Cultura. International Journal of Philosophy of Culture and Axiology, vol. VI, no.

1/2009

The Myth of Alexander the Great.

A Model for Understanding “the Other”

Irina FRASIN
“Gh. Zane” Institute of Social and Economic Research,
No. 2, T. Codrescu street, Iasi, Romania
irinaada@gmail.com

Abstract. Under Alexander the Great the Greeks conquered Asia. This extraordinary
undertaking was made possible, beside the military achievement, by the Greek thought
and philosophy. The belief in the superiority of the Greek over the barbarian and freedom
of the first and slavery of the second rendered the conquest and domination of Asia into a
noble “mission of civilization”. What is more, Western historians of philosophy and
culture have used this Greek self-understanding to legitimate the view of Western cultural
superiority based on universalism.
But the expedition and conquest was also an amazing opportunity of meeting and
knowing directly “the Other”. What Alexander discovered was that the world was much
larger than it was thought in Athens and the barbarians were not so unreasonable as
Aristotle believed. All these things, that raged the king’s contemporaries, are very well kept
by his legend. The deep sense of his adventures is revealed by the legend. Alexander,
passionate for adventure, discovery, curious to know “the Other” is the hero that fights
the absolute “other”: the foreigner, the barbarian, the monster. But with all his actions he
demonstrates that “the Other” can be recognized, understood and even loved.
And maybe his extraordinary discovery should guide us as a model in the turbulent times
we live in which cultural differences become more and more important.
Keywords: culture, myth, the Other, conflict, domination, communication.

The problem of “the Other”, the meeting, the conflict and the
communication with “the Other” are issues as long as history. Ever since
we have recorded history we find proof of conflicts and attempts to
understand and face “the Other”.
The perception of one’s own identity in ethnic groups is
accompanied by a delimitation with regard to an external world that is felt
to be totally different from oneself. The idea that this world is uniform
derives simply from the fact that it differs, to a sometimes varying degree,
from customary standards. It is enough to cite the way Greek view of the

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barbarians1 or the way in which the Egyptians understood themselves,

recognizing theirs as a kingdom of order in contrast with an external world
characterized by chaos2. This way of understanding one’s own identity is
still valid today as it was in ancient times.
The world in constant change, the shrinking of the distances, the
migrations on large scale and even the contact with other cultures by mass
media may create the wrong impression that the whole world is known and
the cultural differences are understood and accepted. Although this may be
true for certain media, the world is still shaken by wars that have to do with
cultural differences or, as Samuel Huntington3 considers, mostly with
cultural differences. In nowadays world the problem of understanding and
communicating with “the Other” is of crucial importance and perhaps the
way our future will be shaped depends on that.
The most part of modern history consists of the conquest,
submission or domination of the Western powers over the rest of the
world. Inheriting and developing a Greek idea, Western Europe, in the
name of its universal values, tried to assimilate “the Other”, to make it
disappear and it was mostly successful. Its way of thinking and its values
are nowadays present all over the world. But this is far from creating, as it
was supposed many times, a united and peaceful world. That is why our
purpose is to go back in history, to read it once more and try underline the
useful lessons for us today; the moment of the Greek conquest of Asia, the
meeting of different traditions, customs, religions and languages in the
same “melting pot” it is such an example.
Under Alexander the Great the Greeks conquered Asia, taking to
the ends of the known world their thought and philosophy. The belief in
their own values, thought to be universal, made the war of conquest a
mission of civilization over the barbarians. It is very interesting to see how
it was possible that the empire be born out of democracy, and the
civilization of the barbarians change the way “the Other” was understood.
In our time, when the civilizations confront and all the cultures
claim their right to existence, the notion of “barbarian” captured the
attention of researchers. In the beginning, the word “barbarian” named
those who didn’t speak Greek or spoke it incorrectly. It was a purely
descriptive notion: it did not oppose the Greeks to the non-Greeks, but a

1Thomas Harrison, Greeks and barbarians, Edinburgh University Press, 2002.

2Lewis Spence, Egypt, Senate, London, 1996.
3 Samuel Huntigton, Ciocnirea civilizatiilor si refacerea ordinii mondiale, Editura Antet –

Samizdat, Bucuresti, 2007.

