Travels with Alexander the Great

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Alexander kills a lion

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Both Alexander and the lion look astonishingly calm about it.

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Both Alexander and the lion look astonishingly calm about it.

Well, as Montaigne noted (see post immediately above) Alexander managed to happily sleep in the morning before the Battle of Gaugamela. So I guess despatching a lion was regarded as a little light exercise before breakfast.

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Alexander's "terrifying glamour"

Revisionist professors, Hollywood turkeys, even the pacifist spirit of our age
cannot wither the incomparable mystique and terrifying glamour of Alexander of Macedon.

In his survey of recent histories of Alexander the Great, Tom Holland writes:

"All those who write about Alexander," grumbled the Roman geographer Strabo, "prefer the marvelous to the true." Such a criticism was not entirely accurate even when he made it 2,000 years ago, and it is certainly not fair now. We live in an age of groundbreaking classical scholarship, when historians of the ancient world have only to get the sniff of a myth to set about busting it. Yet Alexander, more even than Cleopatra or Julius Caesar, has stood insouciant proof against every attempt at revisionism. No amount of cheese-paring by classicists can dim the brilliance of his luster. He remains what he has ever been: the epitome of youthful, world-conquering, terrifying glamour.

Full article here:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703791904576075760889881174.html

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Illustration by Angus McBride

Sabine Müller thinks Alexander's foray into India was simply a propaganda exercise driven by political necessity.

For Alexander the Indian war was a political necessity. First of all the legitimacy of the Macedonian king derived primarily from successes in campaigning. Alexander had to establish his position repeatedly with military triumphs and conquests. The opposition of the Macedonians against his new representation and policy as a king of Asia after the conquest of the Persian empire had increased and was a serious threat to his authority.

Alexander had to continue his march, carry on the war and keep his men busy to avoid a widespread inner revolt. Moreover by adapting the Persian kingship he had taken over the duty to secure the Eastern borders of the empire and to establish his reign over the Indian satrapies following the example of the Achaemenid kings. He could not take the risk to ignore the imperial tradition and to leave India unconquered.

Waging war on India he moreover wanted to establish his declining authority. Nevertheless, his contemporaries regarded the campaign as an ambitious adventure to expand his new empire to the very limits of the world. The Athenian orator Aeschines commented: "Meanwhile Alexander had withdrawn to the uttermost regions of the North, almost beyond the borders of the inhabited world“. So the tales about Alexander’s attempt to break on through to the end of the world were grounded on daily gossip of his very lifetime.

There can be no doubt that Alexander exploited the rumours for his propaganda.

Full article here:

http://www.atopia.tk/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=16&Itemid=57

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Alexander receives the surrender of Rajah Porus

When Alexander entered India, King Ambhi of Taxila responded to Alexander's messengers with gifts and agreed to surrender his prosperous dominions with the following argument:

To what purpose should we make war upon one another,
if the design of your coming into these parts
be not to rob us of our water or our necessary food,
which are the only things
that wise men are indispensably obliged to fight for?
As for other riches and possessions,
as they are accounted in the eye of the world,
if I am better provided of them than you,
I am ready to let you share with me;
but if fortune has been more liberal to you than me,
I have no objection to be obliged to you.
- Plutarch

Alexander, not wanting to be outdone by this generosity, gave Ambhi even greater gifts, plus one thousand talents in money. However, a Macedonian military governor was appointed over Taxila, and Ambhi provided military support to help the Greeks fight his Indian enemies.

A naval officer named Onesicritus heard a lecture on ethics from the wise teachers, who received free food in the Taxila marketplace. They admired Alexander's love of wisdom even though he ruled a vast empire; they said he was the only philosopher in arms they had seen. They asked about Socrates, Pythagoras, and Diogenes, but they felt they paid too much attention to the customs and laws of their country, an illuminating insight from one of the earliest cross-cultural discussions.

One of the naked sages, Calanus, refused to talk with Onesicritus because he would not strip off his clothes; but he did show Alexander an analogy of his government by trying to stand on a shriveled hide, which when trod on its edges would not stay flat; but when he stood in the middle, it did. This was similar to the point Dandamis had made when he had asked Onesicritus why Alexander had undertaken such a long journey. A young man named Pyrrho, who went on to found the skeptical school of Greek philosophy, also talked with these sages, causing his entire outlook to change.

Alexander tried to negotiate with the other two major Indian kings, Abhisara and Poros. Abhisara sent gifts and promised to submit, but Poros said that he would meet Alexander on the field of battle. Alexander drafted five thousand Indian troops into his infantry, had a bridge of boats built to cross the Indus River, and met Poros on the banks of the Jhelum River, which his soldiers were finally able to sneak across at night to avoid confrontation with the elephants of Poros.

This strategic battle fought in the rainy season was won by Alexander using flanking movements around the elephants. Thousands were slain, and after receiving nine wounds himself King Poros surrendered. When Alexander asked the defeated king what treatment he wanted to receive, Poros asked only to be treated in a kingly way. Winning Alexander's respect and friendship, Poros was granted the rule over his own people and later additional territory equal to his own that Alexander also annexed.

http://www.san.beck.org/EC10-Social.html

Some Indian scholars, such as Gopala Pillai, have attempted to trace references to Alexander in Indian literature.

http://murugan.org/research/gopalapillai.htm

However others, like Ramakrishna Rao don’t believe Alexander invaded India at all!

http://www.hinduwebsite.com/history/alexander.asp

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"Around him the whole dream world of the East took shape and substance; of him every old story of a divine world conqueror was told afresh."

