Cool.

Just ran into one of the Modern Greek graduate students, whom I know from my work downstairs in cataloging. As luck would have it, he's working on a topic that is near and dear to my heart, the so-called "Alexander Romance" which sprung up around the tale of Alexander the Great and his exploits supposed as told by Callisthenes, a member of his inner circle. Although the story we have is almost certainly not an actual eyewitness report of the King of Macedon's conquest of nearly half of Asia, the original version of the story (which we now call "Pseudo-Callisthenes") is thought to have drawn upon such firsthand accounts; thereafter the narrative begins to pick up all sorts of fantastic episodes, such as Alexander voyaging to the bottom of the sea in a diving bell, or searching for the Water of Life in the Far East. The popularity of the Pseudo-Callisthenes' Romance cannot be overstated - not only did it rival Homer's epics in stature throughout the Greek-speaking world, but it was translated into almost every known language in ancient and medieval times, and still persists in the poetry and folk traditions of the peoples of Central Asia.

Nevertheless, you probably have never heard of Pseudo-Callisthenes. Classics departments eschew him because he's, well, not classical; and the Great Books crowd don't consider the Alexander Romance to be a Great Book, since it's more of a series of tales than a single story. Never mind that aside from the New Testament, this is the most important and influential text ever written in Greek, and considering how largely Alexander looms in Jewish and Muslim thought, I would venture that the Romance edges out even the Bible! And yet we know it only if we stumble upon it, as I did long after my time at Boston University. Well, perhaps the upcoming blockbuster movies about Alexander the Great (I think there were two of them in production the last time I checked) will inspire people to go back to the sources for the original tale, which is truly one of the Greatest Stories Ever Told.