A dubious hero for the time: Roman histories of Alexander the Great in Plantagenet England

No individual of antiquity appealed to the imagination of medieval writers and artists more than Alexander the Great. For many of those who took up the subject, however, Alexander was not so much the historical ruler of Macedon as he was a legendary figure transformed by centuries of apocryphal tales of his career. This dissertation contends that, despite the frequent conflation of history and legend, a concerted investigation into a more accurate version of Alexander's career led English writers from the eleventh century onward to discriminate the facets of Alexander that confound us still: truth from fiction, or, to use the jargon of the time, “true history” (vera historia) from “popular history” (vulgata historia). The genesis of this movement is found in unedited and largely neglected Anglo-Latin manuscripts of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and by examining these documents I have identified Roman histories of ancient Macedon as the primary sources of this uniquely English insistence on Alexander's flaws and failures. Concerned with the devolution of the conqueror into luxuriant ‘Eastern’ living and tyrannical behavior, these Roman narratives, notably Justin's epitome of the Philippic Histories, revolutionized Alexander's reception in England. This forthright and objective text offered English writers a novel understanding of Alexander's inherent vices, his corruption by his continued success on the battlefield, his soldiers' ultimate rejection of him as a leader geographically and ideologically deracinated from his Macedonian upbringing, and the demise of his global amidst years of civil war. The second aim of this dissertation is to consider the ramifications of this Roman portrayal of human culpability and the collapse of the global Macedonian empire. Not only did Anglo-Latin historiographers possess a record with which to question the validity of popular legends, but even the earliest romances in Anglo-Norman and Middle English offered a broader narrative of Macedon's fall and the vices of its leaders. As a result of this wider awareness of his belligerence, corruption, and untimely death in Babylon, Alexander was finally rejected as a model of kingship with the end of the Plantagenets and the rise of the Lancastrians.