Encounters III: Antonios Pontoropoulos – Performing Gender and Agency in Greek, Latin, and Scandinavian Alexander Romance(s)

About the Lecture

Directly after the death of Alexander the Great, stories concerning his life and conquests circulated across the ancient Mediterranean, giving rise to the Alexander Romance, a fictionalized biography continuously rewritten across multiple linguistic and cultural contexts, from Greek and Latin to Hebrew, Persian, and later Western vernaculars. In this lecture, I will focus on Late Antique Greek versions, Latin rewritings, and a medieval vernacular text written in Old Swedish. This rich textual tradition adapts Alexander as a hero to new historical, ideological, and cultural achievements, while at the same time preserving persistent forms of gender fluidity. Across its various recensions and adaptations, Alexander is constructed through modes of gendered ambiguity that unsettle normative models of heroic masculinity, while female characters are positioned in ways that complicate fixed binaries of voice, gender, and agency.

By focusing on a selection of narrative episodes in which gender appears fluid, ambiguous, or internally contested, my presentation is structured around the following questions: a) How do Greek, Latin, and Scandinavian versions of the Alexander Romance construct and negotiate gender within a broader narrative framework? b) How can gender performativity illuminate the narrative mechanisms through which gendered subjectivity is produced, destabilized, and transformed across different cultural contexts? c) How do different versions of the Alexander Romance engage with, reproduce, or challenge normative gender discourses in Late Antique and Medieval contexts?

Addressing these questions, this presentation emphasizes the Alexander Romance as a space in which gender, identity, and authority are constantly reimagined and reshaped, while also tracing the ways in which Mediterranean literary traditions continued to engage with Western and Scandinavian literary culture across Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. Moreover, it shows how gender and agency are not prefixed, essentialized categories but are constantly performed and negotiated.

About the Speaker

Antonios Pontoropoulos is an affiliated researcher at the Swedish Institute in Rome. He holds a PhD in ancient Greek literature from Uppsala University (2019). His main research interests include ancient fiction, fictionality, and epistolography in combination with modern feminist theory and gender studies as well as the medieval and early modern reception of the classical texts. He recently published a monograph titled Writing Herstory through Ancient Greek Letters: Representations of Women in Fictional Epistolography (Bloomsbury Academic, 2026).

The Encounters Lecture Series

The lecture series started in 2025 as a collaboration between the Norwegian Institutes in Athens and Rome, with the objective of connecting the academic traditions of the Nordic countries and the Mediterranean. It aims specifically at providing a platform for emerging scholars from Norway, Italy, and Greece whose research bridges the two regions.

Dr Delia Tzortzaki (Senior Advisor & Leader of the Norwegian Institute in Athens) and Prof. Han Lamers (Director of the Norwegian Institute in Rome) are jointly hosting the series.

To participate online, there is no need to register, just use this zoom-link: https://uio.zoom.us/j/64101616694. 

For in-person participation in Rome, please register by Wednesday 4 November via https://nettskjema.no/a/encounters