The Alexandrian Lists

Abstract We shall be concerned in this opening chapter, not with the cities attested by the Alexander-historians as having been founded by Alexander in the course of his campaigns but with the lists of cities named as Alexandrias in (a) the Epitome of Stephanus of Byzantium’s ‘[ineq], (b) the earliest surviving Greek and associated versions (henceforth called the a-tradition) of the Alexander-Romance, properly called the Life of Alexander of Macedon, and (c) the lists found in Alexandrian World-Chronicles and Annals of the Imperial period. These lists agree at several points, and the type of information they provide enables us to consider them collectively, but nevertheless each group presents different problems. It seems probable that, except for Stephanus, in the form and substance in which they survive they have a common origin in the same type of popular Alexandrian literature, and, specifically, in the lost original version of the Greek Alexander Romance; although the text of Stephanus is associated with the same milieu, it only occasionally draws on the same sources. It is, in any case, essential that the traditions which they represent should in the first place be studied individually. We may begin with Stephanus.