Re: Great Commanders
PURPLE PATCH: Alexander
—Will Cuppy
ALEXANDER III of Macedonia was born in 356 BC... He is known as Alexander the Great because he killed more people of more different kinds than any other man of his time. He did this in order to impress Greek culture upon them. Alexander was not strictly a Greek and he was not cultured, but that was his story, and who am I to deny it?
Alexander’s father was Philip II of Macedonia... He was assassinated in 336 BC by a friend of his wife Olympias.
Olympias, the mother of Alexander, was slightly abnormal... She kept so many sacred snakes in her bedroom that Philip was afraid to go home after his drinking bouts. She told Alexander that his real father was Zeus Ammon, or Amon, a Graeco-Egyptian god in the form of a snake. Alexander made much of this and would sit up all night boasting about it. He was once executed thirteen Macedonians for saying that he was not the son of a serpent.
As a child Alexander was like most other children, if you see what I mean... At twelve he tamed Bucephalus, his favorite horse. In the same year he playfully pushed Nectanebo, a visiting astronomer, into a deep pit and broke his neck... It has never been entirely proved that Alexander shoved the old man. The fact remains that they were standing by the pit and’ all of a sudden Nectanebo wasn’t there any more.
For three years, until he was sixteen, Alexander was educated by Aristotle, who seems to have avoided pits and the edges o£ roofs. Aristotle was famous for knowing everything... In spite of his vast reputation, Aristotle was not a perfect instructor of youth...
With a teacher like that, one’s values might well become warped. On the other hand, even Aristotle couldn’t help some people. As soon as he had finished reading the Nicomachean Ethics, Alexander began killing right and left...
He was now ready for his real career, so he decided to go to Asia where there were more people and more of a variety... he declared war on Persia... to spread Hellenic civilization. The Greeks were embarrassed about this, but they couldn’t stop him. They just had to grin and bear it...
Alexander put an end to the Persian Empire by defeating Darius... Darius was easy to defeat because you could always count on his doing exactly the wrong thing...
Darius also had chariots armed with scythes on each side for mowing down his enemies. These did not work out, since Alexander and his soldiers refused to go and stand in front of the scythes. Darius had overlooked the facts that scythed chariots are effective only against persons who have lost the power of locomotion and that such persons are more likely to be home in bed than fighting battles in Asia...
Alexander spent the next nine years fighting more battles, marching and countermarching, killing people at random, and robbing their widows and orphans. He soon grew tired of impressing Greek culture upon the Persians and attempted to impress Persian culture upon the Greeks. In an argument about this, he killed his friend Clitus, who had twice saved his life in battle. Then he wept for forty-eight hours. Alexander seldom killed his close friends unless he was drunk, and he always had a good cry afterwards. He was always weeping about something.
Bucephalus died of old age and overwork in India, and the soldiers, who thought the whole business was nonsense, refused to march any farther. Three fourths of the soldiers died of starvation while returning... At this point Alexander and Hephaestion felt it was time to stop fooling around and get married, and they decided to marry sisters, so that their children would be cousins. Wasn’t that romantic?
... I never heard how these marriages turned out. All of Alexander’s biographers say that his nature was cool, if not perfectly frigid. He is said to have sinned occasionally, but he never quite got the hang of it... He was not unattractive, if you care for undersized blonds...
Nothing much happened after the doings at Susa. Hephaestion died a few months later of drink and fever. Alexander passed away in Babylon from the same causes in the following year, 324 BC...
Alexander’s empire fell to pieces at once, and nothing remained of his work except that the people he had killed were still dead. He accomplished nothing very constructive...
Just what this distressing young man thought he was doing, and why, I really can’t say. I doubt if he could have clarified the subject to any appreciable extent. He had a habit of knitting his brows. And no wonder.
William Jacob Cuppy (1884-1945) was an American humourist and journalist. Cuppy is known for satirising. He would read volumes on his subject and then write a brief essay or sketch. This edited sketch of Alexander is from Cuppy’s best-known work, “The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybodyâ€.
http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=story_6-4-2005_pg3_7
I just stumbled up on this piece. Rather interesting I'd say even though its quite satirising! :coffee
