This week we’re going to do something a bit silly, in part because I have to prepare for and travel to an invited workshop/talk event later this week and so don’t have quite the time for a more normal ‘full’ post and in part because it is fun to be silly sometimes (and we might learn something).
One of the standard pop-history counter-factuals that one sees working on ancient military history is some version of “What if Alexander the Great went West instead of East?” It has come up quite a few times here in the comments! And of course we should begin by noting the question is itself a bit silly. Alexander didn’t go East on a lark, his invasion was planned even before he became king and indeed when he became king a Macedonian army was already in Anatolia laying the logistical predicates for his invasion. Alexander thus wasn’t in a position to really decide suddenly to ‘go West’ nor would it have made much sense to.
But I think we can still ask this question in interesting ways that explore the nature of our evidence (particularly its weaknesses) and also the challenges of conquest that lay beyond winning battles. Though before we leap in, it is worth noting that we’ve done two series relevant to this one: a two-part assessment of Alexander the Great (I, II) and a discussion of the combat performance of the Macedonian phalanx (as a component of Hellenistic armies) against the Roman legion of the Middle Republic, in an absurd number of parts (Ia, Ib, IIa, IIb, IIIa, IIIb, IVa, IVb, IVc, V). We’re going to reference both here.
But it is important, to begin with, to decide when Alexander is “going West” (by which we mean ‘to Italy’). This is a more complicated question then you might initially think. The first solution is, of course, to send Alexander west in his lifetime, either at the start of his invasion (334) or at the end of his life (323); the problem, to be frank, is that we don’t know nearly as much as we’d like about the military situation in Italy in that period though. We can construct a basic narrative of the major wars (see below) but questions of army size, composition and even leadership are often quite fuzzy that early.
The tempting solution is to move Alexander forward a few decades chronologically to where we can be more confident about the kind of opponents he’ll face, but the problem here is that Alexander is going to face a very different Italy in, say, 290 than in 323. That said, as we’ll see in a minute, we basically know what would happen if time-traveling Alexander arrived in Italy around that time because in 280 that basically happens: Pyrrhus of Epirus, generally regarded as the most talented general of his generation, leading a Macedonian style army, invades Italy, leading to the Pyrrhic War (280-275). Our sources at this point are still not amazing, but we know the outcome and can reason from that to a degree.
Finally, I think folks sometimes approach this question differently: they want a grudge-match between Alexander the Great and a ‘fully formed’ Roman Republic, because what they want is to really answer ‘who was the best at war in antiquity.’ From the historian’s perspective, that’s a bit silly, of course: being ‘good at war’ is, to a degree, sensitive to context. That said, the chronological divide here becomes decently large (about a century), but the technological divide isn’t all that meaningful – Alexander-style armies in the late third century were still very much a thing! So the question might also be, essentially, “what is an Alexander-like figure went West around 218?” That’s also an interesting question, but I think actually quite easy to answer because our evidence for this period is much better and points very strongly to a conclusion.
So we can deal with each of these scenarios in turn and have a bit of fun with it. As we’re going to see, each scenario not only changes the strategic situation, it also changes our confidence, the degree to which our evidence for the situation in Italy is relatively clear.
But first, unlike Alexander, I cannot fund my campaigns through the neat expedient of looting the entire Persian treasury at Persepolis.1 So if you want to supporting this ACOUP campaign, you can contribute your tribute by supporting the project on Patreon. And if you want updates whenever a new post appears, you can click below for email updates or follow me on Twitter (@BretDevereaux) and Bluesky (@bretdevereaux.bsky.social) and (less frequently) Mastodon (@bretdevereaux@historians.social) for updates when posts go live and my general musings; I have largely shifted over to Bluesky (I maintain some de minimis presence on Twitter), given that it has become a much better place for historical discussion than Twitter.
Strategic Situation in 334
So for our first scenario, we’re assuming Alexander is going West instead of East in 334, invading with the same army he brought into Asia. Naturally our sources don’t entirely agree on how big it was, except that it was around 40,000; I don’t want to get too deep into the weeds on this question. Arrian reports 30,000 infantry and 5,000 cavalry (Arr. Anab. 1.11.3), which if we perhaps add Parmenio’s advance force of roughly 10,000 (Polyaenus 5.44.4) we get the 40,000 infantry and 5,000 cavalry reported in some other sources (e.g. Plut. Alex. 15.1). In terms of composition, Diodorus (Diod. Sic. 17.17) reports 12,000 Macedonians in the phalanx, another 12,000 Greek heavy infantry (allied and mercenary), and eight thousand lighter infantry (Thracians, Illyrians, Agrianians, archers and so on), which adds up to 32,000 infantry (of which 24,000 is heavy). Reinforced over time, Alexander’s heavy infantry component ‘tops out’ around 31,000 for the Battle of Gaugamela (331).
So let’s say Alexander has an army of around 40,000, with 5,000 cavalry and a heavy infantry core of roughly 24,000. He can get some reinforcements but mostly has to make do with the army he has: minor losses can be replaced, catastrophic losses cannot. That’s our ‘benchmark’ to measure against. Let’s also assume Alexander has done some diplomacy in advance and perhaps secured some kind of agreement – as Pyrrhus will later do – with the Greeks of Southern Italy, so he can land his army safely, perhaps near Tarentum, and count on the Greeks of Apulia to initially support him.
What is the shape of the strategic problem he faces?
Well, the good news is that Italy is fragmented in this period. The bad news is that Italy is fragmented in this period. Alexander is not facing one strategic problem but half a dozen.
The problem (for us) is going to be estimating the scale of each of these opponents. We have Livy down to the 290s (Polybius doesn’t start until 264) and bits of other sources (Dio, Diodorus, etc) but those don’t give us a lot of clear numbers, in part because our sources don’t know. The Romans only started writing their history in the late third century, after all, and Livy seems profoundly confused by how the Roman army is even structured in 338 (Livy 8.8, a famously confounding passage in which Livy is confused and also the text is corrupt).2 Livy is also fairly open that early Roman history is full of invented triumphs, unlikely stories that transform defeats into victories and other ‘patriotic’ fibs, so much so that he has trouble untangling them. Still, we can at least make a solid effort of an order-of-magnitude estimate of Italy’s military powers in 334.
We can start with the Romans (but Alexander won’t). In 334, we’re four years on from the end of the Second Latin War (340-338) but we haven’t yet started the Second Samnite War (326-304). As a result, the Romans control Latium and Campania, but haven’t yet moved in earnest into the mountains to the north-east (Umbria) or south-east (Samnium). The Roman census probably totals around 165,000 adult males (on the census figures, see Brunt, Italian Manpower (1971), 13 for the relevant sources), but most of the Latins and Campanians are still socii. Livy claims that by this point the Romans are enrolling four legions annually (around 20,000 men) and then typically doubling this with the Latins (and other socii) for a standard field army of around 40,000 (Livy 8.8.14-15).3 Given our census data and everything else we know, I think that’s plausible and is going to be our baseline.
But Alexander, landing in Tarentum, isn’t going to get straight-away to the Romans, because the first thing in his way are instead the Samnites. The Romans are going to fight two pretty brutal wars with these fellows (The Second and Third Samnite wars, 326-304 and 298-290)4 in the near future, but they haven’t yet, so the Samnites are still independent. Their society is grouped into pagi (a rural district; think something like our non-state armies in terms of organization) which are self-governing, but they confederate together for larger wars. The Samnites were tough hill-fighters whose armies made a good use of light and heavy infantry, along with fairly capable cavalry. In terms of their military strength, the one thing we know is that it takes the Romans three and a half decades to subdue them and the Samnites win some major battles in all of that. One late indicator we have that is useful is that Livy represents the combined Samnite and Senones force at Sentinum (Livy 10.27) as even in size to a 40,000 man combined double-consular Roman field army. By that point, the Samnites had been fighting quite a while and this battle was fought in Umbria (in their allies territory, rather than their own) so this likely isn’t their whole force, but much of it. On the balance then, the Samnites seem to be roughly equal in military strength to the Romans.
Next up, moving north, we have the Etruscans, who are also not yet subdued by Rome. The Etruscans were organized into city-states, but like the Samnites often formed up to fight together in larger confederations, with a heavy-infantry focused force. In terms of effective military power, we know that in 298 the Etruscans could go toe-to-toe with a major Roman field army, at Volterrae (Livy 10.12) and produce a bloody, attritional draw. The Romans will eventually win this contest too, of course, but I think it is fair to assess the Etruscans as not that much weaker than our Romans in 334.
To their north, we have the Gallic peoples of Gallia Cisalpina, particularly in the Po River Valley, with the key peoples being the Boii, Insubres and Senones. These were also pretty militarily significant polities, organized along the ‘barbarian tribal’ lines we’ve discussed before, but it is hard to get their exact strength. Only the Senones are at Sentinum (Livy 10.26.7) but we’re not given their numbers broken out. By 225, an alliance of the Boii, Insubres and another polity, the Gaesatae are going to field an army that Polybius reports as 50,000 infantry and 20,000 cavalry (Polyb. 2.23.3) but this is both probably an exaggeration and also I’m not sure such a large force could have been fielded a century earlier. There’s a tendency in the 300s and 200s, visible in the archaeology, for a substantial expansion of the ‘military’ class in Gallic societies, with poorer men being pulled into armies, a process which was not complete in 334.
But those Gallic peoples are still a substantial force, capable of threatening any of the Italic powers to their south. Perhaps more interestingly, we know how Greek, Macedonian and Hellenistic armies are going to perform against the Gauls when they meet them in quantity beginning in 281: they’re going to have a rough time. Gallic armies, moving into Greece and Macedonia are going to smash a Macedonian army lead by Ptolemy Keraunos, bust through a Greek effort to hold Thermopylae and reach, but probably not sack, Delphi. Another group, the Galatians, are going to spend a few years rampaging in Anatolia before being settled in a region they’d give the name to: Galatia. Hellenistic armies certainly sometimes win against Galatians – Antigonus Gonatas and Attalus I both do so – but they don’t always win, suggesting Gallic armies were a real threat, even to a Macedonian-style force.
And finally, we need to look south: any major invasion of Italy from Greece and Macedonia was likely to draw the attention of the two powers in Sicily: Syracuse and Carthage. Syracuse and Carthage had been fighting back and forth over Sicily on and off since 480 and both could raise substantial forces. Unfortunately, our main source for a lot of this is Diodorus Siculus and he tends to lead with numbers for these battles which are implausible. I won’t go through all of the numbers here: J. Hall, Carthage at War (2023) provides a very capable, up-to-date, digestible (if a bit dry) survey of these wars. But the upshot is that armies of between 30,000 and 50,000 are reported frequently enough to suggest that both Carthage and Syracuse (the latter with Greek allies) could ‘play ball’ in this range if seriously threatened on the island. They also both have fairly powerful navies in this period, often putting out fleets of 100 to 200 ships. Carthaginian resources will be far more vast than this in the First (264-241) and Second (218-201) Punic Wars, but we can’t assume that sort of military power is available to them in 334 for a war over Sicily. Still, either Carthage or Syracuse (the latter leading a coalition of local Greek cities) could probably field a large enough army to demand Alexander’s undivided attention.
We’ve left some folks out (the Umbrians and Lucanians, most notably) but I think we have, roughly our ‘major players.’ And what we have is an Italy-and-Sicily with not one but six major powers, of roughly equal size and military capability: the Samnites, the Romans, the Etruscans, Carthage, Syracuse and a possible multi-polity Gallic coalition. All of whom can put a large enough army in the field to require Alexander to bring essentially his entire expeditionary force to fight them.
Scenario 1: Alexander Invades in 334
As you can tell from above, this is our lowest confidence-level scenario because we simply have a lot of question-marks in terms of the force Alexander is likely to face. But I think we can look at the likely circumstances and chart out a few broad possibilities for how things would go. First, of course, we have to assume Alexander: a very gifted commander with a highly capable army that is generally going to win just about any winnable battle. Even then, Italy in this period is a hard nut to crack; Alexander can probably do it (at least for a while), but he may wish he hadn’t.
The immediate problem is evident with a quick glance up through those numbers: rather than one Persian Empire with a single Great King and a series of field armies, Alexander is facing six opponents, each of which probably has enough military strength to meet Alexander in the field. That fact is important: none of the key polities here are so weak that they’d have to simply surrender in advance and nothing about their stubborn resistance against the Romans suggests that a roughly 40,000 man army of any description would be enough to get them to simply fold.
But beyond this, I think, uncertainty assails us. As noted, our best indicator of how the Roman army fought in this period (Livy 8.8) is an absolute mess that is functionally unsalveagable. It’s clear that Livy, at least, thinks that by this point the Roman army functions in its three battle lines of heavy infantry and there’s no reason to suppose that’s wrong. But beyond that, it’s hard to know how armored they would be or the precise structure of the formation because – again – Livy 8.8 is a mess (and the sources on the ‘Servian Constitution’ are even more anachronistic and messy). So we can probably say the Romans are employing their heavy infantry army, composed of legions, led by consuls, but beyond that unpacking its tactical capabilities is difficult. Which means it is hard to know exactly how it would fare, this early, against a Macedonian-style army.
But we can speak to some of the strategic and operational complications Alexander faces. In particular, Alexander going West is in real danger of becoming trapped in a whack-a-mole problem, complicated by his logistics. In the East, Alexander relied heavily on cities ‘surrendering in advance,’ submitting to his authority and giving him supplies in exchange for getting him to move on out of their territory. Indeed, his logistics do not remotely work without this; if every city along the line of Alexander’s march resisted, his expedition would certainly have failed. But that behavior makes enough sense for cities that hadn’t been truly independent in centuries, for whom large imperial armies transiting past them was a frequent enough occurrence.
But fourth century Italy isn’t like that: it is a mess of defended, fortified cities that have a tendency to ‘hold out’ against raiding and even sieges. We know they have that tendency, because they often do it: against the Romans, against Pyrrhus, against Hannibal. Doubtless Alexander would try to discourage this habit in the same way he did in the East: exemplary brutality against cities that held out. But the Romans and Carthaginians do that too, and it doesn’t lead to swift, lightning advances!
The problem that poses is one of speed and logistics. Let’s say Alexander arrives in Tarentum in 334. His next stop is moving north into Samnium and we can just assume the Samnites roll out for a pitched battle (they absolutely would; the Samnites have testy relationships with the Greeks) and we’ll assume – Alexander being Alexander – they lose,5 at which point the Samnite pagi, awed by Alexander’s strength, might submit. That enables him to cross the Appenines towards Campania and the Romans. So in 333 he descends into Campania, we’ll assume he smashes the Roman field army that will certainly be there to greet him and then…nothing. The cities of Campania don’t surrender in advance and supply him. So he’s forced to besiege Capua and perhaps Neapolis (Naples), because he needs to secure this area in order to draw supplies to support a move north into Latium. But Alexander has capable engineers and an army that can do siege works, so he cracks the defenses of several major cities to secure the region. So by 332, he’s ready to head into Latium; he faces another field army, smashes it and now he has to settle down and besiege at least Rome. Roman resources being what they are, even having smashed a pair of Roman field armies, the city is likely still defended, so he’ll have to take it in a difficult siege. He might instead opt to negotiate.
By this point, chances are pretty good the Etruscans are preparing for his arrival and possibly aiding the Romans and chances are equally good the Carthaginians are concerned about this Greek-speaking invader in their sphere of influence. Let’s say Alexander gets the Romans to finally submit by the end of 332, by which point he’s facing open war with the Etruscans in 331. Except, by this point, he hasn’t had meaningful forces in Samnium in three years and he is clearly fully occupied in the north. So the Samnites revolt and by this point the Carthaginian navy has driven Alexander’s ships from the sea. So he turns south to re-conquer the Samnites and hop to Sicily to try to shut down the Carthaginians, with Syracuse’s help with money and supplies. That’s slow work – Carthage retreats to their coastal fortresses, which must be stormed, one by one.
Of course, the moment it looks like Alexander might win, say, in 329 or 328, Syracuse’s interests here suddenly recalculate against him, so they cut their support and now Alexander has to fight them too. Except at this point, Alexander hasn’t been in Latium for four years…so the Romans revolt and the Etruscans with them. And he still hasn’t quite nailed down the Samnites and hasn’t even touched the Gauls. Meanwhile, his war with Carthage is turning intractable in the same way Pyrrhus’ war did: he has little ability to assail Carthage’s resource base in North Africa (because Carthage can defeat his navy) or to stop Carthage from resupplying its coastal bases.
In short, even if we assume that Alexander can commandingly win all the battles, the slower pace of warfare in a context where everyone has armies and everyone tries to hold out and everyone goes back to war when they’ve regenerated forces makes a ‘lightning’ Alexander-style conquest extremely difficult. This was a problem that really only cropped up towards the end of the real Alexander’s reign and even then only after he reached the Iranian Plateau, but in Italy it would be an immediate problem, because Alexander had a chance to acquire momentum and tremendous looted wealth.
But as the war drags on – again, we’re just assuming Alexander is winning one lopsided victory after another – he begins to run into another problem: money. Alexander’s soldiers expect to be paid and they expect to be paid in silver coins. Alexander was already substantially in debt when he took the throne (Philip II’s conquest of Greece was expensive), so he needs conquest to pay and he needs it to pay in silver. And here he has a problem because in the 330s and 320s, the Romans barely use coinage at all, and what physical ‘money’ they have is mostly in bronze. There’s some silver coinage circulating around Italy, mostly Greek coins in Southern Italy and the Etruscans mint a bit of silver coinage, but much of the coinage was in bronze and even then, compared to Greece, there wasn’t that much of it. Worse yet, nothing I’ve seen in the grave goods of this or previous periods suggests Alexander was going to find anything like the mintable metal wealth he would need at this point either. Most of the fancy grave goods I can recall from this period are – you guessed it – in bronze (weapons, armor, tools), not silver or gold.
Again, it’s not that there’s no silver and gold, but Alexander needs huge quantities of silver to keep his military machine churning and the Italian economy of the fourth century BC is simply not set up to furnish that. A big part of the explosion of Roman silver coinage in the Middle and Late Republic is going to be silver coming from Spain and the East.
So on the one hand, assuming Alexander can win all of his battles decisively and with few casualties, he can certainly force some submissions but actually holding Italy is going to be hard: beyond every enemy is another enemy, which has enough military force to demand Alexander’s entire army, meaning he can’t drop off more than token garrisons as he moves. The possibility of ending up bogged down in playing whack-a-mole as previously ‘subdued’ polities unconquer themselves while Alexander is off elsewhere is high – that tendency was part of why the Roman conquest of Italy took so long! But Alexander can’t take forever because his financial clock is ticking fast: he needs a quick conquest to keep his army funded. But Italy isn’t a huge pot of silver guarded by a single Great King and his fragile army, but rather a smaller pot of bronze, being fought over by half a dozen polities, each with their own army and grudges (and all of them, annoyingly for Alexander, just strong enough to compel his full attention).
How you square those circles is, of course, the unknowable part of the counter-factual. For my own part, I think Alexander could probably have overrun much of Italy, but would have ended up badly bogged down, forced to spend time consolidating his control and setting up systems of extraction and settlement. He might still succeed in Italy, but it wouldn’t be the lightning conquest he had from 334 to 330 where he overran the entire Achaemenid Empire. It would be more like the wars from 330 to 326, where he slowly ground out victories in Bactria and along the Indus, but without the advantage of having already looted the Achaemenid treasury. And of course his army famously lost patience with the slow wars of the back half of his campaign and mutinied in India. We might imagine his army here running out of patience much earlier.
That said, we’ve made a lot of assumptions and left a lot of question marks, because there’s just a lot we do not know this early in Italy’s history: we can only guess at the military strength of most of the major players, or their tactics, or their equipment, or the likelihood they’d hold out.
But we can learn a bit more if we roll the clock forward to 280 and ask how Alexander would fare then.
Scenario 2: Alexander Instead of Pyrrhus
Moving forward to 280, our uncertainly shrinks a lot because we can now say something about how Roman armies might interact with Macedonian-style armies, but of course the tricky thing for our analysis is that the strategic situation has also changed a fair bit.
The main culprits here are the Second (326-304) and Third (298-290) Samnite Wars. The Second Samnite War had confirmed Roman control of Campania, but also over quite a lot of central Italy, with several communities either annexed into Roman citizenship (sometimes as a punishment, intended to obliterate the previous communal identity) or folded into the growing ranks of the socii, most notably the Marsi, Paelingni, Fretani and Vestini, which advanced Roman control all the way to the Adriatic and probably left Rome a clear primus inter pares among powers in Italy. The Third Samnite War is, in my view, somewhat of a misnomer, because it ends up much bigger, with Rome confronting a grand alliance of basically all of the non-Greek polities in Italy: the Etruscans, Umbrians, the Senones (a Gallic people) and the Samnites in what I view as a ‘containment war.’ Roman victory in 290 meant absorbing the remaining Umbrian-speakers and the Samnites into the Roman system, and an incomplete but significant extension of Roman control in Etruria.
