The Excerpta Latina Barbari is the Latin translation of a now lost Greek chronicle compiled in the early sixth century a.d., probably in Alexandria, which made its way to France, where it was translated into Latin in the eighth century.Footnote ¹ There are two roughly equal parts to the Excerpta. The first is a chronology from Adam to the end of the Ptolemaic dynasty which is largely based on Biblical genealogies and follows the Biblical record; the information is mostly provided in the terse and spare manner of a chronicle, although there are a number of remarkable expansions and elaborations at various points, especially on the Dispersion of the Nations, the history of the gods as ancient human kings, and the career of Alexander the Great. The second part is a series of king-lists for different nations, which seem to reflect the raw material of the preceding chronology. The Excerpta's chronology includes a notice on the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar (r. 605–562 b.c.) as idiosyncratic as it is succinct, apart from which Nebuchadnezzar is only mentioned as the conqueror of Judaea:

There is practically no statement in this brief notice which is unproblematic.Footnote ³ Nebuchadnezzar did not actually hold sway over the whole earth, but was involved in a political condominium which included the Medes, the Lydians, and, for a while the Egyptians. His realm was hemmed in on the north and east by the Medes and did not extend to the Caspian Gates. Our most reliable sources indicate that his campaigns took him no further than Egypt, and certainly not as far as the Straits of Gibraltar. He did not conquer Pontus or the Romans, a minor power unheard of outside of Italy in his time. And he is usually said to have enjoyed a reign of forty-three years, not nineteen. Nevertheless, the Excerpta's notice on Nebuchadnezzar should not be dismissed as an errant fiction of no historical value. It is an intriguing testimony to the development of the traditions about Nebuchadnezzar and the rhetorical uses to which they were put in late antiquity.

That the notice on Nebuchadnezzar is not simply a collection of meaningless errors, trite evidence of a decaying society's diminishing awareness of its past, is most clearly indicated by an unmistakable parallel in the Excerpta's summing up of the career of Alexander the Great:

It is worth noting that the significance of the Caspian Gates and the Pillars of Hercules as termini at the ends of the earth is spelled out here in the passage on Alexander, but left to be understood in the earlier one on Nebuchadnezzar. The extent of Nebuchadnezzar's realm, it would seem, is described with reference to the compass of Alexander's conquests, and not the other way around. But this is true not only of the measure of the two kings’ domains. Point by point, the Excerpta's account of Nebuchadnezzar makes sense with reference to the factual, as well as the fantastical, history of Alexander. I will propose that Nebuchadnezzar is made to reflect, and to subtly outdo Alexander for two reasons. First, in order to imply the correct understanding of Alexander's acknowledgement of the True God, which is also found in the Excerpta. And second, to provide a symmetry to the idiosyncratic account of the world's history which lies behind one of the Excerpta's sources, figuring Nebuchadnezzar as the conqueror and Alexander as the liberator of the same people.

The Caspian Gates were a famous Asian landmark in antiquity, but as famous as they were, there was some confusion over their exact location and at least three different passes seem to have been referred to as the Caspian Gates: a series of defiles south-west of Rey through the Elburz Mountains, the Dariel pass, and the pass of Derbend.Footnote ⁵ None of these passes between Media and Parthia or in the Caucasus, however, would have been at the borders of Nebuchadnezzar's kingdom. As mentioned above, to the north and east of his Babylonian empire lay the kingdom of the Medes, who had helped Nebuchadnezzar and his father, Nabopolassar, defeat the Assyrians and with whom Nebuchadnezzar maintained a sometimes uneasy truce. But peace with the Medes meant that upper Mesopotamia and the mountains along her eastern flank, to say nothing of the Caucasus and the interior of Iran, were beyond the ambit of Nebuchadnezzar's conquests. This may not, however, have been altogether clear to the Greeks. In his Cyropaedia Xenophon speaks of the king of the “Assyrians”, who has been identified by at least one modern scholar as Nebuchadnezzar, ruling the Hyrcanians (a people on the Caspian Sea) and making war on the Bactrians (in Central Asia north-east of Iran).Footnote ⁶ At any rate, the Caspian Gates must be set at the limit of his realm in order to make Nebuchadnezzar reflect Alexander.

Even as the boundary of Alexander's empire, however, the Caspian Gates seem rather odd. Our reliable sources on Alexander do not present the Caspian Gates as the limit of his territory, but as one of the significant stages in his pursuit of the defeated Persian king, Darius.Footnote ⁷ The legendary Alexander Romance continues to give prominence to the Caspian Gates as the site of Darius’ palace and the muster point of his last-ditch effort to defeat Alexander, but still does not set them at the edge of Alexander's conquests.Footnote ⁸ The Caspian Gates were perhaps most significant in late antiquity as the entry point for barbarians from the north into the lands of the Romans and of the Persians, and as such were reputed, from at least the first century a.d., to have been fortified by Alexander.Footnote ⁹ We do find the Caspian Gates as a boundary marker in geographical texts, but not in the sense we perceive in the Excerpta. Eratosthenes set the east-west line which divided the northern and the southern portions of the inhabited world at the Caspian Gates, establishing them as a boundary between these two climata.Footnote ¹⁰ This makes the Caspian Gates a terminus, but a northern or latitudinal one, whereas the Excerpta quite clearly makes them an eastern or longitudinal terminus. Strabo uses the Caspian Gates as something of a divider between east and west when he says that in the northern parts of Asia the peoples east of the Gates require only a perfunctory description because of their savagery, while those to the west offer greater scope for elaboration.Footnote ¹¹ While Strabo's may be an eastern boundary, it is nevertheless a comparative and rather subjective one, dividing zones of relative civilization, while the Excerpta's Caspian Gates are an absolute boundary, coterminous with the eastern horizon. And, of course, neither Eratosthenes’ nor Strabo's geographical demarcation makes reference to Alexander.

Some association between the Caspian Gates, Alexander, and the edges of the earth can be pieced together from a number of sources, mostly Roman ones from the early years of the Empire. The Elder Pliny notes the confusion over the location and identity of the Caspian Gates, insisting that the only certitude on the matter is to be found in the reports of those who accompanied Alexander the Great.Footnote ¹² The suggestion here is that the true Caspian Gates are those connected with Alexander. Pliny passes from the Gates to the regions beyond and shortly brings his discussion to Bactria and Sogdiana and that foundation of Alexander's known as Alexandria Eschate or Alexandria the Farthest.Footnote ¹³ Here, he says, are to be found altars set up by Hercules and Dionysus, as well as Cyrus, Semiramis, and Alexander, “all of whom came to their limit in this part of the world” (finis omnium eorum ductus ab illa parte terrarum). Alexander, like the legendary figures before him, erected altars at the River Hyphasis to mark the eastern termination of his expedition,Footnote ¹⁴ and Strabo compares these altars to the Pillars of Hercules as limits of their heroic expeditions.Footnote ¹⁵ The passage in Pliny defines a region only moderately beyond the Caspian Gates—in his description, if not his conceptionFootnote ¹⁶ —with the eastern (or more precisely, north-eastern) limit not only of Alexander's conquests, but also those of all the great world conquerors, and so presumably of the world itself.

