THE LANDSCAPE: A rocky plateau, the ground covered with small ash-colored stones, as if packs of rats had poured out onto the surface and been frozen motionless there; scattered groves of poplars—funeral processions—under a low leaden sky sending neither solace nor hope, and a wind, a ubiquitous wind mingled with sand—the relentless rising tide of an arid ocean.
The city: once prosperous and populous, it had fallen into a state of decomposition. Ruined houses and palaces in disrepair, clogged wells and cisterns, deserted streets and bazaars, and also the remains of an acropolis—a melancholy memento of past greatness. Only the walls still rose, high and proud, the unnecessary safeguard of oblivion and destitution.
Alexander of Macedonia spent the end of the winter and almost the whole spring of the year 333 in Gordion1. He always boasted that he was entirely indifferent to nature and caprices of the weather, but at that time his mood corresponded perfectly to the hopelessness of his surroundings. The situation was uncertain: bad news arrived on the movements of the Persian fleet, the enemy’s intentions were hard to divine, and Alexander was waiting in vain for reinforcements from Greece without which he was condemned to slothful idleness.
Black thoughts came to him then. Premonitions, dreams, and suppressed voices told him that his liberation of the Greek cities in Asia, the great victory at the Granicus, everything he had thus far accomplished, was barely a prologue, and that the great epic would remain unfinished forever—and he who had set himself the modest task of conquering the world would shortly take his place in the dark vestibule of history crammed with the countless crazed daredevils whom human memory had denied the right to greatness and glory passed on from generation to generation.
With the end of May finally came the welcome reinforcements made up of Macedonians and Greek allies. Alexander, bored with the long wait, decided to leave Gordion at once.
Before he left, however—such was the advice offered him—the leader ought to do something extraordinary, something that would heighten his authority and infuse the army with the conviction that the war they were embarking upon was in accordance with the gods’ plans and therefore a holy war.
On all his expeditions Alexander was accompanied not only by doctors, courtesans, artists, and scholars but also by a full-time poet, an official historian and a soothsayer—an uncommonly important figure, who fulfilled two crucial functions: he was the ambassador of the gods, accredited by the conqueror’s movable royal palace, and simultaneously minister of propaganda.
His prophecies, drawn from the flight of birds, the constellations of the stars and the innards of animals, always contained a hidden command: you must cross this wild and barren country, you must conquer the city on the mountain, you must win the battle. Alexander’s task was to translate those metaphysical imperatives into the language of logistics and strategy. Both leader and seer were therefore intimately linked, like an idea and its realization, like a solid conclusion drawn from vague premises, like lightning and thunder.
At this momentous historical moment the soothsayer Aristander advised as follows: here in Gordion there’s a curious object held in universal reverence for centuries, namely, the war chariot of Midas, the legendary king of Thrace. To the chariot shaft a knot is attached which no one has yet been able to untie. You must do it, Alexander!
Alexander listened to all this without enthusiasm, unable to understand why he was being forced to play a role worthy of a stable boy. So Aristander explained, referring to remote and obscure genealogies, that Midas was a blood relation of the kings of Macedonia, in view of which untying the knot was in a certain sense a family obligation, and beyond that, a confirmation of blood ties! It should not be forgotten that Midas’ chariot was dedicated to Zeus—Alexander’s protoplast. “Operation Knot” might contribute to the strengthening of the ancient covenant between Greece and Asia. After all, this was not a matter of indifference to Alexander, who felt the role of liberator suited him better than that of invader and usurper.
It all sounded convoluted and unconvincing, so Aristander went to the heart of the matter and threw a decisive argument on the table. He announced proudly that he had devised the following prophecy:
HE
WHO UNTIES
THE GORDIAN KNOT
WILL BE
LORD OF GREECE
Of course—the seer went on—this was an imperfect version. The whole thing needed a thorough literary treatment. A prophecy should have the form of a distych combining a hexameter and a pentameter. The introduction of linguistic archaisms blunts the categorical nature of a sacred utterance and gives it the desired effect of ambiguity, in fitting with the semantics of the gods, who always express themselves aphoristically but not always clearly.
The troops should be told that prophecy is ancient, confirmed by the authority of many oracles. Ex post prophecies have been practiced by all peoples for centuries. A minor shift in time makes no difference to the gods, who do not concern themselves with any petty shopkeeper’s reckoning of years, for their dwelling is the splendid, unbounded present.
If, on the other hand, for reasons difficult to foresee at that moment, the undertaking came to nothing, they could pretend the whole thing never happened. In that case Aristander, the poet Choirilos, and the historian Callisthenes would pass it over in silence. So Alexander was going to face a mystery without running any risk of failure.
In the end Alexander remarked that the matter of the knot held an uncommon attraction for him. One cannot help being surprised that up to this point he had not found any practical application for the art of prophecy, interpretation of words or even the exegesis of difficult works of poetry.
