Cultural Depictions of Alexander The Great - Literature

Literature

• Dante Alighieri, in Canto 12 of the Inferno, puts Alexander in the river of boiling blood that forms the First Round of the Seventh Circle of Hell, where the murderers and warmongers are punished. Alexander is in the deepest part of the river with the great mass murderers and warmakers of history.
• Alexandre le Grand, tragedy in five acts by Jean Racine, first staged 1665.
• In 1949, Terence Rattigan's play Adventure Story, based on Alexander the Great, premiered in London.
• From 1969 to 1981, Mary Renault wrote a historical fiction trilogy on the life of Alexander: Fire From Heaven (about his early life), The Persian Boy (about his conquest of Persia, his expedition to India, and his death, seen from the viewpoint of Bagoas, a Persian eunuch and Alexander's eromenos), and Funeral Games (about the events following his death). Alexander also appears briefly in Renault's novel The Mask of Apollo, and is alluded to directly in The Last of the Wine and indirectly in The Praise Singer. In addition to the fiction, Renault also wrote a non-fiction biography, The Nature of Alexander.
• French writer Roger Peyrefitte wrote a trilogy about Alexander the great which is regarded as a masterpiece of erudition: La Jeunesse d'Alexandre, Les Conquêtes d'Alexandre and Alexandre le Grand.
• A further trilogy of novels about Alexander was written in Italian by Valerio Massimo Manfredi and subsequently published in an English translation, entitled Child of a Dream, The Sands of Ammon and The Ends of the Earth.
• David Gemmell's Dark Prince features Alexander as the chosen vessel for a world-destroying demon king. ISBN 0-345-37910-1.
• Ivan Efremov wrote a historical novel Thais of Athens about the life of hetaera Thaïs, as she follows Alexander in his campaigns. Alexander and Thaïs have a love relationship in the novel.
• Steven Pressfield's 2004 book The Virtues of War is told from the first-person perspective of Alexander. Pressfield's novel The Afghan Campaign is told from the point of view of a soldier in Alexander's army. Alexander makes several brief appearances in the novel.
• Rudyard Kipling's story "The Man Who Would Be King" provides some glimpses of Alexander's legacy. Made into a movie of the same title in 1975, starring Sean Connery and Michael Caine.
• In Alan Moore's Watchmen, one of the main characters, Ozymandias, goes into detail about how he followed in Alexander the Great's footsteps in order to achieve enlightenment.
• In Fate/zero, the light novel authored by Urobochi Gen, Alexander (going by the name Iskandar) appears as the Servant Rider, and is referred to as the King of Conquerors.
• In Stephen Baxter's A Time Odyssey series, Alexander plays a part in the first and third books, featuring an encounter with Genghis Khan's horde and the extension of Alexander's empire into the New World.
• In Nicholas Nicastro's 2004 historical novel Empire of Ashes, Alexander's career is described from the perspective of a skeptical Athenian soldier/historian who must debunk Alexander's official divinity to save himself from a charge of sacrilege.
• Eternity by Greg Bear features an alternate reality in which Alexander did not die young and his empire flourished instead of collapsing.
• In the novel by Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels in part III, chapter VII, Gulliver sees and talks to the ghost of Alexander the Great.
• In the pages of The Haunted Tank from DC Comics, the spirit of Alexander sent the spirit of Confederate General J.E.B. Stuart to protect World War II Lieutenant Jeb Stuart Smith and the Light Tank M3 Stuart he commands.