Alexander the Great in Jerusalem and the Origins of the Alexander Romance

The ACE department is thrilled to announce an Ancient History Seminar titled 'Alexander the Great in Jerusalem and the Origins of the Alexander Romance' delivered by Ory Amitay, (University of Haifa) on the 6 May 2025, Rendall Building, Lecture Theatre 7.

Tuesday 6 May 5pm (UK) | Rendall, Lecture Theatre 7 or online | Open to the public, and University of Liverpool staff and students

This is a hybrid event, we encourage in-person attendance which facilitates discussion. To join on zoom please click here.

Abstract

The topics presented in this talk come from a comprehensive study of the tradition concerning the meeting between Alexander the Great and the Judeans of Jerusalem. Historically, even if Alexander did visit Jerusalem, it was essentially a non-event, nothing to write home about. The historical void provided an opportunity for consecutive Judean storytellers to fill it with political myths of their own creation.

The overall purpose of these myths—so I argue in my new book
Alexander the Great in Jerusalem: Myth and History (OUP, 2025)
—was on the one hand to negotiate the installation of successive forms of foreign rule over Judea, and on the other to find room for these foreign rules within Judean sacred history. The earliest of these stories, scarcely discussed in previous scholarship, is preserved in the epsilon recension of the Alexander Romance (AR).

While the text itself was composed in the ninth century CE, it is based on a much earlier work, hailing most likely from Judea in the early years of Seleukid rule following the Fifth Syrian War. This heretofore unrecognized work, which I call the Seleukid Romance, represents an early Judean impression of the Seleukid dynasty. In this work, Alexander stands for the Seleukid dynasty, and in particular for Antiochos III “the Great.”

The positive attitude of the Judean work to the Seleukids stands in stark contrast to the dramatic developments in this relationship from the 170s BCE onwards. The composition in the 190s BCE of a Seleukid version of AR, in which Alexander acts as a cipher for a later Hellenistic monarch, is part of a bigger picture. An early similar use of Alexander appears already in the story of Plutarch (Mor. 340d) about Alexander’s counterfactual visit to Cyprus, in which he allegorically stands for Ptolemy I Soter.[1]

A couple of generations later, Ptolemy III Euergetes and the Ptolemaic kingdom are once again represented by Alexander in important episodes in the AR (alpha), dealing with Alexander’s (once again) counterfactual travels to southern Italy and Carthage.[2] Taken together, I suggest that the Ptolemaic episodes of AR alpha and the response supplied by the Seleukid Romance argue for the existence of a Ptolemaic version of the AR as early as the time of Euergetes, which served as a source for the alpha recension, and consequently for the entire AR tradition.

[1] Amitay, Ory and Pestarino, Beatrice. 2025. “Transplanting Kingship: Alexander’s Visit to Cyprus and Ptolemaic Power Legitimation in the Early Hellenistic Period”, The Classical Quarterly 75: 1–15.
[2] Amitay, Ory. 2023. “Alexander between Rome and Carthage in the Alexander Romance (A)”, Phoenix 77: 23–42.

Contact: Beatrice.Pestarino@liverpool.ac.uk