Alexander The Great and the Hellenic Legacy

Good morning class my name is Ian Leisure as you guys know I am your class nerd and today I am going to be giving you guys my presentation on my research paper. The name of my research paper is going to be Alexander the Great and Hellenic Legacy. So in case you guys couldn't already tell I decided to write my paper on the late great Alexander the Great. The reason why I chose Alexander the Great was because I feel that he had such a massive impact not only on the ancient world but also just on society in general and even a lot of the effects of his conquest are felt today. So just a few facts about Alexander the Great and basically why he was so great. So Alexander the Great knocked out the Persian Empire and he did this all at just the age of 32 or by the age of 32. He had one massive army underneath his command of about 40,000 men and in case you guys can't tell this little Macedonian army that I have rolling with me right here probably is numbering around 3,000 if that. So just imagine 40,000 so this whole area being covered by foot soldiers, cavalry, elephants, you name it he had it. Alexander the Great had actually been known for a lot of his leadership and according to Barry Strauss in his book Masters of Command Alexander, Hannibal, and Caesar. Alexander had been known to have judgment, audacity, agility, as well as strategy and he was able to infect terror into his enemies. He had never been known to disrespect his men in fact he treated his men like family and he even knew what was another fun fact despite him being 40,000 men he was known to actually know the first name of a lot of the individual soldiers within his army which is just astounding. He had never lost a battle not one he fought many many battles over his career all the way from Macedon, Greece, into what would be modern-day Turkey, Israel, Syria, Egypt, all these battles that he fought he had basically never lost a single one and he even won as far east as India as you guys know in his conquest. He's famous for bringing Hellenic culture to a lot of the Middle East as well as the ancient world and with that spread of Hellenic culture it actually allowed the spread of many famous religions Abrahamic religions such as Christianity, Judaism, and Islam because Rome took a lot of Alexander's playbook when they when they started to do their conquest and as you guys know the Byzantine Empire one of the most famous Christian empires of all time well and it was also one of the successors to Rome well they they were Christian so definitely Alexander's effects even just with religion had was was very important he had over 70 cities named after him so he was kind of kind of full of himself when it came to his names as I said he died at 32 years old he lived from 356 BC to 323 BC and standing only five feet tall so he definitely helped represent my short kings out here all right and then my thesis statement I had going into this would be why Alexander the Great was so great the reasons why Alexander the Great was so great is because he conquered much of the known world at such a young age against incredible odds helped spread his culture far into the east that still has resonating effects today and was such a unique and beloved leader so the reason why I chose to do this creative project uh this way to kind of show you guys off his army but also I just wanted to show you guys some snippets of a fun little battle I'm about to play just to kind of show the veracity and uh and power of his army but also just like the horrors of ancient combat you definitely did not want to get stabbed by some of these spears and swords and clubs and all that nasty stuff it's just not a good time but um I also was wanting to do it this way because not only does I feel like it kind of gives a good representation of of kind of the effects and the type of military tactics that Alexander used but I also just wanted to play a video game so this video game is Rome 2 Total War you get to play as many of the different ancient empires of the past such as Rome, Carthage, obviously Macedon, you have to play as Persia, Parthia, you name it you can play it as long as it was represented in these old 300 odd BC time period and then obviously this does connect and tie in with my research topic because I'm literally playing as Alexander the Great at the moment and I just want you guys to be able to learn about the significance of Alexander the Great and how important he is as a society today and basically what I have learned is just how important Alexander was despite from studying the stuff that I've studied for my research paper at the moment just how important he was not only to us as a modern day society but just ancient society in general this guy is massively important and if you guys want to like have a good time with making this project do something fun like this you guys don't just have to do a boring old powerpoint no hate for my powerpointers out there I got your back but you know sometimes you guys want to do something unique so it's always good to have a little bit of fun and as I said I'm literally playing a video game for school isn't that great so yeah I'm definitely making it in this world you know what I mean man I should start a YouTube career so I'm gonna go on ahead start this battle and I will skip ahead to when this battle starts oh one more thing I am actually playing on the Egypt map in case you guys can't tell so we got ourselves the pyramids of Giza shown over here as well as you know just just Egypt in general reason why I chose this map is it kind of really shows that whole deserty vibe that whole deserty feeling and I like to have this flat map to really show you guys the effect of and power of Alexander's phalanx so without further ado I'll see you guys in the battle we got in the battle all right guys so hey a few things I wanted to mention before we got in the battle first off I wanted to show you guys the phalanx formation so as you guys remember what professor Garcia was talking about in class and then I also kind of broke it down a little bit more of my long explanations I tend to give I know I'm sorry this right here is a phalanx formation so this right here is a type of formation that I understand these are Macedonians but not only were these guys special tactics that tacticians at it but also so were the Spartans these were the guys to help throw the hold the Thermopylae pass from the Persians this is the tactics the Spartans used they use these spheres to keep the Persians from being able to get through them and again these guys are very tough to get through in the front as you can see why but they're very weak in the back so another thing I wanted to mention coming into that one of Alexander the famous tactics our favorite tactics when it comes to to fighting and this is part of the reason why he never lost a battle is because he always played on the offensive he went to his enemy and once his enemy was cornered they're just like any cornered animal they like to lash out and when they lash out they tend to charge into these bad boys as you can see you have one spear in the front one spear in the middle in case someone gets through and one more spear right here in the back so it's very tough to get through here and in case you had any cavalry trying to leap over do any sort of tactics that will allow them to jump up they have spears up here to help prevent any higher enemies from trying to jump over or things such as elephants or anything else or being able to get up and over the wall so I'll see you guys in the battle one all right guys as you see we are being attacked by the enemy forces and here we're going to go on ahead and get our and get our men into combat with Alexander over here on the right I do have to be careful because we are being flanked as I said look at this weakness but this is one thing why Alexander never had to worry they had support in the rear so now it doesn't matter if he's he has these guys back here to help assist him and now we get to see the famous phalanx formation come into action pushing back his peltast so you guys can see right here right you see how the enemy is not able to get through this formation so now with that light horse almost broken and out of here we can start seeing the infamous flank start coming in for Alexander and his men breaking the enemy cavalry over here not a good idea calvary you're going against spears playing these battles is so much fun and one of our units with that cavalry advantage now the enemy cavalry is done we can start seeing Alexander the Great coming from behind and start taking out these enemy forces and now we're going to start seeing that full encirclement out the enemy so here we're going to see a famous charge the enemy I don't know why they're blind they can't hear a heavy horseman coming from behind but they're going to get slammed in the back and now we're going to start seeing some men get cut down thank you advisor I hear you I got you thank you I really kind of such a nerd and I love it and now it's time to collapse them on the flanks let's get in there boys while we're doing that as you can see I pushed in one of the hoplites with the phalanx formation coming in from the side here royal thorax and let's go on ahead and slam them in right here go in let's get some movie action in here really makes you feel like you're watching the movie 300 in that slow motion you know what let's go on ahead and have him break the battle is turning in our favor and as you can see y'all a great victory for Alexander the Great as always can't be defeated thank you guys so much for watching it's been a real pleasure doing this project um just to answer that last question how long did it take you to put it together I'm making the video I have no idea I guess in person you can tell you but my guess is it's going to be a couple hours um you know it's because I gotta do some editing but I really hope you guys enjoyed I hope I didn't make this too boring for you I wanted to have uh something to resonate and kind of show you guys the ancient combat and uh yeah I'll talk to you guys later see you on class bye