Extracts from the conclusion to In Search of the lost testament of Alexander the Great |
Posted: May 24, 2017 |
Historians have been trying to unveil the man behind the legend for the past two millennia, and the opinion of every age has, to some degree, reshaped Alexander III of Macedonia. What did it mean to be descended from the Macedonian royal house with an elite Greek education? What was Alexander’s relationship with his father, his men, their high-ranking generals, and with his entourage of court ‘friends’, diviners, philosophers and poets? And what part did Homer, Herodotus, Xenophon, and Aristotle’s view of the barbarian Persian Empire play in his character development? Alexander was an elusive equation: a calculable axiom of Aristotle’s empirical and categorising present, and an indefinable irrational number from the Homeric past. He was a mythopoeic conqueror who at once lived by the tenets of the strategically sound and the proportionally outrageous; a tribal leader recalling heroic deeds, and a mortal seeking apotheosis through his progression from Macedonian king, to Greek hegemon, pharaoh of Egypt and basileusbasileon, a Persian king of kings. Indeed his was blood and ichor mixed in one and we suggest the content of his testament would have been no less. In an attempt to better understand the Macedonian-dominated world before, during, and after the death of Alexander, we have been stripping back layers of social, political, rhetorical and philosophical debris that cling to the extant accounts. Somewhere below that exoskeleton lies the bare-boned truth/ Because the entertaining though implausible, corroborating though more often conflicted, the largely intact but irrevocably damaged and inspiring yet troubling portraits of Alexander we gaze upon today, were framed by those extracting something useful from his life, whether for political, territorial or philosophical gain. Like all studies of Alexander’s life and the times of his successors, ours is a brief CAT scan of an infinitely complex body, that dimly lit candle flickering above that still damn dark abyss, Along with those agenda-laden primary historians and those who later came under their sway, and beside the philosophers and rhetoricians who wished to add their brushstrokes to the art, it is their iconograph, and not Alexander’s, that has been hanging in history’s gallery. Ars longa, vita brevis, as Hippocrates once proposed. The Book: http://alexanderstestament.com/the-book/
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