The Alexander Legends

By the time he was thirty years old, Alexander III of Macedon—more commonly known as Alexander the Great—had assembled one of the largest empires of the ancient world through the extraordinary success of his military campaigns. At the time of his untimely death in 323 BC at age 33, Alexander’s rule stretched from Greece to Egypt and into northwest India and modern-day Pakistan, “the largest empire the world had yet known”.

Less than a century after his death, his larger-than-life personality and military and political achievements inspired a work of popular literature that focused on Alexander’s exploits and ambitions, real and imagined. This work, a story of Alexander’s legends called the Alexander Romance, continued to be “rewritten, expanded and modified throughout antiquity” and has “formed the basis of an enormous literature on Alexander that was produced in the Greek east and penetrated Arabic and Persian traditions, medieval and modern Greece, and…the romances of western Europe.”

One of the Alexander mythical legends, a story of Alexander enclosing the wild tribes of Gog and Magog with a wall at the Caspian Gates, originated from Jewish tradition and was widely known in the Middle Ages from a Syriac version entitled Revelationes, an apocalyptic world history falsely attributed to Methodius, bishop of Patara. The Qur’ān’s version of this story (Q 18.83-102) is “very close to that in Pseudo-Methodius.”