Alexander the Great and the Problem with Infinity

Sophie retraces the magnificent tales of military conquest authored by the King of Macedon.  Her comparison with a modern-age conqueror of daunting technological challenges is both surprising and compelling.

This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

https://www.buzzsprout.com/2599997/episodes/18768959

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Alexander the Great and the Problem with Infinity, a podcast by Sophie Manners. Hello and welcome back. I'm Sophie Manners, Professor of European History at Queen's College, Cambridge, author of biographies of people who, on the whole, knew when to stop, which is a quality conspicuously absent from today's subject, wearer of a scarf that my colleague in the classics faculty described this morning as almost Macedonian in its ambition, which I am choosing to interpret as a compliment, and which is, in any case, entirely appropriate for the episode we are about to record. I want to begin with a number. The number is thirteen thirteen years. That is the length of time between Alexander of Macedon assuming the throne of his father's kingdom at the age of twenty and his death in Babylon at thirty two. Thirteen years in which he fought and won every significant military engagement he entered. Thirteen years in which he conquered an empire stretching from Greece to northwestern India approximately two million square miles, encompassing what we now call Greece, Turkey, Egypt, Israel, Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and a portion of India, making it the largest empire in the world up to that point in human history, built faster than any before or since, thirteen years in which he founded approximately twenty cities, many of which still exist and bear variations of his name, thirteen years in which he never lost a battle, he was thirty two years old when he died. He had run out of world to conquer. He had not run out of the desire to conquer it. These two facts, held simultaneously, tell you most of what you need to know about Alexander the Great, and also most of what you need to know about the particular kind of human greatness that destroys everything around it, including eventually itself. I am going to say something at the outset of this episode that my more diplomatically cautious colleagues in the classics department might find professionally uncomfortable, and I say it because I think it is true, and because I think you deserve honesty more than you deserve careful hedging. Alexander the Great was almost certainly the most militarily gifted individual in the history of documented warfare. The qualification almost certainly is there because history is long, uncertainty is expensive, and because my doctoral supervisor's voice in the back of my head never entirely goes away. But the qualifier is doing very little work. In terms of the combination of tactical brilliance, strategic vision, personal courage, logistical capability, and the ability to inspire men to follow him into conditions that no rational person would voluntarily enter. Alexander has no serious peer in the historical record. He was also, by any reasonable moral accounting, responsible for an enormous quantity of death, destruction, and suffering, conducted with a systematic thoroughness that his admirers have tended to romanticize and his detractors have tended to oversimplify, and which requires neither romanticisation nor oversimplification, but honest reckoning. Both of these things are true, they were true of the same person. And the tension between them is the tension that has made Alexander one of the most discussed and most disputed figures in three thousand years of Western historical thought. Julius Caesar reportedly wept at a statue of Alexander, feeling that he himself had accomplished nothing at the same age. Napoleon studied Alexander's campaigns obsessively. Every subsequent empire builder in the Western tradition has measured himself against Alexander and found the comparison either inspiring or humbling, depending on the day and the mood and the current state of their own campaigns. We should start in Macedon, which is where Alexander started, and which in the fourth century, before the Common Era, occupied a position in the Greek world roughly equivalent to the position that the American colonies occupied in the British world in 1750, acknowledged as part of the broader cultural family, regarded by the more established centres of civilization as somewhat provincial and not entirely reliable, and possessed of a military energy that the more comfortable establishment was about to find comprehensively clarifying. Philip II of Macedon, Alexander's father, was one of the great military innovators of antiquity. He transformed the Macedonian army from a regional force into the most effective military machine in the Greek world through a combination of tactical innovation, the Macedonian phalanx, the oblique attack, the coordination of heavy infantry with cavalry, and institutional professionalism. The Macedonian army under Philip was not a citizen militia that assembled in emergencies and went home afterward. It was a standing professional force, trained continuously, maintained at readiness, equipped and paid by the state. Philip built the instrument. Alexander used it to play music no one had heard before. Alexander was born in Pella, the Macedonian capital in July 356 BCE. His mother was Olympius, a princess from Epirus, a woman of formidable intelligence and ferocious ambition on her son's behalf, who reportedly told Alexander that his true father