into the past. But in Alexander’s world, war was considered by many philosophers to be the normal,
even natural state of human affairs. Moreover, nobody doubted how profound its effects were. War,
as the sixth-century B.C.E. Ionian philosopher Heraclitus insisted, was the father of all. Peace, alas,
was the childless maiden.
Those who have denied that Alexander had any real historical effects reveal more about their own
attitudes and values than about Alexander and his world. Writing history according to modern values
may make historians feel less guilty about their own nations’ histories or superior to subjects who
loom larger than life. But such an approach is anachronistic and does a disservice to the study of the
past. It is also a costly disservice, because it prevents us from understanding how Alexander and his
conquests continue to influence our world.
SHORT-TERM EFFECTS
If we try to set aside our own values and tendency to judge everyone in the past according to our
mores, it is easy to see that Alexander’s conquests had both more and less obvious short-, medium-,
and long-term effects upon his own world and upon later history.
Most immediately, Alexander brought about the replacement of the main political and military
authority in the Middle and Near East, the Achaemenid Persian dynasty. After Alexander,
Macedonians or Greeks ruled over lands from western Asia Minor to the Indus for the first and only
time in history.
Second, although Alexander’s system of administering his empire was based initially upon the
Persian system of administration, Alexander’s conquests brought about profound changes as well. In
his wake came the extension and substitution of the Greek language in place of Aramaic as the
language of imperial administration from Asia Minor to India. Of equal importance, there was the
foundation and spread of fundamentally Greek city-states from Alexandria in Egypt to Alexandria
Eschate in modern Tajikistan, and beyond. While some of these new foundations did not survive long
beyond the death of their founder, others did. Alexander projected the essential political unit of Greek
civilization, the polis, all the way from Egypt into Central Asia.
Before Alexander, the essential forms of Greek civic life (ethnos and polis) and the Greek language
were not widespread south and east of the Halys River in Asia Minor, except perhaps within a few
isolated trading posts such as Al Mina, at the mouth of the Orontes River in northern Syria, and
Naucratis, in the Nile Delta of Egypt. After Alexander, Greek civic life, as embodied especially in
the polis, dominated the ancient Middle and Near East, both militarily and politically, and Greek
became the language of public life. In the short term, Alexander thus transformed the military,
political, and cultural map of both Europe and Asia.
MEDIUM-TERM EFFECTS
In the medium term, Alexander’s effects were no less significant. Alexander was right about the
funeral games after his death. His generals did stage a vast contest in his honor: they fought for
decades to succeed him. Although many of Alexander’s friends and generals were brilliant soldiers
and administrators in their own right, none was able to reconstitute Alexander’s vast empire.
But there were glittering prizes for the best of the rest: Ptolemy I and his descendants ruled Egypt
down to 30 B.C.E.; Seleucus and his successors ruled Syria and the Near Eastern provinces of
Alexander’s empire; and Antigonus and his descendants ruled in Macedon and Greece. Eventually all
of these successor dynasties would be conquered, at times reluctantly and after a “long hesitation,”
but, in the end, ruthlessly and comprehensively by the Romans.
Only recently have we begun to appreciate just how vigorous the politics and cultures of these
successor kingdoms were. The period after Alexander’s death was not one of stagnation or
depoliticization. On the contrary, the so-called Hellenistic age, c. 323 to 30 B.C.E., was one of great
political, religious, and cultural energy and creativity. By contact with the cultures of Alexander’s
successor dynasties, Roman culture itself was fundamentally transformed, as the Romans themselves
explicitly recognized. All of this Alexander set in motion. How much more he might have catalyzed
had he lived for only a few more years, and conquered Arabia and the western Mediterranean, can
only be guessed.
LONG-TERM EFFECTS
If we look at Alexander’s long-term effects, the picture is more striking still, though almost never
fully appreciated. As we have seen, Alexander laid out the physical foundations of Greco-
Macedonian, and subsequently Roman, civilization in the Middle and Near East, often by his very
own hand. That Greco-Roman civilization dominated the eastern Mediterranean until the Arabic
invasions of the seventh century C.E., but the eastern Roman empire survived in the form of Byzantium
until the mid-fifteenth century, when Constantinople finally was conquered by the Ottoman Turks.
Alexander therefore was the original architect of an amalgam Greco-Roman civilization in the
Near East, which endured politically for more than 1,700 years. For a mere comet, he had a long
historical tail.
But Alexander’s legacies may be even more enduring and profound. For it was within or on the
borders of the Greco-Roman civilization that Alexander helped to establish that the three great
religions of the book, Rabbinic Judaism, early Christianity, and early Islam, evolved or were born.
