34 THE FIRST DIVERS 



his death in 323 B.C. Soon his deeds were sung, with never- 

 ceasing embelHshment, in every land from MongoUa to 

 Britain. Finally, as the centuries wore on and on, most 

 accounts came to lose almost all basis of fact, expanding 

 into glowing tales of wonder and magic in secret, far-ofi 

 places, such as have centered in turn around Odysseus and 

 Solomon and Sinbad the Sailor, to say nothing of King 

 Arthur and Roland and T. E. Lawrence. 



Most of the surviving versions are based upon the ac- 

 count falsely attributed to Callisthenes, a companion of 

 Alexander. This history of "Pseudo-Callisthenes" was 

 Greek in origin, founded in part upon an Egyptian story, 

 and was probably written in the first centurie)S after 

 Christ. It was quickly translated again and again, until 

 before long it became known in most of the languages 

 of the near-East, such as Armenian, Syriac, Hebrew, 

 Arabic, Persian, and even Ethiopian, while European forms 

 appeared with equal rapidity. Each translator made omis- 

 sions and additions of his own, in accordance with his re- 

 ligion and nationality, so that an audience of small Ethi- 

 opian choir boys in the twelfth century would have been 

 introduced to an Alexander devoutly Christian! 



The Ethiopic version of Pseudo-Callisthenes has one of 

 the best accounts of Alexander's supposed descent into the 

 sea — an adventure which occurs in various forms in a 

 number of versions, and which has, as an historic founda- 

 tion, the remark, in some of the reasonably reliable sources, 

 that Alexander did conduct some marine investigations 