was not Philip, but Zeus himself, specifically Zeus in the form of a serpent, which is exactly the kind of thing a formidably intelligent and ambitious mother says to a son she intends to make extraordinary, and which Alexander appears to have received not as obvious maternal manipulation, but as information requiring serious consideration. His relationship with his own divinity was throughout his life, genuinely complex and not straightforwardly performative, and we will return to it. His education was, by any standard, extraordinary. From the age of thirteen to sixteen he was taught by Aristotle. Yes, that Aristotle, the one who had studied under Plato, the one who effectively founded the disciplines of biology, physics, ethics, logic, and political science as systematic fields of inquiry, the one whose work dominated European intellectual life for the better part of two thousand years. Philip of Macedon had decided that if you were going to educate a king, you should get the best teacher available. Aristotle was unambiguously the best teacher available. He came to Macedon and taught Alexander at a place called Mirza, philosophy, medicine, science, literature, ethics, politics. And the relationship between teacher and student was apparently genuinely warm and intellectually serious. What did Alexander take from Aristotle? The historical evidence suggests a genuine intellectual curiosity that persisted throughout his campaigns. He travelled with scientists who documented flora and fauna and geography, he sent biological specimens back to Aristotle. He maintained an interest in ideas that sat oddly alongside and also entirely consistently with his interest in conquest, and a quality of ethical reflection that manifested not as restraint, but as the capacity to construct philosophical justifications for things he was going to do anyway, which is perhaps a more accurate description of what Aristotle's ethics gave most of his students. He also took from Aristotle, it should be noted, a Greek cultural framework that drew a firm and self flattering distinction between the civilized Greek world and the barbarian non Greek world, a distinction that shaped Alexander's stated rationale for his campaigns, even as his actual conduct increasingly blurred and eventually dissolved it. More on that shortly. Philip was assassinated in three hundred thirty six BCE during the wedding celebrations of his daughter. The circumstances of the assassination have never been definitively resolved. The assassin, a Macedonian noble named Pausanius, had personal grievances, but questions about whether he acted alone and whether Olympius had any role in the matter, have occupied historians ever since, and will continue to occupy them indefinitely. Alexander was twenty years old. He moved immediately and decisively, securing the loyalty of the army, eliminating potential rivals, and demonstrating within weeks that the transition of power in Macedon would be orderly, final, and very much on his terms. Within two years he had subdued Greece, dealt with a Theban revolt by destroying Thebes so comprehensively that barely a stone remained upon a stone. He spared, famously and characteristically, the house of the poet Pindar, because he had read Pindar and considered poetic genius an exemption from the general rules of conquest, and turned the Macedonian military machine toward Persia. The Persian Empire was at this moment the largest political entity in the world. Under Darius III it stretched from the Aegean coast to the borders of India, encompassing dozens of distinct peoples, cultures, and languages, administered through a system of satrapies that was sophisticated, durable, and had been functioning for two centuries. Its military forces numbered in the hundreds of thousands. Its resources were essentially without limit by the standards of the ancient world. It was, in short, the kind of opponent that any rational military planner would approach with great caution and extensive preparation, and possibly a quietly negotiated alternative to direct confrontation. Alexander crossed the Hellespont in three hundred thirty four BCE with approximately forty seven thousand men. He visited Troy first. He was a devoted reader of Homer, carried a copy of the Iliad, annotated by Aristotle wherever he went, and identified himself with Achilles in a way that was both literary and entirely literal, and made offerings at the tomb of Achilles, and ran naked around it, which his companions apparently accepted as a perfectly reasonable thing to do, which tells you something about the general atmosphere of the expedition. The Persian campaign was a sequence of military engagements that still repay careful study because Alexander's tactical decisions at each major battle, Granicus, Issus, Gaugamella, were not merely victories but demonstrations of a military intelligence operating at a level that the opposition consistently failed to anticipate. At Gaugamella in 331 BCE, facing a Persian army that ancient sources place at a million men, the true number was probably in the hundreds of thousands, still vastly outnumbering his own force. Alexander won a decisive victory by identifying the precise moment and location at which a concentrated cavalry charge could split the Persian line and drive directly at Darius III himself. Darius fled. The Persian Empire, for practical purposes, ended. Alexander took Persepolis, the Persian capital, and burned the great palace of Xerxes. In retribution, his stated reason for the Persian burning of Athens, a century and a half earlier, though the timing of the burning, apparently