Alexander Of Macedon Quotes

Our enemies are Medes and Persians, men who for centuries have lived soft and luxurious lives; we of Macedon for generations past have been trained in the hard school of danger and war. Above all, we are free men, and they are slaves. There are Greek troops, to be sure, in Persian service — but how different is their cause from ours! They will be fighting for pay — and not much of at that; we, on the contrary, shall fight for Greece, and our hearts will be in it. As for our foreign troops — Thracians, Paeonians, Illyrians, Agrianes — they are the best and stoutest soldiers in Europe, and they will find as their opponents the slackest and softest of the tribes of Asia. And what, finally, of the two men in supreme command? You have Alexander, they — Darius!

GOVERNOR. And then I must call your attention to the history teacher. He has a lot of learning in his head and a store of facts. That's evident. But he lectures with such ardor that he quite forgets himself. Once I listened to him. As long as he was talking about the Assyrians and Babylonians, it was not so bad. But when he reached Alexander of Macedon, I can't describe what came over him. Upon my word, I thought a fire had broken out. He jumped down from the platform, picked up a chair and dashed it to the floor. Alexander of Macedon was a hero, it is true. But that's no reason for breaking chairs. The state must bear the cost.

So they cut their hair short in front, that their enemies might not grasp it. And they say that Alexander of Macedon for the same reason ordered his generals to have the beards of the Macedonians shaved, because they were a convenient handle for the enemy to grasp.

During this time he got news that a famous statue of Orpheus, enshrined in south Macedon, had started to sweat profusely. The seers, pondering the omen, decided that the new King’s exploits would give the poets work.

A significant number of human cultures have viewed homosexual relations as not only legitimate but even socially constructive, ancient Greece being the most notable example. The Iliad does not mention that Thetis had any objection to her son Achilles’ relations with Patroclus. Queen Olympias of Macedon was one of the most temperamental and forceful women of the ancient world, and even had her own husband, King Philip, assassinated. Yet she didn’t have a fit when her son, Alexander the Great, brought his lover Hephaestion home for dinner.

CHAPTER XXVI.—A new Prince in a City or Province of which he has taken Possession, ought to make Everything new. Whosoever becomes prince of a city or State, more especially if his position be so insecure that he cannot resort to constitutional government either in the form of a republic or a monarchy, will find that the best way to preserve his princedom is to renew the whole institutions of that State; that is to say, to create new magistracies with new names, confer new powers, and employ new men, and like David when he became king, exalt the humble and depress the great, "filling the hungry with good things, and sending the rich empty away." Moreover, he must pull down existing towns and rebuild them, removing their inhabitants from one place to another; and, in short, leave nothing in the country as he found it; so that there shall be neither rank, nor condition, nor honour, nor wealth which its possessor can refer to any but to him. And he must take example from Philip of Macedon, the father of Alexander, who by means such as these, from being a petty prince became monarch of all Greece; and of whom it was written that he shifted men from province to province as a shepherd moves his flocks from one pasture to another. These indeed are most cruel expedients, contrary not merely to every Christian, but to every civilized rule of conduct, and such as every man should shun, choosing rather to lead a private life than to be a king on terms so hurtful to mankind. But he who will not keep to the fair path of virtue, must to maintain himself enter this path of evil. Men, however, not knowing how to be wholly good or wholly bad, choose for themselves certain middle ways, which of all others are the most pernicious, as shall be shown by an instance in the following Chapter.

In 335 BC, the year before his crossing into Asia, the young Alexander the Great was met by an embassy from the Danubian Celts, seeking an alliance with Macedon. When the king asked the Celts to name their greatest fear, hoping that they would say ‘You’, they replied that the only thing they feared was the sky falling on their heads. There is something strangely thrilling about this fleeting encounter between Celtic migrants from the forests of northern Europe and the future conqueror of India, as if two great currents of history had touched for an instant, and parted again.

