Friends, Macedonians, subjects of the vast and frankly impressive empire that stretches, last I checked, from Greece to what my cartographers are calling “basically India” — I come to you not with a military campaign, not with a stirring oration before battle, not even with the thing where I name a city after myself (though, to be clear, that program continues). I come with a simple, humble, deeply personal request.
Please stop calling me “the Great.”
I know how that sounds. I know. Cleitus tried to make this same point at dinner one time and I — well, that’s not relevant. The point is, it has become a thing, and I want it to stop.
It started, I believe, as an honorific. Casual. A term of endearment between a conqueror and his people. But now it’s on the pottery. It’s in the dispatches. My mother has started using it, which, if you knew my mother, you would understand is a deeply unsettling development. She used it at a dinner last spring in a tone that made very clear she considers it a reflection of her and not, in any particular way, of me.
Moreover, it raises the obvious question: great compared to what? Compared to my father, Philip, who was, by all accounts, doing quite well in the whole “domination” department before I came along? Compared to the average Bactrian goat-farmer, who has not, I grant you, conquered Persia? The bar requires defining.
There is also the pressure. “Alexander the Great” must win battles, must drink heroically, must sleep four hours and rise before dawn and ford freezing rivers with his boots off to prove some point about morale. “Alexander” — just Alexander — could perhaps, occasionally, have a lie-in. “Alexander” could say, “You know what, the campaign into the Gedrosian Desert seems logistically inadvisable,” and someone might listen. No one tells the Great anything. The Great simply goes.
My companion Hephaestion suggested, with what I regarded as insufficient sensitivity, that I could simply “lean into it.” He is lucky he is my closest friend. He is also, since he raised the subject, not helping.
I have considered alternatives. “Alexander the Thorough.” “Alexander the Quite Serious About All This.” “Alexander: He Did His Best Given the Circumstances and the Era.” These have not caught on. I accept that.
All I ask is a moment’s consideration. A small, human pause before the epithet. Because somewhere out there, across thirty-odd satrapies, there are other Alexanders — lesser-known Alexanders, Alexanders who repair sandals or oversee modest fishing operations — and I cannot help feeling that in our haste to celebrate one of us, we diminish all the rest.
Though obviously not as much as I have, in a military sense, diminished them.
That part, I’ll keep.