following a night of celebration that involved considerable wine, and at least one woman named Taiis, who made a theatrical suggestion, has led some historians to question the strategic rather than emotional nature of the decision. He pressed on, he did not go home, he did not consolidate, he continued east, through what is now Afghanistan and Pakistan and into northwestern India, through terrain that was not merely difficult, but actively hostile in ways that the physical landscape of Greece and Persia had not prepared his army for mountains, desert, monsoon, peoples who had not read the book that explained that Alexander was supposed to win. He won anyway, generally. At the Hydaspes River, in three hundred twenty six BCE, he fought the last of his great set peace battles against the Indian king Porus and his war elephants, and he won that too, though the elephants caused the kind of confusion and casualties among his cavalry that no previous opponent had managed. And then his army stopped not he, his army. The Macedonian soldiers who had marched with him from Greece, who had crossed deserts and mountains and rivers, and decades of continuous campaigning, who had watched Alexander acquire a Persian wife and Persian court customs, and a Persian claim to divine status that sat oddly with the Greek and Macedonian men who were supposed to be his companions rather than his subjects. Those men, at the Hiphasis River, refused to go further. They had heard there were more kingdoms beyond. They had been hearing there were more kingdoms beyond for thirteen years. They were done. Alexander, by the accounts that survive, was genuinely shattered by this, he retired to his tent for three days, he made sacrifices and took omens, and the omens, conveniently, proved unfavourable for crossing the river, which gave the refusal of his army the cover of divine sanction, and allowed him to order the withdrawal without it being a retreat. He built twelve massive altars on the banks of the Hiphasis, one for each of the Olympian gods, marking the easternmost limit of his campaign. He turned west, he did not take the direct route home. That would have been sensible, and Alexander, by this stage in his career, was not reliably sensible. He marched part of his force through the Gedrosian desert, one of the most brutal environments on earth, in the hottest part of the year, in what appears to have been either a deliberate test of endurance, an act of competitive overreach designed to surpass the legendary sufferings of Cyrus and Semiramus in the same desert, or a catastrophically poor logistical decision, depending on which source you find most persuasive. Thousands died, not in battle, in the desert, of heat and thirst and exposure. He reached Susa in Persia in three hundred twenty-four BCE. He held a mass wedding, ninety Macedonian officers married Persian noblewomen simultaneously, in a ceremony that was simultaneously a political statement about the fusion of Macedonian and Persian cultures and a logistical exercise of remarkable complexity. He married Statera, the daughter of Darius III himself. He already had a Bactrian wife, Roxane, who had borne him a son. His vision was no longer simply of a Macedonian king ruling a conquered empire. It was of something genuinely new, a fusion of Greek and Persian culture, a cosmopolitan world civilization governed by a man who was both Macedonian and Persian, and not incidentally, divine. His senior Macedonian officers were not enthusiastic about this vision. They had followed him across the known world out of loyalty to a Macedonian king, and they found the Persian robes and the Persian court ceremony, and the requirement to perform proskinesis, the prostration that Persians offered to their king, and that Greeks considered appropriate only before the gods. Deeply objectionable. There were conspiracies, executions, the killing of his closest childhood friend, Clitus, in a drunken quarrel that Alexander reportedly spent days of agonized grief over afterward. The inner circle was fracturing under the pressure of what he was becoming. In the spring of three hundred twenty three BCE, Alexander was in Babylon, planning a naval expedition to Arabia and beyond. He fell ill after a banquet. The ancient sources describe a fever that worsened over eleven days. He died on june eleventh, three hundred twenty-three BCE. He was thirty-two years old. The cause of death has never been definitively established and has been the subject of continuous scholarly and medical debate for two and a half millennia. Proposed causes include typhoid fever, complicated by complications from his multiple battle wounds, West Nile virus, excessive alcohol consumption over years of campaigning, and most recently and most dramatically, poisoning, with the finger pointed variously at Aristotle, at one of his generals, at his Macedonian court, at people who had reasons both personal and political to want him dead before he made them cross yet another river. The poisoning hypothesis is intriguing but not established. The typhoid hypothesis is currently the most medically persuasive. The alcohol hypothesis is consistent with the trajectory of his later campaigns, but insufficient as a sole explanation. What we know is that when he was asked on his deathbed, to whom he left his empire, he said or is reported to have said to the strongest or possibly in a different translation of the Greek to the best. The original word is Kretistos. It means strongest or most powerful or most excellent. He may have said it. He may have been too ill to say anything at all. The story has the quality