ALEXANDER’S TRUE GLORY (WHEELER)
If a man’s life-work is to be judged only by what he erects into formal organisation, then we must pronounce the career of Alexander a failure, and more than a failure. He had dismantled what he found, and built nothing sure in its place. His dream of fusing the East and the West had been fulfilled and embodied in no visible institution, no form of government or law, of state or church. Greece, Egypt, and the Orient were still in government asunder.
No wonder that historians have written the story of Greece—among them great names like Niebuhr and Grote—and seen nothing more in the career of Alexander than a brilliant disturbance of the world’s order, an enthronement of militarism, an annihilation of Greek liberty, and an undoing of Greece in all that makes her life of interest to the world. It is another thing that their blindness could see in Alexander himself only a mad opportunist and greedy conqueror, whose life, had it been spared, could have wrought no more than further conquest; for Alexander was of all things an idealist, and they who have not read that in the story of his life, may as well not have read it at all. Grote and Demosthenes are, each in his way, types of historians and statesmen who have spent their strength in deploring the waste of goodly seed-corn scattered on the fields, their eyes turned towards the former harvest, not the next. The old maxims, the old creeds, and the good old times are reasserted, defended, and bewailed long after they have passed to their larger fruitage in the unfolding of a larger life.
When Alexander’s career began, the culture of the world, fixed in two main types, the feminine and the masculine, if we may broadly characterise them so, was still centralised and located, on the one hand in the wealth and settled industrial life of the Mesopotamian and the Egyptian river valleys, on the other in the free energy of the old Greek city communities. When his career ended, the barrier separating these domains had been broken down, never to be raised again.
Man as a base line for measuring the universe, man as a source of governing power, arose in Greece; it was Greece that shaped the law of beauty from which came the arts of form, the law of speculative truth from which by ordered observations came the sciences, and the law of liberty from which came the democratic state. This was what the old Greece held in keeping for the world. Alexander was the strong wind that scattered the seed; again, he was the willing hand of the sower.
The story of Alexander has become a story of death. He died, himself, before his time. With his life he brought the old Greece to its end; with his death, the state he had founded. But they all three, Alexander, Greece, the Grand Empire, each after its sort, set forth, as history judges men and things, the inner value of the saying, “Except a grain of wheat fall into the earth and die, it abideth alone.”[o]
