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 king Demetrius Soter in 150  Being now undisputed master of Syria, he abandoned himself to a life of debauchery. Demetrius Soter’s son profited by the opportunity to regain the throne. Ptolemy Philometor, who was Alexander’s father-in-law, went over to his side, and Alexander was defeated in a pitched battle near Antioch in Syria. He fled for refuge to a Nabataean prince, who murdered him and sent his head to Ptolemy, who had been mortally wounded in the engagement.

ALEXANDER CORNELIUS, Greek grammarian, surnamed from his great learning, born at Miletus or Myndus in Caria, flourished about 70  He was taken prisoner in the Mithridatic war by Sulla, from whom (or from Cornelius Lentulus) he received his freedom and assumed the name Cornelius. He accompanied Crassus on his Parthian campaigns, and perished at the destruction by fire of his house at Laurentum. He is said to have written “books without number,” chiefly on historical and geographical subjects. Of the extant fragments (Müller, Fragmenta Historicorum Graecorum, iii.) those relating to the Jews are important as containing quotations from lost Jewish authors.

ALEXANDER JANNAEUS, king of the Jews, succeeded his brother Aristobulus in 103 and died in 76  His first act was the murder of one of his brothers who claimed the throne, and his reign was disgraced by the cruelties that he perpetrated in order to retain his position. (See and .)

ALEXANDER NEVSKY, SAINT (1220–1263), grand-duke of Vladimir, was the second son of the grand-duke Yaroslav. His childhood and youth were spent at Great Novgorod, whither his father sent him to rule (1228) with some guardian boyars. In 1239 he married Alexandra, daughter of Prince Bryachislav of Polotsk. At an early age he distinguished himself in constant warfare with the Germans, Swedes and Lithuanians, who tried to wrest Novgorod and Pskov from Russia while she was still suffering from the effects of the terrible Tatar invasion. The most notable of these battles, whereby he won his honorific epithet of Nevsky (i.e. of the Neva), was fought on the banks of the Neva (July 15, 1240) against the famous Swedish statesman, Birger Jarl, whom he utterly defeated, besides wounding him with his lance. In the following year the Teutonic Order, in conjunction with the Order of the Sword, succeeded in capturing Pskov; but Alexander recovered it in 1242, advanced into Livonia, and on the 5th of April defeated the knights on the ice of Lake Peipus and compelled them in the ensuing peace to renounce all their conquests. He also prevented the Swedes (in 1256) from settling in South Finland. On the death of his father (1246) Alexander and his younger brother Andrew went on a two years’ journey into Mongolia to obtain their yarluiki, or letters of investiture, from the Grand Khan, who then disposed of the fate of all the Russian princes. He returned (1250) as grand-duke of Kiev and Novgorod, while to Andrew was given the far more important grand-duchy of Vladimir. In 1252, however, the Tatars themselves expelled Andrew and placed Alexander on the throne of Vladimir. Alexander henceforth did his best for his country by humbling himself before the Tatars so as to give them no pretext for ravaging the land again. Most of his spare money he devoted to the ransoming of the numerous Russian captives detained at the Golden Horde. But the men of Novgorod, in their semi-independent republic, continued (1255–1257) to give the grand-duke trouble, their chief grievance being the imposition of a Tatar tribute, which they only submitted to in 1259 on the rumour of an impending Tatar invasion. In 1262 the Tatar tribute was felt so grievously all over Russia that preparations were made for a general insurrection, and Alexander, who knew that an abortive rebellion would make the yoke heavier, was obliged to go to the Horde in person to prevent the Tatars from again attacking Russia. He stayed at Sarai, their Volgan capital, all the winter, and not only succeeded in obtaining a mitigation of the tribute, but also the abolition of the military service previously rendered by the Russians to the Tatars. This was his last service to his country. He died on his way home from the Horde, and in the words of his contemporary, the metropolitan Cyril, “with him the sun of Russia set." The Orthodox Church has canonized the ruler who gave his whole life for Russia and the Orthodox faith. His relics, discovered in 1380, were in 1724 translated by Peter the Great from Vladimir to St Petersburg.

ALEXANDER OF APHRODISIAS, pupil of Aristocles of Messene, the most celebrated of the Greek commentators on the writings of Aristotle, and styled, by way of pre-eminence,  (“the expositor”), was a native of Aphrodisias in Caria. He came to Athens towards the end of the 2nd century, became head of the Lyceum and lectured on peripatetic philosophy. The object of his work was to free the doctrine from the syncretism of Ammonius and to reproduce the pure doctrine of Aristotle. Commentaries by Alexander on the following works of Aristotle are still extant:—the Analytica, Priora, i.; the Topica; the Meteorologica; the De Sensu; and the Metaphysica, i.-v., together with an abridgment of what he wrote on the remaining books of the Metaphysica. His commentaries were greatly esteemed among the Arabians, who translated many of them. There are also several original writings by Alexander still extant. The most important of these are a work On Fate, in which he argues against the Stoic doctrine of necessity; and one On the Soul, in which he contends that the undeveloped reason in man is material ( ) and inseparable from the body. He argued strongly against the doctrine of immortality. He identified the active intellect  ), through whose agency the potential intellect in man becomes actual, with God. Several of Alexander’s works were published in the Aldine edition of Aristotle, Venice, 1495–1498; his De Fato and De Anima were printed along with the works of Themistius at Venice (1534); the former work, which has been translated into Latin by Grotius and also by Schulthess, was edited by J. C. Orelli, Zürich, 1824; and his commentaries on the Metaphysica by H. Bonitz, Berlin, 1847. J. Nourisson has treated of his doctrine of fate (De la liberté et du hazard, Paris, 1870). In the early Renaissance his doctrine of the soul’s mortality was adopted by P. Pomponazzi against the Thomists and the Averroists.

ALEXANDER OF HALES, surnamed , and , a celebrated English theologian of the 13th century, was born in Gloucestershire. Trained in the monastery of Hales he was early raised to an archdeaconry. He went, like most of the scholars of his day, to study at Paris, where he took the degree of doctor and became celebrated as a teacher. It is generally held that he taught Bonaventura, Duns Scotus and Thomas Aquinas, but a comparison of dates makes it clear that the two latter could not have been his pupils and that the statement about Bonaventura is open to doubt. In 1222 (or 1231, see Denifle, Chartul. Univers. Paris, Paris, 1889, i. 135) Alexander entered the order of Minorite Friars and thenceforward lived in strict seclusion. He refused, however, to renounce his degree of doctor, and was the first of his order who continued to bear that title after initiation. He died in 1245 and was buried in the convent of the Cordeliers at Paris. His most celebrated work was the Summa Theologiae (Nuremberg, 1452; Venice, 1576; Cologne, 1611), undertaken by the orders of Pope Innocent IV. and approved by Alexander IV., on the report of seventy learned theologians, as a system of instruction for all the schools in Christendom. The form is that of question and answer, and the method is rigidly scholastic. Of small intrinsic value, it is interesting partly as the first philosophical contribution of the Franciscans who were afterwards to take a prominent part in medieval thought (see ), and partly as the first work based on a knowledge of the whole Aristotelian corpus and the Arabian commentators.

See Wadding, ''Script. ord. minor.'' (Rome, 1650); for his method