Alexandreis

The Alexandreis (or Alexandreid) is a medieval Latin epic poem by Walter of Châtillon, a 12th-century French writer and theologian. It gives an account of the life of Alexander the Great, based on Quintus Curtius Rufus' Historia Alexandri Magni. The poem was popular and influential in Walter's own times: according to Henry of Ghent, it was more popular than Virgil's Aeneid in thirteenth-century schools. Translations were made into Old Spanish (Libro de Alexandre), Middle Dutch (Jacob van Maerlant's Alexanders Geesten) into Old Norse as the Alexanderssaga; Matthew of Vendôme and Alan of Lille borrowed from it and Henry of Settimello imitated it, but it is now seldom read. One line is sometimes quoted:

Incidis in Scyllam cupiens vitare Charybdim (You run into Scylla, desiring to avoid Charybdis) (V.301).

Verses from the poem are quoted by the Lion and the Unicorn in Aesop's fable 110.