Around 68 BC a Roman official in his early thirties walked into a temple in Spain and stopped in front of a statue. He was there on paperwork. His name was Gaius Julius Caesar, he was serving as quaestor in Further Spain, and the job meant riding from town to town hearing court cases on someone else's authority. He was deep in debt, he had held no command and won no battle, and nothing he had done would have earned him more than a line in the records. The statue was Alexander of Macedon, dead for nearly three hundred years, who by the age Caesar had now reached had taken most of the world anyone bothered to count.

Suetonius wrote the scene down almost two hundred years later and says Caesar groaned. The Latin word is ingemuit, a low involuntary sound. Suetonius says he was disgusted with himself for having done nothing worth remembering at an age when Alexander had already brought the world to his feet, and that he asked to be released from the post early. He wanted to go back to Rome, where something bigger might be waiting.

I keep going back to that scene, and it has very little to do with Rome. The man in that temple was a success by every measure available at the time. He was a senator's son holding state office in his early thirties, a member of a governing class of a few hundred men who ran a city of about a million people and everything around it. Some years earlier he had refused an order from the dictator Sulla and survived, which almost nobody managed. Everyone he grew up with would have called him accomplished, and he stood in front of a piece of carved stone and felt like nothing, because the men around him were not the ones he was measuring against.

The same thing happens constantly on a smaller scale. A man sells his company for eight figures and spends the next year thinking about someone he knows who sold for nine. A lawyer makes partner and the feeling lasts about two weeks before he starts studying the year above him. The numbers change and the structure does not, because someone is always in the room who got there earlier, or bigger, or younger, and the arrival that was supposed to end the question just moves it somewhere else.

What follows is about three men who took this further than anyone before or since. Alexander measured himself against a character in a poem, Caesar measured himself against Alexander, and Napoleon came last, knew exactly what he was doing, and left paperwork proving it. Between them they got almost everything a person can get, and none of them ever reached the point where the measuring stopped.

The first link in the chain was already borrowed. Alexander became the standard that ambitious men measured themselves against for the next two thousand years, and he spent his own life measuring himself against someone who never existed. Plutarch says, on the authority of Onesicritus who sailed with the fleet, that Alexander kept a copy of the Iliad with him at all times, a text corrected by his tutor Aristotle and known afterwards as the casket copy, and that he slept with it under his pillow next to a dagger. He called the poem a portable treasury of military excellence.

The comparison was arranged for him before he was old enough to judge it. His tutor Lysimachus called Alexander by the name Achilles, called his father Philip by the name Peleus, and took for himself the role of Phoenix, the old man who raised the hero. His mother's family claimed descent from Achilles outright. He grew up inside the comparison, and choosing one is a different thing entirely from being handed one at six years old.

In 334 BC, at the start of the campaign that would make him, Alexander crossed into Asia and went straight to Troy. He sacrificed to Athena, poured offerings to the dead heroes, and at the tomb of Achilles he rubbed himself with oil, ran a race naked around the grave with his companions in the old manner, and laid down wreaths. Then he said the thing that gives the whole pattern away. He said Achilles was lucky, and the reason he gave was that Achilles had found a loyal friend while he lived and a great herald of his fame after he died.

The herald is Homer. Alexander was standing at the grave of the man he had copied since childhood, at the start of a campaign that would take him from Greece to the Indus, and what he envied was the poet. He wanted the record as much as he wanted the deed, and he said so out loud, at the graveside, in front of his officers. There is a smaller moment from the same visit, when someone offered to show him a lyre that had belonged to Paris and he said he was not interested in that one and would rather see the lyre of Achilles, the one the man had sung on about the great deeds of brave men.

Later in the campaign the Persian king's treasure was divided up, and Alexander was shown a casket so finely made that his companions argued about what was worthy of being kept inside it. He put the Iliad in it, which is how the annotated copy got its name. Then there is the scene that finishes the picture, which Plutarch tells in the Moralia, in the essay on peace of mind. A philosopher travelling with the army, Anaxarchus, was arguing that the number of worlds is infinite, and Alexander listened and began to cry.

