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S1: Alexander the Great in the
Middle Ages: East and West
Tipo Seminar Estado Completed Fecha
Byzantine Views on Alexander the Great Corinne Jouanno The presence in the “Bible” of all Byzantinists, the Oxford Dictionary of Byzan- tium, of an entry devoted to “Alexander the Great”1 is a good indicator of the important place occupied by the Macedonian Conqueror in Byzantine politi- cal imagery. This special place is to a large extent a result of the omnipresence of Alexander in Graeco-Roman paideia,2 and that is why the present paper will begin with a survey of the ancient material available in Byzantium, as it offers the starting point for the elaboration of a Byzantine image of Alexan- der. The two next parts of the article will deal with Alexanderʼs presence in proper Byzantine texts, either under the guise of allusions and anecdotes, or in works and chapters of works specially devoted to the story of his life, so as to bring to the fore the main reasons of the Byzantinesʼ interest in the Macedonian king, to observe the inherited elements and the new trends characteristic of his medieval image, and to determine to what extent the Byzantines appropriated a historical figure who was a pillar in the cultural memory of the ancient world. Ancient Sources on Alexander in Byzantium Historical Sources The texts of the three extant historians of Alexander, book xvii of Diodorus of Sicilyʼs Library of History, Plutarchʼs Life of Alexander, and Arrianʼs Anaba- sis were well known to learned Byzantine readers, and are often referred to, quoted, and/or imitated, but Plutarch seems to have been by far the most appreciated of the three, perhaps because the biographical nature of his work was more appealing to the Byzantines, much alive to the personal dimension of political power, and perhaps also, as suggested by Anthony Kaldellis, because the Lives “had a competitive advantage in the Byzantine context over general histories, which was that they could serve as models for the genre of imperial biography”. Palaeographic evidence indicates that Plutarchʼs Life of Alexander must have been circulating more intensively than the two other works: it was copied many times, without interruption, from the 10 th to the 16 th century;5 on the reverse,
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only one of the 40 or so manuscripts containing Arrianʼs Anabasis is relatively old (the Vind. Hist. gr. 4, copied towards the end of the 11 th c.), while the other manuscripts date from the 13 th or 14 th century 10 mss , 15th, 16th or even 17 th century. As for Diodorus, only 17 of the 59 manuscripts of the Library of History include Book xvii, one of whom was copied in the 10 th century and the others in the 15 th or 16 th century: to judge from the testimony of the world chronicles, it seems the Byzantines appreciated Diodorus as a mythographer and an historian of the Roman world more than as an historian of Classical Greece. Ethical and Anecdotal Material Besides historical works a lot of other ancient texts contributed to the construc- tion of the Byzantine image of Alexander, and provided Byzantine authors with an abundant repertoire of anecdotes on the Macedonian king. Most influential were Plutarchʼs ethical writings and Dio Chrysostomʼs treatises On Kingship. Alexander is indeed much present in Plutarchʼs Moralia: outside the two essays De Alexandri fortuna, he features in the Apophthegms of kings and gener- als, where he is credited with 34 apophthegms, thus coming first in the volume, before his father Philip 32 sayings) and Cato 29 sayings), and he also appears as the protagonist of a series of anecdotes dispatched throughout 35 other Moralia, for instance in the essay How to discern a flatterer and a friend, where he is mentioned no less than seven times. Since Plutarchʼs reputation in Byzan- tium was first and foremost that of a moralist,6 his ethical views on Alexander were even more widely diffused than his biography of the Macedonian king: as a matter of fact, the manuscripts containing the De Alexandri fortuna (around 45) outnumber that of the Life of Alexander (around 35 . Dio Chrysostom too ranged among the favourite political thinkers of the Byzantines:7 Synesios, in the monography he devoted to this author, labelled him an “exceptional” orator and philosopher 4, 1 περιττὸς ἀνὴρ εἰπεῖν τε καὶ γνῶναι). Placed at the head of Dioʼs corpus, the discourses On Kingship were considered as his chef dʼ œuvre 8 and as a reference book on the question of imperial power. Alexander plays a prominent role in three of these four speeches: he is the main character of the second and fourth orations, where he appears in dialogue with Philip (n° 2) and Diogenes (n° 4), and he features in the prologue of the oration n° 1, which opens with an anecdote about his being incited to fight by the music of Timotheos the flautist. Dioʼs popularity certainly explains why references to Alexander and Timotheos recur so often in Byzantine writings.9 Though Lucianʼs fame was more controversial because of his reputation as an atheist,10 he was much appreciated for his stylistic qualities (see Photiusʼ laudatory comment in cod. 128 of his Library), and examples of his influence on Byzantine belles lettres are
