The Alexander most visible to us today is one who was created and recreated in the Roman period. While Alexander’s presence in literature is strong enough that we can reasonably describe the trajectory of intellectual interest in Alexander during the Roman period, more difficult to pin down is the degree to which powerful Romans engaged in conscious imitatio or aemulatio Alexandri, which generally involves squaring literary hints with material evidence that does not always speak to us as directly as we would like it to. Without dismissing the world of ways in which various aspects of Alexander-myth may have been subtly exploited by powerful Romans, this paper charts a path between overly credulous and overly sceptical conclusions concerning individual Romans by taking an overview approach of imperial interest and tightening our definitions of ‘imitation’ or ‘emulation’ in the context of Romans and Alexander. I conclude that both imitatio and aemulatio look quite different at Rome than they do in the provincial east.

It is greatly tempting to speak of a specifically ‘Trajanic’ moment in Alexander reception, as this is the only moment in Greek literature in which an ‘idealised Greek’ Alexander appears. This chapter concentrates on his unusual figuration as a philosopher by Dio Chrysostom and Plutarch, which is both decisively Hellenocentric and at the same time motivated by Trajan’s own profile as a philhellene who admired Alexander as a military hero. The uniqueness of this image is suggested by contrast with other near-contemporary texts that are decidedly philosophical – those of Musonius Rufus, Epictetus, Pseudo-Diogenes and Maximus of Tyre – but that either ignore Alexander or see him as a philosophical anti-type. Idealising Alexander required opportunity, which I suggest came quickly in the form of Trajan, was seized upon by a couple of experimentalists, and disappeared just as quickly, at least within secular literature.