Life of Alexander the Great Is One

¶ … life of Alexander the Great is one of the most well documented lives of the time and within all of that documentation there is a sense that Alexander was either a tyrant or a saint like human. It is clear that the mystery of his existence is challenged by the propriety of the ancient writings and the individual author's ideal of the hero, whom they wished to portray. In Alexander's time and in many times to follow it was the ideal to be feared, with zeal by the enemy and loved with zeal by the ally.

Then Alexander, eager to show his father his prowess, and second to none in excess of zeal, and also with many good men at his side, first succeeded in breaking the solid front of the enemy line and, striking down many, he fought those opposite him into the ground. (Diodorus, 16.85.5-86)

The value of Michael Wood's documentary film, "In the Footsteps of Alexander the Great," lies in the extensive manner in which Wood discusses the differences between the right and wrong of Alexander's time vs. our own.

Additionally the modern reader and even the modern man has a great deal of opinion regarding war, cruelty and any number of other seemingly senseless occurrences that are repeated to the farthest degree within most fable like histories of great men. The challenge is then to interpret, as a modern reader the reality of the life of someone who possesses the ideal characteristics of a hero of Alexander's time.

Reading the Works of Arrian, Curtius, Diodorus, and Plutarch, regardless of the modern language interpretations still leaves the reader with his or her own impressions of right and wrong. It is therefore difficult to address the man Alexander as a whole. The author's all tell the story as historians, yet in a very different tradition of history. The historic fable, the genre of its time does two things, it retells the story as it has been retold before, either through other older epic poetry histories or through legend mixed with the narrators own idea of right and wrong for their time.

Plutarch, probably the most prolific re-teller of Alexander's life seems to express a clear assessment of Alexanader as a man of great honor and civility expressing repeatedly the gifts given to his captured enemies and the kindnesses showed to their widows and daughters. In Plutarch's treatise on Alexander's fortune and virtue Plutarch sums up the ideal philosopher as he compares Alexander to some of the greatest one by one and then reiterates his point-of-view on Alexander's kindness and graciousness.

But if you consider the effects of Alexander's instruction, you will see that he educated the Hyrcanians to contract marriages, taught the Arachosians to till the soil, and persuaded the Sogdians to support their parents, not to kill them, and the Persians to respect their mothers, not to marry them. Most admirable philosophy, which induced the Indians to worship Greek gods, and the Scythians to bury their dead and not to eat them! (Plutarch)

In the manner of an honorable man and a wise man Alexander is given the virtues of a philosopher, the ideal man of Plutarch's age.

In Anabasis, Arrian of Nicodemia tells a tale he hopes to be true but that he states emphatically has questions.

A record the story, which may or may not be true; but the fact remains that no Roman has ever made any reference to this delegation, any more than the two writers on Alexander who are my principal authorities, Aristobulus and Ptolemy son of Lagus. Moreover, it would have been out of character for the republican Romans who enjoyed at that date entirely free institutions, to send a delegation to a foreign king, especially at such a distance from their own country, when they had nothing either to fear or to gain from him. (sections 7.15.4-6)

This is only one example of the way in which interpretation has taken literary form throughout the history of Alexander's story. Arrian retells the story as he interprets it and then adds his own knowledge of the context of the history. Curtius also has a similar message in relation to how things were as apposed to how things have been told.

So it was that Alexander, his pride soaring above the human plane, now proceeded, as mentioned above, to emulate not only the glory won from those peoples by Dionysus, but the Bacchic tradition as well: he decided to imitate the god's procession (whether that was, in fact, the original triumphal march that the god instituted or merely sport on the part of his bacchants).