Consequently, Pyrrhus arrives not to find the fragmented six-way scrum of 334, but instead a rapidly consolidating state system behind Rome (plus the Carthaginians and Syracusans in Sicily). Roman resources were thus substantially greater. Colonial foundations and annexations had nearly doubled the citizen population, to around 290,000 (Livy 10.47; Per 11, 13, 14; once again see Brunt (1971), 13) and it sure seems like the total amount of socii had more than kept pace (even as some of the Latins have drifted into citizenship). We’re not yet to the military monster the Romans will build by 264, but we’re getting there. The good news for our time-traveling Alexander is he now really only needs to beat the Romans to consolidate the peninsula; the bad news is that he has to beat the Romans and there are now a lot of them.
What makes this moment illuminating for our question, however, is that the Romans actually fight a Macedonian-style Hellenistic army, led by Pyrrhus of Epirus. We’ve talked about these battles already, so no need to reinvent the wheel; if you want an even more detailed discussion, there is actually a very good recent campaign history on this one, P.A. Kent, A History of the Pyrrhic War (2020). On the one hand, Pyrrhus’ army is a bit smaller than Alexander’s – around 31,500 initially. On the other hand, it is actually a fair bit more tactically complex and sophisticated and so had some capabilities Alexander may not have, in particular war elephants (which the Romans had no experience of) but also Pyrrhus’ efforts to create an articulated or ‘enallax‘ phalanx. And I think we also shouldn’t overstate the gap in command capabilities here: Alexander was an astoundingly capable general, for sure, but Pyrrhus also has a reputation in the sources as an exceptional commander, the best of his generation. It’s fair to guess that Alexander might have gotten a bit more performance out of his army, but I don’t think we’re looking at a different in kind.
Pyrrhus’ experience demonstrates vividly a lot of the problems we proposed above: the ability of Rome and Carthage to rapidly reconstitute forces, but also the generally slower pace of warfare in Italy, where Big, Decisive Victories didn’t cause huge swaths of towns to surrender. After his first victory at Heraclea, Pyrrhus attempts a sort of ‘thunder run’ through Campania into Latium and within a couple day’s march of Rome, but no one surrenders (or even negotiates), forcing Pyrrhus to pick off Roman garrisons and stubborn towns one by one (starting with Venusia and Luceria). The result was that the Romans had more than enough time to reconstitute. He faces a similar problem with Carthaginian coastal garrison towns in Sicily.
But it also hints at something we can’t be certain is true in 334, but if it is, it is bad news for a west-facing Alexander in 334: even in defeat, Roman armies draw blood. Alexander’s success against the Achaemenids was fundamentally predicted on relatively low casualties, on battles where, if he won, his losses would be minimal. Alexander reportedly loses just 115 men at the Granicus (334), only 150 killed at Issus (333) and a tougher but still mild 1,500-or-so losses at Gaugamela (331).6 Those sorts of losses were basically rounding errors, likely swamped by losses to disease and other natural causes in his army and easily made up by the occasional supplement of reinforcements. But Alexander also needed those losses to be low, because he didn’t have a whole lot of reserves. The only other Macedonian force of note was Antipater’s army back in Macedon, just 12,000 infantry and 1,500 cavalry (Diod. Sic. 17.17.5).7 In short, Alexander is fighting with something of a glass jaw – he gets away with it because his opponents never land a really solid punch.
At Heraclea (280), Pyrrhus wins, but loses either 13,000 or 4,000 troops (depending on who you trust, Plut. Pyrrh 17.4; scholars prefer the smaller number), which is already more than Alexander lost in all four of his major pitched battles. At Asculum (279), Plutarch says Pyrrhus took 3,505 losses, while Diodorus claims 15,000; once again we prefer Plutarch’s smaller number, but once again somewhat more than Alexander lost in all four of his major pitched battles. Pyrrhus’ losses at the draw of Maleventum aren’t clear – our sources are quite bad – but must have been significantly heavier than this. So when facing an experienced, battle-hardened Macedonian-style army commanded by the best general of a generation, the Romans regularly inflict more casualties losing than Alexander took in all four of his major pitched battles, combined.
And that is quite the dangerous blinking warning sign for either a time traveling Alexander or – if we suppose the Romans would have performed similarly in battle in 334 – our 334!Alexander, because Alexander cannot really afford to make up those losses, especially if he also needs to be detaching troops to serve as garrisons. A situation in which even in victory Alexander loses 10% of his army every battle would simply not be sustainable even in the relatively near term for him, because the ‘backbone’ of Macedonian manpower was never all that robust. Indeed, the Macedonian free, citizen population is probably roughly the same size or smaller than the Roman citizen population in 334.8 It is, of course, a lot smaller than the Roman citizen population in 280.
The question, which is unanswerable, of course, is to what degree Alexander, by dint of being Alexander, would have been able to avoid those casualties. My own view is that I don’t think he could have. Pyrrhus was a very capable commander wielding a very capable army; Alexander might be better, but I don’t think he’d be radically better. Instead, as I’ve argued, the attritional Roman style of fighting was built to produce significant casualties, win or lose. Even spectacular victories like the Battle of Cannae (216) or even successful ambushes like at Lake Trasimene (217) result in Rome’s victorious enemies taking meaningful losses. Hannibal loses more men (1,500 to 2,500) ambushing the Romans by complete surprise at Trasimene than Alexander lost in any individual pitched battle. The Roman system of fighting just does that.
Assuming the various people of Italy fought in 334 the way they did in 280 – and we aren’t seeing radical changes in military material culture (to the degree we can tell) which would suggest they didn’t – Alexander’s westward road is looking even more difficult, because he’d be facing far more substantial attrition. And his army simply cannot tolerate those levels of attrition. On balance, I think that means that a hypothetical 280!Alexander fails (again, that’s just Pyrrhus) but also suggests even more difficulties for our 334!Alexander, because there’s no reason to suppose Rome’s armies in 334 are meaningfully tactically different than in 280.9
Scenario 3: Alexander at Cannae
Now we make one more huge jump forward, mostly just to demonstrate the outer edge of our possibilities: time-traveling Alexander the Great fighting the Mid-Republican Roman military system in the middle or late third century (264 or 218).
And I included this mostly because it is illustrative the way in which the uncertainty which has dogged the previous comparisons evaporates into near-certainty: Alexander is absolutely hosed. By the late-third century, our evidence is much better: we have a much firmer grasp on Roman resources, a complete description of their army and quite a lot of well-documented campaigns testing Roman capabilities. No part of what we see when the curtain lifts is favorable for Alexander.
As we move forward, the strategic picture changes again. Samnium, which revolted to join Pyrrhus, is quite forcibly rejoined to Rome at the end of the Pyrrhic War, along with all of Southern Italy. By 264, the ongoing Roman conquest of Etruria is also very complete and has been for a while. We can tell Roman control in Etruria is more firmly settled because when Hannibal tries to get the socii to revolt, he gets some interest in southern Italy, but almost none in Etruria. Consequently, by 264, the Roman mobilization monster is fully operational and we have to assume that Rome probably has access to something like the roughly 700,000 men liable for conscription that Polybius says they have in 225 (Polyb. 2.24). Alexander’s army absolutely cannot trade casualties with that thing – the Romans have a full order of magnitude more reserves than he does; he needs to run an absolutely immaculate series of one-sided miracle victories and he needs a lot of them. Three, as Hannibal is going to show us (really four if we count the Battles of the Upper Baetis in 211) isn’t enough and we know that because it happened and the Romans steamed on through anyway.
And there is just, to be frank, no reasonable chance of Alexander pulling that off. On the one hand, we’ve seen what Roman armies of the 280s and 270s do to Macedonian-style armies: they might not win, but they draw a lot of blood even when losing. On the other end of this period, we know what Roman armies after 200 are going to do to every Macedonian-style army they meet: utterly wreck it. The Romans fight five major battles with Hellenistic armies in the second century (Aous, Cynoscephalae, Thermopylae, Magnesia, Pydna) and win every single one decisively.10 Both options are fatal to our time-traveling Alexander going west, because his military system can’t tolerate those kinds of losses.
I feel fairly confident in saying an Alexander ‘going west’ in 218 would vanish like a pebble into a pond: a few ripples, quickly lost as his army is simply swallowed by the resources and tactical sophistication of the Roman’s military monster. We’ll come back to Carthage later this year, but the Barcid military machine, I suspect, could have accomplished similar results (but note that this machine also didn’t exist in our earlier periods!). After all, it very nearly matched the Romans.
Alexander In the West
So mostly this has been an opportunity to think through the way our vision of conditions in Italy becomes progressively clearer from 340 to 218, along with a look at the changing political and strategic situation.
But we can return to our counter-factual, “What if Alexander went West?”
A lot of the specifics of our answer depends on how far we’re willing to project backwards the certainties of the third century into the fourth. If Roman armies (and the armies of other Italian powers) in 334 behave like they did in 218 or even in 280, Alexander is going to have a very tough time in Italy. But of course, we can’t be confident that we can ‘fill in the blanks’ of 334 with the ‘frog DNA‘ of 280 or 218 (and in some cases, we can be confident we can’t).
But I think we can venture a few conclusions. The sort of lightning conquest Alexander achieved in the east against the Achaemenids is probably not going to happen for our counter-factual Alexander in the west, even in 334 (or 323). Whereas each victory against the Achaemenids could net Alexander enormous territory (and with it, a lot of cash to pay his army),11 everything we know suggests Italy would be a slow, grinding operation.
That slow progress is also likely to blunt Alexander’s own capabilities over time: as the initial conquests fail to provide enough of a cash infusion to lavishly pay his army, Alexander is going to be forced to pare back his force to what he can afford. That in turn threatens to force him to conform to pre-existing mode of warfare in Italy, fighting grinding wars with smaller armies against polities that war continuously and regenerate military capabilities quickly. Combined with the whack-a-mole problem discussed above, it’s not hard to see Italy becoming a quagmire that consumes Alexander’s resources even as he continues to win victories. If we assume – and on the balance, I think this is the most likely – that even when losing, the armies of Italy inflict substantial casualties, all of these problems become much worse. Alexander might well have found that after a decade of victories and grueling warfare, he had managed to make himself the master only of Italy south of the Volturnus, with a more tenuous overlordship over Rome and Latium – and an increasingly fraught relationship with Carthage to the south and problems to the north in the Adriatic with the Illyrians, Pannonians and Dalmatians.
From there, his successors might try to take the path that Rome did, slowly but surely grinding down the peoples of Italy and welding them together into a larger military machine, but to be frank, the manpower of Macedon is probably too limited to sustain that project and the politics of Greece too chaotic to permit Alexander or his successor the uninterrupted decades they’d need to accomplish such a project. It seems far more likely that the moment Alexander dies – or is forced to return to Macedon, perhaps to deal with a revolt among the Greeks – the whole project comes apart. Alexander would become Pyrrhus a few decades earlier in the same way Pyrrhus tried to become Alexander a few decades later.
But there’s an equally useful observation here: pre-Roman Italy could not be subdued by a single lightning conquest and it wasn’t. Instead, the Roman alliance system was the product of many, slow, grinding decades of conquest. Roman expansion outside of Latium – the conquest and consolidation of which had been its own long project from 501 to 338 – began in 343 and seems to have only been truly completed in the 270s. That slow process in turn in part explains why the Roman system was so durable under the pressures of Pyrrhus and the Punic Wars: each new community had been brought into the system, one-by-one and kept in it long enough for the system to become consolidated and customary. It was precisely because Rome’s conquest of Italy wasn’t an Alexander-style lightning conquest that it was durable.
It’s not clear Italy could have been conquered any other way.
- Fortunately, my cats take their wages ‘in kind,’ unlike most of Alexander’s soldiers, who expected payment in silver.
- “The text is corrupt” means we can tell there are copying errors. So Livy was already confused by his evidence and cobbles together a jumbled mess of an army description and then even that is further jumbled before it gets to us. A proper mess and the passage is almost completely unusable.
- But see the above note on how Livy 8.8 is a hot mess.
- We know a lot less about the First Samnite War, to the point that some scholars doubt even the fundamentals of our narrative of it in Livy.
- Not a foregone conclusion, I might note: the Samnites are very capable fighters, especially in their home territory.
- And roughly 1,000 at the Hydaspes (326).
- Antipater is able to enlarge this to 40,000 for the Battle of Megalopolis (331), but only by scraping every available barrel, including hiring what Greeks he could; Diod. Sic. 17.63. I don’t think he could maintain that level of mobilization.
- Including men, women and children, there are probably c. 660,000 Romans. Estimates for the core population of Macedon vary. Taylor, Soldiers and Silver (2020) supposes as few as 200-300,000 in the Antigonid period, Millet, “The Political Economy of Macedonia” (2010) figures around 500,000. Billows, Kings and Colonists (1995) is the outlier, supposing perhaps a million in the Macedonian core, but he is assuming large numbers of non-free serfs to make that large figure, so the citizen figure must be quite a bit less.
- Though, again, the evidence is limited, so they might be!
- We’re going to come back to this later this year, but I want to drop an aside here, because otherwise it will come up in the comments: no, the Carthaginians did not, at any point, field a Macedonian-style pike phalanx. The pop history you may have seen saying they did is misinterpreting a mistranslation of lonchophoroi.
- Granicus nets Alexander most of Anatolia, Issus gets him most of the Levant (minus Tyre), taking Tyre and Gaza gets him all of Egypt, Gaugamela secures the whole of Mesopotamia and a decent chunk of Persia.
I love these kind of hypothetical scenarios, thank you! In the 2004 Alexander movie by Oliver Stone, near the end of the movie, Alexander is talking to the dying Hephaistion about going West and conquering the “strong people of Rome”. Though it is questionable whether Rome was as well-known to the Kings of the Hellenistic world back then.
I recall Mary Renault has a similar vignette, though I don’t have the energy to re-read her two Alexander books to fine it.
Brooding perpetually on my sins as I do, I must confess my mistake: there are three Alexander books by Renault, Fire from Heaven, The Persian Boy, and Funeral Games.
Unless my memory is completely failing me, we don’t need to rely on Stone or Renault. There is a section at the end Plutarch’s Alexander that details the projects left unrealized by his death, and this includes conquering the West.
This suggests a different scenario, one where the invasion of the West is supported by a huge treasury and income, and is undertaken by a Macedonian army of 40,000 men and 30,000 Iranian cavalry as well as a combined Greek-Phoenecian fleet.
I think the big difference between Hannibal and Time Traveler Alexander after a Cannae-style victory is that Alexander is 100% going to charge full force at Rome itself after that, trying to get his army there as quickly as possible. He’s not going to try and detach Rome’s allies like Hannibal. I have no idea if that would actually work ,but after listening to Patrick Wyman’s podcast on Hannibal’s army after Cannae it sounds like it was the only potential way to really beat Rome (even if a long shot).
I suspect it would not work. Real life Hannibal went after Nola right after Cannae, and that was only guarded by a propraetor’s force. He lost. Then he would try two more times over the next year and lose both of those too; and if Livy is to be trusted, he seemed to be pretty reliant on getting factions within the city to open the gates for him.
I can’t think of a single factor that a defense of Nola has going for it over a defense of Rome. Rome is bigger, better fortified, has a larger garrison, and the population is going to be more pro-Roman for obvious reasons. If he couldn’t crack Nola, I can’t see him cracking Rome.
I addition, given Pyrrhus’ attempt at rushing to Rome after winning a field battle also failed, because he couldn’t get the logistics together to actually siege the city. It’s hard to imagine Alexander would fare much better.
A critical difference is that Alexander was much better at sieges than Hannibal, and probably better than Pyrrhus. Good enough for a blitz strike on the city of Rome itself from southern Italy? Probably not. But minor settlements like Nola would have given him far less trouble than it did Hannibal.
He wouldn’t have the logistics, He’d need, as Dr. Deveraux pointed out, cities and towns along the way to surrender and give him food.
Alexander didn’t beat the persians once and then march straight to the capital, he had to subdue cities in his path. Famously Tyre that resisted and forced his siege.
One historian made the case that Alexander deliberately forced a siege of Tyre (he refused all reasonable terms) and detoured through Egypt in order to give Darius time to collect another army. He wanted to decapitate the Persian Empire, and that was only possible if he could bring Darius to battle. His nightmare was the strategy suggested by one of Darius’ advisors – retreat, harass and confine Alexander with cavalry, scorch in front of him.
From what I have read about the Second Punic War in various AskHistorians threads and seen in the Hannibal series on HistoryMarche, I think the best shot at beating Rome was Carthage winning in Sicily and then being able to create a link with Hannibal in Southern Italy. But Himilco and Bomilcar did not have the skill or daring of their Roman counterparts on Sicily, much less of Hannibal. As other posts on this blog have explained, the Romans were good at producing lots of competent enough generals willing to take risks, while Carthage (outside of the Barcid family) struggled with that.
I think the challenge with that is pan-hellenism and the fact that Carthage would have to defeat Syracuse to control Sicily. Alexander would have to avoid getting drawn into fighting on Syracuse’s side, and justify aligning with Carthage to the rest of Magna Grecia (or risk losing his logistics base in Italy).
I don’t know if there were existing divides or tensions he could exploit between Syracuse and the rest of the greek colonies on the mainland.
There’s the problem of the Socii city-states along the way to deal with; they’d be fortified too and it would be a supremely bad idea to just march past them without besieging them, something Alexander is undoubtedly aware of. If he can’t get them to surrender or switch sides (which in the non-time-traveling hypothetical might be possible, but didn’t work out for Hannibal or Pyrrhus) he’s going to be considerably delayed besieging them, during which time the Romans will assemble another field army. He will then be in the difficult position of being caught by a relief army while laying siege, but presumably he’s done proper siege camp fortification and he probably wins that fight too. But then when he gets to Rome the Romans have assembled another field army, and given how the last couple battles went they probably decide to hold the walls with it. That’s a hell of a nut to crack, and meanwhile the Italian powers he’s already beaten are getting restive.
This is more for the earlier fights, but my impression is that italian siegecraft was a lot less advanced than eastern one at the earlier starts (there are a couple of mentions in roman histories that seems to indicate the romans didn’t have the kind of siege knowledge they do later and are mostly just starving cities out)
I would expect Alexander to have an easier time taking fortified italian cities than the romans do at that point.
Quite possibly he’d be faster than the Romans, but a classical-era siege isn’t something you do in an afternoon, and the Romans can potentially raise a replacement army pretty quickly because they’ve got a deep bench of people eligible for the draft who presumably have equipment at home already.
If Alexander commits to a siege he’s got more logisitics issues. Armies have to eat, and the “countryside” almost certainly isn’t “subdued”. So he’s got foraging parties, which are vulnerable, and the main force is fixed on the map.
Rome won’t take long to mount a relief force.
Even if Rome doesn’t sieges are costly to the attackers, because camp sanitation become an issue, and disease/injury will attrit his forces.
I think that Alexander goes West counterfactual shares a lot of issues with another popular one – ‘What if Japan goes North instead of South in 1941″. Theoretically both entities can do it. But they do not have good reasons to do so because there is nothing for them to gain there but more trouble.
Also, the Japanese had tried to go north twice shortly before ’41 and got roundly smacked both times. A surprisingly high number of people asking that counterfactual don’t know about the Manchurian border wars before they ask.
My pet counterfactual regarding Japan in 1941 is What If Japan ignores the USA and instead attacks only the British and Dutch possessions in the South Pacific? The same blitz Japanese forces launch in December 1941 and into early 1942 except they do not attack Hawaii or the Philippines. They can still grab all the resources they covet by conquering the old European empires; the Philippines is left isolated; Japan establishes a defensive perimeter, keeps its navy intact, dares the US Navy to come to it; would Roosevelt been able to take America into a “war of choice” against Japan just to bail our the British in Asia? I think this would have been a very hard sell. And what would the course of WWII have been in the Pacific in such a case? This raises a host of fascinating questions.
the Philippines is too strategic a position to be left alone for long, especially if the british and french naval forces are using it as a safe haven (as they absolutely would, even if the US didn’t officially condone it. especially once isolated, the local US forces would certainly turn a blind eye)
so all that does is delay the US entering the war.. and give it time to get even more of its industry going to support it, since they started ramping up all that in 1939, seeing the writing on the wall. they already had dozens more ships under construction in 1941, and the longer japan waits the more of those will be finished.
and if there is no pearl harbor strike, that US navy can deploy in strong battlegroups able to contest the IJN on much closer to equal footing. which would lead to some pretty nasty naval engagements but given how well american carriers and submarines performed in the immediate aftermath of pearl harbor in blunting the IJN, i suspect adding even more US carriers, battleships, cruisers, destroyers, and submarines to the mix is only go even worse for the IJN over all.
I’m puzzled by your reference to the performance of American submarines. A number of commanders did attempt attacks that could have caused the IJN major problems had the US had working torpedoes. As they had the Mark 14 nothing significant was achieved. The British T-class would undoubtably have had a significant effect (their torpedoes worked) but they had been withdrawn, mostly to fight in the Mediterranean, where they were not particularly suited to the conditions. The Dutch did quite well considering their limited resources but basically the Japanese got an undeserved free pass.
