Episode #38   The Greek Warrior King

In this episode, Rabbi Reinman shows how Aristotle completed the creation of Hellenism, but that Alexander the Great, his student, was the true embodiment of the Greek ideal.

After The Iliad gained wide readership, Hellenism took root in Greek society. The Greeks saw themselves at the pinnacle of the universe, superior to the god race. They built magnificent edifices. They studied the human condition in literature, art and drama. Idolizing the human body, they exercised in the nude in the gymnasiums and publicly displayed the beauty, perfection and prowess of the human body in organized athletic competitions performed in the nude.

The Greeks gloried in their new divinity, but they still lacked a sophisticated view of the universe and the profound questions of existence. Early Hellenism had a mind, a body and a heart, but it lacked a soul until the philosophers arrived.

There were a number of early Greek philosophers, but the famous Big Three, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, established the idea that human reason is the ultimate measure of knowledge. Socrates said that man should always search for the truth by asking numerous questions, that “the unexamined life is not worth living.” The authorities in Athens thought he was dangerous and executed him. Socrates did not write a book, but Plato, his student, recorded his teachings and added many of his own. But Plato’s student Aristotle had the greatest impact on Western thought. Socrates and Plato were artists. Aristotle was a scientist.

Aristotle was remarkable for the orderliness of his brilliant mind and the sheer number of directions in which he pointed it. Never one to plunge headlong into the seas of knowledge, he always began with a dissection of the subject under study. He delineated his objectives, defined a set of terms to categorize his research, and only then, he conducted his inquiry. In this way, he formalized logic, developed controlled experimentation and the scientific method of inquiry and compiled veritable encyclopedias of information through observation, analysis and speculation. He also formulated numerous terms, such as matter, form, energy, infinity, genus and species, which endure until this day as basic units of Western thought. Above all, he was a disciplined student with an insatiable appetite for knowledge of practically any kind.

In Aristotle’s system, nothing is spared the scrutiny and manipulation of human reason. Even God’s place is designated by reason. God is defined as the ultimate perfection, form without matter, eternal, unchanging,[1] deserving of honor but requiring no praise.[2] Aristotle believed there was intelligent design in the universe, but he recognized no divine revelation that communicated the purpose of that design. God had created the world and then withdrawn from active involvement within it. In the practical world, it was up to human reason to devise codes of ethics and morality for the individual and utopian schemes for governing society with justice and stability.

More than any other man, Aristotle opened all frontiers of civilized life to the domination of human reason. He was the one who devised the tools and methods by which humanity could claim mastery over the earth. His work completed Hellenism. It justified the human race’s vision of itself as the new god race.

But if humanity had assumed the mantle of the god race in the Greek mode of thought, the idealized image of the ultimate man, the “Greek god” so to speak, was not the homely, squint-eyed thinker such as Socrates or Aristotle. For if man was a god then all of him was divine, his body, his mind and his soul.

Just as, in our own times, the crowds cheer the drivers of racing cars rather than the engineers who design them, the adoration of ancient Greek society was reserved for the sun-bronzed, heroic warrior-athlete, his body perfect and beautiful, his mind enriched by philosophy, his soul nourished by literature. The philosophers and writers were admired but not idolized as heroes. They were the engineers who designed the cultural tools, but the true Greek gods were the splendid human sculptures molded by those tools, the ones who trained unclad in the gymnasium while they discussed philosophy with their fellows.

The man who came closest to the Greek heroic ideal was Alexander the Great, who was not even a Greek but a Macedonian. Macedonia was a country of hardy mountainfolk so backward that in all of antiquity it did not produce a single philosopher, scientist, thinker, writer or artist whose name is known to history. But the ambitious King Philip II, an ardent admirer of Greek culture, hired the best tutors to give his gifted son Alexander the benefits of a first-class Greek upbringing. Among others, the illustrious Aristotle was brought to the Macedonian capital of Pella to help mold Alexander’s mind during his teenage years. Philip himself trained the boy in the arts of war.

Alexander thus became a potent blend of Macedonian toughness and Greek intellect liberally seasoned with the overpowering personal ambition he inherited from his father. Alexander was a superb physical specimen, a ferocious and tireless warrior, a man with a kingdom at his command and the dream of world empire in his heart. He was also a lover of Greek culture who carried Homer’s The Iliad with him on his campaigns and kept it under his pillow at night next to his dagger. He was cast in the true mold of the Greek hero, and as we trace his career from its meteoric rise to its tragic end, we find that it mirrors the parabolic course of the Greek civilization from which it sprung.

