Alexander the Great was one of the central figures of ancient history as it was understood throughout the Middle Ages and into modern times. This article focuses on a significant change in the way in which he was represented after the arrival of humanist learning in England. While the medieval tradition, based on the Alexander Romance, generally made Alexander an unblemished knightly hero and a minister of God,Footnote 1 in the fifteenth century a new way of thinking about him emerged that was influenced by the negative philosophical tradition represented by Seneca and Quintus Curtius. A central feature of such treatments was his cruelty: in earlier authors this was exemplified by the killings of the philosopher Callisthenes and of his childhood friend Cleitus. But in the Renaissance the judgement attached itself instead to the execution of Philotas, reflecting both a new critical approach to history and a new understanding of the legitimacy of kingly power.
Alexander's ‘cruelty’
Philotas was the son of Alexander's senior general, Parmenio. The so-called ‘Conspiracy of Philotas’ erupted in the autumn of 330, when Alexander and his army were in Farah in Drangiana. A young man called Dymnus invited his lover, Cebalinus, to join him in a plot against Alexander's life. Cebalinus would have no part in it and immediately reported the plot to Philotas. Philotas apparently did not take the threat seriously and made no mention of it to Alexander. Cebalinus then approached one of the royal pages, who immediately informed Alexander. The king assumed that Philotas' silence indicated complicity in the plot, and had him put on trial before the Macedonian peers. Dymnus committed suicide before he could give evidence; Philotas admitted guilt under torture, and was executed. An assassination squad was also sent to despatch his father, Parmenio. Since that time, many historians have believed that Philotas was ‘framed’ because Alexander found his attitude obnoxious, and that his trial was a sham.Footnote 2
Alexander's journey through Central Asia saw the development of a new style of rule and also, it may be said, a change in his character. Now that he had succeeded the dead Darius and declared himself king of Asia, he adopted aspects of Persian dress, behaviour, and court ritual. These developments were unwelcome to the Macedonian nobility and led to several standoffs between the king and his Companions. Besides the Philotas affair, the two most notable cases were the quarrel with Cleitus at Maracanda, which resulted in Cleitus' death, and the implication of the philosopher Callisthenes in the Conspiracy of the Pages, which was followed by his imprisonment and perhaps execution (unless he died of disease). These three episodes became key weapons in the moralizing tradition about Alexander the Great that grew up in Roman times and that is epitomized by Seneca's judgement on the death of Callisthenes: ‘This is the eternal crime of Alexander, which no virtue or felicity of his in war shall ever be able to redeem’.Footnote 3
Of the three episodes, it was that concerning Cleitus that was most prominent in medieval historical writing about Alexander, which derived its main outlines from Orosius, the first Christian historian of antiquity, who wrote his History against the Pagans in the fifth century ad. Cruelty is the watchword of his account of Alexander:
Nor was his cruelty towards his own people any less than his rage against his enemies, as is shown by the killing of his cousin Amyntas, the murder of his stepmother and brothers, the butchering of Parmenion and Philotas, and the eradication of Attalus, Eurylochus, Pausanias and a host of leading Macedonians. Even Clitus, an old man and an old friend, was shamefully killed. At a banquet, relying on his friendship with the king, he opposed the king who was saying his deeds were greater than those of Philip, by reminiscing about Alexander's father. He was run through with a hunting spear by the king who had taken offence for no reason, and, as he died, covered the whole banquet with his blood.Footnote 4
Just below, Orosius writes ‘He killed the philosopher Callisthenes, who had been his fellow-pupil under Aristotle, along with many other leading men because they would not honour him as a god and abandon their normal way of greeting him.’Footnote 5
In the Middle Ages, most writing about Alexander derived in one way or another from the Alexander Romance and its successive rewritings from the tenth to the thirteenth centuries, including the Epitome of Julius Valerius, as well as the Historia de proeliis. Alongside this, however, there is a parallel tradition that derives from Orosius. It appears as early as the Parva recapitulatio de eodem Alexandro et de suis, found in British Library MS Royal 13 A.i, an eleventh-century account of Alexander's career that expands the Orosian picture of Alexander as a bloodthirsty tyrant. In Ranulph Higden's Polychronicon, a world chronicle of 1364,Footnote 6 the author writes:
Alexander labouring oft in drunkenness, exercised most specially that time crudelity, in which passion it happed him to have condemned a noble man of his host… . Alexander commanded the said philosopher [Callisthenes] to be perished, and to have his members cut away, and to be cast into a ditch with a great dog, thinking this philosopher to have intended treason in that he despised the manner and consuetude of men of Persia.Footnote 7
The fullest elaboration of this portrait of the ‘cruel Alexander’ comes in John Lydgate's (c.1370–c.1451) Fall of Princes, which, though it is one sense a ‘mirror for princes’, is also in its pessimism what a recent study calls ‘a narrative tragedy’.Footnote 8 It is dominated by the medieval idea of the Wheel of Fortune that raises men to prosperity and then hurls them down again, in a movement which is not always clearly tied to moral deserts. The reverse, in fact, is true: the most virtuous should watch out for the tipping of the Wheel of Fortune; conversely, those who are great do not owe it to their virtue but to chance. Unlike Fate, the goddess Fortune is unstable and unreliable.Footnote 9 An entire section of Book IV, over three hundred lines long (1107–1449), is entitled ‘How the tyrant Alisaundre slouh his philosophre Calistenes with other for seyng trouthe’.
