Alexander and the Death

/, Literature, Blesok no. 39/Alexander and the Death

Alexander and the Death

The news will probably reach you in Macedonia via the quick line. I don’t know if you are in Stagira or in Pella, or whether you have returned to Athens – much before you would receive my letter. But I also know what the news that you will receive first will be. Lagos, Seleucus and Perdicca composed it last night in the big hall of the palace. So you know that it is a purse work of Ptolemy Lagos. Seleucus and Perdicca mist have quietly looked at the flame of the scented lamps or their sandals, and Lagos, without paying attention to them, started: “The sun that shone on Macedonia, Hellas, Moesia and Byttinia, Phrygia, Cappadochia, and Sicily, Armenia and Syria, Assyria, Babylonia and Caramynia, Sogdiana, Phartia, Sardonya and Bactria has extinguished. Great Egypt as well (Lagos here underlined his future rule). Alexander, son of Philip (stressed as opposed to Olympias) went to gods, the bravest and most honest has gone…” and so forth. You know that these are but empty words that look like truth, that this is only some prologue of a play written by a beginner, and the real play that should follow is gone and it will never be written. It would have been written for sure if Alexander was only a philosopher, tyrant, hero, conqueror, treacheror or a sufferer. You know this funny habit of modern playwrights, that the characters only have one trait. But he was a bit of everything. Most of all he was probably a wonderer and a curious person. And you can not make a drama with such a character, but only a comedy. But Alexander is not a mock character, a character for jokes and scold. He does not deserve this. He was a man, it seems that this might be true, a man who is afraid and a man who is most feared of. But, no, I can not find any distinction that would explain him shortly. He was Alexander and one should write about him differently than everything that has been written so far. And here I address you also as an accomplice in Alexander’s fate. This is not an accusation, and I know that you will understand it in this way. Not, because Alexander was not only the work of Olympias, Philip and Leonides. She taught him how to compare himself with gods and his father and his uncle how to handle a two sided dagger, a bow and spear, with a sarisos. He is also your work. You were teaching him, directly, the skill of ruling. Maybe you will refuse this as too big a deed. But, it was your teaching of perfection of the rule of Athens that rejected him as everything that he was to learn. He had the undying feature to look something that should be changed in everything that exists. And he opposed you in this: he did not choose Athens as a determinant of his rule, but the unclear examples of the big eastern empires, those that he conquered and defeated. Darius and Porus. Can the thought of an empire be inspired by your study of harmony? Could Alexander’s mind transfer the dream of beauty so far to the endless thought of the huge empire where all countries and peoples will be in harmony? It often seemed to me that it was his final goal. But, as I see this endless move around the new palace and the new, big theatre in Babylon, built by Alexander, the thought about the relations between you and him comes to my mind. I am in the shade. Yes, I wrote it as it is – I am standing in the shade of the northern colonnade of the theatre, but now it feels that I have said the truth of myself, in short. I was always in the shade. In the big, heavy and darkening shade of Alexander. But, who wasn’t? Who came out in the sun next to him? And from here, from this shade, I see the everyday Babylon crowd roll, crawl, waves across the big square between the theatre and the palace. I notice that the soldiers are gone. In front of the marble stairs of the theatre, immediately to the left, I see a group of masters, stone carvers, column builders, capital carvers. I see the main master as well, a bony Syrian. They say that he built all the palaces, summer houses, decorative gates of all hard cities of the Great Emperor Darius. His group is made of a dozen of tough, tall men, both dark and pale. Large and experienced stone carvers from India, skillful in the deep cutting of soft stone, Athenians with lively eyes that never cut two capitals in the same way although they look the same. One of the new, newly rich dignitaries of Babylon is with them, a former permanent advisor to Darius. They speak lively and nobody listens to anybody. They wave their arms. Maybe they drank a bit more wide last night and they are still dizzy this morning. But here they go to the flat lands of the former temple of Marduc, to the future foundations of some new construction, one of those that should be built in this new Ecumenical centre. Alexander is dead, but it seems that Babylon will continue to be built. Pillars will be pulled from Marmaris again, which has become some sort of a custom when the palaces of the rich people are built. The old cedars will be cut again at the distant seaside of the Lebanon forests although there is a death threat and ban on the cutting for the new fleet only (three hundred new ships with thirty to sixty vesla!0 and for the dead catafalque of Hephaestion. But the rich dignitaries find the way to bribe, blackmail, and the longest and hardest beams, good for ship basis are built in their palaces, decorated with carving and inerasable dies from the east. And Alexander is dead, immobile and powerless to stop this. But could he stop these undignified sharks