whose chapter on basilikos logos exerted a lasting influence on Byzantine authors of imperial panegyrics of all peri- ods.23 Menander recommanded to conclude a rulerʼs encomion with a “com- plete comparison, examining his reign in comparison with preceding reigns, not disparaging them (that is bad craftsmanship), but admiring them while granting perfection to the present”: as an example he quoted the comparison of “the reign of Alexander with the present one”.24 Afterwards, Menanderʼs chapter was incorporated into the Rhetorica Marciana,25 a late-12th or early- 13th-century rhetorical treatise then partially reproduced in the Synopsis of Rhetoric of Joseph Rhakendytes (ca. 1280–ca. 1330 , a prominent representa- tive of Byzantine intelligentsia under the reign of Andronikos ii Palaeologos 1282 1328 .26 We find again the same reference to Alexander in the “protheo- ria” written by John Chortasmenos (ca. 1370 1436/1437) as a prologue to his Oration to Manuel ii Palaeologus Returning from Thessalonike:27 after defining his work both as a panegyric and a prosphônetikos, he refers to Hermogenesʼ theory of forms (his association of panegyrikos logos with λαμπρότης, ἀκμή and περιβολή) and, mixing recollection of Menander with Hermogenian doctrine, indicates that “brilliancy” can be produced by the introduction of historical examples, such as Alexander, actually mentioned at the end of his own imperial oration. Unsurprisingly, Alexander is also given pride of place in another kind of technical writings much influential in Byzantium, that of military treatises. Addressed as a vademecum to Marcus Aurelius and his foster brother Lucius Verus, about to launch an expedition against the Parthians (ca. 162 , Polyaenusʼ Stratagems of war are quoted by Constantine Porphyrogenitus among the “his- torical works” an emperor is duty bound to bring with him when embarking on a military campaign.28 In this work considered by the Byzantine emperor as a reference book on military art, a chapter rich in 32 exempla is devoted to Alexander (iv, 3 , who thus comes fourth after Iphicrates 63 ex. , Agesilaus and Caesar 33 ex.).29 The anecdotes concerning Alexander put to the fore two main qualities of the Macedonian king, his leadership and great ingeniosity.30 He is skilled in winning his soldiersʼ affection so as to get the most from them, ready to set a good example in order to galvanize his troops into action, and does not hesitate to manipulate opinion, to prevent his men from surrendering to discouragement or even waves of panic. As a matter of fact, he tricks his own soldiers as well as the enemies, so that most of his victories are won through crafty stratagems that allow him to get the upper hand over adversaries much more numerous than his own troops—a peculiarity we also find in the Alexan- der Romance, last but not least of the ancient sources dealing with the life of the Macedonian
conqueror. Alexander Romance Parallel to Plutarchʼs Life of Alexander, another biography of the Macedonian king had taken form in Antiquity, the Alexander Romance, falsely attributed to Alexanderʼs official historian Callisthenes. Because of its loose form and some- what dubious aesthetic qualities, it features at the margins of the literary scene, though it enjoyed an extraordinary popularity throughout the Middle Ages. The date of its emergence has been much discussed, and is difficult to determine with any certainty, for the work, in its present form, is composed of hetero- geneous material, some pieces of which (for instance, the novella presenting Alexander as pharaoh Nectaneboʼs son, Alexanderʼs letter to Aristotle on the marvels of the East, the account of his death by poisoning, or his Last Will) go back to the very beginning of the Ptolemaic period and must have been cir- culating independently before being put together at the end of the Hellenistic times, or in the imperial age, to form the text we call the Alexander Romance. 