Aristotle’s (apocryphal) advice to Alexander the Great on Persian elites (2013)
purplemotes.net
purplemotes.net
When Alexander tried to enter Afghanistan he was met with fierce resistance. Didn't matter what he did, he couldn't quench the uprisings and could not conquer the country. After losing a lot of men, he wrote to Aristotle for advise. Aristotle asked Alexander for a sample of Afghan soil to be shipped to him. Upon receipt of the soil samples, Aristotle laid them under the Court carpet and very soon started noticing that men of the court started fighting and killing each other. They became defiant to authority and that led Aristotle to the conclusion, that there is something unique and bizarre w/ the Afghan soil that makes men fight to the end ... and in a way .. remain as an unconquerable nation. He wrote back to Alexander to with draw from Afghanistan, and which he did.
To this day, from Alexander to British to Russia .. Afghanistan has remained pretty defiant to foreign occupation. We will see how long the US will stay there.
[note: The above story was passed onto us Afghans for generations and other than referencing my grandpa who is no longer w/ us, I unfortunately can't provide any references. So take it w/ a grain of salt.]
But that being said, it's also worth mentioning that that Bactria was one of the most prominent piece of Alexander's legacy, and Alexandria on the Oxus (the remains of which lies somewhere in the north of Afghanistan) was one of its primary cities: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ai-Khanoum
It seems that somehow things were settled and Afghanistan managed to become the heart of one of Alexander's remaining kingdoms: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greco-Bactrian_Kingdom
You can't really have such impressive results when there is little control under your hands!
1. After travelling for a while, I believe that the air and nature of the region DO affect your brain and seems to be in sync with the people in that region.
2. I think this is more of a tale for cultural resilience. If the elderly teaches the young that they'll find until the end; they'll fight until the end. Look at Palestine.
Because they had no-one to pilot the vessel they'd sent out distress calls and my Dad's ship went to aid. Now, technically, this counts as [some nautical term for salvageable rescue] and the crew of the rescuing ship is allowed a proportion of the cargo, so they'd have made quite a lot of money. So they're trying to get an officer swung over there in a swing to board the vessel, but can't because the seas are too choppy, so they end up telling the ship to follow theirs and they get them back to port (but forfeit the rescue money as they didn't actually provide anyone to pilot the vessel).
It gets in to harbour and a pilot goes out to take the vessel in (this is standard practice, local pilots always take a ship into port). He sits down in the chair, feels under the chair, thinks, hmm, that's odd and looks underneath only to discover another bomb!
Luckily that one was disposed of safely.
I thought this was a load of bollocks so I went home and researched it. Wikipedia confidently told me there had been no such bombings or conflict between nationalist Chinese and the Communists in the 60s. It even had a list of all the incidents, and no ship bomb is on there. I subsequently told my Dad it was a load of bollocks, and he got quite upset and ended up emailing me a photo of his log book to show he was on the boat in question, the only evidence he had.
Once I had the name of the boat, the Loch Gowan, suddenly I could google more confidently and lo and behold:
https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1310&dat=19661114&id=...
https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1314&dat=19661113&id=...
https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1734&dat=19661114&id=...
Turns out he'd exaggerated a couple of details, but mostly, it was true. The captain had been killed, the 2nd officer at least injured, the 3rd officer wasn't experienced enough to pilot the ship.
Moral of the story, just because the internet can't back it up, doesn't mean it's not true! And it turns out my Dad doesn't always fib. And, wow, Google has load of old newspapers scanned and OCR'd.
Thanks for sharing the story.
A great quote from the book: "The situation we are faced with can be summed up roughly as followes. Inspired by the example of Theopompus and his pioneering Philippica (a history of Greece written around the career of Philip II of Macedon, Alexander's father), more than twenty contemporaries wrote histories or other kinds of work on Alexander. Not one of these histories survives in the original. Of the many letters ascribed to Alexander, just one extract of one of them has a better than average claim to being genuine. The earliest surviving connected narrative account of Alexander's campaigns was composed in the first century BCE, some three hundred years after the events it relates; it is, besides, only incompletely preserved. Thus the sole connected narrative to have survived complete is a third century CE epitome, or abrigment, of a first-century BCE work in Latin by a Romanized Gaul. Finally, what is generally today accounted the best of the more or less completely surviving histories of Alexander was written by a Greek philosopher-statesman in the second century CE, probably during the reigh of the philhellinic emperor Hadrian. In short, 'it is as if the history of Tudor England could only be recovered from Macaulay's essays and the histories of Hume the philospher' (Robin Lane Fox)."
