Holy Wandering: The Worlding of the Alexander Romance (original) (raw)

For over a millennium and a half—from c. 250 BCE to c. 1450 CE—the single most popular work of fiction in the world was the network of closely related texts that contemporary scholars call the "Alexander Romance." From its joint origins in Ptolemaic Egypt and Roman Greece, the Alexander Romance proliferated vigorously, first around the Mediterranean, then concomitantly east and north across Eurasia, as well as south¬ward into Ethiopia and sub-Saharan Africa. By 1400, virtually every language of culture from the Malay Peninsula to Spain and Timbuktu to Iceland possessed its own version of the fictional life of Alexander. Within each Sprachgebiet, moreover, there tended to be multiple recensions of the work, with a considerable degree of variance between the manuscripts, which not only translated the text from one language to another, but simultaneously reworked the narrative locally to accommodate each new cultural context. Alone among fictions of the ancient world, the Alexander of the Romance appears in the Bible, the Talmud, and the Qur´ān, as well as in the Mazdean Zand, so that acquaintance with the universal conqueror and his fabulous adventures concomitantly traveled with the diffusion of Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, and Iranian scripture. Virgil’s Aeneid may have bequeathed to Medieval and Modern Europe its basic myth for the Westering of culture, but the Alexander Romance successfully galvanized readers collectively across the better part of Europe, Africa, and Asia. Since no single study could hope to do justice to this vast and unwieldy corpus in its entirety, the aim of Holy Wandering is to assess the phenomenon of the Alexander Romance as a whole. In particular, the book explores the relationship between three things: (1) the great Levantine-Mediterranean tributary states within which the Romance flourished—Persia, Macedonia, Rome, Aksum, the Seljuk and Ottoman empires, Songhai, as well as feudal Europe; (2) the era of high metaphysics—pagan, Judaic, Christian, Mazdean, Islamic—which served as the dominant ideology of tributary power; and (3) the Alexander Romance as the supreme fiction of the era which narrates and thereby reveals the complicity between tributary economics and neo-Platonic philosophy. Ultimately, then, the question that the book seeks to answer is: What made the Alexander Romance the supreme fiction of what Gustav Droysen might have called "the long Hellenistic era", and why have so few people heard of it today?