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purely spoken language to a inarticulate pronunciation. The emphasis will

be changed from pronunciation to language and from there to the culture
of other people who cannot attain the Greek way of life. It is mostly agreed
that the moment for this change are the Persian Wars. Face to Persian
menace the Greek sense of self was awaken and the distinction began to
grow. Herodotus4 tells us that the Persian king Xerxes is amazed to see that
the Greeks can fight and resist in war without a leader like himself who can
drive them by force and the Spartan Demaratos tells him that free men
obey only the law. Finally the war becomes, in the Greek eyes, the fight
between a free people and one that obeys an absolute king. This
fundamental distinction between law, which is Greek, and slavery, which is
barbarian, will achieve different other nuances along the way: the respect of
the law and the courage are connected with restraint as well as for the
barbarians luxury leads to weakness and cruelty. But these features do not
have historical truth more than any other features by which the enemy, or
“the Other” is in other occasions characterized.
In short, all this can be reduced to a discussion over values. It is
obvious that in their writings and speeches the Athenians wanted to
suggest that they posses one virtue or the other, but what is more
important maybe is their attachment to these values. The Greeks prized
virtue, that they wanted present in everybody and complained its absence
in them or the others. Consequently, if we follow the way the Greeks
“invented” the barbarian, we follow in fact the way they viewed
themselves. This thing is most obvious where all these virtues are united to
form a political ideal. The democratic ideal, invented by the Greeks,
supposes a type of society formed by the free an willingly acceptance of its
members. All citizens are equal and they obey only the law. Thus Greece
becomes the model for all that is civilized, rational and by contrast the
barbarians embody different stages of irrational thought.
We have to admit that this ideal made the Greeks despise the
foreign cultures in a way that continues to amaze us. But the idea must be
clarified not to get a caricaturized image of the barbarian. We must
emphasize that in the eyes of the Greeks the distinction was not so clear as
we might suppose at a first glance. The Thracians or the Scithians are
viewed differently than the Persians or the Egyptians. And if the Greek can
accept that other civilizations predated his own in matter of religion,
customs and even science, there is one aspect that he cannot understand or
accept: the obedience and slavery of the barbarian. The most important

4 Herodotus, Histories, Wordsworth Classics Editions, London, 1996, p. 549.

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distinction between Greek and barbarian is the dependency of the second

on desires and impulses that denies him the way to freedom. In The Persians
Eschiles puts these words about the Athenians in the mouth of a
messenger to the queen Atossa, the daughter of Cyrus the Great: “They are
nobody’s slaves, they are not submitted to any man”5.
But we should not characterize the Greek – barbarian distinction
as ethnocentrism. Most of the Greek texts refer not to innate features but
to achieved ones. We become barbarians living among barbarians and we
can learn the Greek way of life. In fact there is no difference of nature, it is
only one of culture, and the Greek “superior” culture is opened to everyone.
The idea is clearly stated by Isocrates when he says that “Athens
has become the teacher of the other cities, and has made the name Greek
no longer a mark of race but of intellect, so that it is those who share our
upbringing rather than our common nature who are called Hellenes”6. We
have here a beautiful declaration of universalism. This marks the moment
when the Greek laws become the laws of all mankind. But it is just this
universalism that may worry us if it means imposing to all mankind one law
and one culture – the Greek one in our example. Regarded in this light, the
expedition of Alexander the Great has as its purpose the extension of
Hellenism to a world wide scale.
We know how this kind of attitude is blamed today, when we admit
the multitude of cultures and the right of each to exist. But this should not
prevent us from regarding the relations between Greeks and the others for
what they were and not through the eyes of the conflicts of our times and
the theories they generated.
In the very short description that we made of the barbarian we
didn’t talk of polygamy, incest, promiscuity or other tendencies. Herodotus
talks about them and the tragic authors use them sometimes for hostile
allusions. But if Herodotus talks about them is because he is curious to the
regard of the variety of customs and traditions. But he also believes that a
great relativism7 is normal for these things. In other words, there is a
tendency to separate social traditions and customs, where everyone can act
following his own convictions, and the major virtues that define a human
ideal. The Greeks tried to define these major virtues and because these

5 Eschil, Persii, trad. Alexandru Miran, Editura Univers, Bucuresti, 2000, v. 242, p. 92.
6 Isocrate, Panegiric, trad. Andrei Marin, in Pagini alese din oratori greci, E.P.L.A., Bucuresti,
1969, p. 138.
7 Herodotous,Histories, Wordsworth Classics, London, 1996, III, p. 270 and next.

