Alexander the Great: A Life in Legend

foreign [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] s Williams one of the curators of the exhibition Alexander the Great the making of a myth for those of you who haven't yet seen the exhibition Alexander the Great the making of a myth is the first exhibition to focus on the rich history of Storytelling of one of the most colorful figures of the ancient world from astrological astrological click trabits ancient papyri and medieval manuscripts through to films and video games the exhibition reveals how Alexander's character has been adapted and appropriated across different cultures and religions over 2000 years featuring over 130 exhibits from 25 countries in 21 different languages it highlights Alexander's Universal appeal and explores how his legacy turned into Legend a transformation that started in his lifetime and continues today so tonight it's my great pleasure on behalf of the British Library to welcome you to this the first of our exhibition related events which is presented in memory of the author and Scholar nasib Shaheen we're fortunate to have as our Host this evening the author and broadcaster Tom Holland whose books include Rubicon the triumphant tragedy of the Roman Republic and especially relevant tonight person fire his award-winning history of the Greek o-persian Wars he'll be hosting tonight's guests Lindsay Allen lecturer in Greek and near Eastern history at King's College London she's the author of the Persian Empire and specializes in the history of pre-islamic Iran persepolis Alexander and the near East in the first millennium BC our second guest is leading expert Richard Stoneman honorary visitor professing at the University of Exeter his Works include the translation of the Greek Alexander romance Alexander the Great a life in Legend a history of Alexander in World culture and most recently the book of the exhibition Alexander the Great the making of a myth which is on sale at the British Library Bookshop so with that it's my great pleasure now to hand you over to Tom Holland to introduce tonight's event thank you [Music] thank you so much and thank you everyone for coming um I think when one is doing an event at the British Library really the dumb thing is to begin with a little bit of Shakespeare so I'm going to open with possibly the most famous scene in Shakespeare's most famous play uh Hamlet he is hanging out with Horatio in the graveyard he's about to dig up the skull of Yorick and Hamlet Muses and reflects on the vanity of human greatness and his mind turns inevitably I guess to the greatest man who ever lived Alexander died Alexander was buried Alexander returneth to dust the dust is Earth of Earth we make loam and why of that loam where to he was he was counted might they not stop a beer barrel so Alexander turned to dust might become a stopper for a barrel of beer and hamlet in saying that of course is emphasizing the way that even someone as great as Alexander in the end we're all dead but of course by choosing Alexander Hamlet is also bigging him up Alexander is chosen because his Fame is on such an epic scale and to this day Alexander is probably one of the most famous people who ever lived and his story continues to fascinate and to Thrill because it is one of the great great epics of History so I could just give a very very brief sketch of his life I'm sure all of you will be familiar with it but just in case there are some who aren't um he was born in 356 BC he was a prince in Macedon um the land that laid to the north of Greece there was debate among the Greeks as to whether the macedonians actually counted as Greek Alexander thought he was his enemies in Greece often begged to differ his parents well there was um olympias a princess from the the land of Papyrus near what's basically Albania now back then it was a land celebrated for its witches and the uh the bloodthirsty savagery of its domestic politics and Alexander's father was the king of Macedon Philip or was he and that is a theme that I suspect we will come to over the course of this evening Philip was a very great conqueror in his own right he had basically put the whole of Greece with its quarreling uh city-states in his shadow and Alexander was raised taught by Aristotle the greatest philosopher of his day trained in war he made his own a ferocious War Horse that no one else had been able to tame by the name of bucephalus at the age of 18 He commanded the Cavalry in Philip's great victory over the armies of Thebes and Athens the two most military potent city-states of their day in Greece and which effectively ended Greek Independence for good um Alexander and Philip had a spectacular bus stop when Philip died murdered there were accusations that perhaps Alexander and almost certainly olympias was involved so uh you know a complicated family life I think it's fair to say now someone else who perhaps may have laid behind the assassination of Philip was the great king the king of kings the King of Persia who ruled as the most powerful man on the planet the Persians ruled an Empire that stretched from the Aegean all the way to India and its wealth and its Manpower was celebrated back in the 5th Century the Persians had tried to conquer Greece and Philip in raising an army and aspiring to invade the Persian Empire was consciously setting out he he proclaimed to gain revenge for what the persons had done when they had invaded Greece with Philip's death the young Alexander takes over and he crosses um into Asia he wins A great battle at the river of granicus he subdues the whole of Asia Minor he meets with the great king himself in a battle at Isis on the kind of the hinge between what's now turkey and Syria and he takes prisoner the great King's mother and several of his wives he then goes southwards he um he he captures The Phoenician city of Tire after a great and murderous Siege he conquers Egypt he goes deep into the desert to an oracle called siwa where he is hailed not as the son of Philip but as the son of Ammon who uh the king of the Egyptian gods who is equated with Zeus by the Greeks and so that gives Alexander who is not who is never knowingly modest a great deal to think about um he then found um the most famous of a large number of cities that with as I say he's a very modest man uh he names all these cities that he founds after himself but the most famous Alexandria of course is the Alexandria that he found in Egypt he then heads eastwards he meets the great king for a second time in a mighty battle on the plains of northern Mesopotamia the great king flees his armies are defeated the wealth and the glory of Mesopotamia Babylon and then Persia in the form of persepolis the great City built by Darius the great um the king who had sent the Army to Marathon falls into his hands just as darius's son Xerxes had burnt Athens so now Alexander Burns persepolis he sets off in Pursuit Of The Fugitive great king the great King has been murdered Alexander is accepted by most Persians as their Monarch he heads onwards and onwards up into what is now Afghanistan down into what is now the Punjab comes back through a murderously hot desert um that kills large numbers of his men why he does it maybe we'll touch on that Legend is that he does it because the desert is there and people say it can't be done so Alexander does it uh he returns to Babylon and there at a very young age he dies um age 32. and from that moment on he graduates into Legend there are people of course who worship Him literally as a god his body is removed by one of his generals Ptolemy to Alexandria the city in Egypt that he had founded and he his his coffin is laid out there and preserved goodness knows how long uh equally there are many who hate him the news of his death brought to Athens is greeted by one orator with scorn Alexander dead how can he be dead the stench of his corpse would fill the Earth and from that point on both Alexander's admirers and his detractors have told and retold and retold his story now it is a puzzle however it's a curious aspect of this famous famous story that Alexander although he is one of History's Supreme celebrities in fact the sources for his life The Continuous histories The Continuous biographies are actually very late they all date from the Roman period And there's a very real sense in which the Alexander that we tend to have in our Mind's Eye is less a Macedonian figure perhaps than a Roman one and this in turn I think that there are two corollaries which of this which we want to explore tonight with our two wonderful speakers the first is that if we want to get back to the pre-roman Alexander if we want to get back to some sense of how his contemporaries not just in the Greek world but in the Persian world that he conquered