Alexander ascended the Macedonian throne in 336 b.c.e. at the age of twenty following the assassination of his father Philip, who had been preparing to cross into Asia and attack the Persian Empire. The task now fell to his young son.

At first, it seemed that Philip’s hard-earned gains would not survive his death. The barbarian tribes in the northern provinces of Thrace and Illyria immediately revolted, while in the capital of Pella, factionalism and conspiracies were the order of the day. At the same time, a number of Greek city-states renounced their allegiance to Macedonia, and the entire Greek confederation teetered on the brink of disintegration. In Persia, the emperor Darius breathed a sigh of relief as he saw the Macedonian threat evaporating into thin air.

Alexander’s response was ruthless and decisive. He crushed all opposition within Macedonia, then he marched north with dizzying swiftness, crossed the Danube River and destroyed the rebel forces. Having secured his base, he marched south into Greece and defeated the armies of rebellious Thebes, sold its inhabitants into slavery and burned the city to the ground, sparing only the temple and the house of the poet Pindar. After the sack of Thebes, all of Greece bowed like a punctured balloon before the victorious Alexander. Returning to Macedonia with the grudging Greek pledges of allegiance but not much more in the way of military support, he prepared to take on the Persian Empire.

Without the active support of the Athenian navy, Alexander could not contend with the Persian fleet on the open seas. Instead, he decided to fight a land war against Persian sea power by devastating the Persian naval bases. In this way, he could eliminate any threat to his supply lines as he pressed into the heart of the Persian Empire. In 334 b.c.e., he crossed into Asia by way of the Hellespont, defeated a large Persian army at Granicus and swept down the coast of Asia Minor, capturing port after port along the way.

The ease of his conquests was stunning. History has shown that conquerors who promise to improve the lives of the conquered, either materially or spiritually, are most successful. Alexander came with an army of tough, disciplined, experienced warriors, and brought with him the heady joys of Hellenism. He was practically irresistible.

In 333 b.c.e., an immense Persian army led by Darius tried to intercept the smaller Macedonian force at Issus in Syria, but the Macedonian infantry phalanxes and massed cavalry charges routed the undisciplined Persians. Alexander then proceeded down the coast, besieging and capturing the Phoenician port of Tyre and then Gaza. Egypt, chafing under Babylonian and Persian rule for two centuries, surrendered without a blow towards the end of 332 b.c.e.

The entire coastline of the eastern rim of the Mediterranean Sea now belonged to Alexander. It was a stunning triumph. A council of Greek cities at Corinth voted him a golden crown of victory and, for the first time, offered active military support to Alexander. The smell of conquest was in the air, and the Greeks wanted to share in the spoils.

In the spring of 331 b.c.e., Alexander returned up the coastline to Tyre, passing but a few miles west of Jerusalem but paying it no heed, and marched east across Syria into the heart of Mesopotamia. The Persian Empire was reeling, mortally wounded by Alexander’s early victories, but Darius nevertheless assembled yet another motley host to stand against Alexander’s inexorable advance. The armies met on the plains of Arbela not far from the ruins of the Assyrian capital of Nineveh. Once again, the disciplined Macedonian forces, this time reinforced by Greek cavalry, crushed the Persian army, which scattered in disarray. Darius fled north to Media, where his officers killed him. The Persian Empire had ceased to exist for all practical purposes.

Unopposed, Alexander marched on to Babylon, which accepted Macedonian rule with equanimity as yet another of the regular changes in rulership. Then he continued east and captured the Persian capitals of Susa and Persepolis in 330 b.c.e. Four short years after the Macedonian invasion, the defeat of Persia was complete.

The vast lands, the cities, the overflowing royal treasuries all fell into Alexander’s hands like overripe fruit. The young Macedonian king had become ruler of the entire Imperial Quadrant, and numerous peoples of whom Alexander had never even heard—the Jewish people most probably among them—had suddenly become his subjects.

