Ricerc@Sapienza

The legend of Alexander the Great represents one of the most fruitful themes in world literary history, forged over more than twenty centuries through a vast series of texts in countless languages. The legend continues to attract the attention of scholars working in several disciplinary fields, exploring the various characters, functions, and meanings of such an unstoppable success. The last thirty years have seen studies on the legend of Alexander flourish anew, opening promising comparative perspectives that encompass a polyglot and diachronic view covering the long arc of late antiquity and the Middle Ages. In terms of the dissemination and evolution of the legend of Alexander in the Islamicate world, some major issues remain at the centre of scholarly investigations and discussions: the modalities of transmission of the Greek Alexander Romance (Pseudo-Callisthenes) in the main languages of the late-ancient Near and Middle East (Syriac, Middle Persian, Arabic, Hebrew); Alexander’s presence in the Koran and his identification with the messianic figure of Dhū’l-Qarnayn, the ‘Two-Horned’ (sura 18, 83-102); the complex relation of Alexander with the Water of Life legend. Alongside these central issues, studies continue to grow concerning numerous individual texts – Arabic, Persian or Turkish – that develop the narrative features and sapiential implications of the legend: in this context, a promising – although relatively young – field of research concerns the developments in texts of a more popular and folkloric nature. By taking into consideration the work of numerous scholars and the different research perspectives, this contribution suggests that a thorough overview of the path of the Alexander legend in the Islamicate world and its multiple meanings can only be earned through what Sanskrit scholar, Sheldon Pollock, defines as a three-dimensional philological approach. This approach takes into account – for each text or literary theme – three levels of textual reconstruction, reading and contextualization: that of its genesis; that of the readings offered by its first and subsequent readers; and finally that of our present reading, of scholars who ask ourselves what that theme or text can still represent today.