Alexander The Great Conquest Essay

Alexander the Great’s inexorable ten year conquest of the Persian Empire was a conquest motivated by a number of reasons; finance, revenge, opportunity, expansion and personal zealotry being amongst those debated by modern historians. In his attempts to garner Greek support for the conquest, Alexander veiled his true motivations under the guise of nationalistic revenge. In truth however, Alexander's reasons for the invasion of the Persian Empire lay in financial necessity, territorial expansion, his desire to stand up to his mythological and biological ancestry and the opportunity presented by the relatively weakened state of the Persian empire.

1. Revenge for the Persian invasions of Greece (281) Writing in the first-century BCE,

Writing in the first-century BCE, Diodorus Siculus comments ‘Alexander’s heritage went back to Heracles on his father’s side’ while on his mother’s side, Pausanias suggests he was ‘related to the Aeacids(family of Achilles)’. The heroic deeds and military skills of these heroes were impressed upon him through the education he received from Lysimachus and Aristotle. Plutarch tells us that Lysimachus ‘taught him (Alexander)to think of himself as Achilles’, while his later teacher, Aristotle, tutored the young Alexander in the works of Homer, particularly ‘The Iliad’, which Alexander came to regard at ‘as a guidebook of military excellence’ and ‘took with him Aristotle’s revised version’ on his Persian invasion. For Alexander, the Persian invasion was a platform for him to portray himself as a modern day mythological hero, one who stood up to his mythological ancestry. Diodours Siculus describes his symbolic arrival into Asia: ‘he flung his spear from the ship and fixed it in the ground, and then leapt ashore himself the first of the Macedonians, signifying that he received Asia from the gods as a spear-won prize. He visited the tombs of the heroes Achilles, Ajax, and the rest and honoured them with offerings and other appropriate marks of respect’. Historian Simon Hornblower comments ‘this was a Homeric idea…Alexander genuinely modelled his behaviour on