But politicians, like athletes, were also men of power and achievement, and in certain outstanding cases, they too had been worshipped like gods. Again in the Greek West, Sicilian Greeks had feted Dion, their acknowledged Saviour of the moment; earlier in Greek Asia, similar honours had been paid to Lysander the Spartan general, by the exiles whom he had restored like Alexander, although these exiles were tyrants and oligarchs, favoured in the name of freedom. Not that this deification was confined to the extremes of the Greek world, to Sicily famed for its excess, or to the coast of Asia where worship of the Roman emperor later took such a deep and lasting hold: in Greek thought it was as old as Homer's epics and so, for example, it could be suggested of Spartan kings or of Pericles the Athenian. But for the most part, independent men of power had not arisen in the same way in the dosed world of the cities of mainland Greece as in the kingships of Sicily and Asia. With the rise of Philip, the conditions had altered; Philip's father, King Amyntas, was worshipped with a shrine in a nearby Greek city, probably in his lifetime, while Philip himself had died pleasing the Greeks at a festival which enthroned him among the gods, and there can be little doubt that he would have been more freely worshipped in Greek cities had he survived. He had built a Philippcum at Olympia, in which statues of Olympias, Alexander and himself were displayed, and the round shape of this building and the gold and ivory of its statues perhaps imply that it was meant as a place of worship. 'The man who conquers Persia,' a Greek pamphleteer had told him, 'will have earned glory equal to the gods'; Aristotle suggested more cautiously that a man could only 'become a god' by a show of supreme excellence. He was not inclined to believe such excellence possible, but then his pupil Alexander went east, conquered Persia and displayed such extraordinary qualities from Babylon to the peaks of Pir-Sar that his reservations were agreed to be mistaken.

Against this background, worship of Alexander was neither unprecedented nor blasphemous. Even more than Dion and Lysander, he had freed Greek cities and restored Greek exiles; no returning democrat in Asia or restored exile in Greece would feel the slightest scruple about worshipping him for this godlike benefaction. Too much has been made, often by Romans, of the slavishness of classical ruler worship. It is more revealing that Greek cities almost always paid it in return for favours to their remaining liberties, while for the man in the street a public cult of Alexander meant another day's holiday, festive games, building-work and the chance to enjoy the rare luxury of eating meat, that most tangible blessing of a religious sacrifice in the ancient world. No cult of Alexander is yet known in his lifetime in a mainland Greek city, but Greek envoys soon came to him, some dressed as if on a delegation to a god; only one later anecdote referred to a letter from Alexander demanding this worship from the Greeks, but this story is both wildly unreliable and implausible. At Athens, the sole source of contemporary comment, Alexander's so-called divinity attracted the usual anecdotes and witty epigrams, attributed to his many Athenian enemies, but after much heated discussion it is possible that he was indeed paid public worship in the city at the end of his life. The evidence is not yet conclusive, but even a refusal would not have been a matter of high principle: when Alexander first marched into Greece, the Athenians had hastened to offer him 'even greater honours than they had bestowed on Philip', and it is hard to imagine what these could be apart from a temporary act of worship. Within twenty years, they hastened to offer every possible divine honour to a Macedonian who had freed them beyond any argument. In 324, especially, Alexander's benefits, past and future, to the city seemed disputable, and even if those who opposed his divine honours carried the day, they were not constrained by a demand from Alexander himself. His worship was spontaneous and scattered, a hopeful flattery where it was not genuine admiration.

