Church Fathers and the Reception of Alexander the Great*

chapter 19 Church Fathers and the Reception of Alexander the Great*

Jaakkojuhani Peltonen

For the virtue of those who have done great deeds is esteemed in pro- portion to the ability with which it has been praised by men of genius. Alexander the Great of Macedon who is spoken of by Daniel as the ram, or the panther, or the he-goat, on reaching the grave of Achilles exclaimed ‘Happy Youth!To have the privilege of a great herald of your worth’,mean- ing, of course, Homer.1 ∵

The above quotation is taken from the preface of Jerome’s (ca. 347–420ad) Vita Hilarionis (Life of Hilarion). In his work Jerome provides an idealized picture of Hilarion—anchorite and saint. Even though Alexander was not the subject of the work, it is interesting how Jerome connects together Classical and Jewish literary tradition on Alexander the Great. The anecdote of Alexander weeping at the grave of Achilles was commonplace in the Classical Greco-Roman literature appearing in Cicero, Plutarch, Arrian and the Historia Augusta.2 The writer showed he was aware of the long ‘pagan’ tradition surrounding the famous con-

* I thank Ville Vuolanto and Sari Kataja-Peltomaa of Tampere University and Kenneth Moore, the editor of this volume, for carefully reading the manuscript and giving helpful comments. 1 Jer. Vita. Hil. pref. 9–11: Eorum enim qui fecere, virtus tanta habetur, quantum eam verbis potuere praeclara ingenia. Alexander Magnus Macedo, quem vel arietem, vel pardum, vel hir- cum caprarum Daniel vocat, cum ad Achillis tumulum pervenisset: ‘Felicem, ait, juvenis, qui, magno frueris praecone meritum!’ Homerum videlicet significans. (transl. Henry Fremantle.) 2 Cic. Arch. 24; Plut. Alex. 15.4; Arr. An. i.12. 1–2. Hist. Aug. Prob. 1–2. Alan Cameron, The Last Pagans of Rome (Oxford University Press, 2013), 761–770 treats at length the question of whether the writer of Historia Augusta and Jerome derived their Alexander anecdote from Cicero, or copied it from elsewhere.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi: 10.1163/9789004359932_020 478 peltonen queror and adjusted this tradition to his literary task. Secondly, Jerome refers to the supposed role of Alexander in the Book of Daniel as the “bronze, leopard, and he-goat”. The fame of the king called ‘the Great’ is an undisputed fact that the writer introduces to his audience. Jerome’s passage shows that early Christian writers knew of both the Clas- sical and Jewish traditions of Alexander and that they also wrote about the themes derived from the previous literature. Was there a certain ‘one’, or sev- eral receptions of Alexander that appear in the texts of the Church Fathers,3 and how much do these receptions derive from the Roman or Jewish fascina- tion with Alexander? An important issue for this present study is how the early Christian writers used the old material and made it fit in with their own literary and rhetorical interests. I seek to outline the pivotal themes in early Christian passages concerning Alexander, and to examine the reception of Alexander in its contemporary contexts. The reception of Alexander in the early Christian writers has received very little scholarly interest. George Cary (1956) treated some passages of Augus- tine and Orosius as an introduction for the later, Medieval Alexander literature and considered medieval texts as derivatives of them.4 Richard Stoneman referred briefly to the existence of Alexander as an exemplum in the texts of the Church Fathers but did not analyse or discuss the existence of vast amounts of source material.5 Brian Harding’s The Use of Alexander in Augustine’s City of God (2008), addresses Augustine’s use of Alexander as exemplum. However, besides Augustine and Orosius there exists significant material from Christian writers such asTatian,Tertullian,Basil, Gregory of Nazianzus and John Chrysos- tom, whose passages concerning Alexander have not been analysed in depth amongst the earlier scholarship. These texts of Christian writers represent var- ious literary genres like religious treaties, chronicles and private letters. In this study, I have examined the early Christian material; I will concentrate on those passages that best represent the main themes occurring in the whole corpus.6 I

3 In this present article, I use the term ‘Church Fathers’ referring to early Christian writers who composed their works from the second to the fifth century ad. 4 George Cary, The Medieval Alexander (Cambridge University Press, 1956), 68–70. 5 Richard Stoneman, “Legacy of Alexander in Philosophy”,in Brill’s Companion to Alexander the Great, ed. Joseph Roisman (Boston: Brill 2003), 347 (esp. footnote 67). Cf. Richard Stoneman, “Introduction: The Latin Base Texts for Medieval Alexander Literature”, in Brill’s Companion to Alexander Literature in the Middle Ages, ed. Zuwiya, Z. David (Brill 2011), 1–21, which does not deal with the works of the church father as a source for the Medieval Alexander. 6 For more of the quotations, see Peltonen forthcoming. Christian Djurslev’s Alexander the Great in the Early Christian Tradition will be published in 2018. Unfortunately, I was not able to take this forthcoming book into my analysis.