8 ms·

Aristotle’s (apocryphal) advice to Alexander the Great on Persian elites (2013)

111 points by Thevet 11y ago

lololololololol 11y ago
Wow, is this some sort of religious propaganda because it got too religious too quick (I stopped after reading the story about the Jew being bad and the Zoroastrian being a good Muslim). This is a classical example of confirmation bias - the author is seeking to confirm his theory about the supeemacy of one religion over others and finds positive evidence wherr se deems fit. This is not to say that one religion is truly better than other - all religions are equally unprovable so dont bother. Hacketnews is about computer science, not religious propaganda.
- restalis 11y ago
  I continued reading and found this: "This didactic story probably wasn’t meant to teach that Jews are evil. The ethics ascribed to the Jew are practical ethics undoubtedly common across human tribal groups."
  - Adrock 11y ago
    This defamatory story probably wasn't meant to be defamatory.
- IkmoIkmo 11y ago
  What am I missing here, Alexander predates Islam by some 900 years and Zoroastrianism is a unique religion separate from Islam? How does this make any sense?
- eli_gottlieb 11y ago
  Yeah, I'm not really sure what the point of the page is, other than to tell some apocryphal stories that use cultural groups and historical figures as fairy-tale archetypes.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
droopyEyelids 11y ago
It's interesting that this isn't a larger part of what people think about when they think about 'winnning' in the context of competition with other people. (I blame sports) Losing- failing to get your way or being destroyed, is an obvious state. What we call winning, which amounts to getting your way (often at the expense of others) is actually a shitty compromise. Conversion of the 'enemy' is the real best outcome. Not only do you get your way, but you have more momentum, cooperation, ideas and resources working for your objective afterwards. This should always be your goal when you're "fighting" with other people, and anything else is a sort of failure.
- mc32 11y ago
  The problem is the enemy often resists these efforts. On the other hand, this tactic worked with colonialism. That's essentially what colonial powers did. They won over the people at first by force (conquered) and then via other means they coopted (won over) them and used them to their ends. Then at some point many colonies resented the remote and distanced governance and rebelled.
  - _nedR 11y ago
    >They won over the people at first by force (conquered) and then via other means they and coopted (won over) them and used them to their ends. If by 'won them over', you mean they threatened anyone who opposed them with terrible consequences, and rewarded those who supported them then you are correct. Of course everyone from ISIL to the USA does varying degrees of the same thing.
    - atmosx 11y ago
      I am not sure if you're talking about Alexander, because you make it sound like something everybody does but that's not the case. If anything, nearly everybody does/did the opposite. Alexander became accustomed and adopted the Persian lifestyle, to the point where his countrymen started resenting him, because they didn't feel enough like conquerers. He married the daughter of Darius. Most conquerors at the time, would probably kill them on the spot, just to make a point. Take the Egyptians with the Israelis for example, 400 years of slavery and they were totally set apart. Not assimilated at all. Same with Greeks and Turks, 400 years of slavery but no assimilation. There are many examples and although the enslaved want to believe that this is because of them, it's not... It's because the upper hand didn't allow/want any kind of assimilation. Alexander was a very efficient slaughterer, but he was much more than that. At 300 BC. what more can we ask?
rokhayakebe 11y ago
No data for the following. One important "fact" people do not know is much of the western philosophical works (and other disciplines) we know today (from Aristotle, Plato, Socrates, etc...) are from Arabic writings. Apparently when the Muslim Arabs decided to go and conquer the West, they would take down libraries and rewrite all the knowledge in one language (Arabic). They sent out paid emissaries to the "Four corners of the world" to gather all human knowledge. To that end, Greek works were translated into Arabic and saved in their libraries in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East.
- gargarplex 11y ago
  Are you comparing Google to the Caliphate?
  - guest 11y ago
    everybody knows that Google was founded by Caliph Ali's ghost working in conjunction with a dashing L. Ron Hubbard clone.
- zorf 11y ago
  According to Wikipedia, at least the writings of Plato seem to have come to the west during the middle ages from byzantine (i.e. Greek) sources. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato#Textual_sources_and_history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato#Textual_sources_and_hist...
  - oblio 11y ago
    Yup. It feels strange to completely dismiss the one link between Antiquity and the Renaissance: the Roman Empire, or Byzantium as we now know it.
- m-i-l 11y ago
  See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmission_of_the_Greek_Classics#Arab_translations_and_commentary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmission_of_the_Greek_Clas... : "This work of translation ... constituted one of the greatest transmissions of ideas in history".
qCOVET 11y ago
Here is another piece of story that is not in the article. When Alexander tried to enter Afghanistan he was met with fierce resistance. Didn't matter what he did, he couldn't quench the uprisings and could not conquer the country. After losing a lot of men, he wrote to Aristotle for advise. Aristotle asked Alexander for a sample of Afghan soil to be shipped to him. Upon receipt of the soil samples, Aristotle laid them under the Court carpet and very soon started noticing that men of the court started fighting and killing each other. They became defiant to authority and that led Aristotle to the conclusion, that there is something unique and bizarre w/ the Afghan soil that makes men fight to the end ... and in a way .. remain as an unconquerable nation. He wrote back to Alexander to with draw from Afghanistan, and which he did. To this day, from Alexander to British to Russia .. Afghanistan has remained pretty defiant to foreign occupation. We will see how long the US will stay there. [note: The above story was passed onto us Afghans for generations and other than referencing my grandpa who is no longer w/ us, I unfortunately can't provide any references. So take it w/ a grain of salt.]