His friends asked what was wrong and he answered with a question of his own, asking whether it was not worth crying over that, with an infinite number of worlds out there, he had not yet become master of a single one. He had conquered the Persian empire by then and held more ground than any European ever had. The frame had grown faster than the conquest, so the achievement registered as zero.

The version everyone knows runs the other way. Alexander wept, the popular telling goes, because there were no more worlds left to conquer, an inversion that has been floating around English writing since at least the late sixteenth century and reaches most of us through a line spoken by the villain in Die Hard. Look at what the corruption did. The original is a story about a man tortured by a reference point that kept moving away from him, and we turned it into a story about a man who ran out of road. We gave him a finish line, he never had one, and the ancient writers who passed the anecdote around were making the opposite point, using him as their standing example of an appetite that no quantity of the thing it wanted could satisfy.

The scene at Gades is messier than the version in circulation, and the mess is worth knowing about, because two ancient sources tell it and they do not agree. Suetonius puts it during the quaestorship, at the temple of Hercules in Gades, in front of a statue, and has Caesar groan, with no tears in his account at all. Cassius Dio says roughly the same thing. Plutarch tells a different story and sets it during Caesar's later posting to Spain, years afterwards, with Caesar at leisure reading a history of Alexander, sitting lost in thought for a long time and then bursting into tears.

His friends ask why, and he asks them whether they do not think it a sad thing that Alexander at his age was already king over so many peoples while he himself had done nothing worth noting. The picture we have inherited, of Caesar weeping in front of the statue, is a splice of the two. The statue comes from Suetonius, the tears and the spoken line come from Plutarch, who puts them somewhere else entirely, and two thousand years of retelling has tidied the scene into something cleaner than the evidence supports. That tidying will matter in a minute.

What matters more is the actual standing of the man doing the groaning, which almost nobody examines. A Roman quaestor in Further Spain around 68 BC held elected office and sat in a governing body of a few hundred men who ran the Mediterranean world. He had a recognised name and, measured against everyone alive at the time, he sits in the top fraction of a percent by status, education and prospects. He stood in front of the statue and experienced himself as a failure, because the only measure operating in that room was a Macedonian who had been dead for two and a half centuries.

This is the part the motivational version always leaves out. Everyone quotes Caesar at the statue as a lesson in ambition, an example of raising your standards, and almost nobody notices that the man doing the groaning was crushed, or that the thing crushing him was a comparison he could never win, because his rival was finished. A dead man's record is closed. It cannot have a bad year, it does not get tired, it does not make a poor call at fifty or lose a decade to something that fails, and Caesar was measuring an unfinished life against a completed one, which is a contest with the result written into the terms.

His response was to ask for early discharge and go back to Rome to look for something bigger, and it worked in the way these things work. Within twenty years he had conquered Gaul, crossed the Rubicon, beaten Pompey and made himself dictator of Rome. He also never stopped, because the comparison that ambushed him in a provincial temple simply travelled with him, and there is no record of the day he decided he had done enough.

Napoleon Bonaparte came last, which meant he had two men to answer to, and he knew it perfectly well. Caesar's problem was a private wound preserved in an anecdote, while Napoleon's was a construction project, carried out in public and paid for by the French state. In May 1798, aged twenty-eight, he sailed for Egypt with an army and something else besides.

The Commission of Sciences and Arts had been set up that March with a hundred and sixty-seven members, and most of them went with him. Mathematicians, astronomers, engineers, naturalists, architects, interpreters, printers equipped to set type in Latin, Greek and Arabic. He organised them like a military unit and gave each one a rank, and in August he founded an institute in Cairo and made himself its vice-president. The campaign failed militarily, while the scholars produced the Description de l'Égypte, worked on the Rosetta Stone that one of the soldiers had dug up, and effectively invented Egyptology.

The precedent for a conqueror taking scholars into Egypt was not obscure, and he did not intend it to be. Alexander had gone to Egypt, founded a city there and put his own name on it. Historians have been calling Napoleon's campaign the work of a new Alexander since it happened, and in doing so they are following his lead, because he drew the parallel first and he drew it in public.

The Roman half arrived with the coronation. On 2 December 1804 at Notre Dame, Napoleon wore a wreath of golden laurel leaves made by the goldsmith Martin-Guillaume Biennais, forty-four large leaves and twelve smaller ones on an oval band, pinned at the back of the head. The heavy ceremonial crown sat there unworn and he chose the laurel instead, and one spectator wrote that he looked like Caesar on a Roman coin. Days later, on the Champ de Mars, he handed out standards to his regiments topped with eagles copied from the Roman legions.

