The Greatest Teacher: Death
Once when Julius Caesar had occasion to pass by a statue of Alexander the Great in Spain, he paused to gaze upon it and, tears coming into his eyes, he said, “In the whole of my life I have not been able to achieve even one tenth of the feats performed by Alexander in the space of a single decade.”
Alexander the Great (356-323 BC), the son of the Greek King Philip, conquered the greater part of the known world of his time in a mere ten years. Taking up a project entertained by his father, Alexander decided to attack the huge Persian Empire, marched in 334 BC into Asia Minor and quickly subjugated the cities in that region. He then conquered with comparative ease Phoenicia and Syria, and although he met with serious resistance at Tyre, he overcame this with the help of a fleet and the city was destroyed. Next, he went to Egypt, which submitted to him without a struggle. To this day the city of Alexandria, which he founded, still exists as a monument to his victory in Egypt. Setting out on a further career of victory, he passed through Syria into Persia (now Iran) and marched up the valley of the Tigris through Mesopotamia (now Iraq). He captured Susa, Persepolis, Ecbatana and other Persian cities with their treasures and advanced as far as the Caspian Sea. The barbarian tribes dwelling on the coast of this sea were promptly brought under his rule. Alexander did not tolerate opposition, always pursuing a policy of nipping it in the bud. The new empire was organized, into provinces, each keeping its own traditions and institutions. About this time, he crushed a rising led by Bessus, the successor of Darus. He next entered India, crossing the Indus near Attock in 326 BC and winning a great victory. After some further conquests, he returned through Baluchistan to Persepolis, then set himself to organize the great empire he had conquered.
Alexander was a great administrator as well as a great soldier and spread the influence of Greece throughout the empire he had won. But what did fate have in store for him? In the midst of this tremendous task and while planning a fresh expedition into Arabia, he died in the ancient city of Babylon–as defenseless in the face of death as any poor man in his miserable hut. Although he started out on a career of conquest that has few, if any, parallels in world history, his life was too short for his empire to be welded together. And his only son having been killed in battle, none of his acquisitions could be handed down to a long line of heirs. His vast empire was then divided up between three military officers, none of whom was in any way related to him, and there being no further cohesive or unifying force to hold it together, it was not long before his hard-won empire had disintegrated.
When death comes, it impresses upon the immediate beholders of its ravages just how helpless man is before his Maker. Death strikes all around him, sparing, neither the high nor the low, yet people who are not directly affected fail, sadly, to understand its significance. It has a lesson to teach, but man ignores it. And if he has paid no heed to the most urgent realities of life, death will certainly leave him no respite to cogitate upon them at that time, and there will be no breathing space for him to learn lessons which he should have learned long before.
Death is the greatest teacher, but man lives out his life as if there were no such thing awaiting him at the end of life’s journey.
