The Nature of Alexander Read Free Page B

standards of beauty, he is given a conventional face in a conventional helmet, distinguished only by the elegance of his armour. He adventures to Darius’ camp, disguised as his own herald, wins Roxane’s heart, and escapes across a frozen river, later avenging his foully murdered foe. He flies in a chariot drawn by eagles, and views the monsters of the deep in a glass bell. Seeking the Water of Life once more through forests perilous, he consults the prophetic trees of the Sun and Moon, and with calm courage hears them foretell his end. Warned by an oracle that a close friend will kill him, and urged to purge those nearest him, he protests that he will die by the single traitor rather than wrong the innocent. (Cassander would have learned with some astonishment that he was a dear and trusted comrade.) He is poisoned, and the Seven Sages moralize over his grave.
    Constantinople was sacked, its refugee scholars brought westward their salvaged books; the learned world of Italy rediscovered Greek literature and history. It was in the fifteenth century that the scholar Vasco of Lucena, writing to the Emperor Sigismund, told him that Arrian was more to be trusted than the Latin writers upon Alexander.
    With the Renaissance, therefore, the Romances were consigned to children and the ignorant; the historical Alexander reappeared. But his image was still conditioned by the legends, and by an age without archaeology which, busily excavating all over Italy Roman copies of such Greek originals as had appealed to Romans, admired likethem the soft, late style for its virtuosity, preferring the sentimental contortions of the Laocoön to the most majestic classical Apollo. In this spirit, for a century or two Alexander supplied the painters with subjects for great setpieces, defeating Darius, protecting the royal ladies, marrying Roxane. His eager profile is trimmed down to insipid perfection; his correctly rounded elbow sketches a stock art-school gesture; a resplendent waxwork in an impracticable helmet cascading ostrich plumes, he is the apotheosis of a tinsel-armoured male soprano in Baroque opera, the vacuous imperial puppet of Dryden’s Alexander’s Feast.
    Serious scholars, of course, were meantime reading the sources and critical appraisal had begun, when in the mid-nineteenth century the most formidable of them, George Grote, amid many valuable services to history, disastrously revived the Ideological Alexander. Grote never set foot in Greece, then without tourist accommodation and much beset with bandits; a dedicated radical, he had the fatal commitment which vitiates conscientious fact with anachronistic morality. His whole capital of belief being invested in the Athenian democracy, he was resolute in attributing its fall to external villainy rather than internal collapse. Demosthenes could do no wrong, Philip and Alexander no right. For all practical purposes, Grote’s Alexander is back with the Lyceum; a natural tyrant, forsaking the wholesome Greek virtues at the first taste of Oriental sycophancy and despotic power.
    Commitment breeds counter-commitment; the defence was pushed too far. Sir William Tarn, active till this mid-century, was more learned than Grote, and larger minded. But in his sympathy with Alexander, he too applied, though favourably, his own moral code, often defending him where he can scarcely have thought his actions needed extenuation, and when they would certainly have shockednone of his followers; while his unprejudiced regard for quality in friends or enemies is expanded into an idealistic faith in the unity of all mankind.
    Recent scholarship is now restoring a balance; but these discussions, held in circles where it is agreed to respect the evidence, have filtered down as a turbid seepage to levels where only confirmation of the entrenched dogma is sought. An intractable resistance to levelling down has made Alexander the archdemon of egalitarians; while pacifists, well meaning but ill read, have