Alexander and Caesar Weeping

It is reported that King Alexander the Great, hearing Anaxarchus the philosopher discoursing and maintaining this position: That there were worlds innumerable: fell a-weeping: and when his friends and familiars about him asked what he ailed. Have I not (quoth he) good cause to weep, that being as there are an infinite number of worlds, I am not yet the lord of one?

Plutarch, On the Tranquil Mind

That quotation is often mangled into the statement that Alexander wept because there were no more worlds to conquer.  Julius Caesar when he was a quaestor (auditor) in Hispania supposedly, according to Suetonius, wept before a statue of Alexander, because at Caesar’s age, 33, Alexander was dead after conquering a vast empire while Caesar had not yet done anything to cause him to be remembered.

Earthly ambition of course is a chase after wind.  Last week I purchased a biography of Ramses the Great, quite possibly the Pharaoh of Exodus.  One of the greatest of all the Pharaohs,  he would now be almost entirely forgotten, except by specialists and history nerds, my people, but for the possible connection with Moses.  Kipling I think nails it in his poem Recessional, written for Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee.  Rather than a celebration of the power of the British Empire, it looked forward to a time when that Empire had vanished, and what then would remain:

The tumult and the shouting dies;
The Captains and the Kings depart:
Still stands Thine ancient sacrifice,
An humble and a contrite heart.

Lent reminds us powerfully that our obsessions in this life are often less than nothing in the eyes of God.  True permanence, and true worth, is never to be found in this Vale of Tears.