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Prior to Philip's time and the League of Corinth (337 BC), the Ancient Greek world was fragmented in (often warring) city states and kingdoms. There is little sense in discussing a Greek nationality at a time where, for example, Athenians identified themselves as Athenians first and as Hellenes later. Pericles' reforms in 451 BC exemplify the distinction, ...

Actually, it wasn't intended specifically to set an example, but it did serve to deliver a message that he was not someone who was going to just go away. Alexander's father, Phillip, was murdered in 336 BC, leaving Alexander to rule in his place. Many states, including Thebes and Athens, rose up in revolt when they heard the news. Alexander responded ...

I strongly suggest you read the celebrated and widely read and revered books on Ancient India by: Romila Thapar (Marxist in views) A. L. Basham (Non-partisan) You can also refer to the bibliography of the Wikipedia page Indian campaign of Alexander the Great. In earlier times, India ran from the Hindukush mountains(Afghanistan) to the Himalayas, and ...

I voted up lins314159's answer. I would like to add a couple of things though. The vast majority of Alexander's empire actually started his tenure as the Persian's empire. So a great deal of credit (and attention) should be paid to all the work they did to put that empire together. However, Persia's loss of the Persian-Greek wars 100 years earlier had ...

The Greeks had demonstrated military superiority over the Persians for many years. Both Cimon and Agesilaus had led successful expeditions into Persian territory. That Persia maintained its dominant position over Greece had not so much to do with their own military capabilities, but rather because of the incessant warfare amongst Greek cities. Their focus on ...

Such estimates are pretty difficult. Even for WWII there is no universal agreement over the number of dead - and that's for a relatively recent event that was extensively documented. However, I think one can say from the record that the civilian/military ratio among Genghis Khan's victims was much higher than that of Alexander's. (To wit, Genghis Khan ...

The Charisma - Macedonian soldiers were ready to go with Alexander, because they loved their leader and didn't just go with him because of fear of him. The War techniques - Alexander was "great" at designing new techniques at war. For example, He let the war chariots go inside his line and made his warriors attack the chariots from behind. The chariots then ...

Against the Romans, Alexander would have lost. Several hundred years later, when Perseus of Macedon fought the Roman army, the Macedonians found it hard to keep the line strait and their ranks unbroken, so once there was a gap, the Romans would rush in and massacre the people left and right. The Macedonians with a ridged command structure and armed with ...

The city was Thebes. When Alexander was busy crushing revolts across the Danube, he received word that the Thebans were also revolting and that Athens was involved from the shadows. In addition to this, news of Alexander had not reached the southern Greek city states in some time. He had been busy with the siege of Pelium and news had reached them that ...

There were actually about 70 towns (by Plutarch's count) named after Alexander, but he didn't found and name all those places himself. He was the founder of the various Greek states (even if mostly by virtue of conquest), so it would be perfectly natural for the Greek ruling classes to want to pump up his reputation, including naming a lot of things after ...

As one more piece of evidence, Philip Freeman in his biography Alexander the Great judges thus: The question of Macedonian language and ethnic identity is one of the most contentious topics in classical scholarship, the debate often driven more by modern Balkan nationalism than the small amount of ancient evidence we actually possess. I incline to ...