of something too perfect to be entirely true, and also too true to be entirely invented. The Empire was divided among his generals, the Diadochi. The successors, and the wars between them consumed the next forty years and the lives of most of them. None of them was Alexander. None of them could hold what he had built. The empire fragmented into the Hellenistic kingdoms, which were themselves remarkable achievements, and which spread Greek culture across the Middle East and Central Asia in ways that shaped the development of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and the entirety of Western philosophy and science. The consequences of Alexander's thirteen years are still present in the world, embedded in languages and religions and institutional forms that most people who use them have no idea traced back to a twenty-year-old Macedonian king who decided to conquer everything. Now the tease picture someone for whom the question was never whether a thing was possible, but only how quickly it could be done. Someone who operated at a pace that the institutions and conventions and careful deliberators around him consistently failed to match, not because they were stupid, but because they were calibrated to a normal human rate of ambition. And he was not. Picture someone whose gifts were so extraordinary, so disproportionate to what those around him could do that the conventional rules of his field did not apply to him in the way they applied to everyone else. Someone who rewrote the rules not by arguing against them, but by simply operating outside them so consistently, and with such evident success that the rules began to look like suggestions. Picture someone whose personal conduct became increasingly difficult to account for within the frameworks his supporters had originally used to defend him, someone who started as a comprehensible type and became, over time, something harder to categorize, something that required new frameworks, and provoked genuine unease among people who had been his most committed admirers. Picture someone whose relationship with his own status, his own significance, his own place in history became a central preoccupation, someone for whom the question of whether he was not merely very good at what he did, but genuinely exceptional in some larger, more absolute sense was not a question he was content to leave unanswered. Picture someone who attracted a quality of devotion from followers that went beyond professional admiration into something that looked from the outside considerably more like belief. Someone around whom a culture of loyalty developed that was resistant to outside criticism in the way that cultures of loyalty tend to be, in which questioning the leader was experienced by the followers as an attack on themselves. Picture someone whose methods produced extraordinary results, and also at intervals consequences that were difficult to square with the values their followers had been told the project represented. Someone whose response to setbacks was rarely to reassess, but to intensify, to push further, demand more, insist louder, as though the solution to the problem of excess was more of the same. Picture someone who, having achieved more than any rival, continued to be unsatisfied, someone for whom the horizon kept moving, someone who was finally and fatally unable to stop. Who is this person? It is Elon Musk. I expect a range of reactions to this, from enthusiastic agreement to profound irritation, and I want both groups to know that I anticipated their response and chose the comparison anyway, which is the prerogative of someone who has tenure and a defensible intellectual position. Let me build the case because the case is not primarily political, and I want to be clear about that from the outset. Elon Reeve Musk was born on june twenty eighth, nineteen seventy one, in Pretoria, South Africa. His father, Errol, was an engineer and property developer. His mother, May, was a model and dietitian who moved the family after the divorce to Canada and then to the United States. He was, by his own accounts, and by the accounts of his biographers, a deeply unusual child, intellectually precocious, socially uncomfortable, a voracious reader, someone for whom ordinary social calibration did not come naturally, and for whom intellectual engagement was a refuge that the physical world of school and childhood frequently failed to provide. He was bullied. He retreated into books and into computing. He left South Africa, partly to avoid compulsory military service in the apartheid army, which tells you something about the direction of his moral compass. At seventeen that I think is worth noting, despite everything that has happened since, he arrived in North America with almost nothing and made himself through a combination of genuine intelligence, extraordinary willingness to work at a pace most people would find unsustainable, and a quality of vision that consistently exceeded what his contemporaries could see coming, into one of the wealthiest people in human history. Zip2, X.com, PayPal, SpaceX, Tesla, The Boring Company, Neurolink, XAI. The list is not the biography of a normal career. It is the list of a person who has been running essentially continuously, at a pace that most people observe with a combination of awe and exhaustion for thirty years. SpaceX is the most directly Alexandrian of the achievements. The explicit stated mission is the colonization of Mars, not as a distant aspiration, not as a research programme, not as a political gesture, but as a near-term engineering project, with specific timelines and