He concludes his attack on Alexander:
This charge of cruelty and also of injustice against Alexander was well known and found a brief echo in John Lyly's (1554–1606) play, Alexander and Campaspe (1578), where Alexander's overriding aim to be a philosopher-king does not prevent him from taking his usual hostile line with Callisthenes ‘whose treasons against his prince shall not be borne out with the reasons of his philosophy. Let your lives be answerable to your learnings, lest my proceedings be contrary to my promises.’ The tradition is still remembered in Shakespeare's Henry V (IV.viii; first performed 1598/9), where the Welsh captain Fluellen expostulates:
Alexander, God knows, and you know, in his rages, and his furies, and his wraths, and his cholers, and his moods, and his displeasures, and his indignations, and also being a little intoxicate in his prains, did, in his ales and his angers, look you, kill his best friend, Cleitus.
Of the three episodes of Alexander's cruelty, it is always the two concerning Callisthenes and Cleitus that receive attention in the Middle Ages. Philotas is scarcely mentioned, except in passing. A notable change occurs at the beginning of the seventeenth century, centring on two texts that will be the subject of the remainder of my article: Samuel Daniel's The Tragedy of Philotas (1605) and Walter Ralegh's History of the World (written during his imprisonment in the Tower between 1603 and 1616). My argument will be that these two texts signal the beginning of a new, critical approach to the writing of history, arising both out of contemporary circumstances and out of the reading of previously unknown texts, notably the history of Q. Curtius Rufus.
Samuel Daniel, The Tragedy of Philotas
Samuel Daniel (1562/3–1619), most famous now for one wonderful sonnet (‘Care-charmer Sleep, son of the sable night’), was a highly political author who had already published an epic poem in eight books on England's civil wars (1591). There has been some argument about priority, but there is little doubt that this was one of the sources for Shakespeare's Richard II (1595). Footnote 12 Both authors display a similar conception of history: Richard is brought down for his failings by the turn of Fortune's wheel, and Bolingbroke is pursued by Nemesis for his deposition of an anointed king.
In Philotas Daniel dramatized the single most effective theatrical plot to be extracted from Alexander's saga.Footnote 13 He had a predecessor, a Latin play of 1587, which is no longer extant, and he also mentions a play by his friend D. Lateware which had been put on in St John's College, Oxford;Footnote 14 but for the structure and detail of his plot he drew on Quintus Curtius' account of the ‘conspiracy’ of Philotas (6.7–11). Curtius had been translated into English in 1553 by John Brende, and was known in one or other version to Philip Sidney, who mentions him in his Defence of Poetry (published 1595); but Daniel made use of the Latin original as well as the translation, as is evident from the forms of some of the names.Footnote 15 In addition he drew on the account in Plutarch's Life of Alexander, in which he found the character Antigona. She appears fleetingly in chapters 48–9 as Philotas' girlfriend,
a passing faire young curtisan, borne in the city of Pidna… . Philotas founde meanes to get her, and like a yong man that was in love with her, making merry with her at the table, fondly let fall brave words and boasts of a souldier, saying, that what notable things were done, they were done by himself and his father [Parmenio]: and called Alexander at every word, yong man, and sayd, that by their meanes he held his name and kingdome.Footnote 16
Daniel develops her into a full character with a confidante, Thais, and her role in the betrayal is correspondingly enhanced – for it is Thais who betrays Antigona's confidence. Antigona tells Thais what Philotas said to her:
Philotas' attitude to Alexander is thus apparent but, as in history, the question of his complicity in the plot of Dymnus is imponderable. The issue was that Cebalinus had been told by Dymnus of a plot; he went to Philotas to tell him of it, but Philotas showed little interest and did not bother to inform Alexander of what he had been told. This was taken by the Macedonian peers as evidence of Philotas' complicity in the plot, or at least of his willingness for it to succeed. As Dymnus' suicide pre-empted the possibility of questioning him about his fellow-conspirators, the way was open for Philotas' enemies at court to make him a major conspirator.
