Alexander the Great and Solomon the Wise: Who was Ivan the Terrible quoting?

Abstract

Numerous legends and apocrypha, circulating in the non-literary scene of Slavia Orthodoxa, in which both Alexander the Great and Solomon the Wise were gradually endowed with parallel features, should have become the basis for the functional similarity of these images in Slavic literature. An important role in the literature of the southern and eastern Slavs in this process was played by the Serbian recension of the Alexander Romance, the second Slavonic translation of the pseudo-Callisthenes work. In the Romance Alexander the Great not only inherits the relics of King Solomon, but the Old Testament king becomes a favorite source for the author’s quotations; Alexander himself acquires a «all-wise heart», and perishes from the «women malice», like Solomon, who «heirs hell because of woman». The wisdom of Alexander in the South Slavic Romance allows one to explain one of Ivan the Terrible’s confusing apothegms in the First Epistle to Andrei Kurbsky: referring to an unnamed prophet, the tsar compares «the madness of women» with «the power of many». It seems that both parts of the apothegm are based on Serbian Alexander Romance, while the one that is dedicated to «women malice» is taken from the «proverbs of Alexander», which in their structure copy the apocryphal Judgments of Solomon. Apparently, thanks to Serbian Alexandria, the images of the kings of antiquity merged even in the mind of the Russian sovereign, who impressed his contemporaries with his education. It is possible that one of the consequences of this was the inclusion of Ivan the Terrible in the alternation of already three figures of legendary rulers who had similar functions in the later folklore narrations.