The bees on his robes, the laurel, the eagles, the profile struck on coins and cameos in imitation of imperial portraits, all of it pointed at the same place. A Corsican artillery officer had assembled an identity out of the imagery of a dead Roman. Then it ended, and the last piece of evidence is the one that stays with me.

Beaten at Waterloo, deported to Saint Helena, shut up in a converted farmhouse on a rock in the South Atlantic with six years left to live, Napoleon dictated a book to his valet Louis-Joseph Marchand. It was published after his death as the Précis des guerres de César, a summary of the wars of Julius Caesar, campaign by campaign, the Gallic war and then the civil war, each one written out and then annotated with his own notes on what Caesar had done and how it might have been done better. Sit with that. A man who has lost everything, on an island fifteen hundred miles from anywhere, spending his last years going through the campaigns of a general who died eighteen centuries earlier, marking them up, still working the comparison that had outlasted the empire it built.

The three of them paid in similar coin. Alexander died in Babylon in June 323 BC, aged thirty-two, six weeks short of his thirty-third birthday, after a long banquet and a fever, and the empire came apart within eighteen months. Caesar was killed at fifty-five in a hall attached to the theatre of Pompey. Napoleon died at fifty-one on Saint Helena, in a house he thought unfit, still arguing with his jailer about whether he was entitled to be addressed as Emperor, and not one of the three reached the point where the measuring stopped, because each of them ran out of life first.

I have no clean conclusion here, and I would distrust one if it were handed to me. The honest position is that the comparison does not seem to have an off switch. Every man in this essay got what he was chasing, completely, on a scale nobody reading this will approach, and none of it closed the question, which points at something structural. Achievement raises the reference point along with everything else, so the gap stays about the same while the numbers grow, and the man who reaches the top of the mountain finds himself looking at a taller one the valley had been hiding.

What does seem to be available is a choice about the object. Alexander took a character from a poem, and the taking was done for him by his tutors and his mother's family before he was old enough to weigh it. Caesar took the man his own culture had spent three centuries turning into a myth, and met him by accident, in a building he had walked into for other reasons. Napoleon chose on purpose, at scale, and built a state aesthetic around the choice, and in each case the standard came out of the surrounding air, after which each man organised an entire life around a figure he had never met and could not question.

All three also chose upward without limit, which is the part I find least comfortable. Each picked a rival whose record stood higher than his own and was sealed permanently against revision, then ran the comparison for the rest of his life on terms guaranteed to give the same answer every time. That is a strange thing for men of that intelligence to do once, and all three did it deliberately.

I notice that I do this. I can name the specific people I measure myself against, and if I am honest about how they got that job, the answer is mostly accident. They were adjacent to me at a formative moment, or I ran into their work when I was young enough to be impressed, and I did not sit down and pick them on the merits. They were already there, the way the statue at Gades was already standing in the temple before Caesar walked in on an errand about paperwork. Nobody schedules the encounter, and the figure a man finds himself measured against is usually one he never agreed to.

There is a small object in a museum at Fontainebleau that says the rest of it better than I can. When Biennais brought the golden laurel wreath for its fitting in 1804, Napoleon complained that it was too heavy. The painter Isabey is said to have told him it was the weight of his victories, and that it took that many leaves to hold them all, and Napoleon is said to have answered that they had better forget a few of them, because he could not bow his head under the weight. So the goldsmith took his shears and cut six large leaves out of the crown, and because he had six daughters, he gave one leaf to each of them.

In 1819, four years after Waterloo, the wreath itself was melted down at the Paris mint for the value of the gold. What survives of the crown that a Corsican officer wore to make himself Caesar is the handful of leaves that were cut off because he could not carry them, one of which sits at Fontainebleau while another came up at auction a few years ago and sold for the price of a house. The whole thing went into the furnace. The offcuts are what lasted.

Until Sunday.

PS. I write one of these every Sunday, in shorter form, and send it to the readers who have chosen to receive it. If that interests you, the address is below.

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