Excellently said, Kallistos. If there's one thing I think about as well, it's that for millennia, the Western world has had a notion in front of its blind eyes of a world united by a common culture, common language, common trade and justice - a world which the European nations are only now trying in some ways to recreate after aeons of war. And almost everyone says that this notion came from the stability of the Roman Empire.

What Alexander saw, but did not live to create, was a precursor to that Empire. There's no reason not to believe that, as concepts go, one of his legacies was to hand the notion on to Rome itself.