if we want to get some sense of of of how he was seen of what Alexander the historical Alexander may actually have been it's kind of like panning for gold you need incredible expertise incredible um scholarship and that's why it's so brilliant that we have Lindsay Allen here who is one of the great world experts on this subject great great um figure trying to work out what can how how easily can we Place Alexander not in the context of um the stories told about him by Romans but in the context of the age in which he actually lived but there's also a further corollary to the fact that um the stories that are told about Alexander are very late and that is that um a figure so legendary about whom so many stories are told it is very very easy for these stories over the course of the centuries and of the Millennia to become well ever more improbable ever more implausible to start featuring Griffins and submarines and Dragons as we saw up on the screen and these stories situated the fame of Alexander through time and across the globe and there is no one better to take us through this process than Richard Stoneman whose brilliant brilliant book on on Alexander a life in Legend reveals just how many peoples and how many different ages have told Fantastical stories about Alexander from Iceland to China um and so that too is a part of the history of Alexander we have Lindsay to try and give us some sense of who the real Alexander was and we then have Richard to absolutely obscure that and go on about dragons so um dragons right Lindsay I think you should go first so we so we so we're absolutely attuned to all the inaccuracies that Richard is then going to detail for us yeah I have bad news for you Tom um I think I'm going to be also talking about mutations of Alexander the difficulty of reaching him um can I have the my slide starting thank you beautiful um Blended appearance there um as Tom mentioned I work on the Acumen Persian Empire the Empire that Alexander conquers and in the process rather rips apart um and uh it's often easy to forget that the really most of his um Empire in Asia Minor um in Western Asia as a whole Mesopotamia going on into Central Asia it's all part of the same uh political entity um for over 200 years before his invasion so one of the things that influences our historical sources is um the the influence the weight um the afterlife of the political shape of this Empire and if you think about the fact that this is the stage that Alexander is entering onto the stage settings of that Empire of that dynasty somewhat influence how he moves and and also really the script that is written for him by others so the kinds of sources that even might have been generated in his lifetime are likely to be influenced by the stories of the accumulates the previous monarchs um this image I'm showing you is from the 18th century and it's showing you Alexander visiting the tomb of Cyrus it's a fanciful realization of the tomb of Cyrus but it illustrates very neatly the preoccupation that emerges in our Roman sources that Alexander has for his predecessors in some cases some of his acts of competition such as going across the desert uh are mentioned as part of a competition with the memory of Cyrus who is the founder of the Persian Empire that Alexander is in the process of conquering the focus in our narratives on Alexander's relationship with the memory of Cyrus um rather does down the memory of later Kings like Darius and our later Xerxes Arctic sexies and so on so really Ollie Alexander is placed in this kind of personal relationship with the founder of the Empire so that Alexander can found it Anew and part of what I am saying today is really based on the way I've tried to teach Alexander the Great Thomas extremely flattering about my position in this discipline um I my main work really on Alexander in recent years has been attempting to teach it to successive generations of students along with my colleagues in King's College London and part of that struggle has been to introduce the framework of the preceding political environment and here you're seeing the actual tomb of Cyrus at pasagadai in fars in Iran and think about how our sources are commentating or receiving the memory of that Empire as well as Alexander at the same time and not only that my other message to the students and this is where they start to get very frustrated and apologies to any of them who are listening tonight is to say that really Alexander's brief life is is squished is is kind of concentrated and reformed between the weight of the Persian Empire and then the weight of his successes so in a sense here's the thing on the Anvil being the Anvil being the Persian Empire being hit by hammers that are the successors pressuring his the shape of his life and our sources into New Perspectives so this is one example of that on the left you have a large author start relief that is a sort of big relief that goes up quite high above your head that used to stand in the center of the audience Hall at persepolis that is passer the capital of the Persian Empire that Alexander burned this image shows the Persian king in audience and you can see he is being approached by a petitioner this is something found at the Capitol but it is also circulated around the empire in select examples that we have reaching as far as the western coast of Asia Minor and even commented upon in Greek style by artists working in the Greek mainland and Beyond in southern Italy so this scene of the Persian king in audience which is itself is based on older visions of kingship in this area is something that is circulating by the time Alexander steps into that context now you may have become aware of the fact that Alexander is reputed to have taken on some aspects of the kingship there but in this narrative in Quincy's Rufus one of our Roman sources he's represented as misunderstanding the elements of the audience scene we've got a footstool that is set a table so he's sitting on the Royal Throne it was a little bit too high for him and therefore he has a stool a stable as a footstool and this is a provoking distress according to this tale amongst his attendance and the distress he react responds to in a sort of conscientious way according to this tale and then His companion felota says no no this isn't omen of how you are taking over the Persian Empire um now in our Roman Source this is placed at Souza one of the other Persian capitals um and um it is before his rival derives III is actually dead so this is in the process of um of Conquest um I want to point out that really almost everybody I think at the in the fourth Century associated with this court would have known what this image was and what it meant that it's a kind of political image um so what's happened with this story is that it has mutated and turned into a little Parable or a little kind of prophetic Fable um about the Takeover of the Persian Empire by Alexander and this is just one example of how where we have quite what seemed quite to be quite informal or intimate glimpses into the life of Alexander as he conquers the Empire we actually have something that is quite political quite inflected quite mutated in its in its transmission and by the way just to support my point to say that this is um known about um in the fourth Century at the point when Alexander is invading you have an outline here on the right of the same scene painted on the interior of a shield um on the so-called Alexander sarcophagus excavated from sidon which was created for a king ruling inside on who is in fact appointed by Alexander and thus it portrayed as part of its decorative program for takeover the defeat of Persians by Alexander and his forces and part of the symbolism of that defeat is a useless Shield being being thrown up in the air not defending its Persian carrier with the audience seen inside this is an image an object that you can see in the exhibition and it's just something I wanted to quote here um to show you how memory does form for the immediate um course of the invasion by Alexander in this case it is a scribal record of events during before during and after the battle of galgamilla which is really the big cataclysmic battle that removes some of the great barriers the masked armies of the Persian king to Alexander's event Advance into Iran um in this case it is really about recording data in order to support the sort of scientific program of Scholars in Babylon so the barest minimum of information is often recorded it could have been recorded almost immediately and it could have or it could have been recorded rather a little bit after the event as a sort of edited compilation in this case in the fragmentary translation not mine uh um you have a record of a series of proclamations or