Addressing Power: Fictional Letters Between Alexander and Darius

Abstract

This chapter considers what may be our very earliest example of a Greek 'novel', the Alexander Romance . The misleading singular title 'romance' in fact covers a complex textual tradition extending into five multilingual manuscript families, each of which contains interwoven material from a variety of dates. To make matters more complex, the text is conventionally taken to have originally been patched together from several different pre-existing literary fabrics: a narrative vita detailing Alexander's journey, a collection of letters exchanged between Alexander and Darius, a dialogue with the Brahmans, and various other smaller sections. Despite the evident difficulties involved in stratifying a text like this, it seems likely that the earliest elements date to the Ptolemaic period, perhaps even early in that period. This would indeed make it (caveats conceded) our earliest surviving work of prose fiction from Greek antiquity, with the arguable exception of Xenophon's Cyropedia . Keywords:Alexander; Alexander Romance ; Darius; fictional letters; Greek novel