On greatness
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On my first Western Civ exam this semester I was required to include an essay question concerning Alexander the Great. The essay asked students to explain some of Alexander’s achievements and, having done so, to consider the question of “whether he deserved the title ‘the Great.””
It’s interesting that the essay’s instructions raised the question of desert. The students’ answers interested me further. The good ones fell into three broad groups. The first group suggested that Alexander did not deserve to be remembered as great because of his accomplishments: namely, spreading war and disorder over the known world in pursuit of his own glory and the establishment of an empire. Others argued that he did deserve to be remembered as great, and for the same reason: his accomplishments, namely the creation of a metropolitan, polyglot culture that facilitated the spread of commerce and ideas from Europe to India. The last group argued that regardless of whether we approve of what Alexander achieved—whether we focus on the bloodshed or the unification—the scale and consequences of his actions more than earn him the title ‘the Great.”
The latter, I think, are correct.
The concept of greatness has become entangled with the moral question of goodness. This must partly be the result of casualness and sloppiness. “This pizza is great” and “That was a great movie” or “Have you heard this great new Taylor Swift song?” all suggest approval as the essential grounds of greatness. It was striking to me that among the many reactions to Ridley Scott’s Napoleon, no few condemned the movie for tarnishing the reputation of “a great man.”
Premodern people suffered no such illusions. Greatness, in the ancient and medieval worlds, suggested not goodness but size or strength. In his own language, Alexander was Alexandros Megas—Alexander the Big or Alexander the Mighty. The Latin equivalent was magnus, a clear cognate, Pompeius Magnus being Pompey the Big or Grand or Mighty. Alfred the Great was, in Old English, Ælfred Micela, literally Alfred the Much. Other languages still reflect the idea of size rather than goodness. In Irish, Alexander is still Alastar Mor, Big Alexander, and in German Charlemagne (Carolus Magnus in Latin) is Karl der Große—Charles the Big.
But recall that, for most of my students, Alexander’s greatness was bound up with what he did, which could, in good utilitarian fashion, be weighed in a moral scale. This is certainly the most common modern way of assessing greatness. Andrew Roberts, a historian I admire and whose biography of Napoleon is titled Napoleon the Great in the UK, rather gushingly asserts that Napoleon was great and argues this on the grounds of his accomplishments—unification, standardization, modernization. I disagree that these are inherently moral goods, and I find Napoleon’s personal character morally reprehensible and his philosophy heinous. But I can’t disagree with the assertion that he was great.
Because greatness, the size and power necessary to achieve great and consequential things, necessarily means that a great man can do a lot of damage. And a lot of the great men of history—Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon, Hitler—did so. Think of how many acres a giant destroys simply by walking.
Of the men named in this post I’d consider only Alfred a good man. Something that ought to temper our ambitions.
Much of the confusion, controversy, and furor surrounding the way we remember history and the consequential men of history would evaporate if we could simply remember that greatness is not a moral quality. Separating the two would allow us to see both greatness and goodness more clearly. And the more pressing of these two concerns is certainly to better understand goodness.
