Map of the route Alexander the Great and Pyrrho may have taken to India
Toward the end of his life, someone evidently asked Karl Marx what the meaning of it all was. ”Struggle,” he reportedly said.
Pyrrho of Elis, perhaps one of the Klytidiai—
seers who, it's claimed, explained oracles
in the Temple of Zeus at Olympia—
it’s believed, traveled with Alexander the Great on his campaign to the East,
where he might in India have met Gymnosophists [naked philosophers],
who may have taught him—could be
by signs, for want of a lingua franca
—to doubt everything whatsoever.
“Must I then doubt even doubt?”
he's said to have have asked them
(whether in Sogdian or Greek).
And it seems they in reply signaled,
Yes, it was so!
We don't know. And he maybe did,
perhaps making an exception
for a certain little woman.
He may have lived, to near ninety,
as old as me!
from around 365/360 to 275/270 BCE.
All these things might well have been.
But such may-and-mighting will not serve
To lubricate the wheels of the quotidian:
We must believe in something!
Marx picked strife.
I'd choose the best I might conceivably deserve in life.
Monday, January 27, 2025
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