
Aristotle’s (apocryphal) advice to Alexander the Great on Persian elites (2013) - Thevet
http://purplemotes.net/2013/10/13/aristotle-advice-alexander-persia/
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qCOVET
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.]

~~~
louhike
I do not know a lot of countries which have not been defiants to foreign
occupation. I'll put it harshly but it sounds a lot like propaganda. And as
you can see on this map
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_the_Great#/media/Fil...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_the_Great#/media/File:Diadochen1.png),
he did invade Afghanistan, and even a part of today India.

~~~
yarou
I'd hardly call it propaganda, it's merely a folk tale that reflects the
cultural context within which it was developed. Sort of like the founding of
Rome.

------
Herodotus38
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
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.

~~~
IkmoIkmo
> as conquring the whole world

Unless it's a matter of speech, he conquered about 3.5% of the world's land
mass and about a third of the (estimated) population, neither of which put you
in the top 3 and couldn't be considered the 'whole world' either. By land mass
it's not even in the top 20 largest empires ever. He was unique not for the
greatest empire but rather for being so primely responsible for the massive
empire he did create and in doing it all in about 12 years, the British empire
for example by comparison has no single persons who were so primely
responsible with many leaders emerging over hundreds of years, combined with
his personal role in battles, all of which ending in victory, makes him the
stuff of legends.

~~~
StuffMaster
He conquered the "known world", I believe is how it goes.

~~~
IkmoIkmo
Well he factually didn't even from the perspective of 'his known world',
Alexander both turned back from on campaign, and had planned another campaign
he didn't live to initiate.

But regardless it strikes me as a pretty ridiculous claim to make, (especially
today) when an estimated 70% of the world population lived in places (they
obviously know) that weren't conquered by Alexander. After all there is no
'the' known world. You can find many millions of people who have not a clue of
the world beyond a few miles away and you'll thereby find many different
people who each rule their known world.

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rokhayakebe
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.

~~~
zorf
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_hist...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato#Textual_sources_and_history)

~~~
oblio
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.

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droopyEyelids
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.

~~~
Steko
I dunno, the whole thing seems straight out of _The Art of War_ , best is to
win without fighting ... worst to besiege his cities.

~~~
junto
As a supplement to this; if you do besiege his cities, always leave a narrow
path of escape. A city without hope will fight to the death.

I'm fairly sure that is also in the Art of War too.

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erikb
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
"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
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.

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

~~~
stevenmays
He was Macedonian.

~~~
eternalban
Possibly 1/2 Macedonian, 1/2 "Lion-Snake":
[http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Plutarch/L...](http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Plutarch/Lives/Alexander*/3.html)
... ;-)

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

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lololololololol
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
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
This defamatory story _probably_ wasn't meant to be defamatory.