True to his upbringing, Alexander planted the seeds of Greek culture among the sundry peoples of his new empire. Greeks colonists followed in the wake of his armies and built Greek cities all along the Mediterranean coastline and throughout Syria and the Tigris-Euphrates valley. Greek culture captivated the conquered lands with the grace of its art and architecture, the passion of its dramas, the cleverness of its scholars, the excitement of its athletic games and the siren call to humanity to break the shackles of the god race and breathe the heady air of freedom. In the lexicon of historians, this process was called hellenization, literally conversion to the culture of Hellas, the Greek name for the mainland of Greece. But the upper classes of the former Persian Empire did not have to be coaxed much to accept hellenization; the seeds of Greek civilization found Asian soil very fertile.

In retrospect, it would seem that Alexander would have better served had the war against Persia taken forty years instead of four, that he would have been more fulfilled had he spent the best years of his life on the battlefield pursuing glorious dreams of victory. But fate dealt unkindly with him, and at the age of twenty-four, he was already the ruler of a world empire; the prospect of directing the tedious process of Hellenization did not stir the blood in his veins.

Alexander was not a great statesman-general like Napoleon, for whom the challenge of building a universal European state was more thrilling than the clash of armies on the battlefield. One can be reasonably certain that had Napoleon been successful in his Russian campaign he would not have pressed on to conquer China and India. Alexander, on the other hand, was little more than a callow youth with a natural genius for war, a political dilettante who lacked knowledge, sophistication or even interest in statecraft or any of the other sober pursuits of grown men in power. He was a frustrated conqueror, a warrior with no wars to fight.

It is not surprising, therefore, that after a brief period of celebration in Persepolis, Alexander was already seeking new frontiers, new battles, new lands to vanquish. But there were no compelling strategic reasons for choosing any particular direction. A brief survey of the known world beyond the Imperial Quadrant at the time of Alexander reveals a few insular regional powers, many insignificant little countries and shifting streams of nomadic barbarian tribes.

To the east, a patchwork of tribal kingdoms stretched from Samarkand to the Indian Ocean in a long swath encompassing modern-day Turkestan, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Further to the southeast, the sweltering subcontinent of India, a jumble of disunited cities and principalities, contemplated life with the lethargy induced by its torrid climate and the serene passivity fostered by Buddhism and Hinduism, its dominant religions.

In the distant east, beyond the all but impenetrable barriers of the Tibetan mountains and the Malay jungles, the fabled but rarely seen Chinese Empire was still suffering through its Age of Confusion under the Chow dynasty. The thousands of city-states in the valleys of the Yangtze, Huang-Ho and Yellow Rivers were in a state of chaos and perpetual internecine warfare, while hordes of barbarian Huns exerted intermittent pressure on the Manchurian borders.

To the north, Mongolian and Nordic tribes, crude and uncivilized peoples, roamed the steppes of Scythia, the site of modern-day Russia. It would be centuries before demographic pressures would drive them southward and westward towards the heartland of the Imperial Quadrant.

To the south of Egypt and Mesopotamia, the reclusive kingdom of Ethiopia and the pagan tribes of Arabia sat astride both sides of the Red Sea and prospered from the maritime trade with faraway markets across the Indian Ocean.

To the west of Egypt, the Phoenician daughter city of Carthage, the last remaining stronghold of Canaanite culture, dominated the North African coast. Established during the days of King Solomon, Carthage was notorious for its flagrant practice of child immolation, but it was also a flourishing mercantile center with trading outposts along the coasts of Africa and Spain and in nearby Sicily. Carthage enjoyed the prosperity and security of five hundred years of peaceful trade, and there were no indications that it was inclined to military adventures of any sort. To the south of Carthage, only the wildest legends about the black peoples in the heart of Africa traversed the trackless, lifeless sands of the Sahara Desert.

As we continue northward from Carthage across Sicily and into the heel of Italy, we encounter the Greek cities of Magna Graecia, such as Syracuse and Tarentum, established centuries before during the periods of Greek expansion. This region marked the western extent of the Alexandrine Empire. Further north, we encounter the embattled city of Rome, situated on seven hills alongside the Tiber River in the central Italian district of Latium. Two centuries earlier, Rome had wrested its independence from the Etruscan kingdom north of the Tiber, but now, savage raids by the Cisalpine Gauls, a barbarian Celtic tribe from the far north of Italy, threatened its very existence. Beyond Italy and the coastal settlements, the forests and marshes of Europe teemed with primitive Celtic and Germanic tribes, but only the more advanced Gauls dared approach the civilized lands.

