by Stephen Cave
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
ACHILLES’S REGRET
ALEXANDER has been seen by many as the shining embodiment of ancient Greek values. We saw earlier that he was raised on the heroic myths, was tutored by Aristotle and carried The Iliad with him wherever he went. But despite this training in the classics, we might conclude that Alexander did not read his Homer closely enough.
Both The Iliad and The Odyssey are filled with pathos, as Homer chronicles the toll of the hero culture. The plot of The Iliad begins with Achilles being snubbed by the Greek commander Agamemnon and as a consequence refusing to fight, even calling on the gods to favor the Trojans. The grimly ironic result of Achilles’s petulance is that his closest friend, Patroclus, falls to the spear of the Trojan prince Hector. At this, Achilles goes on a rampage, cutting down swaths of young Trojan warriors: “As a fire raging in some mountain glen after long drought … even so furiously did Achilles rage, wielding his spear as though he were a god, and giving chase to those whom he would slay, till the dark earth ran with blood … but the son of Peleus pressed on to win still further glory, defiling his invincible hands with bloody gore.”
In his rage, Achilles loses all humanity, killing those who are unarmed, some who beg for mercy, and, when he finally kills Hector, defiling the corpse. Homer does not write of him with admiration but has the god of the river that Achilles is filling with corpses rise up against him with the words, “Achilles, if you exceed all in strength, so do you also in wickedness.”
Later, in The Odyssey, while on his homeward voyage after Troy has finally fallen, Odysseus goes down to Hades to visit the shades—the gloomy spirits of the dead. There among them, he finds Achilles, who finally fell to an arrow shot by Hector’s brother Paris, fulfilling the prophecy that if his life was glorious then it would also be short. Odysseus is shocked when Achilles describes his miserable existence in Hades amid the “mindless, disembodied ghosts.” Odysseus remonstrates with him—surely Achilles, most renowned of all warriors, most celebrated of heroes, cannot regret the path he chose, sacrificing long life for glory? “Do not you make light of death, illustrious Odysseus,” Achilles replies. “I would rather work the soil as a serf to some landless impoverished peasant than be king of all these lifeless dead.”
And so in the end it was all for nothing. After all the young blood that drenched the dust around Troy, all the women left widowed and the parents left grieving, after the deaths of Patroclus, Hector and even Achilles himself—after all that, the great hero is condemned to the dark and empty realm of death like everyone else. Homer saw the futility of seeking glory through bloodshed. Perhaps Alexander should have taken heed.
SOCRATES, who taught Plato, who taught Aristotle, who taught Alexander, also closely observed the vainglory of his times. He was convinced by the words of Diotima, the wise woman who was his “instructor in the arts of love”: these great deeds of the heroes, she said, are the acts of men whose “souls are pregnant” with the need to leave some symbolic descendant to live after them. But women can be “pregnant in the body … giving them the blessedness and immortality which they desire in the future.” In other words, men fight battles or write books only because they can’t have babies. Which brings us neatly to the second half of the Legacy Narrative.
9
THE IMMORTAL SEED
GENES, GAIA AND THE THINGS IN BETWEEN
THERE is no doubt that Alexander III of Macedon was a remarkable man. But there is also no doubt that he would not have come to be known as Alexander the Great were it not for an equally remarkable woman: his mother.
We know Olympias only from snippets—mostly disapproving asides from male historians more concerned with chronicling the deeds of her great son. But the picture that emerges is of a woman who makes Alexander seem almost pale by comparison: a priestess and sorceress, power-monger and murderess. Even her warrior-king husband, Philip, was said to be scared of her after he found her sleeping with a giant snake—surely, he concluded, a visiting god. It was Olympias who taught Alexander to believe in his heroic destiny, then cleared the way for him to fulfill it.
The ancient sources claim that Philip II of Macedon fell instantly for the young princess from the neighboring state of Molossia while they were both being initiated into a mystery cult. But romantic as that may sound, King Philip was generous with his affections: he already had three wives when he married Olympias, and he subsequently took a further three more. As a consequence the young queen had to struggle continually to maintain her status in the royal household, and first and foremost, this meant producing a son.
Luckily for her, in 356 BCE, a year after their marriage, she gave birth to Alexander. But with Philip’s many other wives just as determined to produce the next king, the contest to secure her legacy did not end there. Around the same time as Alexander was born, another queen also gave birth to a son, named Arrhidaeus.
As he was a rival to Alexander’s prospects of attaining the throne, Olympias had good reason to wish Arrhidaeus ill. But according to the historian Plutarch, she did much more than merely wish: through her knowledge of the arts of pharmaka—drugs, potions and spells—she ensured Arrhidaeus grew to be both mentally and physically retarded. Alexander, on the other hand, flourished in both his martial and academic training. And as he grew in ability, so Olympias also nurtured his ambitions: she encouraged him to aspire to the heroism of their forebear Achilles and even planted the idea that it was no mere king who was his father but one of the gods rumored to frequent her bed.