The next morning Alexander, accompanied by a few generals and selected soldiers, set out for Midas’ palace.
So there was the legendary chariot—unimpressive, shorn of ornament, falling apart with age and pious pawing—a silly worn-out piece of military junk. He spotted the dark-brown knot easily. He took it in both hands and found it to be a tangle of bast, heavy and solid like the clenched fist of a dead man.
The wrestling match with that inflexible and mysterious object began. At first Alexander tried to find one clear cord leading like Ariadne’s thread to the center of the dark labyrinth. In vain. The knot mocked his efforts. Among those present one could hear a disenchanted murmur.
And then it happened. Alexander drew his sword and with one stroke cut the knot in two. A few cries—whether of admiration or disappointment is unclear. In fact no one realized the deeper meaning of that incident.
That night a tremendous snowstorm, unusual for that time of year, burst over the city. Lightning flashes lit up the darkness, heavy thunderbolts rolled across the sky. To Aristander it was a visible sign of the gods applauding Alexander’s victory over the knot and his feat being to their liking. Aristotle on the other hand didn’t like it at all.
The next day Alexander, relieved, left Gordion at the head of his troops.
A few weeks after the knot episode he received a letter from his master in Athens.
Alexander had previously read those letters as befits a pupil, with urgent attention and proper respect, but with the passage of time the dialogue had broken off, the conversation had inevitably turned into a monologue. The philosopher gave an account of the problems he was working on. Alexander gave his position on the expanding map of the world and limited himself to brief information on himself, banal as a war communiqué.
The Stagirite2, resident of a decaying provincial capital, a philosopher reflecting in the shade of small trees, could not understand his royal pupil, who hunted the fleeting ghost of Achilles without rest, driving infinite herds of mountains, deserts, and forests before him, riding a horse’s back as if it were a wave, in measureless space, in limitless time no days or nights could contain, plunged in the clamor of battle and the hush of battle sites, striped with light and blinding blackness like a tiger.
Philosophers probably need a stable point of reference over the swirling ocean of phenomena. But an unmoving leader would be a figure as absurd as a square triangle.
The Greeks—Alexander thought—most often contented themselves with their own surroundings, the horizons of their homeland; they also had a curious tendency to look at the cosmos from the perspective of a vineyard and to draw far-reaching conclusions from modest experience. Who was it who said they resembled frogs huddled by the pond of the Mediterranean?
Alexander was at first pained and later merely irritated by the pedantic chill and unruffled pomp of the Stagirite’s letters. If was as if there was no room in them for any heart’s emotion, nor any admiration, pride, recognition for his pupil’s extraordinary achievements. Sometimes it seemed as if the sage had lost his sense of humor, the distinctive mark of a sense of reality, when for example he wrote to his charge—then occupied in besieging a city—about the characteristics of odd numbers, the political system of Carthage, the theory of Nile waves, and the lives of bees.
Aristotle’s letters usually contained three well-balanced parts, like the parts of a treatise. In the first part, the philosopher reported exhaustively on his work and scholarly projects. Then followed requests for materials that might enrich his collection of specimens in the sphere of zoology, botany, and mineralogy, as well as—Aristotle’s curiosity being truly inexhaustible—a demand for detailed information on all unusual natural phenomena and on the customs and beliefs of barbarian peoples. The letter ended with what might be called the ethical part, which contained stern reprimands, reflections on the subject of the ideal ruler, models of rational behavior buttressed with examples from the lives of great men.
This time, too, the philosopher played the role of pedagogue. He wrote that rumors had reached him (in Athens, where people relished gossip about any defeat suffered by the Macedonian) of the curious business of the Gordian knot and he had rightly inferred it to have been an unfortunate idea of Aristander’s. He reminded Alexander that he had long advocated the dismissal of that unworthy adviser, who should be sent to settle down on a farm, although if the power of his muscles was equivalent to the power of his mind, it wouldn’t do anyone any good. His fierce contempt for soothsayers struck sparks of sarcasm.
It’s one thing, the Stagirite argued, to listen to irrational voices and views—we are all condemned to that—and a completely different thing to yield to them. Alexander faced an inevitable choice: either give up his inborn power of judgment and let himself be guided by the seer, in which case the glory of future actions would not fall to him—that blow was well-aimed and must have wounded Alexander—or act independently, directed by his own reason, which was his obligation as one of royal origin and great knowledge.
And now for the knot itself. Alexander was mistaken if he imagined he had risen to the level of the task (assuming even the minimal significance of that tasteless spectacle). The knot was supposed to be untied—not cut. Any mangy butcher could have cut it.
In closing, the philosopher asked Alexander not to give any publicity to the affair. Since even gods cannot alter the past, he could only count on kindly human forgetfulness.
