It’s weird how very close some Greek Poleis came to that. Athenian democracy was a sophisticated thing after all. And Sparta? A senate made up of three hundred men with two Kings? I feel as if, with a few more tweaks hither and thither, some of them could have “got there” so to speak. It’s like Hellas’s finger tips scraped universal empire but didn’t go any further and then the real deal came along.
We may argue that Rome, initially was a (non-Hellenic) polis itself. Sparta is indeed the closest point of reference in many ways, but arguably, Rome struck the balance between various competitor-poleis. Some of the good parts of Athens, some of the good parts of Sparta, some of the good parts of Thebes...
The key difference is that Rome managed to moderate its own internal influences (or "strains of political thought", if you will) to create a mixed system that ended up working very well. If we take Sparta as one reference point, we should say "the martial strength of Sparta, but without its ultimately brittleness-inducing rigidity".
Alexander himself was the one who came closest to creating a mixed system himself; and we might almost say "the world was not yet ready for that". But he put the
idea of the universal empire out there, back into the picture. Since the Atreids had passed from the world, the Greek polities had known no
Wanax, no King-of-Kings. Such a notion was only known as foreign; Persian, or Egyptian. But Alexander gave them an ideal again. A hegemonic ambition.
For three hundred years thereafter,
every man of a certain calibre wished to be Alexander. Until, in the wake of Actium, that vision of universal hegemony was made real. (They even had the concept of an imperial
Leitkultur down to a tee! Alexander had plans for that himself.)
I wouldn’t quite compare Achaemenid Persia to the Holy Roman Empire of 1805, but I think I see your point. Once the Great King (a far cry from mighty Cyrus) was toppled, his satraps bowed to Alexander quite quickly.
Exactly. And moreover, the point here is that Alexander was born into a world that was already becoming unstable. Hence my calling it a "dying age". The structures of the polis-leagues was no longer sufficient to keep order in a world with expanding horizons and countless new ideas.
Just as Napoleon was forged in the context of the Enlightenment pilosophers, and Chandragupta was the great pupil of the philosopher Chanakya, Alexander was educated by Aristotle and thus a scion of the "Sokratic revolution" in Greek philosophy. These men overthrew the old order and attempted to institute a new, universalist order. (In the unique case of Chandragupta, this effort even succeeded, although -- again, I think, due to "the world not being ready" -- his Maurya empire didn't last nearly as long as it might have, if given three more centuries of cultural "prep work" first.)
Typically, these efforts led to "failure" in the sense that their new order didn't outlast them; but they did invariably lay the ground-work for the "warring states" era. Compare the Successor kingdoms to the post-Napoleonic nation-states: more centrlised, more organised, set up on a larger scale... and engaged in more structural competition between themselves. And in this way, to use the terminology of Spengler, an Alexander or a Napoleon closes out the "summer" of a High Culture, and initiates its three-hundred-year "autumn" period.
(And at the end of that, we see Caesar and finally Augustus to initiate civilisational "winter": the final phase, where a culture's forms freeze into their definitive iterations.)
Very different story with Carthage. A different beast entirely I suppose.
Carthage was another outsider to the conflict, and in most ways not part of Classial culture-- but rather of Canaanite culture. These two cultural spheres greatly overlapped, but I'd argue that Carthage was to the Levant as Rome was to the Greeks and as America is to Europe. So it is no surprise that Carthage was a great rival to Rome. They were peers and competitors: one fated to eclipse and strangle the other.
Had Rome perished, Carthaginian civilisation would have supplanted it, altering the fate of the world in ways we can scarcely imagine.
To my mind Rome, fresh out of the “Punic Wars Gym” essentially comes waltzing in half way through whilst everyone else is exhausted. There’s more to it than simply youth though I think. The Romans had a profoundly different mindset to the Greeks which, ironically for the future masters of the world, was less arrogant. As much as they tried to tie themselves into the Iliad, I think their lack of connection to the distant Bronze Age was a boon. Much like the earlier Persians to some extent, they’ve got that no-nonsense vitality, no aching for a lost past (as much as they venerate it!). Thus more of an openness to “what works and what doesn’t.”
We very much mean the same thing here. So, yes, completely agreed.
(As an aside: I re-iterate that the concurrence of Rome fighting Carthage and Macedon is highly similar - both in nature and timing -- to America fighting Japan and Germany. A war to determine the fate of a world-system. The winner becomes the hegemonic power over its civilisational sphere.)
I would take issue with the idea Alexander failed at all or was born into a "dying age." He could have very easily designated a single successor but didn't for a reason. As a student of Aristotle he had a Platonic view of politics, the best system is an aristocracy of intellectual warriors ruled over absolutely by a philosopher king. He wanted to make the world a place where the "barbaric" god kings of old disappeared and by conquering the ancient great powers (Egypt, Persia and Assyria) and giving them one each to his trusted generals and the armies serving under them he did just that. If he chose a single successor they likely would have regressed into just another Persian empire.
What
@Cherico notes is correct. I would hardly call Alexander a failure -- rather the opposite, I'm a great admirer -- but he did not succeed, specifically, in the aim of creating a universal empire. And yes: that very much
was his goal. Everything we know about his plans serves to illustrate this. The division of his empire wasn't even his idea. Obviously, we weren't there. but the only account we have tells us that when asked who should get the throne, his answer was
kratistos.
"The strongest."
And he got his wish, albeit three centuries later. Rome
was the strongest. A worthy heir to an imperial dream. Just as
@Lord Sovereign noted. In a way, Alexander was one of the... if not founders, then at least one of the
grandfathers of the Roman Empire.
(And to be clear: I rather
like the idea of deliberately creating multiple kingdoms to prevent a univeral power -- it's very reminiscent of Leto II's Golden Path -- but I'm not aware of even the slightest hint that Alexander entertained such a notion.)