Maybe. But we'll never know, as he caught a fever and died.
How can you DIE of a fever? It's just a very high temperature! Unless there's something about a fever that I don't know about.....
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Maybe. But we'll never know, as he caught a fever and died.
How can you DIE of a fever? It's just a very high temperature! Unless there's something about a fever that I don't know about.....
I agree with Conrad that Alexander III of Macedon (And I of the Grecian states, and his "Hellenistic Empire") was a very flawed man.
However, if he had not been a great borrower of tactics, and had not the common sense to at least listen to his tutor (none other than Aristotle), and his father much less, he would have been an even baser general, and would not have even made it outside of the Grecian states with a big army, much less been able to control them.
He would have been assassinated promptly, and the Empire would have split anyway.
He was an incompetant person, and he was largely responsible for the crumbling of his empire in the following way:
When he conquered a kingdom, he just bowled over it and went on, instead of setting up an interim government other than the army, if even that, in place in that region.
This extreme power vacuum, unfilled even by Alexander and his toadies, caused the empire to crumble rapidly from the inside from the start...
WARNING: DOUBLE POST
I was distracted for a while (Evony, what can I say?) and took a long time in posting...
Yes, "hubris" is not used every day, but I think that the terms narcissistic, selfish, self-centered, could remotely come to mean the same thing as that word.
Let's just put the term "hubris" into layman terms:
If you are "hubristic," you have a massive and incredible ego, and your knowledge and power equal and rival that of even God (or gods).
You are selfish, incompetant, yet have the illusion that nothing is better than you, when in fact most things are.
This word is generally used to describe monarchs, nobility, and likewise, because it is usually only their egoes and selfishness, and downright foolhardiness that only this term can properly apply to these cases...
I would think that this would be at least enough for you to get by...
*AFTERTHOUGHT*
This term can also apply to us commoners, in the same way...
Just realizing... how can we say he aint alexander the great? he maybe made some mistakes, oh well... we are all human, none of us is perfect... so he aint either.
He is one of the very best commander of troops I believe. How can we say someone who has conqueurd so much and has won so many battles and is still now impressing every single one of us so much that we are still talking about him isnt great? yea maybe huge... but oh well :)
He maybe should've had appointed better persons to take care of the area he conqueurd, but easy talking for us... looking back for centuries, seeing what he did and then we come after many years with better ideas, he was in the middle of battles. When you have an enemy before you, do you stop to consider to let him live or die? You'll be dead by then...
For me he is Alexander the Great, even tough he has done many things wrong. The many more things he did right in my eyes win it over those. :)
I still make the assertion that without his father's work and knowledge, and without his tutor/s, he would have made a rather poor ruler.
I believe he is great.
Calling him incompetent is a rather harsh judgement for a man who defeated the Persian Empire which was the greatest empire of its time. Rome at that time was still in its infancy. Maybe Alexander wasn't a great ruler, but he was a conquorer, not a politician. There are only a small handful of people throughout known history that have had such an impact, and the fact that he did have a great impact is proven because here we are nearly 2500 years later still talking about it. He is also a household name. Even people who fail at history and never cracked a book in their life know of Alexander the Great.