Dáráb establishes himself upon the throne, defeats the Arabs and the Rúmans, and marries the daughter of Failakús, the Cæsar. Conceiving, however, a dislike for his spouse, he sends her back to her father, at whose court her child is born, named Sikandar, for the reason given in the story, and brought up by Failakús as his own son and heir. Dáráb meanwhile marries again, has another son—Dárá—falls into ill-health, appoints Dárá his successor, and dies.

At this point in the Sháhnáma, in as much as this and the two following reigns deal almost entirely with the subject of Alexander the Great, who is known to Orientals under the name of Iskandar or Sikandar, there is an important change in the provenance and character of the subject-matter. We have had an instance already in which it seemed probable that recourse was being had indirectly to Greek writers,*

but in the present case the debt to them is indisputable. The basis of the whole account is Greek, and so in a great measure is the superstructure, but the latter to some extent has been pulled down and rebuilt, modified in detail, and added to, by Egyptian, Arabic, and Persian hands. As a general introduction to the three following reigns, therefore, it will be well to set before the reader in outline such facts as are necessary for the proper understanding of the accounts given in the reigns in question.

Alexander the Great, in his expedition to the East, was accom­panied by a literary and scientific staff, in order that the results achieved might be handed down to posterity in a way worthy of so great an occasion. Thus Eumenes kept the royal diary,*

Bæton and Diognetus recorded the distances traversed,*

Aristobulus was interested in matters geographical, ethnological, and botanical,*

while Callisthenes and others drew up general histories. Some of Alexander's commanders too, such as Ptolemy, son of Lagus, who became King of Egypt, Nearchus, the admiral, and Onesi-critus, the pilot, of Alexander's fleet, also left accounts, as did others who were contemporaries but took no part in the expedi­tion. The result was a large assortment of kindred works, not one of which is extant in its original form, though later writers have preserved a good deal of the substance, and in some cases fragments, of the originals. Thus Arrian, our best authority on the whole subject, based his Anabasis on Ptolemy and Aristo-bulus, *

and in his Indica made much use of Nearchus.*

Arrian, however, tells us that even Ptolemy and Aristobulus were not always in agreement,*

and further, that though Alexander's ex­pedition served to explode many fables, it at the same time led to the fabrication of fresh ones.*

Onesicritus, for instance, who, though only the pilot, claimed in his account to have been the admiral,*

of Alexander's fleet, heard tell of two dragons, or serpents, measuring 80 and 140 cubits in length respectively,*

and speaks of whales off the coast of Balúchistán as being half a stade, i.e. over 100 yards, long, and broad in proportion.*

Bæton relieved the prosaic details of mensuration with the account of a sylvan folk—natives of Mount Imaus—who had backward-pointing feet.*

Again, the question as to whether or no the Amazons visited Alexander split the early authorities into two separate camps.*

We may conclude, therefore, that the seeds of the Romance that grew up in later times round the personality of Alexander the Great were sown in his lifetime. The growth thus started not merely increased in bulk by a natural process of evolution in succeeding centuries, but also absorbed materials that originally had no connexion at all with him and his undertakings. Thus, for example, when the historic facts of his career had grown somewhat dim in the popular mind, the expedition in B.C. 332 of his uncle Alexander I. of Epirus to Italy became part of his legend,*

and he was credited later on with having visited Candace, the Ethiopian queen, at Meroe. We may assume, too, that the experiences of the rank and file of his time-expired veterans, military and naval, lost nothing in the telling. Speaking generally too, the travellers' tales, often based on misunderstood metaphor or misinterpreted natural phenomena —tales such as in after-times were told by the friar Odorico and Sir John Maundeville—would add their quota to the romance of the subject. The reader will find examples of such fables in the reign of Sikandar. Long before his time, however, they had made their way from India to Greece. Homer knew something of them, so did Herodotus, so did Hecatæus probably, and so beyond doubt did Ctesias. Moreover, no form was too monstrous or abnormal for the Indian imagination to conceive with respect to god or demon or beings, like the Rákshasas, who were a blend of demon and of man. The companions of Alexander merely heard over again what earlier adventurers had heard, but their association with Alexander brought about a special association of such tales with him.

