No, Aleksander the Great Was Not "Great" in Any Sense with a Strong Connotation of "Admirable"
Bret Devereaux vs. the Hax of Sol III—in this case, James Hankins & Adrian Vermeulle: a pushback from two-and-a-half years ago about one of the weirdest emanations of neofascism I have seen in this...
Bret Devereaux vs. the Hax of Sol III—in this case, James Hankins & Adrian Vermeulle: a pushback from two-and-a-half years ago about one of the weirdest emanations of neofascism I have seen in this past truly weird decade…
Introduction
I do confess that I was shocked when I got to the end of James Hankins’s <https://firstthings.com/the-greatness-of-alexander/> biographical sketch of Aleksander III Argeados of Makedon. Why? Because I learned that Hankins believes that Aleksander was indeed great in a largely positive and admirable sense. Moreover, Hawkins believes that his greatness was the result of something the ancients recognized but that we cannot.
So what is that something?
And what was the cause of his greatness (and utter barbarity) at the very disturbing human social practice of war?
That something and that cause is the exceptional fact that divine favor rested upon Alexander.
Yes, the favor of God Almighty, the Α & Ω, The One Who Is, rested upon him. For, to quote Hawkins, “[when] human beings… exceptionally, achieve greatness… this can only come through divine help”, as Hawkins says “the ancients saw [but]… we fail to see, or… prefer not to see”.
At this point my reaction was that somebody should tell Hawkins to put down the keyboard, back up away from the internet, and not return.
So why is this on my screen? Because I was whipsawed by first seeing:
James W. Hankins: <https://x.com/g_shullenberger/status/2005644591060656193> <https://www.compactmag.com/article/why-im-leaving-harvard/>: ‘Whether through hostility or neglect, Western history is being phased out or allowed to die on the vine at Harvard...
Followed by a, “no, my colleagues are just teaching it differently” backpedal:
James W. Hankins: ‘People teaching in Western fields… almost all of these people regard the language of “western civilization” as minimally outmoded and maximally “white supremacist”. I am an outlier because I think that the civilizations of the West should be taught as a tradition, and preferentially at the undergrad level. Most of my colleagues disagree and make some sort of obeisance to global history and assume the equality of all “cultures”…
And then by what I can only read as a frantic attempt at full clawback, as his colleagues are all of a sudden not deluded fools making “obeisance to global history and… the equality of all ‘cultures’”, but are rather truly outstanding learned scholars:
James W. Hankins: ‘I keep reading people who say that no one is teaching Western civilization any more at Harvard, citing my Compact article. It’s not what I said. Harvard (where I’m still on the faculty till 30 June) has 17 outstanding people teaching in Western fields, ancient, medieval and modern…
So I began chasing links. And got to:
BRET DEVEREAUX: Once You Imagine Alexander’s Victims as People…
Bret Devereaux (2023): <https://x.com/BretDevereaux/status/1657932006984933377>: ‘So, @Vermeullarmine unfollowed me for this tweet (about this excerpt: <https://firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2023/05/the-greatness-of-alexander>) (which prevents me from replying to his reply to his reply to me), but the idea that Arrian’s history in particular was influenced by his context isn’t particularly new.
Replying to @Vermeullarmine: [James] Hankins’ assumption that Plutarch and Arrian lived “beyond fear or favor” is a blinkered one given that, for instance, Arrian was in the court, as it were, of Hadrian and an excessively negative work on Alexander might well have been read as a critique of the emperor…
Indeed, it is basic enough to be acknowledged as a matter of course in the *third paragraph* of Elizabeth Bynam’s chapter in the Landmark (2010, ed. James Romm). Likewise, there’s a reason Antony is the last of Plutarch’s parallel lives; no Augustus.
