Il pallone di Alessandro. Simbologie inverse del potere tra opposti contendenti alla luce delle numerose ricezioni del Romanzo di Alessandro nelle tradizioni greca, latina, armena e siriaca

Antonio C. D. Panaino

Dipartimento di Beni Culturali

Alma Mater Studiorum – Università di Bologna, Accademico Effettivo

Abstract

According to a famous episode contained in the Romance of Alexander (1.36-38), Darius III sent three gifts to his rival Alexander: «a whip, a ball and a chest full of gold». This homage, actually provocative, becomes an opportunity for an amphibolic reinterpretation of the symbolism of each of these gifts. The present study focuses in particular on the different perception of the image of the ball/sphere, between a playful object and a cosmological-astronomical model, starting from the different and opposite Greek and Iranian observation points, and then following its evolution through the later receptions of the original Greek Vorlage of the Romance in Latin, Armenian and Syriac. The investigation thus allows us to analyze on a semiotic level the perception of the “sphere” as an object with multiple meanings through the lexicographic complexity that this word allows to emerge in the rendering of the same interlocution between hard enemies, inevitably bearers of different visions of the world.

Keywords

Alexander Romance, Gifts, Sphere, Ball, Cosmology, Iran, Greece, Armenia, Syria.

This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the CC BY 4.0 license

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