- restalis 11y ago
  Hmm... You are right that there was strong resistance and that "after two years of war and a strong insurgency campaign, Alexander managed to establish little control over Bactria": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bactria#Alexander_the_Great https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bactria#Alexander_the_Great But that being said, it's also worth mentioning that that Bactria was one of the most prominent piece of Alexander's legacy, and Alexandria on the Oxus (the remains of which lies somewhere in the north of Afghanistan) was one of its primary cities: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ai-Khanoum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ai-Khanoum It seems that somehow things were settled and Afghanistan managed to become the heart of one of Alexander's remaining kingdoms: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greco-Bactrian_Kingdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greco-Bactrian_Kingdom You can't really have such impressive results when there is little control under your hands!
  - nicolapede 11y ago
    If anyone is interested in reading more about Alexander's military accomplishments, I found this book http://www.amazon.com/Alexander-Earliest-Detailed-Campaigns-Macedonian-ebook/dp/B007L4095E/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8 http://www.amazon.com/Alexander-Earliest-Detailed-Campaigns-... extremely interesting.
guest 11y ago
this is perhaps the finest pakistani canard I have read in months.
erikb 11y ago
I must be reading something incorrectly. Certainly I didn't hear about these exchanges before. But is it correct that most of the exchanges can be boiled down to "be nice to people"? I always thought politics was based on keeping control of import political powers like media, military, law, food, and money while replacing people in high positions who don't work for you with people that you improved to these positions so that they will follow your rule. In some regard that's nice, at least to the people you improved, but in another regard it's also a selfish business. Can one go to another country, declare oneself as their leader and then just lead by being nice?
- restalis 11y ago
  "Can one go to another country, declare oneself as their leader and then just lead by being nice?" The thing is that Alexander's biggest proportion of conquests were the former Persian Empire's - lands of various people which all their life lived under some foreign rule. So there was a change in power, now here's this new ambitious and charismatic leader offering some of the most nicest conditions imaginable if you just submit. Considering Alexander's record of winnings and therefore - the chances of a revolt against him, is it that hard to believe that people preferred to stay put?
  - erikb 11y ago
    For most people you are right. But in every group large enough there are a few who always want more and who don't think as much about the risk. I'd argue that Alexander himself also was such a person. If you offered him nice conditions for his submission and a low chance to succeed by fighting, do you think he would have submitted? And what about days when not everything is well and nice? Drought, famines, storms, sickness. When something irritating happens people tend to blame leaders. Suddenly the situation doesn't feel nice, no matter what you do as a leader. What do you do then? Go home and stop leading? Just think about us. We probably live in the richest, most peacefully, culturally most widely developed time of human history, yet we don't feel happy about it. Many people would argue that another leader might be better for them than the current one. So I would argue that even if one lives a happy, good life, one is not so happy about it to fully trust the leader.
Herodotus38 11y ago
I just finished a Biography on Alexander the Great (Titled: Alexander the Great, The Hunt for a New Past. by Paul Cartledge), which I found to be very good because the author delves into the various sources of information on Alexander, which I found to be surprisingly scant as much has been lost and much has been handed down to us second hand in summarized form (such as through Plutarch). Alexander had his own personal biographer (who accompanied him on his campaign), Callisthenes put to death. A great quote from the book: "The situation we are faced with can be summed up roughly as followes. Inspired by the example of Theopompus and his pioneering Philippica (a history of Greece written around the career of Philip II of Macedon, Alexander's father), more than twenty contemporaries wrote histories or other kinds of work on Alexander. Not one of these histories survives in the original. Of the many letters ascribed to Alexander, just one extract of one of them has a better than average claim to being genuine. The earliest surviving connected narrative account of Alexander's campaigns was composed in the first century BCE, some three hundred years after the events it relates; it is, besides, only incompletely preserved. Thus the sole connected narrative to have survived complete is a third century CE epitome, or abrigment, of a first-century BCE work in Latin by a Romanized Gaul. Finally, what is generally today accounted the best of the more or less completely surviving histories of Alexander was written by a Greek philosopher-statesman in the second century CE, probably during the reigh of the philhellinic emperor Hadrian. In short, 'it is as if the history of Tudor England could only be recovered from Macaulay's essays and the histories of Hume the philospher' (Robin Lane Fox)." I'll admit, being an American I don't quite grasp the full context of that quote but you can get the gist. Basically, I wouldn't take this letter for actually being true (which the title rightly states as being apocryphal) and rather read take it in its own context of someone, probably a much later Arabic (edit: or Persian) writer using the story of Alexander as a means of conveying their thoughts.
- rmc 11y ago
  It's fascinating how little documents we have of people who were incredibly famous and powerful while they lived. Often, some claim that Jesus of Nazareth didn't exist because we have no documented evidence of him from his lifetime. But Alexander was viewed (in his time) as conquring the whole world, and we still don't have written evidence from his life.
koalaman 11y ago
I'm confused, Alexander the Great was an Arab?
- stevenmays 11y ago
  He was Macedonian.
  - eternalban 11y ago
    Possibly 1/2 Macedonian, 1/2 "Lion-Snake": http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Plutarch/Lives/Alexander*/3.html http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Plutarch/L... ... ;-)