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embodied the universal values they wanted to take them all over the world.
They believed in the unique and superior value of their culture.
Concepts like that of nationalism and xenophobia were built having
as base the innate fear that makes us regard the others from different
cultures with lack of trust or envy. This leads to the desire or the need to
surpass the other cultures. It is impossible not to notice that the
domination over foreign peoples and territories is common throughout
history. It has often been said that the empire that Alexander the Great
founded in Asia was made possible by the influences of the Persian culture
over the young king. But despite this, the possibility of making an empire
depends on the existence of an idea of empire. And this idea was born
from the aspiration towards the universal that we find in the writings of the
Greeks authors one century before. But the great achievement of
Alexander of Macedon surpassed the imagination of the Greek thinkers.
And if their theories were used by the Europeans to help them understand
themselves and legitimize their cultural superiority based on universalism,
maybe we should use the experience of Alexander’s exploit to help us
understand and respect “the Other”, recognizing the differences in the
same time.
The conquering hero dreams of an universal empire that supposes
the melting in the same pot which is kosmopolis of all the different traditions
and customs of Greeks and Macedonians and all the peoples of the Persian
Empire. Plutarch8 tells us clearly about this dream. The cultural and
spiritual panhellenism of Isocrates is but the starting point considering that
the Greek thinker could only admit as right what was in the spirit of Greek
culture from other places of the world. But the oriental influences of the
kosmocrator, his proclamation as rightful heir of the pharaohs and master of
the Achaemenids kings surpasses any Greek utopia. Some historians9
have suggested that these actions of Alexander, like many others 10, were
dictated to the king by practical reasons: it would have been simply
impossible to dominate such a huge territory only with the soldiers
brought from Greece and Macedonia and without the cooperation of
the locals. Nevertheless this should not make us neglect the
extraordinary vision of Alexander the Great.

8 Plutarch, Vieti paralele, Editura Stiintifica, Bucuresti, 1957, LXX, LXXI, p. 89.
9 Donald W. Engels, Alexander the Great and the Logistics of the Macedonian Army, University
of California Press, 1997.
10 The introducing of Persian men into the army, the mass marriages at Susa and so on.

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What Alexander of Macedon discovered conquering Asia is that

the world was much larger than what they thought in Greece and also
much more complicated and beautiful. The expedition in the east was an
amazing opportunity of meeting and knowing directly “the Other” and this
altered gradually the old theories; the uncivilized, irrational and enslaved
barbarians were not exactly as they were viewed. The fundamental
distinction between Greeks and barbarians that become obvious beginning
with the Persian Wars started to be subjected to debate and changes in the
attempt to face the new realities.
The legendary figure of Alexander the Great amazed his
contemporaries and his successors, for whom he became a model, as well
as historians along the ages. Alexander of Macedon took the Greek culture
deep into the east and opened new ways of trade and communication. And
even if he could not achieve the political unity he dreamed of he realized a
spiritual one. The king began his conquest in the name of the Hellenic
League, to revenge the humiliations of the Persian Wars. But he was not
content even after he became the master of the Persian Empire; he always
wanted to go further – and maybe in this desire of his we find the seeds of
the future legend that makes him arrive to the ends of the Earth and even
beyond. Far from the destruction of Persepolis, the marriages of Susa tend
to create the conditions for an absolutely new future: the universal
monarchy, uniting under the same rule Greeks, Macedonians and
barbarians all dominated by feelings of mutual friendship and sympathy.
The great importance of these measures of the king couldn’t be
understood by his Greek contemporaries. The young conqueror, absolute
master of so many different peoples, ignoring the Greek vanity, proved an
exquisite sense of the political realities. Although the Greeks considered
him a tyrant for his convictions and way of acting, Alexander the Great
wanted to create an empire where all the peoples could stand side by side
and work together for the common good. He did not want to repeat, in the
name of the Greek imperialism, what Xerxes failed to do in the name of
the Persian one. It was time for a new way of thinking.
Alexander had all the physical and moral traits of a leader of men.
With more enthusiasm and honesty than his father, he viewed himself as
the leader destined to avenge the Greek humiliations of the Persian Wars.
He believed in the glory of Macedon. But the Orient gave him the amazing
opportunity to meet a new world, new peoples with new laws and customs,
for the knowing of which he showed an extraordinary openness. Inspired
by the Greek idea of omonoia, the good understanding between people that