Suetonius tells us that Nero made preparations for an expedition to the Caspian Gates and to this end he enlisted a new legion of Italian recruits, each six feet tall, which he called “the Phalanx of Alexander the Great”.Footnote ¹⁷ The implication seems to be that Nero's new legion was named after Alexander's infantry line because this force was to be directed toward the same goal as the Macedonian's army had been, that of eastern conquest. But the stated object of Nero's expedition was the Caspian Gates, not India or the eastern Ocean. Perhaps the Roman imagination, or its counterpart in military ambition, could cast itself no further east than this destination, a rather modest one in light of the extent of Alexander's conquests. Perhaps in the association of the Caspian Gates as a target with the name of the conqueror who drove further to the east than any other we see a diminishment of the scope of the Graeco-Roman geographical vision. The eastern boundaries of the oikoumene in the time of the early Principate had, after all, been considerably retracted since the days of Alexander the Great. And perhaps the Excerpta's identification of the Caspian Gates with the rising of the sun and the ends of the earth furnishes us with further evidence of this diminished conception of the world. It is worth noting, however, that this notion is not consistently maintained throughout the Excerpta. The geographic and ethnographic excursus which begins the work seems to consider India the easternmost country in the world and Gades (modern Cadiz) the westernmost.Footnote ¹⁸ The identification of the Caspian Gates with the eastern limit of the world is found only in those passages concerning Nebuchadnezzar and Alexander.

The best explanation for the Excerpta's situation of the Caspian Gates at the eastern ends of the earth may be offered by Richard Stoneman in his analysis of the fabulous geography of the Alexander Romance.Footnote ¹⁹ He refers not to the explicit statements of the Romance, but to its narrative structure. Alexander's ventures into the fantastical realms of exotic marvels, monstrous beasts, and strange races all have the Caspian Gates as their starting point. The Gates were understood to allow passage out of the known world into an “outer space” of fable and wonder. The fabulous realms, like the Land of the Hyperboreans, were at first understood to be north of the Caspian Gates and the Gates at the northern boundary of the oikoumene, but with the eastward extension of the Caucasus—at least conceptually—as far as the Hindu Kush and the Himalayas following the conquests of Alexander those exotic lands could also be situated east of the Gates. When this reorientation of the Gates was combined with the reconfiguration, in successive recensions of the Romance, their sources and derivatives, of the pagan Land of the Blessed, which lay to the north and was one of Alexander's marvellous destinations, as the Christian Paradise in the furthest east, as well as India as the point of departure for Alexander's journeys into the unknown, the Caspian Gates must have seemed not merely to open onto the eastern ends of the earth, but to stand at their very threshold. As Stoneman notes, the last of these adjustments, turning the Land of the Blessed into Paradise, is only found in the relatively late gamma (γ) recension of the Romance (not earlier than the eighth century a.d.), but perhaps in the geography of the Excerpta we can see a stage in the process that brought about this altered conception.

To the modern reader the most preposterous statement in the Excerpta's account of Nebuchadnezzar might be that his kingdom extended to the Pillars of Hercules. There is some debate at present whether or not the Babylonian Empire included Egypt (see below), but complete agreement that it did not extend beyond that country into Africa. A Graeco-Roman audience, however, would quite likely have found this suggestion not nearly so jarring. Megasthenes, writing as early as the time of Alexander's first successors, claimed that Nabocodrosoros (Nebuchadnezzar) had led an army as far as the Pillars of Hercules and conquered a great deal of Libya (the Greek term for Africa) and Iberia.Footnote ²⁰ Megasthenes’ Indica is lost, but an impressive list of later authors refers to what he said about Nebuchadnezzar's expedition to the west, including Strabo, Josephus, Abydenus, and Eusebius.Footnote ²¹ Eusebius’ references to Nebuchadnezzar's march to the west, in particular, bring Megasthenes’ report up to the period and into the genre (Christian chronicle writing) of the Excerpta's Greek original.

If Megasthenes was responsible for originating the story of Nebuchadnezzar's expedition to the Pillars of Hercules, as we must presume without another candidate he was, it is difficult, given the patchy state of the Indica's preservation, to say why. He, or his sources, may have confused Nebuchadnezzar with the Persian king Cambyses, who did lead an invasion of Egypt.Footnote ²² At any rate, the plausibility of an oriental ruler undertaking a march to the western ends of the earth—the incredulity of moderns notwithstanding—must have been bolstered for Megasthenes and his first readers by the acknowledged interest of several Persian kings in the western regions of the Mediterranean and the shores of the Ocean.Footnote ²³ If we assume that Megasthenes was writing under Seleucid patronage, he may have been presenting Nebuchadnezzar as a Babylonian counterpart to the Egyptian world conqueror, Sesostris, found in the pages of Hecataeus of Abdera's Aegyptiaca, written for the early Ptolemies.Footnote ²⁴ Or, by directing Nebuchadnezzar's conquering progress westward, he may have been offering some excuse, in the form of a worthy precedent, for the Seleucid failure to take control of India.Footnote ²⁵ If, however, we set the period of Megasthenes’ activity even earlier, under Sibyrtius, the satrap of Arachosia at Alexander's death, we can see in his account of Nebuchadnezzar's western expedition an emphasis on the unique achievement of Alexander's conquest of India and a reflection of the myth-making going on at Alexander's court.Footnote ²⁶ The latest consideration of the date of Megasthenes sees the prominence of Nebuchadnezzar in his fragments as a corroboration of the traditional interpretation of Megasthenes as an agent of Seleucus, since Babylon was the core of the nascent Seleucid kingdom and later Seleucid kings were identified with Nebuchadnezzar.Footnote ²⁷

We can say with a fair degree of certainty that in the Excerpta, at least, the Pillars of Hercules, like the Caspian Gates, were set at the limits of Nebuchadnezzar's realm so that it should reflect Alexander's empire in extent and boundaries. Once again, the notion of Alexander's territory stretching to the Straits of Gibraltar would have been far less surprising to an ancient reader than it might seem to us. It was by no means unknown in antiquity that Macedonian power hardly extended at all into Africa,Footnote ²⁸ but there were indications that Alexander's intention had been that it should be otherwise and hints that his sovereignty did somehow extend as far as the western Ocean. The Pillars of Hercules and Gadeira (Gades) figure prominently in the so-called Last Plans of Alexander, the list of designs which the conqueror left unfinished at his death, which might very well be fictitious, but were certainly in circulation in the first century b.c. and may even have been published as early as the first reading of Alexander's will shortly after his death.Footnote ²⁹ According to Arrian and Plutarch, Alexander planned to sail a fleet down the Euphrates, around Arabia and Africa, and into the Mediterranean at the Pillars or Gadeira, and so conquer the African interior and Carthage.Footnote ³⁰ Curtius maintains that Alexander intended to coast with his fleet along the shores of the western Mediterranean, touching at Gades and the Pillars.Footnote ³¹ Referring to the same expedition against Carthage, Diodorus says that Alexander was going to build a road along the African coast all the way to the Pillars of Hercules.Footnote ³² However formulated, such plans would have brought Alexander's territorial sway to the Pillars of Hercules. Moreover, Diodorus tells of Alexander receiving embassies from a number of African peoples from as far away as the Pillars of Hercules.Footnote ³³ Taken together with Arrian's insistence that it was Alexander's reception of the ambassadors of far-flung nations and his settling of their differences which most made him “seem lord of every land and sea”,Footnote ³⁴ Diodorus’ report of embassies from the Pillars might suggest that Alexander's rule in some way extended that far.

Over time the relation of plans and the vague suggestion of sovereignty gave way to the positive assertion that Alexander had reached the Pillars of Hercules. In the Alexander Romance the king returns from India to Babylon, but then proceeds again from there to the western ends of the earth. He reports in detail, in a letter to his mother, on his visit to the Pillars of Hercules, which he finds to be two great columns, one of solid silver and the other of solid gold.Footnote ³⁵ It is probably not altogether coincidental that Alexander set out for the Pillars from Babylon, just as Megasthenes has Nebuchadnezzar march from Babylon to the Pillars, but it is difficult to disentangle the lines of transmission and influence. Also in the Romance, Alexander opens his last will and testament with the statement that he has surpassed the bounds set by the Pillars of Hercules and so came to the appointed day of his death.Footnote ³⁶ The Alexander Romance was composed around a.d. 300 on the basis of earlier elements.Footnote ³⁷ So the literate culture of late antiquity entertained the possibility, and in certain quarters was no doubt convinced, that Alexander's realm stretched as far as the Pillars of Hercules, just as it is said to in the Excerpta.