- The Cambridge Ancient History, Vol VI.

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In his earlier TV series In the Footsteps of Alexander the Great, Michael Wood sought to follow Alexander's route of world conquest as closely as possible, beginning in Greece and proceeding through 16 countries, including Turkey, Israel, Egypt, Iran, Afghanistan, and India. However, Wood was barred from entering Iraq because it was a war zone, and was only able to view the terrain on which Alexander's troops faced the Persians at the Battle of Gaugamela by scanning the radar screens of an American AWACS plane patrolling high above.

In this recent TV presentation, Wood is finally able to travel through Syria and Iraq to uncover the story of Alexander the Great’s decisive battle against the might of the Persian Empire in 331 BCE – and seek out its location on the ground. Ancient writers agreed that it was fought somewhere near the city of Irbil in northern Iraq, but the exact location has never before been discovered. Using dramatic new finds in the UK – a cuneiform clay tablet in the British Museum and a papyrus dug up in Egypt – Michael sheds new light on the course of events.

Then to reconstruct the campaign, he follows Alexander’s route through Damascus and Aleppo to the river Euphrates in Syria and travels into Northern Iraq with the British and US military. Exploring a landscape long barred to outsiders by Saddam Hussein, he carries out a detailed reconnaissance on the ground with US forces on patrol between Mosul and Kurdistan. Accompanied by the Head of British forces in Iraq, General Sir Rob Fry, he pieces together the dramatic events that led to this ancient War of the Worlds, and finally, with the help of Kurdish villagers, solves a mystery that has baffled historians and archaeologists for centuries.
Watch Alexander’s Greatest battle here:

Part 1 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eShGFKUCKXk

Part 2 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UdKUrWid6-E

Part 3 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4Bv7e4Yjxc

Part 4 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15tncNX2HY8

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Fourteenth-century miniature Greek manuscript depicting fictional scenes from the life of Alexander the Great
in the style of the late Byzantine period (1204-1453). In this illustration Alexander invades Athens.

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Alexander explodes on the world scene with a bang!

http://highered.mcgraw-hill.com/olcweb/cgi/pluginpop.cgi?it=swf::800::600::/sites/dl/free/0072424370/43862/AlexanderEmpire.swf::Alexander

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Alexander the Great’s role in spreading the gospel
A Christian view



Dr. Warren Carroll

Dr Carroll's spirited lecture focuses on the historic march of Alexander, described as being
“more an elemental force than a mortal man”.

“He believed the gods of Homer and ancient Egypt were with him, and we know as Christians that the One True God must have been with him,” Dr. Warren Carroll said during his public lecture on Alexander the Great. “For by his march across the world, Alexander the Great prepared the way for its conversion.”

Carroll explained that due to the conquests of Alexander, the entire ancient world spoke Greek, which made it possible for the spreading of the teaching of the Gospels, which were written in Greek. “Alexander’s conquests united the world of the Middle East with the Classical world of Greece and Rome—for the first time in history,” Carroll said. “Jew and Greek entered the same cultural orbit.”

A convert to Christianity, Carroll was educated at Bates College and received a Doctorate of History from Columbia University. After founding Christendom College, he served as the College's president until 1985 and then as the chairman of its History Department until his retirement in 2002. He is the author of numerous historical works including The Rise and Fall of the Communist Revolution, 1917: Red Banners White Mantle, and his major multi-volume work The History of Christendom.

"Alexander never lost a battle and, with the exception Napoleon, actually and deliberately aspired to take over the whole civilized world. There is no convincing evidence that Alexander was driven by power and wealth for their own sakes, but the cultural unification of East and West was his explicit and announced objective, Carroll said.

“His teacher was the supreme Greek intellect, the philosopher Aristotle,” Carroll noted. “Alexander was always a Greek first, and considered himself the guardian and champion of Hellenic culture. He was the greatest general of all time…He might have conquered the world, but died before he was forty, with his armies at the border of China. He was a meteor and transformer of history, who created the Hellenistic world through which the Gospel of Jesus Christ spread three hundred years later.”

http://www.christendom.edu/news/archives/archives08/carroll4.shtml

This lecture can be downloaded at Christendom on iTunes U. Click here for the lecture:

http://deimos.apple.com/WebObjects/Core.woa/Browse/christendom.edu.1389502541.01455881139

Or click here to download iTunes:

http://www.christendom.edu/itunes_u.shtml

Not everyone is convinced by Dr Carroll's convictions however. One reviewer commenting on Carroll’s book Founding Of Christendom: History Of Christendom (Volume 1 in a series on Western history written from the orthodox Catholic perspective) writes:

Carroll's favorable attitude toward Alexander the Great is astonishing. Alexander may have been moved by "some supernatural impulse", but he was a brutal killer. I submit that any man who nowadays sought to dominate the entire civilized world, and slaughtered those who got in his way, would be regarded not as a benefactor but as a monster. Such was Alexander.