Alexander’s obvious talents made it easy for Philip to see him as his heir, and at the age of sixteen he was trusted with running the kingdom while the king was away on campaign; a year later, father and son were leading the Macedonian army together. Olympias’s hopes seemed on the verge of being fulfilled. But perhaps Philip came to think Alexander’s rise a little too rapid and his ambitions a little too grand, or perhaps he was simply struck by another young beauty; either way, in his midforties, the king took his seventh wife—Cleopatra, the niece of one of his senior generals—and set about producing more heirs.
The possibility of further competition for inheritance of the throne clearly unnerved Olympias and her precocious son. At the very drunken wedding ceremony, these tensions exploded: the uncle of the bride suggested it was about time some legitimate heirs were produced; Alexander threw a cup at him and demanded an explanation. The king and bridegroom rose to rebuke his son but fell drunkenly to the floor, at which point Alexander said mockingly, “See the man who prepares to cross from Europe into Asia; he cannot cross from one seat to another.”
Olympias and Alexander then fled the country. But Philip clearly regretted the rift with his brilliant son and a reconciliation was made, which included a royal wedding: Olympias and Philip’s daughter married Olympias’s brother, now king of Molossia. It proved to be Philip’s last act: as he led the procession he was stabbed to death by one of his own bodyguards. The assassin fled but was caught and killed by a group of Alexander’s friends. The army proclaimed Alexander king.
Unsurprisingly, many ancient historians believed Olympias had a hand in the king’s murder and wanted to do away with him while Alexander was the unrivaled heir. There was no love lost between her and Philip—at least not since the snake incident. And she was entirely capable of using murder to achieve her goals: with Philip out of the way, she set about eliminating her and Alexander’s rivals, starting with Philip’s newest wife—the cause of the recent spat—who by now had a baby. According to some accounts, Olympias had mother and baby burned alive, whereas others suggest Olympias killed the baby herself before having the young queen hanged.
Throughout Alexander’s lo
ng campaign, mother and son remained in close contact. She sought to look after his interests at home while advising him on who could be trusted and who not. When seriously wounded after one battle, Alexander expressed the wish to see his mother made into a goddess—perhaps so they would one day be reunited on Mount Olympus, home of the gods. When the conqueror finally died in 323 BCE in faraway Babylon, it must for Olympias have been calamitous, inconceivable—for a decade it had seemed that her son really was the invincible hero. But however devastated she must have been, she was quick to find a new object for her ambitions: her grandson, born to Alexander’s Persian wife, Roxana.
In the chaos that followed the conqueror’s death, both this baby son, Alexander IV, and Alexander the Great’s retarded half brother, Arrhidaeus—the one Olympias was earlier accused of working her magic on—were made king, while various generals also set about forming rival dynasties. The Macedonian forces were split, and a showdown became unavoidable. In 317 BCE, Olympias led an army against the forces behind Arrhidaeus—fronted by another formidable woman, Arrhidaeus’s wife, a self-styled warrior queen. But at the sight of Olympias, mother of the great Alexander, dressed in the full regalia of a high priestess of Dionysus, the opposing army defected en masse. She was victorious once more. Poor Arrhidaeus was stabbed to death and his wife hanged. Alexander IV became (albeit, as it turned out, rather briefly) sole king of Macedon, with Olympias as his regent. No doubt she was keen to tell him that the blood of Achilles flowed in his veins too, but more to the point, so did hers.
CHIPS OFF THE OLD BLOCK
“OUR death is not an end if we can live on in our children,” wrote Albert Einstein, “for they are us; our bodies are only wilted leaves on the tree of life.” In writing this to console the widow of a friend, Einstein captured the essence of biological immortality, the second part of the Legacy Narrative. It is the belief that we live on in our offspring, that we and they are connected in a profound way that makes us in some crucial sense the same being. So when these individual bodies have withered and died, still we might flourish in the verdancy of the next generation.
In a way, the pursuit of biological legacy takes us back to the very beginning of our journey: alongside the raw fight for survival, it is the most instinctive means by which we attempt to fling ourselves into an endless future. Across the world, billions of creatures are at it right now—wooing and seducing, laying eggs and spurting semen, birthing and weaning, building nests and herding harems. As Aristotle wrote almost two and a half thousand years ago, “For any living thing … the most natural act is the production of another like itself, an animal producing an animal, a plant a plant, in order that, as far as its nature allows, it may partake of the eternal.”
But to allow you to partake of the eternal this claim to biological immortality must prove itself to be something more than just a metaphor. It is one thing to believe that a part of you lives on in your children, another that this part is enough to secure your survival. Only if you survive through your children is biological legacy a path to living forever. But a strong case can be made for exactly that, though it will take us far beyond your connection to your own offspring—as proud as you might be of the few buds springing directly from your own little twig on the tree of life, much more important is your connection back to the whole, root and branch.
We saw in chapter 8 that for the Legacy Narrative to have any plausibility we have to look at the self in a wholly new way. The other three narratives—Staying Alive, Resurrection and Soul—promise that the person, whether in body or mind, will live on in something like a recognizable form. But it is clear that nothing like Alexander’s body or mind survived in the ordinary sense through his cultural legacy—so we looked at the bundle theory, which suggested that you are not a single coherent self but a collection of memories, ideas and so on that could live on even if dispersed. Similarly, it is clear that neither Olympias’s body nor her mind survived in the ordinary sense in the form of her son or grandson. But the supporter of the biological Legacy Narrative would say that this ordinary sense is wrong; you are not what you think you are.