But while I’m discussing it, I suppose I might note a few other things. First, I must assume that, as an excerpt, the parts that dealt with the third major account, by Q. Curtius Rufus, will have gone elsewhere. Surely he could not be left out entirely. Odd also in a treatment of Arrian’s view of Alexander there’s no mention of the fairly clear theme of Arrian’s sketch of Alexanders character: that imperial power corrupted and degraded his once admirable character (explicit, framed in anti-Persian rhetoric in Bk7, e.g. 7.8.3). But more broadly the ‘I can’t imagine why they don’t like Alexander, it must be because they overlook the divine element in human nature’ tone is odd to me given that the evolution of Alexander scholarship is.. like... comps-topic level basic historiography. As in, I literally had a PhD comps question on this, the shift to viewing Alexander through the lens of his victims (esp. Badian, Bosworth) or scholars finding Philip II more interesting (Borza).
James W. Hankins doesn’t engage with those arguments meaningfully. He does engage with the notion that Alexander at times may have transgressed the limits of war, but not that Alexander in fact launched a series of unprovoked wars, for what seems to be the glory and fun of it. The Greeks and Romans found that admirable, but we don’t need to. Once you imagine Alexander’s victims as people against whom Alexander is launching an unprovoked invasion, it becomes really hard to like Alexander, because as a society we no longer measure greatness by who is the best at killing.
That isn’t ‘standing in a well, unable to see the sky is wide’ but rather, standing at the foot of a giant pile of corpses and, at long last, refusing to declare it a great work of art. One might argue with that position, but it is hard to accuse it of smallness of mind…
And here is the piece Bret is commenting hammering on:
James Hankins (2023): The Greatness of Alexander <https://firstthings.com/the-greatness-of-alexander/>: ‘King Alexander III of Macedon is beyond doubt among the greatest figures in world history. But was he a great man, the finest kind of human being? His extraordinary success, in combination with his moral weaknesses, must have been frustrating for some ancient moralists since, according to the philosophers, a man’s worth and his ability to lead other men was dependent on the excellence of his moral character. Good moral character, they believed, could be acquired by the study of philosophy. According to the great educator Isocrates, in the finest leaders, good moral character was strengthened by wide-ranging study of the best literature, arts, and sciences.
Alexander studied for years with Aristotle, the fountainhead of Western scientific thought, whom some would say was the greatest moral philosopher who ever lived. Aristotle even wrote a number of works, now lost, intended to instruct his pupil in the arts of kingship. According to Plutarch the young king was “by nature a lover of learning and a lover of reading.” He was an admirer of the great lyric poets and Athens’ fifth-century tragedians as well as a voracious reader of history. He was steeped in Homer, author of the two great epics that formed the Bible of the Greeks. According to multiple sources the young conqueror always carried his Homer with him on campaign, keeping it under his pillow, along with a dagger. He modelled his own behavior on Achilles, Homer’s supreme, flawed hero.
Alexander, in other words, according to ancient ideas had the perfect formation to be a philosopher-king. There were some authorities—chiefly Plutarch—who insisted that he met the conditions to deserve such a title. Another biographer, Arrian, while stopping short of that assessment, praised his many virtues of leadership and his extraordinary accomplishments, while excusing his faults as those of a hot-blooded young man misled by scheming advisors. He points to one admirable quality ignored by modern writers on Alexander, a character trait rare among men of supreme power: The great conqueror was capable of remorse for his own faults and made no effort to conceal them. These admissions of bad behavior had good effects on his own character and gave some kind of solace to those he had injured.
Both Plutarch and Arrian, though living long after Alexander’s time, beyond fear or favor, had access to far more information about him than anyone possesses today. Yet their assessment of the conqueror is strikingly different from that of his modern biographers. For in modern times Alexander’s reputation has suffered a disastrous fall. Since the Second World War it has become common for historians to compare Alexander casually to Adolf Hitler or Genghis Khan, or to dismiss him as a “Homeric pirate,” or to psychoanalyze him as suffering from extreme paranoia and megalomania. Modern writers, as though determined to cut him down to size, focus on Alexander’s vices, which (rightly) seem appalling to us: his ruthless elimination of rivals for the throne, and his towering, drunken rages, leading to rash acts of violence against some of his most loyal companions. These included his trusted commander Cleitus, who had saved his life at the battle of Granicus, and the Persian expedition’s official historian, Callisthenes, Aristotle’s nephew, who died in jail after refusing to kneel before the monarch-god. Moderns find it difficult not to interpret Alexander’s obsession with his own image as the mark of a deranged narcissist, or to see his insatiable thirst for victory as anything other than a mental disorder.