Later Alexander speaks:
Craterus is the chief prosecutor in the case.
The trial continues for some time until one of the guards cries out ‘Let's tear the wretch in pieces, let us rend/With our owne hands the traitrous parricide’ (1756–7); but Alexander adjourns the court, and the final decision, along with the description of the torture and death of Philotas, are reported in the manner of classical drama by a messenger. Before this, however, Act V begins with a ‘Chorus’, a dialogue of a Greek and a Persian (between each act there is a chorus, introduced in Act I as a ‘chorus of the vulgar’, whose task is to ‘censure’ the deeds of the great men). The Persian kicks off with a moral:
This ferocious indictment of unjust trial fell uneasily on ears that remembered the trial and condemnation of Elizabeth I's former favourite, the Earl of Essex, in 1601. Comparisons were made at the time with the fall from grace of the ‘Minion of Fortune’, as a contemporary courtier called him.Footnote 22 As Michel writes, ‘There can be little doubt as to Daniel's sympathies in the Essex case’.Footnote 23 Daniel was a member of Essex's circle and described his achievements with enthusiasm in the Civil Wars: the stanzas in question appeared in the editions of 1595 and 1601, but were expunged in 1609. In the publication of Philotas, Daniel found himself constrained to add an Apologie:
The wrong application, and misconceiving of this Tragedy of Philotas, urges me worthy readers, to answere for mine innocency, both in the choice of subject, and the motives that long since induced me to write it, which were first the delight I tooke in the History it selfe as it lay,[///] and then the aptnesses, I saw it had to fall easily into art, without interlacing other invention, then it properly yielded in the owne circumstance, were sufficient for the worke, and a lawfull representing of a Tragedy… . And for any resemblance, that thorough the ignorance of the History may be applied to the late Earle of Essex[.] It can hold in no proportion but only in his weaknesses, which I would wish all that love his memory not to revive. And for mine owne part having been particularly beholding to his bounty, I would to God his errors and disobedience to his sovereigne, might be so deepe buried underneath the earth, and in so low a tombe from his other parts, that he might never be remembred among the examples of disloyaltie in this kingdome, or paraleld with forreine conspirators.Footnote 24
Daniel's remark on the ‘aptnesses it had to fall easily into art’ points up the clear fact that this episode is the only one in Alexander's career that offered a properly dramatic plot. (Perhaps this explains why, once Daniel had done it, Shakespeare ignored the theme.) As for the historical reference, Daniel surely protests too much, for Hugh Gazzard has shown that one passage in the play is a direct quotation from a letter of the Earl of Essex, describing his dead brother in the unusual phrase ‘the half-arch of my house’.Footnote 25 Essex's case was undoubtedly in Daniel's mind when he wrote the play.
The conspiracy of the Earl of Essex resonates through the history of these years and traces of it have been found in many of the literary productions of the time.Footnote 26 On 8 February 1601 Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, who had been the favourite and intimate of Elizabeth I since 1587, when the queen was fifty-three and he twenty, led a rising through the City of London. In the words of Jonathan Bate,
Essex's followers began arriving soon after daybreak… . Some in the yard cried ‘To the court’, but Essex headed east into the city in order to muster the support of the Lord Mayor and the sheriff. Between a hundred and two hundred lords, gentlemen and gallants followed behind as he headed down Fleet Street and under Ludgate. They were not fully armed: the whole adventure was unpremeditated, positively shambolic. The earl's cries that he was acting for the protection of the queen and the city, that his enemies had betrayed the country to Spain, seem to have been met with bemusement.Footnote 27
The plan was to march on the court, protect the queen and arrest Essex's enemies, but ‘They never got near the court. Queen Elizabeth serenely continued with her Sunday routine as if nothing had happened.’ But a month later, all the conspirators were dead.
