good taste" by Arrian himself and probably also by Ptolemy's publisher.)
2. The so-called "Vulgate Tradition" represented by Curtius, Diodorus, the
Metz Epitome (sections 1-86) and (to a lesser extent) Justin and Plutarch, which is principally based on the lost thirteen-book
History Concerning Alexander compiled by Cleitarchus in Alexandria in the early third century BC.
3. The so-called "Alexander Romance", which in terms of the number of manuscripts is by far the largest body of texts to come down to us. A number of its earliest manuscripts attribute this work to Callisthenes, Alexander's court historian. However, it cannot really be Callisthenes' account, firstly because much of it is clearly legendary in nature and secondly because it treats events subsequent to Callisthenes' arrest in early 327BC - hence the "pseudo". However, virtually all known versions appear to stem from an archetypal Greek version called "alpha", which was compiled no later than the third century AD by an unknown Egyptian redactor. A Greek manuscript (A) survives, which closely represents this archetype, but it is very lacunose. These gaps have to be filled using other early manuscripts, especially from translations into Latin (Julius Valerius) and Armenian from the 4th and 5th centuries AD respectively. The work became the source for nearly all popular accounts of Alexander down to the Renaissance, when the handful of surviving manuscripts of the Official and Vulgate traditions were re-established as the main authorities on the king. The Romance was a medieval bestseller and was translated into tens and possibly hundreds of languages with many additions and embellishments along the way. However, if you are interested in its (limited) historical value (rather than its literary merits), then you need to get hold of a version of Kroll's reconstruction of "alpha", which was translated into English by Elizabeth Haight as
The Life of Alexander of Macedon by Pseudo-Callisthenes. Stoneman's Penguin edition is also good (and much easier to find!), but he used the "beta" recension (with a few supplements from the A manuscript and the "gamma" recension), so it is less easy to be sure that you are not reading accreted or corrupted material. The Armenian manuscripts have been translated into English by Wolohojian and his book is the fullest "pure" (i.e. unreconstructed) version of the "alpha" version.
This classification of the sources is about as true and as false as the statement that there are three main parties in the British political system, but it may be useful for getting to grips with the historiography, which is in reality much more complicated in detail (for example, the death of Alexander in the Romance and in the
Metz Epitome seem to come from the same 4th century BC pamphlet by one of Alexander's commanders called Holcias.)
Best wishes,
Andrew