It is a remarkable and disturbing thing that this unfortunate affair went on to have a great career in history. Individuals who wouldn’t be able to say much about Alexander’s true achievements, at the sound of the two magical words “Gordian knot,” fall into a kind of doltish ecstasy, foam at the mouth, roll their eyes heavenward, smile approvingly. And that is precisely what is disturbing.
The Gordian knot became a common phrase, entered the linguistic storehouse of so-called civilized peoples. Worse, it advanced to the rank of a symbol. But a symbol of what? Cunning stealth, intellectual courage, the lightning transformation of idea into act, the supremacy of spirit over matter? No one among those who blithely blather on about it has tried to give an answer to these questions.
Six years after the incident in Gordion, Alexander crossed the threshold into mysterious India. At that time, as we know, it came to—or rather could have come to—the first confrontation between the Two Worlds, when near the town of Taxila he encountered the oddest people, who enjoyed universal reverence: naked philosophers, to whom the clever Greeks attached the name “gymnosophists.” The news of them, included in chronicles, became legend in the centuries that followed.
One of the gymnosophists, whose name was Mandanis, is supposed to have said that Alexander was the first armed philosopher he had seen in his life. The Greeks took this as a refined compliment. But it seems to us an expression of astonishment, and perhaps even a politely veiled accusation.
This encounter of Two Worlds ended as do all international summits, namely with the participants and potential opponents parting fully convinced of the unshakable rightness of their own views. Language difficulties were no doubt a serious obstacle on the way to a true exchange of ideas. Alexander’s army interpreters commanded only a crude vocabulary in foreign tongues and a clumsy soldier’s grammar with its predilection for infinitives and imperatives, just right for requisitioning grain, fodder, and cattle, but not very helpful in conveying subtle shades of meaning.
There was a certain Onesikritos3 in Alexander’s retinue, a navy officer and amateur philosopher in one person. It is to him that we owe the account of the unsuccessful attempt to bring two great cultures closer together. For Onesikritos came to the conclusion that the Indian gurus were simply the counterpart to the Greek Cynics. That observation probably lifted his spirits, because he was a pupil of Diogenes and so the popularity of his master’s doctrine on the edges of the world flattered his vanity. It is hard to find a more revealing example of intellectual arrogance, that is, translating what is mysterious and unknown into one’s own terms and closing one’s eyes to the world’s splendid and instructive diversity. No one wished or was able to draw the real moral from the whole story, namely that the only clothing fit for a philosopher is defenseless nakedness.
In Gordion a lamentable, even reprehensible thing occurred. The tribunals of history treat this apparently trivial incident as a joke.
If the severing of the knot had been performed by one of the Oriental satraps, it would all have been understandable and clear, like an inscription on a rock declaring the tyrant’s will to the desert in a murderous alphabet of arrows, hatchets, and swords. From Alexander one might have expected something in better taste.
After all, he realized very well, and even made sure that all his feats, his whole life, became to posterity an edifying fable, an example worth following, a paradigm. An incomprehensible blindness compelled him to introduce an element of force into the process of thought. How could he overlook the fact that the untying of knots and problems is not an athletic exhibition but an intellectual operation, which assumes the willingness to err, a helplessness before the tangled material of the world, marvelous human uncertainty, and humble patience.
Alexander, unable to cope with the task, destroyed the problem with a sword. We can say with a sigh of relief: it all happened a long time ago and will never happen again. But how do we know? The Gordian knot ceased to exist as a real object, but it continues to exist, stubbornly, as an object of our imagination, a cognitive riddle. We cannot erase it from memory or exclude the possibility that in the very heart of that tangle so mistreated by the conqueror there was some important inscription, warning, wisdom, prayer, hope or even just a model of an ancient cosmology. Now no one can reconstruct the knot—for how could it be done? And that is painful beyond words. The Mystery was murdered.
With a heavy heart (for who did not love Alexander) we must admit that in some sense Alexander gave legitimacy to a certain repellent form of violence. The fact that in every century the Macedonian celebrates his shameful triumphs does not justify him. To him we apply the highest standards.
It is true that violence inflicted on persons differs from violence inflicted on objects, but in the end objects are our neighbors too and demand our care because they are deprived of the power of speech and the capacity for active resistance. And anyway, we don’t know where the escalation of crime begins. Words scrawled on an innocent wall, the breaking of fragile windows, the desecration of cemeteries, burning of temples…The moment of transformation, the liberation of the ominous elements of violence is most often elusive.
That’s why we can draw an analogy between Alexander’s insane exploit and what took place later on a sunny beach in Sicily, when a Roman corporal unraveled the body of Archimedes, who had been drawing shapes and geometric figures in the sand which the simpleton couldn’t understand.
And later on, too, those processions of darkness, burnings at the stake—of papyruses, pigskin manuscripts, books—stakes onto which disobedient authors were cast as if they were a mere afterthought.