The day before the rising, Essex and his friends had attended a performance of Shakespeare's Richard II at the Globe, put on by Shakespeare's company. The show was commissioned by Sir Gelly Meyrick, who soon became the only man ever to be executed for staging a play by Shakespeare. In the wake of the arrests, Elizabeth famously remarked ‘I am Richard II. Know ye not that?’Footnote 28 The political application of the play was unmistakeable to contemporaries.Footnote 29 For several years thereafter, echoes of Essex' rebellion were being found in new plays. In 1605 it was Philotas, and in 1603 a similar reaction had greeted the performance of Ben Jonson's Sejanus His Fall, in which the Emperor Tiberius was played by a certain William Shakespeare. Jonson was arraigned before the Privy Council for treason,Footnote 30 and adapted the play before printing in 1605. It has commonly been assumed that contemporaries would have seen this play about the fall of a royal favourite as a commentary on Essex's rebellion; but Philip Ayres in his edition of the play points out a more topical application – the trial of Sir Walter Ralegh for treason earlier in the same year. There was a new king, and a rebellion against the late queen might not seem as immediate a referent as the condemnation of an enemy of the new king, James I. Furthermore, Jonson was a friend of Ralegh. The argument has force, but if that is so why should Philotas have been seen as a commentary on Essex when it appeared two years later? Indeed, why should not the trial of Silius, which Ayres compares in detail with Ralegh's trial, have one referent while the fall of Sejanus recalled the earlier fall of Essex?
Whichever trial, if either or both, lay behind Sejanus – and Jonson of course claimed that he had written a pure piece of historyFootnote 31 – there is no doubt of the historical credentials of Jonson's play. Samuel Johnson wrote that Ben ‘pulled down all antiquity on his head, and buried himself under it’.Footnote 32 Among the mass of detail that Ben Jonson draws from Tacitus there is the famous analogy of Germanicus with Alexander.Footnote 33 Cremutius Cordus speaks:
Titius Sabinus replies:
Jonson puts forward here the Senecan view of an Alexander destroyed by his vices, and one in tune with Fluellen's assessment in Henry V. It is only a passing reference, designed to enhance the figure of Germanicus, but it shows Jonson, like Daniel, more alert to the vicious tyrant than to the godly monarch. Before we leave Sejanus, let me just mention that character's claim, like Tamburlaine's in Christopher Marlowe's Tamburlaine the Great of 1590 (whom the author had undoubtedly modelled, in part, on AlexanderFootnote 35) to have Fortune at his beck and call: he can ‘buy her ear’ (V.80). So too Tamburlaine had boasted (Part II, I.ii.174):
Lepidus remarks near the end of Jonson's play (V.743),
Jonson, then, still nods towards the medieval tragic concept of the Wheel of Fortune;Footnote 37 nevertheless, men have moral responsibility. Samuel Daniel, by contrast, sees no divine agency (whether Fortune or Providence) in action in Philotas' fall; the story is all of the unjust proceedings of human actors. A sober reading of sober historical sources enables him to exercise critical judgement on the heroic Alexander. As Philip Sidney had already remarked,
the historian, bound to tell things as things were, cannot be liberal (without he will be poetical) of a perfect pattern, but, as in Alexander or Scipio himself, show doings, some to be liked, some to be misliked. And then how will you discern what to follow but by your own discretion, which you had without reading Quintus Curtius?Footnote 38
Sidney implies that the historian can form a moral judgement without the help of Curtius; but he certainly needs Curtius for the ‘facts’ on the basis of which he forms it.
From a reading of Curtius and Plutarch, Philotas became a byword for a man unjustly condemned. As Montaigne put it, (the translation by John Florio appeared in the same year as Philotas), ‘Thousands upon thousands have falsely confessed to capital charges. Among them, after considering the details of the trial which Alexander made him face and the way he was tortured, I place Philotas.’Footnote 39
Walter Ralegh, History of the World
My discussion of Walter Ralegh's treatment of Alexander in his History of the World draws together a number of these themes. Sir Walter Ralegh was, like Philotas, a fallen favourite. A loyal supporter of Queen Elizabeth, he had been thought to be ready to compass the murder of the Earl of Essex, whom he called a ‘tyrant’. But his loyalty to Elizabeth expressed itself as a somewhat apparent dissatisfaction with her successor, James I; and it was only a few months into James's reign (1603) that Ralegh was tried for treason, condemned to death, and then reprieved so far as to be committed to the Tower of London at the king's pleasure. He remained there until he was allowed free to undertake a final, unsuccessful colonial expedition to Guiana. On his return in disgrace the suspended sentence was enacted and he was executed on 29 October 1618.