111 points by Thevet 11y ago

Wow, is this some sort of religious propaganda because it got too religious too quick (I stopped after reading the story about the Jew being bad and the Zoroastrian being a good Muslim). This is a classical example of confirmation bias - the author is seeking to confirm his theory about the supeemacy of one religion over others and finds positive evidence wherr se deems fit. This is not to say that one religion is truly better than other - all religions are equally unprovable so dont bother. Hacketnews is about computer science, not religious propaganda.

restalis 11y ago
I continued reading and found this: "This didactic story probably wasn’t meant to teach that Jews are evil. The ethics ascribed to the Jew are practical ethics undoubtedly common across human tribal groups."
- Adrock 11y ago
  This defamatory story probably wasn't meant to be defamatory.
IkmoIkmo 11y ago
What am I missing here, Alexander predates Islam by some 900 years and Zoroastrianism is a unique religion separate from Islam? How does this make any sense?
eli_gottlieb 11y ago
Yeah, I'm not really sure what the point of the page is, other than to tell some apocryphal stories that use cultural groups and historical figures as fairy-tale archetypes.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

droopyEyelids 11y ago

It's interesting that this isn't a larger part of what people think about when they think about 'winnning' in the context of competition with other people. (I blame sports) Losing- failing to get your way or being destroyed, is an obvious state. What we call winning, which amounts to getting your way (often at the expense of others) is actually a shitty compromise. Conversion of the 'enemy' is the real best outcome. Not only do you get your way, but you have more momentum, cooperation, ideas and resources working for your objective afterwards. This should always be your goal when you're "fighting" with other people, and anything else is a sort of failure.

