31–40 of 51 posts
I'm going to posit that 92% of what we think we know about Alexander the Great is wrong, not just his death.
We know a great deal about Socrates, Plato and Aristotle this way, why not Alexander?
According to wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_campaign_of_Alexander_t... "Alexander's march east put him in confrontation with the Nanda Empire of Magadha and the Gangaridai of Bengal. According to the Greek sources, the Nanda army was supposedly five times larger than the Macedonian army.[5] His army, exhausted, homesick, and anxious by the prospects of having to further face large Indian armies throu…
There are large number of other texts/journals that tells his story differently. He was defeated so badly at the entrance of Indian peninsula that he had retreat and finally succumbed to his injuries.
> Wine was a little syrupy and could have a high alcohol content compared with vintages today. This is tangential but is there any evidence for this claim? It’s my understanding that yeast simply will not grow beyond about 14-15% alcohol, no matter how much sugar you feed them, and this is what puts a cap on the alcohol content of “current vintages”. I’ve always heard that older wines (and other fermentables) were lo…
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol_in_the_Bible#Hebrew
It always puzzles me why sudden deaths in antiquity are always thought of as suspicious. During a time with very little medical knowledge, sudden illness followed by death was probably very common. Just from the short description in the article, something as simple as his appendix bursting would have resulted in similar symptoms. Sudden pain followed by a systemic infection (fever).
We remember him today as a great hero partly for his amazing prowess in battle [1] but mostly because he spent time cultivating his own image. He was clearly interested in posterity, and he didn't want to be remembered as just another guy who killed people and took their stuff. He surrounded himself with men of letters and knowledge and of course he had his personal hiostorians, a habit that I'm guessing he helped establish among the world's kings and warlords.
Anyway, all that he did, worked- and he's remembered not as a butcher who drowned entire provinces in their blood, but as a liberator from the blunt tyranny of the barbaric Persian dynasty, as a son of Ammon who saved Egypt and gave the ancient kingdom new life, as the man who cut the Gordian knot with his brains as much as with his sword. Many since have conquered, but noone else brought so much war in his wake and gained such praise for the act -not until Napoleon.
He was mental [2] but he was a smart guy.
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[1] Seriously, Iron Man had nothing on this guy who led from the front and routinely charged ahead of his army scaling enemy walls and having to be rescued when he found himself in the thick of it with just his bodyguard to protect him.
[2] Killed the man who saved his life in battle in a fit of drunken rage during a party.
It always puzzles me why sudden deaths in antiquity are always thought of as suspicious. During a time with very little medical knowledge, sudden illness followed by death was probably very common. Just from the short description in the article, something as simple as his appendix bursting would have resulted in similar symptoms. Sudden pain followed by a systemic infection (fever).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
He wasn't actually that way though. They mistook notions of brotherly love which are not homosexual to something homosexual. There are no ancient sources that even allude to that. Just modern scholars projecting their own fantasies as usual.
Or simply that maybe there wasn't such a big distinction between being very close to a same-sex friend without any sexual relationship and being close and experimenting/enjoying each other bodies whenever people partied/had some good time. That is, if people back then didn't really see anything wrong with beautiful/healthy (same sex or not) friends enjoying what their bodies had to offer then the strong distinction t…
Alexander's biggest achievement was to go down in history as a man who brought the light of civilisation to the barbarians in the lands he conquered. He was the original enlightened conqueror. We remember him today as a great hero partly for his amazing prowess in battle [1] but mostly because he spent time cultivating his own image. He was clearly interested in posterity, and he didn't want to be remembered as just…
If anything modern historians dramatically index towards “narcissistic butcher”.
I suppose it’s impressive that the Roman reverence for the guy still plays but lots and lots of people view him as a brutal tyrannical conquerer and always have.
> Wine was a little syrupy and could have a high alcohol content compared with vintages today. This is tangential but is there any evidence for this claim? It’s my understanding that yeast simply will not grow beyond about 14-15% alcohol, no matter how much sugar you feed them, and this is what puts a cap on the alcohol content of “current vintages”. I’ve always heard that older wines (and other fermentables) were lo…
I believe part of the problem is that there were many variants that were all translated to the same English word "wine", at least from Biblical history. [0] My understanding was that these could have an equally varying range in alcohol content even though they all received the same translation. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol_in_the_Bible#Hebrew
When I read Arrian, I remember thinking that if I was one of Alexander's generals I probably would have killed him. After 10 years of war you might want to kick back and enjoy being an Emperor. But apparently all Alexander thought about was what to conquer next.
This eventually became a common pattern in the early Roman empire, when the military would effectively help select the leader who would best line their pockets and eventually dispose of him when it was time to cash in again.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foederati#5th_century
"By the 5th century, lacking the wealth needed to pay and train a professional army, Western Roman military strength was almost entirely reliant on foederati units. [...] and the foederati would deliver the fatal blow to the dying nominal Western Roman Empire in 476, when their commander Odoacer deposed the usurper Western Emperor, Romulus Augustulus"