Detail the origins, accretion, and subsequent afterlife of the Alexander Romance, examining in

particular its relationship with both Alexander’s actual life as reflected in contemporary and
posthumous historiography, and the rise of the Greek novel

The Alexander Romance is in many respects a sui generis phenomenon in ancient Greek

literature. Neither history nor fiction, it dabbles in both, all while absorbing elements of folklore,

philosophy, and (perhaps most surprisingly) non-Greek cultures across its many recensions. In

the following examination, the tireless labors of Richard Stoneman will loom large as I elucidate

the Romance’s relationships with the historical Alexander and with other Greek genres (such as

the novel and travel writing). My conclusion is that, like Whitman in Song of Myself, the

Romance’s defining characteristic is its protean capaciousness—its poly-generic ability to

contain multitudes.

Some manuscripts of the ß recension of the Greek Romance attribute it to Alexander’s

court historian Callisthenes.1 Leaving aside the lateness and impossibility of the attribution, this

fact provides a useful entrance into the question of the Romance’s overall relationship to

established historical fact. Stoneman speaks of its relative uniqueness among Greek prose

fictions in being written about a historical personage, and of the “temptation to regard it as a kind

of history (bad history, or perhaps an extreme version of ‘tragic history’).”2 For all that, from its

depiction of the Pharaoh Nectanebo as a kind of magician (on which more below) to the

fantastical beasts Alexander’s army battles in India, it is readily apparent that we are not dealing

with sober history in any meaningful sense of the word. That does not, however, dispose of the

text’s relationship with the historical Alexander as neatly as one might think.

Throughout Stoneman’s magnum opus on the Romance, Alexander the Great: a Life in

Legend, the reader encounters surprising convergences between the Alexander of history and the

1
Stoneman (1994).
2
Ibid.
Alexander of legend. In most cases, while the historical implausibility of the Romance’s version

of events is patently obvious, there is nonetheless a factual core discernible beneath the layers of

embellishment. Historically, for example, Nectanebo II was Egypt’s final Pharaoh; when Egypt

was attacked by Persia in 343 BC, he “fled from Egypt to Nubia and was never heard of again.”3

In the Romance, he appears as an “expert magician” who, upon turning up in Philip’s Macedon

after his flight from Egypt, “falls in love with [Alexander’s mother] Queen Olympias, and uses

his cunning, as well as his magic arts, to become her lover [and, according to the Romance,

Alexander’s real father].”4 What first might appear to be sheer invention is seen, upon closer

inspection, to make a certain degree of alternate-historical sense. Fascinatingly, even the more

salacious details of the account serve a definite propagandistic function. Stoneman is worth

quoting at length:

From an Egyptian perspective, it was vital that Alexander, as a ruler of Egypt, should
have been conceived in the proper manner for a Pharaoh…True, Nectanebo is setting out
to satisfy his own desires…but the net result is a child properly engendered both by the
preceding Pharaoh and, by his magic arts, by the god Amun-Re.5

Although, as Stoneman had noted previously, the story falls into a recognizable folkloric

seduction pattern, it also exhibits a shrewd understanding of Egyptian dynastic politics which,

while not literally historical, is certainly grounded in deep knowledge of historical fact.

While a similarly canny concern for the intricacies of imperial succession is discernible

in the Romance’s account(s) of Alexander’s conquest of Persia, perhaps most striking is the

text’s depiction of the founding of Alexandria. As Stoneman argues cogently, “The historical

record on the foundation of the city is quite full, and here too the Romance comes closest to

being valuable as a historical source.”6 Not only is the Romance probably a source of genuine

3
Stoneman (2008) 13.
4
Ibid. 14.
5
Ibid. 20-21.
6
Ibid. 54.
historical information, full of “detailed local knowledge” which was tragically “garbled in

copying;”7 in some respects it may actually be more accurate than our extant historical sources.

