‘THE LAST DAYS OF ALEXANDER’ IN AN ARABIC POPULAR ROMANCE OF AL-ISKANDAR

Faustina Doufikar-Aerts

The Alexander Romance of Pseudo-Callisthenes spread, through numerous translations and derivatives, not only in the medieval west- ern and Byzantine world, but also in the East. The oriental tradition is represented by the extant Syriac, Persian and Ethiopic versions of the Alexander romance. They derive from the Greek .-recension of Pseudo-Callisthenes, which also underlies the Latin version, known as Historia de Preliis. This .-recension, which is related to the +- recension, did not survive in Greek.1 It is believed that a Pahlavi (Middle Persian) and an Arabic trans- lation played an intermediary role in the oriental tradition. According to this theory a Middle Persian translation should have preceded the Syriac version of the romance. This Pahlavi text did not survive. The Arabic translation in its turn, which is supposed to intermediate be- tween the Syriac and Ethiopic versions of the romance, is considered lost as well. Only secondary indications point to its former existence. There are surviving abstracts and summaries of the story in Arabic,2 transmitted mainly by historians and compilers of Wisdom litera- ture.3 Only a few of these remnants have been published during the past centuries.4 Apart from this, the Persian and Ethiopic versions, which are obviously derivatives through an Arabic intermediary, may be considered a strong clue. A complete Arabic version has not yet come to light. In view of this situation I tried to verify a remark in the famous work of G. Cary, The Medieval Alexander, concerning “an Arabic manuscript discovered in Constantinople, which might prove to be the lost intermediary.”5 After a first reading of this alleged Arabic

1 For a survey of the complicated history of the transmission of the Pseudo- Callisthenes see Van Thiel (1983) xi-xlviii, and Stoneman (1996) 601-12. See also below, note 11. 2 See Nöldeke (1890) 34-49. 3 See Meissner (1895). 4 Among them a short Spanish-Arabic Alexander Romance. See Garcia Gomez (1929). 5 Cary (1967) 12 note 19. 24 FAUSTINA DOUFIKAR-AERTS translation of Pseudo-Callisthenes it became clear to me that the manuscript was not the sought-after Arabic Alexander Romance. In- stead it turned out that it contained ‘A Life of Al-Iskandar,’ entitled Sîrat Al-Iskandar
ZKLFK LV DVFULEHG WR ,EUkKvP LEQ 0XIDUULM DOù ûrî, presumably a citizen of Tyre. It is an Arabic romance, composed in a narrative style quite common for Arabic popular epics, the so-called sîra’s.6 Though the archetype of this popular romance of Alexander can probably not be dated before the 13th century and its narrative style may differ substantially from the traditional Alexander ro- mances, it still contains many legendary motifs, known from Pseudo- Callisthenes and other Hellenistic sources. In spite of this the tradi- tion of the Arabic popular romances of Alexander has been neglected almost completely in the past. None of the manuscripts of the Sîrat Al-Iskandar has ever been published.7 As part of my research I collated this Aya Sofya manuscript with other manuscripts of this kind, preserved in the collections of several European libraries. My reward for making my way through thou- sands of manuscript pages was that I made some discoveries which may prove to be of some interest. I hit upon an episode of the ‘Last Days of Alexander,’ which is otherwise unknown in the Islamic- Arabic Alexander tradition. The Arabic romance tradition in general avoids mentioning the legendary version of Alexander’s death, ac- cording to which he was poisoned.8 According to most authors, he died of natural causes. They dwell on the lamentations and wise sayings uttered by the philosophers surrounding his coffin. Also the ‘Letters of Consolation,’ written by Alexander to his mother, are characteristic of this tradition. The varieties of the ‘Last Days’ epi- sode in medieval European vernaculars were studied by an interdis- ciplinary group of scholars at the University of Groningen some twenty-five years ago. The joint investigations resulted in the edition of Ten Studies on the Last Days of Alexander in Literary and His- torical Writing, which treats medieval English, German, Dutch, French, Romanian, Latin, Byzantine and Spanish versions of the epi- sode of the Last Days, as well as an approach of classical historians.

6 For general remarks about the semi-oral sîra-genre see Lyons (1995). 7 I am currently preparing an edition of the first part of the Sîrat Al-Iskandar. 8 Scarce mention is made of it in some works of Wisdom literature and in the chronicle of Eutychius († 940).