Francis to faithful: Give up your riches to help the poor

[okasha]

62. I refer you to Dr. Robin Lane Fox,

who refuses to call his book about Alexander a biography. In his own words:

More than twenty contemporaries wrote books on Alexander and not one of them survives. They are known by quotations from later authors, not one of whom preserved the original wording; these later authors are themselves only known from the manuscripts of even later copyists and in the four main sources these manuscripts are not complete. The more detailed history goes back to only one manuscript, whose text cannot be checked; another, much used, has often been copied illegibly. Alexander left no informal letter which is genuine beyond dispute and the two known extracts from his formal documents both concern points of politics. On the enemy side his name survives in a Lysian grave inscription, in Babylonian tablets on building work and astronomy and in Egyptian captions to temple dedications. (Alexander the Great, Penguin, p. 11.)

To which one might add that he was supposedly fathered by a god, was accorded divine status as Zeus-Amon himself, his assumed portraits bear a strong resemblance to the conventional depiction of Apollo, his lover was accorded the status of a divine hero, and somehow his teacher Aristotle in all his voluminous works never mentions him.

In short, every word of your post is something we take on faith about a man who has been demonstrably shrouded in myth.