In recent decades the profile of the Alexander Romance has risen from ‘the wildest of fairy-tales’ (W. Tarn, Alexander the Great [1979]) and a ‘weird farrago’ (P. Green, Alexander of Macedon [1974]) to a formidable narrative tradition worth taking seriously. This body of biographical fiction about Alexander the Great has benefited from its position at the crossroads of two developments in Classical scholarship. The first is an emerging curiosity and inclusivity within ancient novel studies towards prose fiction outside the ‘big five’ Greek romances and the Latin Satyricon and Metamorphoses (G. Karla, Fiction on the Fringe [2009]). The second is a growing recognition that Classical literature interacted with a wider world of Mediterranean and post-classical cultures beyond Greece and Rome (T. Whitmarsh, Dirty Love [2018]). As a text that was translated into Syriac, Persian, Arabic, Ethiopic and a host of vernacular languages, the Romance represents a rewarding case study of how the Classical tradition was transmitted and transformed beyond antiquity. The momentum behind this new-found regard for the Romance can be credited in large part to Stoneman, a co-editor of the volume under review, who has cultivated the next generation of Romance studies through his own publications and his coordination of Alexander scholars from a variety of disciplines.

The Alexander Romance has yet to find purchase, however, among more mainstream studies of ancient history and Classical literature. Its ‘fringe’ status stems in part from the fact that the Romance, as Stoneman's introduction clarifies, ‘is a difficult text to define … [with] elements of history, of biography, and of novel’ (p. vii). Its layering of wild fabrications alongside verifiable nuggets of Alexander's biography further complicates the question of whether ‘the author of the AR thought he was writing history’ (p. viii). The editors have therefore identified a genuine need in Romance research to articulate the role that historical enquiry played in the composition and reception of this text. Stoneman's concise but clear introduction identifies two central themes of the volume: the degree to which the Romance could and can still be read as history and the way in which ahistorical elements of the Romance may capture the truth of Alexander better than more exacting sources.

The volume proceeds under three headings, beginning with ‘Defining the Alexander Romance as literature’. While individually illuminating, the organisation of these chapters makes for a disorienting start to a volume on literature as history in the Romance. Two of the chapters – I. Ladynin and Stoneman – make extended forays into past literary sources or models of the Romance and address the Romance itself in conclusion. That is not to say that I disagree with Ladynin's case that the Alexander-Sesonchosis association in the Romance ‘show[s] numerous and significant allusions to authentic Egyptian notions’ (p. 19) or with Stoneman's claim that the text's monstrous wonders ‘do not present themselves as fiction … [but] are about the limits of human experience and power’ (p. 59). But these arguments are introduced only in the synopses of their respective chapters, concluding their analyses of the Romance precisely where the real interpretative work needs to begin.

Y. Trnka-Amrhein's essay on ‘The Fantastic Four’ is the superlative contribution of this first section, offering a cautious but compelling reading of the Romance alongside fragments of the Sesonchosis and Ninus novels. Building upon Whitmarsh's theories of generic interplay among the Greek romances and incorporating mosaics of romance plots, Trnka-Amrhein raises the possibility of a robust genre of the ‘ruler novel’ (p. 26): stories of ‘world-conquering rulers whose legends made them almost divine’ (p. 44). The section ends with the very short essay of H. Manteghi and the very long chapter of D. Selden. Manteghi summarises the intriguing role of Apollonius of Tyana (Balinа̄s) as a helper to Alexander in Ganjavi's Iskandarnа̄ma, but confines to her conclusion the more critical history of how Alexander and Apollonius come together in Persian poetry. The broad comparative lens of Selden's chapter, in contrast, analyses Alexander's invasion of India in Greek, Latin, Sanskrit and Pahlavi. The breadth of his sources and theoretical paradigms may overwhelm non-specialists, but Selden does offer a fascinating reading of Poros as Alexander's ‘compliment, his effigy, his similitude’ (p. 105).

The second section, ‘How to read “bad” history’, makes the most coherent attempt to interpret perplexing or patently false elements of the Romance. G. Oliver applies an economic lens to the Romance and Liber de Morte. He reveals that Alexander's edict to the Persians on markets and prosperity evokes a Hellenistic discourse on the productivity of taxable territories (p. 115), while the Rhodians in Alexander's will suggest a third- to second-century bce context (p. 124). B. Garstad and H. Wulfram, on the other hand, turn to the relationship between the Romance and the Roman Empire. The former revisits Alexander's ‘circuit’ of ahistorical travels to Sicily, Rome and Carthage and argues persuasively that these deviations ‘allo[w] Alexander to draw the Romans and Egyptians into his enterprise and to oppose the Carthaginians’ (p. 156) for a pro-Roman reading of the text. Wulfram's analysis of intertextuality in the Latin Romance is equally convincing: parallels between the Aeneid and Julius Valerius link the heroic destinies of Alexander and Aeneas for a Roman readership. Wulfram also challenges the persistent perception of the Romance as a vulgar narrative for uneducated audiences. The engaging chapters by Nawotka and E. Baynham investigate the Romance’s Battle of Gaugamela and the attempted apotheosis of Alexander respectively. Their conclusions are less decisive than the others in this section, but both model a valuable new approach to Pseudo-Callisthenes’ disinterest in historical precision. In their view, the author ‘makes conscious decisions to select facts, letters and anecdotes to create the image of an ideal king’ (p. 167), and his fictitious accounts deserve the ‘serious consideration’ afforded to other Alexander historians (p. 198).

