alternatehistory.com

I bet we get this a lot, but just for fun...

In this timeline Alexander doesn't wreck his liver (that much) with alcohol abuse, and he is a bit luckier with his genetics, living to a ripe old age.

I know what Toynbee would say: that he would become a benevolent constitutional monarch that ruled lands stretching from Italy to China.

But the accounts I've read (in the book What If) describe an Alexander that would have engaged in endless cycles of ravaging lands to fund further expeditions to...ravage more lands. He wouldn't have been that concerned with administrative issues, only with militarism.

Where would he have reached? Arabia? South India? Would he have changed his goals and decided to work on preserving his empire rather than humiliating rivals?

According to Wikipedia, Alexander had plans for an invasion of Arabia before he died. It's safe to say that he would have gone by sea and conquered the coastal tribes rather than march across the desert and risk further rebellion by his troops. So that's what he does, an expedition that is concluded 4 years later in 319 BC.

I assume that next, Alexander would focus on training more Hellenized Persians in the way of the phalanx, which he had been doing OTL. So he does, and gets bored and takes them to India, conquering the Nanda Empire (precursor to the Mauryans). At this point he learns that the wisdom that he had taken for granted (India was basically the end of the world) was a lie, and that China and Malaysia existed, though they were too far for him to bother with.

So that's the empire he ends up with at the time of his death in 296 BC. Arabia and India, and it's far more unified than what he had in OTL since he gives up the mad dreams of conquest eventually. He has also trained a successor, his son Alexander IV (assassinated in OTL), for control of the Empire.

Will Alex IV become merely a puppet of Seleucus, Antigonus the One-Eyed, Kassander, and Ptolemy?
Top