The project of Alexander was to unite the world under the law of Greek arete presented as political virtue. Alexandria became instead the starting point of a symbolic system globalizing deeply different, based on the obedience to a law that drew its authority not from human nous and material physis, but from the 'word' writed by an extra-human Being without rivals, the one and only God.

The paper focuses on the semantics inherent in concepts such as 'sacer sacrum, sanctus, sanctum' in Latin and the influence they had in European cultural and political life. Rudolph Otto dedicated to the 'sacred' a well-known book titled 'Das Heilige' 1917. Acknowledgeding the impossibility to exactly understand the notion of 'sacer', he chooses to translate it through 'numinous', from 'numen', a word that defines the impersonal manifestation of absolute Power. At the end of the fifties, Mircea Eliade introduced the term 'hierophany' manifestation of the 'sacred', from the greek word 'hieron', to define something absolutely powerful that can reveal itself and may be at human disposal. We assume that, in a historical perspective, the sacred does not exist as such but we must recognize it as a tremendously powerful device which can be used – as it has been used and it is still used – in different ways in human History.