Alexander himself would be pleased, naturally, to receive it. Throughout his life, he remained a scrupulously religious man who carefully sacrificed to the proper gods and consulted his oracles and seers before taking any momentous action; there are countless examples of this, but even in these last months, he was so impressed by the story of a Greek boy in a small Carian city who had been miraculously rescued and carried out to sea by a dolphin that he summoned him and appointed him to a priesthood of the sea-god Poseidon in Babylon. It is unthinkable that such a man would have dared to accept, let alone to demand, divine honours if they went against his own traditional religion. Deification had long been countenanced in Greek thought; he had seen his father's example, and he had studied with a tutor who saw nothing blasphemous in sacrifices, precincts or hymns to a living man: they were high honours, nothing more, as the ancient world did not draw distinctions between homage and worship. The only question was whether anybody in fact deserved them. Alexander's achievements put this beyond doubt: he seemed to be unbeatable, and so at Athens and presumably elsewhere it was suggested that he should be worshipped as an invincible god. The theme of invincibility which he had long encouraged thus found its final expression, despite the march through Makran.

These divine honours were more than an intelligible development from the past. With the single exception of Caesar, Alexander is the only man in ancient history whose divinity was ever to be widely accepted and believed. Here his unique career broke completely with his predecessors: he became a precedent himself, and after Alexander, the history of pomp and kingship could never be the same again. His royal Successors invoked his name, his guidance or his invincibility, copied his claim to be the son of a god as confirmed by an oracle, and even adopted the way he had held his head or worn his diadem. Among the Romans, his impression was even more vivid; here, his effects lived for more than five hundred years, first, in their establishment of a cult of the goddess Victory, probably on early news of his extraordinary successes, then in the continual imitations of their politicians and emperors, from Scipio to Caracalla, who laid claim to Alexander's cloak or breastplate, copied his shield and statues and even recalled the memory of his horse. Christian bishops in Antioch would still be troubled in the late fourth century to find that their congregations favoured Alexander's image on their seal-rings: for the classical world he had become the prototype of glory and superhuman excellence, and men were reluctant to forget him.

To project this back into his lifetime is difficult, but surely correct. For most of his worshippers, Alexander had the added aura of absence.

They had seen him once, at most, when he first freed them and they were left thereafter with a memory of a young man in full glory. If they came to court on his return, they would find evidence of divinity written large in his appearance: the Persian diadem suggested, wrongly, he was representing Zeus, his saffron shoes suggested Dionysus, and his proskynesis , if only from Persians, implied to the uncritical that he was himself divine. In art everywhere, these themes were prolific, and it is mistaken to try and date them all to the years after Alexander's death: by his favourite Apelles, he had already been painted holding a thunderbolt, just as later the same artist would show him between hemispheres, a symbol of Castor and Pollux, themselves divine, and of relevance to Alexander's supposed ascension into heaven. 'I hold the earth,' ran the inscription beneath his statue, 'you Zeus, hold Olympus,' and on a medallion, probably struck to commemorate his Indian campaign, this Zeus on earth was shown on horseback, attacking Porus's elephant and wielding the thunderbolt of Zeus in his hand. The theme recurs on an engraved gem, and in Egypt, after his death, small terra-cotta statues show him holding Zeus's aegis, or goat-skin mantle, over one arm. These humble monuments are proof, perhaps, of how the ordinary soldier remembered him, and presumably they derive from an original sculpture of his lifetime. As for his heroic ancestor Heracles, Alexander was shown wearing a helmet made from a lion's head on an otherwise lifelike series of sculptures carved soon after his death for the sarcophagus of the king of Sidon, his own Companion: the helmet was a symbol of Heracles, and no doubt Alexander wore it in real life. On coins, Heracles's standard Macedonian portrait had taken on Alexander's features: there were precedents for this, not least in the gold coin-portraits of Apollo issued by Philip but unmistakably influenced by Alexander's features; coins also showed Alexander in his lifetime wearing Ammon's ram's-horns, and this was a theme all his own. Both in art and literature, parallels were to be drawn between Alexander and Dionysus, but though there were decided similarities between his triumphal procession on leaving Makran and the epiphany, or manifestation of Dionysus and other gods, this is a theme which only arose after Alexander's death, especially when the Ptolemies began to derive their descent through Philip from Dionysus himself. By wearing oriental dress, Alexander had unintentionally assumed certain features of Dionysus's appearance, but the connection was incidental, and though Alexander might rival Dionysus, particularly in India, he never tried to represent the god directly.