Communications between the advancing Invader and the authorities in the city of Babylon um and in this case we have um the kinds of assurances that a conqueror might have issued to the uh the city that feared his progress feared his coming um as he Advanced and in this case the city worked to in negotiating with him in receiving these proclamations in allowing him into the city worked to preserve the city from the kinds of Vengeance that other centers suffered from Alexander for resisting his resisting his invasion um and what I want to point out is that this is actually not dissimilar from the kind of negotiation Cyrus um the great Cyrus the founder of the Persian Empire would have gone through back in the 6th Century BCE and indeed in that case um excavated in Babylon there was a prop a sort of an ideological document a foundation cylinder in Cyrus's name recording how he too was welcomed into the City by the by the people of Babylon and did all the correct things for the Cults of Marduk the god of Babylon so what you have here is a framework in an age-old City like Babylon which accommodates um the Conqueror um now this is all very well when we know that Alexander conquered Babylon what becomes rather more difficult is when we have our Traditions growing um including places where we suppose he did not go I'm showing you an image here of a reconstructed illustration of Alexander advancing on Jerusalem now this just appears in one author Josephus and it's normally not Incorporated in our understanding of how Alexander went about his invasion because he had far more important places for that period to go to to invade such as Tire sidon and Gaza which are mentioned on his way to Egypt but the description to cephas is extremely elaborate and involves him sending proclamations forward and the priests in Jerusalem becoming aware of his impending arrival and then the welcoming pissy that goes out to invite him in and accompany him in and also his introduction to The Cult of the city and also his introduction to the Prophecies of the city which which sort of foretell that he will take it over um so in this case we have an incredibly elaborate and Lively record of the Takeover assisted that most historians don't think quite happened and this is I think a really great illustration of how story and memory can form around a character like Alexander quite quickly and it can be almost indistinguishable from the real thing so it's not necessarily Griffins and Dragons which distinguish what is real from what is not and just by way I'm going to Crowbar in my favorite place as part of this talk by way of a last example um this on the left you're seeing uh part of the um and this is possibly for Richard and for Tom the Gateway of Xerxes the side of the Gateway of Xerxes at persepolis um which Alexander destroyed in the middle you're seeing an image which sadly isn't in the show because it's just been recently on show in Dublin it's a 17th century and the Epic of the Persian kings written in Persian um uh from the 11th century um and this copy being from the 17th century painted in 1655. in this you see Alexander in his marriage celebration with his new wife Roxanna who in this story is part of the Persian royal family you find Alexander being integrated into Persian Epic into Persian literature very thoroughly and that's something you can go and see in Illustrated really well in the exhibition but the other thing to note is that all of this really illustrates is how much Alexander's memory continued to be connected to this site in Persian language Traditions as well as thinking about our Roman receptions of Alexander and one thing I want to leave you with is the possibility that there were multiple receptions of Alexander on the ground immediately which aren't caught in our Roman filter but which contributed to the richness of the tradition that you see in Illustrated in the exhibition and all I wanted to point out here is my favorite thing about this illustration and that is the artist Marin Mercedes attempt to show that this is indeed happening at persepolis or isaka as it's called in his text with as I've put the little rectangle around it a little Stone figure that is representing our beliefs visible at persepolis in the 17th century I'm going to jump over this because I don't want to get onto for too long but I want to point out that in fact that local memory of the site um is is worthwhile because the site continued to be used after Alexander's destruction and indeed one of the fragments that you may go and look at in the British museum comes from a facade that was moved around late in the fourth Century presumably as part of trying to use this site as part of the local governmental structure after it's um sort of first cataclysmic encounter with Alexander so I'll end there and I just want to also kind of pay tribute to really the many scholars who've contributed to my view of Alexander Pierre Briar Emily Kurt and others um and with whom we talk about not just to Alexander but his conquered Nations as it were and the ghosts really of the Empire that that was taken apart by his invasion and I should also I guess point out that over the many now over 15 years of teaching Alexander to undergraduates I've noticed that the reception of him by them has changed gradually over that time people's attitudes to Conquest has changed people's attitudes to kingship and monarchy have changed and also to the multiple perspectives on Alexander that we can recover so I'll hand over and to Richard and Tom to talk more about those thank you [Applause] I've been living with Alexander now for more than half my life or I should say I've been living with the legends of Alexander in the form of the the Alexander romance I first came across this work when I was in the 1980s when I was when I was researching a book an anthology of travel writing about Greece and I came across quite a number of curious stories about Alexander and his exploits in Greece none of which I'd encountered in any of my undergraduate reading when I had studied Alexander for example there was the story of the um which conveyed that Alexander was actually not the son of Philip and olympias as the historians tell you but the son of the exiled Pharaoh nectar Nebo who had taken refuge in Pella rather fallen for olympias and can strive to make her pregnant by disguising himself as a dragon and that is the story that I encountered in both in medieval Greek sources and in medieval English texts dragons serpents came up again in a cretan story which I put into my book and as these curious stories began to accumulate I thought to there's this is something I'd like to know more about there's a book in this and I if I want to know about something I write a book about it so I went into it and I discovered that the ultimate source of all these stories was the Alexandra Romance the Greek Alexander romance which had never been mentioned to me when I was an undergraduate um my researchers into the Alexander romance then kept me busy for the next 20 years until I produced the the book which Tom kindly mentioned Alexander the Great to life in Legend but I started by making a translation for penguin of the Alex of the Greek Alexander Romance now that in itself was not a particularly easy thing to do because there are actually five Greek Alexander romances and these are these are called resensions the first uh the first um was certainly was written in Antiquity there are Scholars who believe that it was written in about the third Century A.D there are others like me who think it was probably put together in the third Century BC by and large in its existing form um that particular version survives in one manuscript in Paris um and it's a very corrupt text some of it doesn't make sense um it was then copied but more than copied Rewritten several times throughout Antiquity and each person who decided to rewrite it changed the language changed the grammar left out bits they couldn't understand try to make sense of bits that were puzzling added new stories um and as a result there are as I say five different recensions of the uh of the Alexander Romance when I uh did the penguin I had to choose a particular copy text and I chose a manuscript called L which is so called because it resides in the university in library in Leiden in the Netherlands and it's the only version which contains the two wonderful stories about the diving bell and the flying machine which have become absolutely iconic for the AI Alexander Legends my research is into the these texts led me into all kinds of topics into the relation of this text to other ancient Greek novels it's you might if you believe like I do that it was written in a couple of generations after Alexander then it's the first historical