Tragedy of Greek discord

After the abrupt death of the Alexander the King, his subordinates found a well-organized document at his palace: an expedition plan that the deceased had been working on. The sword of this insatiable conquistador was pointed at everywhere from Sicilia, the Italian peninsula, the Mediterranean cities off the North African shore to the Iberian Peninsula. His ambition was to further expand to the west to claim the entire Mediterranean Sea.

What would have happened if Alexandros had lived 10 more years? Some say the Roman Empire wouldn’t have existed in the first place. In fact, Rome had been staging battles with many tribes in the South after conquering the middle of Italy. There wouldn’t have been any hope against the invasion of his army.

God only knows the answer, but back then, Italy was suffering the invasion of Macedonians and Greeks. In the southern Italy and Sicilia were colonial settlements established by Greek invaders. Italy was suffering an utter disruption with Romans, Etruscans, Samnites, and the Celts pitted against each other.

This presented a great opportunity for the Greek. Alexander I, the brother of Alexandros’ mother Olympias, and Pyrrhos, the King’s cousin, attacked Italy one after another for the Greek’s cherished dream of Italian conquest.

But neither succeeded mainly because of the internal discord of the Greek. While there had been attempts at forging a Greek alliance, it appears the people of Greece, a country heavily imbued with city state mentality, didn’t have the capacity to consider themselves as a single unified nation. Indeed, the Greek never unified successfully even when they won Greco-Persian Wars, not to mention during the Macedonian invasion in Greece. The chances of alliance got even slimmer as it was in Italy not, far from their motherland. And this is when Greece forever lost the opportunity of conquering Italy and morphing into a European superpower.