31 Known as the alpha (α) recension, the first extant version of this fictional biog- raphy, mingling inextricably aspects of the historical tradition with invented episodes of a very imaginative kind, has been transmitted to us in a single Greek manuscript, dating from the 11 th century Parisinus gr. 1711 , but it would be false to conclude that it enjoyed only a limited diffusion in Medieval Greece and was soon replaced by new Byzantine rewritings (see below), while it was translated into Latin and Armenian already in the 4 th and 5 th centuries. Other pieces of evidence tend to prove that the scarcity of the manuscript tradition is misleading, and that the α recension continued to be read and appreciated throughout the Byzantine period:32 it is this very text that is quoted or alluded to in John Malalasʼ chronicle 6 th c. , in the apocryphal Letter of the Three Ori- ental Patriarchs to the Emperor Theophilus 9 th c. , in an ethopoia of Nikephoros Basilakes 1115 ca. 1180 ,33 in several poems of Tzetzesʼ Chiliades34 (after 1110– after 1180/85 , and it was also used as a primary source in the Late Byzantine Poem of Alexander of codex Marcianus gr. 408 14 th c. ? .35 Epistolography and Imperial Orations Alexanderʼs presence, in the form of punctual reference or more developed exempla, is conspicuous in Byzantine letters and orations, two literary genres particularly productive in Byzantium. I will pass briefly over epistolography, where allusions to Alexander are often of an ornamental kind. Because they allowed the epistolographer to display his erudition and rhetorical dexterity, such references were part of an intellectual game aimed to create a relation of connivance between writer and addressee, and Byzantine authors used them as a sign of recognition between literati—an epideictic function all the more significant since Byzantine letters were not mere private documents,
allusion to the successes of the Macedonians (τὰ Μακεδόνων), and Basilakesʼ text contains no less than fifteen Alexander references.42 While Italikos follows a standard pattern and alludes to episodes well attested in Alexander historians (battles at Issos and Maracanda, role of Alexander at Chaeroneia, generosity of the king towards his enemy Poros), Basilakes, not content with exploiting material available in “classical” sources43 (which were the normal repertoire of Byzantine literati), also makes a lenghthy allusion to an episode of the Alexan- der Romance, the story of the three presents sent by Darius to Alexander with the intent of insulting him, and reinterpreted by the young king as a presage of victory (ar, 1, 36 and 38 . To Dariusʼ gifts Basilakes compares the rich tribute offered by the emir Abul Asakis to John ii Comnenos: the presence of a cross among the emirʼs gifts is supposed to foretell the Byzantine emperorʼs domi- nation on the oikoumene and his proclamation of the Christʼs kingship all over the world. One must point out the boldness of a reference to a literary work of such a low standard as the Alexander Romance in the very heart of an imperial oration that is a speech declaimed in the most solemn circumstances.44 More- over, by denigrating Alexander, Basilakes also flouts the precepts of Menander Rhetor (who declared such a process “artless”), evidently with the intention of proclaiming the superiority of the Byzantine, Christian emperor over a pagan king.45 He thus at one and the same time exploits all the potentialities and exposes the limits of the Alexander paradigm. Infatuation for Alexander persisted in the following centuries, during the period of the exiled Empire (in panegyrics composed for emperors of Trebi- zond and Nicea) and after the reconquest of Constantinople.46 Comparisons between Alexander and Michael viii Palaeologus 1261 1282 , who recovered Constantinople from the hands of the Latins, are very frequent, as we can judge from the discourses of Manuel Holobolos, official panegyrist of the emperor: just as the Comnenian emperors, admirers of Basil i, appropriated his Alex- ander-friendly stance, Michael viii, who longed to restore the grandeur of the Comnenian Empire, revived in his turn the Comnenian emperorsʼ “zêlos Alexandreios”.47 Later on, the ever stronger pressure of the Turkish threat con- tributed to the topicality of the Alexander paradigm, whose exploitation took on even more nationalist undertones. In the last years of the Byzantine Empire, references to Alexander tend to loose their encomiastic quality and rather serve as patriotic exhortation. In the oration he addressed to Constantine xi Palae- ologus before his rise to the throne in 1449, only a few years before the fall of Constantinople, Bessarion urged the future emperor to remember Alexanderʼs fate, his humble start and meteoric ascension, and consider it as a motif of com- fort and hope for the
salvation of the Empire.4 Military Treatises Because he was a warrior king, Alexander is more present in military treatises than in mirrors for princes, which usually developed a peaceful ideal of ruler- ship. But even in works dealing with the art of strategy, little is said of his brav- ery, and he is quoted first and foremost as a model of ability in getting the best of his troops or cleverness in deceiving the enemies. Most Byzantine handbooks are indeed heavily dependent on Polyaenusʼ Stratagems of War, which was not only read as a reference book, but also several times rewritten: Alphonse Dain mentions the existence of five successive adaptations of the Stratege- mata, probably composed between the 9 th and 11 th century, the