In the years of his imprisonment, from 1603 to 1616, Ralegh busied himself with his library of 515 books, as well as those that he could borrow from his fellow prisoners the Earl of Northumberland and Lord Cobham, and wrote a million words of his uncompleted History of the World. This was the first attempt at a universal history in English, and in it Ralegh broke free from the influence of chronicles and antiquarian studies to create a work whose models were all classical – notably Cicero, Tacitus, and Seneca. It would not be unreasonable to read this work as the first modern history of Greece, anticipating Mitford and Gillies by nearly two centuries.Footnote 40 Ralegh's preface makes clear the philosophical underpinning of his narrative. History is to be a lesson, for ‘the judgments of God are ever unchangeable’, and ‘we may gather out of history a policy no less wise than eternal’.Footnote 41 The English kings are punished for their crimes just as ancient rulers were. Henry VIII, for example is compared to Agag, king of the Amalekites, while Alexander's opponent Darius meets a death that is that much the more wretched because he was ‘ignorant of the living God’.Footnote 42 Apropos Darius (and also Bajazet), he writes ‘God, who is the author of all our tragedies, hath written out for us and appointed us all the parts we are to play; and hath not, in their distribution, been partial to the most mighty princes of the world.’Footnote 43 (The theatrical metaphor is never far behind his writing: ‘The change of fortune on the great theatre is but as the change of garments on the less’.Footnote 44) He continues: ‘as Seneca saith…“to fall under fortune, of all other the most miserable destiny”’.Footnote 45 But Fortune here is actually Divine Providence: a just God is at work in the fates of the moral actors of history. Perhaps Ralegh was sensitive to the charge that had often been levelled at him of atheism. The preface, like his speech on the scaffold, says much of God but nothing of Christ; the morality is deist and perhaps Senecan.
The first part of the History was published in 1614. According to John Aubrey the sales were too slow, so the author burned Part II; but maybe he discontinued writing after the death of his patron, Prince Henry, in 1612. The position of Prince Henry (1594–1612) in these years is intriguing.Footnote 46 Hailed from his earliest years as ‘England's Alexander’, the handsome and arrogant prince, whose ambition was to turn Europe Protestant by the sword, had been a friend of Ralegh since 1604. As an energetic patron of the arts, he had been the dedicatee of Chapman's Iliad and also of Daniel's Philotas. In 1611 Sir George More wrote for him a book, Principles for Young Princes, which drew attention to Alexander as an example of the dangers of pride, ambition, and disdain.Footnote 47 The same message might have been drawn by the new ‘Alexander’ from the Philotas play, whose dedicatory poem warned the young prince against the dangers of good fortune and ambition:
One is compelled to wonder how much Henry would have appreciated the treatment of the historical Alexander in Ralegh's History.
Be that as it may, the book did not remain long in print: it was ‘called in by the King's commaundment, for divers exceptions, but specially for being too sawcie in censuring princes…he takes yt much to hart, for he thought he had won his spurres and pleased the King extraordinarilie’.Footnote 48
Ralegh's heroes are all military and, like the author himself, they are often let down by their rulers. His treatment of Alexander makes clear that he regards Alexander's generalship as much inferior to that of Hannibal and Epaminondas; and it would be interesting to know how he would have treated Caesar, if his history had got that far. In his view, Alexander's successes were due to the incapable generalship of his opponent. He takes from Curtius the description of the gaudy panoply of the Persian army at Issus: Darius is ‘persuading himself, as it seemed, to beat Alexander with pomp and sumptuous pageants’.Footnote 49 He describes the ‘court-like company’, with 15,000 glittering men at arms and 30,000 footmen, followed by the king's ladies,
with fifteen waggons of the king's children and the wives of the nobility, waited on by two hundred and fifty concubines, and a world of nurses and eunuchs, most sumptuously apparelled; by which it should seem that Darius thought that the Macedonians had been comedians or tumblers; for this troop was far fitter to behold those sports than to be present at battles… . In this sort came this May-game king into the field, encumbered with a most unnecessary train of strumpets…and for the most part so effeminate and so rich in gold and in garments, as the same could not but have encouraged the nakedest nation of the world against them.
