Alexander's Legacy

Yesterday it so happened that I ended up giving a tiny little linguistic lesson online. And one of the words involved was the Greek Alexander, which means 'Defender of Men'. Well, we all know how the historical Alexander turned out: conquered the world in his youth, overachieved handily, reached India, became old while still young, caught a disease and never went home again. But the interesting part, as always, was the legacy he left behind.

The age that lived on long after him was called the Hellenistic Age, a mad and wonderful fusion of Greek, Indo-Aryan and Middle Eastern cultures all thrown together into a brew and divvied up among people with vastly-different interests and ideas. As the tumult and the shouting died, as the generals carved up the body of Empire, the greater generals fought themselves into a synthesis that would one day bloom into the greater Roman Empire.

It is sometimes that way; a strong leader who leaves no obvious successor behind (or too many obvious successors) will have made possible the final exhaustion and collapse of his direct legacy. Like a phoenix, though, the fragments often kindle and come together again in some unexpected way.