mc32 11y ago
The problem is the enemy often resists these efforts. On the other hand, this tactic worked with colonialism. That's essentially what colonial powers did. They won over the people at first by force (conquered) and then via other means they coopted (won over) them and used them to their ends. Then at some point many colonies resented the remote and distanced governance and rebelled.
- _nedR 11y ago
  >They won over the people at first by force (conquered) and then via other means they and coopted (won over) them and used them to their ends. If by 'won them over', you mean they threatened anyone who opposed them with terrible consequences, and rewarded those who supported them then you are correct. Of course everyone from ISIL to the USA does varying degrees of the same thing.
  - atmosx 11y ago
    I am not sure if you're talking about Alexander, because you make it sound like something everybody does but that's not the case. If anything, nearly everybody does/did the opposite. Alexander became accustomed and adopted the Persian lifestyle, to the point where his countrymen started resenting him, because they didn't feel enough like conquerers. He married the daughter of Darius. Most conquerors at the time, would probably kill them on the spot, just to make a point. Take the Egyptians with the Israelis for example, 400 years of slavery and they were totally set apart. Not assimilated at all. Same with Greeks and Turks, 400 years of slavery but no assimilation. There are many examples and although the enslaved want to believe that this is because of them, it's not... It's because the upper hand didn't allow/want any kind of assimilation. Alexander was a very efficient slaughterer, but he was much more than that. At 300 BC. what more can we ask?

rokhayakebe 11y ago

No data for the following. One important "fact" people do not know is much of the western philosophical works (and other disciplines) we know today (from Aristotle, Plato, Socrates, etc...) are from Arabic writings. Apparently when the Muslim Arabs decided to go and conquer the West, they would take down libraries and rewrite all the knowledge in one language (Arabic). They sent out paid emissaries to the "Four corners of the world" to gather all human knowledge. To that end, Greek works were translated into Arabic and saved in their libraries in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East.

gargarplex 11y ago
Are you comparing Google to the Caliphate?
- guest 11y ago
  everybody knows that Google was founded by Caliph Ali's ghost working in conjunction with a dashing L. Ron Hubbard clone.
zorf 11y ago
According to Wikipedia, at least the writings of Plato seem to have come to the west during the middle ages from byzantine (i.e. Greek) sources. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato#Textual_sources_and_history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato#Textual_sources_and_hist...
- oblio 11y ago
  Yup. It feels strange to completely dismiss the one link between Antiquity and the Renaissance: the Roman Empire, or Byzantium as we now know it.
m-i-l 11y ago
See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmission_of_the_Greek_Classics#Arab_translations_and_commentary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmission_of_the_Greek_Clas... : "This work of translation ... constituted one of the greatest transmissions of ideas in history".

qCOVET 11y ago

Here is another piece of story that is not in the article. When Alexander tried to enter Afghanistan he was met with fierce resistance. Didn't matter what he did, he couldn't quench the uprisings and could not conquer the country. After losing a lot of men, he wrote to Aristotle for advise. Aristotle asked Alexander for a sample of Afghan soil to be shipped to him. Upon receipt of the soil samples, Aristotle laid them under the Court carpet and very soon started noticing that men of the court started fighting and killing each other. They became defiant to authority and that led Aristotle to the conclusion, that there is something unique and bizarre w/ the Afghan soil that makes men fight to the end ... and in a way .. remain as an unconquerable nation. He wrote back to Alexander to with draw from Afghanistan, and which he did. To this day, from Alexander to British to Russia .. Afghanistan has remained pretty defiant to foreign occupation. We will see how long the US will stay there. [note: The above story was passed onto us Afghans for generations and other than referencing my grandpa who is no longer w/ us, I unfortunately can't provide any references. So take it w/ a grain of salt.]

restalis 11y ago
Hmm... You are right that there was strong resistance and that "after two years of war and a strong insurgency campaign, Alexander managed to establish little control over Bactria": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bactria#Alexander_the_Great https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bactria#Alexander_the_Great But that being said, it's also worth mentioning that that Bactria was one of the most prominent piece of Alexander's legacy, and Alexandria on the Oxus (the remains of which lies somewhere in the north of Afghanistan) was one of its primary cities: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ai-Khanoum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ai-Khanoum It seems that somehow things were settled and Afghanistan managed to become the heart of one of Alexander's remaining kingdoms: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greco-Bactrian_Kingdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greco-Bactrian_Kingdom You can't really have such impressive results when there is little control under your hands!
- nicolapede 11y ago
  If anyone is interested in reading more about Alexander's military accomplishments, I found this book http://www.amazon.com/Alexander-Earliest-Detailed-Campaigns-Macedonian-ebook/dp/B007L4095E/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8 http://www.amazon.com/Alexander-Earliest-Detailed-Campaigns-... extremely interesting.

