Conceiving Eskandar the Great

The eskandar-nāma, or Alexandrian romance, was a popular choice amongst the narratives about the pre-Islamic past adapted by numerous Persian poets and storytellers from the eleventh through fifteenth centuries. Like its medieval French and English counterparts, Persian Alexanderian romances take readers through an array of legends that include battles with natural and supernatural enemies, conversations with philosophers and sages, and quests to real and imagined places. Yet unlike its Hellenistic predecessors as well as its medieval European counterparts, many Persian Alexandrian romances claim that Eskandar is of Persian lineage himself, as the son of Dārāb (Darius II) and Nahīd, the daughter of Philip II of Macedon. In this paper, I demonstrate how the Shāhnāmeh and Neẓāmī’s (d. 1209) Eskandar-nāma wrestle with this attributed lineage, and what this can show us about each text’s complex relationship to the past.
The Shāhnāmeh narrates the scene of Eskandar’s birth through an anecdote that narrates how Dārāb, having obtained Nahīd from Philip II as tribute, subsequently sends her back to Macedonia on account of her bad breath. Out of shame, she hides her pregnancy such that Eskandar becomes known by all as the son of Philip II. Through this genealogical alignment that reflects the account of earlier historians writing in Arabic such as Dīnavarī (d. 903), Eskandar’s conquest of Persia is consequently portrayed as the legitimate move of a king and subsequent narratives about his conquests can be internalized from within the Shāhnāmeh’s world-building perspective. Moreover, this hidden genealogy allows for the Shāhnāmeh to maintain different levels of “truth” in accordance with what is externally and internally known by various characters as Eskandar’s conquests are subsequently depicted. Neẓāmī’s Eskandar-nāma, however, directly engages with this genealogy only to dismiss it as fabricated, asserting from the beginning of the narrative that Eskandar was the son of Philip II. Shifting the focus from genealogy to conduct, the Eskandar-nāma emphasizes Eskandar’s pious character, which gives way to his eventual prophethood, and thus internalizes his character within an Islamic vision of prophetic history. By comparing these two depictions of Eskandar’s birth, I maintain that we can see competing visions of the past at play through observing how Eskandar is variantly “Persianized” or “Islamized.” Moreover, by placing these depictions in conversation with genre theorists such as Jauss and Bakhtin, this paper aims to show how each text relates to historical “truth” while revisiting their rich intertextuality and contemporary generic classifications.