ABSTRACT
Twenty-five years ago Sir William Tarn delivered a Raleigh Lecture on History to the British Academy, 1 to which he gave this challenging title and in which he created the figure we may call Alexander the Dreamer: an Alexander ‘dreaming’ 2 of ‘one of the supreme revolutions in the world’s outlook’, namely ‘the brotherhood of man or the unity of mankind’. He did not claim to have given proof – only ‘a very strong presumption indeed’. Perhaps no one, in a subject of this nature, ought to ask for more. Yet six years later Tarn could write: ‘It is now, as I see it, certain.’ 3 Ten years ago, in his great work on Alexander, certainty was apparently a little abated. 4 But if there was less pretension, there was no more ability to think himself mistaken, and no more civility in dealing with opposing views. And the conclusion reached was described by its author as ‘the most important thing about [Alexander].’ 5 The matter is indeed important. That the ‘revolution in the world’s [i.e. the Greek world’s] outlook’ did take place is a fact; and that it prepared that world for the spiritual climate of the Roman Empire and Christianity – helping to make first one and then the other possible and generally accepted – makes it one of the decisive revolutions in the history of Western thought. Ever since 1933, Tarn’s figure of Alexander the Dreamer has explicitly claimed the credit for this re-orientation: the phantom has haunted the pages of scholarship, 6 and even source-books and general histories of philosophy and of ideas – at least in this country – have begun to succumb to the spell. 7 Perhaps a quarter of a century is long enough for the life-span of a phantom: it is clearly threatening to pass into our tradition as a thing of flesh and blood. It is the aim of this article – an aim in which it can hardly hope to be immediately successful – to lay the ghost. 8
