DAIMONIZED:

Great expectations: Four new biographies suggest that the more we write about Alexander the Great, the less we understand him (Rory Stewart, January 8, 2005, The Guardian)

For nearly two and a half thousand years, Alexander represented a central vision of mankind. His life has the flavour of a fairy story, in part because it inspired so many. Physically beautiful, a fine warrior, educated by Aristotle, born to a royal court, he chose to risk his inheritance confronting the greatest empire in Europe and Asia. He defeated the Persians in every battle and conquered their territory to the very edge of the known world. At the banks of the last river of the Punjab, we are told, he wept because he had no more lands to conquer.

His soldiers, mostly older than he and desperate to return home, followed him for 10 years across 6,000 miles of Asia. In return, he was prepared to leap into their midst, unarmed, when they threatened to lynch him and to jump unsupported over the walls of Multan, when they held back afraid. The empire he established over a million square miles survived in various forms for 300 years. He introduced a coinage, a legal system, a form of philosophy and a style of art that transformed culture across Asia. All this he achieved before he died at 32. His life was magnificent in scope, scale and conviction. Ancient commentators were prepared to accept this without concealing his flaws.

Classical historians attacked him for massacring populations and destroying ancient cities; for murdering his senior staff and for leading his troops on dangerous and pointless desert crossings. Conservative Athenians saw him as a half-Barbarian, capricious Macedonian despot prone to indecent excesses of intemperance and ostentatious displays of vanity. His Macedonian followers were shocked by the respect he showed to local customs after his conquest of the Persian city of Babylon in modern Iraq. There, he took to worshipping local gods, appointed Persians to key positions, created regiments in which Asians mixed equally with Macedonians and attacked Greeks who insulted Persian custom. He was delighted, according to Arrian, when the Macedonian whom he appointed governor of Persia "liked Oriental ways, adopted Median dress, learned the Persian language and took to living as the Persians lived". This approach was as unpopular with some Macedonian followers as it might be with some occupiers of Iraq today.

But ancient writers at least had some sense of the temptations that went with being the absolute ruler of a million square miles of Asia and the most successful and wealthy man in the world before you were 30. By comparison with his drunken father, Philip, or his predecessor, the Persian king Darius, who kept 365 concubines and went to battle with a platoon of pastry chefs, Alexander seems relatively ascetic and level-headed. Most importantly, ancient writers were prepared to allow that for all his faults, Alexander was still indubitably a hero. [...]

Doherty, Cartledge and Foreman, like many modern writers, find it difficult to forgive Alexander's ambition. They see such ambition as a weakness in his claim to be a true Hellenic hero. Cartledge writes that Alexander would not allow his promotion of Hellenic culture to get in the way of his "one overriding ideal, the power and glory of Alexander". But few classical critics would have drawn such a distinction. They grasped that Alexander's love of glory was a reflection of his Hellenic background and an essential component of his heroism. His glory lay in personifying the highest virtues of Homeric culture. He wanted to be regarded as the epitome of his tutor Aristotle's virtuous man: generous, brave in war and great in soul, magnificent in gesture, proud and obsessed with honour. But most of all he wanted to be Achilles and that meant wanting, in his favourite words from Achilles, to be "the best, the best among the best: now and in perpetuity". Achilles, like Alexander, aimed not to be simply the fastest runner, though he was quick, nor a successful warrior, though he fought well. He wished to be acknowledged absolutely as our superior not just in body or in mind but in the very essence of his character. He tried to live like a god.

Alexander quite consciously aimed to be a hero, imitated other heroes and promoted himself as a hero. This underlay the scale of his achievements, the extremity of his courage and his charisma. And such ambition could be seen as a form of insecurity. Certainly, because he was not a god but only playing one, there was a gap between the real Alexander and his image as a hero, which could only be bridged by role-playing, exaggeration and rhetoric and by a culture which tolerated this kind of self-projection.

His contemporaries, and indeed audiences as late as the 19th century, saw nothing inconsistent in the coexistence of self-promotion, fantasy and greatness. They were prepared to allow that real merit could coexist with dreams and showmanship.

We are no longer prepared to accept this. Competitiveness, egotism, self-promotion and rhetoric are seen as weaknesses. Concepts of honour, nobility and magnificence, appropriate to male, aristocratic warriors, seem ridiculous and irrelevant. Our values are now too diverse for us to agree on who might be "the best of men". We are not prepared to acknowledge other men as "great" or our moral superiors. There are now more famous people than ever: some are famous for their plastic surgery or their skill with their right foot, some are famous for nothing in particular. We write about them with an easy familiarity, focusing on their flaws and ordinariness. Modern celebrities are not terrifying exemplars and we do not credit them with honour, nobility or greatness of soul. We acknowledge self-sacrificing heroes such as the 9/11 firemen but we emphasise their modesty. We like our heroes to be accidental heroes. We can no longer accept or create the conditions of Alexander's heroism.

Only a curiously antique historical novel by Stephen Pressfield captures something of Alexander's glamour and appeal.

What Mr. Pressfield also captures though is that Alexander is ultimately a failure because his conquests were only personal.

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 8, 2005 11:11 AM