Hypotheseis, the Strategemata Ambrosiana, the Parecbolae, the Syllogê Tacticorum, and the Tactica by Nikephoros Ouranos.49 The main innovation of the Hypotheseis, fol- lowed by the four other adaptations, is to have reorganized Polyaenusʼ mate- rial into chapters arranged thematically so that Alexander exempla have been dispatched under various headings.50 Such a splitting up of the Alexander material contributes to build up the image of a king ready to face victoriously in every circumstance of war: the new arrangement chosen by the Byzantine authors strengthens his exemplary stature as a strategist, and this impression is still reinforced by the suppression of many proper names and geographical particulars of the original text, which thus takes on a more general significance. It is therefore no wonder that the emperor Leo vi 886 912 , in the 20 th “Constitution” of his Tactica, quotes Alexander as a model of generalship, on a par with the Roman Scipio and the Jewish Phinees.51 Similarly, Alexander is cited as an example to imitate in the opening chapter of the Syllogê Tacticorum: there he is coupled with Cyrus and Caesar, and praised, along with Cyrus, for his “tactical experience and ingeniosity” Gnomologies Alexander also occupies a notable place in Byzantine gnomologies, a genre highly appreciated in Byzantium at all levels of society, if we are to believe Michael Psellos, who quotes “Lacedaemonian apophthegms and collections of maxims (γνωμολογίαι)” among Michael vii Doukasʼ favourite readings Chron. 7c, 4 . The production of florilegia was so abundant in Byzantium, especially between the 8 th and 12 th century (their “golden age”, to quote Marcel Rich- ard 53 , that Paolo Odorico compares the “gnomological territory” to the Amazo- nian jungle54—a jungle still largely unexplored (many collections are waiting for editions, and the study of their textual history and mutual relationship is in its enfance). In this exuberant corpus, Alexanderʼs presence owes much to the influence of the ancient tradition. The Gnomologium Vaticanum can be quoted as an example of a Byzantine collection with a conservative character, bearing
perhaps because they were content with reading the texts of Diodorus, Plutarch and Arrian and found it useless to supplement or revise their works. This was also because, following the example of Thucydides, whom they considered as the greatest historian of Antiquity and the best model to imitate,60 Byzantine historians devoted themselves to the history of the present or of the most recent past. It was the chroniclersʼ task to tell the story of mankind from the very begin- ning, and it is in this literary genre, profuse in Byzantium, that we can find developments of variable length about the reign of Alexander. While Byzan- tine chroniclers showed little interest in classical Greece, which they viewed as an alien world with its democratic city-states, they indeed felt more sympathy for Alexander, founder of a world-wide empire that could pass for a predeces- sor of the (supposedly) œcumenical Byzantine Empire.61 In Malalas, author of the first extant Byzantine chronicle, a three- pages development is devoted to Alexander,62 credited with an Egyptian father Nectanebo), a strange physical appearance, and a biography some particulars of which (marriage with Dar- iusʼ daughter, encounter with queen Candace) have been borrowed from the Alexander Romance. Malalas has mixed this material of Pseudo-Callisthenian origin with pieces of information he seems to have drawn from a mysterious “Bottios”, perhaps a Late Antique historian or chronicler.63 Such a heterogenu- ous combination results in the creation of a rather ambivalent image of the Macedonian king, oscillating between paganism and Christian providential- ism. While performing human sacrifice and addressing prayers and libations to Achillesʼ spirit, Alexander also acts as an instrument of divine will, sent by God to chastise the Assyriansʼ “vain arrogance” and return to the “Romans” (that is the Byzantines) all the territories of which they had been deprived. Alexan- der is even compared with a leopard (πάρδαλις) and thus assimilated to the third beast mentioned by the prophet Daniel in his first vision about the four successive world empires Dan. 7 . By presenting Alexander as the founder of Strategion, a Constantinopolitan place that Constantine the Great had chosen to be the forum of his new capital, Malalas also pictures the Macedonian king as a prefiguration of the first Christian emperor: it is highly significant that his campaign against the Persians starts precisely from this place that was the very heart of the Byzantine empire. Malalasʼ chapter was much re-used (directly or indirectly) in later Byzan- tine chronicles; but, even if chronography is a derivative genre, mainly based upon compilation, each chronicler, by means of cutting, adding, or restructur- ing, is able to lend a new significance to recycled material and transform it into something different. This technique of variatio is particularly remarkable in
