WHO WAS ALEXANDER?
The parentage of Alexander is
slightly surrounded in mystery, yet historians have come to some consensus and
recorded it, if not for experts, at least for lay readers.
There is a Sanskrit couplet in The
Mahabharata where Duryodhana tells Bhima: It is improper to enquire into the
origin of warriors and rivers.
Notwithstanding what has been said
above, we learn from various sources that Alexander who is generally known as
Alexander the Great was born on 20th or 21st July BC in
Pella, Macedon, ancient Greece. He is thus also known as
Alexander III of Macedon and a member of the Argead dynasty.
Alexander succeeded his Philip II to the throne when he was
hardly 20 years old. Phillip II was polygamous, is said to have seven or eight
wives, and Alexander was the child of
his favourite wife Olympias, the daughter of Neopptolemus I, ruler of Epirus.
According to the most distinguished biographer of the ancient
Greece, he was a source of many historical and literary writings after renaissance,
on the eve of the consummation of her marriage to Philip, Olympias had a dream
which meant that her womb was “struck by thunder bolt that caused a flame to
spread far and wide before dying away”. Plutarch’s
story goes a little further and reveals that sometime after his wedding, Philip
had seen himself in a dream, securing his wife’s womb with a seal engraved with
a lion’s image.
If Plutarch’s story is to be
believed, then Alexander’s father will turn out to be not Philip Ii but Zeus,
but the king of Greek gods who lived on Mount Olympus, and will give Alexander
the tag of divine parentage, which present day rationalistic historians would
strongly refuse to believe.
An important point to be learnt
about Alexander is his education. It is
undeniable that he was a pupil of Aristotle one of the greatest Greek
philosophers whose contribution to world literature by way of his immortal book
called Poetics is also great. This book
deals with the theory of poetry and drama and its contents are relevant at all
times in the critical history of literature all over the globe.
Alexander is supposed to have learnt
in the academy of Aristotle subjects like religion, philosophy, morals, logic,
medicine and art. The text books which
he studied during his tutelage were the works of Homer, particularly Iliad.
If we study Aristotle’s theory of
politics, we come to know that he believed in two vocations for a man, the
vocation of a statesman and the vocation of a philosopher, which cannot be
fused together because they reflect two different sides of human nature. Both are respected, yet Aristotle places the
life of activity above the life of contemplation.
However, we find in Alexander the
philosophy of Nietzsche who attacked the ethics of Christianity. He called it a docile ethics, an ethics of
humility, submission and surrender.
Nietzsche stood for force. In the
socio-political aspect this force manifests itself in the elimination of the
weak and the survival of the strong. When the scales are turned, when the weak
survive and the strong are eliminated, we get to what he calls a dysgenic
spectacle which leads to the destruction of the world. He discusses the nature
of two moralities, the slave-morality and the master-morality, and it is the
master-morality for which he stands. Alexander was a believer in mustering
force and using it as a warrior as far as he could in the countries of the
ancient times. He was ambitious for
power, was a military genius, and knew how to defeat his opponents.
Maharaja Porus was in no way unlike
Alexander. He, too, adhered to the
theory of amassing force and using it for expanding his kingdom as far as the
prevailing situations permitted. As he said to Alexander, he, too, was a king
like him, bold and brave, having an invincible spirit. In the last scene of his
encounter with Alexander he appears like an undefeated warrior, not a killed
but a wounded lion.
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