Clearly, no external powers posed a serious threat to the security of the Alexandrine Empire. Realistically, the dangers of insurrection far outweighed the dangers of invasion, but these did not interest the impatient warrior-king as he prepared for new and frivolous military campaigns beyond the borders of the Imperial Quadrant.

We can only speculate about the actual deliberations that determined the course of the next few years, but it seems clear that there were basically two options to be considered. One called for expanding the eastern end of the empire. The other pointed to the west.

From our distant vantage point, it seems that Alexander would have been better advised to turn west. The western region, much closer to his home bases, could have been overpowered with relatively short supply lines, and because of its long familiarity with the Greeks, it could have been Hellenized without much difficulty. Moreover, the Greek cities of Magna Graecia were like a wedge driven into the entire region from which Greek power and cultural influence could be projected in all directions. As for the strategic value of the region, the conquest of Carthage and the entire Italian peninsula would have made the Mediterranean Sea a Greek lake and given tremendous impetus to Greek commerce and industry. With the benefit of hindsight, of course, we also know that had Alexander turned west he would have subjugated Rome and prevented the Roman absorption of the Greek world less than two centuries later.

On the other hand, Alexander may have felt that the western lands were already partially hellenized, while the lands to the east were virtually ignorant of the Greeks. Furthermore, the eastern lands were contiguous with Mesopotamia, the historic center of the Imperial Quadrant, and therefore seemed to represent the next logical frontier for the expansion of the Quadrant. And finally, one cannot underestimate the allure of the fabled riches of the east; the west promised long-term economic growth, but the east promised stacks of booty.

In the end, Alexander chose the east. For the next six years, he was absent from his seat of power, fighting many forgettable battles and defeating many unimportant foes. He planted the Greek standard all along the eastern frontier of his empire, conquering Bactria and penetrating India through the Khyber Pass. In northern India, he won a battle over an army equipped with war elephants and then appointed the vanquished king to rule in his name; part of India had been added to his empire, but it meant nothing. At this point, Alexander’s men refused to push across the deserts to the Ganges River, and Alexander was forced to abandon any dreams of further conquest.

In all his eastern campaigns, at the cost of many thousands of lives, Alexander had founded a few cities, destroyed a few others and not accomplished much of anything else—besides visiting many exotic places and enjoying many youthful escapades. Alexander was a tourist, with an army as his conveyance.

Upon his return to Persepolis in 324 b.c.e., Alexander found his sprawling empire functioning smoothly under the administrative system inherited from his Persian predecessors; his absence had not even been felt. Alexander had enough of a sense of history to want to leave his imprint as a ruler as well as a conqueror, but the method he chose was so bizarre that one suspects his mind was already becoming seriously unhinged. In one spectacular wedding ceremony, Alexander married the daughter of Darius, and ninety of his generals also took Persian brides in a symbolic fusion of the Greek and Persian races; all Macedonian soldiers who had taken Asiatic wives were also rewarded. Demented as this showcase extravaganza seems, Alexander himself must have considered it an inspired act of statecraft.

After this outlandish fusion of the races, Alexander discarded his Macedonian garb and took to wearing the opulent robes of Persian royalty. His bloated vanity found expression in numerous paintings, sculptures and coins which bore his likeness. In all of these, the thirty-two-year-old Alexander is portrayed as a handsome youth with flowing hair and a clean-shaven face. Although practically all grown men were bearded, Alexander shaved his beard to preserve his boyish good looks. But not even the mightiest emperor can arrest the march of time, and as his youth and sanity slipped away, Alexander began to drink heavily and quarrel with his friends and companions.

Presently, Alexander declared himself a god and demanded that all Greece recognize him as the son of Zeus. The Greeks cities did not begrudge him this indulgence, since in many ways he was indeed more powerful than the emasculated Olympian deities, but it did not go down well with his Macedonian comrades-in-arms. Tensions in the palace rose. Living more and more in a drunken stupor, Alexander began to exhibit frequent fits of violent rage, during which he killed some of his most loyal men. The mind of the god was disintegrating, and his body was not far behind. In 323 b.c.e., Alexander sickened and died after a prolonged drinking bout in Babylon. He was thirty-three years old.

