Alexander the Great founded Alexandria. He came with Dinocrates, his
architect, and ordered him to build, between the sea and the lake, a
magnificent Greek town. Alexander still conceived of civilization as an
extended Greece, and of himself as a Hellene. He had taken over
Hellenism with the ardour that only a proselyte knows. A Balkan
barbarian by birth, he had pushed himself into the enchanted but
enfeebled circle of little city states. He had flattered Athens and
spared Thebes, and preached a crusade against Persia, which should
repeat upon a vaster scale the victories of Marathon and Salamis. He
would even repeat the Trojan war. At the Dardanelles his archæological
zeal was such that he ran naked round the tomb of Achilles. He cut the
knot of Gordius. He appeased the soul of Priam.
Having annexed Asia Minor, Syria, Palestine, and Egypt from the
Persians, and having given his orders to Dinocrates, he left the city he
was building, and rode with a few friends into the western desert. It
was summer. The waters of Lake Mariout, more copious then than now,
spread fertility for a space. Leaving their zone, he struck south, over
the limestone hills, and lost sight of civilization whether of the
Hellenic or non-Hellenic type. Around him little flat pebbles shimmered
and danced in the heat, gazelles stared, and pieces of sky slopped into
the sand. Over him was the pale blue dome of heaven, darkened, if we are
to believe his historian, by flocks of obsequious birds, who sheltered
the King with their shadows and screamed when he rode the wrong way.
Alexander went on till he saw below him, in the fall of the ground, the
canals and hot springs and olives and palms of the Oasis of Siwa.
Sekhet-Amit the Egyptians called it, and worshipped their god Amen
there, whom the Greeks call Ammon, worshipped him in the form of an
emerald that lay in a sacred boat, worshipped him as a ram also. Instead
of the twin mud-cities of Siwa and Aghurmi, Alexander saw pylons and
colonnades, and descending into the steamy heat of the Oasis approached
a lonely and mysterious shrine. For what was it mysterious? Perhaps
merely for its loneliness. The distance, the solitude of the desert,
touch travellers even to-day, and sharpen the imaginations of men who
have crossed in armoured cars, and whom no god awaits, only a tract of
green. Alexander rode, remembering how, two hundred years before him,
the Persians had ridden to loot the temple, and how on them as they were
eating in the desert a sandstorm had descended, burying diners and
dinner in company. Herein lay the magic of Siwa. It was difficult to
reach. He, being the greatest man of his epoch, had of course succeeded.
He, the Philhellene, had come. His age was twenty-five. Then took place
that celebrated and extraordinary episode. According to the official
account the Priest came out of the temple and saluted the young tourist
as Son of God. Alexander acquiesced and asked whether he would become
King of this World. The reply was in the affirmative. Then his friends
asked whether they should worship him. They were told that they should,
and the episode closed. Some say that it is to be explained by the
Priest’s bad Greek. He meant to say Paidion (“my child”) and said
Paidios (“O Son of God”) instead. Others say that it never took place,
and Walter Savage Landor has imagined a conversation in the course of
which the Priest scares the King by a snake. A scare he did get—a
fright, a psychic experience, a vision, a “turn.” His development proves
it. After his return from Siwa his aspirations alter. Never again does
he regard Greece as the centre of the world.
The building of Alexandria proceeded, and copied or magnified forms from
the perishing peninsula overseas. Dinocrates planned Greek temples and
market-places, and they were constructed not slavishly but with
intelligence, for the Greek spirit still lived. But it lived
consciously, not unconsciously as in the past. It had a mission, and no
missionary shall ever create. And Alexander, the heroic chaos of whose
heart surged with desire for all that can and can not be, turned away
from his Hellenic town-planning and his narrow little antiquarian
crusade, and flung himself again, but in a new spirit, against the might
of Persia. He fought her as a lover now. He wanted not to convert but to
harmonize, and conceived himself as the divine and impartial ruler
beneath whom harmony shall proceed. That way lies madness. Persia fell.
Then it was the turn of India. Then the turn of Rome would have come and
then he could have sailed westward (such was his expressed intention)
until he had conquered the Night and eastward until he had conquered the
Day. He was never—despite the tuition of Aristotle—a balanced young man,
and his old friends complained that in this latter period he sometimes
killed them. But to us, who cannot have the perilous honour of his
acquaintance, he grows more lovable now than before. He has caught, by
the unintellectual way, a glimpse of something great, if dangerous, and
that glimpse came to him first in the recesses of the Siwan Oasis. When
at the age of thirty-three he died, when the expedition that he did not
seek stole towards him in the summer-house at Babylon, did it seem to
him as after all but the crown of his smaller quests? He had tried to
lead Greece, then he had tried to lead mankind. He had succeeded in
both. But was the universe also friendly, was it also in trouble, was it
calling on him, on him, for his help and his love? The priest of Amen
had addressed him as “Son of God.” What exactly did the compliment mean?
Was it explicable this side of the grave?
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