As for “nasty naval engagements” I fear that any fought at night might have had unfortunate results to the US.
I believe that would have been the opposite. My understanding is that a lot of larger US ships were equipped with surface radars that could be used to detect enemy ships and direct fire to them. Japanese had much less use of ship-borne radar and they were equipping them later.
That depends on the exact date they’re fought at. The US was ahead on surface radar, but in the early stages of the war they didn’t have many and they were plagued by a combination of technical issues and a lack of crew trust. Meanwhile the IJN had fewer radars, but they’d decided in the leadup to the war that, as the smaller navy, night battles were a really good idea and they should prepare for them, so they had a significant edge in night fighting doctrine and really hammered the US in the early night engagements. Then the US got more radars and better at using them and the balance shifted.
The other problem with night battles for the US is that it’s really hard to use aircraft during them. Navigation is difficult, the solution employed for land bombers of broadcasting a radio beacon gives away the transmitting ship’s position, and spotting blacked-out ships from ten thousand feet up is nearly impossible until later in the war when radar is installed on aircraft. Then recovering the aircraft in the darkness is difficult because the carrier has moved.
Oh, another night battle wrinkle is that Japan had some really sweet long-range torpedoes, which didn’t give away the launching ship’s position the way gun flashes would, and proved a nasty surprise for a number of ships that thought they were comfortably out of torpedo range because when the Bureau of Ordinance got a copy of the technical specs they literally did not believe they were possible.
Basically, while Japan severely underrated the US’s willingness to fight, they could count ships as well as anyone, and their basic operational plan was to inflict heavy attrition with night attacks, submarines, and aircraft so they’d engage in the main clash of battle lines from a position of superiority, and they invested heavily in the technology and doctrine to make this work.
I will note, /Britain/ was very well trained for fighting at night, it’s just we had other stuff on our mind at the time. There’s a couple of points where the Japanese Combined Fleet could have had a very nasty surprise (if HMS Indomitable’s scouts had found the Japanese force, for example), it just didn’t quite come off. Taranto, I will note, was a night attack.
I guess I have a corollary question to all of this. What made the Achaemenids of the 330s so weak? Arrian and Plutarch both claim that the Achaemenids fielded over a million men at Gaugamela, and that was after some pretty stinging defeats and needing literal years to reconstitute. That million figure is pretty patently absurd, but it does not really strain credulity that something as vast as the Achaemenid empire could field huge resources and would deploy all of them if someone was stabbing at their vitals.
Yet this analysis is basically saying that this is less effective than some pretty small polities fielding armies around the same size as Alexander’s own force. They don’t have independent cities waiting to tough out sieges, fine, that makes sense. But they do have deep manpower pools (or they should, anyway), and a demonstrated ability to field large armies wand move them around quickly. Why did they fall apart so quickly and inflict so little damage when being stomped?
I would suspect they faced the same issues as the Seleucids (that end up basically inheriting that empire), which has two components:
– It’s too big an empire to have a monarch with. As often discussed, a monarch needs to have built a *lot* of legitimacy to be able to trust large field armies to subordinates without risking revolt. This is rarely the case, which is why such a king-led empire usually can only field one big army at a time, which is led by the king. And the army size is capped by the logistical constraints, so the large manpower reserve can’t be tapped very efficiently.
– A lot of the manpower base is made up from imperial subjects who they’re extracting rent from to supply the core. That manpower is dangerous to recruit (because the subjects might get ideas about revolting now that they’re armed and trained) and even when recruited, will usually be only lightly equipped and have low morale and cohesion. They might just evaporate the moment things get tough because they’re not fighting for anything worthwhile from their own perspective – especially in a defensive battle like Alexander is forcing, since there won’t even be a city to loot as reward.
will usually be only lightly equipped and have low morale and cohesion
could you please explain to me why they should be only lightly equipped, ephasis on only?
Firstly, heavy equipment is expensive and getting a well equipped army out of a community requires some kind of policy of resource investment into supplying the gear. This is at odds with the “role” of imperial subjects in an empire, which is to provide resources for the core, not take them. And a “buy it yourself” model like the Romans did works badly for the usual tributary empire because Secondly, if an empire equips and trains its subject communities extensively, that increases the danger these communities pose when they rebel.
AFAIK buying yourself was the standard for this day and age
Basic imperial policy keeps subject peoples poorer, with the indirect consequence that they are less able to supply themselves with heavy armament. More sophisticated imperial policy will impose regulations to prevent armament parity between subject peoples and the primary imperial nation.
Soldiers in these times would all have understood that there was real importance to just showing up, that they were being paid to march. Soldiers who identify with their ultimate commanders can be taught that fighting is also an important part of their jobs, and that is kind of a necessary prerequisite to morale in battle.
Very sophisticated empires tend toward a system where subject peoples are policed by locally-alienated forces drawn from different subject peoples, and this can create heavy-armament subject units with strong battlefield cohesion, but that is how most of the revolt-that-creates-a-new-empire stories begin.
There’s also the difference in the conditions under which the imperial subject march and what the socii got.
Basically the socii got a lot more of the loot, so a lot more signed up and were much more enthusiastic about it.
Rome really did innovate with that system.
“got a lot more of the loot”
Or any of it, especially for imperial taxpayers.
Conventional empire: “now that I’ve beaten you up, keep paying taxes so I don’t beat you up again.”
Rome, to Italians: “now that I’ve beaten you up, join my gang and share in beating other people up.”
Understandable why it was hard for more conventional invaders to peel away the ‘allies’. Even if you weren’t equal to Rome, was Hannibal or Pyrrhus likely to offer a better deal than being second-rank of a really big gang?
It should be noted that even the Roman’s unusually friendly “Goku Imperialism” still could not prevent a revolt – which we can see the Social Wars as. And as revolts go, it was not a small one, requiring quite a lot of Roman effort to suppress and even then ending with what can at best be described as a draw in terms of outcomes: The Romans manage to keep them in by promoting them from subjects (even with good terms) to part of the imperial core.
Yes, but if you note, the Social War came *after* the Gracchi had accidentally pulled a “I am changing the deal. Pray I do not change it further” on the Socii with their land redistribution plan, which took away the ability for Socii to be able to rent more than a certain amount of the Ager Publicus, and the land redistribution plan did not entitle Socii to grants of land from the Ager Publicus like Roman citizens got, which would have been fair compensation. (Nobody is particualrly going to object to not needing to pay rent for their farm anymore, after all)
Meaning they revolted *because* the Romans had made the deal significantly worse for the Socii, and much more like the traditional tributary-overlord arrangement. (Though it’s important not to overemphasise this- it was *still* an improvement over what Hellenistic empires offered their subjects)
They certainly had more troops than Alexander, but not too many more at any one battle – the logistics and command arrangements do not permit much more than 50,000 on the field. The Achaemenids pulled together three substantial field armies, each of which suffered major defeat – but fought hard They did not have the kind of local defence which Italy (or in later times, medieval Europe) offered, so each defeat opened up large territories.
Macchiavelli noted that a state like Persia, with a single strong centre, was hard to defeat but could be defeated in a few blows. Alexander’s aim point was not so much the empire as Darius, and once he fell the empire fell. But Machiavelli went on that a state like the France of his own day might be more easily defeated in a single battle, but that did not win the war – resistance would continue at province, town and castle level (as the English found out – or the Mongols in their later Hungarian and Polish incursions). Brett is making the same case for Italy.
I think OGH got into this quite well: For a Persian city surrender meant paying tribute to a distant Alexander instead of a distant Darius. Oh well. For the Samnites of the period surrender meant subjugation instead of freedom.
That’s a VERY big difference in motivation, and as we’ve seen even today in Afghanistan (lack of motivation) and Ukraine (tons of motivation) that’s often a bigger factor than raw material strength.
I would not call the Taliban unmotivated. One of the reasons why we (Finland was there as American ally.) lost there was that for many of the local Pashtuns, surrender to the Americans would mean subjugation, in the sense of losing their liberty to lead their traditional lifestyle. We may not think much of that lifestyle (fundamentalist Islam, mistreatment of women, local aristocracies having despotic power etc.) but they saw it differently. Obviously, they must hold these values dearer than life: The Taliban were ready to fight a war with massive losses for a generation until they retook Afghanistan.
The difference is that in Ukraine, we are backing the side that is defending their homes and freedom.
I trust Seth was referring to the old Afghan government set up by the Coalition, which folded like origami the moment the Americans left, whereas the Ukrainian government did not despite facing a much more powerful opponent.
>in Ukraine, we are backing the side that is defending their homes and freedom
Yep, which is why these freedom fighters not only forbid men from leaving, but razor wire their borders and shoot anyone trying to escape. Also why their primary source of manpower on the front are unmarked vans grabbing men off the streets. And, of course, also the reason their invader remains the primary refugee destination.
Coming from a country that has conscription, I consider the enforcement of conscription a necessity. The legitimacy of conscription is based on the idea that free-riding is not allowed. Otherwise, no rational person chooses to voluntary comply with the induction order. (In this sense, conscription is no different from taxes that also need enforcement to get volutary compliance by the majority.) So, you will always have people who are being forced to serve, sometimes with more, sometimes with less brutal methods. The suitable level of strictness is a an optimisation problem to strike a balance between personal liberty, human rights and a socially acceptable difficulty of avoiding service.
The idea that everyone in military age requires a permit to leave the country that is fighting an existential war is quite an acceptable thing. This was done in every European country during WWII, and Ukraine is defending herself against an enemy comparable in brutality and disregard for human life and dignity with Stalin or Hitler.
Ah good old uncritical repition of Russian propaganda…
So, do you have a citation for that last sentence?
https://imgur.com/a/5uUPazN
There’s the Russo-Georgian border. On the Russian side, of course.
“Yet this analysis is basically saying that this is less effective than some pretty small polities fielding armies around the same size as Alexander’s own force.”
Effective against what? Against Alexander’s army, which was, as a matter of force design, tailor-made to the task of empire-killing (by his father Philip). And against Alexander’s personality in his role as an army-leading statesman, which happened to be particularly suited to empire-killing but is a poor match for the strategic situation in the first scenario. If you re-roll the force design and Alexander’s personality, you will tend to be less spectacularly effective against Persia, but more effective in Italy.
Strategically, the Persian Empire is a single hegemony, but Italy isn’t. If you can be patient, you don’t have to fight everyone; you can wait, enter into alliances, etc., and in the limit case do what the Romans did over two-ish centuries. It is merely because Alexander cannot wait — either as a matter of his personality, or as a matter of his army needing to be paid — and his insatiable appetite for conquest, that he chooses hostility with everyone in the first scenario. (something something “good at war” something) Whereas if you face an established hegemony, a rude shock can create chaos (governors rebel, etc.) and with particularly aggressive exploitation, you can replace the hegemon.
His army’s drawbacks are, by Philip’s wise choices, ones that don’t matter in the context of killing an empire, and more specifically the Achaemenid empire.
– Does the nature of the army, of it having to be paid, commit you to always having to fight someone? Not a problem if you have a Big Empire you can fight for a long time; yes a problem if you ever plan on reaching peace.
– Does your army set a preposterously high city-capture rate target? Not a problem if you invade an old rich imperialized region, where cities roll over without a siege.
– Does the army react poorly to attrition? Not a problem if the logistics works out (partly because the locals are cooperative) and the Achaemenid armies in particular don’t inflict many casualties.
– Do you leave your homeland virtually empty and exposed? Not a problem if you are fighting an empire with One Big Army at any one time, they would expose their own if they tried to invade yours, thus they won’t even try (or if they try and you don’t like the deal, maneuver to intercept) and you don’t have land neighbors who would. The latter part is usually a sticking point, but the Macedon of this time happened to border non-state peoples. You also couldn’t do it if facing a non-decadent empire, one which could task multiple independently maneuvering field armies against one strategic problem.
As such, if Alexander’s time machine had a wider range, he would be better served with going into the 400s or mid-200s AD rather than close to his own time. He would still have attrition problems, but he could enter the race for the title of Roman emperor with fair chances.
That last part is an interesting question; it is quite possible that were Alexander facing the Roman Empire of the centuries AD things would work out rather differently.
I think the balance of forces at that point is too adverse even for Alexander if he’s making a bid for Rome; the Roman standing army is vast and still loaded with high-quality heavy infantry. If Italy is threatened they could recall armies from the provinces and put up an army more than twice the size of Alexander’s, and still have reserves they can’t deploy due to logistics constraints. Of course, if he kills or sufficiently humiliates the Emperor in battle that could touch off a political crisis, but I think the direct threat to the capital would encourage the would-be Emperors to stick together because they can’t rule Rome if it’s under Alexander’s control.
His odds of carving off a border province look much better; under those circumstances it’s far more likely Rome would fall into civil war, and they wouldn’t be back for a while. And when they did come back they’d leave their province garrison armies in place, so the fight would be numerically more even.
I’m less sure about that – Emperors were pretty willing to strip the frontiers to fight civil wars/hypothetical time-travelling Alexander, but that didn’t necessarily mean they had bigger-than-Republican armies at the point of contact (and by the time of, say, Julian, they were fighting with definitely smaller ones).
I suppose it depends a lot on how Alexander appears: if he’s a genuine magical time-travelling foreigner that might inspire more solidarity, but if he’s just some comes with the military skill of Alexander and whose troops are mysteriously 45,000-strong and equipped in early-Hellenistic style, he’s probably gonna roll them.
Framing this all as Phillip designing the army to fight the Achaemenids doesn’t work for me. Phillip began with conquering the Greek city states which were another set of many independent or semi-independent cities with highly-motivated local armies – and while they were richer and offered more plunder than Italy would have at the time, they certainly were nowhere near as rich as the Persians.
Part of that is sources. Alexander quickly lost control of Cappadocia and never controlled Armenia or the South Caucasus. Our sources barely mention the fighting in Cappadocia because Alexander was not present. We know almost nothing of how the Macedonians lost control of India and Ashoka took over. Part of that is modern narratives, which tend to present the 40 years of wars in mainland Greece as disconnected chunks (the Rise of Philip, then the Lamian War, then the Wars of the Successors) and not as one long-term struggle over whether Macedonia would dominate southern Greece. And part of that is structural: you can’t feed an army of more than about 100,000 combatants in the ancient world, and if you are king you have trouble trusting anyone else with important campaigns (Memnon of Rhodes had to give hostages before he was put in charge of the war in the Aegean), so a big kingdom can’t attack a medium-sized kingdom from several directions at once or invade it with a much larger army.
One could also add that the Persian monarchy was in a bit of a temporary crisis: Darius was a distant relative of the Achaemenid dynasty, who took power after the main branch had almost died out (supposedly due to poisoning by the chief eunuch)
My impression: The Achemenid field army suffers some really lopsided losses, but that tends to be how battles work out, but that doesen’t neccessarily mean they are unwinnable (Gaugamela in particular seems to be one of those cases where it’s pretty close, and a bit more luck on the Achamenid side might see a complete reversal)
The problem is that these defeats reodes the legitimacy of the king (who, we must remember, came to power in some rather dubious circumstances so he probably has lower reserves of that already)
Yes, it’s always hard to evaluate how determined battle results (or most things in history) are but given that we hear about Alexander’s army winning on one wing while being in distress on the other it seems likely that they weren’t so far from losing their battles, in which case the Persian army being ‘lower attrition’ doesn’t matter – they had plentiful cavalry to annihilate a routing army with.
I think there’s an interesting aspect here that would be interesting to try and model in a Paradox game, which is that conquest is a lot easier in an imperial periphery compared to an independent polity – and thus might also make a game like Imperator align more with the historical reality where the Diadochi did *not* clean up their own backyards but rather spent most of their effort on peer conflicts, while in the game the players usually start the map-painting by absorbing the smaller polities.
What I’m reading from this post is that an imperial periphery is basically *much* more easy both to conquer and to hold. Easier to conquer because you don’t actually need to deliver the siege as such, you only need to convince the current imperial core to transfer ownership of the periphery to you – as Alexander did with Darius and as the Romans did with Antiochus III, in both cases getting most of Anatolia by just winning a single field battle. And easier to hold because having become an imperial subject the polity is usually demilitarised – even if it has the manpower to revolt, its process of recruitment and mobilising is dependent on the imperial core, which it now lost access to.
Which it makes sense for Antiochus to attack Ptolemy instead of the Armenians, despite the Armenians being a lot weaker: Winning against Ptolemy in a single large field battle immediately nets him all of Syria and Palestine as productive and peaceful tributary. Winning against the Armenians nets him a belligerent and unproductive border vassal that will say “goodbye” the next time the army is busy elsewhere.
Yes, games almost always struggle to show the difficulty of controlling the land after conquest. Many (including Paradox) have some revolt / rebellion system, but that’s usually just a chore of erasing small armies from map time over and over again, without it dealing the conqueror any meaningful attritional harm. Still, it could be tweaked that if the conquered region was previously independent, or of the same culture as their prior overlord, they would rebel harder and more often than if they were already an imperial subject before. This would probably have the impact you’re describing – at least, if the unrest system was beefy enough to really matter.
I think Crusader Kings (2 at least, never played 3) sort of does what you mention, or at least something tangential. If you get an Empire-tier casus belli against the Byzantines you can conquer a lot more territory quickly than if you get a series of small County-tier casus belli against some god forsaken minor in the HRE. That’s very much a representation of “cut off the head” style of conquest.
It’s a common new-player and ex-player complaint about CK (2 & 3), that you can fight a full Empire-on-Empire peer war for years over a single County, or fight essentially the same war to merge the two Empires (if you take the time to prepare to create the opportunity).
Another case of realism vs gameplay. Fighting for decades over the same chunk of territory nicely describes the Hundred Years War between England and France, the Austrian-Habsburgs vs Ottomans in the Balkans, the Ottomans and Safavid Persians …
That’s not the complaint. The complaint is that in Vicky, wargoals can be added during the war if its de facto scope escalates through the roof. Why do CK&EU limit the victor to negotiating the end of the war under the rules of the CB that originally sparked the war? Especially given that this choice of CB was frequently made by 1) someone on the losing side, 2) some minor partner of the coalition, who isn’t even warleader anymore.
There are other (and much less tractable) questions around the representation of wars. For example (in EU3) I used to cheese by pausing and simultaneously declaring mechanically separate wars on members of one tight-knit alliance network. This way, the big partner could only enter one war, and the wars against the minors would be much easier to carry to the negotiation I wanted (both in terms of building up warscore, and in terms of the minor remaining the warleader, so that the terms of the CB actually worked the way they should). Even if this ended up falling short of my maximalist goals, I could sign some peace on the “minor wars” comfortably before I signed on the big war, thus five years later I could declare again on the minor and either the major would decline the call to arms, or eat the penalty for breaking the truce resulting from the big war. (Or in the off case, be mechanically still at war with me.)
Im a bit surprised you didn’t do the “What if Alexander didn’t die young and turned to conquer Italy after having subdued Persia.”-scenario.
I’ve seen that one entertained often enough, like in the 2004 movie.
It’ll play out much like the “334” scenario in the post: Alexander was a great general, but a lousy ruler. He wouldn’t have been able to draw on the conquered territories for additional manpower, so the only advantage of invading in 323 rather than 334 is a bigger treasury to pay his troops with. He still faces the need for a protracted game of whack-a-mole against opponents who refuse to stay conquered.
I’m not sure we got to see how good of a ruler Alexander was. I think it’s reasonable to say that he was unlikely to have been as inspired of a ruler as he was a general, but he does appear to be at least slightly better than most of his successors. As in, he correctly identified the issue of his empire being held together by a thin crust of ethnic Macedonians and moved to incorporate local elites into power structures in a way practically none of the successors did (save for a single Ptolemy).
Though, to be fair, I feel like the ultimate trajectory for that is ‘Alexander is murdered by slighted members of the ethnic Macedonian crust who don’t want to share their slice of the pie’, but it’s definitely a step in a better direction in terms of mobilisation of manpower than most of his successors.
His chosen treasurer (Harpalus) did some spectacular embezzlement and then fled with the loot. A few of his governor picks faced serious revolts (some succeeded), and the general impression is that Greek/Macedonian rule was more onerous than Persian
…yeah that’s probably not a great sign…
Yeah, I was expecting that one too.
Arrian wondered about this scenario (Project Gutenberg translation):
> Some authors also have stated that he was meditating a voyage round the larger portion of Arabia, the country of the Ethiopians, Libya (i.e. Africa), and Numidia beyond Mount Atlas to Gadeira (i.e. Cadiz), inward into our sea (i.e. the Mediterranean); thinking that after he had subdued both Libya and Carchedon (i.e. Carthage), he might with justice be called king of all Asia. For he said that the kings of the Persians and Medes called themselves Great Kings without any right, since they did not rule the larger part of Asia. Some say that he was meditating a voyage thence into the Euxine Sea, to Scythia and the Lake Maeotis (i.e. the Sea of Azov); while others assert that he intended to go to Sicily and the Iapygian Cape, for the fame of the Romans spreading far and wide was now exciting his jealousy. For my own part I cannot conjecture with any certainty what were his plans; and I do not care to guess. But this I think I can confidently affirm, that he meditated nothing small or mean; and that he would never have remained satisfied with any of the acquisitions he had made, even if he had added Europe to Asia, or the islands of the Britons to Europe; but would still have gone on seeking for unknown lands beyond those mentioned.
