This interesting Latin story was, as we shall presently see, translated or rather adapted from a Jewish original of much earlier date. Linguistic considerations lead us to assign the Latin text to the earlier part of the twelfth century.[1] The name of the compiler is not known with certainty. Several of the later manuscripts[2] preface the tract with the words, "Solomon, teacher of the Jews, relates the following story," but it is not clear whether this Solomon is intended as the author of the original Hebrew romance, or merely designates the Latin translator.
In its Latin form the story, which shows evident traces of having been revised by a Christian, achieved a considerable popularity, and we find it worked into a number of Latin and vernacular compilations,[3] in certain cases with considerable variations, which show that some other recension of it was also current with which we are not now acquainted. Thus in French literature it appears in several metrical versions of the Roman d' Alexandre,[4] and in a prose compilation of the thirteenth century known as Les Fails des Romains. In the latter version the deviation is particularly marked:[5]
Alexander journeys so far east that he reaches the spot where the sun rises. There he finds a vast river, the Ganges, identified with the Gyon, one of the four rivers
- ↑ Paul Meyer (Alexandre le Grand, ii. p. 49).
- ↑ Those at Dublin, Munich, and Pavia.
- ↑ The impostor "Mandeville" borrowed some details from it, as I have pointed out in a communication to Notes and Queries (December 26, 1914, p. 505). It was used also by the author of the Speculum Laicorum, written about 1272, and by Robert Holcot (d. 1349).
- ↑ P. Meyer (Romania, xi. 1882, pp. 219-247; Alexandre, ii. pp. 201, 221).
- ↑ Paul Meyer (Romania, xiv. 1885, p. 14; Alexandre, ii. pp. 356-361). The story as told in the Faits was reproduced about 1261 in another French compilation, the anonymous continuation of the History of William of Tyre (Receuil des Historiens des Croisades; Historiens Occidentaux, ii. 1859, pp. 586-589).
