Alexander the Great was antiquity\'s greatest commander

[Paralus]

For all his faults he did build cities, instigate trade, order explorations, and attempt to build a consensus based upon cultural harmony and integration.

Arr. 4.2.3-4
As soon as Alexander arrived at Gaza, without any delay he gave the signal to his men to place the ladders against the wall all round and to take it by assault at once [...] They killed all the men, according to Alexander’s injunctions; but the women, the children, and the rest of the booty they carried off as plunder. Thence he immediately marched to the city situated next to that one; and this he took in the same way and on the same day, treating the captives in the same manner ... (4.3.5) The seventh city he took at the first assault. Ptolemy says that the men in it surrendered; but Aristobulus asserts that this city was also taken by storm, and that he slew all who were captured therein.

Having built “consensus”, Alexander then set about building cities, particularly “Alexandria Eschate”:

Curtius 7.6.25-27
The wall thus formed, sixty stades long, constituted the wall of a city, which the king also ordered should be called Alexandria. The work was so swiftly completed that the city buildings were finished on the seventeenth day after the fortifications were erected; fierce competition had arisen among the soldiers over who would be the first to display his completed project (for there had been a division of labour). Inhabitants for this new city were provided in the form of captives whom Alexander liberated by paying their value to their masters.

Little of any consensus built on “cultural harmony” here. Diodorus, in his summary of book 17, sums these “cities” up well when he notes that Alexander “founded cities in suitable places to restrain any who rebelled”.

Consensus and harmony building continued apace as the Indian campaign commenced:

Arr 4.23.5
The city had been surrounded with a double wall. At the second wall the barbarians stood their ground for a short time; but when the scaling ladders were now being fixed, and the defenders were being wounded with darts from all sides, they no longer stayed; but rushed through the gates out of the city towards the mountains. Some of them were killed in the flight, and the Macedon inns, being enraged because they had wounded Alexander, slew all whom they took prisoners.

The apologetic tradition is put into context by Diodorus – again in his summary – when he notes that these people (the Aspasians) suffered “complete annihilation of their [first] nation in order to overawe the rest”.

Alexander was a scholar and a singular man of charisma and vision.

He made these preparations of the fleet to attack the main body of the Arabs, under the pretext that they were the only barbarians of this region who had not sent an embassy to him or done anything else becoming their position and showing respect to him. But the truth was, as it seems to me, that Alexander was insatiably ambitious of ever acquiring fresh territory.

I doubt that I would disagree with Arrian’s view (7.19.6) of Alexander’s “vision” and purpose here. He seems on the money.