Four years ago, at the climax of fashionable handwringing about the war in Iraq, there was rushed into print a crabbed and cranky book entitled Alexander the Great Failure, a volume whose author portrayed the conqueror as the Donald Rumsfeld of the ancient world. Too arrogant and feckless to care about the rule or the future of the titanic empire he had won by the spear, this NPR Alexander died leaving his conquests both ungoverned and ungovernable. The pointed parallel seems rather quaint now that the progress of our arms has rendered most of Iraq safer than Duluth, and the United States has nearly brought to a quiet end one of the most successful anti-insurgency campaigns in the history of the world.
Yet even that angry author’s indictment of Alexander the Great by recounting the wars fought between his successors could not conceal the fact that those successors were Macedonian—that for centuries Macedonians of Greek speech and culture ruled most of the realm Alexander conquered from what is now western Turkey to what is now Pakistan. The Macedonian achievement in establishing long-term, stable rule over bloodied and alien extents—even over districts through which Alexander himself merely galloped, and where few Macedonians were left behind to sniff the ozone of his thunderbolt—is one of the abiding marvels of history.
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