Quote:
Originally Posted by Aegir
2) Yet he did retreat from India.
And for the next time, please don't argue with anything along the lines of "I don't know about that... [followed by non-academically supported flowery remark]" with so much certainty. Treat every discussion that emerges inside this thread as the chance to cross-check with others.
And for the last time, don't confuse any fictionalized version of a historical figure with the real world's version.
|
One of Alexander's problems was that he didn't know the word "retreat". He only retreated from India because he was faced with his entire army mutinying on him. And just afterwards he made the monumentally stupid move of marching through the Makran desert, during which half his army died. Why did he do it? Because he hadn't "conquered" it yet. Furthermore, he had heard Cyrus the Great had failed to march across the Makran, and wanted to upstage him.
Alexander was not a man with a shred of humility, he was a megalomaniac. It's highly probable that by the end of his life he thought of himself as a god. Read any historical account and you'll see that this was his personality.
India was the only time he retreated from a fight, and he didn't retreat because he thought he couldn't win. He retreated because his soldiers mutinied. Alexander was a military genius, but he also had a large dose of Hubris. Early on in his career he might have been willing to retreat, but by India he (a bit like Napoleon) had won so many times, many of which against overwhelming odds and numbers, that he did not think he could lose.
This is not the "fictional" version of Alexander. This is the "factual" version of him. A man increasingly divorced from reality, obsessed with his own godhood. Don't forget, this was a man who thought it was his destiny to
conquer the world. You don't conquer the world by retreating.