The chief significance of both the Caspian Gates and the Pillars of Hercules may simply be that they reinforce the statement which their mention amplifies, that Nebuchadnezzar ruled the whole earth. These landmarks are important not so much because they indicate the bounds of Nebuchadnezzar's, or Alexander's, realm, but because they set limits to the whole world.Footnote ³⁸ The idea of the universal rule of Nebuchadnezzar in the Excerpta was certainly not a new one and could be found by any attentive reader of the Bible. The claim to kingship over the whole world is found in the propaganda generated in Babylon under Nebuchadnezzar and may have been the basis of the notion as it is found elsewhere.Footnote ³⁹ Jeremiah has God as the Creator of the earth and its inhabitants grant all the lands to Nebuchadnezzar, along with the beasts of the field, and Daniel declares that God has made Nebuchadnezzar ruler over all, “wheresoever the children of men dwell, the beasts of the field and the fowls of the heaven.”Footnote ⁴⁰ The general context of Nebuchadnezzar's successes in the Bible, of his conquests as punishments meted out in retribution to disobedient and impious nations, may, moreover, explain the peculiar verb used of his rule: “judging” (iudicans). Like Nebuchadnezzar in the Jewish prophetic books, Alexander was also supposed to have been given a divine promise of worldwide dominion, though by Zeus Ammon, not the God of heaven. The sources which tell us the questions Alexander asked on his famous visit to the oracle at Siwa and the answers he received relate that he wanted to know whether he would be granted rule over the whole world and was told that indeed he would be.Footnote ⁴¹ Of course, Alexander was disappointed that he had to turn back from attacking unconquered nations in the east and reputedly had plans for new campaigns in hand at his death, but there was apparently some sense in which he was understood to have accomplished the conquest of the world.

The sense in which both Nebuchadnezzar and Alexander could most properly be said to have ruled the world is that they were each rulers of a so-called world kingdom. The idea of a succession of world kingdoms, each in turn preeminent in the political sphere and ruling over the greater part of the earth, was common to both Jewish and Graeco-Roman schemes of history.Footnote ⁴² The list of four or five world kingdoms might have minor variations, but it usually included the Babylonian kingdom of Nebuchadnezzar, regularly assimilated with the Assyrians whose seat was supposed to be at Babylon, and the Macedonian empire established by Alexander. As the concept of world empires developed, Nebuchadnezzar came to be seen as something of a seminal figure, as the original world ruler, and was often associated with Alexander.Footnote ⁴³ Nebuchadnezzar and Alexander both appear in the rabbinic Midrash of Ten Kings, a list of those monarchs who “have ruled the world from one end to the other.”Footnote ⁴⁴ It was often conceded that “world kingdom” was a relative description, with the kingdoms varying in duration or territorial extent, encompassing most though not all of the earth,Footnote ⁴⁵ but the author behind the Excerpta seems to insist on an absolute sense, a kingdom which encompasses the whole world from the rising to the setting of the sun. As a consequence every land and people must be accounted for, even if this means imputing unhistorical conquests to world rulers or anachronistic prominence to certain nations. Alexander probably thought no more of the Romans, for instance, than did Nebuchadnezzar, but they could not be discounted at the time of the Excerpta's composition, and so a place had to be found for them in the world kingdoms. We shall see how the implications of this insistence on totality were worked out.

Perhaps the first consequence is immediately obvious. Egypt is included in the list of territories ruled by Nebuchadnezzar. If the world kingdom of Nebuchadnezzar is understood in the comprehensive sense, this is not only unexceptionable, but necessary. The assertion does, however, raise questions of historical accuracy and information. The possibility that Nebuchadnezzar invaded, and even conquered, Egypt is entertained in some scholarly circles and vehemently denied in others,Footnote ⁴⁶ but it seems unlikely that the Excerpta's author had access to sources which might settle the question. Rather he seems to have availed himself of much the same information as we have and was compelled to draw his own conclusions. The fragments of Berossus, as quoted by Josephus, claim that the Babylonians under Nebuchadnezzar ruled Egypt.Footnote ⁴⁷ We may suspect that Berossus made this claim—most likely a false one—in the interests of his Seleucid masters in their rivalry with the Ptolemies of Egypt, as well as his national pride, but we need not assume that the ancient chronicler behind the information in the Excerpta dealt so cynically with his sources. The Egyptian prisoners taken by Nebuchadnezzar, also mentioned by Berossus, might have been captured during the fighting at the outset of his reign (not necessarily in Egypt, or only on its borders) and constitute an authentic detail, but the association of Nebuchadnezzar with the sack of Jerusalem and the deportation of the Judean exiles to Babylon would very likely have made any reference to Nebuchadnezzar's prisoners suggest the conquest of their homeland. The prophecies of Jeremiah promise that Nebuchadnezzar will set up his throne in Egypt and “array himself with the land of Egypt, as a shepherd putteth on his garment”, killing, taking captives, and burning the temples of Egypt's gods, all with impunity.Footnote ⁴⁸ In Ezekiel God declares that He will give Egypt over to Nebuchadnezzar as wages for his devastation of Tyre and make him his agent to bring death and destruction on the land, its idols and princes.Footnote ⁴⁹ The fact that there is no material evidence of such an invasion undoubtedly speaks greater volumes to moderns than it might to readers in late antiquity; the Christians, at least, would have assumed that the prophets’ words had been fulfilled.Footnote ⁵⁰ This conclusion would, moreover, have been in keeping with the parallelism cultivated in the Excerpta between Nebuchadnezzar and Alexander, who did famously conquer Egypt. The author of the Excerpta had grounds for supposing that Nebuchadnezzar ruled Egypt, but it may have been sufficient for him that Alexander, as he saw it, liberated Egypt from her oriental conquerors. I want to work out the structure of this proposal in detail in regard to the Romans, but will suggest here that Egypt may present a parallel case.

The one uncontestable statement in the Excerpta's notice on Nebuchadnezzar is that he ruled over Judea. It is well attested in numerous passages in the Bible that Nebuchadnezzar led the Babylonians in capturing and ultimately sacking Jerusalem, deporting her kings, and carrying off her people into exile.Footnote ⁵¹ The accuracy on this point is a reminder of the perspective of the Excerpta and its sources. The kingdom of Judah may have had some importance amongst the tiny and fragmented states of Syria in their resistance to Nebuchadnezzar, but it was, nevertheless, a minor player in the power politics of Nebuchadnezzar's day, caught between the hammer of Babylon and the anvil of Egypt. Were it not for the Biblical record we would know precious little about the fall of Judah, but just so were it not for the Biblical record we also would know far less about Nebuchadnezzar. Nor is it merely that Nebuchadnezzar figures prominently in the Bible. The fate of the Jewish people was the principal interest of the antiquarian strain in Jewish and Christian literature which endeavoured to substantiate and elaborate the Biblical record. Writers like Josephus and Eusebius sought out information on a personage like Nebuchadnezzar, who was mentioned in the Bible, but largely ignored by the classical tradition, and recorded testimonies that would otherwise be lost to posterity. But any information about matters not pertaining to the Jews, no matter how valuable, was in a sense preserved accidentally, because it is extraneous to that focus on the Jews. And so Judea takes her place alongside Egypt and Rome in the catalogue of Nebuchadnezzar's conquests, because Judea held a—disproportionately—large place in the Babylonian king's reputation. The mention of Judea may also be intended to serve as a reminder that much of what the Excerpta says about Nebuchadnezzar is ultimately supposed to make a point about the relations of Alexander the Great with the Jews and their God, as I hope to demonstrate below.

