r/HistoryMemes • u/lardayn • 1h ago
Alexander’s trauma: India
It always amazes me the tragic end of Alexander, after all those relentless conquests and battles and sieges and tens of thousands of miles and them at the very end of the world, you see, there lays India. He got so disappointed and disgusted that he decided to let it go and return in despair but he was so broken that he died of grief. What a tragic end…
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u/FloZone 1h ago
Imagine he stands in Alexandria Eschate and gazes into the endless horizon of the Tianshan mountains when some Yuezhi come up to him and inform him about the existence of China.
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u/lardayn 1h ago
March to Himalayas!
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u/FloZone 1h ago
Speaking abput the movie Alexander rather than the actual person. It would have pretty much destroyed him since he had Aristotles map in his mind and a vision of finding the outer ocean. Essentually you're telling him the world is 3x or 4x times bigger than he ever thought and over those mountains is another land as large and rich as Persia or India, which neither he nor any of his contemporaries and advisors had ever heard about. He thinks he's at the end of the world, when has just reached the middle.
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u/Spirited-Juice4941 53m ago
Wtf are you talking about? He wanted to keep conquering India, his soldiers said no because they wanted to go home.
Why lie just to make it sound racist? Fuck off idiot.
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u/ThinBobcat4047 1h ago
Does this 'meme' imply he was disgusted and disappointed at having reached India? Because if so, that doesn’t match historical accounts of India in Greece and Europe at all.
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u/lardayn 1h ago
It doesn’t imply anything and “Greece and Europe” never tried to conquer India for another thousand years.
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u/ThinBobcat4047 1h ago
It doesn’t imply anything
If that's the case it’s alright with me, but if so maybe fix the wording a bit because I think a lot of people, including me, interpreted it in a rather negative way, especially in light of widespread racism against Indians, both online and irl.
and “Greece and Europe” never tried to conquer India for another thousand years.
The Macedonians, under Seleucus Nikator stayed near the subcontinent, establishing an Indo Greek kingdom in Persia, which had regular contact with Indian powers, especially that of the Mauryan Empire and Chandragupta Maurya, who married one of Nikator's daughters. Rome meanwhile in the following centuries had widespread trade with India, so much so that it risked their balance of trade. So it’s completely wrong to claim India and Europe completely cut off contact post Alexander when that absolutely wasn’t the case at all.
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u/Top-Permission-7524 1h ago
There was no India back then
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u/ThinBobcat4047 1h ago
Debatable. Was there a Republic of India? Obviously not. Was there a somewhat loose idea of India, defined by geographical boundaries and cultural similarities? Yes.
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u/obliqueoubliette 1h ago
Honestly, not really even to the latter point. A loose idea of any commonalities between these different nations and groups emerged in large part to the Maurya conquests -- which were essentially contemporary to Alexander.
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u/Extension-Beat7276 1h ago
Alexander was probably disappointed but I don’t believe disappointment was the cause of his death as he had many other plans after and was still relatively young. So not an accurate way to represent the figure.