#STAR WARS THE OLD REPUBLIC ROMANCE FULL#

If AlexanderвЂ™s official court historian, Callisthenes, was once credited with its authorship (thus вЂpseudo-CallisthenesвЂ™), the prevailing belief must have been that it emerged in, or soon after, AlexanderвЂ™s Asian campaigns. We cannot discount an archetype that may have been written even earlier still, in the Ptolemaic era.

#STAR WARS THE OLD REPUBLIC ROMANCE FULL#

Recension A, while poorly written, full of gaps, and clearly a syncretic account, is nevertheless the best staging point scholars have when attempting to recreate an original (usually referred to as вЂО±вЂ™ вЂ“ alpha) dating back some 700 or 800 years (or more) before the extant recension A. The oldest text we know of today, recension вЂAвЂ™, is preserved in the 11th century Greek manuscript known as Parisinus 1711 the text titled The Life of Alexander of Macedon most closely resembles a conventional historical work, though any factual narrative is just the early backbone to which other elements were attached.ДЎ7th-century manuscript of an Alexandrine novel (Russia): Alexander exploring the depths of sea. Birthing a LegendДЄttributing the Romance in its earliest form to a single author or date remains impossible, but evidence suggests that both the unhistorical and the quasi-historical elements were in circulation in the century following AlexanderвЂ™s death. This is a warning that not only does the Romance contain some valuable and unique elements of truth, but that the mainstream biographies we rely on when excavating Alexander from the frail manuscripts from the past, contain elements of clinical fabrication, principally from personal agenda.

вЂњвЂ¦ the uncomfortable fact remains that the Alexander Romance provides us, on occasion, with apparently genuine materials found nowhere else, while our better-authenticated sources, per contra, are all too often riddled with bias, propaganda, rhetorical special pleading or patent falsification and suppression of evidence.вЂќ ( Public Domain )ДЄs far as the Romance, separating the fact from the fabulae has, indeed, proved no easy task, for material was added through a gradual process of accretion, a dilemma encapsulated in Peter GreenвЂ™s biography of the Macedonian king:

Alexander the Great Destroyer? The Sacking of Persepolis and The Business of War вЂ“ Part IДЄlexander Mosaic, Naples National Archaeological Museum.

Tomb of Alexander the Great already found, archaeologist claims, but findings have been blocked by вЂdiplomatic interventionвЂ™.

Alexander the Great: Was he a Unifier or a Subjugator?.

So, the emergence, and development, of the Greek Alexander Romance, in the Hellenistic world, is perhaps not surprising. But for the Greeks the stories of the past were literally mythoi, and the segregation between myth, legend, and the factual past was a soft border blurred by Homeric epics and HesiodвЂ™s Theogonia, which permitted a coeval interaction between men, heroes, and gods. There are many episodes in the story of Alexander when it is hard to be sure just where the historical element ends and вЂromanceвЂ™ begins, and by tradition, much legendary material had already infiltrated biographies of the Classical period. But where and when did it first appear and what did it originally look like? Which earlier accounts did it absorb and what is its relationship to the mainstream Alexander histories? Most importantly, does it contain unique factual details? Where Fiction Met Fact The Greek Alexander Romance, often referred to as a вЂpseudo-CallisthenesвЂ™ production, is in one form or another one of the most influential and widely read books of all time it has birthed a whole literary genre on Alexander the Great and his campaigns across the Persian Empire.

Star wars the old republic romance