A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

like a thunderbolt; when the Thebans shouted defiance from their walls, he took the town by storm
and massacred all the inhabitants. Unlike his father, Alexander had no sentimental attachment to
Thebes.
But he resembled his father in one important respect: he was a romantic who dreamed of far
horizons. He crossed the Hellespont and defeated a Persian army - by attacking them without delay,
instead of spending two days preparing for the battle as they expected. King Darius of Persia raised
another army; Alexander defeated that as easily. The chronicle tells how, after this victory at Issus,
Alexander moved into the king’s tent, bathed himself in the royal bath, then stretched out on a
silken couch and raised his goblet of wine. ‘So this is what it’s like to be royalty...’ He pressed on
into Syria, then into Egypt, where he founded the city of Alexandria. Then he went back and
defeated Darius yet again and moved into Babylon. Typically, he treated Darius’s womenfolk with
the greatest courtesy, and married one of them. After this, he spent five years wandering around his
newly won empire. His men finally begged him to take them home and Alexander marched
reluctantly back to Babylon. He was still searching for the city of his dreams. He was planning the
invasion of Africa when, at the age of thirty-two, he caught a fever and died.
Modern research has added a valuable piece of information to the history: that Alexander probably
died of alcoholism. This provides an important missing piece of the jigsaw. We know that
Alexander was a man of extremes; on several occasions he ordered whole towns to be massacred,
down to the last woman and child; yet he was also capable of gallantry and generosity. When his
friend Hephaestion died, Alexander’s grief was deep and genuine; but he also ordered the
crucifixion of the doctor who had attended Hephaestion’s deathbed. After an argument with his
foster brother Kleitus, Alexander seized a spear from a guard and ran him through; then, when he
realised what he had done, he tried to run it into his own throat. These are the typical extremes of
an alcoholic, with his drunken furies and fits of sentimentality and generosity. Above all, the
alcoholism confirms the diagnosis of Alexander as a self-divided man, desperately trying to escape
the narrowness of left-brain consciousness. He would have been happier if he had been stupider,
but he came of a family of intellectual romantics. We have seen that his father studied philosophy
at Thebes; and when it came to choosing a tutor for his son, Philip chose Plato’s pupil Aristotle.
But Alexander, like Philip, was too emotional, too undisciplined, to enjoy the consolations of
philosophy. Wine was for Alexander what cocaine was for Sherlock Holmes: an escape from the
boredom of a dismal, dreary, unprofitable world. The story of Alexander crying for fresh worlds to
conquer is probably apocryphal; but it catches the essence of his craving for unexplored horizons.
It is important to grasp that boredom is one of the most common - and undesirable - consequences
of ‘unicameralism’. Boredom is a feeling of being ‘dead inside’; that is to say, loss of contact with
our instincts and feelings. Experiments with EEG machines have shown that when we become
bored the right cerebral hemisphere begins to display alpha rhythms - the rhythms that appear when
the brain is ‘idling’. Robert Ornstein, one of the pioneers of split-brain research, discovered that
this happens when someone is doing mental arithmetic. It happens, in fact, during any activity in
which we are not really interested. But if the right brain ‘idles’ too much, it goes to sleep. The
psychologist Abraham Maslow described a case of a girl who suffered from depression and a sense
of meaninglessness; she had even ceased to menstruate. He discovered that she wanted to study
sociology and was being forced - by financial necessity - to do a boring, repetitive job. When
Maslow suggested that she should go to night school and continue her studies of sociology, her
problems promptly vanished. The boredom had caused her right brain to spend most of its time