Before I read the post properly, I would like to jump in and say how much I like the word “silly”. Going way back into Middle English, it means “simple” in the Biblical/Proverbial sense of being ignorant, possibly to a morally deficient extent, but now it just means “not serious”.
The scenario I’m more interested in, personally, is what happens if Alexander goes west in 323- having already made himself Basileus Megas of the East?
I assume we take a “nothing really changes” position- the strategic scenario in Italy isn’t much different to 334 (though this is mid-Second Samnite), and the additional resources he’s gained aren’t likely to translate to a serious increase in effective military power (and probably not enough to offset the additional burden of having to keep to keep the empire together)?
I think the core issues remain. Alexander didn’t really create a good system for raising Persian manpower, as evidenced by the fact his successors don’t have one, so he’s running about the same army with only slightly increased reserves. He doesn’t have the funding crunch, assuming he has installed a loyal treasurer this time, but he does have an army that’s getting pretty tired of campaigning.
The main change is that he has much more territory that might revolt and require him to abandon the campaign to resubdue, if the bloom comes off his reputation as a result of struggling in Italy.
But Alexander *was* trying to raise manpower from ethnic Persians in the way that the successors very much weren’t. There’s the epigonoi phalanx he was raising. There’s Persian / Bactrian cavalry in his Indian campaign. There’s the mass marriage of his officers with locals. The extent and motivation of Alexander is heavily debated, but he saw himself as a ruler of both Macedonians *and* Persians, and was seemingly trying to create an aristocracy that involved both ethnicities. In stark contrast with the Seleucids or Ptolemies, who had a very firm ethnic hierarchy in their empires, with Macedonians above the others. To the extent that (in Egypt especially) the ethnic term became synonymous with rank.
We’ll never know how well this would have worked in practice – these policies of Alexander were strongly disliked by the upper echelons of Macedonians – but it was very different from what was attempted in RL.
@autonomousmonster I realised I started a similar comment thread just a few minutes after yours below, apologies for the crossposting.
Typos:
Alexander’s success against the Achaemenids was fundamentally predicted on relatively low casualties -> predicated not predicted
Alexander would become Pyrrhus a few decades earlier in the same way Pyrrhus tried to become Alexander a few decades later. -> Not a typo, but a really nice sentence that deserves highlighting.
Missed the opportunity to use the Alexander Mosaic mirrored so he’s pointing left
It’s fine, let’s just say this time he’s marching on the Egyptian map.
There’s a scenario 1.5 which is hinted at it the introduction but then not tackled: Alexander doesn’t die in 323BC and goes west in ~320. There’s some evidence that that was his plan, and that he had ordered a huge fleet to be built in Egypt for that purpose, although probably against Carthage rather than Italy. Let’s assume he lands in Rhegium in 320 with the bulk of the royal army, and a strong navy to boot.
While we can probably assume that the Italian situation is about the same as in 334, I think Alexander has a few key advantages here. He has no shortage of silver. He has a fleet to enable his own movements, to deal with logistics, to blockade enemy cities, and to prevent his enemies from doing all of that. The core of his army is hugely experienced (ie, the silver shields). He has vast manpower because he’s happy to recruit Macedonian-style soldiers from his Persia in bulk (aka, the epigonoi – a drastically different policy to his successors). His reputation is enormous, possibly causing faster surrenders from minor communities (conditional on news travelling far in the 4th century BC).
Of course the one major additional disadvantage that Alexander would have is the near certainty of unrest in Asia and some satrap or other going rogue. That division of attention might fundamentally prevent him from going West at all, or staying there for long enough to conquer Italy.
But if we add “no revolts in Asia” (or that loyal forces left behind can handle them) to our already silly counter-factual, then I think a conquest of Italy up to and including Etruria is on the cards. Probably to become a satrapy that immediately centrifuges out of Macedonian control as soon as Alexander dies (or even returns East).
That’s the scenario I thought we were looking at.
Not a time-travelling Alexander. But an Alexander not dying so early.
He does have more silver. I’m not sure the manpower situation is THAT much better. There’s a difference between being willing to raise large numbers of Macedonian-style troops from the former Persian empire and actually doing it. (and getting them to Italy).
Indeed. That’s why I mentioned the epigonoi by name: a 30,000 strong phalanx that Alexander was training from Persians at the time of his death. Even his later campaigns in India involved significant quantities of Asian cavalry. Getting them to Italy is another matter, but the whole scenario is predicated on him being able to ship an army there in there in the first place.
The war of hte diadochi was tough and brutal. If Seleucus or someone could have had an extra 30,000 strong Macedonian style phalanx lying around, he would have used it.
I don’t think we can conclude that Alexander’s epigonoi program would have worked, or even that he put an special effort into it just from the fact that he started it.
As I said, Antigonos and Seleukos specifically revoked those policies of Alexander. The sources tell us that Alexander did this and put special effort into it. Would it have worked? Who knows! But at least it shows that Alexander was trying to recruit from Asia far more actively the successors ever did.
Now the sources aren’t great for Alexander. But if we’re going to discount them just because we don’t like what they say and substitute our own guesses, then I don’t see what basis we have for discussing any of this what so ever.
The sources said that he cared but the sources also said he barely spent any time in Persia proper. So :shrug:
But I’m mainly skeptical this program would have worked because it’s really, really hard. We’re talking integrating the aristocracy of the conquered people and the conquerors, getting conquered to fight in the culturally specific manner of the conquerors while remaining loyal, and to do it within decade or two? That’s basically unprecedented in the history of empires. I guess the Roman’s did something like that but they took centuries and were starting with people much closer in culture. And, as ACOUP often reiterates, they don’t treat the conquered aristocrats as conquered.
Additionally, the Epiganoi were children of Persian nobles. If he wanted to turn it into a socii esque source of manpower, he’d need to significantly expand it to the Persian “middle-class” to the extent that the middle class existed. Which is a whole ‘nother can of worms.
Sorry if there are typos. I typed this out on mobile, which this website seems oddly hostile to.
> We’re talking integrating the aristocracy of the conquered people and the conquerors, getting conquered to fight in the culturally specific manner of the conquerors while remaining loyal, and to do it within decade or two?
The British come close in India. The Sepoys more or less fought in the European manner, and the Princely States were in part a way of integrating the aristocracy. I don’t know enough to talk about the time frame with confidence, but EIC armies were majority native from Plassey onward.
Granted, that is two millennia later and in a context where the British have a large technical advantage (though smaller in 1750 than 1850) and where the main rivals are other natives not “outside context” opponents as Italic heavy infantry would be to Persians.
I was beaten to the punch to bring up the British in India in the 1700s and 1800s. Quite successful with the East India Company and then the Indian Army.
@Jake
Your point is great, and it made me think that you could see the Indian independence movement as a reaction to the lacking integration of Indians in the British rule. The main problem was that the British were not ready to allow Indians to actually get the positions for which they were competent. No matter how well educated and Westernised, no Indian would ever get a high civil service position, or become a field-grade officer, or even less, reach a position of prominence in the Imperial core. Mahatma Gandhi is a good example. If the British had been as good at integrating local elites as Romans, Gandhi would probably ended up either as a British minister or a law lord, or perhaps become the Goevernor-General of Canada.
Alexander’s attempt to have a joint Perso-Macedonian nobility and military corp might have indeed have failed. The most likely reason, IMO, would have been a revolt by the upper tiers of Macedonian society that were unhappy with having to share the spoils of conquest (especially, positions of power and prestige) with the conquered. Even without escalating to full blown civil war, the threat of it might have made Alexander backed down (it’s likely why the Seleucids didn’t continue the policy – although the Ptolemies did in the late 3rd century, leading to all sorts of domestic troubles post Raphia). Although considering what Antipater was up to, something akin to the wars of Diadochi might have happened even if Alexander stayed alive.
All that circles back to the point in the top comment – the most likely thing that would prevent Alexander conquering Italy ~320 would be events in Asia tying him down in the east.
I thought of the British in India also as having done a decent job of integrating conquered peoples into their military establishment, although it must be noted that the Sepoys were also capable of mutiny.
About the India analogy: I think the thing about the East India Company is that it was immortal. Individual Governors General died like flies, but the Company itself just kept going and going. Individual princes and other opponents would die eventually, but the Company could only be killed in London, if someone drove an Act of Parliament through its heart.
That is not an advantage that Alexander could ever possess over Rome. Quite the reverse.
@FinnishReader,
If the British had been as good at integrating local elites as Romans, Gandhi would probably ended up either as a British minister or a law lord, or perhaps become the Goevernor-General of Canada.
That might have stabilized things for a while longer, but I have a hard time believing that the British Empire could have lasted indefinitely, given 1) the rise of ideologies like modern nationalism and socialism, which (at their core, at any rate) were hostile to the idea of empire, and 2) the weakening of Britain as a result of two world wars.
On the flip side, you could argue that modern India isn’t a European-style nation-state either (Bangladesh is much close to being one, but certainly not India), and that it’s not necessarily any worse to be ruled by white English people in London than by Brahmins in Delhi, so that if people have (more or less) made their peace with the latter then they could theoretically have made their peace with the former. People have certainly made that claim, but usually it’s made by people criticizing the modern Indian state, not defending the British empire.
About the India analogy: I think the thing about the East India Company is that it was immortal. Individual Governors General died like flies, but the Company itself just kept going and going. Individual princes and other opponents would die eventually, but the Company could only be killed in London, if someone drove an Act of Parliament through its heart.
By the same token though, dynasties outlast the death of individual princes, so do ideological movements and groups like nations, religions, etc.. Why would that give the Company an advantage over their South Asian opponents?
This is not an argument Dalits (or Indian Muslims) ever make. It’s notable how broad the “colonialism was really bad” consensus is in India to the point that each side accuses the other of underrating how bad British colonialism was (for example, the left accuses the right of it when the right treats the Mughal Empire as another colonizer). Think why that is.
“it’s not necessarily any worse to be ruled by white English people in London than by Brahmins in Delhi”
Amartya Sen, I believe, noticed a huge difference. Local rulers (probably meaning a landlord rather than someone in Delhi) were more in tune with local conditions, and could lighten taxes in response to bad weather and such. The distant Company was more indifferent and brutally extractive. As for modern rule, Sen famously notes that India stopped having major famines after it got independence. India isn’t good at preventing chronic poverty and malnutrition, but compared to the colonial era it is much better at preventing masses of people from simply starving to death.
There’s also stuff about how Britain siphoned off much of India’s GDP, and any GDP growth, for a couple centuries; local inequality at least has _some_ re-circulation of wealth.
“Why would that give the Company an advantage over their South Asian opponents?”
As ad9 says, dynasties aren’t decision making entities; policy, and competence, changes with each new monarch. A corporation set on profit will be more consistent in its core focus, and have a collective competence less dependent on any one person — especially for the EIC, vs. a modern corp with powerful CEO.
There was also that the EIC was _foreign_, overseas, and couldn’t be attacked at its core, and could keep coming despite setbacks.
“the Company could only be killed in London, if someone drove an Act of Parliament through its heart”
Actually there is another way to kill it: block its profitability so long and thoroughly that people give up and disband the EIC. Obviously didn’t happen, but it is a route other than going to London.
Hector, it is essentially the same issue as with the Roman Republic and Empire. If people are primarily loyal to the Republic, that loyalty will not be shaken by the replacement of one consul by another. But if they are primarily loyal to a Prince or Emperor, they might indeed not be loyal to the new Emperor. A dynasty is not a decision-making entity. An institution can be.
Alon Levy, why in the modern world would Dalits wish to argue that “it’s not necessarily any worse to be ruled by white English people in London than by Brahmins in Delhi”? The first of those options is not open to them. It makes far more sense, politically, to demonstrate loyalty to the country they will all be living in, and declare the other lot to be traitorous. So that is what everyone will feel. Why shouldn’t they? Who could possibly prove them wrong about their own feelings?
What their ancestors feelings may have been a couple of centuries ago is another matter. Consider, for example, the Koregaon Ranstambh: https://www.newstatesman.com/world/asia/2018/01/british-east-india-company-hindu-right-and-battle-over-oppression
“it’s not necessarily any worse to be ruled by white English people in London than by Brahmins in Delhi.”
People have made variants on this argument with respect to decolonization generally, that it did not improve the lot of the average resident of a colonized state. To which the response of the contemporary Academy is: “You’re not allowed to say that. The editors who printed that argument must apologize, you must be expelled from any professional organizations, and you can never speak publicly again.”
The British were not the only power raising European-style native infantry (and artillery) in India. The French did too, but so did Indian powers. The Maratha Army of Hindustan gave Wellington one of the hardest fights of his career.
@mindstalk0
Hmm, that reminds of a paper I had once randomly encountered: Direct versus Indirect Colonial Rule in India: Long-term Consequences by Lakshmi Iyer, in which she had used the ‘Doctrine of Lapse’ as an Instrumental Variable to estimate the effects of direct versus indirect rule: according to the 1961 census the districts which had fallen under British rule thanks to the doctrine of lapse had less schools and health centres than the districts which had remained part of Princely States; even decades later there existed a gap, though smaller than in 1961, in poverty and child mortality rates.
Though, about whether the Princely States had also done on average a less worse job on other fields I haven’t yet encountered convincing evidence.
On a side note, Lakshmi Iyer theorised that the effect she had found was caused by the British retaining the right to depose native rulers for ‘misrule’ and replace them with a relative; by contrast for British administrators the usual penalty for bad performance was to be transferred to another district. Thus according to her the native rulers had better incentives to do their job well. However, I remain unconvinced of this theory of hers; it may look plausible to me, somebody with nearly no knowledge of Indian history, but if she had instead claimed, to provide a random example, that this was caused by the racism of the colonial government leading to positions being held by incompetent Brits which otherwise would have gone to competent Indians that would also have appeared plausible.
GDP growth was much higher under British rule than in Mughal times; however, most of that was in the form of population growth instead of GDP per capita growth.
Also, on the ‘siphoned off much of India’s GDP’-thing, I was on the impression that good faith estimates of the ‘wealth drain’ suffered by India indicate it was too small to be a large factor in explaining poor economic performance under the British Raj.
Though what was instead the main reason I don’t know.
I had once encountered the claim that it was that the British Raj did not dare to raise too high taxes on the Indian upper class, fearing this might lead them to want independence, with the result that the British Raj had one of the lowest tax-to-GDP ratios in the world* and there thus was not enough money left over for the needed investments in education and infrastructure. However, that theory might also have its own problems.
* Moreover, the tax system was also highly regressive for this reason, being based on taxes which disproportionately fell on the poor like the salt tax.
This is not an argument Dalits (or Indian Muslims) ever make. It’s notable how broad the “colonialism was really bad” consensus is in India to the point that each side accuses the other of underrating how bad British colonialism was (for example, the left accuses the right of it when the right treats the Mughal Empire as another colonizer). Think why that is.
@Alon,
You’re absolutely correct, of course. I was responding quickly and was therefore sloppy in outlining a claim (a claim I don’t personally agree wth, I hope that was clear).
It’s correct that nobody actually makes the argument I made, as I framed it. I was trying to frame an *exaggerated* version of arguments that people do make though, and was also not considering the British empire as it actually existed, but rather the hypothetical kinder, gentler empire that @FinnishReader was hypothesizing.
What you do hear is the opinion that the economic, social, ethnic and national aspirations of some communities continue to be frustrated today, and that the departure of the British didn’t mean a transition to true sovereignty. Of course, the *degree* of frustration isn’t the same, not even close (as you point out, no one, including me, however critical we might be of the modern Indian state, thinks that British rule in India, or for that matter British or French rule in Africa, actually was better than what came afterwards).
I had/have in mind stuff like the statement by E. V. Ramasamy that August 15 should be a “day of mourning” and that his followers should wear black. Of course, that was an emotional response to the frustration of his ideological goals as much as it was a rational response to anything, and it was made before the modern Indian state had had a chance to prove itself. If he were alive today and you pressed him on the question, I’m sure he would say that as much as he disliked the modern Indian state, the end of British rule was clearly a step forward.
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/blogs/tracking-indian-communities/tamil-nadu-on-august-15-1947-euphoria-and-boycott/
@Mindstalko,
Amartya Sen, I believe, noticed a huge difference. Local rulers (probably meaning a landlord rather than someone in Delhi) were more in tune with local conditions, and could lighten taxes in response to bad weather and such. The distant Company was more indifferent and brutally extractive
Correct. (I don’t agree with Amartya Sen on everything, anymore than I agree with E. V. Ramasamy, but he’s correct on that, and not just of the Company but also of the post 1857 rule by the British crown).
Again, I was imprecise in my framing of an argument I don’t personally agree with (against a hypothetical British empire which was less bad than in reality). I don’t think the end of British rule in India, or French rule in Africa, was a moment for unqualified celebration, but it was certainly a moment for *qualified* celebration, and an immeasurably important step forward.
As ad9 says, dynasties aren’t decision making entities; policy, and competence, changes with each new monarch. A corporation set on profit will be more consistent in its core focus, and have a collective competence less dependent on any one person — especially for the EIC, vs. a modern corp with powerful CEO.
I don’t really see the difference- most monarchies aren’t as absolute as we tend to think, they have councils of ministers, ruling elites, etc.. Surely the bigger issue here is that the British were technologically more advanced than the Marathas, Sikhs, Tipu Sultan etc.? They were the first country to have an industrial revolution, the impressive thing is actually that they *lost* some wars against Asian powers, not how many they won.
Even if some of their opponents used their resources to invest in a modern army, I have a hard time believeing that the British couldn’t have won an arms race with the Marathas etc. in the long run, just because they were more industrialized.
@Hector
I actually doubt that was the BEICs main advantage.
The conquest of India happened between 1750 and 1850, when the industrial revolution was still in its infancy.
Moreover, I doubt that the technological gap actually was that big; the BEIC’s Indian adversaries imported European adversaries and hired European officers to train their armies; with the French supporting various powers like Mysore because of their rivalry with Britain. I also recall stories of some Indian adversaries of the BEIC having excellent artillery, but I have forgotten whether those cannons had been manufactured in India or Europe. Then there also were Mysore’s rockets, which I had read even inspired to British to create their own Congreve rockets.
I have the impression that ‘institutional’ factors were more important.
Like the BEIC’s relationship with Indian bankers; for example, the conquest of Bengal had been partially financed with credit of the Jagat Seth house of Indian bankers. (I have read about that among others here: https://www.reddit.com/r/EconomicHistory/comments/15ezini/in_the_18th_century_the_jagat_seth_house_of/)
I also wonder whether the BEIC had less problems with internal politics/stability or high-ranking officers defecting than their Indian opponents; however, that might be based on unrepresentative anecdotes.
Depends on which part of Sub-Saharan Africa which is discussed; some did relatively well after independence, in other countries post-independence economic performance was worse than during the colonial period.
However, poor post-independence economic performance is usually blamed on indirect effects of colonialism, from artificial borders to state apparatuses designed for oppression and extraction.
Though, whilst that certainly made things worse, considering that Ethiopia is even poorer than the Sub-Saharan African average, I am not wholly convinced that was the main cause. Maybe, instead the slave trades might be more important to explain present Sub-Saharan African poverty; I know that according to studies done by some economic historians, like Nathan Nunn, the parts of Sub-Saharan Africa which had suffered the most from the slave trades now have worse outcomes in various metrics, from violence, though government quality, to trust, and are subsequently poorer in the present. However, thanks to the possibility of such issues of reverse causation and confounding variables (maybe those issues not only were exacerbated by the slave trades, but also made places more vulnerable to them) I am also not wholly convinced the effect was of the great magnitude that they claimed.
Oh, is it already this late! Maybe, I should attempt to stay away from those comments sections in the future if writing my comments seems to always take longer than I originally thought.
People have made variants on this argument with respect to decolonization generally, that it did not improve the lot of the average resident of a colonized state. To which the response of the contemporary Academy is: “You’re not allowed to say that. The editors who printed that argument must apologize, you must be expelled from any professional organizations, and you can never speak publicly again.”
The reason you’re not allowed to say that is because it’s a dumb argument, generally made by people unaware of how much economic stagnation there actually was under colonial rule in South Asia or Africa. The GDP/capita growth rate of “British India” was so low it made Mao in China (of whom I assume you’re not a fan) look like an economics genius. And over in Africa, a country like Burkina Faso didn’t have a single university until 14 years *after* the French left.