George the Monk,64 author of one of the most popular Byzantine chronicles, transmitted in about 150 manuscripts, and also translated into Slavonic and Georgian. Though reproducing large passages from Malalas in his own chapter on Alexander,65 George carefully expurgated his source from its most offending pagan elements (notably its reference to human sacrifice). He also interpolated into Malalasʼ account some new developments which profoundly modify the meaning of the whole sequence. The most prominent one, placed right at the centre of the chapter and occupying half of its length, is the story of Alexanderʼs visit to Jerusalem, borrowed from Flavius Josephusʼ Jewish Antiquities (xi, 297 347 , and enlarged with a minute description of the costume of the high priest, which happens to be a patchwork of excerpts from the Septuaginta, Josephus, Theodoretus and Anastasios Sinaites. The second longest addition features at the very end of the chapter, where George the Monk, following Palladiusʼ opus- cule On the Peoples of India (i, 2 15 , narrates Alexanderʼs visit to the Brahmans. The admiration Alexander expresses regarding the Indian sagesʼ ascetic way of life, piety and “high philosophy”, mirrors the feelings he was credited with towards the high priest in the Jerusalemite episode. George the Monkʼs chron- icle is an edifying work whose didactic purpose is clearly indicated in the very preface.66 The two interpolations dealing with Alexanderʼs visit to Jerusalem and his encounter with the Brahmans contribute to draw the portrait of a pious, exemplary king. But, in this chronicle written at a time when the memory of the iconoclastic crisis was still fresh,67 the Jerusalemite episode can also be read as a variation on a theme dear to George the Monk: Alexanderʼs prostration before the high priest, is to be compared with the respectful attitude of Chris- tian emperors of the past, such as Constantine, Valens or Theodosius, towards saintly monks, illustrating the primacy of spiritual over political power.68 To quote Paul Magdalino, Georgeʼs chapter on Alexander is “history rewritten from an orthodox point of view” While in Malalasʼ chronicle, the ambivalence of Alexanderʼs portrait resulted from the juxtaposition, in one and the same chapter, of conflicting material, in Georgeʼs case ambiguity is due to the presence of a second (much shorter) development concerning Alexanderʼs reign (vii, 1). A distinctive feature of Georgeʼs chronicle is indeed that its two first parts deal roughly with the same period (from the creation of the world up to the Hellenistic times) but accord- ing to different sources: while in the first part George follows Malalas as his chief source, in the second part he offers a narrative mainly based upon the Septuaginta.70 Subsequently, his second notice about Alexander is an almost verbatim quotation from Macc. i, 1 9, that is
it underwent “fluid transmission” 73 copyists felt free to re-write their model, modifying its word- ing, subtracting some details or even whole episodes, and adding new ones, which they thought well fit to embellish the story of Alexander. During the Byzantine millenium, seven successive rewritings of the Romance were pro- duced (recensions β, λ, ε, and γ, Poem of the Marcianus gr. 408, recension ζ, Rimada 74 , some of which even include “sub-recensions”, due to intensive reworking and interpolating.75 A small part of these texts is datable with a rel- ative precision (the oldest rewriting, β, was composed during the 5 th century, ε towards the end of the 8 th or the beginning of the 9 th century; the Rimada was published in Venice in 1529 ; but other texts are wavering in a sort of chronolog- ical “no manʼs land” (the dating of γ, compiled from β and ε, oscillates between the 9 th and the 14 th century, date of the oldest manuscript). Four of these Byzantine versions of the Romance (β, λ, Marc. gr. 408, Ri- mada) can be classified as conservative rewritings, as far as they keep on picturing Alexander as a pagan hero: the author of β, the oldest work of the series, was content with expurging the text of his model (α recension) from much of the Egyptian material introduced by its Alexandrian author, and with simplifying the wording of the narrative, in order to make Alexanderʼs story more easily readable; he also eliminated the few echoes to Alexanderʼs “black legend” that were subsisting in the α recension, so as to portray an impeccable hero.76 Besides, being anxious to offer a more exciting version of Alexanderʼs adventures, he completed his fictional biography with new episodes of a fabulous kind (travel through the land of darkness, discovery of the fountain of life, encounter with various monsters)—a tendency then followed by many rewriters of the Romance, and giving way to celebrated episodes such as Alexanderʼs ascension