It should be noted further that the Greeks, like ourselves, had two Indies—an Eastern and a Western—and consequently the fables derived from and respecting the Indians or, as they were called, Ethiopians, were held to apply to the West as well as to the East.*

It was in Egypt—the land which he had delivered from the hated Persians and where Ptolemy and his successors had main­tained the Alexandrian tradition and had ruled with so much glory—and it was at Alexandria, which the great conqueror had founded and where he was buried, that the Greek Romance of Alexander, so far as we are aware, first received literary form and expression. The author is unknown, but appears to have written about the third century of the Christian era. The authorship is attributed in one of the extant MSS. of the work to the historian Callisthenes, the relative of Aristotle through whose influence it came about that he accompanied Alexander to the East. His rough comments, however, on Alexander's adoption of Persian customs were not well received by the conqueror; he was imprisoned and died in captivity. The title of “The Pseudo-Callisthenes,” by which the Romance now is known, is said to have been bestowed upon it in the first instance by Isaac Casaubon.*

The work no longer is extant in what we may call its primitive form, but this, branching in three directions, gave rise to a numerous progeny of MSS., of which some twenty still survive. Three of them, known as A, B, and C respectively, are preserved in the National Library in Paris, and to one or other of these three the rest of the MSS. are said to conform in character.*

The MS. known as A, a very early Latin version of the Romance supposed to have been made by one Julius Valerius early in the fifth century A.D., and an Armenian version of about the same date,*

are looked upon as representing collectively the nearest approximation that we possess to the original work. The MS. known as B is the only one of the three that attributes the authorship to Callisthenes.*

During the seventh century A.D. some Greek text of the Romance, conforming generally to the A type, was translated into middle Persian, or Pahlaví, as it is called, and this Pahlaví version was retranslated shortly afterwards into Syriac. No trace of the Pahlaví version remains, and there is no scrap of historical evidence to indicate that such a work ever existed, but the Syriac version is still extant, and has been edited with an English translation by Budge. We call it BHA, and shall have occasion frequently to refer to it in the ensuing pages.

It was the publication of this Syriac version that led Professor Nöldeke to infer, and satisfactorily to prove, that a Pahlaví version of the Pseudo-Callisthenes once must have existed. Such proofs naturally are very technical, but one example may be given by way of illustration. It concerns the transliteration of proper names unknown to the Syriac translator. Nöldeke found that in the Syriac version the letter l was substituted for the letter r in such words as Osiris, Abdera, Kraterus, Parmenion, and others, while, on the other hand, r was substituted for l in Platæa, Eumelus, Candaules, &c. Now, there is nothing in the form of these two letters, as they are written in Greek, Arabic, or in Syriae itself to account for such substitutions and interchanges, but it so happens that in Pahlaví the same sign stands for both l and r, and the conclusion follows that the Syriac version was made not from the Greek or Arabic, but from the Pahlaví.*

Appended to all the MSS. of the Syriac version, distinct from it, but, ??ke it, based upon the Pseudo-Callisthenes, there is extant a Syriac Christian Legend of Alexander which claims to be taken from the manuscripts in the house of the archives of the kings of Alexandria.*

This Legend was composed about the years A.D. 514 or 515, and seems to have been suggested by an incursion of the Huns through the Caucasus, which took place at that time. The author writes as one horror-stricken at the uncouth aspect and savagery of the invaders, and at the ruin caused by them. Shortly after its composition, it was turned into verse, with some additions by the Syriac poet, Jacob of Sarúg, who died in A.D. 521. The legend, and the additions thus made to it, derive respectively from branches B and C of the Pseudo-Callisthenes, and their subject-matter became known to Muhammad, who made use of it in the Kurán, where Alexander is referred to under the title of “Zú-'l-karnain,” or “The Two-horned,” that name having been suggested by the Legend, where we read: “The Lord said to him (Alexander), ‘Behold I have magnified thee above all king­doms, and I have made horns of iron to grow on thy head, that thou mayest thrust down the kingdoms of the earth with them.”*

