How do historians account for the remarkable successes of Alexander the Great?
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How do historians account for the remarkable successes of Alexander the Great?
In the nineteenth century historians explained amazing figures like Alexander in a very simple way. The Scottish historian Thomas Carlyle said history is nothing but the biography of great men, so in a way Alexander was explicable because he was great. And everything can be explained because of his greatness, and the reason we study his history is to recover this greatness. Historians have become increasingly uncomfortable with this sort of explanation for a couple of different reasons, the most important of which is because it doesn't take account of all the other historical forces that made someone like Alexander possible--it doesn't take account of the circumstances in which he was born and raised, his political context, the men who fought for him, the hundreds of thousands of slaves who built the Egyptian empire that he conquered, none of these things get taken into account when we think of Alexander as a great man. That said, it's very clear that there are certain people in history who stand out as extraordinarily charismatic and around whom so many key historical events seem to revolve, and clearly Alexander is one of them. But here we come to another problem, which is that the sources on which we rely for our history of Alexander are quite remarkably very far removed from Alexander himself. If we struggle to recover the details of the daily lives of average people, we have trouble, but this is true of Alexander's life. None of the biographers' work of Alexander's own time survived. So when we're trying to understand the history of Alexander the Great, we're relying on Roman historians writing in many cases three to five centuries after Alexander's death who want to hold up Alexander as a Roman figure. So are we getting the Macedonian Alexander, the Greek Alexander, or the Roman Alexander? That would be like me writing a biography of Queen Elizabeth I and that account being treated as a primary source. So we have this problem: that even the greatest men in history are often very poorly documented. The last thing we need to bear in mind as we assess the achievements of Alexander is we have to think about the larger historical context that made him possible and that Alexander himself was emulating the examples of the great Persian king, Cyrus, who had put together the Persian empire in the middle of the sixth century. Many of Alexander's Roman biographers suggested Alexander had read biographies of Cyrus and was modeling himself on Cyrus. And certainly the way Alexander put his empire together emulated Persian models. Then to understand Alexander's achievements-and we don't have to denigrate these achievements--when we put them into their broader historical context, they become more understandable.
In what ways does the Hellenistic world resemble the world we live in today? What accounts for these similarities?
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In what ways does the Hellenistic world resemble the world we live in today? What accounts for these similarities?
Even though the Hellenistic worldand this word Hellenistic means the Greeklike worldwas much smaller than our world, it was still the globe and essentially the Hellenistic world was a global society; this was new. Whereas in the classical Greek world of the fifth century, people lived in the polis in a small city-state, in the cosmopolitan world of the Hellenistic civilizationthat word cosmopolitan means universal citypeople lived in enormous metropolises. And moreover they lived in these enormous metropolises that ringed the Mediterranean. People were no longer fixed in a particular polis with its identity, with its gods, with their family and kin; they were spread out often as individuals in this Greeklike world. Moreover this Greeklike world was united through this common language of Greek. So even though Alexander's conquests created an empire that couldn't last as a unifying entity after his death, it was divided into three major parts. Each of these was governed by a Greek-speaking ruler and had a Greek-speaking bureaucracy, so that in each of these very different kingdoms, you still had a similar governmental structure. Moreover, anybody who could speak Greek was welcome and was useful in these places. So in much the same way that English has become the language you have to speak in a global culture in order to get a good job, it was the exact same thing in the Greek world, and native Greek speakerslike native English speakershad an immediate advantage. There was an exodus or diasporadispersion, a Greek wordfrom the Greek mainland so Greeks were settling all over this world looking for opportunity.
Another key aspect similar to our own world is a world of incredible mobility. You could be very sure if you went from one place in this Greeklike world to another you would meet people who spoke Greek, who ate the same kinds of foods, who dressed in the same ways, and who had the same kinds of values you did. But you would also meet people who were exotic and foreign, people the Greeks called barbarians or people who didn't speak Greek. You would intermingle with these people and absorb these exotic influences. This was wonderful; some people loved this. But other people were very frightened by it because it meant all those traditional values that had connected you to the polis were now being disrupted. But of course, it also meant that if you were a person of no family and no wealth in this old Greek world, and you could get yourself to one of these cosmopolitan cities, you could reinvent yourself, you could become an entirely new person with new opportunities. Another thing that was troubling to people was that this Hellenistic world was an incredibly commercialized materialistic world. Classical Greek values were about simplicity and modesty and modest display, but the Hellenistic world was about stuff, having gaudy things and beautiful things in your house and that again created a diversity of opinion. What we see as a result of this is the same as what we see todaya lot of new religions, self-help philosophies being developed in order to help people deal with and navigate this incredibly new culture. All the things that you thought were true in your old world turn out to be open to debate. We have cultural relativism and we have to find new ways to think about this. The old religion doesn't help explain the world, so we have new philosophies like Stoicism and Epicureanism, which help us make sense of our world in a new way.