Justified True Belief

(●) The Macedonian king who took the Persian empire before he was thirty, and left the eastern world speaking the language the New Testament would be written in. + Do the arithmetic first, because the arithmetic is the astonishing part. Alexander became king of Macedon at twenty. By twenty-five he had beaten the largest empire on earth in three set battles and taken its capitals. At thirty-two he was dead in a palace in Babylon, and within about fifteen years his son had been murdered, his generals had carved up his conquests, and the political thing he built was simply gone. What did not go was the world he left lying around behind him. Greek-speaking cities from the Nile to the Hindu Kush, Greek-speaking administrators running them, and an everyday form of the language, called koine (the Greek word for "common"), that a merchant in Antioch and a clerk in Alexandria could both use without either one sounding foreign. That is what a Macedonian king who never heard of Israel’s God left to the people who preached him. Nearly four centuries after Alexander, a Jewish tentmaker from Tarsus walked from city to city around the eastern Mediterranean preaching a Galilean carpenter, and nowhere in the record does he need an interpreter. One more fact worth holding on to. Alexander wrote no book, and every account of him written by a man who marched with him has been lost. What survives are five later narratives, the earliest composed nearly three hundred years after his death and the best of them, by a Roman provincial governor named Arrian, some four and a half centuries later. Arrian is trustworthy because of what he chose to copy: two eyewitnesses, Ptolemy and Aristobulus, whose books have otherwise perished entirely.

(●) 356 BC: Born at Pella to a king the southern Greeks called a barbarian, and taught as a boy by Aristotle, the best mind in Greece. + Macedon in 356 BC was a horse-breeding kingdom on the northern edge of the Greek world, rich in timber and silver and poor in prestige. Athenians called its people half-Greek, and Demosthenes, the greatest orator in Athens, would tell the assembly fifteen years later that Alexander’s father was "not only no Greek, nor related to the Greeks, but not even a barbarian from any place that can be named with honor" (Third Philippic 31, Vince translation). The father in question was Philip II, three years into a reign of twenty-three that would turn that kingdom into the best army in Europe. The mother was Olympias, a princess of the Molossians in Epirus, from a house that traced its descent to Achilles, and she made sure her son knew it. Plutarch, writing more than four centuries later, reports that Alexander was born on the sixth of the month Hecatombaeon, the same day the great temple of Artemis at Ephesus burned down, and that Philip received three pieces of good news in one afternoon: a victory, a win at the Olympic games, and a son. Those are the stories that gather around a famous birth, and Plutarch tells them as stories. The schooling was real. When the boy was about thirteen, Philip hired Aristotle, then in his early forties, and gave the pair a retreat at Mieza where visitors in Plutarch’s day were still shown the stone seats and the shaded walks. Alexander kept a copy of the Iliad that Aristotle had corrected for him, and Onesicritus, who later steered his ship down the Indus, reported that he slept with it and a dagger under his pillow. Somewhere in these years came the horse. A Thessalian dealer brought Philip an animal nobody could mount; Alexander noticed it was shying at its own shadow, turned its head into the sun, and rode it. He called it Bucephalas, and Plutarch says his father wept and told him, "O my son, look thee out a kingdom equal to and worthy of thyself, for Macedonia is too little for thee." At sixteen he was left to govern Macedon while Philip campaigned. At eighteen, at the battle of Chaeronea in 338 BC, he is said to have been the first man to charge the Sacred Band of Thebes, the picked infantry regiment that had not lost in four decades. They did not survive the day.

