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"The date sounds crudely right, but Rome was a Kingdom, then a Republic, then an Empire."

It's interesting that when Rome was still a small city-state, relatively unknown, Alexander the Great decided to go around Rome and leave it alone on his conquest of the known world.

It's interesting that when Rome was still a small city-state, relatively unknown, Alexander the Great decided to go around Rome and leave it alone on his conquest of the known world.

All the challenges were the other way, to the east. The mighty and cosmopolitan Persian Empire was the greatest power in the world, so far as anyone in Europe knew. This is exactly what Alexander undertook, telling Darius II at the outset of the war that he considered all the Persian lands and vassals to be his own.

I think I have read that there was a quite formidable empire on the Indian subcontinent which might have offered the overextended expedition a greater challenge than any thus far encountered had Alexander ventured beyond the lower Indus in modern Pakistan. We'll never know. The weary Macedonian troops refused to go any farther from their known world.

Alexander the Great decided to go around Rome and leave it alone on his conquest of the known world.

huh???? Alex didn't even head west to conquer the Illyrians -- he headed to conquer the civilised states in the East -- Persia in particular. The Persian Empire was ripe for picking -- remember the Persians practically came up with the notion of an Empire, with bureaucracies and administration in place. The Persian Shah was also very weak (just a decade earlier, Macedonian mercenaries had nearly helped a minor son take the throne, so they knew the country) and by just tipping it over, he got a developed Empire falling into his lap

Rome at that time had just been sacked by the Celts (well, around that time).

When Alex reached India, he nearly got routed by a very minor Indian King -- Purva. His soldiers heard of the mighty Magadhan Empire (based in the Gangetic plains) with its gigantic army and basically told Alex to shove it -- they wouldn't head any further east.

Incidently, Greek commanders got Indianized and many settled in northern India, or moved east -- in what is now Kashmir there are folks (hunzas?) who are supposed to be near pure Greeks), while in Bengal tales of demonic figures and the Devi goddess are supposed to be linked to tribals fighting against a force led by Northern Indians with Greek mercenaries.