 |
| Worldhistory.org believes Alexander the Great looked like this. |
Months back I was having a conversation with a friend, and the famous Alexander the Great quote came up. You know the one. "Alexander the Great wept, for there were no more worlds to conquer." And it is such a great quote, if historically inaccurate. Too bad he didn't try his hand in America.
Here's the problem: in all likelihood, this never happened. My friend mentioned this, and being of an historical mind and a curious sort, I decided to find out for myself. Sure enough, there is no evidence to support this. To be fair, it would be difficult to prove anything about him as he died in 323 BCE.
So where did this quote come from? Someone probably misremembered Edmund Waller writing this in 1655:
When for more worlds the Macedonian cried,
He wist not Thetis in her lap did hide
Another yet, a world reserved for you
To make more great than that he did subdue …
—“A Panegyric to My Lord Protector,” lines 73–6
That's not quite as pithy as the quote we all know, but it's possible that it goes back even further. Plutarch, who was born just a little more than a decade too late to see Christ hang from the cross, had a few things to say about it, but it wasn't translated into English until 1653. Give this a whirl:
Alexander, whan he herde Anaxarchus argue that there were infynite worldes, it is said that he wept. And whan his frendes asked hym what thing had happened him to be wept for: “Is it nat to be wept for,” quod he, “syns they say there be infynite worldes, and we are nat yet lorde of one?”
Not quite the same as our quote, but kind of related. Here's the thing. Even Plutarch, who is almost as old as two millennia, could not have possibly met Alexander, who lived 300+ years before. That's longer than America has been a country. Imagine the shit we've forgotten or don't know about what happened in, say, 1776. So how accurate could that possibly be?
There's one more quote that might have been the seed from which this quote grew. It's from Valerius Maximus, who lived in a time where he could have actually run into Jesus on the way to the Golgotha.
Alexander’s heart had an insatiable longing for glory. When his friend Anaxarchus told him, following the authority of his teacher Democritus, that there were innumerable worlds, Alexander said, “Alas, poor me, because so far I have not even gained possession of one!” To possess the world was too inglorious for this man, though the world is great enough to serve as the home of all the gods.
Still not our quote. So we can go back about 2000 years, and we still don't have any evidence. So it's probably bullshit, which is a shame. If it didn't happen, it probably should have. And you know what The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance says about legend versus truth.
 |
| Print the legend. |