(●) 336 BC: His father was murdered, and the new king of twenty answered a Greek revolt the next year by wiping Thebes off the map. + Philip was killed at Aegae during the wedding festival of his own daughter, stabbed by one of his bodyguards, a man named Pausanias, who had a private grievance and was cut down before anyone could question him. Alexander was king before the guests had gone home, and the news travelled south as an opportunity. The next two years were spent proving otherwise. He marched north to the Danube, and while he was up there a rumour reached Greece that he was dead. Thebes rose, killed the Macedonian officers in its citadel, and called the rest of Greece to join in. Alexander came back down faster than the news of his coming and took the city. The decision on what to do with it was handed to the allied Greek states who had fought alongside him, and they voted to raze it. Plutarch reckons upwards of six thousand Thebans put to the sword and thirty thousand sold into slavery. Alexander spared the priests, the family of the poet Pindar out of respect for his verses, and one woman named Timoclea, who had killed a Thracian officer for assaulting her by pushing him down a well, and who answered the king’s question about her family by naming a brother who had died fighting Philip. He let her and her children go free. The rest of Greece stayed where it was. At Corinth the assembled Greeks named him their general for the war against Persia that Philip had planned, and philosophers and politicians queued up to congratulate him. One did not. Diogenes was a Cynic, which in that century meant a man who had made a whole philosophy out of owning nothing and wanting nothing, and who said so to anybody within earshot; he lived in a suburb, and he did not get up. Alexander went to him, found him lying in the sun, and asked whether he wanted anything. He wanted the king to stand out of his light. Plutarch says Alexander told the courtiers who were laughing that if he were not Alexander, he would choose to be Diogenes. Before crossing to Asia he handed out almost the whole royal estate to his officers, and when one of them asked what he was keeping for himself, he answered, his hopes.

(●) 334 BC: He crossed into Asia with roughly thirty-five thousand men, and never lost a battle he commanded. + The numbers are worth pausing on. Plutarch’s sources give him somewhere between thirty and forty-three thousand infantry and a few thousand cavalry, about seventy talents in the war chest, thirty days of supplies, and, on one account, two hundred talents of debt. A talent was a weight of silver, and the easiest way to feel what one was worth is to count it in labour: about six thousand days of a skilled craftsman’s wages, which is the better part of twenty years of work. So the war chest was real money, the debt was nearly three times the war chest, and the man carrying both was invading an empire that stretched from the Aegean to the Indus. It went something like this. At the river Granicus in 334 he attacked across the water into cavalry waiting on the bank, and in the melee an officer named Cleitus cut off the arm of a Persian who was swinging at Alexander’s unprotected head. Remember that name. At Issus in 333 he broke the Persian centre, and Darius III, the Great King of Persia, fled the field and left his mother, his wife and his children behind in the camp. Darius then wrote offering a huge ransom, an alliance, a daughter in marriage, and every province west of the Euphrates. Parmenio, Philip’s old general and the most experienced soldier in the army, said that if he were Alexander he would take it. "So would I," said Alexander, "if I were Parmenio." Instead of chasing Darius inland he spent a year taking the coast, because a coast in Persian hands meant a Persian fleet behind him. Tyre, an island fortress off the Lebanese shore, held out for seven months while his engineers built a causeway out to it from the mainland. Gaza cost him two more. Egypt, which loathed its Persian governors, opened its gates, and on a strip between the sea and a lake he walked out the lines of a new city himself, marking where the market should go and which gods should have temples: Alexandria. Then he went into the western desert to the oasis of Siwah, to the oracle of Ammon, an Egyptian god the Greeks identified with their own Zeus. An oracle, in that world, was a shrine where a god was believed to answer the questions people brought him, the answer arriving through the mouth of a priest, and this one was famous enough that a king would ride hundreds of miles of sand to hear it. What the priest told him there he never made public. Arrian, who is careful about this sort of thing, writes only that he heard what was agreeable to his wishes, as he himself said.