specific rockets, and an apparent genuine belief that this will happen in something resembling a human lifetime. Private rocket companies were not supposed to be able to do what SpaceX has done. The established aerospace industry, with its government contracts and its institutional knowledge and its extraordinary resources, had not managed reusable orbital rockets. SpaceX managed them on a fraction of the budget in a fraction of the time by ignoring the consensus about what was possible and replacing it with a series of increasingly ambitious engineering experiments that failed spectacularly on a number of occasions and eventually worked. The Falcon 9 first stage landing on a drone ship in the middle of the ocean is one of the genuinely remarkable images of 21st century engineering. And it was produced by a company that was told repeatedly and by people who knew what they were talking about, that it couldn't be done. Tesla, and I want to be precise here because the Tesla story has become politically charged in ways that make clear-eyed assessment difficult, transformed the automotive industry's relationship to electric vehicles from one of polite theoretical commitment to one of commercial urgency. Before Tesla, electric vehicles were niche, compromised, and treated by the major manufacturers as a regulatory obligation rather than a product category. After Tesla, every major automotive company in the world spent billions accelerating their electric vehicle programs, specifically because they were afraid of what Musk was building. This is, by any objective measure, a consequential shift, and it happened faster and more completely than the established industry's own projections suggested was possible. The parallel with Alexander deepens, as I said, in the trajectory rather than merely the achievement. First, the pace. Alexander conquered two million square miles in thirteen years. Musk built multiple companies across multiple industries, simultaneously, at a pace that people inside those companies have described, in terms ranging from admiring to traumatized, as unlike anything experienced elsewhere in the business world. Both men operated at a speed that created its own logic, moving so fast that the normal processes of institutional consideration, consultation, and careful deliberation could not keep up, and that created around both of them the perpetual sense that the rules applicable to everyone else did not apply. Second, the relationship to conventional limits. Alexander was told that the Persian Empire could not be conquered by a Macedonian army. He conquered it. He was told the Gadrossian desert was impassable. He marched through it at great cost, apparently partly to demonstrate that it could be done. Musk was told that a private company could not build orbital rockets. SpaceX built them. He was told that an electric vehicle company started from scratch could not survive against established manufacturers with a centuries head start. Tesla survived and currently dominates its segment. Both men had a relationship with the word impossible that was, at minimum, deeply sceptical. Third, the cult of personality. Alexander's campaigns generated a culture of devotion around him that was by the end indistinguishable from religious reverence. He was in the eastern parts of his empire, actually worshipped as a god, and he appears to have genuinely engaged with this rather than deflecting it. Musk has generated through social media and the specific culture of his companies, and the extraordinary breadth of his ambitions, a quality of follower devotion that goes substantially beyond normal commercial loyalty. The people who believe in Musk believe in him in a way that is structurally similar to belief, unfalsifiable, emotionally committed, resistant to external critique, and organized around the figure rather than around any specific proposition that could be evaluated on its merits. Fourth, the relationship to power and its expansion. Alexander, having conquered the Persian Empire, did not stop. Musk, having built SpaceX and Tesla, did not stop. The acquisition of Twitter, subsequently renamed X, the founding of XAI, the political interventions, the accumulation of influence across media and politics and technology, and now explicitly government. This is the behaviour of someone for whom the question of enough has not presented itself as a meaningful question. Alexander's soldiers answered it for him at the Hiphasis River. No one has yet managed the equivalent for Musk, and the trajectory continues. Fifth, the consequences that diverge from the stated values. Alexander proclaimed himself the liberator of the Greek cities of Asia Minor. He burned Persepolis and marched through the Gadrossian desert, and executed officers who disagreed with him. Musk has spoken extensively about free speech, about the democratization of technology, about the liberation of human consciousness from earthly constraint. He has also conducted mass layoffs with methods that his own employment lawyers reportedly found legally questionable, used his social media platform in ways that drew accusations of partisan manipulation, and engaged in a range of public conduct that people who were not long ago among his most committed admirers have found difficult to reconcile with the values they believed the project represented. I am not I want to be absolutely clear, making a moral equivalence between burning a city in 330 BCE and contemporary technology business practices. Um that would be historically irresponsible, and I decline it. I am making a structural observation that in both cases the