If Judea was at the focus of antiquarianism in late antiquity, then Pontus stood at its distant periphery, but the mention of Pontus amongst the territories conquered by Nebuchadnezzar is, I believe, of crucial significance in understanding the meaning and intention of the notice on the Babylonian king in the Excerpta Latina Barbari. Pontus was a country in north-east Asia Minor along the southern shores of the Black Sea between Colchis and the River Halys, both the coastlands and the mountainous interior as far south as Cappadocia. The expansion of the Medes into Anatolia, which brought them into conflict with the Lydians, most famously at the battle halted by an eclipse in 585 b.c., would have debarred the advance of the historical Nebuchadnezzar's power into the area.Footnote ⁵² Nevertheless, there was a longstanding tradition of Babylonian activity in the region of Pontus. When the Medes and Lydians, astonished by the day turning into night, determined to make peace, Herodotus says that one of the mediators they called in was Labynetus the Babylonian, who has been identified by modern scholars with Nebuchadnezzar or Nabonidus (later king of Babylon himself) as his representative.Footnote ⁵³ The inclusion of Pontus amongst the lands ruled by Nebuchadnezzar may go as far back as Megasthenes, who is supposed to have said that Nebuchadnezzar resettled some of the people he conquered on his campaigns in Libya and Iberia on the borders of Pontus, thus implying a tidy explanation for the presence of Iberians in both the Caucasus and the Iberian peninsula, as well as the impressive extent of Nebuchadnezzar's activity.Footnote ⁵⁴ In addition to being unhistorical, these references to Pontus in the time of Nebuchadnezzar are probably also anachronistic; the name of Pontus for a distinct region is not found in Herodotus or Xenophon and seems to have arisen in the time of Alexander. More problematic, however, is how incongruous the mention of a minor and out of the way country like Pontus seems alongside the other nations of undoubted historical and cultural importance included in Nebuchadnezzar's empire, such as Egypt, Judea, and Rome. The real significance of Pontus may reside not in that Nebuchadnezzar was supposed to have conquered the country, but that Alexander had failed to do so.

Antiquity, no less than the modern world, tended to dwell on the accomplishments of Alexander, but there were certain tasks which he had memorably left undone. The conquest of Pontus was one of them. Alexander's route east led well south of Pontus and in his haste to meet Darius in battle he did not take the time to secure this territory with his main force, and as a consequence his overland line of communication with his Macedonian base remained threatened by hostile forces.Footnote ⁵⁵ This fact did not go unnoticed by ancient writers. Arrian tells the story of Pharasmenes, the king of the Chorasmians, who offered to help Alexander subdue his neighbours, the Colchians and the Amazons, as far as the Black Sea.Footnote ⁵⁶ Alexander's reply holds the most interest for us. He is supposed to have said that he could not presently concern himself with attacking Pontus, as he was occupied with the conquest of India and so the whole of Asia, but in the future, after returning to Greece, he intended to launch an expedition by land and sea against Pontus. This project was, of course, interrupted by Alexander's death, and the expression of his unfulfilled intention only serves to underscore the fact that Alexander never conquered Pontus. The Last Plans of Alexander likewise contain a reminiscence of Nebuchadnezzar. According to Diodorus, Alexander planned a campaign into the western Mediterranean against not only the Carthaginians, but also the inhabitants of Libya and Iberia, the very regions Nebuchadnezzar is said to have conquered, and he proposed to resettle populations from Asia in Europe and vice versa, the very project — although no specific people or place is mentioned in regard to Alexander—which Nebuchadnezzar is supposed to have carried out on the most grandiose scale with the transportation of the Iberians.Footnote ⁵⁷ The implicit point is clear: what Alexander planned but failed to do, Nebuchadnezzar accomplished. Alexander's failure to conquer Pontus is reiterated in Justin's Epitome of Pompeius Trogus when the Pontic king Mithridates is given a lengthy speech in which he boasts that none of the countries of his realm, Pontus amongst them, had ever experienced foreign domination and Alexander had not even approached them.Footnote ⁵⁸ The assertion is that Pontus had never been conquered, and the affirmation of this is that Alexander, the greatest of conquerors, had not even attempted the task.

We must now clear up a possible source of confusion. As we have it, the Excerpta might be taken to suggest that Alexander had managed to add Pontus to his empire. Pontus seems to be mentioned in the Excerpta's version of Alexander's last will and testament, in which he disposed of the territories he had conquered to various generals, companions, and relatives: Ponton autem Leona dixit regnare Footnote ⁵⁹ (he told Leon to rule Pontus). Fortunately, the Excerpta is not alone in preserving this document, a fabrication, but an early and important oneFootnote ⁶⁰ (it is more plausible, if also more poetic, that Alexander bequeathed his empire “to the strongest” with his dying breathFootnote ⁶¹ ). There are several other versions in both Greek and Latin, which demonstrate that this line in the Excerpta is corrupt. In all of the other versions the territory or satrapy in question is not Pontus, but the Hellespont, and in all but one the heir who receives it is Leonnatus.Footnote ⁶² The name of the Hellespont (Hellesponton), like that of Leonnatus, has been cut short in the Excerpta, leaving the incorrect, but not impossible –ponton. It is not easy to say at what point in the transmission of the text this corruption occurred, but there were plenty of opportunities for it in a work which was compiled from other sources, translated, and recopied, and such a corruption is by no means rare or remarkable in the Excerpta. What must be borne in mind is that while the readers of the surviving manuscript of the Latin translation, perhaps those of its archetype and possibly even those of the Greek text from which it was immediately taken, might well have been left with the impression that Pontus was Alexander's to leave to the heir of his choice, this was not the intention of the original. The understanding of the author of the Excerpta's material on Nebuchadnezzar and Alexander, the compiler who brought them together, was consistent with the consensus of ancient authors that Alexander had failed to conquer Pontus. That leaves us with the question of why the Excerpta insists that Nebuchadnezzar did conquer Pontus.

The preliminary answer to this question must be that the Excerpta here depends on a tradition going back to the early Hellenistic period which not only dealt with Nebuchadnezzar, but also reflected on Alexander. We have already seen that Megasthenes had Nebuchadnezzar conquer Libya and Iberia and carry their populations off to Pontus and that these deeds correspond to some of the plans Alexander left unfinished at his death.Footnote ⁶³ The correspondence hardly seems accidental. Indeed, there are signs that it was not unusual for Megasthenes’ contemporaries, especially those who shared his propagandistic or even “nationalistic” purposes, to have the ancient heroes of the countries with which they identified outdo Alexander. In Hecataeus of Abdera's work on Egypt the world conquering Pharaoh Sesoosis (Sesostris) is said to have campaigned not only in all the country conquered by Alexander, but also in lands the Macedonian never reached.Footnote ⁶⁴ This notion of Nebuchadnezzar's superiority to Alexander, moreover, seems to be corroborated in the Book of Daniel. In explaining his first dream of a great image, its parts made from different materials, Daniel tells Nebuchadnezzar, “Thou art this head of gold” and promises him that the kingdoms that come after will be inferior to his own.Footnote ⁶⁵ In a subsequent vision of Daniel's it is made quite clear that Alexander's kingdom will be among those which follow Nebuchadnezzar's Babylonian kingdom.Footnote ⁶⁶ The Excerpta seems to accept Nebuchadnezzar's superiority to Alexander, even if it only signals this acceptance very subtly with the mention of Pontus. But we are left to ask whether at this point the Excerpta is doing any more than preserving a tradition. Why did this tradition resonate with the author of the Excerpta, or what relevant message was it intended to convey?

