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Alexander
Alexander the Great
Introduction
But Alexander of Macedon and Napoleon Buonaparte were poets on a throne, and the part they played
in history was not that of incompetents and weakling.
There are times when Nature gifts the poetic temperament with a peculiar grasp of the conditions of
action and irresistible tendency to create their poems
not in ink and on paper, but in living characters and
on the great canvas of the world. Such men become
portents and wonders whom posterity admires or hates
but can only imperfectly understand. Like Joan of Arc
or Mazzini and Garibaldi, they save a dying nation
or like Napoleon and Alexander they dominate the
wo
Notes
Plutarch
Plutarch was one of the last classical Greek historians. He was
born around AD 46 at Chaeronea in Boetia, and died sometime
after AD 120. He was a student in the School of Athens, became a
philosopher, and wrote a large number of essays and dialogues on
philosophical, scientific and literary subjects (the Moralia). We
know that he traveled widely in Egypt and went to Rome. Plutarch
wrote his historical works relatively late in life, and his Parallel Lives
of eminent Greeks and Romans is probably his best known and
most influential work. As he states, his intention in the Lives was to
write biography, not history as such, and this is reflected in the
cho
Uprising at Opis
Alexander left Susa in the spring 324. With his light troops
he boarded the fleet of Nearchus and went down towards the
sea, with the intention of exploring the Persian Gulf. In the
meantime, Hephestion was to lead the main body of the troops
to Opis, where Alexander planned to meet him at the beginning of the summer.
Opis owed its importance to its geographical situation,
which is why Alexander had chosen it to be the centre of his
military administration. He had built a gigantic camp which
served as a depot, arsenal and war machine storage. Here the
young recruits coming from Greece were enrolled; and from
here they set off to join their garrison loc
Resource name: /E-Library/Disciples/Kireet Joshi/English/Alexander the great/The Soul of a Conqueror.htm
Alexander
The Soul of a Conqueror
(A portrait of Alexander by Will Durant
The intellectual career of Aristotle, after he left his royal
pupil, paralleled the military career of Alexander; both lives
were expressions of conquest and synthesis. Perhaps it was the
philosopher who instilled into the mind of the youth that
ardor for unity which gave some grandeur to Alexander's victories; more probably that resolve descended to him from his
father's ambitions, and was fused into a passion by his maternal blood. If we would understand Alexander we must always
remember that he bore in his veins the drunken vigor of Philip
and the barbaric int
Illumination, Heroism and Harmony
Preface
The task of preparing teaching-learning
material for value oriented education is enormous.
There is, first, the idea that value-oriented education should
be exploratory rather than prescriptive, and that the teaching learning material should provide to the learners a growing
experience of exploration.
Secondly, it is rightly contended that the proper inspiration to turn to value-orientation is provided by biographies,
autobiographical accounts, personal anecdotes, epistles, short
poems, stories of humour, stories of human interest, brief passages filled with pregnant meanings, reflective short essays
written in well-chise
Resource name: /E-Library/Disciples/Kireet Joshi/English/Alexander the great/After Alexander^s Death.htm
After Alexanders death
We see the greatness of Alexander as a whole, only when we
contemplate the effects of his life work on successive periods of
history. In the few years of his reign he actually put the ancient
world on a new basis. The whole subsequent course of history,
the political, the economic and cultural life of after times, cannot be understood apart from the career of Alexander. John
Gustav Droysen wrote: "The name of Alexander betokens1 the
end of one world epoch, and the beginning of another." (...)
Through the unexpected early death of Alexander the leaders
of the army present at Babylon were suddenly faced by extreme-
ly difficult problems.
Acknowledgements
This monograph is part of a series on Value-oriented Education
centered on three values: Illumination, Heroism and Harmony.
The research, preparation and publication of the monographs that
form part of this series are the result of the cooperation of the following
members of the research team of the Sri Aurobindo International Institute of Educational Research, Auroville:
Abha, Alain, Anne, Ashatit, Auralee, Bhavana, Christine, Claude,
Deepti, Don, Frederick, Ganga, Jay Singh, Jean-Yves, Jossi,
Jyoti Madhok, Kireet Joshi, Krishna, Lala, Lola, Mala, Martin,
Mirajyoti, Namrita, Olivier, Pala, Pierre, Serge, Shailaja, Shankaran, Sha
Resource name: /E-Library/Disciples/Kireet Joshi/English/Alexander the great/Alexander as a General.htm
Alexander as a general, leader of men
and king of Asia
When Alexander died, he was not yet
thirty-three. He was
carried off at the very height of his youthful vigour, like his ancestor and model Achilles.! He had not completed the thirteenth year of his reign. A retrospect of his gigantic life work
brings before us a personality of quite unique genius, a marvellous mixture of demonic passion and sober clearness of
judgement. In this iron-willed man of action, who was a realist
in policy if anyone ever was, beneath the
surface lay a nonrational element: for example, his 'longing' for the undiscovered and the mysterious, which, coupled with his will to conque
Resource name: /E-Library/Disciples/Kireet Joshi/English/Alexander the great/Alexander the Great.htm
Alexander young
Alexander the Great
Alexander was born on the sixth day of the month Hecatombaeon,1 which the Macedonians call Lous, the same day on
which the temple of Artemis at Ephesus was burned down. It
was this coincidence which inspired Hegesias of Magnesia to
utter a joke which was flat enough to have put the fire out: he
said it was no wonder the temple of Artemis was destroyed,
since the goddess was busy attending to the birth of Alexander.
But those of the Magi who were then at Ephesus interpreted
the destruction of the temple as the portent of a far greater disaster, and they
ran through the city beating their faces and crying out that day had brou
Resource name: /E-Library/Disciples/Kireet Joshi/English/Alexander the great/The Battle with Porus.htm
Three anecdotes of Alexanders life
and conquests
The Battle with Porus
Before leaving Nikaia, Alexander had sent messengers to all
the Indian princes residing in the lower valley of Cophen to
invite them to recognize him as their suzerain and to come to
pay him homage. A few of them had answered favourably,
notably Taxiles, with whom Alexander already had friendly
relations. But many others had refused. Because of this,
Alexander was obliged to open a way by force to the Indus.
Alexander drove his troops to the border of the Pauravas.
Before crossing, he sent a messenger to Porus inviting him to
submit himself to his tutelage.1 But Porus was not a