Paperback. Blue cover with white title.

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Alexander the Great (356-323 B.C.E.) precipitated immense historical change in the Mediterranean and Near Eastern worlds. But the resonance his legend achieved over the next two millennia stretched even farther – across foreign cultures, religious traditions, and distant nations. This engaging and handsomely illustrated book gathers together for the first time hundreds of the colourful Alexander legends that have been told and retold around the globe. Richard Stoneman, a foremost expert on the Alexander myths, introduces us first to the historical Alexander and then to the Alexander of legend, an unparalleled mythic icon who came to represent the heroic ideal in cultures from Egypt to Iceland, from Britain to Malaya. Alexander came to embody the concerns of Hellenistic man; he fueled Roman ideas on tyranny and kingship; he was a talisman for fourth-century pagans and a hero of chivalry in the early Middle Ages. He appears in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic writings, frequently as a prophet of God. Whether battling winged foxes or meeting with the Amazons, descending to the underworld or inventing the world’s first diving bell, Alexander inspired as a hero, even a god. Stoneman traces Alexander’s influence in ancient literature and folklore and in later writings of east and west. His book provides the definitive account of the legends of Alexander the Great – a powerful leader in life and an even more powerful figure in the history of literature and ideas.

Reviews:

• This is not about Alexander the romantic historical legend, who as an apocryphal tale has it “wept salt tears at the realisation he had no more worlds to conquer.” If you have come for the battle scenes, prepare for disappointment. This is a very detailed examination of Alexander’s literary afterlife in ancient and medieval literature from China to Scandinavia. It is well-structured and written in an approachable style.

• Richard Stoneman has translated for Penguin paperbacks the Alexander Romance, which in various forms circulated in the near east and Europe, and was widely read for well over a thousand years. For people living in England and France in AD 1400, it would have been the Alexander Romance, and not Arrian or Curtius, from which they gained their knowledge of the man. The Romance had many variants, often tailored to the needs of a particular culture, Persian, Greek, Jewish, Arabic, Latin. Stoneham explores the evolution of the mythical Alexander and has chosen to do this through various topics, his miraculous birth, his cities, his contacts with India, with Amazons, as Universal Emperor etc. This has its strengths, as in each of these areas the myth evolved differently from other parts of the myth. It does also however result in a lot of shifting backwards and forwards in time, though it also enhances understanding in the way the myth was adapted to dovetail into the needs of a particular culture, hence the universal emperor was particularly appealing to those who aspired to such a role; ( and it probably still does). What may be missing is perhaps the very early stages of the myth – Alexander may well have invented the cult of personality, and it is likely that the Romans that went east, Crassus, Caesar, Anthony, Trajan were all trying to emulate whatever they believed to be the real Alexander. How much has the Romance penetrated our ‘historical’ sources, most of which are late Roman? Stoneman’s book illustrates that what we think we know about the past is more influential than the past itself.