The ancient Greek text in Alexander’s letter took more time to make than the entire spread itself. 😭

Alexander and his mother, Olympias exchanged letters during their lifetime, and this habit is featured in the Alexander Romance as well – in fact, about a third of the Romance is epistolary, using the frame narrative of Alexander recalling his post-Persian Conquest adventures to his mother and Aristotle. In my version, Alexander is just about to start writing that letter.

I originally wrote the letter in English for Alexander to read aloud, but I wanted the scroll he’s writing in to be in ancient Greek.

I constructed a first draft translation by bringing in the original letter-opening line from the Romance, studying and choosing a letter-writing formula among many (The Formulaic Language of the Greek Private Papyrus Letters, Delphine Nachtergaele), and some machine translation (which I didn’t quite trust).

The next step was to transcribe and convert the sentences from mixed-case into uppercase, since they only had capital letters back then (lowercase letters were invented around Alexander’s time but didn’t become a thing until some hundred years later). I used that as an opportunity to learn my Greek alphabets, while breaking down the sentence and correcting the machine part.

Βασιλεὺς Ἀλέξανδρος Ὀλυμπιάδι τῇ γλυκυτάτῃ μου μητρὶ χαίρειν καὶ σε πολλὰ εὐχόμενος ὑγιαίνειν. Πολὺς χρόνος ἐγένετο ἀπὸ τῆς προτέρου μου ἐπῐστολῆς.

Then I wrote that in boustrophedon, which is a left to right, right to left alternating reading order. For each alternating line the letters are mirrored.

I did this mainly to flex lol. It’s not really needed for Alexander to write boustrophedon – but I thought it’d be cool to showcase an outmoded style of writing/reading.

Footnotes:

1. Strabo’s quote: Book 11, Chapter 5, Paragraph 6.