I mirabilia Indiae nel Commonitorium Palladii

In the first part of the Commonitorium Palladii there is a series of news on India that the narrator, Palladio in fact, would have received indirectly from a lawyer from Thebes of Egypt. Here we find mention of some mirabilia: the extraordinary longevity of the inhabitants of the island of Taprobane, identified with the current Ceylon, known as the Blessed, who would come to live up to 150 years due to the exceptionally healthy climate and the inscrutable will divine; an archipelago of a thousand islands in the Red Sea, called Maniole, in which there is supposedly a magnetic stone capable of attracting ships equipped with iron clubs and preventing them from moving; again on the island of Taprobane, the trees would never lack fruit, because in the same tree, while one branch is in bloom, another would see fruit sprouting and yet another would have already ripe fruit; then the sheep would not have woolen hair and their bristly skins would clothe the inhabitants; in the Ganges would live an enormous animal, the odontotyrannus, capable of devouring an entire elephant; and again serpents seventy cubits long, ants a span long, scorpions one cubit long. This series of mirabilia is linked to the paradoxographic genre, which has a long tradition in the Greek and Roman world starting from the Alexandrian age. In fact, it is no coincidence that the natural elements and wonderful animals are found in the stories of Alexander the Great, due to his arrival on the edge of the known world and of India. A part of the critics investigated to understand whether authentic news, which reached Alexander and his companions through merchants or travellers about that part of the world hitherto unknown, was originally hidden behind them. Unknown realities may have been reinterpreted in a fantastic form by the Western imagination, or perhaps already referred to as mirabilia to the conquerors: in the odonto-tyrant, for example, one could "recognize either the Indus crocodile or some other really existing animal, however already fantastically transformed into the imagination of the Indians themselves” (Ruggini); one can reflect on the fact that trees with perennial fruits are echoes of plants that produce inflorescences several times a year at different times (coconuts?). In this contribution we try to examine in particular the mirabilia present in the Commonitorium Palladii, to see their relationship with the Romance of Alexander and with the other late writings on Alexander the Great, following, as far as possible, the maze of sources and focusing on the particular contextualization of these phenomena within the work which is the main object of our interest.