In less than thirteen years Alexander of Macedon, who came to the throne in 336 BC after the murder of his father Philip, marched from Greece to India and overthrew the greatest power in the world — the Persian Empire. But together with the conquests grew an idol: the dream of a single universal kingdom and the deification of the ruler himself. At the oasis of Siwa the oracle of Amun proclaimed Alexander the son of a god, and he identified himself ever more openly with Zeus-Ammon. At his court he began to introduce the Persian rite of proskynesis — prostration before the king — and the Macedonians, for whom one bowed so low only before gods, murmured darkly. A living man was demanding, with mounting insistence, the honors of a god.
The idol fell suddenly, and with a simplicity all too human. In June 323 BC Alexander died at Babylon — young, about thirty-three, leaving neither a grown heir nor any clear disposition of power. The body of the colossal empire, held together by the will and magnetism of a single man, began to come apart the moment that man was gone.
There followed the long captivity of the wars of the Diadochi — the "successors." For more than three decades Alexander's generals tore the empire to pieces, making and betraying alliances; whole peoples and provinces became mere stakes in dynastic quarrels, small change in other men's ambition. The universal kingdom, conceived as unity, turned into an arena of unending slaughter among former comrades-in-arms.
And yet out of the disintegration came a return — not political but cultural, a remelting deeper than any empire. Alexander's conquests carried the Greek language into every corner of the East, where it settled into the koine — a common spoken Greek that became the tongue of trade, science, and thought from Egypt to India. In Alexandria the Ptolemies founded the great Library, and Jewish scholars rendered the Holy Scriptures into Greek — the Septuagint — opening the Bible to the Greek-speaking world for the first time. Hellenistic universalism, a single cultural space laid over tribes and borders, became the channel down which, three centuries later, the Christian preaching would flow: the apostles would carry the Good News in koine, drawing on the Greek Bible, along roads laid down by the ambition of a king who died at Babylon. At the station of Wisdom the collapse of a world-idol turned into a language made ready for the Word to come.