Alexander’s ancient biographers seem unconcerned with what modern readers (rightly) find most abhorrent: the atrocities for which he was responsible. These include the annihilation of Thebes, the slaughter and enslavement of enemies who had surrendered to him, the wolfish plundering of conquered cities. It hardly excuses Alexander that such actions were normal practices in ancient warfare, and that execution and enslavement of defeated enemies was permitted under some ancient laws. However excused, such actions were surely not those of a philosopher-king. We are shocked by these things, and by the failure of the ancients to condemn them, forgetting that our grandfathers saw no crime in the fire-bombing of German cities from the air or the nuclear incineration of two Japanese cities filled with innocent civilians.
Since all the information we moderns have about Alexander’s deeds comes from the same ancient writers who profess to admire him, it can be puzzling that the moral assessments of ancients and moderns differ so much from each other. We are inclined to think of these differences as stemming from the moral blindness of the ancients. Such condescension towards the past is an odious modern habit of mind. But perhaps we should also take stock of the moral myopias of our own time, the deficiencies in our own era’s ways of assessing a person’s worth.
In our age of science and materialism, we tend to look past the high ideals expressed by men in the past, to think that all their achievements must be the product of historical forces beyond their control, that all their heroism is a mere cover for self-interest. We prefer to cut great historical figures down to our own modest size. Arrian, who was a Stoic philosopher as well as a historian, warns against this attitude, writing,
“any one who reproaches Alexander should not do so merely by citing actions that merit reproach, but should collect all his actions together, and then carefully reflect who he himself is and what kind of fortune he enjoys, that he can condemn Alexander, given what Alexander became and the height of human good fortune he attained, the unquestioned king of both continents whose name reached every part of the world, whereas he is himself a lesser man, whose energies are spent on petty things and who does not even get these things right (Loeb translation)…”
If we fail to see the greatness of a man like Alexander, perhaps the reason is that we ourselves are too petty, too stunted in our outlook to appreciate it. As the Chinese poet Han Yu wrote, “A man living at the bottom of a well will think the sky is small.”
We can’t accept greatness in part because we find it difficult to take ancient religion seriously; we moderns overlook the divine element in human nature, and the ability of the divine to transform us. For us, Alexander’s wish to be recognized as a god can only be evidence of insanity or, at best, a cynical ploy to win support among superstitious men. The ancients excused Alexander’s pretensions to superhuman status on the grounds that he did in fact have a great soul; his opinion of himself was justified. It was not hubris, because the gods did not punish but rewarded him with unbroken success. The ancients saw what we fail to see, or what we prefer not to see: that human beings can, exceptionally, achieve greatness, and this can only come through divine help. As the Theban poet Pindar wrote in his eighth Pythian Ode,
“Creatures for a day! What is a man?
What is he not? A dream of a shadow
Is our mortal being. But when there comes to men
A gleam of splendour given of heaven,
Then rests on them a light of glory
And blessed are their days (Tr. C. M. Bowra)…[Hankins, James. 2023. “The Greatness of Alexander”. First Things. May 12. <https://firstthings.com/the-greatness-of-alexander/>.]
First Things’s note to the excerpt is:
This biographical essay is excerpted from The Golden Thread: A History of the Western Tradition, by Allen C. Guelzo & James Hankins, forthcoming from Encounter Books in 2024.
