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1 results

  • 4 - Alexander, Philosophy and Rome

  • Edited by Richard Stoneman, University of Exeter
  • Book:
    A History of Alexander the Great in World Culture
    Published online:
    13 January 2022
    Print publication:
    03 February 2022, pp 65-85

  • Summary

    It is greatly tempting to speak of a specifically ‘Trajanic’ moment in Alexander reception, as this is the only moment in Greek literature in which an ‘idealised Greek’ Alexander appears. This chapter concentrates on his unusual figuration as a philosopher by Dio Chrysostom and Plutarch, which is both decisively Hellenocentric and at the same time motivated by Trajan’s own profile as a philhellene who admired Alexander as a military hero. The uniqueness of this image is suggested by contrast with other near-contemporary texts that are decidedly philosophical – those of Musonius Rufus, Epictetus, Pseudo-Diogenes and Maximus of Tyre – but that either ignore Alexander or see him as a philosophical anti-type. Idealising Alexander required opportunity, which I suggest came quickly in the form of Trajan, was seized upon by a couple of experimentalists, and disappeared just as quickly, at least within secular literature.