"Your Opinion of Alexander the Great?" Topic

Writing in Slingshot magazine, Richard A. Gabriel says:

Alexander the Great is a figure who seems to divide opinion in a way unlike any other ruler or general of antiquity. Uniquely in Alexander's case it seems necessary to take a side – he is either a Good King or a Bad King, with little scope for adopting a middle or agnostic opinion.

What is your opinion of Alexander the Great?

From my limited knowlage he seems less of a bastard then those before and after him.

He knew how to work the people. While he was alive, he had the largest empire in the world. It was even relatively stable…while he was alive. He was also reckless. His recklessness probably got himself killed. For Ancient times, he was a relatively benevolent king. Folks get wrapped around the axle because they try to apply modern day morals and sensibilities to him and then come to the conclusion that he was a bad man.

He was apparently prone to having a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day.

I like what Gunfreak said.

I also hate it – though it happens all the time – when modern folks do what Joker said in his last sentence

He changed the world.

Although his own empire proved ephemeral, he brought about the Hellenization of Asia all the way to India. That was a permanent and lasting change that I don't think could have happened without his conquests.

Your opinion depends not on him, but on you. How can we really know who he was?

Well, he's just this guy, you know?

(With apologies to Zaphod Beeblebrox)

I think he was great!

Did he leave his country stronger or weaker after his reign?

I think his biggest failure was in leaving his empire to the be fought over by is generals.

FREEDOM!
.
.
oops, sorry wrong dude. Alex was the one with less face paint.

I think he was like a proto-Rommel, he took a good army and did marvels with it.
I think he may have been quite egotistical – but he seems to have thought himself related to a god, so I suppose that goes with the territory!

He was considered a good king by his contemporaries and successors, and for many in subsequent centuries.

I think he was essentially a good king for the period he lived in.

The greatest.

Troublemaker,

regards

Darius III

Good king. My evidence is that more than 2000 years later there are Iskanderuns and Alexandrias far east and south of Makedon, and folksongs tell of him in all the dialects of Asia.

He made gay sex cool long before Freddie Mercury.

There's a reason why we don't call him Alexander the Pretty Good. He was a magnificent bastard.

i suspect to the average (non-noble) subject of whatever autocratic ogliarchy he defeated in each phase, he was probably marginally better than the previous rulers, or at least no worse.

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

Probably needed a few more decades of survival to otherwise judge him as a ruler. Though, honestly, for the average Joe, what effect would he really have had? You pay your taxes and hope the local officials protect you from bandits, and once in a while some guy rides in on a horse, hands the local official a scroll you can't read anyway, and you either have to pay more taxes or your young men get sent off to fight and die somewhere else for a "king" you've never met and know next to nothing about. Much later, a few of the men come back with a bit of loot and some gory tales or no loot and the news that somebody else is now "king."
Rinse and repeat.

Spent too much time expanding his empire and not enough time stabilizing it. As soon as he died it broke up.

The end result was that as parts of his empire came in contact with a stable empire (Rome) it was overrun and absorbed.

He was a murderous thug driven to conquer EVERYBODY because his mommy told him he was special.
Reminds me of Joffrey and Cersei.

I'd rank him higher than Obama, but nowhere near the level of Regan.

Parzival's History of the World in a nutshell:

You pay your taxes and hope the local officials protect you from bandits, and once in a while some guy rides in on a horse, hands the local official a scroll you can't read anyway, and you either have to pay more taxes or your young men get sent off to fight and die somewhere else for a "king" you've never met and know next to nothing about. Much later, a few of the men come back with a bit of loot and some gory tales or no loot and the news that somebody else is now "king."

Rinse and repeat.

Too far in the past to have an honest opinion to be honest. It's one thing to have an opinion on the current President and while I can say something about Johnson or Nixon, Lincoln and Washington gets even further away from my point in time and I can say even less about them. For me to comment on anything Alexander did is a waste of time, how am I to know what is true and what is myth after all this time.

If he were alive today I think there's a good chance he'd be on Death Row.

DM

He was over-qualified for Death Row.

I haven't seen the movie yet. I think my wife has it, but she prefers "Troy" and "300." I will try to talk her into finding it so I can give a well-informed, accurate opinion.

Well whatever else he may have been, he was one heck of a leader!

I am afraid I can't stop thinking of Colin Farell with his hair dyed blonde. The king who launched a thousand Wargames armies?

As noted above, he wasn't called Alexander the Bad.

"If he were alive today I think there's a good chance he'd be on Death Row."

