Alexander the Great
King of Macedon, conqueror of the Persian Empire (356–323 BCE)
Also known as: Alexander, Alexander III of Macedon
Alexander the Great (356–323 BCE) was the Macedonian king whose conquests created the Hellenistic world and ended the independent Persian Empire. Quigley uses him as the textbook case of a peripheral state imposing a Universal Empire on a civilization's core — a structural pattern he applies elsewhere to Rome's relation to Greece and to later imperial conquests.
The Hellenistic conquest
Quigley's military-historical narrative gives Alexander a central place in the development of siege artillery and combined-arms warfare. "His son Alexander the Great had stone throwers at Halicarnassus in 334. Two years later, at the famous siege of Tyre, Alexander had stone throwers strong enough to shake the walls of the city, if we are to believe Diodorus Siculus" (WS 318). The Phoenician city-states' resistance was "not destroyed completely until Alexander the Great captured Tyre in 332" (WS 217). After his death "in 323… the great empire of Alexander the Great had been divided among three of Alexander's generals, Antigonus in Europe, Seleucus in Iraq and the east, and Ptolemy in Egypt" — and the resulting Hellenistic period of "internecine warfare" continued "to the Roman sack of Corinth in 146 B.C." (WS 320, 340).
Peripheral conquest as a civilizational pattern
In The Evolution of Civilizations Alexander illustrates Quigley's repeated point that civilizations are often consolidated not from the core but from the peripheral state that absorbs them. Mesopotamian civilization "had sufficient vitality to put up a vigorous resistance to Alexander's invasion before it also succumbed in 333 B.C." (EoC 223). The early Phoenician commerce "of the eastern Mediterranean" was "destroyed by Alexander the Great in 332 B.C." (EoC 240). The chains of Universal-Empire imposition that Quigley traces — Macedon over the Greek city-states, Rome over the Hellenistic world, the Carolingians over the Latin West — all share the structural feature of consolidation from a peripheral base.
Cited in
- weapons-systems-political-stability · p. 217 Quigley
It was not destroyed completely until Alexander the Great captured Tyre in 332 and Rome won the Second Punic War of 218–201.
- weapons-systems-political-stability · p. 318 Quigley
His son Alexander the Great had stone throwers at Halicarnassus in 334. Two years later, at the famous siege of Tyre, Alexander had stone throwers strong enough to shake the walls of the city.
- weapons-systems-political-stability · p. 320 Quigley
By 315 the great empire of Alexander the Great had been divided among three of Alexander's generals, Antigonus in Europe, Seleucus in Iraq and the east, and Ptolemy in Egypt.
- weapons-systems-political-stability · p. 340 Quigley
The rise and world conquests of Philip II and Alexander the Great from 359 to 323; and (4) the Hellenistic period of internecine warfare from the death of Alexander in 323 to the Roman sack of Corinth in 146 B.C.
- evolution-of-civilizations · p. 223 Quigley
Had sufficient vitality to put up a vigorous resistance to Alexander's invasion before it also succumbed in 333 B.C.
- evolution-of-civilizations · p. 240 Quigley
Of the eastern Mediterranean until destroyed by Alexander the Great in 332 B.C.