Naturally, Zú-'l-karnain became an interesting personality to the followers of Muhammad. The passage in the Kurán referring to him was much commented on, and the Syriac accounts of him were translated into Arabic. Now it was to the interest of learned Persians, living under Arab rule in the centuries succeed­ing the Muhammadan conquest of Írán, to impress their masters with the sense of the past greatness of the empire that they had subdued, and for this purpose the legends of the vanquished race were translated into Arabic. It obviously was desirable that so great a hero as Alexander, and one so interesting to the followers of the Prophet, should be utilised, and in order to effect this the whole Persian traditional view of Alexander was altered. As we have seen alroady,*

he was held in hate and horror in Sásánian times as the arch-persecutor and would-be exterminator of Zoroas­trianism; he was one of a trinity of ill, of which the other two were Zahhák and Afrásiyáb. Persians, however, that had been converted to, or had been brought up in, the Muhammadan Faith soon came to regard Alexander from another standpoint. To them he was no longer an evil being who had striven to uproot the true religion, but the hero commissioned by God to overthrow a false one, in fact another Asfandiyár with other and better aims, for had not his credentials been countersigned by the Prophet himself? This change of view robbed such memories as still survived of Alexander's triumph over Darius Codomanus of much of their bitterness, and it only remained to abate it al­together by legitimating the conqueror's position. This was easily managed, for the author of the Pseudo-Callisthenes had suggested a way. Concerned for the honour of his country by birth or adoption, he had made Alexander out to be the son of the last native king of Egypt—Nectanebus II.—who had suc­ceeded, it was said, in passing himself off to Olympias, the wife of Philip II. of Macedon, during the latter's absence at the wars, as no less a person than Amen-Ra, the two-horned god of Egypt. The Egyptians were old hands at this sort of falsification. Hero-dotus tells us*

that Cambyses, after his conquest of Egypt, was made out by the Egyptians to be the son of Nitetis, a daughter of Apries. What Egyptians had done the Persians could do, the necessary story was substituted for that of Nectanebus, as we shall read in this reign, Sikandar became the eldest son of Sháh Dáráb, and the oppressor of Írán one of its national heroes.

At what precise period Alexander assumed his station in the long line of the Sháhs is not known, and probably never will be. In the Pahlaví version, made, it would seem, by some one who was neither an orthodox Zoroastrian nor an orthodox Muhamma­dan, he was still, as we see from its Syriac representative, the son of Nectanebus; in Firdausí he is the son of Dáráb. Between the two accounts there is a space of some three centuries or more. We may reduce the interval somewhat by assuming, as we may, that the metamorphosis had been completed in the days when Firdausí was growing up, and a new edition of the Bástán-náma in modern Persian was being compiled in the middle of the tenth century by order of Abú Mansúr.*

This, we may assume, con­tained a version of the Pseudo-Callisthenes as it existed after centuries of adaptation by Persian and Arabic hands. The ascrip­tion of a Persian paternity to Alexander can be traced further back. It was known to Tabarí who died in A.D. 922, and to Dínawarí who died in A.D. 896.*

Neither of them endorses the story, but merely gives it a place among the other accounts that, in accord to the method of Arabic historians, they give of the same event. As these accounts consist of the statements of older authorities, we may consider that the story was current early in the ninth century A.D. Most unfortunately the work that, more than all others, would have thrown light upon that and many another point, and taken us back to the middle of the eighth cen­tury, is no longer extant. This was the Arabic translation of the Bástán-náma made by Ibn Mukaffa. He was a Zoroastrian who became a Muhammadan late in life, thereby, as was said of him, merely exchanging one corner of hell for another, as his orthodoxy was more than suspect. He was learned both in the Pahlaví and in the Arabic, and was put to death about A.D. 760. It is not unlikely that he was responsible for the inclusion of Alexander among the legitimate Sháhs. By all accounts he was just the right man in the right place for such an undertaking.

It is hoped that the above sketch may be sufficient to indicate the provenance of the Romance of Alexander the Great and how it came about that it was incorporated into Íránian national legend. It will be seen that it reached Firdausí in a mingled stream. The basis is Greek, and the Pseudo-Callisthenes itself is based on history. The broad facts are there. It tells us that Alexander was a Grecian king, that he conquered Egypt, invaded and sub­dued Írán, penetrated into India, defeated Porus, returned, died at Babylon, and was buried at Alexandria. Its author introduced Egyptian elements and additions, and it underwent further adap­tations at Persian and Arab hands. These will be noted and dealt with as they occur in this and the two following reigns. The vogue of the Pseudo-Callisthenes, however, is not to be cir­cumscribed within such limits as these. For many centuries it superseded the more historic accounts of Alexander that still are extant; and versions, in addition to those already mentioned, have appeared in Latin, Hebrew, Turkish, Ethiopic,*

Coptic, English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Norwegian, Swedish, Dutch, Slavonic, Malay, and Siamese.*

Dáráb, the last of the mythical Sháhs, does not appear in the Zandavasta, with which at this point we part company. In order to connect him with the Kaiánian dynasty he was made the hero of a foundling legend, as we saw in the previous volume.*

His name was suggested by that of his successor Dárá—the historical Darius Codomanus—who was remembered in connexion with the invasion of Persia by Alexander the Great, and his inclusion among the Sháhs was due to the necessity of providing his suc­cessor with a father. Later on he was called upon again to act in that capacity to his successor's conqueror.