novel um it involved investigations into ethnography because Alexander encounters monsters and monstrous peoples in the course of his in the course of his expedition to the East and it involved philosophy because of the the central scene where he encounters the naked philosophers of taxila in the in in Northern uh Pakistan um and enters into debate with them but the five the five Greek recensions were only the beginning of the story the uh there were two Latin versions made before the uh by the end of antiquity and as the centuries went on the Alexander romance was translated into every language of medieval Europe it was it's uh it was translated into Persian into Arabic into Syriac and many of the other languages of the the middle and Far East um including a Malay version which is based on one of the Arabic versions um nobody can possibly control traditions in all these languages I have a few languages and I learned a bit of Persian but in 2010 I organized the conference the University of Exeter in which on which was called the Alexander romance in Persia and the East which brought together a great many scholars who could speak authoritatively about many of these um more exotic uh versions of the Alexander Legends including turkic Mongolian Chinese and so on and as the as the years have gone by the number of Scholars working in this field I'm pleased to say has mushroomed so almost almost every every language tradition is now getting its requisite attention um in the in the Middle Ages the Alexander romance as I said was translated or refashioned in every language of Europe as Tom said from Iceland and Ireland to um to Serbia Bulgaria Russia um and was there are in fact more versions of the I believe more versions of the Alexander romance extent than of any other work except the Gospels in fact Alexander even made it into the Bible because people in the Middle Ages noticed that there's a gap between the end of the Old Testament and the beginning of the book of Maccabees and in producing the beautiful Illustrated history Bibles they decided that it would be a good idea to insert the Alexander romance as a bridge so Alexander just carries you neatly from the end of the Old Testament to to the beginning of the Hellenistic period foreign it should not be forgotten that he also appears in the Quran in Surah 18 of the Quran the search for the Water of Life is told in this in this version he is known as dulcanine the two-horned one so what does it all mean well how why does this uh why does this particular story about Alexander achieve such an achieve such traction make such an impact um when the the more sober authoritative historians like Aryan and quintus courteous really don't get that much attention during the the Middle Ages they begin to come into their own again in the Renaissance well I think it all goes back to this moment when Alexander encounters the naked philosophers at taxila he asks them a series of silly questions like who are more numerous the living of the dead and what is uh what is the nature of kingship um at the end of when they've given their answers they ask him for immortality but he says I can't give you immortality because I'm only Immortal myself and they say well if you're only Immortal then why do you career around the world killing everybody to which he replies that it's actually his Fate To Do It um his his he can't escape the decrees of Providence that say that this is what he has to do and in fact the the change the that uh that this kind of Savage Conquest brings about in people's lives is essential to um to the continuance of life uh well this is just a story though that was told a good many times in Antiquity and Rewritten in a number of Greek and Latin texts up to the end of end of the sixth century um it's a kind of Allegro and penceroso moment when these when these when the Conqueror is brought face to face with the quietest philosopher who does nothing but sit under a tree and waits for the fruit to fall down so that he can eat it and that's that's what they live on and these people existed they're also described in the historians um Alexander was rather impressed by them and some some of them were impressed by him the leader as they as he's called dandamus was not uh Alexander gave him some gifts skills and bread and oil um which dandamus received with contempt except he said well I'll have the oil it'll help the fire burn a bit more brightly um but Alexander adopted one of these naked philosophers a character called kalanus who then traveled with Alexander for the rest of the expedition and until uh kalanas fell ill and took his own life by ascending a pyre in parsagada probably in pasagadai rather than persepolis there are the naked philosophers they've popped up at just the right moment um now kilan has traveled with Alexander as I say to the end of his life including the Journey Down the River Indus after Alexander turned back decided not to continue with the conquest of India and that Journey Down the Indus occupied six months there was a certain amount of slaughtering involved as they went along but I can't imagine other than that Alexander and kalanus and a couple of other Greek philosophers who traveled with Alexander namely anaksarcus and Pirro sat together on the poop deck of an evening and they the the Greeks learned a bit of Sanskrit and the Indian learned a bit of Greek and the Indian taught them a bit about Indian philosophy Pirro was very impressed Pirro seems to have adopted certain Buddhist ways and is known as the founder of radical skepticism which has a great many affinities which I could go into in more detail if you were really interested um with with the Buddhism Buddhist idea of no self and the impermanence of of everything so to wrap up Alexander's travels really created the conditions for this kind of intellectual interchange and reflection on the big questions of life how to live how to die and he and such figures as an exarcus and Puro raised interesting and intricate philosophical questions which fed into the intellectual ferment of the period following Alexander's death which I think of as the 40 Years War because the successors were at War for 40 years until the Hellenistic kingdoms finally took some sort of coherent form and like many other periods of political and Military chaos it was also a period of great intellectual activity the Hellenistic alexandrian Scholars um were were the source of enormous amount of intellectual advances not just philosophy but science and other things as well and it's because Alexander brought these different worlds together or I would say um one that at least one aspect of that was this interchange between India and and Greece and if I if I'm spared that's what I'm going to be spending the next decade or so thinking about thank you very much um thank you both very much so what we're going to do is we'll have a chat for maybe 15 minutes uh 20 minutes between ourselves and then we will be taking your questions um just just to kick off Richard um you portray figure who in a way is infinitely capable of attracting Legends he's kind of like a magnet attracting iron filings he just kind of Picks Them Up um and Lindsay you've talked about how um the historical Alexander if we can talk of such a thing how how perspectives on him are constantly changing so back in the 30s and the 40s an age when British imperialism was viewed in a much more positive light than it is now there was this idea that Alexander had done all his his conquering and his slaughtering in the name of a Brotherhood of Man that he was interested in establishing a kind of United Nations um this is obviously an idea that um over recent decades has has faded from academic discourse and you've talked about how you in your you know your own career you have seen how um the Allure of Alexander as a conqueror has begun to fade among your students for I guess for obvious reasons reflecting the kind of the evolving ethos but what struck me going into the exhibition was that the historical Alexander seems almost as flexible almost as ready to kind of um attract positive takes as the mythical Alexander because in in the exhibition um Alexander is portrayed as a gay icon so his his best friend um the patroclus to his Achilles her feistyon has been cast regularly as as a participant in a gay relationship with Alexander and also um very very kind of fashionably in the exhibition we have the figure of Bago ass the the Persian Boy written about by Mary Reynolds um any any young boy who reads that is almost calculated to cross his legs when he reads the scene where nagos actually becomes a eunuch um but in that there is we see Alexander portrayed as a kind of a transgender hero do you think that um there is enough in the historical story