I’m not a super big fan of the modern Indian state, but in the purely material sense, it’s immeasurably an advancement over what went before. Which is why I said (imprecisely) that when people on the right compare the Islamic conquest to British colonialism, or when people on the left compare the Indo-Aryan invasion and the subsequent ‘varna’ social order to British colonialism, it’s not a means of praising the British, it’s a means of criticizing these other groups.
I think he runs into an additional problem, which is that Italy and Carthage have probably heard of him and can reasonably infer he’s bent on dominance of the known world. He could find himself facing a pan-Mediterranian coalition, with Carthagenian ships breaking his blockade of Roman ports. I don’t think we can infer he has as much mastery of naval battles as land battles, so he could easily end up being the one blockaded.
That’s possible, but I’m not sure it’s that likely? Local rivalries are strong, and people care deeply about them. It’s just as likely that some states will ally with Alexander in order to beat up their neighbours. If Rome and Carthage ally together against the Macedonians, then you can bet that Samnium and Syracuse will ally with the Macedonians against them. Basically the only time we see grand coalitions forming in an antiquity (eg, the 3rd Samnite war), it’s with states that already neighbour the aggressor. Long distance, pre-emptive joining of a coalition to maintain the balance of powers just doesn’t appear to be a thing in the international anarchy of the ancient Mediterranean.
Alexander would have been aware of all the stories about (what he would have considered ‘lesser’) kings’ attempts to build a shipping canal into the Red Sea. I don’t think it’s improbable that he wanted the new Egyptian fleet for consolidating the Arabian Peninsula and going on to India, he was certainly the kind of person who thought he could solve the logistical issue with that plan.
How about Alexander surviving in 323 BC after coming back from India, but going west from Egypt along north Africa against the Carthaginians rather than into Italy? Would Carthage offer more silver, more easy conquests, less resistance?
That’s what I was thinking. My understanding of the central mediterranean at the time is that the largest and wealthiest cities, and those Alexander would have heard of for sure, would be Carthage and Syracuse, not Rome or Capua.
In particular, in Carthage Alexander would find the silver he would so desperately need, a continuos supply line from Egypt, and an enemy that, while mighty, might be subdued in a short string of pitched battles (which may not be as attritional as fighting against italians) culminating with a siege. The fleet would have been a tough nut to crack here, and a major spoiler of his campaign’s supply lines, but for one thing, naval ability to stop land operations is not a given in this time (Hannibal manages more or less fine without much naval support for the second half of the war) and for the second, Alexander might have been able to convince the Syracusans to join the fight and keep Carthage’s fleet sufficiently busy, and I don’t think anyone else would have come to Carthage’s aid.
My understanding of Carthaginian politics is that they behaved rather imperially in their own backyard. Unlike the Romans, who wasted no chance to increase the citizen body, Carthaginian citizenship was restricted to residents of the city proper who had to be born already a citizen.
Nearby communities also of punic descent (if there is such a thing) would be treated as second class citizens, paying taxes and contributing manpower, but not really allowed to participate in the political life. At least that’s what I remember from reading Livy.
If that is true, it might have been a fair bit easier for Alexander to decisively defeat Carthage and hold its territory afterwards (it’s just a change in imperial masters).
Having consolidated power in Carthage, Syracuse would be the next best city to take.
Livy is very explicit in his description of the sack of Syracuse during the second Punic war that Syracuse makes Rome look small and shabby in comparison. Even if this is a great exaggeration, Syracuse was probably the second wealthiest city in that neck of the woods, and the key to controlling all of Sicily.
If I were Alexander at this point I’d leave the Syracusans in charge of Sicily and use them as allies rather than subjects to do what Phyrrus tried to do, which is establish his hegemony over Magna Graecia, roughen the noses of the Romans (and/or Samnites) and call it a day. Maybe even establish some Macedonian colonies on Apullia.
Alexander being Alexander would probably have tried to take direct control of Sicily and Syracuse, and though I think he’d succeed at that, I doubt he’d have much appetite for Italian conquest afterwards.
What do we know about the military capability of Carthage around 323 BCE? If it’s similar to their capability in the First Punic war, Alexander may have a similar problem to the Cannae scenario in the blog post. It took Rome a LONG time to beat Carthage in that war and Rome’s victory wasn’t at all assured.
A big part of that was the inability to directly strike at the Carthaginian heartland. Losing one or maybe two battles against Alexander under these circumstances would likely lead to a siege of the capital, and I can’t see the Carthaginian state of this era surviving the fall of their capital. There would be a much greater possibility of a real knockout blow.
Hi
So in the end, we can assume that it didn’t happen because it didn’t worth it. It wouldn’t have paid for itself. And it is always a strong incentive. If not a necessity.
But, for the sake of it, why assume Alexander would not attack Italy from the North ? Going first overland through present days Serbia and inland Croatia, confronting the Celts then the other polities one by one ? Of course, this what Hannibal tried without success a few decade later but…
One issue with this route is that he has to march through a lot of unconquered (and not particularly favorable) terrain before he even gets to Italy.
My understanding is that the terrain of the land route is pretty bad, and this would favor the locals when they object to the army marching through. There’s a number of reasons Rome subdued Greece and Macedon way earlier.
Yes… but for someone who will conquer Bactria (that is present-days Afghanistan !) maybe it wouldn’t have been such a challenge…
Yeah, the eastern adriatic coast is pretty rugged and then you have to cross the alps. Even in modern times that’s no cakewalk, much less in Alexander’s day. (though then again, Hannibal managed to go through similarily difficult route)
But there’s honestly no real reason to: If you can take the sea route there’s no reason yo take the land route here. And Alexander can probably take the sea route.
Yes. In later eras, you always see the Byzantines and Normans, e.g., duking it out over southern Italy or the western Balkans by ferrying armies across the Adriatic. They never march overland, taking the hard way via Illyria.
The logistics of the route would be harder (both to march through and later ship supplies along). But nothing fundamentally changes but the order in which he has to defeat and pacify the locals. The arguments laid forth by Brett are exactly the same whether its Samnites -> Romans -> Etruscans -> Boii or Boii -> Etruscans -> Romans -> Samnites, so what is there to discuss?
The thing is the Western Mediterranean+Greece was a lot more militarized than the Eastern even before Alexander. I suspect the reason is the Persian Empire. Basically the Persian Empire was stronger than Media or Lydia or…But weaker than the sum of their parts. Also our sources are not good enough to prove it, but the Persian Empire may have been rotting out at least militarily. Mainstream estimates seem to suggest rather more manpower in theater for the Second Invasion of Greece than Alexander’s campaigns 150 years later despite the latter being far more existential.
The early Assyrian Empire was likely in many ways a more formidable foe despite being much smaller. Shalmaneser III allegedly invaded Syria in 845 B.C. with about 120,000 men. And why did he need such a host? Well because a grand coalition of Syrian and Palestinian states had defeated him 8 years earlier…
Incidentally one hot take I have is Assyrian was the first ‘true’ empire. It actually managed to directly control the core of distant, strong polities, was far stronger than any predecessor, and had considerable state capacity (see the peoples forcably migrated, perhaps in the millions). Incidentally the Inca Empire was similar in being vastly larger than any predecessor and having significant state capacity.
I could see Alexander running into a problem sort of similar to Persia’s invasion of Greece. Where in a certain sense his strength is a weakness in a zone of fairly militarized but small polities. No Greek city-state was close to a match, but collectively they won. Alexander might find himself fighting Carthaginians and Syracusians, Romans and Samnites, fighting shoulder to shoulder.
>Incidentally one hot take I have is Assyrian was the first ‘true’ empire. It actually managed to directly control the core of distant, strong polities, was far stronger than any predecessor, and had considerable state capacity (see the peoples forcably migrated, perhaps in the millions). Incidentally the Inca Empire was similar in being vastly larger than any predecessor and having significant state capacity.
Sargon II would disagree, what with picking his name from the guy who created what he perceived to be the first true empire.
The Inca, incidentally, bearing a striking resemblance to Akkade (an empire grown to supercede a preceding age of smaller states that’d already accomplished great things but never managed to coalesce into one polity; also a very similar level of technological development; also a palace economy. That’s what /I/ want to see, the Inca transplanted next to circa 2300 BC Mesopotamia.
Wonder how suited cuneiform is to quechua…
Is this a masterpiece or what?! I never get tired reading such deep analysis from Dr. Devereaux.
That he started the whole post with “This is just a short bit of silliness because I haven’t got the time to do something proper” is a hilariously strong humblebrag
The use of “334!Alexander” amuses me, in that it is similar to the fanfic usage of F! or M! to denote a gender-swapped version, and so it makes me think of an AO3 category involving time-swapped characters where you have 1066!Napoleon invading the British Isles.
As a minor enthusiast of punctuation, it’s fascinating to be alive at a time when a new use for an established punctuation mark is emerging.
The 90s and the emergence of texting emojis must have been a wild time for you 🙂
I think the first usage I saw of this was on Television Without Pity 20+ years ago, though I can’t think of an actual example I encountered. But if they’d been covering Deep Space 9, e.g., they might have referred to Mirror!Kira.
I would assume the practice starts with online discourse, so maybe it goes back into Usenet days; do you think it could go back into fanzines and however fanfic was distributed in the Before Times?
To me, the key thing is going to be attrition. If Alexander wins field engagements, but loses 10% of his army in the process, that’s going to very quickly whittle him down until even he can’t win. He doesn’t have a lot of methods for getting new troops, especially with his fleets are defeated. And this means that he’s eventually going to be weak enough that even he can’t win. A 20,000 person army against a 40,000 person army is going to have a very, very bad time no matter who’s in charge!
And he’s not going to be able to just fight. He’s going to have to garrison territory. At best he’s going to have to appoint extremely capable people to running the cities he’s conquered, which removes them from his army. At worst, he’ll have to station troops. And a group of troops that’s maintaining dominance in a city isn’t a group that can assist you in the field. Nor can he rely on those conquered territories to supply troops–they’ll be loyal to the group he conquered it from. Basically any garrison is going to have all the problems of an army that stalls out in enemy territory.
The best-case would be, at least to my limited knowledge, conquer a reasonably sized territory and establish yourself as ruler. Legitimize your rule to the point where you CAN pull troops. Since Alexander isn’t going to sit still, he should use his army to support one or another person in existing disputes, the way Rome and England did while expanding their colonial empires. This gives you victories to brag about while also limiting the exposure of your core of loyal troops to danger. It also allows you to progressively weaken the other city-states and enfold them into your sphere of influence. Slow, sure, but more steady and more certain. Eventually, sure, there will be a coalition built for the purpose of crushing you, but by that time you’ve built up the capacity to raise an army equal to if not greater than the coalition force.
Carthage is the big issue, far as I can see. Alexander will have two territories, separated by water. He needs a way to communicate between them and transport troops and supplies between them. If not, he’ll lose his base, trading his existing power base for the opportunity to make a new one in Italy. Easy way to handle this is to offer to help Carthage out in Sicily. That incentivizes them to not sink your ships (they’d be sinking their own troops), while giving you the opportunity to build your own fleet (the way the Romans did).
Some parts directionally correct, but insufficient.
– Alexander was notoriously terrible at picking good governors/officials.
– “Divide, conquer, legitimize, repeat” is what the Romans did, so it’s a directionally correct idea. However, Alexander’s army burns his money too fast for it to be viable. After he wins a reasonably-sized polity and makes peace, he would have to either disband the army and figure out on the fly how to create a new, cheap army, or else find some other silver-containing pinata to declare war on.
– Help out the Carthaginians (non-Greeks) in Sicily against the local Greeks? The army might just decide to mutiny. (They were very unhappy about the treatment of the Greek contingent of the Persian army defeated at the Granicus.) You are also trying to address a permanent threat by giving them a temporary help of a nature which improves their long-term position.
– In this period, fleets have not capital ships but labor ships (sorry). Building new ships (both transports and wooden-ram fighting ships) is fast and dirt cheap. Bronze rams are more expensive, but the real issue is paying the extremely numerous rowers. Having your fleet sunk in a “decisive” battle and building one next year is cheaper than being forced to maintain your fleet by the presence of an enemy fleet that doesn’t engage. This also means that naval battles aren’t strategically decisive, they only open a one-campaigning-season window for the army to accomplish operational goals (cross straits, win sieges).
– On the other hand, fighting ships have very little endurance (I would say ~8h if you actually expect to fight, which can be extended by deeply compromising the ability to fight; I suppose if you want to ferry the hull and disembark most rowers to do so, you can get a week?) and transport ships prefer not to lose sight of the coast (making open-sea hops at specific places).
Thus Carthaginian fleets operating far from any friendly land base (either city or army) cutting supply lines isn’t a thing.
Galleys have more than a day’s worth of operational endurance. The figure I found searching was two weeks, which seems inherently plausible given that land soldiers carry about ten days worth of food on their person, and there’s probably a backpack’s worth of space between the benches. Certainly their operational endurance is high enough to maintain a blockade of a port, since the Romans did that during the First Punic War. Keeping the path between Greece and Italy totally locked down would probably require a forward base, admittedly, but it’s quite plausible they could secure a local ally or two.
I don’t think there’s any way that a galley had two weeks of sea endurance, the problem isn’t food, it’s fresh water.
Yeah, everything I’ve read says a few days max for galleys powered by oarsman. 2 weeks is way outside the range of anything I’ve seen discussed. The discussion for triremes is normally whether it was *every* night or just *most* nights. I’m curious where guy’s research comes from, I have an inkling it might be an AI hallucination.
the same goes for soldiers on land, so if you replenish your water every night on land
Ancient galleys (triremes) hauled out every night for preference, and could cruise for 2-3 days max. A fleet that stayed in the water was significantly handicapped, so the usual technique for blockade was to establish a fortified camp around an adjacent beach, haul out and and keep a few galleys on patrol. Galleys could be launched very quickly.
The north African littoral beyond Cyrenaica is not good for galleys, so the usual route was Greece-Italy-Sicily-Tunisia. Alexander going after Carthage would mean taking Sicily first.
The fleets fleet limitations aren’t as big an issue as you make it out to be. Soldiers can be used as oarsmen, so the difference between “fighting ship” and “troop transport” isn’t a thing here; any ship Alexander sent out would be both. However, the hypothetical fleets transporting troops for Alexander have to leave from somewhere on land and put down soldiers somewhere on land. If you can strike there, you don’t need to play cat-and-mouse over the entire ocean, you can attack them as they came out of port or as they attempt to land. There are plenty of examples of this from the late 1700s/early 1800s.
And yes, you’d have to maintain the ships, but you probably wouldn’t have to do it alone. An ad-hoc coalition of limited extent to deal with such a significant threat isn’t unheard of in the ancient world (see Greece against the Persians)–sometimes the devil you know is the obvious better choice! One of those not-so-great administrators Alexander put in place might be willing to switch sides for the right price as well. This does triple duty as far as you’re concerned–it helps you keep your fleet in the water, it deprives Alexander of the resources of the rebellious group, and it siphons way troops for the inevitable counter-attack against the person you convinced to turn traitor. A reasonably good investment for someone opposing an Alexander moving westward.
The limited operational range also gives you an advantage. Remember, you just need to keep Alexander’s men from landing. You don’t actually have to fight them, you just have to make it too dangerous to land a significant number of them (some will always get through). Coast along and keep them from landing long enough and they’ll either die of thirst or get desperate enough to try something stupid (remember, by definition we’re not dealing with Alexander in command here; we probably are dealing with one of his notoriously bad picks). I would put the advantage on the side of the person opposing the landing, in fact–they’re going to be fresh and have good knowledge of the coast, whereas Alexander’s fleet is going to have been in the water for a bit of time, with likely a significantly shorter timespan (as they used up resources on the way in).
If they’re stopping every night that means they are, essentially, coasting. This means that you don’t need to stop them at their likely heavily-defended ultimate destination. You just need to stop them SOMEWHERE before that spot. A bit of local knowledge about potential landing sites would give you a real advantage here if you couldn’t stop them from launching in the first place.
Ultimately I think the ability to resist Alexander getting new troops from his base of operations is going to be greater than Alexander’s ability to overcome those challenges. Which means he’s limited to what he’s brought with him, plus some small reinforcements from ships that are focused on carrying communications, smuggling, and the like. Which makes attrition, as I said in the beginning, ta decisive factor here.
Less Trafalgar, more Lissa (1866). Naval combat in classical antiquity focused neither on missile exchange nor boarding, but ramming. In the period all of these scenarios are set, “fighting ship” was almost synonymous with “trireme”.
I suspect there would also be morale problems with using soldiers for rowers. Rowers normally came from citizens too poor to afford the heavy infantry equipment. The other way around, if an army was accompanied by a naval wing (the army camp providing the safe beach on which the triremes were pulled ashore each night) and the rowers weren’t needed in that job, they could be used as light infantry.
Meanwhile, transports (including troop transports, but for the most part each ship would carry a proportionate mix of men, gear, and food) were hired/commandeered civilian cargo ships. If you put troops on them, they would be impervious against boarding (some pirates of this type do exist, though most “pirates” are amphibious raiders, “Vikings coming ashore” style), but boarding is not what an enemy state’s navy would try.
And on yet the other hand: because, as mentioned above (and as you also mention), at this time ships of all kind prefer to (or have to) mostly follow the coast, you can cut a supply line “in the middle”.
In this period, opposed landings just don’t happen, for two separate parts. The naval part is that if the defending fleet (that cannot be defeated in battle for analysis to get here) encounters the transports, it can easily sink them, thus most commanders either don’t attempt the crossing, or run the blockade with their whole army (and there are successful examples). This is the purpose of fleets accompanying armies: to allow friendly armies to cross straits, and prohibit enemy forces (or food resupply runs) from doing the same into e.g. besieged coastal cities. There is no long-range command of the sea in this era. The land/amphibious part is that the embarked army can come ashore on any reasonable beach, and since it moves faster than opposing infantry walks on land (and most coasts aren’t dead straight to begin with), if it is safe afloat, it will simply move along and try again in a few hours, at a location to which only the enemy cavalry could have followed them.
Amazing! Now we just need to know if Frederick the Great could have beaten Napoleon…
Napoleon said (or at least implied) he could have. I think that was magnanimity speaking, of course, but he certainly considered him to be one of the all-time greats, placing him in the class of elite generals – with Alexander, Hannibal, Caesar, Gustavus Adolphus, Turenne and Eugene – whose campaigns collectively comprised everything one needed to know about strategy. (Personally, and considering they often came as a pair, I’d rate Marlborough slightly above Eugene, and I suspect there was some Anglophobia in Napoleon’s selection… )
Napoleon was fortunate that he had some very able deputies, and arguably never faced a truly great general in battle on the other side for most of his career (managing to avoid coming face-to-face with Suvorov). If Napoleon was the best general of the 1800s (the decade), then one could argue that Masséna was in second place and Lannes makes a decent case for third.
However, he was also not invincible. If we discount the retreat from Moscow, the Leipzig campaign (an exercise in attrition, effectively unwinnable for the French) and Waterloo (a troubled Napoleon past his prime) then there’s still one major defeat in his resumé: Aspern-Essling. Charles was a fine commander, possibly the best native general Austria ever produced, but nobody would put him in Napoleon’s league, and he still managed to beat him.
So if Charles can beat Napoleon, could Fred? Surely. If we look at the biggest France-Prussia showdown of the wars, Jena was in the end a big blow-out victory for the French, but it very nearly went wrong and Frederick surely would have performed better than the Prussian commanders on the day (albeit we have to note that part of the reason for poor Prussian generalship was that both Brunswick – no slouch, if a bit over-cautious – and his second-in-command were removed from the field by serious injury, so we have to make Frederick personally invincible as well as ageless).
One of the problems for Napoleon’s enemies, though, was that they needed not only to win but to keep winning. Where Austria and Prussia seemed to go down after the first punch (even if Austria kept groggily dragging itself to its feet after a couple of years on each occasion, ready to be smacked down again), it took very long and arduous campaigns on both fronts to bring Napoleonic France down. I don’t know if Frederick could beat Napoleon consistently enough on the offensive to accomplish that, but I’m fairly sure he probably couldn’t. He might do a better job of preserving Prussia’s independence but I don’t think it makes a meaningful difference to the trajectory of the war.
But of course, if we’re treating the counterfactual as “Frederick somehow longer and is still fighting” then I think the wars are ended with the First Coalition. Even if Frederick loses at Valmy, he doesn’t abandon the campaign, Prussia smashes its way into France in 1792-3 before the Revolutionary army really finds its feet, and the rise of Napoleon never happens anyway.
While I concur on Valmy, I think this is overlooking what made Napoleon great as a military leader. It wasn’t his battle command, although that was generally quite good. It was his ability at the operational & strategic level and his integration of that with his tactics. As you note, Austria/Prussia are each effectively knocked out quite readily, whereas Napoleonic France has to be beaten in a series of campaigns. This is not due to the extreme robustness of France: in all the many other wars of the 17th and 18th centuries, all the great powers can lose several campaigns, just like Napoleonic France, before being compelled to make peace. It’s why you can have such prolonged wars. The outlier here is Napoleon’s victories, where he wins an overwhelming victory in months, and does so repeatedly.