If he were alive now it'd be a bleedin' miracle!

He wasn't called Alexander the Bad by Hellenistic historians. His image was widely used across Persia (after his death) to represent the devil, so perhaps the people he conquered may not have had such a high opinion of him, but then they didn't get to write the history.

He was a brilliant general, with enormous charisma, who took a *lot* of personal risks in battle and was lucky not to have been killed several times.
He also seems to have been a psycopath; very probably that is linked to his intense ambition.

I think we'd be in a better position to comment, if we had another 20 years or so of his achievements (or failures) to reflect on.

In terms of generalship, Rommel is the only one I think that approaches him in audacity.

To a large degree though, every thing else (including his sanity) is rendered moot by his early death.

Meh…

His momma was "HOT" !!!

Well he did inherit his daddy's army and a conquered Greek world to back him (including a bunch of highly competent officers) and was able to decapitate the highly efficient Persian state and replace it with a Hellenistic leadership.

His bravery meant that by the time he died he was a wreck from all the injuries he had sustained. Alcholism and various mental problems certainly didn't make things easier to live with somebody who was increasingly convinced he was a god.

His military skill was greatly aided by one of the finest military systems in Ancient Time and the fact that it was highly effective at dealing with Persian-style armies.

Alexander was the right guy with the right stuff, the right tools at the right time fighting the right enemy. Impressive job, but I prefer self-made men who started from scratch like Genghis Khan …

A good Irish Lad!

I have no opinion about him. We have not enough neutral data. It's pretty absurd to claim that he was a "psycopath" or a "sociopath" or "whateverpath". We just don't know enough about him. We just know that he was a charismatic leader, a brilliant field commander, ruthless -as much as any other leader of his times- and that he was more ambitious than any other of his contemporaries. Beyond that, we can only guess.

As Joker mentioed further up the comment thread, the danger in these sorts of questions/responses is seeing te man and his accomplishments in today's light, rather than in his own.

It is foolhardy and worthless to judge someone and/or their actions in anything other than their own environment. Judging them by today's morals/standards is disrespectful not only to the subject being considered, but to history itself. It does no one any good.

Judging Alexander in his own environment, how he acted according to the social rules he lived with, is the only fair way, and even then it is fraught with danger because so little ontemporary information about him exists.

It is true that we have a lot of info about him, but almost all of it comes from centuries later, and one has to question the motives of the author when writing down those works, since almost all those authors were writing for someone else and likely included much contemporary bias.

So I say it's almost impossible to say what he was truly like. There are so many books about him now that virtually any opinion could be supported by some tome.

V/R

I find the Mary Renault Alexander to be quite a sympathetic character…

Cheers,
Aaron

*(sotto voce) Bill, it was actually Richard Lockwood (the reviewer) who wrote the bit quoted, not Gabriel (the reviewed)!

Bad kid, totally out of control!

I've always wonderd how well pyrrhus would have done in Italy if he had Alexanders army at it's best. I mean his army was about the same size as alexanders(about 40 000) but over half was verious italics and italian greeks.

He was a superb general (with serious need of some dicipline) Imagien what he could do with Alexanders army.

A good tactical General but a little lacking on the Strategic side. Good politician in regards to conquered country treatment.
Lacked the ability to judge key people including his mother who acted as his counsels.

Great general but pretty poor statesman. The cavalier way in which he handled his succession was pretty irresponsible. The innovations and charisma of his father, Philip II, is what paved the way for Alexander. Philip likely was the better of Alexander in all respects, too bad he died before he could prove that against the Persians.

He may have been a brilliant general, but he also had very able lieutenants & inherited an excellent army from his father.
Had a nasty tendency to kill off friends, ask Cleitus? Destroyer of Thebes.
Probably fortunate that Memnon of Rhodes died just before he invaded Persia, otherwise he would have faced tougher opposition.
No plans for a succession, just glory, glory.
Definitely a bad king as he seems to have given little thought to his kingdom. But as a barbarian conqueror, unsurpassed until Temujin rode the steppes.

He liked to kill things….

In order to become an emperor one is bound to tread the psycopath.

He was lucky to be the son of Philip, to fight a Persian Empire in decline, and to die young.
Otherwise, he was a pretty good general, almost as good as Hannibal

He is not universally known as 'The Great' for no reason…

Alexander devoured an empire; Hannibal choked on one.

There was a good episode of In Our Time about him just the other week. It should be available as a podcast download from the BBC Radio 4 website. It wasn't long enough to go into great depth, but it was kind of interesting to listen to.