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was wont. Nor is this half-borrowed interest by any means the only one. The Cressid story, indeed, does not reach its full attraction as a direct subject of literary treatment till the fourteenth century. But the great Alexander cycle gives us work which merely as poetry equals all but the very best mediæval work, and its importance in connection with the famous metre named from it is of itself capital.

The Alexandreid.

In interest, bulk, and importance these two stories -the Story of the Destruction of Troy and the Alexandreid-far outstrip all the other romances of antiquity; they are more accessible than the rest, and have been the subject of far more careful investigation by modern students. Little has been added, or is likely to be added, in regard to the Troy-books generally, since M. Joly's introduction to Benoît's Roman de Troie six-and-twenty years ago,1 and it is at least improbable that much will be added to M. Paul Meyer's handling of the old French treatments of the Alexandreid in his Alexandre le Grand dans la Littérature Française au Moyen Age.2 For it must once more be said that the pre-eminence of French over other literatures in this volume is not due to any crotchet of the writer, or to any desire to speak of what he has known pretty thoroughly, long, and at first-hand, in preference to that which he

1 Le Roman de Troie. Par Benoît de Sainte- More. Ed. Joly. Paris, 1870.

2 Paris, 1886. The number of monographs on this subject is, however, very large, and I should like at least to add Mr Wallis Budge's Alexander the Great (the Syriac version of Callisthenes), Cambridge, 1889, and his subsequent Life and Exploits of Alexander,

knows less thoroughly, less of old, and in parts at second-hand. It is the simplest truth to say that in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries France kept the literary school of Europe, and that, with the single exception of Iceland, during a part, and only a part, of the time, all the nations of Europe were content to do, each in its own tongue, and sometimes even in hers, the lessons which she taught, the exercises which she set them. That the scholars sometimes far surpassed their masters is quite true, and is nothing unusual; that they were scholars is simple fact.

Callisthenes.

The Alexander story, which Mr Wallis Budge, our chief authority (and perhaps the chief authority) on the Oriental versions of it, speaks of as a book which has had more readers than any other, the Bible alone excepted," is of an antiquity impossible to determine in any manner at all certain. Nor is the exact place of its origin, or the language in which it was originally written, to be pronounced upon with anything like confidence. What does seem reasonably sure is that what is called "the PseudoCallisthenes"-that is to say, the fabulous biography of the great king, which is certainly the basis of all Western, and perhaps that of most Eastern, versions of the legend-was put into Greek at least as early as the third century after Christ, and thence into Latin (by "Julius Valerius" or another) before the middle of the fourth. And it appears probable that some of the Eastern versions, if not themselves the original (and a strong fight has been made for the Æthiopic or Old-Egyptian origin of nearly the whole), represent

Greek texts older than those we have, as well as in some cases other Eastern texts which may be older still. Before any modern Western vernacular handled the subject, there were Alexander legends, not merely in Greek and Latin, not merely in Ethiopic or Coptic, but in Armenian and Syriac, in Hebrew and Arabic, in Persian and perhaps in Turkish and it is possible that, either indirectly before the Crusades, or directly through and after them, the legend as told in the West received additions from the East.

As a whole, however, the Pseudo-Callisthenes, or rather his Latin interpreter Julius Valerius,1 was the main source of the medieval legend of Alexander. And it is not at all impossible (though the old vague assertions that this or that medieval characteristic or development was derived from the East were rarely based on any solid foundation so far as their authors knew) that this Alexander legend did, at second-hand, and by suggesting imitation of its contents and methods, give to some of the most noteworthy parts. of mediæval literature itself an Eastern colouring, perhaps to some extent even an Eastern substance,

Latin versions.

Still the direct sources of knowledge in the West were undoubtedly Latin versions of the PseudoCallisthenes, one of which, that ascribed to Julius Valerius, appears, as has been said, to have existed before the middle of the fourth century, while the other, sometimes called the Historia de Præliis, is later by a good deal. Later still, and repre

1 Most conveniently accessible in the Teubner collection, ed. Kübler, Leipzig, 1888.

senting traditions necessarily different from and later than those of the Callisthenes book, was the source of the most marvellous elements in the Alexandreids of the twelfth and subsequent centuries, the Iter ad Paradisum, in which the conquerer was represented as having journeyed to the Earthly Paradise itself. After this, connected as it was with dim Oriental fables as to his approach to the unknown regions north-east of the Caucasus, and his making gates to shut out Gog, there could be no further difficulty, and all accretions as to his descent into the sea in a glass cage and so forth came easily.

Their story.

Nor could they, indeed, be said to be so very different in nature from at least the opening part of the Callisthenes version itself. This starts with what seems to be the capital and oldest part of the whole fabulous story, a very circumstantial account of the fictitious circumstances of the birth of Alexander. According to this, which is pretty constantly preserved in all the fabulous versions of the legend (a proof of its age), Nectanabus, an Egyptian king and magician, having ascertained by sortilege (a sort of kriegs-spiel on a basin of water with wax ships) that his throne is doomed, quits the country and goes to Macedonia. There he falls in love with Olympias, and during the absence of her husband succeeds by magic arts not only in persuading her that the god Ammon is her lover, but to some extent in persuading King Philip to believe this, and to accept the consequences, the part of Ammon having been played of course by Nectanabus himself. Bucephalus makes

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a considerable figure in the story, and Nectanabus devotes much attention to Alexander's education-care which the Prince repays (for no very discernible reason) by pushing his father and tutor into a pit, where the sorcerer dies after revealing the relationship. The rest of the story is mainly occupied by the wars with Darius and Porus (the former a good deal travestied), and two important parts, or rather appendices, of it are epistolary communications between Aristotle and Alexander on the one hand, Alexander and Dindymus (Dandamis, &c.), King of the Brahmins, on the other. After his Indian adventures the king is poisoned by Cassander or at his instigation.

Its develop

Into a framework of this kind fables of the sort above mentioned had, it will be seen, not the remotest difficulty in fitting themselves; and it was ments. not even a very long step onward to make Alexander a Christian, equip him with twelve peers, and the like. But it has been well demonstrated by M. Paul Meyer that though the fictitious narrative obtained wide acceptance, and even admission into their historical compilations by Vincent of Beauvais, Ekkehard, and others, a more sober tradition as to the hero obtained likewise. If we were more certain than we are as to the exact age of Quintus Curtius, it would be easier to be certain likewise how far he represents and how far he is the source of this more sober tradition. It seems clear that the Latin Alexandreis of Walter of Châtillon is derived from him, or from a common source, rather than from Valerius - Callisthenes while M. Meyer has dwelt upon a Latin

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