§ 1. Dárábgird, now Dáráb, is in Párs, some fifty miles south of the salt lake Niris, which also is referred to.

§ 2. Border wars between the Íránians and the northern Arabs were of frequent occurrence.*

For Shu'íb cf. NT, p. 57, note.

§§ 3-4. The account here given of the incidents that led up to the birth of Sikandar is a Persian substitution for the Egyptian story told in the Pseudo-Callisthenes,*

and in the Syriac version.*

The oft-told tale is briefly as follows. Nectanebus*

was king of Egypt and a great magician. By his magic arts he had triumphed on all occasions over his enemies. At length the time came when he perceived that his spells no longer would avail to protect his country from invaders, so, disguising himself, he fled to Mace­donia, where he set up as a soothsayer. His fame soon reached the ears of Olympias, the wife of Philip of Macedon, who then was absent on a campaign. She had heard a rumour that he intended to divorce her and take another spouse. Accordingly she made up her mind to consult Nectanebus, and summoned him. He came, and at once was smitten with her beauty. She sought his advice on the matter of the divorce, and he told her that the rumour was not false, but that he could help her. He then went on to inform her that she would have a son by the two-horned god of Egypt—Amen. With the aid of dreams sent by his magic arts he reconciled first her and then Philip to the situation, per­sonated the god himself, and thus became the father of Alexander the Great, taking good care that the birth of the child should occur at the most auspicious astrological moment.

The foal, stated in the text to have heen born at the same time as Alexander, is of course the famous steed Bucephalus, which accompanied him in his campaigns as far as the river Hydaspes, the modern Jhílam, and either was killed by the son of Porus when Alexander was forcing the passage of that river or died shortly afterwards of toil and decrepitude at the age of thirty years. Alexander founded two cities by the river in memory of his charger and of his victory over Porus, and named them respec­tively Bucephala (Jalálpúr?) and Nicæa (Mong?).*

It is only in the Persian and Ethiopic versions of the Pseudo-Callisthenes that the births of Alexander and Bucephalus are made to syn­chronise, which shows that both accounts come from an Arabic source, for as the Syriac version represents a no longer extant Pahlaví version, so the Ethiopic derives from a lost Arabic one. In the Ethiopic version Bucephalus is a mare.*

§ 3. We have here a reference to Russia if the reading is correct. P reads “Sús.” The word “Rús” (Byzantine ) dates from the ninth century A.D., when Northmen (Scandinavians) founded the Russian Empire. It may be a corruption of rothsmen, “rowers.”*

The Russians were in evidence in Firdausí's days.*

§ 4. In the Pseudo-Callisthenes, Bk. i. c. 13, and in the Syriac version loc. cit., Philip is said to have chosen the name Alexander in memory of a dead son, so called, whom he had had by a former wife. According to one of the accounts in Tabarí, the mother of Alexander was the daughter of the king of the Rúmans and named Halái (Olympias?). The Sháh, her husband, finding that she was troubled by an unpleasant odour, gave orders that means should be found to remedy this. The doctors agreed to exhibit the wood of a tree called in Persian sandar. They boiled it and washed her with the extract. This, to a great extent, did away with the smell, but not entirely, and, as the cure was not com­plete, the Sháh sent her back to her father. She was already with child, however, and when her son was born she composed his name by putting her own and that of the tree together, and called him Halái-Sandarús, that is the primitive form of Al Iskandarús.*

Sandar appears to be a shortened form of sandarús, the Arar tree, Callitris quadrivalvis, a native of north-west Africa, which pro­duces the resin known as “gum juniper” or “sandarach,” the latter a word often used in the Sháhnáma.*

Firdausí takes a different view of the meaning of Iskandar. He makes that word equivalent to Iskandarús, but he attributes to it apparently its proper meaning. It is derived either from the Greek , garlic; or the Latin ascalonium, shallot. In any case the treat­ment that the lady underwent appears to have been more or less homœopathic in character.