Because I first began reading about Alexander knowing very little about his true history, I can remember the series of impressions as they succeeded each other in my growing understanding of this amazing man. But the final impression, which has lasted beyond the others, is that Alexander must be unique in the annals of world conquerors in that his metaphysical side – his soul, if you will – still stares out at us across two and a half millennia. The mystical, religious side of Alexander remains as the most unique impression of his life and career, as difficult as that is to reconcile with our modern world, where warriors are not priests.

By and large, Alexander’s religious faith has not been emphasized until fairly recently in Alexander studies because it is an element of his personality that takes modern readers somewhat aback. To understand even something of what Alexander felt about man’s – and his personal – relationship with the gods, means trying to get a handle on the Graeco-Macedonian concepts of religion in the fourth century B.C.E., which requires work. It is far easier, for moderns, to write off Alexander’s connection with the gods as some kind of megalomania, the “I think I’m becoming a god” syndrome. I think this is a bad misreading of not only Alexander in particular, but pagan concepts of divinity in general.

It cannot be emphasized enough that, in Alexander’s age, the Greeks had already had a thousand years of history in which a man could become divine by great deeds, and sometimes (as in the case of Hercules) by great suffering. Greek myths were replete with stories of half-human, half-divine heroes or heroines whose divine attributes could, but did not always, allow them to excel all other human beings. Although by Alexander’s time, these concepts had receded into a half-legendary Greek mythos of Hector and Achilles, primitive warriors and magical enemies, there is no reason to doubt that Alexander believed it showed an option still available to the extraordinary human being.

Alexander’s own family quite calmly claimed descent from two of the great half-divine heroes of antiquity: Hercules, on his father’s side, and the legendary Achilles himself, on his mother’s side. Both Hercules and Achilles were sons of Zeus, so their semi-divine status was of the most powerful type. In modern days, we tend to smile at this childlike acceptance of divine ancestors, but it was far more common and commonly believed in the ancient world than our Judeo-Christian blinkers would have us believe. Julius Caesar quite seriously believed that he was the ancestor of Aeneas and Venus, while Aeneas was the son of the god of war, Mars. Divine descent in the past did not, of course, make a man divine in and of itself, but it allowed that extra touch of divine essence which could permit an ordinary man, by extraordinary deeds, to win his way into divine Olympus itself. It was no more peculiar to Alexander to believe that, if he were good enough, he might join Herakles on Olympus, than a good Baptist in Kansas could believe that, by meticulous Christianity, he can one day join the heavenly choir around the Throne.

Alexander seems to have acquired a deep and abiding faith in the gods, possibly through the religious fervor of his mother, Olympias, who was known – if not notorious – for abandoning herself to the rites of Bacchus. But fairly early on, Alexander seems to have picked out three major gods to whom he sacrificed and from whom he hoped for favor: Apollo, Zeus, and Hercules. The latter, of course, is particularly appropriate for an ambitious youth hoping to transcend the barriers between human and divine.

Another feature of ancient Greek faith was the conviction that by showing humble and steadfast honor to the gods, the gods would reward their devotees. No king who ever lived was more meticulous than Alexander in leading the religious devotion, either for his army, or in personal devotions. Almost literally before his father’s body was cold, after Philip’s murder in 336 BC, Alexander was sacrificing to the gods. Before and often after every major battle, he worshipped, standing before his men both as celebrant and as the unofficial high priest of Macedon. He sacrificed before crossing rivers and, on his unending travels through Asia to India, never neglected both religious celebrations and the solemn founding of temples from Macedon to the Indus River. He often sacrificed to his “usual gods,” but he was willing to sacrifice to the divinities of other lands, fields, streams, and personified abstractions if they could be helpful: before the battle of Gaugamela, he is said to have conducted sacrifices to the divinity Fear.

Alexander carefully visited nearly every oracle of every major shrine in the Mediterranean, including Didyma, Dodona, Delphi, and the famous oracle at Siwah. He went both to show reverence for the gods and to ask them for guidance in his own actions. And whatever he sought from the gods, he found. At Siwah, whatever he heard, appears to have convinced him that he had been accepted by Zeus Ammon as his own son. As Alexander once said, the gods make some men peculiarly their own. Apparently he felt that sense of daily connection with Zeus Ammon for the rest of his life and awarded him honors literally until he lay dying.

In a Judeo-Christian culture, it is impossible for us to easily conceive of a devoutly religious warrior. In his faith, Alexander was far more like the warriors of the Old Testament, who saw no discrepancy between praying to Jehovah for success and then fighting battles with relish, receiving victory as a god-given sign of their piety. He was a warrior prince who expressed both his faith and his ambition through battle.

There is very little we can say about Alexander with certainty – but that his mystical connection to the ancient Greek gods provided him with a constant source of strength and comfort, is arguably as certain as anything about him. There is also reason to believe that Alexander felt that his achievements had made him worthy of apotheosis as a colleague of the gods he had worshipped devotedly all his life. It is an irony of history that, in a Christian age, such a belief is enough, in and of itself, to convince modern readers that he was a megalomaniac, insane, or both. But in the terms of his own age, he had simply followed the contract between men and gods to its logical conclusion, never claiming achievement without acknowledging their help, and exhibiting within a pagan context the qualities of strength, courage, will and generosity that he believed they best loved.