Mother Nature does not mind if men are sexually attracted to one another. It’s only human mothers and fathers steeped in particular cultures who make a scene if their son has a fling with the boy next door. The mother’s tantrums are not a biological imperative. A significant number of human cultures have viewed homosexual relations as not only legitimate but even socially constructive, ancient Greece being the most notable example. The Iliad does not mention that Thetis had any objection to her son Achilles’ relations with Patroclus. Queen Olympias of Macedon was one of the most temperamental and forceful women of the ancient world, and even had her own husband, King Philip, assassinated. Yet she didn’t have a fit when her son, Alexander the Great, brought his lover Hephaestion home for dinner.

Although the founders were often good classicists, they took as a model for the American republic the pre-Julius Caesar Roman Republic. For the record, our word democracy comes from the Greek demokratia, which means, literally, “people-power.” History’s only democracy was instituted at Athens in 508 B.C. by Cleisthenes. Every male citizen over eighteen years of age was a citizen, able to gather with his fellows on a hillside, where, after listening to various demagogues, he could vote with the other citizens on matters of war and peace and anything else that happened to be introduced that day. In 322 B.C. Alexander of Macedon conquered Athens and eliminated their democracy, which was never again to be tried by a proper state (as opposed to an occasional New England town meeting). Current publicists for the American Empire have convinced themselves that if other nations, living as they do in utter darkness, would only hold numerous elections at enormous cost to their polity’s plutocracy (or to the benign empire back of these exercises), perfect government would henceforward obtain as The People had Been Heard: one million votes for Saddam Hussein, let us say, to five against. Although the Athenian system might now be revived through technology, voting through some sort of “safe” cybersystem, no one would wish an uneducated, misinformed majority to launch a war, much less do something meaningful like balance the budget of Orange County, California. One interesting aspect of the Athenian system was the rotation of offices. When Pericles told Sophocles, the poet-dramatist, that it was his turn to be postmaster general or some such dull office, Sophocles said he was busy with a play and that, besides, politics was not his business. To which the great Pericles responded, the man who says politics is no business of his has no business.

Hekate in Byzantium (also Constantinople, now Istanbul, Turkey) It is probable that Hekate had an established presence in Byzantium from a time before the city was founded. Here Hekate was invoked by her title of Phosphoros by the local population for her help when Philip of Macedon (father of Alexander the Great) attacked the city in 340 BCE. Petridou summarises the account given by Hsych of Miletus: "Hecate, or so we are told, assisted them by sending clouds of fire in a moonless rainy night; thus, she made it possible for them to see clearly and fight back against their enemies. By some sort of divine instigation the dogs began barking[164], thus awakening the Byzantians and putting them on a war footing."[165] There is a slightly alternative account of the attack, recorded by Eustathios. He wrote that Philip of Macedon's men had dug secret tunnels from where they were preparing a stealth attack. However, their plans were ruined when the goddess, as Phosphoros, created mysterious torchlight which illuminated the enemies. Philip and his men fled, and the locals subsequently called the place where this happened Phosphorion. Both versions attribute the successful defence of the city to the goddess as Phosphoros. In thanksgiving, a statue of Hekate, holding two torches, was erected in Byzantium soon after. The support given by the goddess in battle brings to mind a line from Hesiod’s Theogony: “And when men arm themselves for the battle that destroys men, then the goddess is at hand to give victory and grant glory readily to whom she will.” [166] A torch race was held on the Bosphorus each year, in honour of a goddess which, in light of the above story, is likely to have been Phosphoros. Unfortunately, we have no evidence to clarify who the goddess the race was dedicated to was. Other than Phosphoros, it is possible that the race was instead held in honour of the Thracian Bendis, Ephesian Artemis or Hekate. All of which were also of course conflated with one another at times. Artemis and Hekate both share the title of Phosphoros. Bendis is never explicitly named in texts, but a torch race in her honour was held in Athens after her cult was introduced there in the fifth-century BCE. Likewise, torch-races took place in honour of Artemis. There is also a theory that the name Phosphoros may have become linguistically jumbled due to a linguistic influence from Thrace becoming Bosphorus in the process[167]. The Bosphorus is the narrow, natural strait connecting the Black Sea to the Sea of Marmara, separating the European side of Istanbul from the Asian side. The goddess with two torches shown on coins of the time is unnamed. She is usually identified as Artemis but could equally represent Hekate.

