Alexander the Nice conquered an enormous empire that stretched from the Balkans to modern-day Pakistan. But when the Macedonian king had turned his consideration westward, it is attainable he would have conquered Rome, too, feasibly smiting the Roman Empire earlier than it had an opportunity to come up.
So why did not Alexander the Nice attempt to conquer Italy? The reply could also be that he died earlier than he obtained the prospect.
The king of Macedonia dominated from 336 B.C. to 323 B.C., when he died of an unknown sickness in Babylon at age 32. Alexander’s empire fell aside shortly after his dying. Had he not died, nevertheless, it is attainable that Alexander would have focused Rome and, together with his substantial forces, defeated the Everlasting Metropolis.
Some historic texts counsel that Alexander the Nice was planning a army marketing campaign within the West that concerned conquering elements of Italy, amongst different areas alongside the Mediterranean. The Roman historian Quintus Curtius Rufus, who lived within the first century A.D., claimed that Alexander the Nice had deliberate a sequence of conquests that, if profitable, would have expanded his empire all the best way to what’s now the Strait of Gibraltar. Alexander deliberate to construct 700 ships to help this invasion, Rufus famous. Different historic writers made related claims.
“The Romans had been satisfied that Alexander would have tried the conquest of Rome, however for contemporary historians, it’s unattainable to say,” Nikolaus Overtoom, an affiliate professor of historical past at Washington State College, instructed Dwell Science in an e-mail.
Associated: The place is Alexander the Nice’s tomb?
Some historic writers claimed that after Alexander died, his secretary, Eumenes, gave certainly one of Alexander’s senior generals, Perdiccas, plans that included the conquest of a part of Italy, Robin Waterfield, an unbiased scholar with a background in classics, instructed Dwell Science in an e-mail.
“Now, some students imagine that the [plans] should not real — maybe a forgery by Eumenes, or maybe the complete story arose years, even a long time later,” Waterfield mentioned. Nonetheless, “I believe the steadiness of proof is that they are real.”
How would the invasion have gone?
It is finally unclear what would have occurred if Alexander the Nice had tried to invade Italy. The Romans had been so strongly satisfied that Alexander would have tried the invasion that the historian Livy (lived circa 59 B.C. to A.D. 17) wrote a textual content speculating how the invasion would have ended, with Livy predicting that the Romans would have defeated Alexander. Livy famous that Alexander’s uncle, Alexander I of Epirus, who dominated a kingdom of the identical identify, tried to beat a part of Italy however was killed in battle in 331 B.C.
Waterfield famous that descriptions of Alexander’s plans point out he would have invaded different areas within the Mediterranean earlier than touchdown on the Italian mainland. This implies that Alexander’s forces would have been overwhelming, even when the Romans had any allies of their struggle in opposition to him.
“By the time he reached Italy and confronted the Roman Republic he would have had the assets of the total Mediterranean at his command — an unlimited mercenary military, and he’d have commanded all the provide routes,” Waterfield mentioned. The “solely factor that might have stopped him was inside insurrection or mutiny by his Macedonian troops.”
Philip Freeman, a humanities professor at Pepperdine College in California, mentioned that if Alexander had invaded Italy, he probably would have succeeded, noting that there have been a lot of Greek colonies in Italy that may have supported Alexander’s rule.
“The Romans had been powerful and would have resisted, however they weren’t but the highly effective power of later centuries,” Freeman instructed Dwell Science in an e-mail. “If Alexander had invaded, I believe there would have been no Roman Empire since Roman energy would have been nipped in the bud, so to talk.”