of Alexander that he can always kind of pick up positive spins so the imperialist Alexander comes to be seen as something negative but the LGBT Alexander kind of starts to Hove into view do you think that would be a fair perspective I I personally yes I think I guess possibly some of my arguments revealed that I think to a certain extent there's there's a bit of a void there that is filled with creative story making out of people's expectations um and I think if you have he's more of an event than a person in quite a lot of our in quite a lot of our material so if you have an event you can kind of project all sorts of different expectations and takes upon him um I don't have a particular need to sort of see it as positive or negative um but it is interesting to see how there have been different responses to elements of the story over the years I've I remember getting into a small argument with students over the marriages of the Persian women to um to Alexander's macedonians um which you know is is kind of like a potentially a war crime but his kind of often romanticized and seen as something quite wholesome and in support of the sort of League of Nations idea so you can take things both ways depending on your perspective and really one of the things that it's worth emphasizing about our approaches to Alexander is to be critical and multi-skilled I would say as Richard was saying you need to cover several Traditions at once only one of those marriages lasted didn't it so Lucas is married we heard all the rest fell apart fairly quickly but one of the interesting things about the Alexander romance is that there's no sex in it actually of any kind I mean he gets married to Roxanna who is presented as the uh as the daughter of Darius which in history she wasn't but uh but there is there's no kind of romantic aspect to it and the nearest you get to this is a is the story of his visit to the uh um the queen of merway Queen Candace um but she's actually a mother figure rather than rather than a um any kind of girlfriend though in some of the later Byzantine rewritings of the of the story that does become that does become a romantic encounter and is that because you you touched on how um well Liz you touched on on how he's portrayed by Josephus going to the temple then you talked about how the Christian Scholars write about him and how he ends up remarkably as a figure in the Quran do you think that the reason that in in the Alexander romance despite the fact that it's named a romance there isn't actually much um romance as we would describe it is because in these stories he comes to be focused on much more kind of abstract objects of Desire whether that is the Jewish the Christian or the Muslim God or his his pothos his yearning for for the unknown and the unreachable yeah do you think that that's that's what's kind of motivating him yes um well the pothos is a word that uh Aryan uh gives us many times pothos meaning desire or longing um and whenever Alexander decides to do something yet more outlandish or to go even further it's his pothos at work he just can't can't control himself and in the romance this is carried to the ultimate degree because he is constantly searching for immortality he is Frost in his search for the Water of Life he is frustrated in it because his Cook gets there first and he fails to drink it um and it towards the end of the romance there's the wonderful encounter with the talking trees in India well you'll meet the trees when you go into the exhibition they'll tell your fortune for you which is rather special um they'll probably tell your fortune the same as mine actually you're gonna die and then and in the end that's what they that's what they tell him yes you're going to die but tell me what they say is you'll never go home again you're going to die in Babylon very soon and your wife and sister are going to be horribly murdered just just what you wanted to hear from from a friendly tree well so so the the idea of a hero who roams the world looking for an escape from Death there are echoes there of much older epic Traditions that are associated with Mesopotamia so Gilgamesh is the absolute a classic example now Lindsay as I understand it one of the one of the kind of academic developments over the recent decades has been an appreciation of the degree to which um Babylonian culture endured well into the Hellenistic period so to what extent do both of you think that the stories that come to be told of Alexander under May bear the trace elements of Mesopotamian Legend yeah I had a wonderful student Mesopotamian epic and I hope some of that sees the light of day um soon um so I think there is tons of work to be done on that um it's so interesting that looking at it from the perspective of somebody who looked at a kind of a long durray a long perspective view of Conquest ideology including near Assyria near Babylonian and Persian kings when I was a student the pothos idea tends to pop up when Alexander does something that you'd expect in a Syrian King to do you know the sort of oh let's climb a mountain let's do something really performatively propagandistic Let's cross this desert it's the pothos and that kind of Yearning is something that that seems to appear in in earlier Conquest accounts too so in that sense Alexander is following other people's footsteps I think it's quite an exciting range of ideas and the other thing to note is that it's already a very diverse Court that's part of the ecuminate system you have multiple religions multiple communities multiple ethnicities who were all exchanging ideas philosophical ideas they're often all arguing with each other what one presumes in order to gain favor with the King and so one already has a sort of um potential for the exchange of ideas at that point that Alexander sort of comes in and perhaps ramps up too so but that's his speculation I I did some investigation a few years back into the I into the concept of Alexander's Fortuna his fortune in quintus courteous because the Fortuna of Alexander which is almost always on his side and is helping him to achieve his ends is very different from Fortuna fate touche in Greek in most other Greek and Roman authors when because for Fortuna in Seneca for example is your enemy um you never know what she's going to do to you next whereas on Alex inquis courteous she's always on Alexander's side and I think that quintus courteous has picked up a little bit of a Persian idea about the far of the king which influenced his idea of fortuna I even thought I could trace it Trace who who quintesses who courteous is uh sources have been talking to but it's all a bit speculative but it's another I think it's another possibility and if I might mention one more thing um the the image of Alexander ascending into the sky born by a born in a um uh of Chariot or a box or something carried by Griffins very often this is represented in Cathedral art and elsewhere as Alexander sitting like this and on either side of him there is there is a griffin facing inwards and and this is a Persian image this is the master of the animals isn't it um and it also appears on some of the furniture from the so-called tumor Philip at vergina which suggests to me that all this furniture is actually post Alexander's holquest of Persia because that was where they got the imagery from so so that's to my mind another uh Persian and in and also Mesopotamian image so so if we can recognize the imprint of Mesopotamian and Parish and myth-making on the figure of Alexander both in in the historical sources and in the more legendary sources what about the process of Alexander's own self-mythologization so we we are told that he he he travels with historians and the Roman historians claim to be drawing on these historians now you don't go off with a load of historians unless you think you're going to be a historical figure a figure of of earth-shaking moment but we're also told that he he traveled with uh you know the Iliad under his pillow wherever he went um and I wonder to what extent do you think both the historical and the legendary understanding of Alexander that we have is shaped by Alexander's own attempt to shape his Legend um I think it might be shaped by ptolema's attempt to shape Alexander's Legend I think they we didn't we we've perhaps unjustly not mentioned Ptolemy very much in this but if we think about autonomy is his friend who takes his body yeah who hijacks the body and basically becomes Pharaoh in Egypt turns Alexandria into a kind of manifestation of the memory of Alexander all the way down to this all of these multiplying stories about its foundation by Alexander and you know he's he's physically in the city and Aryan thought that Ptolemy was bound to be the most reliable source for Alexander