Here we can turn once again to Alexander, that reflection of Nebuchadnezzar in the Excerpta, and not to the deeds he left undone, but to what he is most notably said to have done. In the Excerpta, Alexander is said not once, but twice to have gone to Jerusalem and worshipped the Lord God, first in the main chronography's treatment of his career:

and again in the midst of the list of the high priests at Jerusalem included in the Excerpta's compilation of its raw materials:

The earliest account of Alexander's almost certainly fictitious visit to Jerusalem is preserved in Josephus’ Jewish Antiquities and was widely accepted as historical by the time the Excerpta was written.Footnote ⁶⁹ The question is not whether there are precedents for the claim that Alexander came to Jerusalem and acknowledged the Lord God, but rather how this acknowledgment is to be taken. The understanding of Alexander's gestures of reverence at Jerusalem exhibits a marked ambivalence, developing into two distinct strains of interpretation. On the one hand, Augustine insisted that Alexander's acts of worship did not make him a true believer, rather they showed him in his folly adding the True God to his collection of false gods:

This opinion seems consistent with Josephus, who omits any explicit acknowledgment of the Jewish God on Alexander's part, since he appears to have been wary of stories of gentiles converting to the Jewish religion in general.Footnote ⁷¹ On the other hand, the later recensions of the Alexander Romance, with their demonstrably Christian additions, have Alexander declare to the Jews that he takes their God as his own:

Alexander's acceptance of the True God here is not necessarily exclusive, but neither is there anything to suggest the shallow miscomprehension which Augustine saw in the incident.

There is no explicit indication of how the author of the Excerpta understood Alexander's acknowledgment of the True God and how he wanted his readers to understand it. Alexander's glorification of God declares Him to be the only god, but not his own god. The wording of Alexander's declaration does not, as far as I know, correspond to that of any similar acclamation in the Alexander tradition. It does, however, bear some resemblance to the words of Cyrus at Daniel 6.26: “for he is the living God, and stedfast for ever.”Footnote ⁷³ An allusion to another gentile ruler acknowledging God as living and eternal, particularly one who was granted success by God, but not converted to his religion, would indicate the Excerpta's acclamation is not a sign of true belief on Alexander's part. The one variant in the Excerpta's two notices on Alexander's visit to Jerusalem is also ambiguous. In the first notice Alexander addresses God as deus solus, in the second as solus princeps. Princeps is not a term used of God in the Vulgate, nor is ἄρχων, the word Frick thought to be its Greek original,Footnote ⁷⁴ in the Septuagint. Rather, the word is used of the angelic powers that belong to the nations,Footnote ⁷⁵ and, at least in the Septuagint, of the gods of the gentiles.Footnote ⁷⁶ In the New Testament it is used of Satan as the “prince of the devils” and the “prince of this world”.Footnote ⁷⁷ The term is also used in Isaiah's prophecy of the Messiah and in John's Apocalypse of Jesus Christ as the “prince of the kings of this earth”.Footnote ⁷⁸ This last usage might make princeps (or ἄρχων) seem like a particularly apt title for a gentile ruler to employ in addressing God (at least for a Christian), but the instances in which the word refers to pagan gods or Satan might equally suggest Alexander's profoundly imperfect understanding of the God he addresses. So how are we to take Alexander's glorification of God in the Excerpta? The parallelism of Nebuchadnezzar and Alexander is, I suggest, key to the answer.

The geographic parallelism of the realms of Nebuchadnezzar and Alexander, upon which the Excerpta positively insists, once we bring it to bear upon the matter of a gentile ruler's encounter with the God of Israel, seems to introduce a broader and more significant parallelism in the lives and conduct of the two kings. The story of Nebuchadnezzar's encounter with God is found in the book of Daniel, and it presents several correspondences with Josephus’ account of Alexander at Jerusalem. Dreams are central to both narratives. The bulk of the interaction between Nebuchadnezzar and Daniel is devoted to Daniel's interpretation of two troubling dreams dreamt by the king, and Alexander recognizes the high priest of the Jews as the figure he saw in a dream encouraging him to the conquest of the Persian Empire.Footnote ⁷⁹ And all of these dreams are only fully understood thanks to the king's meeting with a servant of God. In both cases, as well, the gentile king offers worship to God through an act of reverence directed toward His human representative. Once he had interpreted his first dream “Nebuchadnezzar fell upon his face, and worshipped Daniel, and commanded that they should offer an oblation and sweet odours unto him”, and Alexander, much to the surprise of his followers, as soon as he met him prostrated himself before the high priest Jaddua, or, as he himself explained, to the God whose priest he was.Footnote ⁸⁰ The details in which Alexander reflects Nebuchadnezzar do not seem to have been considered incidental or peripheral to the account of his visit to Jerusalem; on the contrary, these are the only details mentioned in Origen's reference to the episode in the Contra Celsum.Footnote ⁸¹ Nor does Josephus seem to have left a recognition of some connection between his text and that of Daniel to chance; rather, he has Alexander shown the Book of Daniel and joyfully recognize himself in the prediction of a Greek who will overthrow the empire of the Persians.Footnote ⁸² The similarities in the stories of Nebuchadnezzar in the Bible and Alexander in Josephus, though, might tell us more about the sources at the disposal of the author behind the Excerpta and why he made a connection between the two figures, rather than the means by which he intended to convey his message to his readers, since he does not mention either the dreams or acts of reverence in speaking of Nebuchadnezzar or Alexander, but he may still have depended on some familiarity on the part of his reader with two commonly read texts in order to get his point across.

If the Excerpta explicitly produces geographic and political parallels between Nebuchadnezzar and Alexander and implicitly alludes to parallels in their encounters with the God of Israel, we may presume to find in Nebuchadnezzar an indication of how we are to understand Alexander's glorification of God. That their empires were both bounded by the same landmarks might suggest that Nebuchadnezzar and Alexander were to be seen as equals, but the mention of Nebuchadnezzar's conquest of Pontus, an achievement Alexander notably failed to emulate, suggests otherwise. By insisting on his possession of Pontus, the Excerpta seems to endorse Daniel's pronouncement that Nebuchadnezzar would prove superior to the kings who came after him, including Alexander. Nebuchadnezzar was greater than Alexander, and like him he confessed the True God, but immediately after his confession Nebuchadnezzar transgressed by erecting his golden image on the plain of Dura and commanding all of his subjects to worship it.Footnote ⁸³ If Nebuchadnezzar was greater than Alexander, but offered God only a temporary or superficial confession, we are directed by the Excerpta to concur with Augustine and discern that while Alexander may have glorified the True God, that did not make him a true believer.Footnote ⁸⁴ His glorification of God certainly does not indicate his redemption or his acceptance as a Christian avant la lettre as the later versions of the Alexander Romance might suggest.

