The Alexander story, which Mr Wallis Budge, our chief authority (and perhaps _the_ chief authority) on the Oriental versions of it, speaks of as "a book which has had more readers than any other, the Bible alone excepted," is of an antiquity impossible to determine in any manner at all certain. Nor is the exact place of its origin, or the language in which it was originally written, to be pronounced upon with anything like confidence. What does seem reasonably sure is that what is called "the Pseudo-Callisthenes"--that is to say, the fabulous biography of the great king, which is certainly the basis of all Western, and perhaps that of most Eastern, versions of the legend--was put into Greek at least as early as the third century after Christ, and thence into Latin (by "Julius Valerius" or another) before the middle of the fourth. And it appears probable that some of the Eastern versions, if not themselves the original (and a strong fight has been made for the AEthiopic or Old-Egyptian origin of nearly the whole), represent Greek texts older than those we have, as well as in some cases other Eastern texts which may be older still. Before any modern Western vernacular handled the subject, there were Alexander legends, not merely in Greek and Latin, not merely in AEthiopic or Coptic, but in Armenian and Syriac, in Hebrew and Arabic, in Persian and perhaps in Turkish: and it is possible that, either indirectly before the Crusades, or directly through and after them, the legend as told in the West received additions from the East. As a whole, however, the Pseudo-Callisthenes, or rather his Latin interpreter Julius Valerius,[72] was the main source of the mediaeval legend of Alexander. And it is not at all impossible (though the old vague assertions that this or that mediaeval characteristic or development was derived from the East were rarely based on any solid foundation so far as their authors knew) that this Alexander legend did, at second-hand, and by suggesting imitation of its contents and methods, give to some of the most noteworthy parts of mediaeval literature itself an Eastern colouring, perhaps to some extent even an Eastern substance. [Footnote 72: Most conveniently accessible in the Teubner collection, ed. Kuebler, Leipzig, 1888.] [Sidenote: _Latin versions._]