to heaven or submarine exploration, which first appeared in the λ recension, probably around the 7 th or 8 th century. In the three other rewritings of the Romance (ε, γ, ζ), the Alexander mate- rial has undergone more radical changes, and the pagan king has been trans- formed into a Christian hero. The author of the ε recension opened the way by inserting into Alexanderʼs story the episode of his visit to Jerusalem, modified in order to show the Macedonian king converting to monotheism. Alexander thus becomes a confessor of the true faith and an instrument of divine Provi- dence who encloses the Unclean Nations of Gog and Magog at the margins of the world to prevent them from polluting the earth before the advent of the Last Days. The late Byzantine recension ζ, derived from ε, expanded this very image by transforming Alexander into a Messianic figure, who acts under the protection of the “great god Sabaoth” and his earthly messenger, the prophet
Jeremiah. The author has even introduced into the Jerusalemite episode a ref- erence to Danielʼs prophecies about the succession of the world empires, in order to present Alexanderʼs victory over Darius as a result of divine will. The episode of Gog and Magog, present in ε, γ and ζ, was borrowed from Pseudo- Methodiusʼ Apocalypse, probably the most famous representative of apocalyptic literature, a flourishing genre in Medieval Greece, from the times of Arabic expansion up to the collapse of the Empire, and even beyond.77 Alexan- der occupies a significant place in the apocalyptic tradition, where he makes his first appearance in texts of Syriac origin, produced between 628 and 638, the so-called Syriac Alexander Legend and the Metrical Homily by Pseudo- Jacob of Sarug. A few decades later, towards the end of the 7 th century, he reap- pears in the original, Syriac version of Pseudo-Methodiusʼ Apocalypse, which was soon translated into Greek probably at the very beginning of the 8 th cen- tury:78 there he is credited with a crucial role in the history of mankind, both as a constructor of the gates destined to prevent Gog and Magogʼs invasion, and as an ancestor of the Last Roman Emperor who, after a successful mil- itary campaign against the Arabs and a pious reign in peace and prosperity, is destined to go to Jerusalem and surrender his power to God at the arrival of the Antichrist. Pseudo-Methodius resorted to fanciful genealogical manip- ulations to establish a relationship between Alexander and the Last Roman (i.e. Byzantine) emperor: Alexander, he maintains, was born from Philip and Cuseth, daughter of the king of Ethiopia, who then remarried Byzas, founder of Byzantium, and begot Byzantia, mother-to-be of the kings of Rome, Byzantium and Alexandria. The supposedly Ethiopian roots of the Byzantine Empire are aimed to put its role at the end of times in accordance to Psalm 68, 31 “Ethiopia shall hasten to stretch out her hand readily to God”. The same genealogical construct was reproduced in apocalyptic texts influ- enced by Pseudo-Methodius and belonging to the corpus of the so-called Visions of Daniel,80 whose popularity and influence on the foreign policy o Byzantines and Saracens alike are mocked by Liudprand of Cremona in the report of his second embassy at the Byzantine court.81 Thus, we meet again Alexanderʼs Ethiopian genealogy in the Pseudo-Chrysostom Apocalypse (§ 1 3 ,82 which may have been composed at Constantinople in the mid 9 th cen- tury.83 In other apocalyptic texts, Alexander, though not mentioned explicitly, is nevertheless recognizable under the guise of some or other of the emper- ors of the Last Times: as a matter of fact, in many Byzantine apocalyptic texts, Pseudo-Methodiusʼ one and only Last Emperor has been replaced by a series of two, four, or even five emperors, and the abdication of the last one does not
Macedonian conqueror and transform him into a predecessor, or even a figure of Byzantine emperor, and the persistent apprehension of his belonging to a remote, alien past. Prominent in “popular” literature, the first tendency, encouraged by the Medieval habit of typological interpretation, can be dis- cerned as well in the few Byzantine visual images of Alexander that have sur- vived, and almost all illustrate one and the same episode, Alexanderʼs aerial journey: this scene, inspired by the Romance, was indeed often represented on textiles, sumptuary objects (crowns, cups, boxes, seals, medallions …), many of which seem to be of imperial provenance, and even on reliefs placed at the entrance of churches Saint Sophia in Constantinople, Mistra).90 The most remarkable characteristic in these images of Alexanderʼs flight is the choice made by the artists of picturing the Macedonian king with the garnments and the attributes of a Byzantine emperor: subjected to actualizing reinterpreta- tion, the Pseudo-Callisthenian episode is thus transformed into an image of the Byzantine dominance over the oikoumene.