The Alexandrine Empire, held together by one man for seven years, was divided up among the leading Macedonian generals immediately after Alexander’s death. On his deathbed, he was supposedly asked, “Who should succeed you?” And he replied, “The strongest.” There was, of course, an intense battle for his throne, and four principal divisions emerged, the Ptolemaic Empire, the Seleucid Empire, the Kingdom of Macedonia and Greece and the Kingdom of Pergamum in Asia Minor. Alexander’s dreams of a world empire died with him, but the process of hellenization that he had initiated continued for centuries.

Alexander, for all his shortcomings, was undoubtedly one of the most important figures in history. His conquests drove the roots of classical Greek culture so deep into the soil of the Imperial Quadrant that they could never again be eradicated. But the patterns of his life also afford us a remarkable insight into the dynamics of achievement.

Ordinarily, people spend the productive years of their lives pursuing their goals, and in most cases, even highly successful people leave at least some parts of their ambitions unconsummated. It is extremely rare for a person to achieve, before the prime of life, the complete fulfillment of his goals to the point where there is nothing left to accomplish. Yet this is exactly what happened to Alexander. Alexander was first and foremost a warrior, prepared from earliest childhood by his father for a lifetime of conquest, specifically the conquest of the mighty Persian Empire. In actuality, however, it took Alexander only four years to overcome Persia, whereas it had taken his father twenty years to overcome Greece.

The young Alexander, never trained for a peacetime role, had reached the pinnacle of his potential, and his whole life stretched before him devoid of goals and aspirations, with no further hopes of accomplishment and fulfillment. It was a terrifying prospect. In desperation, he tried to prolong his growth period by useless campaigns in the east, but these accomplished nothing. Back in Persia, Alexander was forced to face the reality that there was indeed nowhere left to go and nothing left to accomplish, and his life began to collapse. His declaration of godhood, his dementia, his excessive drinking, his fits of violent rage were all symptomatic of a life that had fallen apart at its core.

Yet why did all this have to happen? Why couldn’t Alexander simply have sat back and enjoyed the fruits of his brilliant conquests? The answer to these questions goes to the heart of the human condition.

A human being is by nature a volatile creature, constantly bombarded by myriad thoughts, feelings and experiences that keep him in perpetual flux. Therefore, he is always either in a state of growth or decline; the forces of life do not allow him to remain indefinitely on a perfectly level plateau. Thus, when a person ceases to rise, he begins to decline. If a person ceases to rise because age or infirmity have sapped his energies, the decline may be relatively mild; if his innermost impetus is still forward, it will counterbalance his decline. If, however, a person ceases to rise because he no longer discerns any higher ground, if his innermost impetus is spent, his decline is precipitous. In Alexander’s case, once the decline began it was steep and irreversible, because there were no unaccomplished goals to restrain his fall.

In view of all this, we begin to perceive a striking similarity between the patterns of Greek civilization and the life of its greatest hero. In its youth, we see Greek art and literature declare the independence of man from the god race. As the culture matures, we observe the idea of mankind as the new god race germinating in the Greek mind. In a great rush of literary and philosophical activity, we see the Greek mind consumed with the idea of the supremacy of human reason, and we see the final proclamation of the Kingdom of Man with the arrival of Aristotle. The distant and unknowable Creator, in the Greek view, had no practical involvement in terrestrial affairs. The Olympian deities, if they existed at all, endured only at the sufferance of man. Man had no rivals as supreme master of the planet.

In the Greek mind, the victory of mankind was complete. Man had made himself master of the world with the brilliance of his mind, and the conquests of Alexander had implanted this concept in the entire Imperial Quadrant. Human reason of the Greek variety now ruled the universe; all that remained was to shine the spotlight of reason on each little piece of the universe, and it would surely yield its secrets. Undoubtedly, it would take a long time to do this, but the victors had the luxury of time.