The reason for this is logistics: moving and supplying a pre-industrial army, as this blog has covered, is enormously challenging. Any kind of fortified post in the way proves a substantial obstacle if any kind of an enemy field army is in the area. Supply constraints are horrific, campaigning seasons are short, and both sides can simply opt not to take field battles. Wars tend to turn into long sequences of contested sieges, with infrequent pitched battles. Those pitched battles, if won decisively (and some are – Blenheim, Ramillies, Poltava, Leuthen all come to mind) can produce some more rapid gains. These gains are limited, though, because decisive pitched battles tend to take place relatively far from the other side’s homeland. So Ramillies results in the occupation of Belgium but doesn’t permit farther advance, Poltava destroys the Swedish army but another decade of fighting is required to compel Sweden to make peace, etc.
Napoleon consistently manages to find and win decisive battles in his enemies heartland. Both Austerlitz & Wagram are fought while Napoleon is already occupying Vienna; Napoleon occupies Berlin just 10 days after Jena-Auerstadt. How? The answer tends to be very dependent on context, but to make a generalization he contrives to bring forward far more troops than expected far more rapidly than expected (e.g., by co-opting the German princes to enable the march from the Channel to Ulm in 1805, or by moving his army in widely separated pieces for speed, trusting that he’ll be able to converge them when it counts). He’ll take appalling gambles with his supplies in order to do so, trusting that victory will put everything right. If he’s unable to make this happen (as in 1812 & 1813), his army will be destroyed – but up until that point in his career, he makes this happen over and over. And so Napoleon, with the same military environment that had produced over a century of bloody-but-indecisive European warfare, is able to conquer most of Europe in in half a decade.
In short, I think the contest with Frederick the Great (let’s assume he replaces Frederick William III, taking the throne in 1797 and opposing Napoleon for the first time in 1806) would basically play out just like it historically did – Napoleon throws his armies bodily against Prussia, far faster than anyone expects, and looks for a battle right away. If Frederick loses it, Napoleon will occupy all Prussia and the war is over, just as it was historically. If Frederick can find a way to win that battle, the war continues, and Napoleon will probably try to pull a Wagram and amass overwhelming force before trying again; Frederick isn’t in position to stop him from doing so. Nonetheless, Frederick may well prevail in the contest and force Napoleon from Germany as Russian armies arrive. I concur he’s unlikely to be able to get to Paris; French strength in this scenario isn’t spent in the same way it was in 1814.
I would think that Napoleon would prove the victor, though – the Grande Army in 1806 is far superior in morale and officer quality to their Prussian foes, and consistently outfights them under all circumstances and commanders (most notably the performance of Davout’s 3rd Corps at Auerstadt). Frederick is brilliant but he could still lose (see: Kunersdorf), and the odds would be stacked quite heavily against him.
“He’ll take appalling gambles with his supplies in order to do so”
Is there an analogy to make with Julius Caesar? I have a vague memory of Bret saying that Caesar tended to operate at the end of his logistics, and kept making it work.
I’m not as familiar with Caesar’s battles, but I think the analogy you suggest is entirely reasonable: the key requirement of conquering at large scale is being able to win wars decisively, and the obvious way to do this is to push the boundaries of logistics and make it work nonetheless. So all history’s great conquerors, who we disturbingly revere, might well share a common pattern here.
“Austria kept groggily dragging itself to its feet after a couple of years on each occasion”
You have now put into my head the idea of Austria as the Wish.com Samnites.
I’d favor Davout over Massena.
One challenge for Frederick is it is a different kind of war. For him, 50,000 men was a large army. Jena-Auerstedt had 120,000 Prussians+Saxons. The largest forces he handled were during the War of the Bavarian Succession where not much happened. Though it wasn’t really formalized till later, the Napoleonic Wars basically saw the invention of the Corps-Army structure. A Frederick-like person during this period I’m sure would do great, but I could see a Frederick somehow time-teleported struggling. Though no doubt still doing much better than the actual Prussian commanders.
Another major thing is the fact that Prussian society was still deep in Ancien Regime. The Prussian reforms took place after Tilsit, and transformed the country into a state that was much more modern than previously: freedom of enterprise, no formal class-based professiona bans, an agricultural reform (enriching the rich, as in Britain) and a much more modern army. These built the basis for a state that emerged as a major victor from Napoleonic Wars, and went on to unify Germany half a century later.
Without the defeat of Prussia by Napoleon, Napoleon’s Russian campaign and the German War of Liberation would never take place, and there would be much less basis for the German and Russian national feeling in the 19th century. We would not have unified Germany today, and Russia would look different, too. Perhaps much better.
None of these counterfactuals consider “why.” That’s how the post is scoped and so I can’t really criticize it, but the question “what would get Alexander to go West?” is pretty interesting too and I wish you’d had time to incorporate that into each of the timelines.
Myself, I don’t see Alexander going to Italy without a formal alliance with Carthage that divides the Mediterranean between them, like maybe Carthage would want to consolidate Sicily so badly that they would bring in the Macedonians. Even then I think you just get a quick Magna Grecia expedition slipped in before Anatolia with the rest of Italy left as an exercise for after Persia.
A formal alliance with Carthage sounds deeply unlikely IMO. Ever since Herodotus they were viewed as Persia-friendly, with the Sicilian invasion of 480 BC presented as an attempt to distract Magna Graecia from helping the Greek homeland against Xerxes. Nonsense of course, but widely believed. The league of Corinth, the legitimacy of Alexander with the Greeks, and the casus belli against Persia were all framed as panhellenism. Allying with Carthage would fly in the face of that. Real Politik sometimes takes precedence over ideology, but this would be a really hard sell. Not to mention that Carthage would be a far juicier target than 4th century Italy.
The obvious counterfactual not addressed here – of course the question is “what if Alexander went West instead of East” – is what if he went West after going East? That is, if Alexander hypothetically survives a few years after his factual death, avoids civil war against Antipater, and then invades Italy with at least in principle the full resources of Persia at his back? This is the scenario posited by the movie when Alexander is discussing his plans by Hephaistion’s deathbed.
The situation in Italy remains identical to the above analysis, of course, but Alexander now has much more depth. The real cutting-edge of his army is still somewhat limited (and to an extent irreplaceable) but he can supplement it with eastern troops, and doesn’t have to denude his elite Macedonian forces as much for garrison duty. The money problem also becomes a bit less of an issue.
The likelihood of a revolt in his rear, however (meaning in Persia, not an attack of dysentery) and corresponding need to get out of Italy and deal with that, makes the scenario even more complicated and unknowable than the above, so I understand why it wasn’t tackled.
I think the best Alexander could achieve in that scenario is something similar to what actually happened in Bactria and India. He spends several years on grinding campaigns trying to subdue the region, wins a few battles, founds a few colonies, and makes a few alliances before his army mutinies and he’s forced to go home with the job unfinished. I doubt he’d be able to establish lasting control beyond Magna Graecia. After Alexander dies maybe a successor kingdom could hold out in that region for a few decades before being swallowed by the Romans, which would be an interesting counterfactual. If anything it would probably expedite the Roman conquest of southern Italy since the hard work of consolidating control over the individual city-states would already be done for them.
Interestingly, the final description of an attritional grind where Alexander keeps winning grinding costly victories, but its not enough due to the complexities of campaigning in Italy, immediately brought to mind Belisarius and his difficulties in the 6th C.
This is a fun counterfactual, but I feel like some of the analysis relies too much on a “reversion to the mean” alternative. If you forget Italy for a moment and instead ask, what if we re-ran Alexander’s invasion of Persia, would he succeed? I think the answer to that question closer to “maybe.”
There are many “what if” scenarios where Alexander could have lost one of his pitched battles to Darius. A reasonable historian from an alternate universe where Alexander lost one of the pitch battles or was surprisingly killed in battle would be reasonable to conclude that Alexander conquering Persia was “unlikely.” Note that Alexander did end up dying to wounds sustained during battle, he just did so after conquering Persia.
Furthermore, while Alexander did mostly rely on cities surrendering, there are some notable exceptions – such as the Siege of Tyre and the Siege of the Sogdian Rock, where Alexander was able to break the sieges using some inventive means (building a bridge and having soldiers scale the cliffs at night, respectively).
Thus, while Pyrrhus of Epirus’s campaign in Italy is a reasonable starting point for what the “expected” outcome of an Alexander campaign in Italy might look like, it feels like an odd comparison to his conquests in the East because it is relying to much on “reversion to the mean.” It is certainly possible to imagine an Alexander-style commander managing to engineer a Cannae style battle, then quickly marching to a fortified town (perhaps a Samnite city) and breaking the siege through some clever earth works or a surprise assault. At that point Alexander may subdue Samnium and use it as a base to continue conquering Italy.
In short, while the “mean Alexander” would probably struggle to conquer Italy, if you imagine an alternate universe Alexander who got as lucky as he did in Asia Minor, he would likely have outperformed Pyrrhus, if not replaced the Romans as the conqueror of Italy.
Hmm, that reminds me of Jona Lendering’s claim that the Persians would have won the battle of Gaugamela had it not been for bad omens demoralising their army:
This was then followed by a lengthy section on bad omens, from a lunar eclipse to a “fall of fire”.
Source: https://www.livius.org/articles/battle/gaugamela-331-bce/
However, I don’t know what that other historians think of that claim.
I’m not sure – Granicus, Issus and Gaugamela were not skin-of-the-teeth battles: there were points in all three where parts of Alexander’s army found themselves in difficulty, but all three were eventually won in a fairly predictable manner (indeed, largely the same fashion in each case). At Issus and Gaugamela the big question is what happens if Darius stands his ground instead of fleeing when Alexander comes for him, but I think the likeliest outcome is that Darius is captured or killed, and the campaign ends with an Alexander victory *early*. I suspect the only way that the outcome of Issus or Gaugamela could be credibly reversed in a re-run is by replacing the Persian commander, such that firstly he is simply more competent than Darius and secondly that his person is less sacrosanct making him less a single point of failure.
The most promising counterfactual is the Granicus, if we assume that Cleitus was a little slower off the mark and Spithridates finished Alexander off. That probably ends the campaign, because while the army of Macedon is still certainly capable of fighting and winning, it lacks the central unifying figure to drive and lead it to do so (while Philip III is present, as we see after Alexander’s death, he is not capable of filling that role).
Overall, though, and that one moment of jeopardy aside, I don’t think Alexander’s conquest of Persia was particularly fortunate or “unlikely”. It was a well-planned, well-executed campaign by an excellent general with an excellent army, versus a relatively poorly-planned, poorly-executed defensive campaign by a poor commander-in-chief (with an admittedly capable army, but one probably inferior to the Macedonians in quality, if not in number).
This is a fantastic post, thank you. This kind of content is a fun – if silly – guilty pleasure.
In that spirit – I think you substantially understate the relative difficulty of Alexander’s historical conquests, which you describe as “a huge pot of silver guarded by a single Great King and his fragile army”. To be sure, the presence of lootable bullion in the East was a big deal, and that won’t be present to the same degree in the West. And the heavily armored infantry armies that Rome will ultimately field during the Second Punic Wars & after period where we know more about the Roman military are something that had no Achaemenid equivalent and which prove entirely capable of smashing Macedonian-style armies.
But the Achaemenid Empire wasn’t just a sequence of “fragile” armies that Alexander could beat – it, too, possessed mighty fortified cities with strong garrisons that didn’t readily surrender – Halicarnassus, Gaza, and Tyre. Alexander overcame each in turn and despite being tied up for years in some cases, managed the difficulties and dangers of revolt that imposed.
While the imperial character of the Achaemenid Empire meant that many areas would go quite freely over to Alexander, I don’t think these areas were subsequently less likely to revolt then Alexander’s hypothetical conquests in Italy. Alexander proves adept at handling this sort of issue – garrisons under capable commanders (Antigonus in Phrygia), astute political settlements (installing opposition figures from the local elites with existing power bases into power, then making them dependent on Macedonian garrisons), following local traditions and working with the local elites (everywhere, but especially Egypt). To an even greater extent than Rome, Alexander’s goal is to co-opt local power structures, and he’s willing to tolerate almost any level of autonomy so long as they recognize him as supreme. He pays a price for this, of course, in being unable to extract many resources from conquered territories other than loot and provisions, but I don’t think the sort of constant revolts by every people in his newly conquered Italian possessions that you suppose is likely. It’s not like these folks revolt (to my knowledge?) against the Romans even when Roman rule is quite new, before it’s consolidated, and Roman rule even from the start was more intrusive than what Alexander would do.
There’s also some substantial difficulties Alexander did face in his historical conquests that aren’t present here: unlike against the Achaemenids, Alexander will enjoy naval supremacy over anyone other than Syracuse & Carthage; there’s no local cavalry tradition of note; he will never be substantially outnumbered as he was at Issus and Gaugamela; and the amount of geographical distance he has to manage things over is far smaller and more linked by the sea he controls. Of course, this means the solutions he developed to those problems (conquest of the coast; clever tactics and terrain control; ditto; focusing on using local resources) aren’t relevant. But it also implies that Alexander might indeed be equal to the challenges he would face in the West; he was the consummate problem-solver, which is really what good generalship means.
None of this changes the result of the ‘Alexander as Hannibal’ scenario where I think it’s unambiguous that Alexander simply couldn’t mobilize resources at the scale of Roman Italy. I do think he would be quite a bit more than a “pebble in a pond”. Hannibal, after all, manages to bedevil Rome in a way that makes him a household name 2 millennia later, and while total Carthaginian resources substantially outstrip Macedonian ones, that’s across Africa, Iberia, and Italy – Hannibal was working with a force probably weaker than Alexander’s field army (somewhat larger, much less heavily armored, also entirely dependent on local resources) and without serious siege capability.
But ‘Alexander as Pyrrhus’ and ‘334 Alexander’ both strike me as cases where I’d imagine the quite real difficulties are eventually overcome. I would concur that Alexander’s superiority over Pyrrhus as a battle commander is not so great as to change things.
But Pyrrhus never really demonstrates the knack for turning battles into larger successes in the way Alexander invariably does. I don’t think we should suppose this was just because Pyrrhus’s job was much harder – we’re basically taking our sources word for it that Pyrrhus was a great general, and this seems to be based on his undoubted and impressive success in battle. But he never succeeds at anything – his life is an unbroken stretch of failure. He spends decades trying to become King of Macedonia, and it was not an impossible goal, but he can never make it work, consistently having to turn around and head back to Epirus with his tail tucked between his legs. His early Italian campaigns see a long run of victories but he keeps alienating and antagonizing everyone he comes in contact with (note the contrast with Alexander) and ultimately leaves with nothing to show for it. The most parsimonious explanation is that Pyrrhus was a fine battle commander and an able organizer, but his larger scale judgement was seriously flawed when it came to winning wars.
I think the most likely case in our silly counterfactual is that Alexander, with his apparently flawless military judgement, finds the solutions Pyrrhus didn’t and successfully achieves a durable supremacy in Italy for himself and his successors in both scenarios. He won’t get much out of it – it’s not rich in bullion and the “systems” of administration he’ll create in the process aren’t good at extracting armies out of Italy in the way the Romans will – but Alexander seems unsurpassed in his ability to break, destroy, and build on his successes. That is, he could conquer as well as anyone ever could.
“it, too, possessed mighty fortified cities with strong garrisons”
The impression though is that Alexander faced fewer of them. Italy as Bret describes it might have had fewer _mighty_ cities (I dunno scale of Etruria or Samnite settlements vs. Tyre) but also seems to be a more continuous grind. Alex beat 3 holdout cities, but could he beat 20 (to make up a number)?
“goal is to co-opt local power structures”
But are the local power structures comparatively co-optable? E.g. if Asia Minor cities tended to be run by small elites, while Italian communities were broad republics of warriors, I’d expect a difference in (a) being able to co-opt them and (b) _staying_ co-opted (see how long the Spartan oligarchy in Athens lasted).
‘where I’d imagine the quite real difficulties are eventually overcome.’
Do you think Alex would avoid the “10% attrition even when beating Romans” problem? Or that he could suffer it and keep going?
My impression is that a key problem with beating Rome is that the Republic doesn’t politically accept the concept it can be beaten. They can lose battle after battle and keep fighting until they can declare a positive outcome in the war. Alex would have to utterly break them like Tyre, except that they’re much bigger than Tyre with multiple reinforcing cities.
On the fortified cities – Tyre, at least, is an entirely different order of magnitude of difficulty as a siege from anything he would face in the West (being on an island – and Alexander didn’t have a fleet). But to be sure, I think you’re right that Alexander is going to face more sieges here than in the East overall (although his campaign in Afghanistan is maybe a fair analogy). I just think that this is already a challenge Alexander has demonstrated he can cope with quite handily, and that increasing the scale is going to cause him additional grief but shouldn’t seriously threaten his overall success. I think scenario 1 does suppose that he’ll win all these sieges, but assumes that he’ll face substantial revolts meanwhile – but Alexander historically copes with this sort of challenge in both the Levant and in Afghanistan/Bactria without losing his gains up to that point.
On the cooperativeness of local power structures – I think this is an example of Fremen Myth in supposing the hill peoples of Italy to be less coercible than the long-subdued cities of the Eastern Mediterranean. These cities are basically structured along similar lines in governance, and the local differences that do exist don’t seem to make them any less susceptible to Roman governance. Alexander won’t come up with the highly durable and extractive governance structures that the Romans do, but he’ll do just find at co-opting key elite factions to buy himself some quick supplies, cash, and nominal subjugation for the duration of his lifetime.
On attritional battles against Romans – while I don’t doubt this is the case, the key killer in pre-modern warfare is always going to be disease. Alexander taking tiny casualties in his big battles doesn’t change the fact that he must have been experiencing high casualties from disease and hard marching, and our sources just mostly don’t tell us about this. While battles against Romans are going to cost him quite a bit more than battles against Persians, it doesn’t really change his overall manpower or morale picture in any dramatic way. I think the passages in the post focusing on this are over-egging the pudding in celebrating the Roman style of warfare, which – to be fair – is understandably Dr. Deveraux’s passion.
Bottom line for me is that I think the Roman Republic, while certainly astonishingly resilient and effective at mobilizing military power, is not unbeatable. It comes quite close to the brink at several points during this period. Alexander coming in 334 or 280 would likely have been a challenge substantially beyond Roman capabilities, and the very real difficulties they would present to him are not obviously any greater than the very real difficulties he historically overcame in the East.
“this is an example of Fremen Myth in supposing the hill peoples of Italy to be less coercible”
But I didn’t say anything about hill peoples or tribes. I said “republics of warriors” — like Rome itself. Is it a Fremen Myth to say that Rome, as a republic where heavy infantry was bulk of the formal political class, was harder to subdue than a polity with a small elite and disinterested masses? I don’t know much about Samnite or Etruscan government, but as Bret said, they gave Rome itself a hard time and long fight.
That’s true, and I apologize – I was assuming.
And it’s quite correct that these folks did give Rome a long fight. But I think that ‘small elite and disinterested masses’ only describes some of the East (Egypt is exactly what you suggest, I think). Other parts of the East – the many Greek poleis along the Anatolian coast; the apparently (maybe – I don’t think our sources are good in either case) similar confederations in inland Anatolia; the Bactrians, etc. So I think Alexander was capable of finding ways to get at least nominal subjugation as long as he himself was alive.
And these confederations in Italy mostly do stay comfortably loyal to Rome. Some of them do revolt semi-regularly (the Samnites, most famously) but generally only when a foreign conqueror has already had some significant success (Pyrrhus, Hannibal) or when Roman governance has become gradually quite a lot more unacceptable (the Social War, 2 centuries later).
Basically, I don’t think these folks are uniquely ungovernable, and Alexander historically proved actually very good at finding ways to subdue all sorts of peoples and polities, at least while he was alive.
“the many Greek poleis along the Anatolian coast; the apparently (maybe – I don’t think our sources are good in either case) similar confederations in inland Anatolia”
But hadn’t those already been imperially subjugated by the Persians? Making it a matter of trading one overlord for another, and handing off some food and silver to avoid a siege, rather than a matter of giving up independence. Bactrians I dunno.
Also it wasn’t just 3 sieges that Alexander’s army conducted during his campaign. Our sources deal somewhat in depth, for what they are, with Tyre and the Sogdian rock, but there’s also passing references to Alexander or subordinate columns of the Macedonian army laying siege to (and I think often assaulting) forts an walled towns and such in India and Central Asia, and it’s also worth mentioning that beating down the Illyrians to his north, which involved tough sieges (again seemingly often conducted well, with a fantastic siege train and techniques and Alexeander injecting his own cleverness), was something Alexander himself was doing before his Asian expedition.
I think it’s easy to forget that Alexander’s Macedonian army’s campaigns was not just against the Persian Empire (which was really not that highly centralized), but that we can’t forget to look at the more grinding and equally challenging (or even more so) campaigns in Sogdiana and India, which also were largely successful, even if the latter ended with the army refusing to cross further into India (and here the fact that it’s been such a long campaign and they are so far from home is an important fact) they did conquer and subdue the part of northwestern India that they did venture into.
