The reception of Alexander the Great is an enormous subject, and this is certainly an enormous book. Weighing in at nearly 900 pages, it contains 33 articles by a variety of scholars from Britain, the USA, Australia and several European countries on Alexander's image in many periods of history. Almost half the book (fourteen chapters, to p. 376) focuses on the period up to the second century ad, while three further chapters are devoted to Jewish and Christian treatments of Alexander in antiquity. That leaves sixteen chapters for the medieval and modern periods and the non-Mediterranean world. Inevitably this second half is no more than a sampling of possible topics.
Reception theory is like the elephant that a group of blind men sought to describe, each detecting only one aspect of the beast. If Alexander is the elephant, each student appreciates only one part of the historical Alexander. But this is just half the story. The parable expresses the difficulty of reaching a true understanding of past events. The essential principle of reception theory is that our understanding is unavoidably conditioned by our circumstances and experience. As originally conceived and developed by H.R. Jauss, H. Marcuse, S. Hall and C. Martindale among others, it is a form of reader-response theory that begins from our experience in the present of the subject (originally, a literary work) under consideration. The theory has been fruitfully extended to historical subjects and thus forces us to remember that, as H. White has argued, every story we can tell about the past is a story about ourselves.
The only contributor who considers what reception theory entails in the study of Alexander is, I think, A. Cohen in her study of some modern sculptures celebrating Alexander. She reflects on Jauss's five modes of reception: admiring, associative, sympathetic, ironic and cathartic, not least to show how Alexander can be used in modern Greece (and even in the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia) as a symbol of nationalist pride. The same story can be told in G. Taietti's study of Alexander in Greek folksong.
The result of this lack of definition, even by the volume's editor, of ‘reception’ means that several papers are not really about reception, even historical reception, at all. For example, E. Koulakiotis provides an excellent survey of the presentation of Alexander in the Attic orators, which to my mind is a straight historical study of ideas and propaganda. G. Squillace also shows how Alexander's own propaganda infected the historical tradition at its source. At an even further remove from reception are J. Mullen's study of Alexander's adoption of Persian traditions and clothing and A. Morris's study of Alexander's interactions with disabled people (though she does consider both modern scholarship and the film presentations of Alexander in showing how the disabled are sidelined by history and its writers).
This is not to suggest that reception is an irrelevant concept in considering ancient Hellenistic, Roman and Jewish presentations of Alexander. The myth of Alexander began with the king's own self-fashioning in art (O. Palagia's article) and in other ways such as the quest for divinity. Though the memory of Alexander seems to have been patchy in the Hellenistic world, F. Muccioli details the claims to ancestry of, for example, Mithridates VI of Pontus and Antiochus I of Commagene. He remarks that he did not establish an ‘era’, though Dionysius of Halicarnassus treats him as a significant time-marker. Nonetheless, fourteenth-century Nestorian epitaphs from Quanzhou (China) give their dates ‘from Alexander the Ilkhan, son of Philip’. But still, is our use of the expression ‘ad’ to be regarded as ‘reception’ of Jesus?
Many people in the ancient world explicitly or inescapably created the Alexander that suited them: the Ptolemaic kings, Roman statesmen like Mark Antony (though we can only see Octavian's refashioning of Antony's reception of Alexander, as K. Erickson makes clear), philosophers like Seneca and Plutarch, and the Christian emperor Constantine. Such investigations constitute valuable studies of the ‘receptionists’ and the theme of imitatio. The difficulty is that these ‘receptionists’ are also our sources for Alexander. It has been said that any problem in Alexander studies is always a problem of the sources: the privileging of reception means that the king himself eludes us even more systematically than before. If Curtius and Arrian are simply children of their age, where does that leave historical truth? Similarly for S. Asirvatham, Plutarch's Alexander, though he may be the most admired of his historical subjects, is really a kind of Roman. J. Nabel pinpoints one form of the question on p. 209: ‘For would-be Roman conquerors of the East, was the desire to match or exceed Alexander's achievements a genuine commitment, or were Alexandrian echoes merely useful propaganda tools to justify foreign campaigns to a domestic audience?’ This tension runs through the whole book. Christian writers, as J. Peltonen shows, could excoriate Alexander in Senecan terms as the vain and drunken tyrant, slave to anger and luxury, while also (especially in the Greek east) deploying him for exempla of virtues like self-restraint and loyalty.