(●) 331 BC: One battle at Gaugamela ended the Persian empire, and the following spring he burned its ceremonial capital. + On the first of October, 331 BC, on a plain near Gaugamela in what is now northern Iraq, Darius put an army in the field that outnumbered Alexander’s, and by how much is a question the ancient sources are no help with, since they exaggerate wildly; Arrian credits Darius with a million infantry, which is less a figure than a way of saying more men than anyone could count. Modern estimates are soberer and still come out at about two to one or better against roughly forty-seven thousand Macedonians and Greeks. Alexander pulled the Persian line apart by drifting to his right, waited for the gap, and rode into it at the head of the Companion cavalry, the household regiment of noblemen who rode beside the king. Darius fled again. Babylon and Susa surrendered without a fight, and with them the accumulated treasure of two centuries. Then Persepolis, the ceremonial heart of the empire, where the Great Kings received tribute under carved stairways of subject nations bringing gifts. Alexander burned the palace. Parmenio argued against it: the property was his own now, and burning it would tell Asia that he had come to loot rather than to rule. Alexander said he was paying the Persians back for what they had done in Greece a century and a half earlier, when they burned the temples of Athens. Arrian, who admires him more than most, will not defend this one. He writes that Alexander does not seem to him to have acted with prudence, and that this was no retributive penalty at all on the ancient Persians, who were long dead. Six years later Alexander came back through Persepolis, and Arrian notes drily that he did not commend the act either. Darius did not last the summer of 330. The Persian empire held its provinces through governors called satraps, each of them ruling in the king’s name with his own troops and his own tax collectors; and it was one of these, Bessus, who arrested his own king and then killed him on the road when Alexander’s pursuit got close. Alexander, now Great King in fact, began to wear Persian court dress and to mix Persians into his household. His Macedonians noticed.

(●) 330 BC: In three years he had his father’s general killed without a hearing, speared the officer who had saved his life, and arrested Aristotle’s nephew, who died in his custody. + This is the stretch that even his admirers handle carefully. Late in 330 a conspiracy against the king was uncovered, and Philotas, Parmenio’s son and commander of the Companion cavalry, was accused of having heard about it and said nothing. He was tried before the army and executed. Parmenio himself, seventy years old and holding the supply lines in Media, had done nothing at all; Alexander sent riders ahead with orders, and he was killed without a hearing, because the son of a man you have just executed is a problem and the father of a man you have just executed is a worse one. Two years later, at Maracanda in central Asia, came the night everyone remembers. It was a drinking party. A poet was singing verses mocking Macedonian officers who had recently lost a fight, the young men were enjoying it, and the older men were not. Cleitus, the man who had saved Alexander’s life at the Granicus, had drunk too much, and he said what the old guard had been thinking: that Macedonian blood had bought all this, and that the king was now disowning his father Philip and calling himself the son of Ammon. Alexander threw an apple at him, then looked for his sword, which someone had prudently removed. Friends dragged Cleitus out of the room. He came back in through another door, still talking. Alexander took a spear from a guard and ran him through. Then, Plutarch says, he pulled the spear out of the body and would have turned it on himself if the guards had not held his arms, and he wept for a night and a day and would not speak. In 327 he tried to introduce proskynesis, the Persian court gesture of prostration before the king, at his own table. To Persians it was ordinary good manners toward a monarch. To Greeks it was what you did in front of a god. Callisthenes, Aristotle’s nephew and the official historian of the expedition, stood up and said so, and the experiment was dropped. Not long afterward some royal pages were caught plotting to kill the king, and Callisthenes, who had been their tutor, was arrested. How he died the sources cannot agree on: Ptolemy says he was tortured and hanged, Aristobulus that he was carried along in chains and died of disease. Either way, Aristotle’s nephew died in Alexander’s custody for making a distinction that Aristotle would have made too.