because Ptolemy was a king and it would be disgraceful for a king to tell a lie therefore everything in his history that's why Oliver's Stone in his film begins with Anthony Hopkins yeah yeah but it's a it's a really good frame in the film because in a sense it shows how much the story is probably ptolemy's so I showed um the Mosaic Alexander Mosaic at the end with a view of Darius as king fleeing um and and that is one of the locations proposed for an original version of that is Alexandria um that so much of the sort of narrative and the kind of especially um the aspects from Richard May disagree but a lot of the aspects relating to India are partly related to ptolemaic imperialism and their own posturing in the Hellenistic world so um it's one it it Richard's sort of other point about the iconography being interpreted as a tale is quite telling in our in the example I showed that you have an awful lot of what appear to be quite immediate and personal stories about Alexander that are actually far more commentaries on on on on his reception in the 300 years afterwards this is not my good audience do you think that we can say anything about the historical Alexander's relationship to Homer and no nothing at all that is that is you can argue for it I'm not ruling it out but uh but but this idea that he is inspired by Homer that he models himself on Achilles this is this is a myth that we we cannot redeem and and reconstitute as history I think I think very difficult to do so okay annoyingly skeptical it goes beyond that doesn't he I mean yes Troy is important when he when he's crossed the Heller spot he has to go to go to Troy and have a look at the uh the tomb of Achilles and so on but he goes so far beyond that I I think that what he's actually um in terms of Greek mythology and religion it's Heracles and Dionysus he's yeah that's Dionysus he's hunting comes with elephants degrees doesn't he and that's right that's right yes the Dionysus myth has to has to be in there and he has to find Dionysus um in all sorts of places where um uh where um where some where where Ivy is growing for example because uh yeah because it's dionysus's plant and the uh um the story about the Conquering the rock of aeonas I mean it said that he did that because Heracles had already done it yeah but it's made quite clear by Aryan that actually he made up this story um he made up the story that Heracles had done it in order to make it something more important to in his career but also this kind of sense it's like Everest you climb it because it's there you this huge that's right yes people say it can't be conquered so I'm going to conquer well a bit like going across the desert it's yes yes well it was it was a difficult Rock to conquer I guess but um okay so um just one last uh question before we open it up to you guys um I don't know how many of you seen the exhibition it I mean there is an amazing array of material from across the world from across a whole array of different periods one of the things that really struck me though was the um the ability of Alexander to generate myth right the way into the present so I think absolutely one of my favorite and most unexpected things in there is where um Alexander the Great comes back from the dead and he captures um world leaders including Mrs Thatcher and is confronted by Superman which is certainly not in the Alexander romance or indeed in Aryan um and so I just I just wondered what what for both of you is your favorite modern retelling of Alexander of the Alexander story uh because I grew up a pony girl um there's a beginning of a movie called The Black Stallion um where the tale of bucephalus and Alexander is told as though it is a separate Fable that has nothing to do with anything else and I love that story because it's connected with introducing an object into the story and it's all about the idea that you know that it's the one point where it actually does seem like quite a wonderful and romantic story and so I I really love love that that rendition I think I needed notice of that question you don't have to answer I had some I have so many uh favorite modern treatments but uh I mean I have three you talk I'm I'm always very I am a great admirer of Mary Reynolds because I think she imagines the ancient world very effectively and largely convincingly and and she also went very seriously into the nature of Alexander in the book of that title and really uh um I think managed to say a lot that was that was very uh very telling about about him um otherwise it's the uh um it's the you know the standard modern modern historians I suppose that I find myself working with most of the time I I completely agree with you about about Mary Reynold um far from Heaven and the Persian Boy and amazing novels yes okay um do you have any questions dear audience surely there must be yes yes two at the back one there one there thank you thank you very much uh it was a fascinating subject and it's a fascinating talk so as you mentioned autonomy half inched the corpse and took it off to Alexandria where it became um a massive tourist attraction throughout most of late Antiquity but then mysteriously disappeared so if you were Indiana Jones where would you go to try and find the corpse um under the water well I've just been there uh I a couple of weeks ago to Venice this is brilliant a brilliant thesis that Venetian Sailors sailed to Alexandria looking for the body of Saint Mark um you know evangelist brilliant get him bring him back make him the patron of Venice so they'd stop at Venice and they look around for a body and there's an amazing body and an amazing sarcophagus must be Saint Mark so they Nick it wrap it up in pork so that the Muslim Customs inspectors won't uh won't look too closely bring it back to Venice um bury it under the main altar of San Marco um and so I I I went there a couple of weeks ago and paid my respects to the body of Alexander the Great and it was a great great thesis um who knows um Lindsay do you have it's never going to be excavated is it no I think it's improbable DNA tests I think unlikely I love the Saint Mark's idea um I've been there to look at the achievement Advance that's in the treasury which is also an interesting presence I don't know why it's there um uh yeah I mean it's worth noting that it was a revered Shrine through the Islamic period as well um so if you if you wanted to go and check out um a really magnificent work by PM Fraser called ptolemaic Alexandria um he has all the footnotes on all the tales about the traces of the shrine which he proposes is connected to the memory of Alexander and the other thing this is a tale circulating which is alluded to in the exhibition is the idea that the nectar Nebo sarcophagus which is reproduced in the exhibition downstairs and can be viewed in the British museum was reputedly also a burial place or used as a barrel place for Alexander which is an idea that has been revived more recently it's like why not but if it is the sarcophagus of nectar Nebo then I'm afraid it's empty and in the British museum which is on brand but maybe he's still out there who knows um there was a question at the back there I think yes but and then behind right right at the back after that hello um I met Alexander for teaching uh the new GCC on um engine history um and I teach it to year tens in to Hamlet's East London um and I teach all these kids all the way to year 10 and at no point they've been taught about a bisexual person um and you seem to not be sure whether he is or where there isn't but we teach it very much as if he is bisexual and the first couple of lessons the kids are a bit uneasy about it remember I saw the second week has just taken for granted that he is um so I think it's really important that the kids get to learn about bisexual personal history they don't have a chance to do it before or after I wonder how important you think that is to his Legend um I think it I mean I think it has become extremely important now and I think as you point out exactly what you say um it's a possibility that um that deserves a lot of examination a lot of kind of Interest I think it's definitely one of the most interesting aspects for students to talk about I'm possibly disappoint them a bit maybe I'm a bit like tan who was like I don't want to talk about that in the 1940s um be as a bit too British but Richard what do you think on the on the other hand um it's not a that homosexuality by sexuality are not categories in the ancient world there is no word for these things for these dispositions in Greek or Latin um the these the there simply is no particular differentiation made and people can May freely have sex with either sex and give them the availability of slaves of either sex it was probably very easy for them