In an age when lions are near to extinction, and the Masi warriors whose tribal identity is based on the human race’s oldest test of kingship—the slaying of the “king of beasts” by hand—despair of having lions enough to hunt, it is easy to overlook the awe with which primal man viewed the apex predator of his environment. In Asia it was the Tiger, in North America the bear, and in Central and South America the jaguar. But in the womb of the Western Experience it was the lion, as it was in Man’s birthplace, down in Africa.
I sit now, surveying the outlines for the last few chapters of Of Lions and Men, looking at the dust cover of Victor Davis Hanson’s The Wars of the Ancient Greeks. The cover art is a detail from the Alexander Sarcophagus, made at the death of the most successful king of the ancient world, the man who collected kings like trophies on his quest to become a god. The flesh-eating-box of Alexander was curiously decorated with a seemingly—to us moderns—foolish event from the conqueror’s life, in which he was nearly slain by a lion in a local hunting preserve—a walled garden, we might assume, such as the lion-stalked garden that surrounded the Tower of the Elephant in Robert E. Howard’s Conan story of the same name.
In this scene Alexander stands before, and above, a reaching lion, that is crouched low before him with paw upraised to rend. Alexander stands before the lion with shield raised [a beautiful example of the ergonomic aspis] with his rear hand armed and ready to strike. There is no need, though, for the king of kings to strike the king of beasts, for two men armed with axe and spear [not the noble sword, but less honored, and grimly utilitarian, weapons], are killing the beast even as it threatens their master.
Most likely commissioned by Ptolemy—a boyhood friend to Alexander, and founder of the Egyptian dynasty that would bear his name down through the centuries—the coffin of the man who ushered in an age even as he extinguished dynasties, tribes and kingdoms, depicts a reality he feared would separate him from his spiritual ancestor—Achilles. For in this illustration Alexander, who wanted nothing more than to be the reincarnation of the matchless striving individual who stood against mortal rule in his quest for the divine, becomes his antithesis, Agamemnon, the secular figurehead king, who stands at the head of his tribe as his loyal men dispatch the very symbol of their ancestral world in a grim workmanlike fashion.
In the Alexander Sarcophagus we see the closing of the second of the three acts in the story of Lions and Men, in which the beast that once symbolized the awful threat of the natural order against which the best men tested and proved themselves, is reduced to defiantly metaphoric livestock. Alexander must have felt it in his bones when he failed to dispatch the lion himself, and must have felt it again years later after he had turned butcher during the depopulation of the barren reaches of Afghanistan. We can never know which murder of what un-remembered tribe brought this feeling back, but it must have been articulated to his companions to have been reflected so prominently on the vehicle to the afterlife constructed at the command of the men who would fight over it in a generation long contest to be recognized as his successor, and mere shadow.
There is a sense here that the original stakes for which men had ever fought, had now been withdrawn from the table, and what would be left to them would increasingly bring about their own downfall at the hands of the impersonal forces they loosed in service to their ambition. Such a pale-spirited struggle continues even now, mere miles from the place where Alexander once won dozens of kingdoms in his roaring lion helmet.
