Ricerc@Sapienza

The Alexander Romance constitutes one of the main narrative cycles belonging to the common Eurasian medieval library, and Iran has played a central role in all aspects of its mythical and historical roots as well as its eschatological and literary developments through the centuries. The Persian tradition of the Alexander Romance shows a unique complexity, due to the confluence of at least three main elements: the Zoroastrian national reaction to Alexander’s conquest, the transmission of the Greek Pseudo-Callisthenes, and the messianic perspective of the monotheistic religions, embodied in the Koranic figure of Dhū’l-Qarnayn. The quantity and quality of the Persian narratives related to Alexander make them a key corpus for a comparative analysis that may drive us to a deeper understanding of the functional reasons of the universal success that the Alexander Romance experienced all through Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, up to the threshold of the Modern Era. Two examples are presented here.