Antonios Pontoropoulos

My project Letters and representations of cultural identities in the Alexander Romance: Late antique receptions” focuses on the transmission and cultural reception of the so-called Alexander Romance in late antique literature. The Alexander Romance is a fictionalised biography of Alexander the Great that is rewritten and translated, in both prose and verse, across western and eastern vernaculars. Here, I focus on the Byzantine β recension (5^th century C.E.) and Julius Valerius’ late antique Latin text, titled De rebus gestis Alexandri Macedonis translatae ex Aesopo Graeco, dated to 400 C.E.  The principal aim of this project is then to explore the use of fictional letters and epistolary communication in late antique Greek and Latin Alexander traditions. There are around thirty-five fictional letters which circulated either as independent anthologies or as embedded letters in wider narratives. The writers and their receivers are mostly historical individuals linked with the campaigns of Alexander the Great. In both texts, specific literary and/or epistolary motifs function as signposts, which convey processes of cultural transmission and reception across different historical and literary contexts. This project therefore makes an important contribution to the study of fictional letters in late antique and Byzantine Alexander texts and elucidates processes of cultural reception and transmission of these narratives.