ALEXANDER THE GREAT had a dream to bring, in the entire known world, Greek Democratic Cities culture. As a Macedonian, he learned Greek culture from his tutor Aristotle, but never experienced it himself directly. At twenty, he became king of Macedonia, after his father Philip II, had been murdered, probably in a plot organized by his mother Olympias. Paradoxically, he began his conquest of the World, by crushing resistant Greek cities which had created the extraordinary culture he was so found of. Then he decided to avenge these same Greek Cities previously ill-treated by the Persian Empire. Frenetically and sometimes furiously, he conquered peoples and nations making himself the “King of Kings”. From Macedonia to Kandahar [ that means Alexandria ], he created almost a hundred cities, blending many cultures into a new civilization: “Hellenistic”. His death at 33, broke his dream of global hegemony and of merging East and West.
© Alice Labrèque and Jean Routier, 2013