But soon it began to dawn on the Greeks that by their own criteria they had reached the pinnacle of achievement. They breathed the rarefied air of the mountaintop and wondered where to go from there. Admittedly, scientists could busy themselves in their laboratories indefinitely with the study of nature, but what would stir the blood of the rest of society? What goals remained to excite the human spirit and intellect? What pursuits remained besides self-indulgence and gratification? Was there intrinsic meaning to the life of the new god race, or having reached the summit, were they also doomed to the degeneration and frivolity that characterized the Olympian deities? In what manner and to what purpose should a man live to be worthy of his status as a higher being?

These questions plagued the Greek mind in the generations following Alexander, ultimately sending Greek civilization into its inevitable spiral of decline. The ambitious philosophies of Plato and Aristotle, with their global scope and boundless aspirations, gave way to the decadent philosophies of the Skeptics, Epicureans and Stoics.

Distrusting both the senses and reason, the Skeptics denied the possibility of any knowledge with certainty. The wise man should seek tranquility rather than truth, and since all theories were probably false, he should not bother to combat the popular myths. “Nothing is certain,” declared Arcesilaus, a leading Skeptic, “not even that.”

Epicurus, however, declared that pleasure is certainly good, and pain is certainly bad. Therefore, the value of everything, from wisdom to sensuality, is measured by the pleasure it delivers and the pain it avoids. According to the materialistic philosophy of Epicurus, there is no higher meaning to life, no gods, no spirituality. Only atoms and space exist. Man is not the product of design but a spontaneously generated piece of matter that has evolved through natural selection. His mind and his soul are forms of matter that die together with the body. All man can do is seek a small measure of happiness during his brief stay on the earth, and the key to happiness is pleasure.

The Stoics also presented a materialistic view, but they believed there was design in the universe and that God and Nature were one and the same. In fact, the Stoics believed there was so much design that everything was predetermined and there was no free will. Man achieves happiness only by a serene acceptance of the course of Nature and by suppression of his own needs and emotions. The Stoic, therefore, seeks a passive life, and his ideal is perfect apathy, an absence of feeling, which will allow him to achieve perfect peace of mind.

None of these philosophies is particularly godly in outlook. Rather, they reflect the sense of disillusionment that dominated Greek culture in the post-Alexandrine period, the groping of self-appointed gods who have lost their way.

The stumbling of lost gods also characterizes the art and literature of the times. We see the sculpture that represented the human body in its idealized form, such as The Discus Thrower, give way to the realistic disclosures of the life-ravaged Old Market Woman. We see literature turn away from social commentary and become stylized and shallow, replacing evocative tragedies and acerbic political satire with the pastoral verse of Theocritus and the parlor farces of Menander. We see the creativity and intellectual vigor of Athens replaced by the pitter-patter of librarians preserving the living works of a dying age. We see a society sliding downhill, fumbling about, like a disoriented Alexander, for a way to justify its self-image.

Paradoxically, this period of cultural decline also produced prodigious strides in Greek science and technology. Euclid established standards of geometry that would endure for two thousand years. Archimedes, the foremost Greek scientist, made breakthrough discoveries in hydrostatics and mechanics. The astronomer Hipparchus devised the system of latitude and longitude and invented trigonometry. The geographer Eratosthenes measured the earth’s circumference with uncanny accuracy and suggested that one could reach India by sailing west across the Atlantic Ocean. Theophrastus explored botany and pharmacology, Herophilus investigated anatomy, Erasistratus pioneered physiology and preventive medicine, and a host of others probed dozens of frontiers in the study of the natural world.

Upon reflection, however, there is no paradox whatsoever. In actuality, the surge of science and technology did not occur in spite of the declining culture but because of it.

In a vigorous culture, the talented young intellectual is presented with a number of secular avenues that lead to the ultimate goal of intellectual fulfillment. As a philosopher, he can investigate the meaning of life and the relationship of man to the world around him. As a historian, he can examine the forces that determine the rise and fall of societies. If he is creative, he can probe the depths of the psyche through literature or formulate new artistic visions. As a mathematician, he can explore the interrelationships of numbers and forms. As a research scientist in any number of fields, he can hunt for the secrets of the natural world. As a doctor or an inventor, he can improve the life of his fellow men.

Faced with all these options, the young student must make a choice. Occasionally, this choice is determined by a strong affinity for one particular field; he may love to write or play with numerical calculations. The relative opportunities for financial reward undoubtedly play an important role as well. For the most part, however, students will be drawn to the fields that provide the most intellectual stimulus and satisfaction, to the fields that represent the higher intellectual pursuits.

