Alexander the Great: The Making of a Myth

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The core of my research interests has been the continuity of the Greek world and Greek tradition up to the present day. I have written anthologies and travel guides reflecting this interest. Since the early 1980s the main focus of my research has been Alexander the Great, especially in later legend. I have recently participated in several international conferences on the Ancient Novel and on Philip and Alexander. I am currently writing a biography of Xerxes and a study of Megasthenes. I was born just a few miles from Exeter and have been an Honorary Fellow in the department since 1996. I spent thirty years as a classics editor, most of those years for Routledge; since retiring from that role in 2006, and returning from London to live in Devon, I have been taking an active part in university affairs, including teaching, research and a planned conference. A lexander the Great​ was a pioneer of political spin, a master of image-making. He permitted only a single court-approved sculptor, Lysippus, to do his portrait and took a team of propagandists and influencers on his invasion of Asia. On a medallion dating to late in his reign or just after, he appears in the guise of Zeus, holding a fiery thunderbolt – the first time a European monarch minted his own image. His widely circulated drachma coins, issued in a uniform design across his vast empire, show the profile of a beardless, youthful Heracles, with features so much resembling Alexander’s own that coin dealers today sometimes confuse the two. After Alexander died of a sudden illness in 323 bc, leaving no viable heir to the Macedonian throne or the headship of his immensely powerful army, his leading generals (the ‘successors’) ramped up this image-making campaign, drawing power from the myth of the man they had served for thirteen years.

These stories permeate western and eastern cultures and religions, and have endured for more than 2,000 years. Even now, Alexander continues to appeal to new generations and his image persists today in film, theatre, literature and even video games. Why do the curators think they have the right to relativise great treasures of world culture and reduce them to the status of comics? Anyway, the idea that history is bunk misses the point about Alexander. His strange allure comes from the way he was absolutely real yet also, to his contemporaries and later generations, superhuman and godlike.There is no need to book in advance. Drop in places are limited to 25 people per workshop and allocated on a first come, first served basis. Piece together an epic tale 2,000 years in the telling. From astrological clay tablets, ancient papyri, and medieval manuscripts, to Hollywood and Bollywood movies and cutting-edge videogames, our major exhibition crosses continents to explore the fantastical stories that turned legacy into legend. And Alexander is still popping up many centuries later – including in a Superman comic dating from 1983 in which a megalomaniac villain called Planeteer kidnaps eight heads of state including Margaret Thatcher, in an attempt to cast himself as Alexander’s reincarnation. Alexander the Great: The Making of a Myth exhibition is currently on at The British Library until Sunday 19 February 2023. Speaking of bigger pictures, there are not many of them. There’s a suit of Stuart armour with Alexander on it yet no hint of the great images in tapestries, or Albrecht Altdorfer’s apocalyptic Renaissance painting The Battle of Alexander at Issus, and just an odd little copy of Veronese’s great painting of Alexander.

Bizarre though they may seem, many of the legends have a kernel of lived experience, a subject touched on in many of the catalogue essays. * In Asia, Alexander did encounter animals that must have seemed monstrous to him, including monkeys that might have appeared like ‘wild men’. It has even been suggested, not implausibly, that the fable of the foot-shaded Sciapods arose from Alexander’s glimpses of yogis. In one case at least we can be certain of the correlation between fact and fantasy: Alexander’s encounters with the Gymnosophists, a sect of ascetics who, in many late antique and medieval texts, are depicted either welcoming the Macedonians or fiercely upbraiding their campaign of conquest. A passage preserved from the writings of Onesicritus, one of Alexander’s senior officers, reveals that such an encounter did in fact take place and that the invaders were tongue-lashed by a sect leader called Dindimus or Dandamis. This free-spoken holy man has served both Greek Cynics and early Church Fathers as a vessel for anti-materialist diatribes, a tradition still very much alive in 17th-century England, as seen in the BL’s copy of The Upright Lives of the Heathen from 1683. This is not unconsidered populism. It’s something far worse. By mixing up vaguely Alexandrian materials from different times and places, we are being led to think his history is not reliable. Instead, the curators suggest, it’s merely a concoction in which Assassin’s Creed has as much veracity, and is as culturally valid, as the ancient historian Plutarch’s Life of Alexander – shown here in a lovely copy made in Renaissance Florence. Alexander the Great acceded to the throne at the age of 20, as king of the ancient Greek kingdom of Macedon. By his death in 323 BC, he had created one of the largest empires in the world – but myth proved more powerful than historical truth, and Alexander’s life remains lost in legend. In 2009 I was appointed Consulting Editor in Classics to I.B. Tauris Publishers in London, and am actively seeking new authors for their classics programme, and for the series I edit, 'Understanding Classics'. Storyteller and musician Luke Saydon will take us on a storytelling journey full of curious puppets, catchy songs, sensory props, wearable crafts and playful moves.

What is most striking, perhaps, is the continuity of the storytelling. One of the most arresting parts of the exhibition – which Peter Toth, the curator of western ancient and medieval manuscripts, admits is his favourite – is a display in which a 16th-century manuscript from Iran showing Alexander conquering China is displayed alongside an Indian poem about his defeat of the Russians. Join us as we explore the fantastical stories surrounding Alexander the Great. Move, create, design, build and relax with our authors, artists, musicians, dancers and storytellers. It is my great pleasure to write the first blog for 2023, in which I will discuss a topic dear to my heart: Alexander the Great and his reception(s). He built an empire that stretched across the world. Rode across the sky on a flying chariot. And descended to the bottom of the sea in a glass bell.

In the library, on the other hand, “we have the afterlife, we have the storytelling, and that’s what we can showcase. We don’t think anyone, anywhere has done that before.” From the Middle Ages onwards the Alexander-Romance was translated into several languages, such as Latin, Syrian, Coptic, Armenian, Hebrew, Persian, English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Ethiopic, and Malay! Every translation bears new elements to the story, as it is the product of a different culture. Seeing the richness and the value of this material, the British Library curators – Peter Toth, Ursula Sims-Williams, Adrian Edwards, and Yrja Thorsdottir – decided to organize the first ever exhibition about the storytelling around Alexander, rather than the historical one. Undoubtedly, Alexander III was an important historical figure who set forth a new era, but the mythological Alexander had an even greater impact: as Greeks say, he still ‘lives and rules’, and his impact has been ongoing for over 2300 years, permeating Islamic, Asian and European cultures. Over the centuries, Alexander’s life gave rise to a whole wealth of mythology, with countless paintings, tapestries, and illuminated manuscripts featuring his legendary adventures: travelling to distant lands, encountering mythical animals and fantastical people, and accomplishing what were then impossible feats such as descending to bottom of the ocean in a diving bell or being flown through the sky in a box (carried by griffins).

Pharaoh, prophet, philosopher. European, Middle Eastern and Asian cultures have all moulded Alexander into the fictional hero they want him to be. And today artists and storytellers alike are still trying to reimagine the man and his myth. Who was he really? You’ll have to decide for yourself.