摘要：Abstract. Parallels between Julian the Apostate and Alexander the Great were drawn re-
peatedly in antiquity. Although the comparison instantiates a familiar topos in the reper-
toire of Roman imperial panegyrists and historiographers, in Julian’s case a unique com-
plexity attaches to the ‘Alexander comparison’ on several counts. Close reading discloses
lines of influence and reaction holding between the earlier and later testimonies, and
what some of them postulate reflects an awareness of observations made about Alexan-
der in Julian’s writings that indicate a strong interest in him on the emperor’s own part.
Moreover, the image of Julian as an obsessive ‘Alexander-emulator’ transmitted in one
strand of the ancient tradition has a modern counterpart in some scholarship which as-
cribes to him a deepening psychological inclination to identify with, or to rival, Alexan-
der. This paper aims both to explicate the formation and development of the theme of
Julian’s ‘likeness to Alexander’ as an antique literary construct, and to review the modern
representation of him as a passionate ‘Alexander-emulator’, arranged in four sections: I.
Introduction; II. Precedents and parallels: the ‘likeness to Alexander’ theme as a literary
topos; III. The passage of the Julian–Alexander comparison from rhetoric to historiogra-
phy in the external testimonies: (i) Libanius; (ii) Ammianus; (iii) the Christian testimonies
(Gregory Nazianzen, Philostorgius and Socrates Scholasticus); IV. Alexander’s image in
Julian’s writings: the hypothesis of emulation reviewed.