(●) 326 BC: In India his army finally refused to go any further, and it was the first order he could not give. + He crossed the Indus and won his last great battle at the river Hydaspes against a king the Greeks called Porus, whose war elephants terrified the Macedonian horses and whose courage in defeat so impressed Alexander that he gave him his kingdom back and more besides. Bucephalas died in that campaign, thirty years old, and got a city named after him. Then the army came to the Hyphasis, the modern Beas, in the monsoon, after eight years of marching, and stopped. Alexander called the officers of the brigades together and made the speech of his life, which Arrian gives at length: the Ganges is not far, the encircling ocean is just beyond it, from there we sail round to Libya and the Pillars of Heracles and the limits of the empire will be the limits of the earth. The Pillars of Heracles were the headlands on either side of the strait at what is now Gibraltar, and for a Greek they were the western door of the world, the place past which there was nothing worth naming. So he was standing in a monsoon in the Punjab and promising his men the far side of everything. Almost none of that geography was true. The men listened in silence. An officer named Coenus, who had been with him from the beginning, finally answered for them, and what he said was that the men wanted to see their parents and their wives and their children again. Alexander shut himself in his tent for three days waiting for them to change their minds. They did not. He announced that the omens were against crossing, and turned south. The way home cost more than the way out. At a Mallian town on the Indus he went over the wall ahead of his men, was trapped inside with three companions, and took an arrow through the lung; the army heard he was dead, and he had himself carried on a boat past the whole camp to prove otherwise. Then, in the autumn of 325, he marched an army through the Gedrosian desert along the Makran coast, and the desert killed more of his people than any Persian ever had. It is here that Arrian tells the story he calls perhaps the noblest thing Alexander ever did, and it is a story about a helmet of water (T2).

(●) 323 BC: He died at Babylon at thirty-two, and inside a generation his empire was four kingdoms. + The last two years were spent trying to make one empire out of two nations. At Susa in the spring of 324 he held a mass wedding: he married a daughter of Darius, and eighty of his officers married daughters of the Persian and Median nobility on the same day, in the Persian manner, with dowries from the king. Over ten thousand ordinary Macedonians who had taken Asian wives were registered and given presents. And there was one more thing, which had been quietly under way out in the provinces for years: thirty thousand Persian boys had been in training all that time in Greek and in Macedonian arms. His veterans hated all of it, and at Opis on the Tigris they mutinied. Alexander’s answer was to discharge the lot of them and start replacing them with Persians, at which the Macedonians camped outside his door and begged. The reconciliation banquet at Opis is the high-water mark of his reign: nine thousand people at the tables, Greek seers and Persian Magi beginning the ceremony together, everyone pouring one libation, and the king praying, Arrian says, that harmony and community of rule might exist between the Macedonians and Persians. The Magi were the priests of the Persian religion, and theirs is the word the Gospel of Matthew uses for the wise men who came from the east; a libation is a splash of wine tipped out on the ground as an offering, the ordinary way a Greek or a Persian began a meal that mattered. Two priesthoods, one prayer, nine thousand men pouring at once. In the autumn Hephaestion, the friend he had had since boyhood, died at Ecbatana, and Alexander’s grief frightened people. The following June, at Babylon, after a long night of drinking, he came down with a fever that did not break. The soldiers filed past the bed; he could no longer speak, and lifted his head to each of them. He died on the tenth or eleventh of June, 323 BC, at thirty-two, having reigned twelve years and eight months. Some writers, Arrian says, report that when his Companions asked whom he left the kingdom to, he answered, "To the best." He had made no arrangements at all. His generals fought each other for forty years; his half-brother was murdered, and his son by Roxana, born after his death, was murdered about 310 BC. By 301 BC what had been one empire was four Greek-speaking kingdoms, and it stayed that way until Rome came.

What He Believed and Acted On

(T1) A man’s work has no limit except the work itself. + Most ambitions have a shape. A farmer wants the north field, a merchant wants the Alexandria run, a king wants the province across the river, and when he has it the wanting is over and he goes home. Alexander’s ambition had no shape of that kind, and the speech at the Hyphasis is where you can see it plainly, because he had to say out loud what the end was supposed to be and he could not name one. Watch what he actually offers his exhausted army in that speech. Not a border. Not a treaty. He tells them the Ganges is close, that the ocean encircling the earth lies just beyond it, that from there the fleet will sail round into Libya and out through the Pillars of Heracles, and that the limits of the empire will simply be the limits of the world. He believed the geography, and the geography was wrong; there was no such route, and India did not end where he thought. But the geography was never the engine. The engine was a conviction that stopping was itself the defeat. Greek had a word for the thing that thought is chasing here, pothos, a longing or yearning for something out of reach, and Arrian uses it of him again and again: he was seized by a longing to see the citadel at Gordium, to found the city in Egypt, to sail the ocean. It is not greed. A man who wanted money would have stopped at Susa. It is closer to what Augustine, seven centuries later and looking at his own restlessness rather than a map, would call a heart that has not yet found what it is for.