I'll admit, being an American I don't quite grasp the full context of that quote but you can get the gist. Basically, I wouldn't take this letter for actually being true (which the title rightly states as being apocryphal) and rather read take it in its own context of someone, probably a much later Arabic (edit: or Persian) writer using the story of Alexander as a means of conveying their thoughts.
Often, some claim that Jesus of Nazareth didn't exist because we have no documented evidence of him from his lifetime. But Alexander was viewed (in his time) as conquring the whole world, and we still don't have written evidence from his life.
I met a traveller from an antique land Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed: And on the pedestal these words appear: ‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!' Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
Unless it's a matter of speech, he conquered about 3.5% of the world's land mass and about a third of the (estimated) population, neither of which put you in the top 3 and couldn't be considered the 'whole world' either. By land mass it's not even in the top 20 largest empires ever. He was unique not for the greatest empire but rather for being so primely responsible for the massive empire he did create and in doing it all in about 12 years, the British empire for example by comparison has no single persons who were so primely responsible with many leaders emerging over hundreds of years, combined with his personal role in battles, all of which ending in victory, makes him the stuff of legends.
But regardless it strikes me as a pretty ridiculous claim to make, (especially today) when an estimated 70% of the world population lived in places (they obviously know) that weren't conquered by Alexander. After all there is no 'the' known world. You can find many millions of people who have not a clue of the world beyond a few miles away and you'll thereby find many different people who each rule their known world.
It is definitely not the case that "history is (always) written by the victors".
This statement greatly distorts the truth. Almost all extant Greek philosophical texts can be traced to 17 Byzantine manuscripts.
The book reviewed here has much more information about the transmission of Greek philosophy (the review is well-worth reading too):
Losing- failing to get your way or being destroyed, is an obvious state.
What we call winning, which amounts to getting your way (often at the expense of others) is actually a shitty compromise.
Conversion of the 'enemy' is the real best outcome. Not only do you get your way, but you have more momentum, cooperation, ideas and resources working for your objective afterwards. This should always be your goal when you're "fighting" with other people, and anything else is a sort of failure.
I'm fairly sure that is also in the Art of War too.
If by 'won them over', you mean they threatened anyone who opposed them with terrible consequences, and rewarded those who supported them then you are correct. Of course everyone from ISIL to the USA does varying degrees of the same thing.
Alexander became accustomed and adopted the Persian lifestyle, to the point where his countrymen started resenting him, because they didn't feel enough like conquerers. He married the daughter of Darius. Most conquerors at the time, would probably kill them on the spot, just to make a point.
Take the Egyptians with the Israelis for example, 400 years of slavery and they were totally set apart. Not assimilated at all. Same with Greeks and Turks, 400 years of slavery but no assimilation. There are many examples and although the enslaved want to believe that this is because of them, it's not... It's because the upper hand didn't allow/want any kind of assimilation.
Alexander was a very efficient slaughterer, but he was much more than that. At 300 BC. what more can we ask?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrus_the_Great (note the date)
Also, when the conquistadors went about they would often find warring parties and play sides. This made it easy to divide and conquer and gain cooperation of some locals and eventually see their culture and values prevail. Kind of the same William the conqueror did (kill the nobility/chieftains and let the cooperating peasants live)
The thing is that Alexander's biggest proportion of conquests were the former Persian Empire's - lands of various people which all their life lived under some foreign rule. So there was a change in power, now here's this new ambitious and charismatic leader offering some of the most nicest conditions imaginable if you just submit. Considering Alexander's record of winnings and therefore - the chances of a revolt against him, is it that hard to believe that people preferred to stay put?
And what about days when not everything is well and nice? Drought, famines, storms, sickness. When something irritating happens people tend to blame leaders. Suddenly the situation doesn't feel nice, no matter what you do as a leader. What do you do then? Go home and stop leading?
Just think about us. We probably live in the richest, most peacefully, culturally most widely developed time of human history, yet we don't feel happy about it. Many people would argue that another leader might be better for them than the current one. So I would argue that even if one lives a happy, good life, one is not so happy about it to fully trust the leader.
This is not to say that one religion is truly better than other - all religions are equally unprovable so dont bother. Hacketnews is about computer science, not religious propaganda.