The chapter considers the motivation for Alexander the Great’s expedition to India, which took him beyond the limits of the Persian Empire he had set out to conquer. Ambition (pothos) is seen as more probable than either strategic necessity or scientific curiosity. The course of the campaign from November 326 to July 325 BC is outlined, and the reasons for the savagery of the fighting during the journey down the Indus are considered. The chapter also reviews the impact of Alexander’s encounter with the ‘naked philosophers’ of Taxila. One of them, Calanus, travelled with Alexander until his death, and it is suggested that his conversation made an impression on another of Alexander’s companions, the philosopher Pyrrho, who became known as the founder of scepticism. The paper also reviews the legacy of Alexander in India. Foremost is the detailed account of India written by Megasthenes, a former member of Alexander’s army and ambassador from Seleucus to Candragupta. Indo-Greek dynasties persisted in north-west India for two centuries after Alexander’s death, but to narrate this history would go beyond the subject. The chapter looks briefly at the evidence for other Greeks who left records of their residence in India.

Sir William Alexander’s tragedies on classical themes include two relating to Alexander the Great: one is about the latter’s defeat of Darius III and the other follows the fortunes of the successors after Alexander’s death. (It begins with a long speech by Alexander’s ghost). This chapter aims to combat the prevailing critical contempt for these plays by demonstrating the high level of scholarship that went into their composition and the thematic unity to the Alexandraean Tragedie conferred by the series of chorus meditations on Fortune and mutability. Sir William’s educational background and classical reading are explored, as well as his connections with the stage, and his work is compared with earlier Elizabethan plays on classical themes, including the comparable play by Samuel Daniel, Philotas.

The introduction briefly surveys Alexander’s historical career before going on to describe the development of his legend in the various Greek and Latin versions of the Alexander Romance, which continued to be rewritten (as the Historia de Proeliis) to the end of the Middle Ages. It also provides the context for the contributions surveying the Jewish, Persian, Arabic, Spanish, Slavic, French and German receptions of Alexander in literature, as well as his impact as a political role model in the Crusades, Muslim expansion and the world-dominating ambitions of early modern Europe. It concludes with a glance at the contested figure of Alexander and his homeland of Macedonia, in the present-day Balkans.

Alexander played an important role in medieval Islamic philosophy and Persian literature, serving as a vehicle for discussions of the ‘ideal king’ in Mirror for Princes literature. This chapter explores the background to one particular work, Amir Khusraw’s Mirror of Alexander (1299), in which the king consults the philosopher Plato for advice on rulership before embarking on his submarine voyage to explore the nature of the universe. Plato’s characterisation as a mystical sage is contrasted in medieval Islam with the wisdom of Aristotle, Alexander’s teacher. In Amir Khusraw as in Nizami, Alexander is as much a philosopher as a king.

Greek accounts

These three passages are almost the only references to the customs of any Indian peoples in what survives of Ctesias’ account of India. Ctesias of Cnidus was a physician who held a post at the court of the Persian King Artaxerxes I, probably from 415 to 398/7 BCE. He wrote an extensive account of Persian history in twenty- three books and a much shorter description of India in one book. His history of Persia is regarded as extremely unreliable, not least where it contradicts his predecessor Herodotus, but it probably contains much that was in oral circulation in Persian court circles. Ctesias’ Indica is the first monograph devoted in Greek (or any other language) to India: he did not visit India but recorded what he had learned from merchants, some of them Bactrian, visiting Persia from the Indus Valley and the ‘Silk Road’. His works are lost, but we possess long excerpts from both of them in the reading diary of the tenth-century Byzantine bishop Photius, as well as scattered quotations in other writers, notably Aelian. Most of the Indian extract is devoted to hydrography, to zoological and botanical marvels – griffins, poisonous birds, manticores – and to bizarre races like the Dog-headed people. By contrast, Megasthenes, who spent time at the court of Chandragupta Maurya in the early third century BCE, wrote a book which included extensive information on manners and customs, including (F27 Schwanbeck = FGrH 715F32) their simplicity and the infrequency of lawsuits among them.