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generates the equality of rights, he tried realize the universal empire “he
melted and recomposed in a great pot of friendship the lives, the
characters, the marriages and customs and wanted that everyone consider
the whole Earth his country”11. His politics, although created enmity
between his generals and plots against him, brought for him the admiration
of the thinkers of the following centuries.
There are many ways of understanding Alexander the Great and his
exploits and the various interpretations of thinkers and historians stands
proof to this. Along the centuries his personality, his empire and legacy
have been studied from different perspectives. The relics and the ancient
literary sources offer just a base for our image of Alexander the Great.
Thus our interest refers not so much to historically proven data but to the
thought of people. Reading the legend of the conqueror and following its
development along the centuries we can see and understand not only the
image of the king, but also the preoccupations of the Greeks, Romans,
Byzantians and other peoples and societies including the contemporary
one. For the purpose of our research the historical truth is not as relevant
as the image of the conqueror in people’s mind. The facts are for
historians to debate on, but what is more interesting is the idea that stands
behind them: what determined Alexander the Great to act in the way he
did. And as this question will probably remain forever without a certain
answer we should turn to legend to see the probable replies, to see what
people along the centuries imagined and wanted to believe that stand
behind Alexander’s actions.
The idea of world wide domination was very early associated with
Alexander the Great. In spite of anterior projects – the Egyptian idea that
the pharaoh is the master of the peoples of the four cardinal points or the
tradition of the Great Persian Kings – this idea reflects the Greek desire to
underline the universal mission of the conqueror. Thus the idea of the
kosmocrator is very largely known and appreciated all over the Greek and
Roman world. This emphasizes the universality and eternity of Alexander’s
conquest, denouncing any form of despotic ambition and lack of measure.
Any way, the general impression that the great adventure of
Alexander of Macedon leaves in the mind of the reader cannot be resumed
to a military and economic exploit. The desire to know the world, to
understand the mysteries of an even larger universe as got farther away

11Destinul lui Alexandru, I, 6, 1, quoted by Jean Sirinelli in Urmasii lui Alexandru, Editura
Teora, Bucuresti, 2000, p. 21.

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from Greece, played in his expedition a role at least as important as the

wish to gather victories and wealth.
The elements that history offers to the reader – no matter how
great and important they prove to be – are never kept unchanged in the
minds and memory of the generations, in the folklore. They have to
undertake certain mutations till they become legend. History, for the one
that lives it as well as for the one who describes it, does not have an
immediate meaning. It appears, for the one that meditates over it, as a
series of unpredictable and incomprehensible events. There is no meaning,
just a succession of different events, wars, disasters, victories. And if we
see history as an endless row of victories and defeats, greatness and
decadence, we end up finding in this the law of history itself: there is no
greatness without decadence and whoever reaches to high ends up by
knowing the abyss. The great and glorious heroes become victims of
history, of destiny. This is the lesson Herodotus and the Greek tragic poets
teach us.
The legendary Alexander achieves victory where all the others fail,
gets to know success without having to taste the bitter taste of defeat. Not
only that he becomes the master of Athens and defeats king Darius
(something that no other king could do), but he surpasses Herakles himself
in his attempt to get to the ends of the Earth. The story of this fabulous
destiny drives its roots into the historical events: of all the known kings
Alexander is the only one who was never defeated and got to the limits of
the known world. His death at only thirty two, when he was preparing his
expedition in Arabia, is the event that “immortalized” his glory. In his case,
the law of history – as the ancients saw it – had to bind its head to his
example: Alexander got so high and had no time to know defeat. His
historic destiny is in itself an exception of history.
In the attempt to understand the sense of the adventure that took
Alexander the Great to the limits of the known world we discover that his
destiny represents in fact a search for identity, for the meaning of
existence, for freedom. If the historic Alexander gave us an amazing lesson
by his political measures that used both Greeks an barbarians to create a
better world, the Alexander of legend turns to represent the hero that
searches “the ultimate Other” to discover himself. The famous Greek
warrior and traveler Odisseus, in spite of the fact that he goes all around
the world, meets all kinds of strange creatures, knows different kinds of
living, remains firm to his goal of getting home. No matter how good life
can be elsewhere, there is no place like home and not even the promise of