(Q) "I, for my part, think, that to a brave man there is no end to labours except the labours themselves, provided they lead to glorious achievements." + Source: Arrian, Anabasis of Alexander V.26 (Chinnock translation). From his speech at the Hyphasis in 326 BC, made to the officers of an army that had marched for eight years and wanted to go home. They heard him out and refused anyway (T1).

(T2) A commander is owed nothing he has not paid for in his own blood. + Here is the scene Arrian singles out from the whole reign, though he adds that some writers put it earlier, among the Parapamisadae. The army is crossing the Gedrosian desert in the heat, dying of thirst, and Alexander is walking rather than riding so that the men can bear it better by seeing him bear it. Some light infantry scouting ahead find a little water in a cleft of rock, barely enough for one man. They scrape it together and hurry it back to the king in a helmet, delighted with themselves. He thanks them in front of everybody, and pours it out on the sand. Arrian says the whole army was revived by it as though every man had drunk. He calls it perhaps the noblest deed Alexander ever performed, and it is the same instinct that runs through the speech at Opis, where the king answers a mutiny not with threats but by inviting anyone who has a wound to strip and compare. He led from the front and he had the scars to prove it, and Arrian records them one by one: a scimitar blow to the head at the Granicus that sheared a piece off his helmet, a catapult bolt at Gaza that went through shield and breastplate into his shoulder, an arrow near the river Tanais that broke a bone in his leg, an arrow through the lung at the Mallian town. Ancient armies did not follow men who spent other people’s lives from a safe distance, and neither, really, does anyone else. Christian readers can admire this straight out, and then notice which direction it goes. Alexander shares his soldiers’ thirst as their leader, and the sharing makes the leadership legitimate. When Jesus takes up the same subject, he says the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, "But it shall not be so among you. But whoever would be great among you must be your servant" (Mark 10:43). The movement in that sentence is not from the top of the column to the middle of it. It is all the way to the bottom, and it ends at a cross rather than a crown.

(Q) "Come now! whoever of you has wounds, let him strip and show them, and I will show mine in turn; for there is no part of my body, in front at any rate, remaining free from wounds." + Source: Arrian, Anabasis of Alexander VII.10 (Chinnock translation). From the speech at Opis in 324 BC, answering veterans who had accused him of enjoying the fruits of their labour. The words "in front at any rate" are the point of the sentence: no scars on the back means he had never run (T2).

(T3) Conqueror and conquered should become one people. + Aristotle had given his pupil the standard advice of the Greek world on how to handle foreigners. Plutarch reports it in the first oration On the Fortune or Virtue of Alexander, section 6: Aristotle told him to rule the Greeks "like a moderate prince and insult over the barbarians like an absolute tyrant," to take care of the first as friends and domestics, and to scorn the second as "mere brutes and vegetables" (Goodwin’s edition of Plutarch’s Morals). Alexander did the opposite, and it is the one policy that consistently made his own men furious. Start with the marriages. He took a Bactrian wife, Roxana, out of the country he had just finished conquering, and afterwards he married a daughter of the dead Darius and stood eighty of his officers up beside Persian and Median noblewomen on the same day at Susa. Then look at the army. He enrolled Persians in the Companion cavalry, the regiment that was the Macedonian aristocracy on horseback, which is roughly like taking the men you beat last year and commissioning them into the household guard. And he had thirty thousand Persian boys taught Greek and drilled in Macedonian weapons, so that when his veterans finally watched the finished product marching past they understood exactly what it meant for them: there was now somebody else who could do the job. A few Macedonians went that way themselves, and willingly. One of his officers, Peucestas, learned to speak Persian properly and wore Persian dress, and Alexander praised him for it while the rest of the Macedonians thought he had gone native. How much of this was an ideal and how much was arithmetic is honestly disputed. In 1933 the historian W. W. Tarn read it as a doctrine of the brotherhood of mankind; Ernst Badian and most scholars since have thought that too generous, and have pointed out that a Macedonian holding an empire of perhaps twenty million people with a home army of a few tens of thousands had strong practical reasons to make Persians into partners. Both can be true at once. What is certain is that the prayer at Opis asked for something no Greek political thinker of his century had asked for, and that his own army regarded it as a betrayal. What the church would later say about this goes further than Alexander could, and rests on something other than a king’s policy. Paul writes to a congregation of Greeks and Jews that "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus" (Galatians 3:28). Alexander’s unity was held together by his own person and dissolved within months of his funeral. The other one has outlived every empire that has tried to sponsor it.

