From Tyrant to Philosopher-King: A Literary History of Alexander the Great in Medieval and Early Modern England.
- Author/Editor
- Stone, Charles Russell.
- Title
- From Tyrant to Philosopher-King: A Literary History of Alexander the Great in Medieval and Early Modern England.
- Published
- Stone, Charles Russell. From Tyrant to Philosopher-King: A Literary History of Alexander the Great in Medieval and Early Modern England. Turnhout: Brepols, 2013. 254 pp.
- Review
- Stone proposes "to offer a history of the histories of Alexander, the classical texts that were interpolated, redacted, and translated by scholars from the twelfth to the seventeenth century and that account for our modern dichotomous conception of Alexander as a disturbingly violent tyrant or a political visionary who established a harmonious, multicultural empire" (2). The Middle Ages knew Alexander in two versions: as a decadent, corrupt pagan tyrant who deserved poisoning, or as a political idealist who sought to "defeat and unite disparate cultures under the yoke of political and philosophical idealism" (5). The first position is that of Pompeius Trogus, and later of Orosius; the second was spread initially by Diodorus Siculus, Arrian, Quintus Curtius, Plutarch, and Justin in the Roman world, and subsequently, combined with folk Eastern elements, through romances. Chapter 5 (141-63) is devoted to "'Moral' Gower and the Rejection of Alexander." Stone sets Gower firmly in the former camp: "By the end of his career Gower possessed an extensive knowledge of the various traditions of Alexander literature in circulation and clearly rejected Alexander as one of history's imitable models of kingship" (141). Gower's Alexander emerges gradually but steadily over the course of his oeuvre as "an extended moral warning on kingship" (142). Stone traces this progress through the "Mirour de l'Omme" (Alexander is undone by Fortune, and his empire by the greed and treachery of his successors); the "Vox Clamantis" (Gower as Aristotle to Richard II/Alexander, arguing in Senecan fashion that "the fall of a man is due in part to his own faults and errors, not merely the machinations wrought by Fortune" [144], and--like Aristotle--failing to be heard); the "Confessio Amantis" (writing to advise both Richard and Henry IV, Gower "effectively graduates from echoing . . . Seneca and Cicero . . . to the manner of Augustine and Orosius" [157-58], and holds up Alexander's insatiable appetite for conquest, "for waging perpetual warfare and disturbing world peace . . . a clear condemnation of war," as his undoing); and "In Praise of Peace" ("clearly marks the culmination of Gower's development of a singular, definitive reception of Alexander, as he condemns more explicitly than at any point in his writings the ancient ruler's inability to restrain his will and mad desire for conquest") (159). [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 41.1]
- Date
- 2013
- Gower Subjects
- Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations
Mirour de l'Omme (Speculum Meditatntis
Vox Clamantis
Confessio Amantis
In Praise of Peace