I had a weird dream last night that Alexander of Ancient Macedonia created a big empire that stretched from Greece to India (Egypt included). However he was able to crush the mighty Ancient Persia with just a few thousand men.

Could this actually be possible? I think so.
 
The son of Philip the Great, the greatest king in Macedonian history? Are you talking about that Alexander? I don’t think any Macedonian king could get any further than Philip’s truly great achievement of unifying Greece under Macedonian leadership.
 
The son of Philip the Great, the greatest king in Macedonian history? Are you talking about that Alexander? I don’t think any Macedonian king could get any further than Philip’s truly great achievement of unifying Greece under Macedonian leadership.

Pfft. "Philip the Great"? Quite the impressive conquest of "Greece", what with the Peloponnesus never being brought into the fold and Sparta standing athwart Philip's ambitions. He totally unified it, too, just as the Athenians had done a century before. And we all know how well that ended. Argread propaganda at its finest!

As for the OP, had he not died fighting the Triballians, Dardanians, and Taulantians in his first year on the throne, Alexander probably would have marched eastward on a Persian adventure. Philip II, after all, had been fitting out an army for that purpose and the Isocrateans of Philip's Greek empire were calling for a crusade to free Ionia from Persian despotism. How well Alexander might have fared requires a lot of inferring, as we don't have many sources on the man, but from what we do have we can guess he was fairly intelligent and fairly charismatic, as well as being endowed with some level of military skill. (His being given command of the Macedonian left at Chaeronea at the age of 16, and his competent handling of it, attest to that.) Who knows what might happen if given the opportunity to actually go on an anabasis to free the rest of the Greek world from the tyranny of Achaemenids? He may well have had the skill to defeat the Persians and secure the freedom of the Greek-speaking peoples of Asia Minor.

Which is interesting enough TL fodder by itself! Without getting into ASBisms of a Greco-Macedonian empire extending from the Nile to the Indus.
 
Pfft. "Philip the Great"? Quite the impressive conquest of "Greece", what with the Peloponnesus never being brought into the fold and Sparta standing athwart Philip's ambitions. He totally unified it, too, just as the Athenians had done a century before. And we all know how well that ended. Argread propaganda at its finest!

As for the OP, had he not died fighting the Triballians, Dardanians, and Taulantians in his first year on the throne, Alexander probably would have marched eastward on a Persian adventure. Philip II, after all, had been fitting out an army for that purpose and the Isocrateans of Philip's Greek empire were calling for a crusade to free Ionia from Persian despotism. How well Alexander might have fared requires a lot of inferring, as we don't have many sources on the man, but from what we do have we can guess he was fairly intelligent and fairly charismatic, as well as being endowed with some level of military skill. (His being given command of the Macedonian left at Chaeronea at the age of 16, and his competent handling of it, attest to that.) Who knows what might happen if given the opportunity to actually go on an anabasis to free the rest of the Greek world from the tyranny of Achaemenids? He may well have had the skill to defeat the Persians and secure the freedom of the Greek-speaking peoples of Asia Minor.

Which is interesting enough TL fodder by itself! Without getting into ASBisms of a Greco-Macedonian empire extending from the Nile to the Indus.
Going East? Why would he do that? The Achaemenid Empire was resurgent at that point, as evidenced by its survival for centuries more before eventually falling; and the current Persian Imperial family still claim descent from the Achaemenids. No, Alexander, had he been smart, would have marched west; remember, the Etruscan Kingdom hadn't unified the Italian Peninsula yet, and we're still fighting the Romans. Hell, he might even have been able to ally with the Carthaginians to create an alliance that the Etruscans would have not stood a chance against! I personally think there's a chance Alexander surviving could have butterflied away the United Celtic Kingdom.
 
Going East? Why would he do that? The Achaemenid Empire was resurgent at that point, as evidenced by its survival for centuries more before eventually falling; and the current Persian Imperial family still claim descent from the Achaemenids. No, Alexander, had he been smart, would have marched west; remember, the Etruscan Kingdom hadn't unified the Italian Peninsula yet, and we're still fighting the Romans. Hell, he might even have been able to ally with the Carthaginians to create an alliance that the Etruscans would have not stood a chance against! I personally think there's a chance Alexander surviving could have butterflied away the United Celtic Kingdom.

To hazard a guess? Alexander would've gone east precisely because the odds were long and the forces arrayed against him daunting. If you read between the lines of the accounts that've survived to the present, you get the sense he delighted at throwing himself headlong at the most formidable obstacle task he could find for the sheer joy found in mastering it. Such men usually meet grizzly fates through their eschewing of prudence and restraint: It's what got Alexander himself killed. But the scant few who don't tend to have outsized impacts upon the world, and maybe a Persian adventure would've been one of those impacts.

Rather doubtful, though.
 
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