Alexander.......................

 

The boy-emperor, barbarian though he remained after all of Aristotle's tutoring, had yet learned to revere the rich culture of Greece, and had dreamed of spreading that culture through the Orient in the wake of his victorious armies. . . .But he had underrated the inertia and resistance of the Oriental mind, and the mass and depth of Oriental culture.  It was only a youthful fancy, after all, to suppose that so immature and unstable a civilization as that of Greece could be imposed upon a civilization immeasurable more widespread, and rooted in the most venerable traditions.  The quantity of Asia proved too much for the quality of Greece.  Alexander himself, in the hour of his triumph, was conquered by the soul of the East; he married (among several ladies) the daughter of Darius; he adopted the Persian diadem and robe of state; he introduced into Europe the Oriental notion of the divine right of kings; and at last he astonished a sceptic Greece by announcing, in magnificent Eastern style, that he was a god.  Greece laughed; and Alexander drank himself to death.

-Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy