Romance, however, still kept pace with propaganda. Judaea in the harsh grip of Antiochus thought nostalgically of the Beast with Two Horns who had harmlessly passed that way, and soon pictured him on his knees before the Torah, honouring the One God. The Ethiopians, original models perhaps for the fearful Zangs, evolved their own Alexander story in which, besides conversing with an angel who supports the world, he kills an enormous dragon by getting it to swallow a kind of bomb, and blowing it up. “How is the great Alexander?” the two-tailed mermaid would demand of Aegean sailors, who must hasten to answer “He lives and reigns” if they wanted to save their ship.
In Rome Caesar was struck down in the Forum, to save the Republic, which promptly died of it. Under Divine Augustus, no one had a motive for praising Alexander. Caesarians cared to eulogize no rivals. Greeks, in Roman prejudice, were lightweights, Greeklings, slick Levantines; panders, procurers and profiteers. To the learned world, on the other hand, Athens was the university where they sent their sons to pick up the intellectual polish of the conquered; and there the dead hand of the Lyceum still wrote on.
But among the republicans, in their bitter underground, interest in Alexander was keen and active. Had he not lived, it would have been necessary to invent him. His was an imperial effigy which could be safely burned.
To this time belongs Trogus, the inaccurate and hostile Justin’s now vanished source; and Diodorus. The date most favoured for Curtius is just after the dreadful Caligula, one of whose little conceits was dressing as Alexander. A deified Macedonian, three centuries safely dead, was a propagandist’s gift for a tyrannic proto-Caesar. Such monsters did men become who presumed to claim divine honours from their fellow citizens—present company of course excepted.
Here and there the stream of calumny met intractable rocks of fact, too firmly fixed to be washed away. Working this awkward material in, the republican moralists said he had started well, but all power corrupts, and none so absolutely as power over servile, cringing barbarians. The adoption of their effeminate clothes and customs spoke for itself.
There remained the discrepancy of his face. All this while, his statues were being busily reproduced by Roman copyists, the demand being far greater than looted originals could supply. Even the originals had not all been done from life. Yet even with the least talented, something about the eyes shows who is meant.
Perhaps the face, perhaps Greek patriotism, worked upon the young Plutarch long before he embarked on the Parallel Lives. Two of his earliest works were essays on the Fortune or Virtue of Alexander, upholding the second above the first—the hostile writers had given Fortune most of the credit. Much later this warm-hearted, charming and long-lived man put Alexander into the Lives alongside Julius Caesar. He was, unfortunately, a ragbag of a biographer, scarcely ever discarding a good story, seldom distinguishing primary from secondary sources, deeply concerned to edify. But “books have their destinies,” and his account of Alexander’s youth and childhood is the only one we have; his sources for it have disappeared.
Some time towards the end of Plutarch’s life span, in the second century AD, Alexander was rescued for history by a fellow soldier. He was Flavius Arrianus, a Romanized Bithynian Greek. Hadrian made him governor of Cappadocia, an honour seldom granted to his race; he was a brave and able general who fought off a dangerous barbarian invasion. Epictetus, whose pupil he had been, had taught him:
Don’t you know that all human ills and mean-spiritedness and cowardice arise not from death but from fear of death? Against this therefore fortify yourself. Direct all your discourses, readings, exercises thereto. And then you will find that by this alone are men made free.
Perhaps it was Alexander’s freedom which attracted Arrian. But the clutter of hindsighted romance and committed lying annoyed the honest general. Happily, he was in time to find the primary sources still intact in unburned libraries. He assessed their value, a chance we no longer have, and settled for Ptolemy, Aristobulus the architect-engineer, and Nearchus, Alexander’s admiral and boyhood friend.
This I claim; and never mind who I am; never mind my name although it is not unknown among men; never mind my country, or my family, or any rank I have held among compatriots. I would rather say: for me, this book of mine is country, kindred and career, and it has been so since my boyhood.
He did not, in his lifetime, enjoy any conspicuous fame, and it is sad that he cannot know how much we owe him.
Some time about AD 300, on the fertile shore of Alexandria, crossroads of trade and of traditions, all the flotsam of romance, folk tale, rumour, agitprop, and moralistic fantasy, combined with some tattered shreds of history, was gathered by some untalented but limitlessly credulous author, and cast on the waters of time. Implausibly attributed to Callisthenes, who died four years before Alexander, it became the first work of fiction to achieve bestsellerdom in translation throughout the known civilized world. Far beyond its circle of hearers and readers at first hand, illiterates without number heard it retailed at second, third, fourth, or hundredth remove, by bazaar storytellers, itinerant entertainers, people beguiling a journey, pedagogues, court poets, jongleurs and priests. It spread first among the peoples he had known and conquered, then on and on among those he had never seen and only known from rumour, till it reached the Far East which, having been taught that the land mass ended with India, he had not believed to exist.
Greek variants proliferated; versions appeared in Armenian, Bulgarian, Hebrew, Ethiopic and Syriac, the last being done into Arabic. Most significantly, soon after its appearance, one Julius Valerius did it into Latin, the universal language of the literate Western world. Greek in the Dark Ages, and well beyond them, was rarer in the West than gold. Latin was everywhere. From Valerius’ Callisthenes, along with the Roman sources, and from them alone, the image of Alexander came down to the Middle Ages. The Middle Ages split his image in two.
To the Church he was a gift, as he had been to the republicans. Here was Virtue corrupted by Fortune; the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the pride of life, riding fast to dust and judgment. In an age when Crusaders were proud to approach the Holy Sepulchre up to their horses’ fetlocks in Jewish blood; when heretics were burned alive; when holiness was seen in a hair shirt crawling with lice of ten years’ breeding; when excommunicate kings, to escape damnation, had to bare their backs to the scourge or kneel in ashes, there were stern useful morals to be drawn from King Alisaunder.
But an age of oppressive orthodoxy, whether under priest or commissar, breeds rebels. “To hell will I go!” cries young Aucassin, defying Nicolete’s censorious guardian.
For to hell go the fair clerks, and the fair knights fallen in tourneys or in grand wars, the good sergeants-at-arms and the men of honour. With those will I go. And there go the fair courteous ladies, who have two friends or three besides their lords. There go the gold and the silver, the vair and ermine; there go harpers and jongleurs and the kings of the earth. With them will I go, so I have Nicolete, my most sweet friend, with me.
There, too, they would go with Alexander. His medieval romances are a vast ramifying theme. Their fascination is that, though their authors had access only to the most hostile sources, their residual relics of fact were enough to seize imagination and cast a spell. Incident might be wildly remote from history, yet the chivalrous knight saluted a kindred soul. In the Alexandreis and the Roman d’Alexandre, he is the pattern of valour and courtesy, glorious in arms, protective to ladies, fair and generous to enemies, liberal to vassals. God, not Fortune, directs his destiny; envious treachery, not Nemesis, contrives his death.