Reframing Alexandrology

This paper offers a sidelight to Paper 2 and 3 by discussing the Judeo-Christian creation of a new Alexander commonplace in ancient literature, namely the fictional story of Alexander’s visit to Jerusalem. Jews and Christians fully accepted the tale as part of genuine Alexander history, which sets them apart from the imperial ‘pagan’ writers, who never mention the visit. The story thus circulates in religious milieus as opposed to the acknowledged historiographical channels of Alexander literature, such as Arrian and Plutarch.

As Paper 2 shows, the easy circulation of Alexander-commonplaces throughout the Hellenistic Mediterranean paved the way for the Macedonian king’s use as a shared idiom for discussing kingship in varied Roman imperial literatures. Among Greek writers, Plutarch used such commonplaces to create a unique version of Alexander whose kingship, bound specifically to his status as a world conqueror, became the positive paradigm against which other Greek and Roman rulers could be measured, especially in the programmatic setting of the Lives.

This paper explores whether a set of Alexander commonplaces can help reveal a literary culture in the world of the Roman Empire that operated above linguistic and cultural differences. To do so it considers whether Alexander commonplaces can be productively viewed as a widely understood idiom for discussing kingship that was deployed in a variety of texts from the Latin, Greek, Jewish (Greek, Aramaic and Hebrew), and Demotic Egyptian literary traditions.

The author of these lines has frequently referred to what he thinks to be dead-ends in the History of Alexander the Great, for example in the following words: “Today the history of Alexander has […] reached a crisis point as it has not been sufficiently stimulated by the methodological advances which Greek history has, in the meantime, been able to adopt.