In this sense, it seems clear that the study of philosophy and similar subjective fields surpasses the study of science. The philosopher is concerned with living, thinking subjects. He contemplates the human mind and soul, and no matter how materialistic his doctrine, he deals with values, aspirations and other matters of the spirit. The scientist, on the other hand, is concerned with the mechanical forces that govern both the animate and the inanimate physical world. No matter how clever his discoveries, his work contains no determinations of good and evil, no right and wrong, no keys to the meaning of life, no spiritual sustenance.

Furthermore, the chain of reasoning that leads the philosopher to his conclusions has real lasting value; indeed, it may often be more valuable than his final conclusions. The scientist, however, is an intelligent hunter rather than a thinker, and therefore, the investigation that leads the scientist to his discovery has no residual value, except that it may offer clues to a related investigation. The importance of the information the scientist discovers is not measured by the process that led to the discovery, whereas the conclusions of the philosopher live and die by the reasoning that gave birth to them.[3]

Therefore, it would seem that under ideal conditions the young intellectual would be drawn to philosophy rather than science.[4] These ideal conditions existed in Greek society during the times of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle when Greek philosophy reached out to conquer the world of knowledge and Greek culture was still full of vigor and ambition. Had the young Archimedes, for instance, come to Athens when Socrates was teaching philosophy, he would surely have been drawn into its intellectual vortex. But by the time Archimedes was born, philosophy had degenerated. The teachings of the Skeptics, Epicureans and Stoics did not offer much to excite his interest, and it is small wonder that he sought instead the solid ground of scientific inquiry. Thus, it was actually the cultural decline itself that led to the effusion of science and technology in the post-Alexandrine period.

The pattern repeats itself in modern times. After being buried under an avalanche of Christianity for a thousand years, classical Greek culture was revived during the Italian Renaissance in the fifteenth century. For the next three centuries, the reborn Greek spirit gradually shook itself free of the restraints of Christianity, gathering strength with the passage of time. By the end of the eighteenth century, thinkers such as Voltaire, Rousseau, Locke, Leibnitz and Kant brought the new Greek culture, now called secular humanism, to its peak, much as Socrates, Plato and Aristotle had done two thousand years before.

Having reached its limits, the new Greek culture once again began its inevitable decline. During the nineteenth century, the Greek spirit attempted to prolong its vitality and fire its idealism by turning to liberal and socialist philosophies. But in the twentieth century, these ideologies moved from theory into practice and showed themselves quite useless. By the second half of the twentieth century, secular humanism stood exposed as a bankrupt ideology that could only offer society a hedonistic, narcissistic materialism.

Devoid of thinkers, ideology and spiritual inspiration, secular Western society has moved into a new post-Alexandrine period. There is nothing left to fire the spirits and imaginations of aspiring young intellectuals, and therefore, it is small wonder that would-be philosophers and thinkers are making space shuttles, cellular phones and semiconductors instead. Just as in the post-Alexandrine period, the decline of the modern West has led to tremendous progress in science and technology.

This then was the parabolic pattern which characterized the progress of Greek culture in ancient times and its revived form in modern times—a growing awareness of the human genius, a heady declaration of human supremacy, followed by bewilderment, disillusionment and decline. Thus, the downfall of Greek culture was caused by internal depletion rather than by external assault. The historical progress of Judaism, however, stands in sharp contrast to this pattern.

The cycles of rise and decline that characterized Jewish history were never caused by the exhaustion of the nuclear Judaic spirit; there has never been a time when the Torah itself ceased to provide spiritual sustenance to the core element of the Jewish people. Decay sets in when the ultimate goal is reached, but the faithful Jew climbs a mountain without a pinnacle. He acknowledges God as the Master of the Universe and devotes his life to elevating himself and drawing closer to God, a goal that can never be fully achieved. Judaism, therefore, is an inexhaustible source of new spiritual rewards as each new rung of the endless ladder towards God is climbed, and it never goes into internal decline.

External erosion, however, is an altogether different matter. All human beings, by their very nature, are vulnerable to physical or intellectual enticements, and as we have seen, the Jewish people certainly suffered through periods of erosion by external influences. Whenever the national devotion to the Torah faltered, the weaker elements wandered. In Biblical times, the Canaanites enticed them with wanton pleasures. In modern times, the Enlightenment offered exciting new intellectual ideas. In the post-Alexandrine period, the Greeks offered both.