(Q) "But all of you without exception I consider my kinsmen, and so from this time I shall call you." + Source: Arrian, Anabasis of Alexander VII.11 (Chinnock translation). At Opis the mutinous Macedonians came and lay in front of the palace gates, and their spokesman said that what hurt was hearing Persians called the king’s kinsmen while no Macedonian had been. Alexander interrupted him with this sentence. The spokesman, an old captain of the Companion cavalry named Callines, then walked up and kissed him, and the mutiny was over (T3).

(T4) The king is the son of a god. + In the winter of 332/331 BC he took a small party several hundred miles into the Libyan desert to the oasis of Siwah, where there was an oracle of Ammon, the Egyptian god Amun whom Greeks matched up with their own Zeus. Plutarch reports that the priest met him with a greeting that hailed him as the son of the god, and adds a deflating alternative: that the priest, trying to be polite in Greek, fumbled the ending of the word for "my boy" and produced something that sounded like "son of Zeus" instead. Alexander, says Plutarch, was quite happy to let that version circulate. Understand what such a claim did and did not mean in his world. Greek myth was full of men with a divine parent, and Alexander’s own family already claimed Heracles and Achilles; a hero with a god somewhere up the family tree was a familiar idea and not blasphemy. What was new, and what caused the trouble, was the suggestion that living men might receive the honours reserved for gods. When he tried to bring in prostration at court in 327, Callisthenes made the argument for the other side, and it is worth hearing from a pagan: men have always distinguished the honours due to men from those due to gods, temples and sacrifice and prostration belonging to the second, and mixing them "debases the gods, as far as lies in human power, to an unseemly level" (Arrian IV.11, Chinnock translation). Alexander himself was not consistent about it, which is one of the more likeable things in the record. Plutarch says he carried himself very haughtily toward foreigners, as if fully persuaded of his divine birth, and much more moderately among Greeks, and that after taking an arrow he looked at the wound and told his friends that this was real flowing blood, not the ichor that immortals are supposed to bleed (Life of Alexander 28). Arrian, defending him, guesses the whole thing was a political device for managing subjects. This is where Christian thought parts company with him, and the parting is not a small one. The New Testament does not deny that a man can be the Son of God; it insists that one man is. But the direction of travel is the reverse of Siwah. Alexander was a man reaching for the honours of a god. Paul writes of one who was "in the form of God" and who "emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant," and was exalted afterwards by God rather than by an oracle (Philippians 2:6-9).

(Q) "God was the common father of us all, but more particularly of the best of us." + Source: Plutarch, Life of Alexander 27 (Dryden translation, revised by Clough). In Egypt he had heard the philosopher Psammon say that all men are governed by God, and Plutarch says that what Alexander himself made of the idea was "more like a philosopher." It concedes that everyone is God’s child and then quietly reserves a better grade of the relation for the exceptional (T4).

