Nikitas wrote:"Only the truly uneducated (or Turkish propagandists) would foolishly compare the destruction caused by the Ottoman Empire to that of Alexander the Great's Empire!"
Have you read Greek accounts of Alexander's campaigns? How he avenged the invasion of the Persians that had happened 150 years previoius to his expedition into Asia? There are some parts that astounded me, like the total annihiliation of the community of Greeks who had sided with the Persians and moved to central Asia. He killed every single one of their descendants! That is a pure application of the "dominant gene theory" if ever there was one. And above all do not forget that he, like our other illustrious ancestors, owned slaves.
It is fashionable in modern Greek intellectual circles to praise Alexander, and it is equally fashionabel to run down the Spartans. But the Spartans refused to participate in Alexander's eastward march because their laws prohibited a Spartan army from being commanded by non Spartans. That attitude should be more useful to us today than Alexander's imperial dreams.
I don't run down the Spartans ....
But I maintain no matter the negativities of the time of Alexander (thousands of years before the Ottomans) ... the disparity between the attitudes and achievements and most of the means such as they were for those times, between the Ottoman's and Alexander's Empires are more than academic.
) thousands of years before the other ... Surely you need to apply a little hindsight as to the acceptable differences inherent to the two time points in history.