guest 11y ago

this is perhaps the finest pakistani canard I have read in months.

erikb 11y ago

I must be reading something incorrectly. Certainly I didn't hear about these exchanges before. But is it correct that most of the exchanges can be boiled down to "be nice to people"? I always thought politics was based on keeping control of import political powers like media, military, law, food, and money while replacing people in high positions who don't work for you with people that you improved to these positions so that they will follow your rule. In some regard that's nice, at least to the people you improved, but in another regard it's also a selfish business. Can one go to another country, declare oneself as their leader and then just lead by being nice?

restalis 11y ago
"Can one go to another country, declare oneself as their leader and then just lead by being nice?" The thing is that Alexander's biggest proportion of conquests were the former Persian Empire's - lands of various people which all their life lived under some foreign rule. So there was a change in power, now here's this new ambitious and charismatic leader offering some of the most nicest conditions imaginable if you just submit. Considering Alexander's record of winnings and therefore - the chances of a revolt against him, is it that hard to believe that people preferred to stay put?
- erikb 11y ago
  For most people you are right. But in every group large enough there are a few who always want more and who don't think as much about the risk. I'd argue that Alexander himself also was such a person. If you offered him nice conditions for his submission and a low chance to succeed by fighting, do you think he would have submitted? And what about days when not everything is well and nice? Drought, famines, storms, sickness. When something irritating happens people tend to blame leaders. Suddenly the situation doesn't feel nice, no matter what you do as a leader. What do you do then? Go home and stop leading? Just think about us. We probably live in the richest, most peacefully, culturally most widely developed time of human history, yet we don't feel happy about it. Many people would argue that another leader might be better for them than the current one. So I would argue that even if one lives a happy, good life, one is not so happy about it to fully trust the leader.

Herodotus38 11y ago

I just finished a Biography on Alexander the Great (Titled: Alexander the Great, The Hunt for a New Past. by Paul Cartledge), which I found to be very good because the author delves into the various sources of information on Alexander, which I found to be surprisingly scant as much has been lost and much has been handed down to us second hand in summarized form (such as through Plutarch). Alexander had his own personal biographer (who accompanied him on his campaign), Callisthenes put to death. A great quote from the book: "The situation we are faced with can be summed up roughly as followes. Inspired by the example of Theopompus and his pioneering Philippica (a history of Greece written around the career of Philip II of Macedon, Alexander's father), more than twenty contemporaries wrote histories or other kinds of work on Alexander. Not one of these histories survives in the original. Of the many letters ascribed to Alexander, just one extract of one of them has a better than average claim to being genuine. The earliest surviving connected narrative account of Alexander's campaigns was composed in the first century BCE, some three hundred years after the events it relates; it is, besides, only incompletely preserved. Thus the sole connected narrative to have survived complete is a third century CE epitome, or abrigment, of a first-century BCE work in Latin by a Romanized Gaul. Finally, what is generally today accounted the best of the more or less completely surviving histories of Alexander was written by a Greek philosopher-statesman in the second century CE, probably during the reigh of the philhellinic emperor Hadrian. In short, 'it is as if the history of Tudor England could only be recovered from Macaulay's essays and the histories of Hume the philospher' (Robin Lane Fox)." I'll admit, being an American I don't quite grasp the full context of that quote but you can get the gist. Basically, I wouldn't take this letter for actually being true (which the title rightly states as being apocryphal) and rather read take it in its own context of someone, probably a much later Arabic (edit: or Persian) writer using the story of Alexander as a means of conveying their thoughts.

rmc 11y ago
It's fascinating how little documents we have of people who were incredibly famous and powerful while they lived. Often, some claim that Jesus of Nazareth didn't exist because we have no documented evidence of him from his lifetime. But Alexander was viewed (in his time) as conquring the whole world, and we still don't have written evidence from his life.

koalaman 11y ago

I'm confused, Alexander the Great was an Arab?

stevenmays 11y ago
He was Macedonian.
- eternalban 11y ago
  Possibly 1/2 Macedonian, 1/2 "Lion-Snake": http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Plutarch/Lives/Alexander*/3.html http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Plutarch/L... ... ;-)