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Originally posted by Yorick:
quote:
Originally posted by Lanthir:
Aelia I agree with your view point might I add that in many cases he required many of his follows to marry women who were of mid eastern nobility.
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He married a Persian too.
However Aelia, loving a culture and being influenced by it - ie taking from it, is very different to CONTRIBUTING to it.
Just what exactly did he contribute to the Persian culture he took from?[/QUOTE]I didn't say he did contribute to it, I said he didn't completely destroy it and make it Hellenistic, as was suggested.
However I would say that, although it was not his intention, Alexander's campaigns did contribute to Eastern culture. Whenever you have new ideas and new people in a culture, there will be influences - the new people will take something from the culture they are in, as Alexander did, and those people in the culture will be affected by the new people and ideas. It appears you're suggesting that the Persian culture was somehow static for hundreds of years, that they didn't evolve in any way from exposure to other eastern cultures, to Greece, to Egypt, then Alexander arrived and threw everything into disarray. If you change something in a culture, or influence it, you don't destroy it, it just changes. For example, Romans adopted Greek literature, considering it far superior to their own efforts. This didn't mean that the Romans had no culture, that they were psuedo-Greeks, but that their Roman culture had been influenced by Greeks. Similarly with Persians, Hellenistic ideas that Alexander and his men brought in didn't destroy anything in Persian culture, they influenced it and made it evolve.
Also the new Alexandrias he made were mostly for his own troops, who were too old, and he wanted stable cities that could come to arms and down insurgents if there were any. He left most eastern cities intact - Babylon, Pergamum, Tyre, etc.