According to the official account the Priest came out of the temple and saluted the young tourist as Son of God. Alexander acquiesced and asked whether he would become King of this World. The reply was in the affirmative. Then his friends asked whether they should worship him. They were told that they should, and the episode closed. Some say that it is to be explained by the Priest's bad Greek. He meant to say Paidion ("my child") and said Paidios ("O Son of God") instead. Others say that it never took place, and Walter Savage Landor has imagined a conversation in the course of which the Priest scares the King by a snake. A scare he did get—a fright, a psychic experience, a vision, a "turn." His development proves it. After his return from Siwa his aspirations alter. Never again does he regard Greece as the centre of the world.
The building of Alexandria proceeded, and copied or magnified forms from the perishing peninsula overseas. Dinocrates planned Greek temples and market-places, and they were constructed not slavishly but with intelligence, for the Greek spirit still lived. But it lived consciously, not unconsciously as in the past. It had a mission, and no missionary shall ever create. And Alexander, the heroic chaos of whose heart surged with desire for all that can and can not be, turned away from his Hellenic town-planning and his narrow little antiquarian crusade, and flung himself again, but in a new spirit, against the might of Persia. He fought her as a lover now. He wanted not to convert but to harmonize, and conceived himself as the divine and impartial ruler beneath whom
