Napoleon studied Caesar. Caesar wept before a statue of Alexander. Alexander wanted to be Achilles. The greatest men the West ever produced were all trying to become the same Greek warrior... Alexander the Great kept a copy of the Iliad under his pillow. His tutor Aristotle had personally annotated an edition for him. According to Plutarch, when Alexander arrived at the ruins of Troy in 334 BC, he sacrificed at the tomb of Achilles and ran naked around it. He told the priests offering to show him Paris's harp that he had no interest in seeing the harp of a coward. "I would far rather see the lyre of Achilles," he said, "which he used to sing the glories of brave men." Three centuries later, in 69 BC, Julius Caesar was serving as quaestor in Spain when he stood in front of a statue of Alexander in the temple of Hercules at Cadiz. He was thirty-two: the same age at which Alexander had died, having already conquered most of the known world. Caesar wept. When his friends asked why, he answered, according to Plutarch: "Do you not think it is matter for sorrow that while Alexander, at my age, was already king of so many peoples, I have as yet achieved no brilliant success?" Eighteen centuries after that, Napoleon Bonaparte sat for his coronation portrait wearing a golden laurel wreath, modelled on the wreath of Julius Caesar. He carried with him on campaign the works of Plutarch and Caesar's own commentaries. Each of these men was reaching back, through the centuries, to the figure who came first. And that figure was a half-mortal Greek warrior who, when offered the choice between a long, quiet life and a short, glorious one, chose glory. The Greek name Akhilleus is most plausibly derived from akhos, meaning grief, and laos, meaning people. The grief of the people. The greatest hero of the Western imagination is not named for victory or for strength. He is named for sorrow... But that is the bargain: to choose greatness in the Achilles tradition is to choose a particular kind of suffering. Alexander died at thirty-two. Caesar was murdered by his closest friends. Napoleon ended his life on an island in the South Atlantic, looking at the sea. Each of them got what Achilles got: a name that has outlasted empires, and a life that was paid for in full. What drove the men who built Western civilization was not happiness. It was something older, deeper, and harder to name. The Greeks called it kleos: the glory that survives death. Achilles got there first. Three thousand years later, men are still trying to follow him... -- -- -- If you enjoyed this, I write a weekly newsletter read by over 50,000 people who love rediscovering the beauty of the past. You can join us here: James-lucas.com/welcome If you'd like to support my work, a paid subscription is what makes it possible.

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