I don’t think there’s anything to suggest that Pyrrhus’s and certainly not Hannibal’s army enjoyed anything near the same success and expertise in siegecraft, no matter how skilled they may have been as generals.
They do. The Samnites revolted against the Romans almost immediately after being subdued when Pyhrrus shows up. Various Socii also did join up with Hannibal, although he didn’t trigger a full collapse of the alliance network. I think it quite likely they’d cause similar problems for Alexander if he’s struggling in the north and/or Carthage shows up.
If he manages the sort of lightning blitz he did with Persia and rapidly subdues Rome, they probably don’t revolt because they don’t like their chances, but if he loses momentum the prospects look a lot better.
Fair enough. I will note that in both cases a famed foreign commander is knocking on the gates of Rome after having already won a battle (or battles) convincingly – and even then only some of the Italic cities revolt. It seems unlikely that just getting bogged down in grinding-but-successful warfare like the kind supposed in scenario 1 is going to cause revolts ex nihilo.
IIRC, Justinian the Great tried to speedrun Roman conquest in the 6th century AD. Like this hypothetical West Alexander, he made some impressive conquests that he absolutely failed to secure, and the whole thing fell apart once he had to focus on problems in his homeland.
Rome wasn’t built in a day.
Justinian had the misfortune of the Justinian plague happening, which killed, according to modern estimated, about as efficiently as the Black Death. This was enough to destroy the economical basis for any military venture.
Otherwise, Italy in Justinian’s time was politically so far away from the pre-Roman Italy that you might as well use “Roosevelt and Churchill failed in subduing the whole Italy in 1943” as an equally good analogue. Italy was governed by Gothic kingdoms that were, probably, pretty interesting mixtures of Gothic foreign elites using local administrators and local notables forming their own local polities. Justinian’s armies had, when arriving in Italy, a lot of legitimacy that nobody could have claimed before Roman empire. The question whether the operation was ultimately sound is a completely different thing, and I don’t think we have enough data to argue whether Belisarius and Narses could have maintained Roman rule in Italy if there had not been any plague. Personally, I think that they might well have been able to do it, but in that case, East Roman Italy would have probably fallen to Arabs a generation later, because the locals would have been utterly happy to get rid of Byzantine bureaucracy and taxes.
Mostly though, there really wasn’t anything in it for Alexander to go west. He followed the money.
> Indeed, the Macedonian free, citizen population is probably roughly the same size or smaller than the Roman citizen population in 334.
So, the obvious counterfactual here is of course to switch Macedonia out for Rome, sometime between 336 and 334 BC.
Everybody is asking what is Alexander west to Italy instead of India. But the more interesting question to me is, If Luigi Cadorna time-traveled his whole army – with years of supplies – into Aquileia 338. How exactly does he manage to lose?
There are some situations where even Cadorna isn’t incompetent enough to lose…
Most realistic answer is that all of his men die from same variant of the flu / malaria that they have no natural immunity to (and the opposite happens, killing off a good chunk of Italy at the same time). Everybody always forgets about diseases when time travelling…
I can think of a possible plausible sequence.
-Railroads and Ports, as built infrastructure, are likely not part of this time travel scenario, being part of built infrastructure rather then part of an army. Trucks existed at the time, but trains, as I understand it, were still the main way to move supplies around. Modern armies (WWI is similar enough to count) tend to be pretty supply intensive, so Cardona likely doesn’t have enough transport to move supplies around.
-As I understand it, he was a bit of a glory hound. Likely, he wants to head straight to Rome as a result, instead of doing a slower conquest of the in between areas.
-Put these two together, and Cardona likely leaves a bunch of supplies behind, marches straight towards Rome. The northeastern Italians likely enjoy some free food (“Those brown sweetened rectangles are nice”, “Not a fan of those strings of dough”, “The brown tubers with white flesh are all right. Really filling.” depending on exact rations), are not sure what to do with new materials/metals, but they look nice, and maybe suffer some gun safety accidents when they notice that cartriges fit neatly into the guns.
-His army fends off Ancient Italian attacks pretty easily with modern weapons, but is used to fighting with lots of supplies and runs through ammunition quickly. They are also unfamiliar with foraging and therefore run low on food at some point.
-They perhaps can siege a few cities, but eventually run out of food, or Italians attack when the army is low on ammunition and can’t fight as well. Mysterious army with magic weapons gets a mention in some histories, archaeologists find some aluminum nuggets and modern cartridges, assume contamination, otherwise history goes approximately as it really did.
“…otherwise history goes approximately as it really did.”
I don’t think you can casually introduce the potato to Iron Age Europe and claim ‘history goes approximately as it did’. This is before the adoption of the mold-board plough that revolutionised agriculture in northern Europe, meaning all those bothersome Celts and Germans are operating on seriously suppressed numbers compared to later periods.
However, introduce the potatoes to Italy, which then get picked up by the Cisalpine Gauls and transmitted to their more northerly cousins?
Cue a *massive* transalpine population boom fuelled by the grow-anywhere starchy wondercrop, followed by cyclical celtic mega-migrations as the notoriously blight-prone tuber does it’s thing (at least for a couple of hundred years as folks shake out how to grow it reliably long-term).
Considering the celts seemed to do fairly well when powered by bog-standard wheat, oats and barley, I think not only would Cadorna fail at taking Rome but that he would also cause carnage of at least equal proportions to the Late Bronze Age Collapse.
At some point in time, if Alexander lives, he’ll have the Successors and not just Macedonian troops. That should change the scenario somewhat, since Persian troops were known to take greater casualties and still keep on fighting.
My understanding is that the Successor’s Persian troops were mostly light infantry/archers and did not do great against heavy infantry, which the Italians had in spades. I’m also not sure how many Alexander could actually bring without an impractical logistical burden. He might be able to use them as garrison troops, assuming their loyalty could be relied upon, which might help with the revolts in his rear.
If he manages to reequip them as Macedonian-style heavy infantry as he was trying to do, that could change a great deal. There’d still be logistical issues with deploying a larger field army, but he’d have a deep bench of reserves.
I think that Alexander going west in 334 would quickly establish his rule in Magna Graecia, then he would defeat the Samnites (he had quite a lot of experience in fighting against Thracians and Illyrians at home, and I doubt Samnites were significantly different). After that he would make the Samnites his allies/vassals incorporating them into his army (like Thracians and Agrianes). Samnites would also provide a buffer zone against the Romans (who, as far as I understand, couldn’t threaten Magna Graecia without dealing with the Samnites first).
So Alexander would be able to completely ignore Romans (he would have no strategic interest to fight them) and instead he would attack Sicily, establishing his control over Syracuse (either peacefully or via conquest) and driving Carthaginians out of Sicily. After that he would have to gather or build a huge fleet (which is quite possible, since he had the resources of Macedon, the League of Corinth, Magna Graecia and Sicily at his disposal) to defeat Carthage on sea. After several naval battles he should be able to invade Africa and took Carthage (which would provide Alexander with enough loot in silver and gold to pay his army).
After that, I think, Alexander would be done with the west and would return to his eastern conquests, invading either Anatolia or Egypt (through Cyrenaica). I suppose after the death of Alexander his western conquests would become a basis for a separate Hellenistic kingdom (probably with Syracuse as its capital), which would be quite a tough opponent for Rome, maybe even tougher than Carthage was IRL.
“(which is quite possible, since he had the resources of Macedon, the League of Corinth, Magna Graecia and Sicily at his disposal)”
I am not sure I agree. Alexander did not himself have much of navy in 334 and not a lot money to get one sans Persian conquest. Can’t see Athens finding much interest if fighting Carthage for Alex on their own dime (err tetradracma). Why are the Greeks of Magna Greacia going to go fight Carthage not really ever bothered them? And where is the money for their fleet coming from? Syracuse was was large and wealthy but it was no Athens circa the 430s sitting on some thousands of talents of silver to fund a navy indefinably – If it was one assumes Agathocles would have done better in his wars with Carthage.
I agree that this naval stage would be the hardest part for Alexander, but I think it is still manageable. Syracusans had a long rivalry with Carthage, so they definitely would be interested to defeat it. Corinth was an ally of Syracuse, so perhaps it would send its fleet willingly. Overall, the panhellenistic ideology would be very helpful here. Another reason for the Greek states to support Alexander might be that Carthaginians controlled trade routes in Western Mediterranean, so defeating them would open trade routes beyond the Pillars of Hercules to Greek merchants. And of course Carthage was rich, so possible loot might also be a factor. If some cities in Magna Graecia or Sicily decide to ignore Alexander’s demands and rebel against him, he might destroy them as he destroyed Thebes, to intimidate other cities (and also to gain some additional money).
Also, it seems that Romans won the naval war with Carthage during the First Punic War while having less resources, controlling less Greek states and having less experience in naval warfare. If Romans could do it, then Alexander definitely would have a chance, especially considering that he would only need an opportunity to transport his army into Africa. After that he probably would manage to defeat Carthaginians on land and take the city by assault even if his fleet would be defeated.
I may have missed something scrolling down but there is a big gap in Scenario 1- Back home and a bit east of that a not very happy Great King. So how does Alexander talk his way out of bad feelings over his dad’s forward operating force having fun in Asia Minor? But also none of Sparta, Athens, and Aetolia are really happy with the status quo Alexander leaves behind. Without cash flowing back from Alexander’s conquests how does Antipater keep a lid on things and scrape up replacements to send to Alexander? Athens and Aetolia might prefer a more lofty “Hellenic’ rebellion without Persian cash, but Sparta at least would likely be happy to take Persian cash and start a war as soon as Alexander looked to be bogged own in a multi faceted war that was not sending silver and gold home by the bucket load. Also seems kinda easy for an Athenian rebellion to cut off Alexander since there is no well funded Cleitus and big new shinny fleet to show up overwhelm the Athenian navy.
Sparta DID rise against Macedonian hegemony once Alex was safely in Asia, but Sparta failed to create a pan-Hellenic alliance (the lesson of Chaeronea was harsh) and Agis III and his army was destroyed at Megalopolis in 331 BC. Alex sniffed from afar that this was a battle of midgets.
I am aware of that. You are I think making the mistake of holding everything the same . When Sparta launched its revolt (Was it? Since Sparta was not a member of the the League of Corinth) The situation of 332/331 will quite different under Scenario 1 than in real history. In 332/331 BC Alexander will not marching toward Persepolis largely unmolested and hold all of Western Persia and and have scored large masses of money (post Granicus and Issus). He will not posses the the resources such that he can send some 3000 Talants of silver to Antipater for his expenses facing Agis and and revolt in Thrace. Nor does Alexander have the means for a build a navy out of the Phoenicia and ( and Cyprus, Cilicia etc.). Nor come into possession of Egypt nearly for free, or really all of the western Persian empire as tribute paying provinces. If we follow Devereaux Alexander will now be tied down trying finish off Rome. With only a tenuous hold on what he has taken and facing new enemies at hand in the Etruscans. Carthage will likely be a interested and unfriendly observer. Persia will will sitting comfortably. Agis rather than getting the scraps out of the Persian disintegrating military position in the west in 333/332 BC has the potential for real subsidies from the King. Athens will if still seeing it beloved Black sea trade in Macedonian hands have a fee trade line to Egypt when it consider grain imports. Alexander will have only a paltry fleet and no money to build or pay for one. All in all Alexander will vastly less wealthy, Persia a free actor sitting about with time and money on its hands and Antipater likely more manpower poor than he was in reality. Agis no doubt paid politically for Sparta staying out of the fight in 338. But the calculations of Athens and Aitolia and Memnon in Thrace would likely be different if Alexander was a poor warlord tied down in Italy with wealthy Persia at hand than what was the reality of Alexander master of all of Western Persia and able to send potentially not just money but Himself back west if he chose and delay forcing the issue with King for another day.
The main takeaway here I think is that it’s a lot easier to seize control of an existing system than to build a new one from scratch. Alexander’s rapid conquest of the east is only possible because the Persians (and their many predecessors) had already spent centuries at this point consolidating imperial power over the region. Alexander is able to essentially stage a hostile takeover of that pre-existing government apparatus…and then immediately breaks it.
Alexander and his Macedonians are great thieves, not great builders.
In fairness, his death plays a major role in the breaking. If he had lived a couple more decades and left behind an adult son, a more stable system of rule may have developed. (Or not, insofar as he seemed more interested in conquering than governing)
The Persians had a fairly lenient system (there was no need to be too extractive). The Macedonians/Greeks seems to have acted like kids who have just broken into a candy shop – lots of looting and swindling, and it took them a while to settle down. Alexander does not seem to have moderated this – his model was Achilles, not Cyrus.
The venerable collection of articles and essays, “The Generalship of Alexander the Great” includes a counterfactual chapter by Toynbee (“What If Alexander Had Lived?” is the title, I think) that postulates Alexander surviving his 323 BC illness and going on to conquer pretty much EVERYTHING, the West, India, and even China! It’s a thrill-a-minute ride thru the centuries thereafter, culminating in the world-ruler Alexander XXIV or something, since the Hellenistic inventors and scientists bring steam engines into being and Greek and Carthaginian seafarers fan out to the New World and beyond. The philosophies of Asia also merge with Hellenism to beget a new religious synthesis that pretty much negates any rise of Christianity. Like I say, it’s a madcap whirl thru a very alternate universe.
In response to some posts above (“Why was Persia so weak” “How could Italy really put up a bigger fight then a bigger Empire”)
Rome vs. Greece and Rome vs. Spain seems a good analogy, which played out like this blog post and history describe. Same army fights some large, rich, powerful kingdoms it can beat in battle, and at the same time fights in a poor, disunited region where people are constantly fighting each other. And sure enough, the large, unified kingdoms take a small number of battles to beat (because just one particular enemy needs to accept a loss) in their wars, while the poorer region with lots of little enemies to fight becomes a slog. Plus creates recruitment troubles/discontent, due to less plunder to attract soldiers. I’m thinking/wondering if that history influenced this post.
I think the big question here is would the various actors of Italian Peninsula and Sicily have united together against a new threat; the Greeks had a history of this, but does Italy? From what you describe as the Pyrrhus and the Hannibal scenario, the answer is, for the most part yes, but a lot of that yes is because more and more of it is now under the Roman thumb (and those who don’t join are trying free themselves from underneath it) than any sort of unified identity between the players. I think that fact is true before then.
For the 334 case we actually have a point of comparison that I’m surprised wasn’t mentioned; Alexander’s uncle Alexander of Epirus. Alex of Epirus was called by the Greek colony of Taranetum to help deal with the southern Italic tribes like the Messappians, the Lucinians, the Bruiitians and the Samnites. He doesn’t do a terrible job from what I gather; he’s able to recapture a few (most of them captured Greek colonies) cities over a nice range of Southern Italy from Terina in the south and Sipontum on the spur of the boot (it’s also . He also manages to secure win oat Pasterum and notable is that he signs a treaty with Rome after beating the Samnites and the Lucinians. Now, I don’t know what is involved with this treaty (historically, it was inconsequential) but some have suggested an alliance. But I think it bears fruit to the idea that Italy was not united against a new threat; heck it’s possible most of the Greek colonies (I say most because I don’t know enough about Alex of Epirus campaign to know about where say the Italoites League or Syracuse fit into it) were probably united behind Alex of Epirus. Epirus likely did not have a sizable army compared to Macedonia, so quite a bit of his army was likely built from Italy. Obviously, Alex of Epirus doesn’t succeed in conquering Italy; he’s killed at Pandosia in 331, perhaps the first time the Italians have beaten a Macedonian-esque army.
But what would happen if Alexander of Macedonia answered Taranetum’s call instead of his uncle, or if he joined his uncle in 334 (this is stretching the dates I admit; I’m pretty sure Alexander was in Anatolia before his uncle left for Italy). I think we would see something similar to Alex of Epirus’ campaign but perhaps not as unsuccessful. Perhaps the treaty with Rome brings the Romans on the side of the more skilled Alexander against the Samnites (at least until they argue over whether the treaty was an alliance or an agreement of vassalage; I can imagine Alexander thinking it as such) and speeds up the slow grinding process of siege and hard fighting. I don’t know, not an expert, just I think things go a bit better for Alexander than Bret gives credit; at least until the Carthaginians join against him because there’s no way he’s beating that navy.
And doesn’t deal with the fourth option; one that Livy raised, what if Alexander went west after his conquests in Asia. Let’s assume that Alexander, manages to make it back to Macedonia in 324 or 323 (maybe he takes a year off) with drinking himself to death. What’s different than the other cases is that Alexander is now entering early on in the Second Samnite War, where his presence actually could make a difference. And I would argue that would be the best time, diplomatically, for him to invade; military, his army is probably way too exhausted to be of much use. I don’t have reason to believe that Rome and the Samnites are going to join hand-in-hand for a new threat, which means Alexander can take advantage of joining one side and taking down and then other afterward, if the circumstance were ideal. They aren’t because again his army probably doesn’t have the patience for another venture (getting them to Italy is the biggest hurdle) or a long slow war.
Or we could ask Livy what he thinks would happen.
https://web.archive.org/web/20070228233052/http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/txt/ah/Livy/Livy09.html
Hello, this is my first comment on this blog, which I’ve known since September of last year.
This post is amazing, as are all the others, and I can say they tremendously help me teach my students about Roman history and Latin (and make me love Tolkien’s legendarium and LOTR movies even more!). So thank you!
PS: sorry for speaking English so poorly, I’m French.
What you seem to be missing is that “Alexander” DID invade Italy.
Specifically in 334.
He did NOT fight Romans. He made a treaty with Romans.
It was Alexander of Epirus. Uncle of Alexander of Macedon. Little brother of Alexander of Macedon´s mother Olympias. Also Alexander of Macedon´s brother-in-law – the husband of Cleopatra who was Alexander of Macedon´s little sister and only full sibling, and therefore her husband´s niece.
Just how did the details of military fighting of Alexander of Epirus´ invasion of Italy compare to the details of Pyrrhus of Epirus´ invasion 50 years later?
Alexander of Epirus DID expressly compare Italy with Persia – dying impaled by spear he said that his nephew was fighting against women.
More comparisons…
In contrast to Persia, Italy had numerous independent and free city-states, infantry-heavy armies and fortified cities. Hard to conquer them one by one, hard to hold.
But another region that ALSO had numerous independent city-states with socially wide infantry armies, habit of freedom and fortified cities was guess where?
Balkan Greece.
The way to Chaeronea took a lot of time for Philip of Macedon. And after Chaeronea, Alexander and Successors faced repeated revolts.
Unlike Italy, Greece had some silver, not just copper. But becoming the Hegemon of Corinthian League does not seem to have given Alexander quite free use of that silver! He was short of cash till he did get the Persian silver.
How did Philip manage to conquer Greece despite the difficulties handling multiple independent cities like Thebes and Athens? How did he find it worthwhile to persist in doing so, and how did he manage to pay his armies because even victories did not immediately return enough silver?
Another banger. Thanks!
One question. Why were the Greek/Macedonian soldiers so insistent on *silver*? I can understand wanting *money*, and not just getting paid in food or vague promises of land. But presumably they would have been happy with any sort of hard currency, right? So if copper was the main currency in italy, wouldn’t they have been satisfied getting paid in copper Italian coins? Or was there something special about silver at the time?
Imagine the exchange rate. Or just the amount of extra weight to carry for the equivalent amount of bronze for the silver you expected. For that matter if your goal is to go back home and be rich where your family is, they may not even accept non-silver currency.
” if copper was the main currency in italy, wouldn’t they have been satisfied getting paid in copper Italian coins? ”
This is specie money, not fiat money. Far as I can tell, silver was around 100x as valuable by weight as bronze.
I dunno how much loot a Macedonian soldier hoped to get, but let’s say 10-50 pounds of silver. Now imagine bring 1000-5000 pounds of bronze home…
Trade goods, you say? It’s 300s Italy, I don’t think there _was_ much in the way of higher value trade goods.
There’s slaves, but if Alexander starts enslaving and selling off local populations, the rate of surrender is gonna collapse…
Then that raises the question of how currency worked in Italy. How could anyone buy anything if it required lugging around hundreds of pounds of metal?
“How could anyone buy anything if it required lugging around hundreds of pounds of metal?”
For one thing, you’d buy small purchases. Coins like the as and sestertius were “small change”. 100 pounds bronze = 1 pound silver = over 3 months gross income for a skilled Greek laborer, hardly casual purchases. A single 4 gram silver drachma was a good day’s income; half a drachma if you were just a juror or oarsman.
Alternatively you’re using copper ingots to settle trades between merchants, or seasonal debts.
