Benefits of a Classical Education

Nine years ago, I spent an enjoyable lunch-hour tracking down the origins of Hans Gruber’s famous line about Alexander the Great. It seems fitting to kick JOMT off with this, the finest bit of internet sleuthing I’ve ever done.

The Benefits of a Classical Education

Hans Gruber: a keen mind, a good education, a sharp sense of style and some killer ambition combine to make him one of the greatest villains in cinema history. Well, that and Alan Rickman’s sandy growl. Die Hard is notable for several things: it’s the best Christmas movie ever made (take that, It’s a Wonderful Life); it’s really good; it’s really fun; and it features some brilliant dialogue. So today we’re going to examine what might be one of the most famous lines in cinema history:

Sugh a lovely, evocative quote, suggesting such epic scope, such sweeping breadth. Alexander the Great, greatest Alexander of them all. There he is, toga-clad, Adonis-like hair whipping in a gentle wind as he stands atop a cliff and considers his life’s achievement, and weeps for he has done all a human can do – there is nothing left for him. So classical! So classy!  Of course Hans Gruber would purr those words; he’s a man who understands and appreciates ambition.

So, what’s he actually quoting? Hans-baby claims it’s Plutarch (‘Benefits of a classical education’) but… he might not be right. Let’s investigate!

As I’m sure you don’t need to be told, Alexander the Great pretty much conquered everything, back in the day. He was mad successful, good looking, had a great education (was tutored by Aristotle and slept with a copy of the Illiad under his pillow, or so the legend goes – it might even have been a first edition !) All… very much like our own dear Hans.

But did he actually weep when he realized he’d won the great game of life?

Well… probably not. The quote that sainted Hans bastardized up there is probably the product of an unholy union between Plutarch and John Calvin – yes, the Protestant Reformation Calvin – by way of Reader’s Digest  and The Twilight Zone.

Plutarch, who lived a couple of centuries after Alexander, wrote in On the Tranquility of Mind that ‘Alexander wept when he heard Anaxarchus discourse about an infinite number of worlds, and when his friends inquired what ailed him, “Is it not worthy of tears,” he said, “that, when the number of worlds is infinite, we have not yet become lords of a single one?’

Later, Calvin – who lived many centuries after both Plutarch and Alexander – changed the quote up so that, now, Alexander ‘hearing that there were other worlds, wept that he had not yet conquered one.’

You’ll notice that Plutarch and Calvin are saying that Alexander wept because he learned there were more worlds out there, and he hadn’t even mastered his own yet. But Hans’ quote is about thwarted ambition of a different nature. When did it change?

I think the new formulation came from Reader’s Digest. Unfortunately, I can’t follow the Reader’s Digest information to its source because the attribution appears on a Wikiquote page, and then everything else online cites that. But here’s what the Wikiquote page says:

Things to note: the quote is now by Alexander about his father, but much more like the Hans Gruber quote we know and love.

But how did this quote wind up being the rousing summation of Hans Gruber’s ambition? Well, there’s another stop we have to make on our journey from Alexander’s tears to Hans Gruber’s mouth: The Twilight Zone.

The 1963 episode of the groundbreaking anthology show, ‘Of Late I Think of Cliffordville‘, is devoted to a single premise: karma is kind of a nasty customer. (Julie Newmar, one of the actresses who played Catwoman on the 1960s Batman tv show, is in ‘Cliffordville’ – it’s well worth watching, as much for  the bad age-makeup and shaky acting as for the quote.)  ‘Cliffordville’ opens with a robber-baron at the end of his life, drunkenly conversing/monologuing with a janitor about ambition, and in this conversation we find the seeds of Hans Gruber’s great qutation:

Anyway! ‘Cliffordville’ is based on a 1943 short story, ‘Blind Alley’, by Malcolm Jameson. You can read the full text here; Hecate is not a janitor, but essentially Satan’s secretary, and the quote does not appear in the story.

What’s important is that, in the Twilight Zone episode ‘Cliffordville,’ the quote is worded almost exactly the same way it is in Die Hard, and to mean exactly the same thing: that hollow, disappointed feeling you get when you realize you’ve achieved everything you set out to do. Finish a book, conquer about two million square miles of land, steal a lot of money, whatever.

Either way, it looks like Hans Gruber’s education wasn’t 100% classical. Sorry, Hans. Don’t worry, we still love you.

Just One More Thing…

When Plutarch mentions worlds, he means “other countries.” In Plutarch’s time, it was inconceivable that other worlds in the sense we might mean - other plants - existed; the planets were considered “wandering stars”. Indeed, the word “planet” comes from the Greek Planan, meaning “wanderer.”

[A version of this essay first appeared on Hodderscape in 2015]

Keep asking questions, friends!

Amy x