Small Hetalia shitpost (Featuring Greece,Cyprus,and Egypt)

@punkbarbarian & @creacherkeeper / herakles - euripedes (tr. anne carson) / @creacherkeeper / wild geese, mary oliver / not used to it / @beatricexbenedick / do not go gentle into that good night, dylan thomas / savannah (played by kaity) / @typewriter-worries / naddpod

[Image description: ten screenshots of text on white or dark grey backgrounds.

1: a screenshot of a tumblr post reading “no because im actually going insane about this. the fact that none of us were really supposed to be librarians/guardians. we are literally the bottom of the barrel because everyone else was picked off before most of us even knew magic was fucking real!!!! and we’ve been thrust into this responsibility because we Have to or else the library and everyone in it would be destroyed. and of course we suck!! we weren’t meant to be doing this in the first place but now we have no choice and it’s just AAAHHHHHHH “

a response from creacherkeeper that reads “okay i know you reblogged this from me but “literally cosmically-defined not cut out for greatness but you simply have to save the world anyway because we need you to and there’s no one else” is something that can be soooooo #also taking a bunch of early 20 somethings who don’t have family or whove never had friends #and saying #love each other and care for each other and protect each other like your lives depend on it #because not only do they #but the fate of the whole world depends on how well yall can work as a team #family by fate #god. #im unwell about this game #library of lensa

2: three lines from a play, underlined in red. “Theseus: Stop. Give me your hand. I am your friend. / Herakles: I fear to stain your clothes with blood. / Theseus: Stain them, I don’t care.”

3: “THEY NEED TO BE FRIENDS

simply all the pcs growing up so lonely for such radically different reasons

oughh”

4: “You do not have to walk on your knees/ for a hundred miles through the desert repenting. / You only have to let the soft animal of your body / love what it loves. / Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. / Meanwhile the world goes on.”

5: “Maybe it’s just part of being an adventuring party, he thinks, or maybe they never should have been asked to do this so young.”

6: A screenshot of a discord message from hollis (he/ him) “kai is like a really fucked up camp counselor” it has one 🥰 react.

7: “Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight, / And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way, / Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight / Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay, / Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

8: “She dislikes lensa, sure, but lensa has had mortals before and will have mortals again.”

9: “Love is at the center of it all. Love is the point.”

10: “The world should have protected you, but you have been asked to protect it. What an honor, what an injustice.” The text is highlighted in a light purple, with a reference number at the end. End ID.]

i am feeling normal about the library of lensa (lie)

A lot of people on here joke about Alexander being “crazy” or “insane”, and I know some people hold the belief that he was an insane monster (I even saw an article titled “Alexander the Monster” which basically made Alexander out to be worse than the devil lol). I was just wondering what you think regarding Alexander’s mentality/sanity and why do you think some people believe that he was this crazy psychopath. Btw, I just finished reading Becoming and I loved it!!!!

First, thank you! I’m glad you liked the novel! Now, on to the question…

When people talk about “crazy” Alexander, it usually falls into two different categories. One subset is that Alexander went crazy with grief after Hephaistion died; I’ve argued against this elsewhere, so won’t again here in any detail.

Another subset claims he became megalomaniacal, pointing for proof to his “Persianizing,” including an attempt to introduce proskynesis (the bow before the Persian Great King that Greeks viewed as due only to gods), his desire to be deified, and a penchant for dressing up as various gods (Dionysos, Herakles, and even Artemis).

That tendency isn’t just on Tumblr; similar accusations are made in academia under the maxim that, “Absolute power corrupts absolutely.” (Lord Baron Acton)

Yet that’s the cynical take. I think how one views the world (and human nature) has something to do with how one interprets Alexander’s behavior. We must recall that Alexander lived in a society where kingship was seen as divinely bestowed, and carried with it certain religious obligations with regard to one’s subjects.