(Q) "To the best." + Source: Arrian, Anabasis of Alexander VII.26 (Chinnock translation). His reported answer, on his deathbed at Babylon, to Companions asking whom he left the kingdom to. Arrian is scrupulous: the eyewitness sources he trusts say only that Alexander could not speak at the end, and he introduces this line as something "some authors have related," adding that others have him predicting a great funeral contest in his honour. Diodorus reports the same answer, and the single Greek word behind it, kratistos, will carry either "best" or "strongest" depending on who is translating, which is why the line turns up in English both ways. What is certain is that he left no arrangements, and that the contest happened.

What Christian Thinkers Made of Him

(†) The language his armies carried east is the language the New Testament was written in. + Picture a treasury official from the kingdom of Meroe, in what is now Sudan, riding home from Jerusalem in a chariot on the Gaza road, reading a scroll aloud to himself. The scroll is the prophet Isaiah, a Hebrew book, and the official cannot read Hebrew. He is reading it in Greek, and a Greek-speaking Jew from Galilee can climb into the chariot beside him and start explaining it from the same page (Acts 8:27-35). That conversation is possible because of a Macedonian king who had been dead for three hundred and fifty years. Here is the chain. Alexander’s conquests planted Greek-speaking soldiers, settlers and administrators from Egypt to Afghanistan; Plutarch credits him with founding more than seventy cities, and while modern historians can confirm far fewer than that, the ones they can confirm sit on the roads and rivers that carried everything else. Out of the mixing of Greek dialects in those places came koine, "common" Greek, the plain trade-and-street version of the language that everybody could use. His bodyguard Ptolemy took Egypt and founded a dynasty in the new city on the coast, and it was there, in the third century BC, that Jewish scholars translated the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek. That translation is the Septuagint, so called from a tradition that seventy-two elders made it, and it is the Bible in which most of the ancient world first met the God of Israel. By the first century the results were everywhere. Jerusalem had synagogues of Greek-speaking Jews, and the first argument in the Jerusalem church was between the Greek-speakers and the Aramaic-speakers over the food distribution (Acts 6:1). Paul preached in Greek in Antioch, Athens, Corinth and Rome, and wrote his letters in it. Christians have long read this as one strand of what Paul means by "the fullness of time" (Galatians 4:4): the gospel arrived in a world that already had one language for it, and the man who supplied the language had no idea he was doing it.

(†) Jews and Christians have read Daniel’s he-goat as him since at least the first century. + The eighth chapter of Daniel is a vision of two animals, and it belongs to that small class of prophetic passages that stop and label their own symbols, so that a reader is not left guessing at them. A male goat comes from the west so fast it does not touch the ground, with one conspicuous horn between its eyes, and it smashes a two-horned ram and tramples it. Then this: "the goat became exceedingly great, but when he was strong, the great horn was broken, and instead of it there came up four conspicuous horns toward the four winds of heaven" (Daniel 8:8). The chapter names the ram as Media and Persia and the goat as Greece (Daniel 8:20-21), and the parallel passage says the mighty king’s kingdom will be "broken and divided toward the four winds of heaven, but not to his posterity" (Daniel 11:4). His son was murdered as a boy, and four kingdoms is what there was. The identification is old. Josephus, the Jewish historian writing in the AD 90s, tells a story of Alexander coming up to Jerusalem, bowing before the high priest, and being shown the book of Daniel, "wherein Daniel declared that one of the Greeks should destroy the empire of the Persians" (Antiquities XI.337, Whiston translation). Most historians regard the visit itself as legend, since none of the Greek historians mention it, but the passage shows how Jews of the first century read the text. The Christian writers took it over. Hippolytus of Rome, about AD 204, walking through Daniel’s visions, says flatly that "by the he-goat that came from the west, he means Alexander the Macedonian, the king of the Greeks," and that after his death "there arose four horns under it, toward the four winds of heaven" because he had divided his kingdom into four principalities (Fragments from Commentaries, On Daniel II.8-9, Ante-Nicene Fathers translation). There is also the Jewish memory of him from much closer up. The first book of Maccabees, written about 100 BC and preserved in the Greek Bible (Scripture for Catholic and Orthodox Christians, printed among the Apocrypha in Protestant Bibles), opens with a short, cold obituary. He came out, he made many wars, he took spoils of many nations, "whereupon he was exalted, and his heart was lifted up." Then: he fell sick, he divided his kingdom among his servants, he reigned twelve years and died, and "after his death they all put crowns upon themselves; so did their sons after them many years: and evils were multiplied in the earth" (1 Maccabees 1:1-9, King James Apocrypha). The writer knew exactly what had come out of those four kingdoms, because a king out of one of them, Antiochus IV, had desecrated the temple in Jerusalem.

