Sorry for the delay. With the first pick, I select Alexander III of Macedon, aka Alexander the Grrreat!
Now, on a corpse for corpse basis, there are indeed a few assholes who can boast about a higher total body count. But it’s worth remembering that most of the ancient world was uninhabited empty space, and far fewer people were alive to be ground to pieces by imperious conquerors. When Alexander was acclaimed king, the largest empire in the world was Achaemenid Persia, with a population of around 50 million subjects, and all of “Greece” (not really a thing at the time) had a population not much larger than Ohio, Belgium or Benin. While the exact number of deaths Alexander was responsible for is impossible to determine, the estimates range from half a million to over three million killed, and that puts Alexander’s atrocities, on a relative basis, in the same ballpark as history’s other prolific butchers.
But gross carnage (hehe, two meanings!) is not why I’m choosing Alexander first. I’m choosing him for a few other reasons. To be frank, the first is that I did not want to write about [redacted]. That guy was a real jerk. Plus he doesn’t really fit in my system; @baddraftanalogies, but I wanted the strongest power forward available to pound the paint; I have no need for a puny meth-addled point guard to hit 3s for three quarters and then fade down the stretch. I also wanted to address the need to draft a category 5 asshole who did most of his damage outside of what would become Europe (and has a different legacy beyond the less hostile European assessment), and that Alexander did.
The second reason is that, while judging Alexander to be a giant butt cavity is in line with many contemporary scholars, there are still way too many level 0 dickheads in the world who think he’s Great because everybody calls him ‘the Great’. The one area in which he was undeniably great was being a military commander. Fine, he literally never lost a battle. May have been innovative in siege warfare. But outside of that, there’s scant evidence he had any other Great-worthy abilities.
He inherited one of the most effective and war ready armies ever from his father, so a big brained military reformer he was not. He had the finest tutors, including Aristotle (who was kind of an asshole too), but an enlightened monarch he did not become, preferring ten swigs of wine to one reflective thought. He had no interest in actually ruling anything. What he conquered he left for others to administer. The only governing philosophy was acknowledge him as the King of Kings and keep the money following to fund his next campaign of plunder and slaughter.
Now imagine, allegedly, an utterly worthless buffoon brands himself as cut from the same cloth as Alexander the Great in a Pizza Hut commercial while not knowing a single actual fact about who Alexander was or what he did. When has being so risibly illiterate in history ever hurt anybody? Yeah, even the myth of Alexander is an asshole onto itself.
Warning: May cause severe psychological damage
The third thing is that the evil that men do lives after them. The Hellenistic period is very interesting and dynamic, but the trends are starkly negative in the aggregate. When Alexander was dying, he supposedly said something like, “fuck it, I’m dying, so bros, the strongest inherits everything”. Cool planning man. You are at least nominally responsible for tens of millions of people and the best you got is: the greediest and most vicious fuckers in the room, fight amongst yourselves for my empire. So now your assbag generals establish perpetually warring dynasties that largely weaken and attrite each other over the next two hundred years, and the cost is paid in blood and taxes by their helpless populations. Same as it ever was I guess, but more than usual.
One very specific consequence I’m going to highlight (and I’m straight-up paraphrasing this excellent podcast episode from this excellent podcast https://literatureandhistory.com/) is the rise in slavery as a result of Alexander’s conquests. So Alexander conquers the known world in about a decade give or take. This introduces a rapid and large influx of slaves into his empire, and slavery becomes an even more integral part of the economies of the post Alexander kingdoms. Slavery begets more slavery, as a small class of people profit handsomely from its existence. Slaves become cheaper and even more expendable and are forced into unimaginably horrific labor. Sure, slavery predated Alexander by thousands of years, but Alexander is the first psycho to take it truly global.
And now I’m just going to quote this passage in full from the source above, because it’s fucking fantastic and kinda beautiful:
I feel that so far I have skimped on some short, easily digestible lowlights of the violence, greed and cruelty attributed to this pick/prick. I’ll start by saying one good? thing about him. He probably didn’t kill his father (his mother probably didn’t either), but let’s get rolling:
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Had his cousins, several princes, and various commanders executed when he became king. Not uncommon, but still, kind of a dick move
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Razed Thebes and sold the survivors into slavery to fund his forthcoming campaign in Asia
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Captured Tyre and sold 30,000 more people into slavery
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Looted and burned the capital city of Persepolis, possibly because he was too drunk to give a fuck
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Bashed people’s heads in on a whim, giving at least one future king so much PTSD that he shook uncontrollably at statues of Alexander (but don’t worry this guy was an asshole too)
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Wanted to form a new race by mixing Macedonians and Persians. Some people interpret this as at least somewhat positive, as it challenged the supremacy and xenophobia of his native culture, but like, all those forced marriages, doesn’t sound super consensual to me!
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The long-term effects of his conquests made life so miserable for poor people in the region that some suggest it laid the groundwork for Christianity. Bonus.
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Did I mention he thought he was the son of Zeus, and he did all of this shit to prove he was greater than Achilles who was uh… a fictional character?
Lastly, I think Alexander by Oliver Stone is underrated and Colin Farrell wasn’t bad at all (and Val Kilmer is the GOAT, f off haters). I have no comment about Richard Burton’s portrayal because I have not seen it. But if you’re not yet persuaded that this Alexander dude was a buffet full of bad news, I’ll ask you to close your eyes and just imagine him being played by a self-obsessed actor who was so vain he could barely share the spotlight with another fictional character in the same franchise. Now open your eyes.
