Both showed the same disagreeable insistence upon their own superiority to other men, whose rivalry they could not brook. But Alexander sought to maintain it by exalting himself to a superhuman position, Napoleon by degrading his rivals with the poisoned weapons of calumny and lies. The falsehoods of Napoleon's official documents have never been surpassed. Alexander did not sink so low; but the assertion of divinity seems to most of us moderns a more monstrous violation of modesty, and a flaw which affects the whole character of the claimant.
His assumption of divinity questioned.
§ 68. So strongly is this felt that an acute writer, Mr. D. C. Hogarth, has endeavoured to show[165:1] that this too was one of the later fables invented about Alexander, and that the king himself never personally laid claim to a divine origin. The criticism of the evidence in this essay is excellent, and to most people will seem convincing. Nevertheless, after due examination of the matter, I am satisfied that the conclusion is wrong, and there is good reason to think that the visit to the temple of Ammon was connected with the policy of deriving Alexander's origin from that god. The very name Alexandria, given at that moment to his new foundation, was a formation only hitherto known in connection with a god's name. The taunt of his
soldiers at Babylon, that he should apply to his father Ammon, is perfectly well attested, and implies that his claim to divinity was well known in the army.
An ordinary matter in those days.
But to my mind a greater flaw in this able essay is the assumption that for a Greek or Macedonian to claim divine origin was as odious and ridiculous as for a modern man to do so. It is only yesterday that men held in Europe the theory that monarchy was of divine origin. In Egypt and the East it was quite the common creed that the monarchs themselves were such.[166:1] The new subjects of the Macedonian king would have thought it more extraordinary that he should not have claimed this descent than that he should; and in Egypt especially the belief that the king was the son of a god and a god himself did not conflict with the assertion of his ordinary human parentage. This is a condition of thought which we cannot grasp, and cannot therefore realize; but nevertheless the fact is as certain as any in ancient history.
Perhaps not asserted among the Greeks.
The assertion, therefore, of divinity in the East was an ordinary piece of policy which Alexander could hardly avoid; the writer I have quoted has, however, shown strong reasons to doubt that he ever claimed it in Greece, though individual Greeks
who visited his Eastern court at once perceived it in the ceremonial of his household, and though his soldiers taunted him with it during their revolt at Babylon. But this after all is a small matter. He probably knew better than any of his critics how to impress his authority upon his subjects; and whether it was from vanity or from policy or from a contempt of other men that he insisted upon his own divinity, is now of little consequence.