These religions of the book ultimately evolved out of Judaism in relation to Greco-Roman civilization
and its religious practices and frequently in opposition to them. To take but one example of the
historical significance of those contacts and conflicts, few people seem to have reflected upon the
question of how and why all of the central texts of Christianity came to be written in Greek. Or to
make the point in another way, we might ask what the consequences would have been for the history
of Christianity if all of its canonical texts had been written in Hebrew or Aramaic, the everyday
language of Jesus and his closest disciples.
It was largely as a long-term result of Alexander’s conquests that Greek became the primary
language through which Christianity was spread throughout the Mediterranean world. Moreover, it
was on the island of Pharos, near Alexandria in Egypt, Alexander’s first and greatest foundation, that
the Torah was translated into Greek, supposedly by seventy-two learned Jews from Jerusalem during
the reign of Ptolemy II Philadelphus (308–246 B.C.E.). It was thus within the city whose plan
Alexander himself marked out with barley-meal crumbs in the shape of a Macedonian military cloak
that the Hebrew Bible was made into a book, the Septuagint, that could be read by Greeks.
Alexander’s conquests laid the physical, linguistic, and cultural foundations for the contacts and
conflicts between Greco-Roman polytheists and the peoples of the book. To the extent that the
religious beliefs of the peoples of the book were shaped by their contacts and conflicts with the
polytheists, we might say that those religions, as they are practiced today by more than three billion
believers worldwide, owe more than a little to the ambitions of a Macedonian king.
As Alexander conquered the Middle and Near East, he believed that he was laying th
e foundations
for a world empire of the best; instead he was building the civic substructure for the world empire of
a god who makes redemption possible for all. History is full of ironies and unintended consequences;
how Alexander’s empire of the best was transformed into the empire of the redeemed is among the
larger and more significant ones.
And so the oracle of Zeus Ammon may have been fulfilled, but in a different way. If Zeus Ammon
told Alexander that he would remain invincible until he reached the ends of the very earth, then the
oracle did not lie. Alexander’s name, story, and legacies have conquered the world. Ammon never
guaranteed that Alexander would be alive to see the day he conquered the world, nor did the ram-
headed god reveal how he would do it. But then again, oracles are notoriously difficult to interpret.
Whether the fulfillment of Ammon’s oracle in this way would have at last satisfied the passionate
longing of the ambiguous genius whose deeds have been described in this book can never be known.
THE AMBIGUITY OF GREATNESS
What mere mortals can know is that Alexander laid the foundations of the Greco-Roman civilization
from which Western civilization eventually arose. Perhaps this is why we care so much whether
Alexander was a mass murderer or a messiah. As the embarrassed or proud heirs of the civilization
he helped to create, we want Alexander to be either a villain or a savior. I hope to have shown that
Alexander was an ambiguous figure who combined great and admirable deeds and qualities with
terrible mistakes, sporadic crimes, and lapses of judgment. Like Mozart, Alexander also disturbs our
rest and reminds us that individual greatness often comes at a high price, that life indeed is fragile and
uncertain, and that the interpretation of the end of the drama can be viewed from many different
perspectives. But this has often been the case in history.
When he was First Lord of the Admiralty in 1915, Winston Churchill was responsible for strategic
mistakes that led to the deaths of thousands of British and Anzac soldiers at Gallipoli. Between
World War I and World War II, Churchill did everything possible to block self-rule by India, thereby
helping to deprive hundreds of millions of Indians of political freedom. His plan to interdict the
German supply of iron ore from Scandinavia in 1940 also led to disaster.
On the other hand, Churchill simply did not know how to give in to Hitler, and thereby, arguably,
saved Western civilization at a time when men “considered its redemption worth any price.” At the
end of a recent biography of Churchill written by a former English Labour politician and historian of
great distinction, Churchill was judged to be not only the greatest British prime minister of the
twentieth century, but also the greatest human being ever to occupy 10 Downing Street.
On Tuesday, July 31, 1945, at 7:48 A.M., by one eleven-word message written with a lead pencil,
Harry S. Truman signed the death certificates of about 130,000 Japanese civilians, who died instantly
or within a few months after the first atomic bomb exploded over Hiroshima on August 5. And yet, the
author of an enormous, prize-winning biography of Truman concluded that Truman “was the kind of
president the founding fathers had in mind for the country. He came directly from the people. He was
America.”
The point of citing such cases is not to denigrate two great leaders of the twentieth century or to
impugn the historical judgment of their biographers. It is to suggest, rather, that historical “greatness”
itself is often a far more ambiguous and subjective concept than is usually appreciated, and that many
great historical figures have made mistakes and caused great suffering without thereby becoming
monsters. Men and women with great abilities often have possessed correspondingly great flaws and
they have made terrible mistakes because, in the end, the great, just like the rest of us, finally are
human beings. We must learn to live with the ambiguity of the great. If we are able to live with the
ambiguity of the great, perhaps we may live better with our own. In the meantime, it may be wise to
keep an eye out for eagles.
