Alexander's stories
In chapter XXXVI of the Second Book of Essays, Montaigne compares the " three excellent men " whom he puts " above all others " : Homer, Epaminondas, whom he finally judges " the most excellent " and Alexander the Great. Of the latter, he not only praises " so many military virtues, diligence, foresight, patience, discipline, subtlety, magnanimity, resolution, happiness, in which he was the first of men ", but also " the excellence of his knowledge and ability, the duration and greatness of his glory, pure, clean, free from stain and envy ". Montaigne adds : " even long after his death it was a religious belief to consider that his medals brought good fortune to those who carried them ; and that more Kings and Princes have written his gestures than other Historians have written the gestures of any other King or Prince, and that even now the Mohammedans, who despise all other histories, receive and honor his alone by special privilege ".
What better introduction than this text for today's Débat d'histoire . The theme will be the representations and appropriations of Alexander's story, from the earliest Greek and Latin texts that tell it, to contemporary presences of the Macedonian conqueror in politics and fiction. This ambitious journey across centuries and cultures (including those of the " Mahometans mentioned by Montaigne ") is made possible by Pierre Briant's recently published book in Gallimard's Folio Histoire collection. Its title is : Alexandre. Exégèse des lieux communs.
In it, Pierre Briant continues and expands on his " " research into representations of Alexander. In 2012, he presented the first results in a work already published by Gallimard, Alexandre des Lumières. Fragments d'histoire européenne, in which he studied the multiple links forged between the mid-seventeenth century and the 1830s by historians and philosophers between the history of Alexander's Asian expeditions and conquests - in Egypt, Persia and India - and the European expansion and colonization of their time. With this new book, Pierre Briant has broadened his inquiry in a number of ways : by considering a very long period of time, from the 4th century BC to the present day, by making ample room for non-European traditions of Alexander history or myth, by taking into account not only the Alexander of historians, but that of painters and sculptors, novelists and film-makers, and even that of rock bands " heavy metal ".
Pierre Briant is at home at Collège France, where he is a professor emeritus. As we follow in Alexander's footsteps, the footsteps of history and the footsteps of legends, we'll be able to discuss in today's conversation the major questions that underlie all his thinking : for example, the contradictory political uses of the past, the resistance of myths to historical knowledge, or the strong links - even if they are denied or hidden - that bind this knowledge, constructed by professional historians, with the fables of fiction, the prejudices of peoples or the interests of nations and states.
The multiple " stories " of Alexander are part of a fundamental tension : on the one hand, the proliferation of appropriations of the hero's gesture, on the other, the repetition of the opposition between civilizing conquest and destructive conquest. This long duration of the same motifs is due as much to the scarcity of Greek and Roman historical sources (Plutarch, Diodorus Siculus, Quinte-Curce, Arrien) - all produced at a distance from the events themselves - as to the many translations, adaptations and rewritings of the Roman d'Alexandre, composed in Greek between the 2nd and 4th centuries AD and translated into Latin, then into all the languages of the East and West. It is this novel, both historical and marvellous, that inspires the Byzantine and medieval Alexander, instrument of God and first crusader, and the Persian or Arab Alexander, believer in Allah.
To the force of the " colonial interpretation " of Alexander, whose conquests are supposed to have opened up the world, merged peoples and developed Asia, Pierre Briant counters the need for a " history in equal parts " of the Macedonian victor and the Persian vanquished and, more broadly, a " multipolar history " that takes into consideration the half-century between 350 and 300 B.C. J.- C. and the processes it entailedC. and the processes he describes as " transitions of empires ". Hence, the possibility " of wresting the history of the Achaemenid Empire from Hellenocentrism " and, conversely, " the impossibility of writing the history of Alexander without knowing from the inside that of the Achaemenid Empire ". The study of the legendary constructs and political uses to which Alexander's conquests gave rise is an essential prerequisite for building a history which, by dismantling the forms and reasons for them, brings us closer to the reality of the past they imagine or instrumentalize.