No soldier in history is more indisputably "great" than Alexander, surpassing the majority even of good and eminent generals, as do Napoleon and very few others. What marks him out--even more than the quality both of his swift tactical insight and deliberate strategic planning - is the "daemonic" strength of will and leadership with which he dragged a war weary army with unbroken success to Khodjend and the Punjab. He wrote his name across the Near and Middle East for two hundred years; and yet his work was ephemeral, in that the Empire which he left, even in the strong hands of the early Seleukids, was dying on its feet from the first generation.
Even his personality made no permanent impression beyond the Greco-Roman world; for, as is not generally realized, the Legend of Alexander that so deeply impressed not only medieval Europe, but the world of Islam, and even lands which the historical Alexander never saw, is not a spontaneous growth of the age immediately after him. The versions of the Romance of Alexander, which existed by the fifth century A.D. in Syriac and Armenian as well as Greek and Latin - which caught the imagination of Firdausi and of Arabic poets, which penetrated even to Ethiopia, and were brought west again by the Crusaders with their incrustations of Eastern marvels - are all derived from one book, a literary forgery, ascribed to Kallisthenes, and written probably at Alexandria in the second century A.D. It became very popular in the later Empire, quite outshining the more sober and "highbrow" popularization of Curtius.
"But this book was itself a farrago of heterogeneous elements - pieces of genuine history, ancient stories once told in Babylon of Gilgamesh or Etanna, literary forgeries of the days soon after Alexander . . . variations due to Egyptian patriotic sentiment, like that which made Alexander the son of the last Pharaoh, Nectanebus. In the Persian version Alexander became a son of Darius; among the Mahommedans he turned into a prophet, hot against idols; the pen of Christian monks made him an ascetic saint.
"That the East today has so much to tell about Alexander is only due to the fact that old mythical stories of gods or heroes who go wandering through lands of monsters and darkness, of magic fountains and unearthly oceans, became attached to his name in the popular literature of the Roman Empire."