Epilogue
ARRIAN’S EULOGY
As we contemplate the ambiguity of greatness nearly two millennia later, Arrian’s balanced judgment
of Alexander is still well worth considering.
Alexander died in the hundred and fourteenth Olympiad, in the archonship at Athens of Hegesias.
He lived thirty-two years and eight months, as Aristobulus says; he reigned twelve years and the
aforesaid eight months. In body he was very handsome, a great lover of hardships; of much
shrewdness, most courageous, most zealous for honor and danger, and most careful of religion;
most temperate in bodily pleasure, but as for pleasures of the mind, insatiable of glory alone;
most brilliant to seize on the right course of action, even where all was obscure; and where all
was clear, most happy in his conjectures of likelihood; most masterly in marshaling an army,
arming and equipping it; and in uplifting his soldiers’ spirits and filling them with good hopes,
and brushing away anything fearful in dangers by his own want of fear—in all this most noble.
And all that had to be done in uncertainty he did with the utmost daring; he was most skilled in
swift anticipation and gripping of his enemy before anyone had time to fear the event; he was
fraudulent; very sparing of money for his own pleasure, but most generous in benefits of others.
If, however, Alexander committed any error through haste or in anger, or if he went some
distance in the direction of eastern arrogance, this I do not regard as important; if readers will
consider in a spirit of charity Alexander’s youth, his unbroken success, and those courtiers who
associate with kings to flatter but not to improve them, and who always will so associate with
kings to their harm. But I do know that Alexander alone of the kings of old did repentance for his
faults, by reason of his noble nature; while most people, if they have admitted any error, by
defending their misdeed, as if it were a good deed, think that they will conceal their error; and
this is a great mistake. For I at least feel that the only cure for sin is a confession of sin and
evidence of repentance, since the offended party will not feel the offenses so grievous if the
offender agrees that he did not well; and for the man himself this good hope is left behind for the
future, that he will not so offend again if he appear grieved at the errors of the past. But that he
referred his birth to a god, even this I do not altogether think to be a grave fault, if it was not
perhaps a mere device to impress his subjects, and to appear more dignified. In point of fact I
hold him no less famous a king than Minos, Aeacus, or Radamanthus; they traced their origin
back to Zeus, and yet this was not associated by men of old with any arrogance; nor yet Theseus’
descent from Poseidon, nor Ion’s from Apollo. Moreover, I feel that the adoption of Persian
equipage was a device, both toward the Persians, so that their king might not appear wholly
removed from them, and toward the Macedonians, to mark some reversion from Macedonian
abruptness and arrogance; for the same reason, I suspect, he drafted into their ranks
the Persian
troops who carried the “golden apples” and the Persian nobles into their cavalry squadrons. And
his carousings, as Aristobulus says, were prolonged not for the wine, for Alexander was no
wine-bibber, but from a spirit of comradeship.
Whosoever speaks evil of Alexander, let him speak such evil, not merely by producing what
deserves evil-speaking, but gathering all that Alexander did into a single whole; let such a one
consider first himself, his own personality, his own fortunes, and then on the other hand
Alexander, what he became, and the height of human prosperity which he reached, having made
himself king, beyond all contradiction, of both continents, and having spread his fame over the
widest possible span; let such a one, I say, consider of whom he speaks evil; himself being more
puny, and busied about puny things, and not even bringing these to success. For I myself believe
that there was at that time no race of mankind, no city, no single individual, whither the name of
Alexander had not reached. And so not even I can suppose that a man quite beyond all other men
was born without some divine influence. Moreover, oracles are said to have prophesied
Alexander’s death, and visions coming to different persons, and dreams, dreamed by different
persons; there was also the general regard of mankind leading to this same conclusion, and the
memory of one more than human; and even now there are other oracles, after this great gap of
time, which have been delivered to the Macedonian race, and all tending to the highest
estimation of him. True it is that I myself have quarreled with certain acts in my history of
Alexander’s deeds, but I am bold to admire Alexander himself; and those acts I blamed, both for
the sake of my veracity, and also for the general benefit of mankind; and that is why I myself too
took up this history, not without the help of God.
Appendix
Sources: Flacks, Hacks, and Historians
THE LOST ALEXANDER LIBRARY
Before there was a library of Alexandria, there was a library of books about Alexander. The original
collection was made up of works written during and just after Alexander’s lifetime. Unfortunately, all