Alexander the Great Neelesh

Question 1

Alexander's Empire at its Greatest 

Today Alexander has become great. Although we had not heard of his many deeds before, rumor has it that he never attended the royal academy. We did not hesitate and with Alexander's great strategy we gracefully won. He has proven himself Great because of his strategy that was able to bring Persia to her knees  in two battles, both Issus and Granicus. His great strategy was shown in the battle of Granicus when he surprised the army by breaking the lines with our finest men, myself included, and then the other men charged making the troops disintegrate and the foul King Darius fled, effectively defeating an army that held 5,000 more trained men than his. Even when he was at his worst drinking, killing fellow generals he was still very charismatic and cunning when he successfully stopped the Opis revolution that was caused by the rift between us Macedonians and the Persians, by quickly creating a concord where the men of all nationalities sipped from the same cup and, being very charismatic, convinced us to put aside our differences and become a real army. In this way he has shown himself to be cunning by breaching the rift between different nationalities, and shown to be charismatic, which are both qualities of a good leader. One of his many conquests was his triumph at Hydaspes in India, against the savage king Porus, we managed to defeat his army and his elephants with our brilliant army and his unwavering courage, and then he showed what a generous king he was by sparing his life and even granting him land. In this way he has shown multiple qualities of his greatness, he is both a great leader, a brilliant strategist, and has a compassionate heart.      

Question 2

Lighthouse of Pharos

These new cultures that I have interacted and met over my time with Alexander has aided this empire by bringing new ideas and the blending of cultures has made a new culture now being penned, Hellenistic. Because of Alexander's conquest of most if not all of the known world, a new culture having aspects of Egyptian, Greek, Indian, and lastly Persian has created this new, rich culture that had Alexander not been there would never have flourished. A prime example of this would be the great city of Alexandria, I have heard stories but they say that the city is breathtaking, they say that there is a huge lighthouse named the Pharos that guides ships to the bay and illuminates the entire night! The movement of new ideas can be clearly seen with the Lighthouse because it was Alexander himself that conquered and named the city Alexandria, but also, he was the one who commissioned his general Ptolemy to create it. Through this we can see how a man from Macedonia took an idea and created it in Egypt, miles away from Macedonia, because of Alexander the Great's conquest of Egypt. Besides architecture, Hellenism allowed many scholastic achievements to be made in science and technology such as the great scholar Eratosthenes who some say has proven the size of the earth using numbers! Another mathematician Euclid has written a book about shapes and numbers that is translated into three languages. This last statement shows that without any doubt Hellenistic culture has allowed thoughts and ideas to spread in multiple languages, as in Euclidean's case, to help us understand the world around us, and help us better our life, as in Ptolemy's case when he created the Lighthouse. Not to forget our great leader Alexander has created this Hellenistic culture with his conquest of the known world and subsequently spread ideas all over his empire.

Question 3

I think that Alexander the Great can be compared to Paul Revere, which was the man who alerted all the townspeople on the eve of the Revolutionary War to gather up their armory for the British were coming. I think that Alexander the Great can be compared to him because history has seemingly glorified both their images as being very heroic and skipping out any other details of their life. For example many people know that Alexander the Great conquered all these places and did good things, but many people seem to overlook the fact that he was bipolar, drank excessively, ordered hundreds and thousands of civilians killed and on top of that killed his best friend and main general over a trivial matter when he was drinking. Likewise, while Paul Revere did not do things that were as bad as Alexander, many people forget that there was two other people besides him that went on the midnight ride through the countryside, William Dawes and Samuel Prescott which he did not give credit to. Also another point of comparison between these two important is that they both did their own separate deeds on a sort of blind, dumb, luck. For example when Alexander conquered parts of Asia he was only interested in achieving more land and exploring Asia, the Hellenistic period and the blending of cultures was only blind luck that happened after he died and his empire was split up between his generals. Likewise Paul Revere was one of the many that alerted the townspeople and actually did not make the full ride, many believe the reason we only remember Paul Revere is because of his reputation of him being in the Boston Tea Party that made Henry Longfellow make a poem about him. Others speculate that he was the only one in the poem because his name was easier to rhyme than Dawes and Prescott, which is obviously dumb luck, so Revere was therefore lionized and made to have a bigger role than he actually had in the Revolution, which is exactly how Alexander the Great was lionized and made to have a much bigger role in Hellenistic culture than he really had. In both these ways these two historical men have been lionized and become greater than what they truly were.

Burke Justin, . N.p.. Web. 25 Sep 2013. <http://www.personal.psu.edu/users/j/r/jrb5453/ART 002/assignment7.htm>.

. N.p.. Web. 25 Sep 2013. <http://www.usc.edu/dept/LAS/arc/ugaritlight/ugarit/Pages/The Investigation/AncientLighthouses.htm>.

Knox, Skip. N.p.. Web. 25 Sep 2013. <http://europeanhistory.boisestate.edu/westciv/alexander/06.shtml>.

Brown, Bryan. "Alexander the great: in the fourth century b.c, this 20-something military genius conquered half the known world." Junior Scholastic 9 May 2011: 20+. General OneFile. Web. 26 Sept. 2013.

(http://go.galegroup.com/ps/retrieve.do?sgHitCountType=None&sort=DA-SORT&inPS=true&prodId=GPS&userGroupName=avlr&tabID=T003&searchId=R9&resultListType=RESULT_LIST&contentSegment=&searchType=BasicSearchForm&currentPosition=6&contentSet=GALE%7CA256889501&&docId=GALE|A256889501&docType=GALE&role=ITOF)

Gabriel, Richard. "Alexander the monster: historians say the battlefield atrocities of the Macedonian king were part of his brilliant military strategy. But were they really born of his personality?" MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military HistorySummer 2013: 38+. General OneFile. Web. 26 Sept. 2013.

http://go.galegroup.com/ps/retrieve.do?sgHitCountType=None&sort=DA-SORT&inPS=true&prodId=GPS&userGroupName=avlr&tabID=T003&searchId=R10&resultListType=RESULT_LIST&contentSegment=&searchType=BasicSearchForm&currentPosition=1&contentSet=GALE%7CA333618542&&docId=GALE|A333618542&docType=GALE&role=ITOF

Untereker, J., J. Kossuth, and B. Kelsey. N.p.. Web. 25 Sep 2013. <http://wso.williams.edu/~junterek/india.htm>.

Jed Untereker, J. K.. N.p.. Web. 25 Sep 2013. <http://wso.williams.edu/~junterek/>.


Edmonds, Molly.  "What happened to the two other men on Paul Revere\u0027s ride?"  12 

March 2008.  HowStuffWorks.com. <http://history.howstuffworks.com/history-vs-myth/paul-

revere-ride.htm>  25 September 2013.



Beck, Roger B., Linda Black, Larry S. Krieger, Phillip C. Naylor, and Dahia Ibo Shabaka. Holt McDougal World History. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 2012. 143-144. eBook. 

N.d. Photograph. n.p.  
http://callisto.ggsrv.com/imgsrv/FastFetch/UBER1/ZI-0HVC-2011-MAY09-LASON-22-1

Wikipedia contributors. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 3 Ju. Web. 26 Sep 2013. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:J_S_Copley_-_Paul_Revere.jpg>.  

Dune Jimmy, . N.d. Photograph. n.p.
http://www.touregypt.net/images/touregypt/pharos2.jpg