(†) Augustine used him to say what a kingdom without justice actually is. + In the fourth book of the City of God, written while the Roman empire was visibly coming apart, Augustine asks a question that sounds like a riddle and is not: "Justice being taken away, then, what are kingdoms but great robberies? For what are robberies themselves, but little kingdoms?" A gang has a leader, an agreed division of the loot, and a code. Grow it large enough that it holds cities and rules peoples, and the only thing that has changed is that nobody can punish it any more. Then he produces his witness, an anecdote that goes back to Cicero. A captured pirate is brought before Alexander, who asks him what he means by infesting the sea. The pirate says: "What thou meanest by seizing the whole earth; but because I do it with a petty ship, I am called a robber, whilst thou who dost it with a great fleet art styled emperor" (City of God IV.4, Dods translation). Augustine calls the answer apt and true, and moves on. That is the mature Christian estimate of Alexander, and it is not a sneer. Augustine does not deny the ability, the courage or the scale; he denies that any of them settle the question a king should be judged by, which is whether the thing he built was just. Christians had reason to feel the point. They lived under emperors who used the same word for conquest that the pirate used for theft, and their own Scriptures had already put it at the level of physics rather than politics: "Behold, the nations are like a drop from a bucket" (Isaiah 40:15).

(†) Where the gospel parts company with him: divine honours, cities burned for glory, friends killed in anger, and a kingdom that could not outlive him. + The ledger has another column, and with Alexander it is drawn from what he himself did, not from what admirers made of him afterwards. - The honours of a god. He let himself be hailed as the son of Ammon and tried to introduce prostration at his own table, and the man who publicly objected died in his custody. Scripture puts the honours of God out of reach of any king by putting them within reach of only one man, and that one by descending rather than climbing: he "emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant," and the exaltation came afterwards and from God (Philippians 2:7-9). - Glory bought with cities. Thebes was destroyed and sold, Tyre was stormed after seven months and its women and children sold while some two thousand men of military age were crucified along the shore on Diodorus’ account, and the palace at Persepolis was burned for a revenge on people who had been dead for a hundred and fifty years. Arrian, who admired him, refused to defend that last one, and Augustine’s pirate is the exact measure of the first two. - Friends killed in anger. Parmenio was executed without a hearing; Cleitus was speared at dinner for saying something true. Arrian is remarkable here: he praises Alexander as the only ancient king he knows who repented of his errors, and adds that "the only cure for sin is for the sinner to confess it, and to be visibly repentant in regard to it." That is a pagan historian arriving unaided at something very close to 1 John 1:9, and it is worth saying that the days of weeping over Cleitus were real. It is also worth saying that Parmenio stayed dead. - A kingdom that died with him. He conquered from the Danube to the Punjab and left no succession, no constitution and no heir who survived childhood; the wars over the remains lasted longer than his reign. "Put not your trust in princes, in a son of man, in whom there is no salvation. When his breath departs, he returns to the earth; on that very day his plans perish" (Psalm 146:3-4). The contrast Daniel draws is with a kingdom that "shall never be destroyed" and is given to one like a son of man, whose dominion "shall not pass away" (Daniel 2:44; 7:14). None of this makes him a villain in a morality play. He was, by the testimony of men who marched behind him, generous, physically fearless, capable of real remorse, and better to the people he conquered than most conquerors have managed. What makes a pagan king worth a Christian’s attention is what he left behind rather than what he believed, and the fact that his life gives the clearest ancient answer to a question the Psalms keep asking: what exactly is a great man worth, once his breath departs.