Remember, not just anybody could be king of Macedon; one had to be an ARGEAD: e.g., from a specific family (gens). They were descendants of Herakles, and so of divine descent. This is different from the Successors who followed. Alexander was raised as a prince; Ptolemy, Antigonos, or Seleukos were not. The importance of these heroic ties can be found in the stories that popped up later, making Ptolemy a bastard of Philip (and thus an Argead), or the later Seleucid claim of descent from Apollo. And we know the Molossian royal house claimed descent from Achilles.

Again, not just anybody can be a king. One has to be special by ancestry.

Being born to the purple doesn’t necessarily make one any less of a dick. We’ve plenty of evidence to the contrary. (Demetrios Poliorketes? Pyrrhos? Antigonos IV Epiphanes?) But it does instill a different awareness of one’s place in the world.

Modern cynicism forgets just how seriously ancient people took religion. On his deathbed, among the last actions Alexander forced himself to perform until he literally couldn’t get up, were morning sacrifices to the ancestors and gods, on behalf of the Macedonian people. I think that says a lot not only about his own religiosity, but his sense of himself as a conduit between his people and the gods. The proper performance of religious rites were central, not just to his success, but to the survival of Macedonia. In our modern world, it can be hard to connect to this somewhat archaic notion.

In addition, the stories of him visiting hospital tents after battle, personally writing letters to his officers, talking and joking with his soldiers, marching with them, eating what they ate, and dressing as they dressed, all point to somebody who understands the principles of leadership, as opposed to just bossing people around. Some have argued that he lost that as time went on, but he was still out marching with them in Gedrosia (despite a collapsed or partially collapsed lung), so I’d argue he did not. The helmet incident (where he poured out precious water brought to him, because the rest of his men didn’t have any) is an exemplar of his continued understanding of what solidarity meant. It may have been as calculated as hell, but that’s not the act of a madman or megalomaniac. Also, just because it was calculated doesn’t mean it wasn’t genuinely meant. He was trying to keep his men alive, not let them give up.

Did Alexander, over time, turn into an arrogant little shit? Almost certainly, given his mind-boggling achievements, and the fact the Greeks never touted humility as a virtue. But I don’t believe he was a narcissist or had taken leave of reality. Such characterizations are simplistic, played for pop approval and laughs, or because it’s too much effort to look under the surface.

I do think he was struggling desperately to figure out how to govern such a vast, international empire, and not in some Tarn-esque “Brotherhood of Mankind” way. He never (personally) lost a battle, but uniting Eastern and Western ways of rule was a puzzle he never solved. THAT was his great failure. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, “Show me a hero and I’ll write you a tragedy.” And that’s where Dancing with the Lion will eventually head. Alexander’s story is, ultimately, not a triumph, but not because he was crazy or a Macedonian Hitler.

I’d also point out that people who oversimplify Alexander as either a demon or demented, are buying, hook, line and sinker, the moral narratives of the ancient authors, especially of Plutarch, Curtius, and Justin, but also Arrian and Diodoros. These are not neutral accounts. We must be careful of their biases.

All that said, I don’t want to excuse Alexander’s war crimes (and I don’t know what else you’d call some of what he did). But even those were not the actions of a “crazy” man. They were brutal, but considered (which may be worse).

Razing Thebes sent a message of what happens when a city foreswears an alliance multiple times. Rounding up and killing Greek mercenaries after Granikos sent a message to others serving under Darius (an attempt to peel off some of Darius’s more dangerous support troops). Razing Tyre (and Gaza) sent a message about what happens when resistance defies certain “rules of war” (Tyre’s treatment of the heralds). The burning of Persepolis was not a drunken frat party gone wrong; it was a political statement. Note ALL moveable wealth was gone and it happened just before they left, plus it destroyed the place where Persian kings were crowned, preventing one from emerging in Alexander’s wake. (Not that Bessus cared, nor Spitamenes after him). Philotas fell victim to a real conspiracy (even if he wasn’t part of it), not a CIA file (contra Badian), and the Proskynesis Affair was an attempt to regularize court procedure not institute worship of Alexander. The murder of Kleitos was, indeed, a drunken brawl, with no good excuse, but was followed by (I think) genuine remorse, even if he accepted the forgiveness of the troops because he needed to.

