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 25civilization 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. 26According 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 27harmony 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?
