4 - Cultural identity

Summary

The Alexander Romance is a fictionalised account of Alexander's conquests that stands at what many take to be the beginning of the novel writing enterprise in antiquity. The story opens with the last pharaoh of Egypt, Nectanebo II, learning that his country was about to be conquered, fleeing to Macedon, setting up shop as a magician, and seducing Philip's queen Olympias. Nectanebo, not Philip II, fathers Alexander, and as a result Alexander is both Macedonian-Greek and Egyptian, a potent fiction that enables him to lay claim to Egypt. At the same time he remains the pupil of Aristotle and the heir of his apparent father, Philip. Heliodorus' Charicleia and Theagenes is the last of the five Greek novels that have survived intact. One of its main characters, white-skinned Charicleia, was exposed at birth, rescued and brought to Greece where she was raised as an upper-class Greek girl. After adventures that carry her from Greece to Egypt and Ethiopia, she is reunited with her natural parents, who happen to be the black-skinned king and queen of Ethiopia. Charicleia appears Greek, but biologically she is not Greek at all. At the moment of her conception, her mother was gazing at a picture of Andromeda awaiting rescue from the sea monster by Perseus. That image of Greek womanhood was so powerful that it altered the course of nature and the resulting white child was exposed to protect her mother's reputation. In The Alexander Romance and Charicleia and Theagenes the conventional oppositions of Greek and barbarian are intentionally joined in characters whose behaviour clearly allows them to act Greek, whatever their ethnically distinctive parentage.