Even the choice to enter Gedrosia wasn’t the decision of a madman, but of one whose logistics were legendary for working…except when they didn’t, because of an uprising and monsoon behind them that was unplanned for. It was a FUBAH, not a foolish choice. He was looking for a trade route linking India and Mesopotamia. Notions that he just wanted to one-up Cyrus and Semiramis misses the point.

The so-called request to the Greek states for deification is problematic as to just what he asked, versus what was later said (remember, we’re hearing about it from Athenian demagogues who hated him). The claim to be the son of a god was not megalomania or a shot at divinity, but an affirmation of hero status; being the son of a god didn’t necessarily mean one was immortal one’s self. As for precedent, his own father had put a statue of himself alongside the 12 in his final parade, plus there’s a heroōn (hero shrine) built above Royal Tomb I at Vergina. That’s either Philip buried there (my own personal opinion), or his father Amyntas III. The Spartan general, Brasidas, received hero cult from Amphipolis after his death, but Lysander accepted it from the Samians will still alive.

Alexander outstripped every one of these by no small measure, and seen in context, his claim to be a son of Zeus-Ammon is not some bizarre, out-of-left-field assertion. If Lysander was a hero, and his father Philip, then what did that make Alexander? And the inflated “Final Plans” were about 50% invented by Perdikkas to get the army to vote them down.

Alexander did terrible things and we need to let those terrible things stand—call them out and recognize them. Yet when I look at his behavior, even in his latter years, I just don’t see the horrific corruption of, say, the Trump administration, or of Vladimir Putin’s Russia, or Xi’s China. At some level, I think Alexander still saw himself, and struggled to be, a “Philosopher King.” He just didn’t know what that meant anymore.

I think, by the end, he was lost. Macedonian kings were expected to win wars and provide loot. Alexander did that to a degree no Macedonian monarch had ever before achieved. He was the Energizer Bunny of Macedonian kings. His own men (and culture) had created a monster. No wonder he felt betrayed by their “indiscipline” on the banks of the Hyphasis. “But I gave you even more than you ever dreamed of!”

Indeed, he did. That was the problem. They made him turn around. When his army “defeated” him, he wasn’t sure who he was any more, or what he was doing. I see a lot of his career after as a scramble to re-define himself. He’d conquered all this territory at a relatively young age. Now what was he supposed to do with it?  Ruling is a lot less glamorous than conquering.

He’s perhaps the greatest military mind who’s ever lived (tied with Subutai, Genghis Khan’s general). He was also an exceptionally inspirational leader. But that “ruling schtick”? It got in the way. Appointing Hephaistion chiliarch was among his smarter decisions, even if Hephaistion died on him too soon. It was tacit recognition that he needed help. I’ve joked that Hephaistion’s appointment amounted to, “Here, you figure out how to make this whole thing work; I want to go conquer more stuff.”

Once he lost Hephaistion, he became a boat without a rudder. But as noted, his mourning was not beyond the pale. The only difference is that he had the money (and authority) to impose his wishes. As a former bereavement counselor, I wrote an article called “The Mourning of Alexander the Great” that deep-sixes misconceptions about mourning and Alexander’s behavior.

Was he “crazy”? No. Was he the devil? I’m sure the countries he invaded thought so. Was he a megalomaniac? Almost certainly not. Was he an arrogant asshole (especially when he’d been drinking)? Almost certainly so. But his arrogance sprang from an odd mix of massive, early success mixed with deep insecurity spawned by his upbringing.

I find him fascinating precisely because he’s not a simple read. He’s not Donald Trump. He’s not Adolf Hitler. He’s not even Caesar, or Napoleon. He’s intensely complex, which is, I think, the source of his continued fascination.

I’d advise those who read about him to allow for that complexity. Avoid simplistic readings, even while not white-washing the really ugly side of his career.

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