to do that in many cases um so I'm not sure if Alexander would have understood if you called him bisexual I mean I I guess it's what I was touching on the way in which Alexander is such a hero he's such a totemic figure that that even as the kind of idea of him in the Great World Conqueror becomes unfashionable something else comes in to replace it and now he's a kind of great gay icon because that's you know he the fact that he is a hero seems to remain constant why he's a hero on what basis he is to be Lord of zero that changes but um I I mean it's it it's fascinating that that your students still accept that he's a hero thank you it was very interesting um I saw an exhibition at the British museum which rather surprised me it was about ancient Greece and it said categorically that ancient Greek men only had relationships with women in order to have children and families and that their friendships and romances and everything were with other men I was surprised I'm not surprised you were surprised I think that's a rather over cut and dried statement yes how do we know we don't we don't have any any experiences about this really and we certainly don't have anything that the women said about it um do you think that um if Alexander hadn't died so young he would have been able to sustain his Empire that had become so large in going out so far or do you think that it's kind of fortunate for his legend that he died at such a young age before he had a chance to All Fall Apart live fast Die Young that's a great question Lindsay what do you think um I think it's been a it's a great advantage to the The Legend that he did die this young because everybody had to LEAP on him as a kind of totem of of whatever was coming out of this disruption to um the existing political order so you have lots and lots of people doing lots of different versions of that so of course it becomes this immensely fertile starting point I don't know whether he would have sustained it um he did put it put together death a lot of people on the way back into Iran and Mesopotamia um I I would have I think there's probably there probably would have been quite a bit more violence but there were certainly attempts to kind of keep um manage the legacy of this political class that was still there they hadn't all been wiped out from the previous Empire um so I I don't know it would have been a successful attempt to hold on to power there might have been a similar kind of fragmentation that did happen into different into different sort of areas of control by his lieutenants if you see what I mean simply because the same kind of communication system would have been in operation but would have been perhaps a bit bit more difficult to operate if you were moving key people at lots and lots of different places that had been there in familial kind of locations for several Generations so there would have been some kind of massive disruption anyway that's my main answer I just said they were supposed to have been his last plans he was said at his death to be to be planning further conquests in North Africa Carthage and further west to create a world Empire but he wasn't in in the final stage is doing terribly well at holding together what he'd got already um the Indian the Indian conquests the Indian kingdoms that he made his own reverted almost as soon as he'd turned his back and this is I think one of the reasons why there isn't really very much legend about Alexander in ancient Indian sources he just wasn't very interesting for them it was a little local local turmoil for a short period um also I wonder really everything so often you feel that Alexander is doing kind of Tourism with an army um yeah he's actually really interested in seeing places and meeting philosophers and all these other kind of things and perhaps the the hard work of administration was not something that he most wanted to to commit himself to his attempts to create a mixed ruling class uh don't seem to have got very far aided India all I got was this elephant on this idea that Alexander was planning to um conquer the West the Romans were obsessed by this idea uh and it inspires Livy the great historian of Rome to come up with um I think after Herodotus the second counterfactual in in history where he asked what would have happened had Alexander lived and had he invaded Italy and confronted the infant Roman Republic um and Libby has no doubt that of course the Romans Romans would have won but but I think that for the Romans Alexander's youth is a crucial part of his image because he serves as a kind of warning particularly in the Republican period of just how dangerous it can be for young men to have control of an army which is why if you look at the portrait busts of Romans from the Republican period they kind of fetishize age I mean mean or they all have a crow's feet and baggy lines under their eyes and all kinds of stuff which is why again in the Imperial age when um Augustus who who goes to visit the body of Alexander and I think knocks the tip of his nose off um when he is portrayed throughout his life as a young person you know he's laying claim to that in a way that kind of that that image of alexandrian Youth and it's a real marker of the the end of the Republican period in the beginning of the the autocracy of the uh the Imperial age anyway do we have um there's a gentleman in the front thank you for a fascinating evening we in our time have become much more aware of China than we used to be um is there anything in the mythology of Alexander which reveals um how in his time China was viewed is there is there any I think one of you referred to the in him even getting close to China or something like that can you fill us in on that yes um the the Syriac version of the Alexander romance which was written in about the fifth or 6th Century A.D is a translation of the from the Greek but it has additional material and one of the bits of additional material is that he encounters the Emperor of China um so by this this is about the time when the Western world is beginning to understand that that there is a China and a little bit about what it's like um and that gets expanded I think quite a bit in the Persian ethics doesn't it um there's a doesn't doesn't Alexander actually have a Chinese girlfriend in uh yeah the the scope of his sphere of operations expands to kind of include the perspective from Iran I would say or from in further further east um so yeah China does become a full participant as a sort of yes I'm not in not in his lifetime because essentially the Greek understanding is that India is the furthest East you can go that there's nothing really beyond that um not as far as we know from from the sources on him for yeah or his lifetime although we would imagine that there are actually across Central Asia um sort of roots that do connect that I mean there's the theory isn't there that the Terracotta Army uh which stands in the Tomb of the first emperor um in China that that these are influenced perhaps by Greek models of sculpture I don't know whether you have any views on the plausibility of that that's pretty uh well it's possible but I think it's a bit far-fetched um I mean going the in the Greek period yes the there is an awareness of some people called the seres the silk people um and the Arcus the Alexander historian writes about Siri care which means silk but the words for the CRS never actually turns up and then suddenly about China in in August in Augustine poetry suddenly the series keep on turning up it's um it's it's an awareness that comes in at the beginning of the Roman Empire but it's confusing isn't it because Pliny describes this having red hair and blue eyes which doesn't sound not very Chinese potentially quite Central Asian Central Asian is possible yes anyway um do we have excuse me I was wondering if we have much in relation to Alexander's relationship with Aristotle either in historical record evidence or in myths that might have developed subsequently um Lindsay what's the um I so I'm gonna I'm gonna do my annoying teacher thing which is I would suggest that we we treat Alexander's relationships with contemporaries famous contemporaries with with slight caution um so the idea that um a king has his designated Sage is something that appears in Mesopotamian culture as well and later eras so um it could be that and if you look at Pliny and look at all the particular artists that are associated with Alexander it's all the most famous ones um so bear in mind that there could be a little bit of like well he's famous he's famous um that going on but um I did want to sort of point out that a lot of the kind of wisdom literature and medieval wisdom literature um tradition associated with Alexander is fundamentally built built around