when he was alive? And when he would find out that something indecent and forbidden was taking place, against the main interests of the royal work that he determined, he would pour his rage on those who would reveal the truth to him and there were less and less news like this coming to him and he would sink deeper and deeper in the self-composed image that everything was happening according to his will, in accordance with his desires and ideas. Poor Alexander. He did not have the power of Philip, his real father, his creator, he did not have his raw wisdom to understand everything around him as it was. Philip knew how to turn what was going against him in his advantage, he knew how to bribe his opponents, how to attract them to himself with wild feasts, promises, to pretend that he was adapting to others’ will, to show that he was defeated even when he was winning. There was no shrewder soldier and ruler of Macedonia than Philip from Amynta onwards. And there was no luckier one than Alexander. Luck was always on his side, even when he was the slave to defeat, even when he himself thought that he was lost. Like at Granicus and Issus. That is why Alexander was consumed by his greatness and he knew how to impose his point of view of himself to everybody. His victories seemed easy because everybody, the Thebans and Athenians and Darius and Porus, as birds enchanted by the immobile looks of the predator, knew in advance in the coldness that fear put in their bows, that their defeat was inevitable. Because they had Alexander in front of them. But, for Alexander, the victories were not the final goal of each war, the most important thing that he wanted to achieve. He was the only one who won the battles, wares in which he won, the dead, the cripples, the blood, the suffering to turn into a value of divine importance. This was his gift, what nobody before him managed to achieve – not event the big Nabuchodonosor, nor Kyros, Xercus and Darius. A dangerous and damned talent. But you know, as I know, as all close people know, that Alexander was not of divine origin. Yes, he was from the tribe of crude Macedonians who are still barbarians for the Helens although they that their masters. But, the divine in Alexander was the ease with which he prepared for war and conquest, and with which he won. It was not an effort and hardship with him, but it all went easy as with an experienced, skillful and talented craftsman who did not feel his craft as a difficulty. It was like breathing for him, like sleeping, like drinking water, like it came itself, the wars and victories, they were coming as if he didn’t want them, as if he didn’t think of them, without caring. He was the war himself, he was the victory and there the fear and respect came for what he was doing and towards himself as a deity. Gods were involved here because he called them and they mixed up because he put them at peace and made the old Macedonian deities and Hellenic gods equal to the Egyptian ones probably the oldest and the most powerful, so he showed as their offspring, as the offspring of gods. You know that this is all but a deception of mind that has gotten into everybody and which Alexander encouraged because it gave him benefits and advantages. But I can not answer one question that must also tickle your curiosity: did Alexander believe himself in his divine origin? There was a time when I was sure that he believed, that he was blinded by this thought which separated him from all others, mortals, and put him above them. In those moments there was something divine, powerful, indescribable. He was closed within himself, his eyes were turned backwards, to his own soul. Then he was insensitive to the suffering around him, possessed by thoughts that suddenly led to strange, seemingly unreasonable decisions. Then he would decide to start some conquest, when some of the close satraps or courtiers would be killed, how the prayer would be said in the morning – with a sacrifice, humbleness, choir, or with a frowned face, silently, like hating those equal to himself. The hate to gods that Alexander could so visibly and carelessly show was taken by us all with fear and care, cursing within us his price and rage towards those who were only ones entitled to rage. Then he was divine. But at those moments, the evil rules his spirit, there were awful, unjust deeds prepared. I believe that in these ecstasies he was convinced that he was god, that he was given the right to rule the life and immortality, that he touched the place from which everything was open, without borders, without prohibitions. Then I felt, watching him up close, that he would touch the very essence of divinity, the true being of evil. But, yes, you also know that he could also be a man with many virtues, with many small, everyday weaknesses. Self-centered and sensitive as some of the muses and changeable and stubborn as a hetaera. Weird comparisons, you think? But at least I know that there was some persistent female caprice with him that he could not hide although he was ashamed of it. At those moments, when he would see on my face that I recognized that damned call of nature of his, hate would shine in his eyes. Hate to me, who knew his weakness. But this weak spot that he felt himself was the most innocent and most entertaining side of his character. Maybe it was only in the circle of your former students from Mieza that he became better, nicer and softer than at the moments of his funny caprices.

2018-08-21T17:23:23+00:00 December 1st, 2004|Categories: Prose, Literature, Blesok no. 39|0 Comments