"If I remember right, Alexander was enlightened relative to others, but I forget why.
Having Aristotle as a tutor probably helped."
We, human beings, have many general tendencies that harm us individually and collectively. One of such tendencies is to justify savagery, barbarism, brutality and so forth. And our tendency to select and love English butcher in comparison to French butcher, or Yellow Devil in comparison to the Pink...
The sagacity and reason merely demand that we ought to be humble about our past and present.
It is not any matter of pleasure that our ancestors were savage and barbarian. And amongst them was one Alexander--the barbarian robber, the bigger Chimpanzee.
And it is not any matter of pleasure that our own world is savage and barbarian. And leading our world and preserving and enhancing its savagery and barbarism are our political leaders--the servants of robbers, the bigger Chimpanzees.
Alexander put Aristotle and all the towering Greek Philosophers to total disgrace in fact. The proof of which is: Aristotle's works were not published for many centuries after his death. And the survival of Aristotle's works is in fact a miracle.
The world's leaders have put all philosophy and philosophers to total disgrace. Through their work, culture and priorities, they have closed department of philosophy in almost all universities and have even closed the schools of philosophy...
Similarly, we are made to love our native robbers and hate the distant ones. But we need to be clear that it makes no difference whether my great-grandmother's great-grandmother was raped or murdered, and my great-grandfather's great-grandfather fleeced and devoured by their next door neighbor or any man come from across the ocean.
Looking through the eyes of any pure child, the idiocies and imbecility of adults have been limitless. And the idiocies and imbecility of adults are limitless. Give a grain of black pepper to a child who has never tasted it, and command him to eat that. He will crush it under his teeth and spit the whole thing out. It has a sharp bitter taste and is by no means anything attractive thing. Then teach him our history that, for thousands of years, our great young men massacred one another in oceans and upon land--with commands from our leaders, hurrah! Harrah! And medals of honor, etc....--for snatching the ownership of these grains of black pepper from one another or for looting the grains of black pepper.
Coming back to Alexander, we have no reason to justify him or call him great. We have no reason to invent any reason for calling him great. He was a gang-leader of the biped beasts of Macedonia--and with no superior weaponry than other biped beasts in the world, with ten thousand odd young beasts of his species he set off to conquer and plunder whatever world was known at the time. He wanted nothing but useless things like gold and gems. For carrying food or other necessary items from some distant land to Greece was impossible those days. And his life and campaign depended upon the services of the natives of the lands he conquered. He had no choice but to depend upon them and not to slaughter them. Not to intervene with their ways. He could not perform as a Changez Khan at the time.