BABYLON, PERSIA, JUNE 323BC     The man’s head moved back and forth as he lay in the bed. His lips moved, trying to form words, though no sound came out. He opened his bloodshot eyes at the feel of someone’s touch on his sweating forehead. A cool cloth gently dabbed at his face.   “Is that better my King?” a voice enquired. Alexander ‘the great’ of Macedon opened his red eyes again and struggled to focus with blurred vision on the face peering down at him.

Axioms are often cherished long after reason would counsel their abandonment.

That the Roman empire was, like all its predecessors, a form of extortion by force, an enriching of well-connected Romans (who “make a desolation and call it peace”) at the expense of hapless conquered peoples, would also not have carried much weight with most readers. Hadn’t Philip of Macedon’s first conquest been the seizure of the Balkan gold mines? Hadn’t Alexander’s last planned campaign been for the sake of controlling the lucrative Arabian spice trade? How could anyone demur over such things? What would be the point of holding out against the nature of man and of the universe itself? Augustus set up in the midst of the Roman Forum a statue of himself that loomed eleven times the size of a normal man,10 and similarly awesome statues were erected in central shrines throughout the empire. Augustus was not a normal man; he was a god, deserving of worship. And, like all gods, he was terrifying.

Darius the third, emperor of Persia, had two hundred thousand soldiers under his command. Bactrians, Arachosians, Scythians. Some Greek mercenaries. On the other side, thirty-five thousand soldiers, and Alexander of Macedon. Alexander the Great. Five Persians to every Macedonian. It should have been a slaughter. But Alexander pulled so much of the enemy out to the flank that a gap opened in the middle of the Persian lines. Alexander called his men to form a wedge, and leading with his own cavalry, he pushed through and headed straight for the emperor. There were vast forces to either side, surrounding him. But it didn’t matter, because he saw how to reach Darius. Alexander saw something no one else had seen. These people? This little faction of the OPA? Between Earth and Mars and me, we outnumber them. We outgun them. All this has happened because someone saw an opportunity that no one else did. They had the audacity to strike where no one else would even have considered an attack. That’s the power of audacity, and if a general is lucky and strong-minded, they can take that advantage and keep the enemy on their back foot forever.

The attitude of city-state Greeks to this sub-Homeric enclave was one of genial and sophisticated contempt. They regarded Macedonians in general as semi-savages, uncouth of speech and dialect, retrograde in their political institutions, negligible as fighters, and habitual oath-breakers, who dressed in bear-pelts and were much given to deep and swinish potations, tempered with regular bouts of assassination and incest. In a more benevolent mood, Athenians would watch the attempts of the Argead court to Hellenize itself with the patronizing indulgence of some blue-blooded duke called upon to entertain a colonial sugar-baron.

The three main takeaways you should learn –   1. You should be able to identify Classical and Romantic Play in other people, and their natural motivations. It has immense predictive power.   2. You should be able to identify what situations you are playing Romantically, and what situations you are playing Classically. You should always know which is which.   3. If you’re playing Romantically, you absolutely must learn when to stop and shift gears to Classical. Contrast George Washington, Otto von Bismarck, Mustafa Kemal, Deng Xiaoping, and Tokugawa Ieyasu with Hideyoshi Toyotomi, Napoleon Bonaparte, Adolf Hitler, Alexander of Macedon, etc. Choosing “Romantic Play indefinitely” has, historically, a very predictable outcome.   Please study this thoroughly. This concept is incredibly useful, and potentially life-changing.

Behind the 'Abbasid Caliphate of Baghdad we find the Ummayad Caliphate of Damascus, and behind that a thousand years of Hellenic intrusion, beginning with the career of Alexander of Macedon in the latter half of the fourth century B.C., followed by the Greek Seleucid monarchy in Syria, Pompey's campaigns and the Roman conquest, and only ending with the Oriental revanche of the warriors of early Islam in the seventh century after Christ.

were still being worshiped when Alexander of Macedon conquered the region more than 3,000 years later.