Alexander & Iskandar Symposium
Recent scholarship has challenged long-standing attempts to organize the Alexander material into neat, yet misleading, categories of genre, language, and influence within Europe. Although convenient, these categories are not reflective of Alexander’s literary reception from Late Antiquity onward. As soon as Greek legends of Alexander spread via recensions and translations (into Latin, Armenian, Ethiopic, and Syriac), they were freely adapted and began to accumulate episodes and anecdotes. By the end of the Middle Ages, the descendants of these texts accounted for a global network of stories, some shared and disseminated widely across Europe, Africa, and Asia and some uniquely informed by local attitudes and a host of historical, political, and religious contexts. The emerging interest in Arabic and Persian Alexander texts and the transmission of the legend across Asia has made non-European texts more accessible for English-language readerships. We are now positioned to consider the Alexander material not within isolated literary traditions defined by language, political borders, or modern nationalities but across a global, fluid, and multilingual textual transmission. However, even with a broader consideration of what constitutes the medieval or early modern Alexander, a significant challenge in engaging with the legend remains: the sheer scope of the material has always hindered comparative studies of the Alexander legend, although a comparative approach is understandably necessary in making sense of the vast textual network that popularized the legend.