Alexander

As you may have figured out by reading my essays on my blog tsuyomatte.wordpress.com, I despise most and revere few. Among these few, my favorite heroes include Alexander the Great and the samurai Yagyu Munenori.  I have studied much about them both, seeing value in their best qualities despite their few failings.  Just yesterday I discovered a book called The Virtues of War: a novel of Alexander the Great by Steven Pressfield.

Pressfield’s skill at delivering the physical and spiritual dimensions of the battle at Chaeronea is pure mastery. This was Alexander’s first great victory, noted because he defeated the renowned Theban Sacred Band of 300.  What was most bewitching was the details of the great valor expended on both sides.  Fate gave the day to young Alexander (age 18) as he led the left wing of his father’s battleline.  His Companion Cavalry routed this undefeated heavy infantry phalanx, but they refused to surrender as even the most elite eventually acquiesce.  They were surrounded.  And, in order to keep them from committing ritual suicide (in similar fashion to samurai seppuku), they’d been disarmed.  The last 40 huddled together, bleeding and broken, begging for death due to the dishonor of defeat.  They refused to bind their wounds… bleeding the ground wet.  “Cease!” was Alexander’s command, holding back the bloodlust of his warriors who had lost friends, brothers, and fathers in the othismos exchange just minutes ago.  Still sitting astried his black charger Bucephalus, he looked on them–past the rush of a glorious poet’s lines of his utter annihilation of his foe–and ordered their weapons returned and for them to be released without harm.

As his father Phillip II rode up and was told of this counterintuitive action, he nodded at those who wished to finish them off with his overriding command.  “Follow the orders of your commander” were his words.  Alexander had acted with reverence– without respect for whose standard under which it was displayed–to that rarest of actions that make the gods themselves envy the rarest of us.  Valor!