As the Greek presence in Asia became more and more entrenched, the tug of Greek culture began to be felt in Jewish society. Strings of Greek cities along the Mediterranean coast and along the east bank of the Jordan River drew the curious Jewish youth with the enthrallment of their theatrical presentations, the cleverness of their rhetoricians, the pageantry of their athletic tournaments and the licentiousness of their taverns and dance halls. Greek culture, decaying on the inside but glittering on the outside, drew the innocent Jewish youth with its charms, and Jewish society, glittering on the inside, began to be corroded on the outside.

Nevertheless, the first encounters between the Jews and the Greeks were fairly cordial. The Talmud relates that the Samaritans petitioned Alexander for possession of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.[5] The Samaritans, transplanted to Israel by the Assyrians two centuries earlier, were old thorns in the side of the Jewish people. They had failed in their attempts to prevent and then disrupt the reconstruction of the Temple, but having assisted in the siege of Tyre,[6] the Samaritans felt that Alexander would rule in their favor. To counter the Samaritan claim, the Jews sent a delegation led by Shimon Hatzadik, Simon the Just,[7] who was the High Priest and the last surviving member of the Men of the Great Assembly . At the sight of the eminent sage, Alexander dismounted and bowed with respect. Then he ruled in favor of the Jews, and to the utter dismay of the Samaritans, he subjected them to Jewish authority.

Afterwards, Alexander returned to Jerusalem with Simon the Just to see the Holy Temple. Impressed by its beauty, he suggested that a statue of him be placed in the Sanctuary. Simon the Just gently dissuaded him from this plan, explaining that images were forbidden in Jewish law. Instead, he offered two more lasting memorials—all male Kohanim born that year would be named Alexander and all contractual dates would be measured from the establishment of the Alexandrine Empire.[8] It was a good bargain for both. The Jews were spared the abomination of a statue in the Temple, and in return, Alexander has become a quite common Jewish name and the dating system, known as minyan shtaros, endured for fifteen hundred years.

The Talmud tells of several other disputes that Alexander settled in the favor of the Jews.[9] Josephus also reports many other favorable enactments for the benefit of the Jews, including the exemption from taxes during the fallow sabbatical year. Apparently, the Jewish people and their venerable sages had made a positive impression on Alexander and the Greeks. As a wise and sober people with very high moral standards, the Jews were certainly deserving of the respect of the Greeks. And for their part, the Greeks could well afford to treat the Jews with deference. As far as they could see, Judea was an insignificant little province, comprising little more than the city of Jerusalem, with absolutely no military capability. What threat did this tiny, reclusive nation pose to the mighty Greeks?

It would be many years before it dawned upon the Greeks that the unassuming Jews were their most dangerous foes, that the Jews were the bearers of a potent ideology whose message would electrify the world. Ultimately, the Jews and their Christian and Muslim imitators would bury Greek civilization for a thousand years. In the meantime, however, the Greeks allowed the Jewish people to pursue their own agendas in benign neglect. As long as they paid their taxes.

[1] Metaphysics

[2] Nicomachean Ethics

[3] The works of Aristotle offer a prime example. Students of philosophy still read and argue over Aristotle’s Ethics. No biologist, however, would have any interest in reading Aristotle’s History of Animals. Many of his conclusions have been disproved, and those that have survived are integrated into common knowledge, making Aristotle’s biology a superfluous relic in which only historians may perhaps find some passing interest.

[4] The term philosophy is used here in the general sense of subjective knowledge of the human condition and is meant to include similar studies, such as history according to the modern analytical method, and creative pursuits such as literature and art.

[5] Yoma 69a

[6] Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews

[7] According to Doros Harishonim (1:181, 195), Shimon was not known as “the Just” during his own lifetime. He was known as Shimon the son of Chonio, the High Priest. Shimon had a grandson, however, who also became High Priest and bore the same name, Shimon the son of Chonio. This second Shimon was a rogue, and to distinguish between grandfather and grandson, people began referring to the first Shimon posthumously as the tzaddik, “the one who was just.”

[8] Avodah Zarah 10a

[9] Sanhedrin 91a