While cautioning that “The narrative of Ps.-Callisthenes [i.e., the Alexander Romance] does not

lack inconsistencies,”8 C. Bradford Welles uses the text to establish the actual order in which the

foundation of Alexandria and Alexander’s famous visit to the oracle at Siwah occurred. Citing

the same “wealth of local details and of local customs”9 as Stoneman, Welles ultimately

concludes “that Alexander founded Alexandria only on his return from Siwah,”10 not, as some

other ancient sources have it, prior to his visit to the oracle. Stoneman is similarly inclined to

credit the Romance in its contention that Alexander “spent time in Memphis, the capital of

Pharaonic Egypt, and was crowned there as Pharaoh.”11

No historian, then, the author of the Romance was nonetheless able to incorporate history

into his conte. But if it isn’t a history, what is it? Susan Stephens cites Stoneman and Dowden in

calling it a “proto-novel.”12 In the cited chapter, Stoneman notes that “It is probable that the

Romance had assumed something much like [the A recension] already in the third or second

century BCE,”13 thus putting its original composition well prior to the classic Greek novels of the

first few centuries AD. Setting this fact alongside the Romance’s undeniable affinities with the

later genre, what might be the explanation? I argue that the proliferation of fantasy in the

Romance comes from a different, but no less imaginative source, one that was already

established as a genre by the time of our text’s composition: the travel narrative. Leaving aside

the genre’s earlier pedigree in Herodotus, the most obvious influence on the Romance’s hybrid

7
Ibid.
8
Welles (1962) 283.
9
Ibid. 284.
10
Ibid. 298.
11
Stoneman (2008) 55.
12
Stephens (2008) 56.
13
Stoneman (1994).
bestiary/ethnography is Ctesias’ lost Indica, summarized for us in Photius’ Bibliotheca and

dating to around the turn of the 4th century BC. Alongside such beasts of the field as the

manticore, Stoneman helpfully catalogues the “human races” described in Ctesias’ account: “the

pygmies of central India…men with dogs’ heads whose language consists of barking…another

race that lives exclusively on milk…[and] a race of men who up to the age of thirty have white

hair all over their bodies.”14

Ctesias’ influence on the Romance is obvious, but so is Pseudo-Callisthenes’ inventive

personal spin on the travel narrative tradition: “Here they encounter giant fleas the size of frogs

and numerous strange races including men with the faces of lions, giants with hands like saws

and a creature that sounds like nothing so much as King Kong.”15 The lion-headed men are both

dissimilar to and clearly influenced by Ctesias’ (and Herodotus’) dog-headed man, while the

frog-sized fleas are perhaps a permutation of Ctesias’ fox-sized ants. As in his use of history real

and imagined, the author of the Romance has skillfully integrated the traits of an established

genre into his own unique creation, creating a hybrid genre both distinct from and akin other

ancient novels: one things of the Menippean prose-verse menagerie of Petronius’ Satyricon, or

the folkloric grab-bag of Apuleius’ Metamorphoses. In the final analysis, what the Alexander

Romance shares with these texts is, paradoxically, its very inability to be classified.

I have done no more than sketch the broad outlines of the Romancer’s achievement; the

story’s voluminous afterlife, in both later recensions of the text and the rise of independent

Alexander-sagas in Persia, is beyond the purview of my analysis. The text’s unique status within

the literature of antiquity, however, should be quite perspicuous. In straddling the line between

popular literature and belle-lettres, the author of the Romance created a kind of micro-genre with

14
Stoneman (2008) 69.
15
Ibid. 73.
few imitators. While Stoneman’s classification of it as a “proto-novel” is useful and even, to a

limited extent, accurate, it does little to pinpoint the Romance’s curious blend of history,

invention, and (by the standards of the day) cutting-edge ethnography. One needs to venture as

far afield as Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy for a literary composition so singular in its purpose

and execution—and so full of wonders.

Works Cited

Stephens, Susan (2008). “Cultural Identity.” The Cambridge Companion to the Greek and
Roman Novel, pp. 56-71. Ed. Tim Whitmarsh. Cambridge University Press.

Stoneman, Richard (1994). “The Alexander Romance: From History to Fiction.” Greek Fiction:
the Greek Novel in Context. Ed. J. R. Morgan and Richard Stoneman.

Stoneman, Richard (2008). Alexander the Great: A Life in Legend. Yale University Press.

Welles, C. Bradford (1962). “The Discovery of Sarapis and the Foundation of Alexandria.”
Historia: Zeitschrift für Alte Geschichte, Bd. 11, H. 3 (Jul., 1962), pp. 271-298.