Whereas a defining majority of modern Egyptians and the whole 100% of the dwellers of Mesopotamia, as we know them, have nothing in common with their illustrious predecessors, except for occupying the same spaces as they used to, the same cannot be said about the Greeks, although almost all scholars concur in that there is a huge incongruity between the ancient and modern Greeks, as if a race of giants had, in the course of time, mutated into a race of midgets. I disagree with the cruelty of such an assessment. The heroic fight of the Greeks to overthrow the Ottoman yoke two centuries ago, and a very similar resolve shining through the stanch resistance they offered to their occupiers in World War II, shows an enduring presence of a very special national spirit, which is inconsistent with the image of Untermensch that has so unfairly evolved as their modern-historical national stereotype.
It is by no means for the reason of their intellectual inferiority that I am reluctant to yield this small Greek subsection to the modern nation of Greece, not to mention the mostly artificial modern state of Macedonia, in their proper places within the section Nations And Their Heroes. Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome, even though genetically tied to the present-day Greeks and Italians, belong not so much to them alone, as to the whole race of their cultural and intellectual heirs, which we collectively call Our Western Civilization. With this preamble in mind, let us now remember one particular legacy, that of Alexander III the Great of Macedonia and of the world, not so much within its standard biographical and historical parameters, which can be easily obtained from any kind of encyclopedia and thousands of reference books, but in the aspects of a special concern, as already implied in the title of this entry.
The big question of this entry is whether Alexander was a Hellenistic nationalist at heart, or a universalist internationalist; and whether in his conquests of the East he was a Westernizer of the East, or otherwise, an Easternizer of the West? Nota bene, both ought to be the best answer, but with several caveats.
The first part of the question is complex in itself. If we might call him a Greek nationalist, one must keep in mind that Alexander was not exactly a Greek, but a Macedonian, which happens to be a distinctly different, albeit no longer appreciated as such, through the fog of many ages, thing. This doesn’t disqualify him at all from being a Greek nationalist, as it wouldn’t disqualify, say, Catherine the Great of Russia, 100% German-born, from being a fierce Russian nationalist, or the 100% Georgian-born Stalin, with many more examples of how a foreigner can be capable of a far greater nationalistic zeal toward his or her adoptive nation, than most of that nation’s native-borns. Individual psychology has something to do with it…
In Alexander’s case, he may truly have believed in the superiority of the Hellenistic culture, but he was still far from trying to impose it on the conquered peoples. Instead, he was prepared to create what he sincerely believed would be a healthy cultural mix; and, for better or for worse, neither he nor his epigones welcomed what I would call a cultural crosspollination. What he and they probably failed to understand was that such crosspollination was bound to happen whether they wanted it or not.
In fact, Alexander can hardly be called a Hellenistic chauvinist, although at first it surely seemed so. But in the later years, as his miraculous sweep of the world had been going on with a superhuman success, he was wont to allege to have been born a son of god, in which he may well have believed himself, overawed by his supernatural triumphs, where he saw the hand of god, more than his own wisdom, skill, or plain luck. He was eager now to rise above the fray, to use different cultures as clay for the creation of a common heavenly mix. In that, he was clearly becoming an internationalist.
At the same time as he was becoming an avowed internationalist, he was acting and thinking less and less like a Greek, causing some discomfort among his armies, who were by now following him out of sheer belief in his miraculous destiny, rather than out of a sense of national affinity. The Greeks as a whole were showing a marked superiority complex vis-à-vis the Orientals, which Alexander no longer shared. At his royal court, many Oriental rituals and manners were now rigorously introduced, and even in his outward appearance, he no longer looked like a Macedonian or a Greek.
His reign lasted for twelve years, and his early death was probably the best thing that could happen to his legend. His real-life empire was built on a miracle, sustained by that miracle against the discontent growing around him, but might not have lasted much longer beyond that, coming against the rising tide of the nitty-gritty. The prospect that his empire would collapse, or rather split into several pieces, was due to the fact that it was becoming no longer manageable, while the chunks it was to split into were more or less manageable, but only in complete separation from the others.
Alexander’s personal legacy in the Orient has attained the aureole of a legend exactly because he has never been looked upon as some foreign invader and colonizer by the conquered peoples. His status of a god had detached him from his foreign roots and afforded him the citizenship of those nations that recognized his divine supremacy. He is a major hero to the Moslem world today, which speaks volumes on this matter.
There is a historical consensus that Alexander was a ruler of extraordinary genius, but he was also unique in having another colossal genius for his tutor and mentor. I am convinced that Aristotle’s influence had to be tremendous on Alexander, even if he, understandably for an autocrat, wished to downplay it. I think that he deserves much credit for being an incredibly good learner, which, coupled with a clear vision of his destiny, allowed him to achieve so much at such a young age.
Yet no achievement, even the greatest of all time, is possible without a downside to it. The underlying philosophy of his statesmanship must indeed have been fed by Aristotelian principles, but only up to a point. Whenever the governing practice of his rule encountered conceptual obstacles, his and Aristotle’s philosophy, of necessity, would be found wanting. The stumbling stone, even for Aristotle, in retrospect, had to be the phenomenon of unmanageable multicultural interaction.
While Alexander’s importance in the Hellenization of the non-Greek world cannot be overstated, his legacy to the Greek world proper has been considerably tarnished. In the process of crosspollination we have been talking about, it seems that only the foreign nations under his rule may have seriously profited from such a symbiosis. Greek culture, being superior to the other cultures of the time, had little to profit from, but instead was corrupted by foreign superstitions and biases. Astrology and primitive forms of divination became an irresistible fad, and the philosophy of the Greeks, that had been setting the gold standard of human thought up until then, next descended into a dark age, producing nothing of comparable value for a couple of centuries, until, ironically, the Roman conquest of Greece revived the Greek self-respect to an extent sufficient to give a last temporary boost to the dying Ancient Greek culture, soon to be supplanted with the advent of official Christianity, the latter destined to radically transform the Greek culture, as well as the basic parameters of philosophical discourse and inquiry, this time for good.
Winding up this entry, I am returning to the perils of forced multiculturalism, as it exists in our time in modern suddenly-multicultural communities, and also caused by nations infected with the crusader spirit. As we are seeing around us, the advantages of the Alexandrian crosspollination are hard to find, while corrupting influences of all sorts are in evidence, accompanied by what the medics call transplant rejection, and leading to what the politicos call a clash of civilizations.
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