The tension between reception and history is neatly exemplified in the two papers on Jewish treatments of Alexander. A. Klęczar traces the use made of the image of Alexander in later Jewish writing, from the rabbinic period to the Middle Ages; M. Ben Shahar, by contrast, subjects the texts (Josephus and rabbinic sources) that recount a visit by Alexander to Jerusalem to a form of Quellenforschung, which leads him to the controversial conclusion that Alexander probably did visit that ‘insignificant city’ and that his contemporary historians ‘neglected to mention it’ (p. 423).
A reader expecting a book on the reception of Alexander to be mainly about ‘our’ world would find rather little to chew on in this book. The modern Greek reception is well treated. Many of the contributors discuss the two well-known films, by Robert Rossen (1956) and Oliver Stone (2004), though there is no mention of the Indian Prithviraj Kapoor's Sikandar (1941), which would be an interesting comparison. A. Blanshard argues interestingly that the failure of Rossen's film is the result of its being too much of a history lesson: it had nothing to say to the 1950s, and a film about violent warfare would have been uncomfortable viewing so soon after the Second World War.
The critical failure of Oliver Stone's attempt may be due to the same loyal adherence to the sources and starry-eyed view of the hero. But this film also placed centre stage the king's affair with the eunuch Bagoas and thus foregrounded gay love for the first time in a film about antiquity, an innovation that was poorly received in some quarters. E. Baynham and T. Ryan's article on Mary Renault's treatment of Bagoas is one of the most penetrating pieces of reception criticism in the book, showing how the figure of Bagoas (whom Renault could use as a narrator because he was not, like a woman, excluded from public life) enables her to explore the issue of homosexuality, which was a prominent subject in her writing, through the hero whom she admired. Renault both had views on Alexander and wished to take a position in a modern controversy.
The rest of the post-antique world receives patchy treatment in this book. There is nothing on the European Middle Ages (except B. Blythe's welcome study of the Italian Romance tradition), nothing on the Elizabethans, in fact nothing on drama and the novel (except Mary Renault). The non-Mediterranean world is also poorly served. Apart from a masterly essay by J. Nabel on ‘Alexander between Persia and Rome’, which considers Sassanian and Roman representations of each other's past through the collocation of Alexander and the Achaemenids, and makes fruitful use of Ferdowsi and other medieval Persian authors to recover the tantalising Parthian and Sasanian tradition, there is nothing on the rest of the Islamic world. The numerous Arabic treatments of Alexander go unstudied, as do their offshoots in Mongolian, Malay and Chinese tradition. The absence of anything Indian is less surprising, as Alexander notoriously made no impact on Sanskrit literature.
There is an interesting spread of articles on the modern world. J. Wiesehöfer and R. Bichler show how scholarship itself is an aspect of reception: Droysen's Alexander, as well as Schachermeyr's, Berve's, Tarn's and others, are all suitable subjects for treatment, though the linguistic range of these articles does not encompass, for example, Francoist Alexanders in Spain (though it is easy to imagine what they would look like). A. Fulińska's essay on Napoleon's view of Alexander is a tour de force of historical research and pertinently quotes Metternich's observation that ‘the mania for parallels had been a real evil for history’ (p. 545). R. Mairs explores the importance of Alexander for British administrators and adventurers in nineteenth-century India, noting how, while Alexander took the Iliad with him on campaign, British officers took J.W. McCrindle's volumes of translated sources on Alexander's invasion of India and other classical writers on India. J. Warren brings the experience of a professional soldier in the US army to bear on Alexander's campaign in Afghanistan, concluding that conquest was easier for Alexander than for modern powers because (a) he could be as destructive as he liked and (b) he was able to make use of marriage politics. Here modern conditions do shed light on the past, though the ‘reception’ under consideration is that of Afghanistan vis-à-vis Alexander and Soviet and western forces respectively (p. 752).
It seems ungrateful to ask for more when presented with almost 900 pages of excellent scholarship on Alexander. It has not been possible to mention every contribution in this attempt to draw out the main lines of the book's achievement. Yet the book leaves so much un-discussed. A reader will come away having learnt much about Alexander but still unaware of the true reach of his reputation in Europe and the Far East, and the ways in which his legend was used to explore the human condition. Perhaps the reasons for Alexander's unique position in world history can never be fully understood. These explorations of different aspects of the elephant in the room are much more than the fumblings of blind men, but the great grey beast remains so massive as to elude full description.
