The Guiding Light of Ambition

During Trajan’s last days, he idolized the path the future held for him, seeking to arrive where Alexander and Dionysus had halted. Even as his soul was elevating to the heavens, his ambition tethered him to the path he once swore to take. As all around him understood the gravity of his disease, they abandoned him.

If I were as young as Alexander, I would have conquered India too.

As he looked to the shore and wept at his supposed misfortune, a man who, at the peak of the mountain, realized there was no path that could lead him higher. Loved by Senatus Populusque, honored as optimus princeps (the best ruler), and yet, his ambition had taken hold of him. His successes had always been portrayed to him as stepping stones; his thirst had never been quenched, a grave error noticed by all the Stoics.

Napoleon was an anomaly to the world: a minor Corsican noble who spent his youth reading and idolizing the conquests of Caesar and Alexander. Yet Lady Fortune dealt him a hand he chose to play. Unwilling to fear the Angel of Death, he overthrew the Directoire (which had itself overthrown the foolish King Louis XVI). His ambition as the Master of Europe came at the cost of millions of lives.

I can no longer obey; I have tasted command, and I cannot give it up.

As Talleyrand presented him with a youthful essay he had written and submitted in a competition, one that reflected a more measured and contemplative mind, the youthful and dreamy Napoleone had criticized the ambitions of Alexander and Cromwell:

What is Alexander doing when he rushes from Thebes into Persia, and thence into India? He is ever restless; he loses his wits; he believes himself a god.

What is the end of Cromwell? He governs England—but is he not tormented by all the daggers of the Furies?

…

Ambition, which overthrows governments and private fortunes, which feeds on blood and crimes, ambition, like all inordinate passions, is a violent and unthinking fever that ceases only when life itself ceases; like a conflagration, fanned by a pitiless wind, it ends only after all has been consumed.

Napoleon, now emperor, nearing his invasion of Russia, scarcely glanced at it before casting it into the fire. The man who had once contemplated the limits of power could no longer endure the sight of them.

The author deserved to be whipped, what ridiculous things I said, and how annoyed I would be if they were preserved.

A short time later, his ambition would once again litter Europe with a generation of bodies and find himself exiled to a rock in the ocean, sulking on how sharp his gradient descent had been.

(This is all too ironic, as he had previously stated:)

All men have the same dose of happiness... I would have been no less happy as Monsieur Bonaparte than as the Emperor Napoleon.

The grip of ambition is amplified by our current societal values; it attracts all pleasures. For what pleasure exists for the mind, if not to elevate itself ever higher?

However, I currently place myself at the mercy of current events. Too many times has Lady Fortune blessed me when I least expected it, or cursed me to roam Tartarus, nullifying all the hopes and dreams I had set as my guiding light. Ambition is the fuel that sustains man, his primary source of happiness, but if that guiding light becomes an eternal flame, a source of blindness to present realities, then it consumes him.

As with Alexander, who believed himself a god; as with Napoleon, who withdrew from Metternich and Castlereagh’s pleas for a return to pre-revolutionary borders, blind ambition had always served as a double-edged sword.

The die is cast. We call it delusion when failure is the result. We remember Xerxes as a tyrannical beast, yet forgive Napoleon’s conquests in Egypt. We remember Lafayette’s bravery in the Americas, yet forget his treachery to the Revolution. We call it ambition and bravery if our delusion leads us to success.

As Antony suggests in Caesar’s funeral oration:

The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.

Ambition, then, is not judged in itself, but in retrospect, filtered through consequence and narrative. When he repeats that Caesar “was ambitious,” the word ceases to describe and instead becomes an accusation shaped by circumstance, readily accepted so long as the outcome justifies it.