(Simplified)
Why Alexander mattered in Byzantium The presence of an entry on Alexander the Great in the Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium shows how important he was in Byzantine culture. He was everywhere in Greek and Roman education (paideia) Byzantines inherited many stories and ideas about him from antiquity They reused these to shape their own image of Alexander The article studies: Ancient sources available in Byzantium Mentions/allusions in Byzantine texts Full works about Alexander Historical works Byzantines knew well the main historians of Alexander: Plutarch – most popular Arrian Diodorus of Sicily
Why Plutarch was preferred: His biography style matched Byzantine interest in individual rulers His work could serve as a model for imperial biographies Ethical and anecdotal texts Other writers shaped Alexanderʼs image through stories and moral examples: Plutarch (Moralia) → many anecdotes Dio Chrysostom → political philosophy Lucian of Samosata → critical/ironic portrayal Aelian → negative traits (anger, luxury, arrogance) Result: Two traditions emerged: Positive (heroic king) Negative (“black legend”) Rhetoric and education Alexander was central in rhetorical training: Used in school exercises (progymnasmata) Appears in rhetorical manuals like those of Menander Rhetor Key idea: Emperors were often compared to Alexander in speeches This became a standard rhetorical technique Military treatises Alexander appears as a model general in: Polyaenus ( Stratagems) He is praised for: Leadership Clever strategies Psychological warfare Important: His success is often shown as due to intelligence, not just bravery The Alexander Romance
George the Monk Makes Alexander more Christian and moral Adds: Visit to Jerusalem Philosophical encounters John Zonaras Based on Plutarch Strongly idealized portrait: Wise Just Temperate Gnomologies (collections of sayings) Alexander appears frequently in: Moral collections of maxims Example: Loci Communes Important change: Negative stories disappear Only virtues remain: Courage Justice Self-control The Byzantine transformation of Alexander Over time, Alexander becomes: Classical hero Brave, intelligent, successful Imperial model Ideal ruler for Byzantine emperors Christian figure In later texts:
Converts to monotheism Acts as Godʼs instrument Even appears as a messianic figure Gog and Magog and apocalyptic tradition The story of Gog and Magog in Byzantine versions of the Alexander Romance (ε, γ, ζ) comes from: Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius This was: One of the most famous apocalyptic texts in Byzantium Part of a wider tradition that flourished from: the Arab expansions 7 th century) until the fall of the Byzantine Empire Apocalyptic literature was very influential in shaping how history and the future were understood. Alexander in early apocalyptic texts Alexander appears first in Syriac texts 7 th century): Syriac Alexander Legend Metrical Homily of Pseudo-Jacob of Sarug Later, he appears in the Greek version of the: Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius Alexanderʼs role in apocalyptic history In these texts, Alexander the Great is given a cosmic, religious role: Builder of the gates He builds a barrier to imprison Gog and Magog This prevents chaos before the end of the world Ancestor of the Last Roman Emperor He becomes part of a mythical genealogy This links him to the future Byzantine ruler of the End Times The Last Roman Emperor End-time ruler)