This interpretation of the hints in the Excerpta seems to be corroborated by two points. The association between Alexander and Nebuchadnezzar also indicates an association between Alexander and Babylon, the ill-omened site of his untimely death,Footnote ⁸⁵ and this association often proved an opportunity for adverse reflections on Alexander. For instance, the Sibylline Oracles mention Alexander's conquest of Babylon several times as somehow climactically symbolic of his subjection of the entire East or Asia,Footnote ⁸⁶ but in lines repeated at the opening of two different Oracles they refer to Babylon as the undoing of Alexander, the place that proved him a mortal and no son of a god:

Far from signalling his acceptance of the truth and power of God, the mention of Babylon calls to mind the most hubristic and impious claims Alexander made about himself, that he was the son of Zeus Ammon and ought to be counted amongst the gods, or at least the heroes. And it is these lines from the Sibylline Oracles that Clement of Alexandria quotes in the Protrepticus when he decries the error of idol worshippers who deify men and call Alexander the thirteenth god.Footnote ⁸⁸ The Excerpta also constructs its notice on Alexander's visit to Jerusalem in such a way that any allusion to Nebuchadnezzar will tend to have a negative import. As the Excerpta describes it, Alexander comes to Jerusalem directly from his foundation of Alexandria. The founding of Alexandria by Egypt is perhaps the definitive accomplishment of Alexander in the Excerpta, which regularly calls him Alexander Macedo et conditor. But the deed itself is given remarkably short shrift as the preamble to his acknowledgment of God, and it is as preamble that it must be read. The foundation of a city is an impressive accomplishment, especially the foundation of one of the foremost cities of the Mediterranean world, but in a context that alludes to Nebuchadnezzar it takes on an inauspicious air. That king extolled the virtue of Babylon, the city he had rebuilt and embellished so thoroughly and magnificently as to make it practically his refoundation, immediately before he was driven mad by the judgment of God: “Is not this great Babylon, that I have built for the house of the kingdom by the might of my power, and for the honour of my majesty.”Footnote ⁸⁹ He will again confess the Most High as a God who lives forever, but that confession was wrung from him after the travail of insanity and humiliation.Footnote ⁹⁰ The mention of a city foundation just before the confession of God is a reminder not merely of a famous deed, but of the pride and arrogance which were imputed to Alexander as much as to Nebuchadnezzar. The acknowledgment of the True God on the part of the great gentile king and city builder is unstable and a prelude to further transgression, it is confounded with his pride and error. Why should another city builder's declaration of the glory of God be any different?

It may be considered ironic that mention of Nebuchadnezzar's conquest of “the whole of Asia” (totam Asiam) seems to do more to strengthen his association with Alexander than to properly define the limits of his kingdom. We may think of the neo-Babylonian empire as almost definitively Asian, encompassing the most populous parts of the Near East and not extending into Africa or Europe, but as we have seen this was not the conception of the ancients, who saw Nebuchadnezzar as a world conqueror. Moreover, I can discover only a single instance in the ancient authors of Nebuchadnezzar's realm being connected with the term “Asia”, and that in the most circuitous fashion. Josephus says that the temple in Jerusalem was opened again after its destruction by Nebuchadnezzar “once Cyrus had seized the kingdom of Asia” (Κύρου τῆς Ἀσίας τὴν βασιλείαν παρειληφότος) and then describes how this came about by citing Berossus and tracing the Babylonian kings from the death of Nebuchadnezzar down to Cyrus’ conquest of the city “after he had conquered all the rest of the kingdom” (καταστρεψάμενος τὴν λοιπὴν βασιλείαν ἅπασαν).Footnote ⁹¹ The implication seems to be that Cyrus completed his conquest of Asia with the capture of Babylon and that the kingdom of Asia he thus came into had previously been held by the vanquished Babylonians. We could wish for a clearer indication that Nebuchadnezzar was said to have ruled Asia.Footnote ⁹² By contrast, a variety of sources are quite explicit that at several junctures in his career Alexander is supposed to have assumed, or been credited with, the kingship of Asia.Footnote ⁹³ The famous story of the Gordian knot in particular associates Alexander with the dominion of Asia, which an old prophecy promised to whoever succeeded in undoing the knot.Footnote ⁹⁴ When we take the usual subject of references to the rule of Asia into account, the Excerpta's mention of Nebuchadnezzar's conquest of Asia seems intended to bolster the parallelism with Alexander, rather than to indicate his proper realm.Footnote ⁹⁵

The parallelism between Nebuchadnezzar and Alexander offers an analogy by which we can understand Alexander's glorification of God, but it also provides a symmetry to the events of world history which are attested in the Excerpta Latina Barbari. Nebuchadnezzar is said to have subjected the land of the Romans to his rule, and while this is wildly unhistorical, it is no more so than the claim that his realm extended to the Straits of Gibraltar. The solid precedents for the latter assertion would have made the former quite plausible. In Nebuchadnezzar's day the Romans may have been a minor Italian people who would remain unheard of in the Near East for centuries, but it was necessary to include them amongst his subjects, not only to depict Nebuchadnezzar's realm as a truly universal kingdom, but also because of the importance they would assume in time. This sort of anachronistic retrojection of a prominent historical role for Rome also occurs in the fabulous accounts of Alexander. The earliest versions of the Alexander Romance have him go to Italy and receive the submission of the Romans.Footnote ⁹⁶ The Excerpta participates in this same tradition of contact between Alexander and the Romans, with the notable variation that Alexander does not accept the allegiance of a free people, but rather liberates the Romans from their subjection to a conglomeration of oriental nations. It is this distinction in the Excerpta's presentation of events which introduces the symmetry of Nebuchadnezzar and Alexander. The lands and peoples subjugated by Nebuchadnezzar are freed by Alexander.

It is only in the brief notice on Nebuchadnezzar that the Excerpta explicitly ascribes the conquest of the Romans to him, but there are further links connecting the subjection of the Romans and their eventual liberation by Alexander to Nebuchadnezzar. The fullest report of Alexander freeing the Romans comes at the end of the Excerpta's enumeration of the Roman kings, for Rome's regal period was supposed to have ended with the people's domination by a host of eastern peoples.

Nebuchadnezzar is not mentioned here, but this passage has definite affinities with the one in which the Excerpta describes the end of the kingdoms of Judah and Israel:

In both passages a list of kings comes to an end with conquest and subjugation to the same conglomeration of oriental nations, the conquered lands are made tributary, and all of this is said to come about by an act of God. Nebuchadnezzar may not be mentioned in the note on the end of the Jewish kingdoms either, but he was unmistakably the agent of their demise. The conquest of Jerusalem, in the Judaeo-Christian tradition, was the single most famous deed of Nebuchadnezzar, and his sack of Jerusalem is described in the Excerpta just before this note. It is immediately followed by the notice devoted to Nebuchadnezzar, which includes mention of his conquest of Judea. The similarities in these two descriptions of foreign domination seem not merely to associate Nebuchadnezzar with the subjection of the Romans, but to ascribe this conquest to him, especially when he is elsewhere explicitly said to have subjected the land of the Romans.

It should be possible to confirm this ascription by recourse to the chronography of the Excerpta, since dates from Adam are assigned to practically all of the principal events of world history, but it is when we turn to the chronography that we encounter confusion regarding Nebuchadnezzar and the conquest of Rome. The earliest of the events we are discussing, the end of the kingdom of the Jews, is supposed to have taken place in the 4,892^nd year of Adam.Footnote ⁹⁹ The reign of Nebuchadnezzar is said to have come to an end in Adam's 4,911^th year.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ And the end of the reign of Quintus Tarquinius, the last king of Rome, occurs in the year of Adam 5,071.Footnote ¹⁰¹ This year, 5,071 from Adam, falls in the reign of the Persian king Artaxerxes II Mnemon (5,056–5,098 from Adam) and no mention is made in the notice on his reign of the conquest of Rome or any campaigns at all.Footnote ¹⁰² There is, moreover, an obvious inconsistency in all of this. The Romans are not supposed to have lost their liberty until the passing of the kings, but nearly two hundred years before this they are included amongst the peoples subjected to Nebuchadnezzar. As Gelzer said long ago, the chronology of the Excerpta is reasonably orderly up to the Babylonian Captivity and then descends into hopeless corruption.Footnote ¹⁰³ In this regard it is noteworthy that a Babylonian king list is not found amongst the ruler lists of various nations in the latter half of the Excerpta, the raw material of the chronography in the first half, and so the dates of the Babylonian kings were probably not carefully integrated into the chronological reckoning of the work as a whole. What we can ascertain from all of this is not that Nebuchadnezzar is precluded by the dating of the Excerpta from being the conqueror of the Romans, but that the historical narrative which has the Romans conquered by Nebuchadnezzar and the powers of the East and then liberated by Alexander has been grafted, somewhat clumsily, onto the basic chronography of the Excerpta and that no real effort has been made to reconcile the events or dates of the added narrative with those of the main chronography.

