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The sword already up. An engineer who was on the campaign says he pulled the pole-pin out instead, which nobody repeats.

In the spring of 333 BC the Macedonian army came through Gordium, the old Phrygian capital in the middle of Anatolia, and Alexander went to look at the wagon. It had belonged, the local story went, to Gordias, a peasant whose ox cart had arrived in the city on the day an oracle promised the arrival of the next king; his son Midas dedicated the cart to the gods, and its yoke was lashed to the pole with a knot of cornel bark so involuted that no one could find the ends. The prophecy attached to it said whoever undid the knot would rule Asia. He was 22, had crossed into Asia the previous year with an army he could not afford, and had just recovered from an illness at Tarsus that nearly killed him. He worked at the knot for a while. Then, in the version everybody knows, he drew his sword and cut it, and Alexander cutting the Gordian knot has meant impatience with false problems in every European language since. There is a second version, and its source is better: Aristobulus, an engineer who was actually on the campaign, said Alexander simply pulled the wooden pin out of the pole, which released the yoke and let the whole thing come apart with the knot intact. The dull explanation comes from the man who was there, and the memorable one comes from writers who were not, which is the usual arrangement. Either way the oracle paid out. Within eighteen months he had beaten Darius at Issus and taken the Persian coast; within four years the Persian empire was his; by his death at 32 he ruled from Greece to the Punjab, and the wreck of that empire, fought over by his generals, set the shape of the eastern Mediterranean for 300 years. Berthélemy painted it in 1767 in the full French academic manner: torchlight, a temple interior, priests recoiling, Alexander in a blue cloak with the blade already up. The detail he gets right is the audience. Alexander's own officers are watching, and their faces are the faces of men who have just realized what kind of career they have joined.