Alexander The Great indeed was deserving of his name. A King of Kings, a Conquerors’ Conqueror, and a mere mortal who through acts of courage, agency, intelligence, vision, relentless persistence, and sheer force of will aspired, touched upon, and quite frankly deserved a stature of deification.
It’s quite absurd how some modern onlookers of history see through the acts of towering historical figures through the sanitized lens of detachment from nature, life, and death that we employ to navigate the world of today. Lifespans were shorter, death was a daily companion, and life was harsh, cruel, sobering to a fault, and merciless in its punishment of those who didn’t wield power well.
In such a world a man with the proper temperament, fertile circumstances, right preparation, fine education, and prime opportunity seized the world’s entire imagination for centuries by going farther than anyone has gone before him and by carving for himself a deep place in history.
A man who was faulty, temperamental, unstable, a drunkard, murdering, cruel ruthless, generous, gracious, bisexual, with delusions of grandeur, and a military strategic genius, all rolled into one. You can’t dissect people into good and bad, we’re all both at the same time, and we choose our paths in life riding both beasts of burden.
Say what you will of Alexander, for he was indeed great. And even though he lived a rather short life, it was a life well lived and time very well spent on earth during which he did achieve immortality in our minds.
This was such a beautiful biography of Alexander.
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