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Chapter 10 - Herodotean Material in a Late Version of the Alexander Romance

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 December 2018

By
Corinne Jouanno
Edited by
Adam J. Goldwyn  and
Ingela Nilsson
Adam J. Goldwyn
Affiliation:
North Dakota State University
Ingela Nilsson
Affiliation:
Uppsala Universitet, Sweden
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Summary

This chapter focuses on the Alexander Romance, detailing the ways that a late (fifteenth-century) Byzantine version of the romance interpolated Herodotean material into the narrative to re-work the text as a memento mori. For instance, an episode that appears in the surviving Greek version and its Slavonic source, and must therefore have been part of the lost original text, shows Alexander inspecting his troops and suddenly seized by a melancholy crisis, while thinking how short-lived he and his men are fated to be. This episode is, in fact, a rewriting of a Herodotean anecdote which involved Xerxes. This chapter, then, does two things: first, it examines Herodotus’ influence on the Byzantine versions of the Alexander Romance and, second, uses this as a way to examine Herodotean borrowings throughout the Byzantine corpus, such as in the works of Stobaios, Tzetzes and Nikephoros Gregoras.
Type
Chapter
Information
Reading the Late Byzantine Romance
A Handbook
 , pp. 211 - 229
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2018

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