Alexander The Great The Hunt For A New Past

1 The Fame of Alexander The world remembers Iskander and his deeds. Macedonia gave him its sceptre. Iskander was the son of Philip. His life was one long dream of glory. Abai, 'Iskander', trans. Richard McKane Inheriting at the age of twenty his father Philip's position as master of the Greek world east of the Adriatic, Alexander had also, by the ripe old age of twenty-six, made himself master of the once mighty Persian Empire. By the time he was thirty he had taken his victorious arms to the limits of the known oikoumene (inhabited world). Yet, before his thirty-third birthday he was dead. Small surprise, therefore, that he should have become a legend in his own lifetime. That his legend has spread so far and so wide from Iceland to China since his death in 323 bce is due very largely to the so-called Alexander Romance. This fabulous fiction took shape in Egypt, mostly some five or more centuries after Alexander's death. Thanks to this, and for other reasons too, of course, Alexander became in various countries and at various times a hero, a quasi-holy man, a Christian saint, a new Achilles, a philosopher, a scientist, a prophet and a visionary. But in antiquity he was most famous of all as a conqueror. Here is Arrian, writing in the early second century ce under the influence of the Roman emperor Trajan's recent conquests in Parthia (in modern Iran); his Anabasis ('March Up Country') is our best ancient historical source on Alexander: 'For my part I cannot determine with certainty what sort of plans Alexander had in mind, but none was small and petty, and he would not have stopped conquering even if he'd added Europe to Asia and the Britannic Islands to Europe . . .' Arrian was quite properly alert to Alexander's fame. But that comment on his last plans (see Chapter 10) is just the sort of measured and reflective remark that commends him to the modern critical historian and biographer of the world-conqueror. Apart, perhaps, from his casual remark about 'the Britannic Islands' as if they were not part of 'Europe' . . . A millennium and a half later, Shakespeare's Hamlet comments rather irreverently in the graveyard scene on the possible earthly fate of Alexander's corpse: Alexander died, Alexander was buried, Alexander returneth into dust; the dust is earth; of earth we make loam; and why of that loam, whereto he was converted, might they not stop a beer-barrel? This is a chauvinistic English illustration of the fact that Alexander has featured in the national literatures of some eighty countries, stretching from our own Britannic islands to the Malay peninsula by way of Kazakhstan (home of Abai, its national poet). This, in its turn, is another way of saying that Alexander is probably the most famous of the few individuals in human history whose bright light has shot across the firmament to mark the end of one era and the beginning of another. As the novelist Mary Butts put it rather well (in a note to her 1931 fiction, The Macedonian): 'There are men who sum up an epoch, and men who begin another. Alexander did both.' She aptly cited, too, another passage of Arrian: 'I am persuaded that there is no nation, city or people then in being where his name did not reach; for which reason, whatever origin he might boast of, or claim to himself, there seems to me to have been some divine hand presiding over both his birth and his actions, inasmuch as no mortal on earth either excelled or equalled him.' Another local testimony and testament to Alexander's fameCartledge, Paul is the author of 'Alexander The Great The Hunt For A New Past', published 2005 under ISBN 9781400079193 and ISBN 1400079195.