Nebuchadnezzar does seem the most likely candidate to have been the eastern ruler responsible for the subjection of the Romans from which Alexander freed them. He is, of course, explicitly said to have conquered the land of the Romans. And he was from the time of Megasthenes reputed to have been active as a conqueror in the regions of the far west. This identification also makes sense of the indication that he conquered Egypt. Rather than the working out of a number of hints and oblique statements found in the Old Testament prophets, Berossus, and Josephus, Nebuchadnezzar's conquest of Egypt can be seen as the inauguration of an oriental domination which is eventually broken by Alexander. In the Excerpta the Egyptians and the Greeks are usually listed alongside the Romans as peoples freed by Alexander from servitude to the eastern nations.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Nebuchadnezzar and Alexander can thus be seen in the succession of world rulers.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ As such, their realms have a parallel universality, but their roles provide the sequence of historical events with balance and structure. While Nebuchadnezzar leads the peoples of the East to dominance and subjugates the peoples of the West, Alexander conquers the former and frees the latter. This equipoise would have been particularly meaningful to the inhabitants of the Roman Empire, who saw the Excerpta's western peoples as inside their oikoumene and the eastern peoples as hostile outsiders.

The problem of dates in the Excerpta brings us to the last, insoluble problem in the notice on Nebuchadnezzar: the length of his reign, given as nineteen years. The last cuneiform document from the reign of Nebuchadnezzar is dated to his forty-third year.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ This appears to have been the last year of Nebuchadnezzar's reign, since Berossus assigns to him a reign of forty-three years at his death, and through Josephus this reign length was readily accessible to the Greek writers of late antiquity.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Accessible perhaps, but not necessarily utilized. We know from the Praeparatio Evangelica that Eusebius was aware of the 43-year length for Nebuchadnezzar's reign, but Jerome's translation would indicate that Eusebius did not include this figure in the Chronological Canons.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Indeed, there is no independent column of dates for the Babylonian kings in the Canons at all, rather the Assyrians are followed by the Medes and then the Persians in the leftmost column of dates for the duration of the neo-Babylonian kingdom.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ We have already noted that the Excerpta does not include a Babylonian list in its collection of king lists. The seventh-century Chronicon Paschale, which largely depends on Eusebius for the Biblical period, does not give an overall reign length for Nebuchadnezzar, although it does for each of his successors.Footnote ¹¹⁰ It is not until the eighth-century work of George Syncellus that the figure of forty-three years for Nebuchadnezzar's reign appears in the Byzantine chronicle tradition stemming from Eusebius.Footnote ¹¹¹ The length of Nebuchadnezzar's reign seems to have been considered problematic by early Christian historians, perhaps because the Bible offered no figure which would have authoritatively settled the question.Footnote ¹¹² The length of nineteen years might have been proposed with the intention of addressing a question which must remain obscure to us.

The figure of nineteen years does occur in the record of Nebuchadnezzar's reign, although not as its overall length. In both the historical and prophetic books of the Bible, the second Babylonian capture of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple is said to have taken place in Nebuchadnezzar's nineteenth year.Footnote ¹¹³ This is the regnal date according to the non-accession-year system which seems to have been prevalent in Syria and Palestine.Footnote ¹¹⁴ According to the accession-year system which was standard at Babylon, however, this event occurred in Nebuchadnezzar's eighteenth year.Footnote ¹¹⁵ This is probably the reason why Josephus gives the date of the sack of Jerusalem as Nebuchadnezzar's eighteenth year.Footnote ¹¹⁶ The Excerpta may have assigned a length of nineteen years to the reign of Nebuchadnezzar simply because the number nineteen figures prominently in the dating of that reign, in the same way that Hilarianus, at the end of the fourth century, gave an idiosyncratic eighteen years to the remainder of Nebuchadnezzar's life after the fall of Jerusalem.Footnote ¹¹⁷

In the end, the problem of the Excerpta's nineteen years for Nebuchadnezzar must remain largely intractable. No solution adequately explains the difficulties it presents. It may simply be a mistake, a transmission error that has crept into the process of copying and translating. Numerals are, after all, particularly susceptible to corruption, consisting, as they do in Greek and Latin, of a series of letters which can be easily misread, added, or dropped.

There are signs that the parallelism of Nebuchadnezzar and Alexander found in the Excerpta, or the thinking behind it at any rate, exerted an influence on subsequent literature. These appear, for instance, in the later versions produced by the successive rewritings of the Alexander Romance.Footnote ¹¹⁸ In the earliest recension we have of the Romance, the so-called α recension, composed around a.d. 300, Alexander is said to have visited the tombs of the Persian kings and found there the sepulchre of Cyrus, constructed as a tower, to which were chained a number of mutilated Greek prisoners, reworking in this particular an incident found in the historical tradition.Footnote ¹¹⁹ No mention of Nebuchadnezzar is made here, but in the derivative β recension, to which elements were added as late as a.d. 550, as well as subsequent versions, the first grave Alexander is supposed to have encountered is that of Nebuchadnezzar, along with the golden vessels he had plundered from the Jews:

The recollection of Nebuchadnezzar might have been attracted to this passage by the magnificent structure of Cyrus’ tomb or by the evidence of an oriental despot's cruel inclination toward mutilation and captivity in his treatment of defeated enemies.Footnote ¹²¹ The discovery of the vessels taken from the Temple in Jerusalem at the tomb of Nebuchadnezzar certainly seems to set him alongside Cyrus as an eastern potentate whose misdeeds must be undone and punished in the person of his heirs by the retribution of Alexander's victories.Footnote ¹²² But he also joins the other legendary oriental conquerors, Sesostris, Semiramis, as well as Cyrus, encountered or alluded to in the course of Alexander's progress through the Romance, who both offer Alexander a measure of accomplishment to surpass and warn him against pride and excess.Footnote ¹²³ Nebuchadnezzar's appearance in the later versions of the Romance seems to reflect the dual role he has in the Excerpta, that of a conqueror whose subjects are liberated by Alexander and of a great king who demonstrates the true measure of Alexander's deeds.