And, from this very post: “because in the 330s and 320s, the Romans barely use coinage at all, and what physical ‘money’ they have is mostly in bronze”
It’s apparently not a very monetized economy yet, or if it is it’s tallies and IOUs and temple accounts, not cash.
ah, ok. I think that last paragraph answers my question. So is it fair to say that the Italians had a more advanced/abstract financial system, using abstract debt and credit, while the Persians insisted on hard bullion? That would explain why it was so easy to plunder the Persians and so difficult to plunder the Italians. It would be like robbing a modern bank… you’d get a few hundred dollars of petty cash, but nothing like the millions you’d need to pay a real army.
“is it fair to say that the Italians had a more advanced/abstract financial system”
I dunno, could be the opposite, mostly a bunch of independent farmers, with little trade. Or, trades of the right sizes were done by simply weighing out silver, like in pre-coinage days. (Remember that coins as such are from like the 700s BC, but cities and trade of some sort go back to ~3000 BC. People got by for over 2000 years without coins.)
It’s more likely a financial system based in a lot of good will and interpersonal credit and handshake agreements of a kind that characterises most pre-modern economies. It’s not likely to be something rooted in a lot of firm record keeping. Valuable coinage is the sort of thing initially valued because it can replace that sort of ad hoc thing with something more tangible.
Otherwise, I don’t think it should be particularly difficult to recognise that the reason the Roman (and larger Italic) economy can’t furnish the needs of Alexander’s army is because they’re just plain poorer at the time.
@aj
I think that “more advanced” is probably the wrong way to formulate this. The key point here is that the economy is non-monetary. Most farms are almost self-sufficient, and while you do have a monetary economy, many transactions are smallish. The market day is every eight days, and people doing business there are urban population, who are buying groceries. Larger purchases are very formal and take days to complete, because you need a magistrate as a witness. (Early Roman law used the same formal contract type for buying cows as for buying real estate.) Real estate moves rarely, and even then, mostly within extended families, and without actual money changing hands. Barter is probably still common. When you actually end up doing a major monetary transaction, you actually move a wagonload of bronze from one place to another.
Because money is scarce and unwieldy, personal-level obligations are the key to any larger-scale “business”, which looks more like politics than business in our sense. This is economy where you might get a cow from your patron as wedding present for your son if he marries an orphaned daughter of the patron’s loyal, but unfortunately late client, and you will get to be a centurion in the spring campaign against the Etrusci, but on the other hand, you will need to forgive the small debt that Quintus Rebius, a client of a friend of your patron owes you.
Same as everywhere – on formal and informal credit (as said above, coins come late). Coins are for impersonal market transactions – small ones like buying a fish for dinner in Piraeus, or large ones for for paying people who are not local and so outside the credit network (typically mercenaries – the original reason for coins). Italy did not have a lot of impersonal markets and did not employ many mercenaries. So bronze small change and tallies worked fine.
The Persians kept a large cash reserve because in war they employed a lot of mercenaries kept a large fleet. Greek cities were also cash heavy for the same reasons.
“I dunno how much loot a Macedonian soldier hoped to get, but let’s say 10-50 pounds of silver. Now imagine bring 1000-5000 pounds of bronze home…”
Bigger problem is there probably was not that many bronze coins to do it. Looking at the bronze fractions from say Syracuse where I can find good comparisons to silver. The fiduciary overvaluation is rather large. There is not going to be enough bronze in circulation to pay out the kind of by weight value you are talking about.
“there probably was not that many bronze coins to do it”
That would _also_ be a problem! But even if the bronze existed, I suspect shipping a ton per soldier would not have been feasible or desirable…
Interesting post, particularly the point about the difference in loot. As Octavian says in Rome, “The East is where the money is.” It was much more profitable to conquer Western Asia than Italy. It also highlights the difference between trying to conquer an empire versus independent polities. The tributaries of Darius had no real allegiance to him; once the winds were blowing Alexander’s way, they had little reason not to switch sides. By contrast, all the states of Italy had their own political identities that they would be loathe to surrender, so they’d have to be ground down slowly.
I do wonder if there are any thoughts on a final scenario: Alexander goes west after he goes east. Assuming he doesn’t die on the march back from India, he’s still a young man and given his personality, might well have tried to conquer the rest of the Mediterranean world. Would he, backed by the resources of his earlier conquests, been able to take Italy then?
Bret’s talked about this a bit on Bluesky.
He says that it isn’t clear that Alexander’s finances are actually on sounder footing, he’s having to deal with rebellious satraps, and a possible civil war with Antipater.
It doesn’t look like Bret thinks that Alexander’s position in 323 would actually be particularly more favorable than his position in 334 as far a conquering Italy is concerned.
(I’d also note that “young man” might be an overly optimistic take on his health. He had already been nearly killed several times and quite likely even if he hadn’t died in 323 he wouldn’t have survived THAT much longer. )
Did Alexander incur any serious chronic conditions?
If you look at his Successors, note how many of them lived past 80 (Antigonos Monophtalmos, Ptolemaios), and were actually fighting past age of 80 (Antigonos actually fell at Ipsus age 81) or nearly to 80 (Lysimachus fell in battle age 78 or so, Seleucus was assassinated age 77 and was on a campaign, having defeated and killed Lysimachus a few months before).
When I look for any successors who died young for natural causes, only Cassander did, about age 58 (dropsy or consumption)?
Which means that any alternate history where Alexander does not die age 32 – either does not sicken at Babylon or makes a recovery – would have to deal with a possibility of Alexander campaigning in 270s BC.
How would a 80 year old Alexander campaign compared to how he had done at age 30?
He had taken several serious wounds. The best anti-Alexander tactic is simple – target Alexander specifically (came close at Granicus and closest in a siege in Ariana).
With the Hellenistic understanding of personalized kingship, did any of the Successors fall in battles that they were otherwise winning, because the enemies concentrated on targeting the person of the king?
Suffering as many nearly fatal injuries as he did likely amounts to a serious chronic condition.
Thanks for this quite interesting alternate-history investigation. I think I pretty much agree with all the scenarii outlined here, including the disclaimers about inevitable uncertainties. Now, I have to admit the time-traveller Alexander hypotheses don’t really catch my attention. It seems to me that Alexander would have gone to war against Rome in 290 or later with the same army he had at Granicus. And going to Italy instead of Persia in 334 is an interesting investigation on an operational standpoint, but wouldn’t make sense on the strategic one, for reasons well outlined here. And in fact, Alexander didn’t do it for these very reasons (or at least the chunk of these reasons he would have known back then).
I have to say, I’m a bit disappointed that you skipped the most intriguing scenario, as many have mentioned in the comments above. A scenario so tempting that Arrian already mentioned it. What would have happened if Alexander have lived on after 323 and had had time to consolidate his grasp on the Achemenid Empire before turning his gaze westward? And I won’t claim originality here, as I think the start of that fiction is quite obvious: it’s unlikely he would have had much interest in conquering Rome. On the other hand, Carthage would have been a tempting foe, and Magna Graecia an interesting target.
And two tracks start from there: he might have wanted to conquer Magna Graecia first, much like his father did for Greece proper, ending up subduing Neapoli and Syracuse, and then probably turning his attention on Carthage, which would have been deeply upset by such a turn of events. Alternately, he might have wanted to appear as the saviour of the Western Greeks against the Punic threat (though this might be a bit anachronistic), and would have gone straight to Sicilia to conquer its western half, which would have led him to conquer Syracuse at some point, since Syracuse would have started being upset well before Carthaginians had been beaten back.
I would have liked you to pick up there and share your thoughts whether Alexander’s Persian Empire would have been like to hold up while he was busy so far away, or whether he would have had to go back for additional campaigns in Asia, much like Antiochos III zipped back and forth for most of his life. And then the next question would be to attempt guessing whether Alexander would have been able to land on Africa (or march along the Lybian coast) to lay siege to Carthage, and if he had a decent chance to vainquish Carthage in his lifetime. Since most of that would have probably kept him busy for a least a decade, in the best case, would he really have had any interest to conquer Italy afterwards (assuming he actually manage to conquer Carthage), or would he have had to focus on consolidating such a gigantic empire for the remaining of his life? And assuming he then live on to at least 50 (not dying early as a result of sickness or assassination), could such an empire hold together in the hand of his chosen successor? And then, could his son or grandson, assisted by some decent or even good general (say, Pyrrhus) go on and actually attempt to subdue the rest of Italy, while still holding onto the whole former Achemenid and Carthaginian empires?
(OK, there are so many uncertainties here it’s no longer the domain of historians, but of fiction writers. Still, that’s the most enthralling scenario, I think.)
We have Diodorus for Alexander´s written down plans:
“[18.4.1] Now it happened that Craterus, who was one of the leading men, had been sent ahead to Cilicia by Alexander with the soldiers discharged from the army, some 6,000 in number. At the same time he had received written instructions which the king had given him to carry out; but after the death of Alexander the successors decided not to implement what had been decided.
[18.4.2] For when Perdiccas found among the king’s memoranda plans for the completion of Hephaestion’s funeral monument, a very expensive project, as well as the king’s other numerous and ambitious plans, which involved enormous expenditure, he decided that it was most advantageous to have them canceled.
[18.4.3] So as not to give the impression that he was personally responsible for detracting from the king’s glory, he submitted the decision on the matter to the common assembly of the Macedonians.
[18.4.4-5] The following were the largest and most remarkable of the plans.
It was intended to build 1,000 warships larger than triremes in Phoenicia, Syria, Cilicia and Cyprus for the expedition against the Carthaginians and the other inhabitants of the coastal area of Africa, Iberia and the neighboring coasts as far as Sicily; to build a coastal road in Africa as far as the Pillars of Heracles, and, as required by such a large expedition, to build harbors and shipyards at suitable places;
to build six expensive temples at a cost of 315 ton silver each (the temples just mentioned were to be built at Delos, Delphi and Dodona, and in Macedonia there was to be a temple of Zeus at Dion, one of Artemis Tauropolus at Amphipolis, and at Cyrnus one of Athena);
in addition, to settle cities and transplant populations from Asia to Europe and vice versa from Europe to Asia, to bring the largest continents through intermarriage and ties of kinship to a common harmony and feeling of friendship.
Likewise there was to be built at Troy a temple of Athena which could never be excelled in size by any other.
A tomb for his father Philip was to be constructed which would be as large as the greatest pyramids in Egypt, which some reckon among the Seven Wonders of the World.
[18.4.6] When these plans had been read out, the Macedonians, although they approved highly of Alexander, nevertheless saw that the plans were extravagant and difficult to achieve, and they decided not to carry out any of those that have been mentioned.”
Sicily is included.
Italy is not.
WOULD Alexander have sat quiet “consolidating” Persia, or would he have restlessly gone ahead with plans like building harbours, shipyards and ships for expedition against Carthage as soon as Craterus/Antipater interchange had gone through (a few months later, still in 323)?
When would Alexander have reached the tally of “1000 warships larger than triremes” that was his aim for expedition against Carthage?
I have no idea what he would have done, but his goals sound like he was an actual map-painter and not a normal historical actor. Are we sure Diodorus isn’t making this up, or credulously believing his own fibbing sources?
It’s silly. Persia was a large and wealthy empire and a potential threat to the hegemony Macedonia was building in Greece. Of course he went east. There was nothing of interest in the West at that point.
And now this triggers more interesting hypothetical. What if it’s Phillips who for some reason wants to go to the west? What if it’s… Cyrus? But what I want to know more is what if Alexander instead appears at.. Adrianople (378). Suppose he teleports to ruins of Pella with his army (and Antipater’s army too for good measure) and try to at least reclaim his homeland? Could he square off with declining roman army or is it still too much? If he can, how lightning his conquest can be now?
What about Alexander trying to take Italy in 2025? I’m sure he could capture Florence at least.
Once he steps in Tuscany, Livorno will send him a proposal: if you erase Pisa from the face of Earth, we will join you as ethernal loyal subjects.
Alexander’s reply: no need to raze the city, we will just beat it together, this ancient rivalry only led to pointless infighting, I will put and end to it and you will be both equal members of the empire as joint siblings and citizens of Italy!
Livorno’s counter-reply: no way we will be that with the Pisani, we will rather join forces with Pisa to stop you tyrant from stopping our mutual hatred, to arms sons of San Bugliano!
(something similar will happen in the rest of Italy with the various cities confusing Alexander by allying with and against him, with and against other cities, with and against themselves, often at the same time or alternating between odd/even days… unless Alexander proposes to fight France, then everybody will agree and send him to France)
I think the most interesting case is “what if Alexander hadn’t died when he did, and then turned West?”. Now he’s backed by his entire empire. I’ve even read that it was something he was considering, but I can’t vouch for that.
I think most people think What if he went West at the end of his life and presumed he stayed healthy for another decade or two is the name of the game.
course how much with the shadow of Alexander himself, which all militaries might be learning FROM is its own question.
the true question is if after Cannae If Hannibal actually March on Rome immediately, to besige them as a Show, could he have forced a Peace Settlement.
or even what if Scipio had died at Caanae, so no him to be absurd in Spain while every other Carthagenian was asleep at the Wheel.
I have a follow-up question, then. Alexander sliced through Persia like a hot knife through butter, the Romans have stomped all over the Hellenistic kingdoms, but spent 700 years fighting against the Persians instead of burning Ctesiphon to the ground. Was is a rock-paper-scissors situation, or were the Persian armies of Orodes that much better than the ones of Darius? If yes, then how and why?
The Romans did sack Ctesiphon in 116 and 165 and 198 and probably in 283 and again in 298. The Romans had no problem burning Ctesiphon to the ground.
Also, ‘the Persians’ elides some pretty important distinctions between the Achaemenid, Arsacid (Parthian) and Sassanid Empires. These were not the same guys with the same military system.
But the broader point here is that the Romans were already managing an empire already a quarter larger, by population, than Alexander’s empire at its maximum extent. The Parthians/Sassanids were only one of their security challenges and the Romans never really made a serious effort to conquer or even invade the Iranian Plateau which was the actual base of their power. The Roman goal never seems to have seriously been to conquer Persia, which they couldn’t have administered from Rome (or Constantinople) even if they had done – recall that even Alexander recognized that he’d need to move his capital east, out of Macedonia all the way to Babylon.
Instead, the Romans are generally looking to secure Syria, maintain control over the Armenian kingdom and sometimes create or maintain a buffer zone in northern Mesopotamia. To do that, they sometimes roll down into Mesopotamia and sack Ctesiphon as a means of exerting pressure on the Parthian or Sassanid Empires, while the Parthians and Sassanids do the same by attempting to invade Syria. Neither side is making any major effort to permanently conquer the other.
“maintain control over the Armenian kingdom”
Why was that of importance to them?
I really like the points you made, but I propose another scenario: Alexander invades in the 320s, either after having defeated Carthage (it was allegedly planned), or without having done that (his generals considered it unfeasible). In this situation, Alexander has access to much more wealth and manpower from his newly conquered empire. Granted, he also has to keep it held together and prevent rebellions. But he would likely have been in a much better starting position than Pyrrhus, with more money as a strategic reserve to pay troops, and more supplies to gather up in his bases of operations. He also likely would have had his fame preceding him, which would have meant that at least the Greek cities would have been more likely to collaborate with him. In reality, Pyrrhus struggled to keep Greek cities in check. They didn’t send him troops and supplies as much as he needed, plus they dragged him between Italy and Sicily, warring against multiple opponents. I bet that Alexander’s prestige (he conquered the Persian empire!), dread (he defeated so many enemies!), ethnic pride (he was bringing the Hellenes together and above any other!) would have opened more doors in the South of Italy.
I think that as far as his fame preceding him goes, it would have gone both ways: when Pyrrhus asks the cities of Magna Graecia to support him, he has already proven capable of beating Rome and he still gets that much of a hard time getting their support. When that hypothetical Alexander knocks on their doors and asks for their support, he hasn’t yet beaten Rome. Also, Pyrrhus is undisputably a Greek ruler, being king of Epirus, whereas the Greekness of the Macedonians was always a…complicated question so ethnic pride is a lever Alexander would have been far less able to use than Pyrrhus was.
Interesting post, I read your blog, but I don’t have means to make proper academic article our journal post for this theme.
Variants of political affairs are endless, idea, that everybody would team up against Macedonia is unprobable. Samnites hating the Romans, Etruscan are divided, but there are cities who can gladly join up Alexander. Lucanians, Messapians can be recruited against Rome too. You are forgetting the pride of those ancient people, they were so shortsighted and proud they could fight against Macedonia one after one… As they did against Rome most of the times, does it ring a bell? So Romans have only Romans and Latins, Marsi and those lesser tribes. I know why are You abstaining scenario of Alexander coming after conquest of Persia. 321 BC crushing defeat of Romans from Samnites, not good position to fight Alexander.
There are certainly many problems which would Alexander III. faced during Italy campaign. I have complaint why not involve scenario to invade Italy after return from Arabia (plan to conquer it would take year a max). So even if Lamian war happened Macedonia can crush this revolt even without Alexander (in case he is still in Arabia, or in Babylon preparing new armies). So the invasion year 321 or 320 BC seems real. First I have to take out Carthage out of equation partially. Their land army on Sicily would lose in direct confrontation with Macedonia. There is no certainty that Carthage will burn their fingers for Romans, if Macedonia firstly attack Italy. For morons who thinks in terms of Greekness. Macedonia was part of Greek world since Mycenaean age, hostility and “barbaric” traits are Demosthenes psyché not historical reality. Doric dialect, Greek writtings were dominant as official language of cities and administrative! Gosh this is so infuriating, can’t You read the inscriptions, angarams on Macedonian coins, seals? Read a little… Hostility to Macedon had different reasons than alleged mythological family tree. It was chessboard serving to the needs, those ridiculous efforts of Abydos or different Greek cities to look for affinities with Romans in Hellenistic era…
Syracuse were close to rule of Agathocles capable military commander, he could fend off Carthage himself. And politics is much bigger factor, even if there was Lamian war or not, Atens could send massive fleet, so could Rhodes and other states. Don’t forget those rich oligarchs were glad to send off hoi polloi to fight with prospects, there would be less of them… Sad, but true. So even without Phoenicians who are brethrens of Carthage Macedonia can build up a massive navy (tetréres, pentéres included), not to mention Cyprian Greeks eager to serve and win (experts in in navy big ships). So yeah, Carthage has no no advantage with fleet, maybe parity. Roman fleet is small, Etruscan in tens, Italiote Greeks have fleet in Tarent (c. 100), Sikeliote Greeks in Syracuse (c. 200). Include Greco-Macedonian navy from the East and Greeks could rule the waves.
As You know, without land bases, navy is useless so Carthage situation is difficult for war in Sicily/Italy. With Persian money, new recruits, war elephants I see hard time for everybody coming into Alexnder way. With navy superiority (and even without it, we know from ancient history that disembarkation can be done in the face of stronger opponent) Alexander has free hand what to do. Btw, You are totally missing one thing, experience of soldiers, NCO cadres, of Macedon, there veterans hadn’t competition. Especially “division” leaders, Alexandr (and other commanders before him) understood Napoleonic principle of flying columns (see his campaign in Central Asia). With this in mind and navy landings) why the hell he would go from Tarent in one column to north like a bull? No experiences, imagination what so ever. You are underestimating skills of Greek engineers, their poliorkétika was somewhere else, so notion Alexander is reyling on surrender of cities made my day.
The book https://www.amazon.com/Alexander-Great-Logistics-Macedonian-Army/dp/0520042727/ which all Romanophlie and military enthusiats are using is faulty to big degree. You have old reviews from 80’s of N.G.L. Hammond, A. M. Devine and somebody third, wagons, carts were truly important, so did navy. So I have arguments why things could go on different course. Alexander was aware of politics and diplomacy oh what the heck, read the Heckel https://www.amazon.com/Path-Conquest-Resistance-Alexander-Great/dp/0190076682 Alexander wasn’t so dumm, that only brute force can solve everything. For Roman army in Alexander era we have superb works of M. Taylor and articles and books from Armstrong https://www.pen-and-sword.co.uk/Early-Roman-Warfare-Paperback/p/21680 Why are You so evasive about level of Roman military art doctor Deveraux? Roman legions operated in style of warbands, legions in the style Punic wars were ahead in the future (respectively, proper system of triplex acies is finalized on late 3rd, early 2nd CE BC)
We know Macedonia had lead and planned reforms of Macedonian phalanx could shuffle the cards at the table (article https://www.academia.edu/28157056/A_Note_on_the_Later_Phalanx_of_Alexander_the_Great).
I don’t see how in direct battle Romans or anybody else at that tine can do something against cavalry tactics of Hetairoi, Greeks combined with Asian units (horse archers). Without protection of the flanks it’s hard to win. Yeah, Romans could improvise, ditches, stakes, but guess what even Neo-Assyrians builded portable “bridges” for obstacles (so their chariots and cavalry can attack), same goes for Macedonians.
All I wrote doesn’t mean Alexandr victory is certain, on the contrary, we need to evaluate much more factors in bigger details. But still he would have very good chance to gain victory. Especially in scenario when Alexander is going in late 320’s to invade Italy with Persian money, massive navy, experienced army. I gave you the food for thought I hope You will think about it.