this relationship with Aristotle so it becomes an incredibly important access an incredibly important um uh point of thinking about the advice one gives to Kings which is another major medium that Alexander inhabited rolled Alexander inhabited um but Richard might have other ideas about Aristotle's historical relationship with Alexander which is a bit more generous than mine well there's not very much we can say about it really but I'm we do seem to be told that uh Aristotle was employed by Philip as his tutor um that there's really very very little detail about uh and and the legends that are told of Alexander Aristotle is obviously a huge figure uh both in in Christian Europe and in in the Muslim world uh in the in the in the Legends he's incredibly important what how how is that relationship Amplified in the Legends um well as Lindsay said through these uh mirrors of Prince's texts notably for example The Secret Of Secrets which is one of the first in first objects that you'll come to in the in the exhibition I think there's an Arabic version and there's a um an English translation of this and one of the uh one of the earliest English book printed books and yes Aristotle is there to convey all kinds of precepts about how to be a good King and how well how to be a good person actually but specifically focused on kingship and this Secret Of Secrets which starts off in Arabic I think I'm writing saying then goes like the romance into in a great many languages of of Western Europe and Spanish because of the Arab presence in Spain and from from there on into Latin English and so on so uh so it's it's really a medieval Story the uh this uh this interaction of Alexandra and Aristotle in in the Roman period there are a lot of Greek philosophers who are pitching themselves to Roman emperors as an Aristotle equivalent and the way that they kind of invariably suck up to Caesar is to say well Alexander was awful of course he you know he he just went off on one and didn't pay attention to a philosopher at all but you Caesar will be different is that a tradition that passes into the medieval period the idea that um Alexander actually ignored Aristotle and kind of went off the rails um it it's not in the it's not in this wisdom tradition no I I don't I don't think you do get that um it's uh I think also uh throughout the Hellenistic period it was important for uh for Kings to have philosophers at at court I mean their their friends had to include philosophers as well as other cultural uh individuals um so there's a there's a long tradition lying behind uh Seneca trying to uh trying veins and it's a model um for the earlier Kings so you for Xerxes being one example Richard can speak to as well that you you also have Xerxes being advised by you know advisors who who he ignores but he's notably portrayed as being a less successful advisee than Alexander yes okay [Music] um there's one very very fascinating I was wondering um and maybe you alluded to this in in a way the myth of Alexander is this actually the uh the Legacy um or the legacy of Alexander the um power or the creation of the the drive to create the Roman Empire so that uh this uh myth actually um motivated Romans to achieve similar things and and and eventually go beyond the limits of what they might have in mind uh during the Republic hmm well I mean the other important thing to notice that it the the birth of these Roman narratives really hits at the point where Octavian and August Octavian who becomes Augustus makes himself Augustus um really has a has a an Emergency to autocratic powers or what he attempts to make autocratic power and that is of course it happens at the same time that he defeats or takes over the ptolemaic Kingdom so there's an important way in which to a bit like Alexander and Cyrus for our Roman emperors to associate themselves with Alexander it shows that they're kind of jumping back over and overcoming these dodgy Hellenistic Kings um and and kind of are on the model of the founder of that world rather than their successes so it's important to note that it's not just Rome being sort of let's conquer the world but it's it's particular political moment of the principles coming into being and and being kind of first of all being Incorporated in Long assemblages of of History like that of didorous cyclist and then Alexander himself becoming a focus of this idea of what is what is monarchy this kind of conquering monarchy oh well here we are you know let's examine this example so so it's a is quite a distinct early Imperial phenomenon I would say but I think even I mean even into the early Imperial period there is a deep suspicion around Alexander on the part of moralists and on the part of biographers and when they look back at the Warlords who destroy the Republic the sense that both Pompey and Julius Caesar were modeling themselves on Alexander is used to explain basically why these Warlords end up tearing the Republic to Pieces so Pompey is supposed to have modeled his quiff on Alexander's and have worn his cloak and the idea that Caesar is directly modeling himself on Alexander is a theme that doesn't necessarily redound to Caesar's Advantage um it it is seen as something that has made him possibly monstrous but I do yeah I mean over the course of the um of the Decades the the sense of Alexander as someone to emulate um does start to become more acceptable and and the the classic example of this is trajan who launches um a seemingly successful invasion of Mesopotamia Waters his horses the Persian Gulf um and then goes back to Babylon and offers sacrifices to uh to the shade of Alexander and basically Babylon by the early 2nd Century A.D is chiefly famous for the Romans as the place where Alexander died which is basically the measure of of how the historical memories of Babylon are starting to to fade and become myth we've got time for one one last question I think if it could be a a brief question hello thank you very much for this uh talk um I'd just like to um if you could just elaborate briefly more on Alexander and kind of like the end of days like um with the kingdoms of Gog and Magog right okay that is that's not a short question but it's a brilliant question it's so fascinating and talking about the end of days I think it's a perfect way to end this this uh session so right let me see if I can summarize that um the the story of the enclosure of the uh enclosure of the unclean nations of Gog and Magog starts in Syriac literature in in the 6th Century um in the um in the prophecy of a character called pseudo-methodius um who of course is prophesying with hindsight and says that in the last days the the unclean Nations who have been closed enclosed behind a wall by Alexander will break through and Usher in the age of the Antichrist um this was another extraordinarily popular text the pseudo myth audience it began in Syriac it was immediately translated into Greek and then into Latin and there are a huge number of Western European translations and of course if you've got a nice Prophecy of the end of days you can bring it out or any suitable occasion really um with small adaptations so the I mean the people who were going to cause all the trouble for the for pseudo-methodius were were the Arabs but then then you could make it the Huns or you could make it the Russians or you could make it to anybody who was bothering you at the time that's what you do with prophetic literature um very much like the um the other Legends Lizzy one last comment on oh my goodness Alexandra in the end of days yes um one this is something that you know if you're a Babylonian there was already a tendency to characterize everybody coming from the north um Northeast as scary scary two this is another brilliant example of stories of Alexander being generated where play in places where he has he never went because the gold Magog story became a very important narrative in the sort of narrative of him coming to the Caucasus and and becoming a sort of a civilizing king of the Nations and the Caucasus where he never as far as we can tell ever went near um and thirdly this is partly Richard's fault I had a student who went on and learned Armenian if you all need to do stud purely to study the Alexander romance so go forth and learn languages to learn to examine other versions of the Alexander romance we really we need it because we really need people who can do the Armenian Alexander romance well there you go guys you know what you've got to do um many many thanks for coming thanks to our two wonderful guests have a very good evening thank you foreign [Music]

Channel: British Library

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Id: ii4AcJ50-0Q

Length: 92min 7sec (5527 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 26 2023