So far, so good: against such opponents Alexander could not lose. Pretty soon we reach Alexander's encounter with the Amazons, on which Ralegh has a good deal to say. He had himself met Amazons on his first expedition to Guiana and so he knew that the reports of Alexander's encounter with their queen should be true; he raises the matter ‘in part, to justify mine own relation of these Amazons, because that which was delivered me for truth by an ancient cacique of Guiana…that these women still live and govern, was held for a vain and unprobable report’.Footnote 50
However, Alexander was quickly corrupted by the East:
The truth is, that Alexander in going so far into the east left behind them the reputation which he brought out of Macedon; the reputation of a just and prudent prince, a prince temperate, advised, and grateful; and being taught new lessons by abundance of prosperity, became a lover of wine, of his own flattery, and of extreme cruelty. Yea, as Seneca hath observed, the taint of one unjust slaughter, amongst many, defaced and withered the flourishing beauty of all his great acts and glorious victories obtained.Footnote 51
He sank into luxury and ‘entertained in his court and camp the same shameless rabble of courtesans and Sodomitical eunuchs that Darius had done’.Footnote 52 He killed his friends: Ralegh quotes Seneca on the death of Callisthenes: ‘This is the eternal crime of Alexander, which no virtue nor felicity of his in war shall ever be able to redeem’.Footnote 53 Section xxii is headed ‘Of Alexander's riot, cruelty, and death’. An extended description is given to the fate of Philotas and Ralegh quotes some lines from Samuel Daniel's play to illustrate his theme:
Surely Ralegh must have had his own case in mind in copying out these lines?
His treatment of Alexander's death is surprisingly brief, and his final judgement is that he was
Far inferior to Caesar, and many other that lived after him, seeing he never undertook any warlike nation, the naked Scythians excepted…. But it seemeth, fortune and destinies (if we may use those terms) had found out and prepared for him, without any care of his own, both heaps of men that willingly offered their necks to the yoke, and kingdoms that invited and called in their own conquerors. For conclusion, we will agree with Seneca…‘That [both he and Philip] were no less plagues to mankind, than an overflow of waters, drowning all the level; or some burning drought, whereby a great part of living creatures is scorched up.’Footnote 55
Ralegh's excoriating treatment of the great conqueror completes the swing from the medieval conception to the modern. Part of this is simply due to his method: he makes not a mention of the Alexander Romance, which had dominated many medieval accounts, but relies above all on Curtius, Seneca, and Plutarch. The classical sources are recognized for their superior accuracy to medieval anecdote, and the interpretation emerges from the narrative. This is not to say that Ralegh was bound to judge Alexander a bad man as a result of his reading of these sources; criticism of morals is different from critical use of sources, as Sidney observed.Footnote 56 But there is a theoretical swing going on as well. More than two hundred years earlier, Lydgate had presented an Alexander capable of committing crimes, while his contemporary Gower had retailed the old story of Nectanebo's seduction of Olympias. But Lydgate's Alexander, and his victims, are an example of the action of Fortune, who raises men up and casts them down again. Their crimes are not irrelevant but it is almost taken as read that the great will commit the crimes that will bring them down. Fortune ruled the fates of all our heroes, though Tamburlaine and Sejanus might claim that they could bend Fortune to their wills. But for Ralegh, Fortune has come much closer to Divine Providence, and the wickedness of actors of the past not only deserves censure but will benefit those who study them. Morality is more than a few frozen traits of character, as in a masque: people have a choice in how they act.
There is a further message too. For the first time, people other than kings may be heroes, and those heroes may be let down by kings. No doubt Ralegh saw himself as a prime example of this; but the considerations advanced by Samuel Daniel regarding Philotas surely echoed a world in which monarchs should no longer have it all their own way. Essex's conspiracy – if such it was – failed; Elizabeth won her cause, and James won his against Ralegh. But writing like Daniel's and Ralegh's about crowned heads is a small cog in what I must not call the Wheel of Fortune, but perhaps the traction engine of history, that was to lead within a generation of Ralegh's execution to the realization that a king, too, could lose his head. Both Cromwell and Milton admired Ralegh's History of the World.Footnote 57 In the Middle Ages, Alexander was an Everyman whose only limitation was that he could not be a god. Now no king would ever be a god again. As Ralegh said, ‘Death alone…can suddenly make man to know himself’.Footnote 58 The medieval Alexander was dead; the history of Alexander was just beginning.
