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 m] PHASES OF PAGAN DECADENCE 39 the year 100 a.d.* Its most apparent motive was to give an Egyptian parentage to the great conqueror. Though the narrative is utterly unhistorical, it is not an original romance invented by its author; for it appears to have been put together from popu- lar Graeco-oriental myths respecting the conqueror's career. Some of these stories originally may have had no connection with Alexander, but were gradually attached to him, just as the French chansons de geste ascribe to Charlemagne and his peers many deeds of former heroes whose fame was absorbed in the epic effulgence of the greatest of mediaeval em- perors. But whatever its source, this collection of fantastic, impossible stories exhibits all manner of literary decline. In place of deeds which some hero might have done, there is a succession of preposterous occurrences having no related sequence; nothing of real human significance takes place ; there is no rela- tion of fortune to character; and no character to which one lot rather than another might properly have fallen. Adaptations of this work — in some of them Alex- ander is a propagator of the Christian faith — in many languages filled the East; it was turned into Latin, and Latin versions of it in the West were the chief source of that vast company of versified vernacular romances which, while they fed the mediaeval passion for the remote and marvellous, also satisfied the his- toric and literary sense of the Middle Ages with 1 It iB interwting to note that It U not Utor than the time of Arrlmn, who wrote the naoft aober historical aoooont of Alexander that we