The final section, ‘Related texts’, features four chapters on the reception of the Romance from Late Antiquity to the Buyid court. As a group, these chapters suffer from their inclination to summarise rather than interpret – not entirely without justification, as many of their sources are little known even among Alexander scholars. It is nonetheless a challenge to identify the volume's central questions of literature as history in most of the contributions. C. Djurslev's essay on the gates against Gog and Magog provides a well-contextualised study of the ethnographic discourse surrounding Alexander's northern gates and the association of Unclean Nations with Huns, Goths, Alans and Saracens. While I craved more content on the historical relationship between Alexander's gates and the Roman military discourse of fortification (p. 210), Djurslev profitably reminds us that scholars of the Romance ‘are not tracing a linear development of a coherent, static tradition’ (pp. 212–13). This is certainly borne out by A. Klęczar's chapter on Alexander in Tamid 32, which reveals Alexander to be a humbled exemplar of universal kingship in Talmudic narrative. Although the chapter is well written and instructive, I fail to detect any semblance of the historical themes established in the introduction.

C. Jouanno's chapter explicitly engages the theme of history by documenting historical readings of the Romance across Byzantine world chronicles. While she does describe several examples of how chroniclers deploy Alexander allusions (pp. 228–31), the preponderance of the chapter clarifies and contextualises the sources as if for future research – complete with an appendix (pp. 237–9). The final chapter by E. Cottrell traces the transmission of Alexander anecdotes and epistolary fiction in Persia between the tenth and thirteenth centuries. Devoting a substantial portion of her essay to the historical and intellectual contexts of this transmission, Cottrell addresses the history of the Alexander reception in medieval Persia but not the issues of historicity within that reception.

There are two ways to evaluate the collective merit of the contributions in this volume. On the one hand, it is certainly the case that studies of the Alexander Romance are still at an embryonic stage of development. Only in the past 30 years have modern critics been able to access multi-recension translations and editions of the texts, primarily through Stoneman's initiative. Only in the past decade have historians, philologists, medievalists and religious scholars begun to pool their collective expertise and tackle the massive corpora of Romance narratives in an interdisciplinary fashion. Under these conditions, every chapter of this volume takes a valuable step forward by hypothesising models and sources for the Romance, by grappling with its most confounding fictions or by charting how intermediate generations of ancient and medieval readers before us made sense of its contents. Each chapter lays the groundwork for substantial future research and makes original claims about the interpretation or reception of the text.

If the objective of this volume was to forge connections with more established fields of ancient historiography or to define the Romance’s relationship to the practice of history-writing in antiquity and beyond, however, the collection falls short. It is certainly true that ‘few ancient historians adhered to the Thucydidean or Lucianic ideal’ (p. ix) of historical accuracy and that fiction permeates the works of more ‘serious’ authors like Livy, Josephus and Arrian. But that does not mean that ancient authors and audiences did not recognise specific conventions of historical texts or espouse some common beliefs about historical plausibility. In order to rigorously assess the degree to which the Romance author(s) believed themselves to be engaged in history or literature, any study must first begin by elucidating the ancient criteria by which such fields were demarcated. While there are flashes of this awareness throughout the volume (pp. 26, 59, 131–3, 196–8, 206–7, 226–7), nowhere do such criteria receive thorough scrutiny.

The impression that this volume leaves is of fourteen individual Romance scholars writing to one another and to other specialists in the field. This impression is reinforced by inconsistencies of style (single vs double quotations passim, bibliographies vs long-form footnotes) and a distracting number of typos (‘Euphrate’, p. 161; ‘Secundary’, p. 241; missing punctuation in footnotes, pp. 50–2). The different citation formats of ‘Ps.-Callisth. γ 2,26’ (p. 4 n. 6), ‘Ps.-Call. 3,33,14 (Kroll: thus A)’ (p. 123 n. 41) and ‘Al.Rom. (β) i.26.3–29.1’ (p. 153 n. 94) will scarcely put off those who work with the Romance recensions regularly. But to a newcomer they represent an unnecessary thicket. If the Alexander Romance is to succeed at garnering the attention it deserves within Classics and Medieval Studies writ large, then we as its specialists must make its recensions as approachable as possible.