“CHILDREN are the only form of immortality that we can be sure of,” said the writer and actor Peter Ustinov. This is a common thought, perhaps because it is indisputable that something of us is passed on to our children—hope of biological immortality is therefore not quite so blind as the wait for the resurrection. The question, however, is whether that something is enough to warrant a claim to eternal life. Nowadays we can state precisely what a parent’s biological legacy is: 50 percent of their genes, which then make up 50 percent of their children’s genes, combining with an equal amount from the other parent.
Of course, Olympias, like most other parents, passed on more to Alexander than just genes, including, for example, a belief in her and her son’s heroic ancestry and divine destiny. But such values and ideas belong to the realm of cultural legacy that we have already examined; our concern in this chapter is with the blood and guts of biology. And biologically speaking, it is the genes that leap from generation to generation, outliving the individual bodies of their carriers. That is why, according to the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, “the genes are the immortals … we, the individual survival machines in the world, can expect to live a few more decades. But the genes in the world have an expectation of life that must be measured not in decades but in thousands and millions of years.”
But it is of course one thing to say that our genes are immortal, quite another to say that you and I are therefore immortal. Indeed, the standard version of the gene’s-eye view of life offers little hope for our prospects of living on; rather, it portrays us humans as temporary, short-lived vehicles for the ruthless striving of the genes. The real action, according to this story, started with the evolution of DNA (the stuff that genes are made of) long before our births and will continue long after our deaths. And one thing that genes have learned in their long history is that it is much more efficient to code for organisms that reproduce than to try to build ones that individually last a long time. The wear and tear of life is just too great to risk investing everything in a super-vehicle. Much better to have disposable containers such as human beings, which continually produce fresh new containers. So at first sight, talk of immortal genes does not sound very promising for your survival—at least, not if you are one of these disposable containers. But perhaps that is the wrong way of looking at the continuum of life and your role in it.
Genes get a lot of attention, partly because they are regarded as the primary unit of natural selection. But that does not make them the primary unit of life; that privilege goes to the cell. Cells are microscopic yet hugely sophisticated self-contained bundles of biological activity. Curled up in the nucleus of each cell are its genes, acting something like the cell’s construction manual and route map in one. Cells are, if you like, genes’ way of getting around in the world.
You are a collective of around one hundred trillion cells, each of which contains a separate, complete copy of your genes (except either your eggs or sperm, which only contain 50 percent). Usually when we look at life, we tend to focus on other big multicellular beings such as fellow humans, dogs, grass and carrots. But the vast majority of organisms on earth are simply one single cell, and until recently (in evolutionary terms) all life on earth consisted of such single cells roaming free, going it alone. At various points in the history of evolution, these individual cells have decided to combine their resources and gang together. Plants, animals and other multicellular beings are the product of this communal living. On one level, you appear to be an organism in your own right; but on another, you are simply a colony of cells, each controlled by its little ball of genes.
A few further facts help to make this clear. Some of your cells, such as certain white blood cells, live largely autonomous lives roaming around your bloodstream waiting for a signal to attack their prey, such as unwelcome microbes. Such cells are an essential part of your immune system.
Yet very similar cells can be found in any pond, where we call them amoebas and consider them to be independent organisms. As the evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis put it, “humans are integrated colonies of ameboid beings.”
Our cells are now too specialized to live outside of the collective that we call a human being, but that is not true of all animals. Some sponges (which are animals, albeit rather simple ones) can be pushed through a sieve and their cells will continue to live independently, eventually searching each other out and reassembling. In the case of such a sponge, the question of what the real agent is in all this—the genes, or the cell they control, or the multicellular collective—seems a matter of perspective. And the same is true of you.
It might seem obvious that a human is something over and above a lump of individual cells. But if this seems obvious when looking at a fully grown human being, it is much less obvious when looking at a newly conceived one. The fact is, you were quite literally once a single cell: you started out as the fusion of an egg cell produced by your mother and a (much smaller) sperm cell from your father. This cell then divided into two, and the two resulting cells then divided again, and so on and so on to produce the trillions of cells that make up your body. As it grew, this clump of cells slowly acquired new abilities as a collective, over and above what an individual cell could do alone—such as the capacities to do math and make music. This clump can also produce further cells—eggs or sperm—that are capable of fusing with another cell to produce a whole new clump carrying 50 percent of the first clump’s genes.
Therefore from the point of view of your genes, traveling the world in their little cells, the chain of life looks unbroken from generation to generation. There are no abrupt starts and stops such as we see at the level of the multicellular human. When a cell replicates, it first replicates its genetic code, then fully divides itself, ensuring both halves get a complete set of genes. Although we call the resulting cells “daughters,” each is really a direct continuation of the original. Nothing in this process dies or disappears or is lost; there is no corpse. One living thing has become two, and it lives on in a quite literal, physical way in both the successors.