Alexander and Nebuchadnezzar are also associated in other legendary material. One Rabbinic story holds that the Throne of Solomon came into the possession of Nebuchadnezzar, and after his conquest of Babylon Alexander brought this throne from there to Egypt.Footnote ¹²⁴ The legend seems to offer a lesson opposite to that of the parallelism of the two kings in the Excerpta, for while Nebuchadnezzar tried to mount the Throne of Solomon and received a broken leg for his troubles, Alexander refrained from any such attempt. In the Excerpta comparison with Nebuchadnezzar devalues the acts of Alexander, here it serves to render them praiseworthy. A similar story appears in the much later early modern Greek Phyllada or Book of Alexander the Great, which has the Romans give Alexander the robe of Solomon, which Nebuchadnezzar had taken from Jerusalem; no explanation is offered as to how the Romans came by this robe in the first place.Footnote ¹²⁵

Perhaps the most remarkable result of the parallelism of Nebuchadnezzar and Alexander is to be found in the Chronicle of John of Nikiu, written at the time of the Arab conquest of Egypt in the mid-seventh century. The Chronicle survives only in a late Ethiopic translation of an Arabic text, which is itself a translation of a possibly Greek, but more likely Coptic original.Footnote ¹²⁶ Despite the attenuated state of the Chronicle's survival, it is quite clear that John of Nikiu attributes to Nebuchadnezzar one of the most famous deeds of Alexander. According to John, Nebuchadnezzar captured the city of Tyre by filling in the strait which separated the island from the mainland with earth.

As in the Excerpta's account of the fall of the Roman and Jewish kingdoms, there is a confusion or identification of eastern peoples, since Nebuchadnezzar is here the king of the Persians. But the real interest of the passage lies in the description of the siege itself. Nebuchadnezzar's siege of Tyre was apparently one of his most remarkable undertakings, at least from the Phoenician perspective. Josephus bolsters the testimony of Berossus concerning Nebuchadnezzar by relating that two otherwise unknown authors, Diocles and Philostratus, mention that Nebuchadnezzar besieged Tyre for thirteen years.Footnote ¹²⁸ He does not, however, give any details as to how the siege was conducted or indicate the final issue of the siege. John of Nikiu's description presents an obvious analogue with the deeds of Alexander, who, as all of the sources on his career indicate, was occupied for several months in besieging the island city of Tyre and only took it after much difficulty and effort.Footnote ¹²⁹ The association of the siege of Tyre by Nebuchadnezzar, famous for his dreams from the Book of Daniel, with Alexander's siege of the same city can only have been reinforced by the fact that this was reputed to have been an occasion in Alexander's career for a remarkable concentration of dreams and visions.Footnote ¹³⁰ Indeed, nearly half of Plutarch's account of the siege of Tyre is taken up with relating dreams and portents.Footnote ¹³¹ There might also be some Biblical warrant for John ascribing the activities he does, no matter how redolent of those of Alexander, to Nebuchadnezzar, since Ezekiel speaks of Nebuchadnezzar coming against Tyre and building elaborate siege works and entering the city with his horses and chariots.Footnote ¹³² Ezekiel's description would suggest far more than a blockade of the roadstead off the mainland, rather ambitious engineering works and a sack of the island city by land forces, not marines. It certainly did to Jerome, who assumed that Nebuchadnezzar had built a mole to the island city when he besieged Tyre.Footnote ¹³³

The association of the two conquerors in their sieges of Tyre might have been very inviting to the historian, but it is not without its own significance. What made Alexander's siege of Tyre so difficult and protracted and his capture of the city such a signal accomplishment, all of our sources once again agree, is that Tyre was situated on an island and Alexander had to build a mole from the mainland in order to prosecute his siege.Footnote ¹³⁴ This being the case, Alexander cannot have been preceded in his undertaking by Nebuchadnezzar, otherwise the earlier mole might be presumed to have made a peninsula out of the island as Alexander's did.Footnote ¹³⁵ So John of Nikiu's account of Nebuchadnezzar's siege of Tyre is not merely meant to reflect Alexander's siege, it detracts from Alexander's accomplishment in taking the city and changing the face of land and sea. The building of the mole is not just given to Nebuchadnezzar, it is taken away from Alexander. As with the conquest of Pontus in the Excerpta, Nebuchadnezzar is seen to outdo Alexander. In John of Nikiu's Chronicle as it stands, however, Nebuchadnezzar's surpassing of Alexander serves no apparent rhetorical purpose and we can only guess at how and why the story he retails came about.

The Excerpta Latina Barbari presents Nebuchadnezzar and Alexander as parallel cases in the history of the world. This is quite clear from the close similarity of the terms in which the geographical extent of their realms is described. This rather obvious parallelism is, though, suggestive of more telling comparisons of action and character. That comparison, in the first instance, resolves itself into an opposition. Nebuchadnezzar is the conqueror of the free and civilized peoples who make up the Roman Empire and who have contributed to it their culture and institutions: the Romans, Greeks, and Egyptians, as well as the Jews. Alexander, in the fullness of time, is their liberator from the tyrannical and oppressive powers of the East. The opposition of Nebuchadnezzar and Alexander, of conqueror and liberator, affords a tidy narrative symmetry to an idiosyncratic account of world history. This account in which Nebuchadnezzar and Alexander appear to bulk large, or rather excerpts from it, has been grafted onto the chronicle which forms the basis of the Excerpta's structure. This much seems to be indicated by the interpolated narrative's disagreement with the basic chronicle over the geographic limits of the world and its inconsistency with the fundamental chronography of the Excerpta. This peculiar narrative may have been imperfectly integrated into the Excerpta, but to the mind of the compiler who assembled its constituent parts it must have served some purpose, perhaps no more than to elaborate the meagre information on certain figures who appeared in the chronicle's sparse annals, and the Excerpta remains practically the sole repository and the best evidence for this narrative, certainly as it regards Nebuchadnezzar and Alexander.

The comparison of Nebuchadnezzar and Alexander is not an altogether even one. The sharper definition of the geographical terms circumscribing Alexander's realm suggests that he is the focus of the juxtaposition and Nebuchadnezzar serves to reflect him. There might be a certain historiographic necessity to Alexander's precedence. If Nebuchadnezzar's career as it is described in the Excerpta is largely an invention based on the life of Alexander, the invention and the example of Alexander serve to compensate for the paucity of information about Nebuchadnezzar the world conqueror, if not the conqueror of Jerusalem. The evidence for the Indica of Megasthenes suggests that the reconstruction of Nebuchadnezzar on the basis of Alexander was nothing new, but had been going on since the time of the Macedonian himself or shortly thereafter. The example of Megasthenes also indicates that the image of Nebuchadnezzar was built up not only upon what Alexander did, but also what he wished to do and failed to do. The mention of his conquest of Pontus makes it clear that the Excerpta also presents a Nebuchadnezzar who did what Alexander did not, who outdid him. There is a subtle and significant suggestion of Nebuchadnezzar's superiority over Alexander.

The Excerpta's account of Nebuchadnezzar is presented as a bland historical narrative, but it is also—perhaps primarily—a measured, if indirect, evaluation of the merits of an historical personage, and not even the one under discussion. Nebuchadnezzar is another gentile ruler who, like Alexander, encountered the True God and acknowledged Him, but his acknowledgement was imperfect and repeatedly short-lived, at best; Alexander was no better than Nebuchadnezzar as a world conqueror, in fact a little worse, and just so his adoration of God at Jerusalem signifies nothing more than Nebuchadnezzar's faulty and failing grasp of the Divinity. The implicit evaluation, the limitation of virtue and worth, perhaps even an expulsion from the fellowship of believers, is necessary for a character like Alexander who is supposed to have had dealings with God, but who was not weighed in the explicit and final scales of Holy Writ, as Nebuchadnezzar was. The cryptic manner in which the evaluation is communicated in the Excerpta may seem to suggest a concession to the modern notion that history, especially when written in the terse and laconic form of the chronicle, is no place for moral judgments, even if there remains some urgency to offer the reader an idea of what to make of Alexander's glorification of God. Rather, I see at work here an impressive authorial competence, albeit one more suited to the controversialist than the historian, which understood that in historical writing a moral message is most effectively conveyed by the course of events themselves, even if they must be construed to serve this purpose, than by any amount of editorializing.