gap between the stated values of the project and the actual conduct of the person leading it widened over time in proportion to the accumulation of power and the reduction of meaningful institutional constraint. Sixth, the question of the horizon. Alexander stood at the hyphesis and wept because there was more world beyond, and his army would not follow. Musk has said publicly and apparently sincerely that he is afraid of dying on Earth, that the multiplanetary future is not optional but necessary for the survival of human consciousness, and that this mission is what drives him. Both men are at their core defined by a relationship to the horizon, to the always more, the always further, the refusal of the sufficient. This is the quality that produces extraordinary achievement. It is also the quality that produces extraordinary damage, and in both cases the two are not separable. Where do the parallels strain? Alexander fought in person, he was wounded multiple times, an arrow threw his lung at the siege of the Mali citadel, which his companions believed had killed him, nearly did kill him, and from which he recovered with a speed that his soldiers interpreted as divine, and that modern medicine would attribute to extraordinary luck and physical robustness. Whatever else Alexander was, he put his own body in the line. Musk does not build rockets with his hands or drive Teslas into battle. The physical stakes are categorically different. Alexander died at thirty two. Musk is in his fifties, and the story is not over. History cannot yet deliver a verdict on the full arc, which means I am in the unusual position as a historian, of making comparative observations about a living subject. I do this with appropriate epistemic caution. The comparison I am making is structural and historical. What Musk does next is unknown, and unknown things should be treated as unknown. And Alexander built something, the Hellenistic world, the spread of Greek culture and language across the Middle East and Central Asia, that outlasted him by centuries, and shaped the development of the world's major religious and philosophical traditions in ways that are still visible and still active. Whether Musk's legacy will have that quality of deep historical consequence, whether SpaceX and Tesla and X will look in five hundred years like the foundational structures of something civilization scale is genuinely uncertain, and I will not pretend otherwise. The verdict Alexander, without hesitation and with full acknowledgement of everything that means. Not because his achievements were morally superior they were not. Not because his methods were more defensible. They were not, but because the scale of what he did in the time he had, from the resources he started with, and the degree to which his thirteen years of campaigning genuinely reshaped the world in ways that persisted for centuries represents a concentration of historical consequence that has no parallel in the modern era. Not yet. There is also the matter of completion. Alexander's story is finished. We know the arc from Pella to Babylon, from twenty to thirty two, from the annotated Iliad under the pillow, to the altars on the hyphysis, to the deathbed in Babylon, and the Empire dissolving into war. It is a complete shape. It is, in the literary sense, a tragedy, not because it ended badly, but because it ended with the inexorable logic of someone who was too much of what they were, pushed too far by qualities that were inseparable from their greatness, and consumed by the force they had spent their life generating. Musk's story is not finished. I genuinely do not know how it ends. That is not a criticism. That is the condition of writing about living people, which historians are generally trained to avoid for exactly this reason. I grew up in Kingston upon Thames, where the general view is that a person should be appropriately ambitious, certainly, but should also know when to have a cup of tea and a sit down and let someone else take the next shift. Alexander of Macedon is perhaps the most comprehensive refutation of this philosophy in the historical record. He never had a sit down, he never took a rest. He marched until his army refused to march, and then he found a desert to cross instead. He was thirty two years old and he had run out of world, and I suspect I cannot prove this, it is a historian's impression, rather than a scholar's conclusion, that the world running out was harder for him than the dying. That is what greatness of a certain kind costs everything, including the capacity to stop. Alexander III of Macedon, born Pella, three hundred fifty six BCE, died Babylon, three hundred twenty-three BCE, King of Macedon, Pharaoh of Egypt, King of Persia, Lord of Asia, never defeated in battle, never satisfied. Every subsequent empire builder's measuring stick, whether they knew it or not. He would have found the comparison to a technology entrepreneur mildly insulting and also entirely compelling. He was, above all else, a man who understood the logic of Moore. He would have recognised it immediately. I'm Sophie Manners. Thank you for being here. Read Arian's Anabasis if you want the ancient sources. It is the most reliable of them, and was written by someone who understood military operations. Read Peter Green's Alexander of Macedon if you want the best modern scholarly biography, a book of formidable intelligence, and not inconsiderable opinions, and then make your own mind up, because Alexander is one of those figures about whom having a settled opinion. Opinion is probably less interesting than continuing to think. Good night.