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immortality can make him change his mind12. From this point of view
Alexander and Odisseus are opposite characters: no matter how far from
home Alexander gets, no matter how many wonders he discovers his need
of the new is never satisfied. The passion for adventure, discovery and the
curiosity to meet ‘the Other” make of Alexander the hero that meets “the
ultimate Other”: the foreigner, the barbarian, the monster. But with all that
he does he demonstrates that “the Other” can be recognized, understood
and even loved13. Finally, at the end of his adventures Alexander get the
wisdom he was searching for. He remains the prototype for the
adventurous hero, passionate for knowing “the Other” and the world, free
by his knowledge and with the promise of immortality.
Centuries after the death of the hero, the legend of his adventures
continues to be retold, adapted to different cultures and traditions that it
encountered. In Arabic, Persian or Hebrew, Alexander becomes a visionary
prophet, a builder, the greatest and fairest king. The deeds and actions of
Alexander the Great continue to fascinate us even today because they
surpass the limits of time and “the adventure hero is the best example of a
non-historic individual”14. By what it has more deep and profound, his
exploits continue to be a model for us today, in the turbulent times we live in.
For a long time the Western civilization dominated the world. It
tried, and succeeded, most of the times, to impose its model all over the
world. Fed by the ideas of the superiority of its thought and way of life,
inspired by its Greek ancestors, the European actions mirrored its despise
and lack of understanding of the others. The colonial thinking shows this
very clearly: the imperialistic tendencies mean profit not only for the
mother country, but also for the colony, that gets the “benefits of
civilization”.
This way of seeing things created restlessness and conflict,
especially as the subjected parts began to get back their voice. All the
societies try to preserve themselves, their belief and customs, their language
and religion and economic and political independence. And nowadays, as
Samuel Huntington underlines in this book15, the cultural maps become
more and more important. The global politics are dominated by rivalry
between different cultures.

12 Homer, Odiseea, Editura Tineretului, Bucuresti, 1966.

13 See the episodes with the death of Darius and the weddings of Susa.
14 Georg Simmel, Cultura filosofica, Editura Humanitas, Bucuresti, 1998, p. 15.
15 Samuel Huntington, Ciocnirea civilizatiilor si refacerea ordinii mondiale, Editura Antet –

Samizdat, Bucuresti, 2007.

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But today, “the Others” appear on the scene of the world’s politics
and the Western civilization must take them into consideration. This
situation creates new possibilities for all partners. The model that was
successful for so long needs change, and this leaves the West somehow
puzzled. The globalization in the name of western values needs now the
contribution and acceptance of the others. As many researchers debating
this problem showed, the future of us all depends on the ability of
communication, the ability of true dialogue, in which all partners are heard
and understood. It is of crucial importance that the West finds new ways of
communicating not to but with “the Other”. And what is perhaps even
more important is to realize that it’s not doing this on its own, but together
with the others. And for this the great lesson of history that we turned to
should help. The visionary king understood much before us that to create
harmony in the world we should open up a dialogue where no one has the
last word.
On the other hand, if we keep reading the myth of Alexander, we
discover that the deep truth and hidden knowledge that the king uncovers
at the end of his fabulous adventures is that “the Other” is indispensable.
The Socratic knowledge, the discovery of one’s self passes by the
knowledge of “the Other”. King Alexander tries to find the ultimate other
at the ends of the world in order to get a better knowledge and
understanding of himself. In the end he achieves a mysterious land, where
men know a superior kind of happiness: he obtains wisdom, the Absolute,
the Immortality. For whoever reached the wisdom, the universe has no
more secrets. The whole voyage of Alexander is an initiation. But what we
should not neglect is that to get to the self knowledge that the Delphic
oracle demanded – “Know thyself” – we should reflect ourselves in “the
mirror” of the other. For a long time “the Other” was seen as a threat or
an inferior race or simply neglected; but if we learn to take him as a
dialogue partner, we have the promise that this will lead to a totally new
kind of experience.

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