And Adrian Vermeule’s endorsement of the greatness of Aleksander III Argeados of Makedon is here:
Adrian Vermeule: ‘“If we fail to see the greatness of a man like Alexander, perhaps the reason is that we ourselves are too petty, too stunted in our outlook to appreciate it. As the Chinese poet Han Yu wrote, “A man living at the bottom of a well will think the sky is small”.
Excellent piece from @JamesWHankins1…
It’s too bad the right-wing neofascist brain-eater ate James W. Hankins’s brain. His Virtue Politics book was interesting—largely wrong-headed, IMHO, but interesting.
One more note. Put me down as somebody who views the language of “western civilization” as always outmoded and regrettably option a destructive rhetorical flame thrower deployed by white supremacists. My preference is to talk about the “Dover Circle” as of 1500—the civilizations then in a circle of roughly 400 miles’ radius around Dover, England, and those cultures that have descended from them by direct inheritance and cultural adoption.
Why? Briefly, look at this:
It is a map showing what Stanford’s Ian Morris <https://archive.org/details/whywestrulesforn00morr_1/mode/1up> thinks are the economic and civilizational “core areas” of “Western” and “Eastern” civilization since the year -9600.
For nearly all the time since the invention of agriculture, the Eastern core is the Yellow River and Yangtze Valleys, shifting a little. There is continuity here: political continuity, cultural continuity, unbroken chains of influence, even substantial continuity of genetic descent.
This is in great contrast to the “Western core”:
Fom -9600 to 1400, from Basra on the Persian Gulf to Tbilisi in the Caucasus to Ithaka off the northwest corner of Greece to Thebes in Egypt.
From -250 to 250, Italy, Sicily, and Sardinia.
After 250 it reverted back to the original Basra-Tbilisi-Ithaka-Thebes quadrangle.
For 1400 to 1800, it picked up stakes and moved to Western Europe.
By 1900 the Western “core area” has extended a pseudopod across the Atlantic to the American northeast and contracted in Europe
And come 2000, Morris’s “Western core” is the continental United States plus the more-settled parts of Canada.
I feel a great lack of continuity here. What has the civilization of Uruk in -3000 have to do with the civilization of Silicon Valley today? In what sense are they both “the West”, save that there are some people at Stanford who read The Story of the Man Who Saw the Deep, the Epic of Gilgamesh <https://archive.org/details/gilgameshnewrend00ferr>?
Certainly there was a time in the 1800s when people wanted to tell the Story of Civilization as something like an Olympic-torch relay race. But this is like picking out pictures of things you like in a photograph and claiming that they are “yours”. There was no single torch. There were no hand-offs. And if there had been a single torch, it would come with all kinds of things that we do not like at all.Earlier peoples ascribed the rôles of torch-bearers in this relay would have been very surprised to learn that the inhabitants of the Thames Valley were in any way them or their heirs. In the -50s, Roman Senator and Proconsul Marcus Tullius Cicero snidely snarked argued that the Britons had no silver and were too stupid and uneducated to make good slaves—hence they were not worth imperializing. Athens had very little tolerance for Jerusalem. And Jerusalem had even less tolerance for Athens.
And do subscribe to Bret Devereaux’s Patreon <https://www.patreon.com/c/u20122096/posts>. It is very much worth it. He is that good.
The obvious modern equivalent to Alexander is Napoleon, who still gets remarkably favorable treatment despite launching repeated wars that cost millions of lives - proportionally more than any of the great C20 dictators, I think. A more detailed indictment here from Doug Bandow
https://www.cato.org/commentary/napoleons-death-200-how-should-murderous-dictators-be-remembered
Bret Deveraux’s blog is terrific. I found it via a reference somewhere to his series of posts “The Queen’s Latin” (back when ER still was current; I suppose it would be “The King’s Latin” today. https://acoup.blog/2021/06/11/collections-the-queens-latin-or-who-were-the-romans-part-i-beginnings-and-legends/ Great series of articles; then I was hooked.