John B. Zavrel - quotes

Consul John B. Zavrel quotes on Alexander's life:

"Please allow me to briefly inform you about the Order and its goals. This spiritual community is based on the good deeds and ideas of Alexander the Great. It is this Greek royal son, who thousands of years ago set on a journey from Greece to create a world empire, stretching from the north African Egypt across Asia and all the way East up to the mountains of India.

There are many historical facts and myths about Alexander the Great, who was born on July 20th in the year 356 B.C. in Pella, and died at the age of only 33 in Babylon on June 10, 323 B.C. In memory remained the spreading of the Greek culture to the East, the mutual enhancement of the cultures. In memory also remained the fact that in spite of conquest expeditions and battles, Alexander also stood for cooperation, tolerance, promotion of the arts and science and an engagement for a world, in which the human dignity is a fundamental element.

The era of Alexander the Great has influenced architecture, science, and humanistic and spiritual thinking up till today. Emperors, kings, scientists and even popes have chosen his name in admiration of Alexander."

[Speech of the John B. Zavrel on the honoring of Edward Tabachnik, 5 January 2001]

"The research took decades," Peyrefitte recalls in a conversation with me. Before beginning to write, the former French diplomat followed "the footsteps of the young Alexander" on a historical trail from Greece over present-day Israel and northern Egypt to India."

["Roger Peyrefitte: Alexander is my destiny" Article by John B. Zavrel]

"Alexander was a hero in his own lifetime. Through the continual interest of the educated West in the Greek past and through the spread, mostly in Oriental languages, of a legendary romance of Alexander's exploits, his fame reached from Iceland to China"

"Bucephalos was Alexander's for the keeping, and he loved the horse for the next twenty years; he even taught him to kneel in full harness before him, so that he could mount him more easily in armour, a trick which the Greeks first learnt from the Persians."

"Already a horseman and a musician, Alexander passed his early years at Pella. The Macedonian kings, who maintained that their Greek ancestry traced back to Zeus, had long given homes and patronage to Greece's most distinguished artists; Pindar and Bacchylides the two lyric poets, Hippocrates the father of medicine, Timotheus composer of choral verse and music. Zeuxis the painter, Choerilus the epic poet, Agathon the dramatist had all written or worked for Macedonian kings of the previous century."

"Alexander's reign and patronage saw a golden age of Greek painting, many of whose masters were drawn from cities governed by his friends, and from an early age, there are stories to show that he knew how to treat them."

"His father had appointed the most suitable Greek tutor for a son who had already outgrown his boyhood attendants. He sent for Plato's most brilliant pupil, Aristotle son of Nichomachus, 'thin legged and small-eyed' and as yet unknown for his philosophical publications. 'He taught him writing, Greek, Hebrew, Babylonian and Latin."

"The contact between Greece's greatest brain (Aristotle) and her greatest conqueror (Alexander III of Macedon) is irresistible, and their mutual influence has occupied the imagination ever since."

["Lend me your name, Alexander!". Article by John B. Zavrel]

"He was a man of passionate ambitions, who saw the intense adventure of the unknown. He did not believe in impossibility; man could do anything, and he nearly proved it. Born in a half-world between Greece and Europe, he lived above all for the ideal of a distant past, striving to realize an age which he had been too late to share. No man ever went as far as Alexander on those terms again. The chivalry of Homer's heroes dies with him."

["The last days of Alexander the Great". Article by John B. Zavrel]